Review of Marx's the Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital Works

Karl Heinrich Marx was a sociologist, historian, revolutionary and economist. He published (with Friedrich Engels) the most celebrated brochure in the history of the socialist movement known as Manifesto der Kommunisitischen Partei, more ordinarily known as The Communist Manifesto. Marx is also the author of Das Kapital, which is the movement’s most important book. Marxism is based on other writings and books that were written by Marx and Engels.

Marx observed in The Communist Manifesto, that two fundamental classes was created from the rise of factories and mechanisation as a means of production, these classes are known as the bourgeoisie, those who owned the means of production. The proletariat, those who were largely property-less workers, the proletariat sold their labour to the bourgeoisie. Marx believed that the key variable in defining social class is the source of income.

Marx names three classes each of which consists of people whose revenue or income “flow from the same common sources” in Das Kapital. The source of wages for wage labourers, the source of profit for capitalists and the source of ground rent for landowners. Marx named another class in Class Struggles in France 1884-1850, known as the finance aristocracy, they lived in obvious luxury among the masses of low-paid, starved, unemployed workers. This class includes bankers and stockholders whom seems to be detached from the world of actual ‘work’. Marx described this class’ source of income as “a source of income created from nothing – without labour and without creating a product or service to sell in exchange for wealth”. 

People who know how to speculate are being employed by the finance aristocracy, “But while speculation has this power of inventiveness, it is at the same time also a gamble and a search for the “easy life”; as such it is the art of getting rich without work.” The financial aristocracy appropriates to themselves, public or private funds without giving anything of equal worth in exchange, it is according to Marx, “the cancer of production” and “the plague of society and of states”. 

In conclusion, social class is influenced by many factors such as a person’s relationship to the means of production, their source of income such as their rent, labour and properties, people’s access to consumer goods and services, people’s status group and which political parties they support. In his works Karl Marx introduced a marxism view on social and politic spheres, named the main social classes and how they affect society.