> That's sure not how the Manifesto reads.
>
> --- On Thu, 11/6/08, Michael Smith <mjs at smithbowen.net> wrote:
>
> > [Marx] doesn't
> > seem to have believed in the kind of Whig idea of linear
> > progress -- each stage an "improvement" on the
> > last --
> > that most of our contemporary Pwogwessives continue
> > to hold.
In my library, texts don't read -- they are read. The way I read the Manifesto, Marx's Miltonic paean to the bourgeoisie's heaven-storming achievements -- which he grants, of course, very emphatically -- stands next to an appreciation of the destructive and brutal character of bourgeois society. E.g.:
> Owing to the extensive use of machinery, and to the division of
> labor, the work of the proletarians has lost all individual
> character, and, consequently, all charm for the workman. He becomes
> an appendage of the machine, and it is only the most simple, most
> monotonous, and most easily acquired knack, that is required of him.
> Hence, the cost of production of a workman is restricted, almost
> entirely, to the means of subsistence that he requires for
> maintenance, and for the propagation of his race. But the price of a
> commodity, and therefore also of labor, is equal to its cost of
> production. In proportion, therefore, as the repulsiveness of the
> work increases, the wage decreases. What is more, in proportion as
> the use of machinery and division of labor increases, in the same
> proportion the burden of toil also increases, whether by prolongation
> of the working hours, by the increase of the work exacted in a given
> time, or by increased speed of machinery, etc.
>
> Modern Industry has converted the little workshop of the patriarchal
> master into the great factory of the industrial capitalist. Masses of
> laborers, crowded into the factory, are organized like soldiers. As
> privates of the industrial army, they are placed under the command of
> a perfect hierarchy of officers and sergeants. Not only are they
> slaves of the bourgeois class, and of the bourgeois state; they are
> daily and hourly enslaved by the machine, by the overlooker, and,
> above all, in the individual bourgeois manufacturer himself. The more
> openly this despotism proclaims gain to be its end and aim, the more
> petty, the more hateful and the more embittering it is.
This doesn't sound to my ear like the Whig narrative of linear progress, which would argue that the social conditions of bourgeois society are a big improvement for everybody on those of feudal society. Marx's view is more, well, dialectical.