READ AND DISCUSS:

From scattered rage to concentrated strength

The Manifesto summarises the historical development of the working class in a few sentences. It describes how it has been transformed from a scattered “incoherent mass” into a proletariat concentrated together in large workplaces and working-class communities, thanks to the development of capitalist industry.

The summary draws on the history of the English working class in particular. Without naming it as such, the Manifesto refers to the Luddite movement of the early nineteenth-century when skilled workers, particularly weavers, boldly organised. They attacked factories and smashed the knitting machines and steam powered looms that the factory owners were using to employ unskilled and lower paid workers in order to undercut their pay and conditions.

1. Why does the Manifesto describe movements such as the Luddites as a doomed attempt to restore “the vanished status of the workman of the Middle Ages”?

Wages reduced to the same low level

The hand loom weavers certainly weren’t the last section of skilled workers to see their livelihoods destroyed by the introduction of new technology. The Manifesto suggests that the general trend of capitalist development will be for machinery to undermine skilled labour, driving down all workers’ wages “to the same low level”. Today, for example, new sections of skilled workers are seeing their jobs threatened by AI.

Even when absolute standards of living grew for some - but certainly not all - sections of the world's working class and poor, such as during the post-war upswing of 1950-73, the share of wealth going to the capitalist class grew further still. Since that time, the stark gap between rich and poor has accelerated. Oxfam’s 2026 Global Inequality Report ²⁴ describes how “the world’s 12 richest billionaires have more wealth than the poorest half of humanity”.

Nevertheless, some sections of the working class have maintained relatively high wages compared to others.

2. What sections of the working-class have managed to maintain relatively high wages? What different reasons can you think of why that has been the case?

Trade union struggle is victorious ‘now and then’

One of the factors that helps defend wage levels is, of course, trade union organisation. The working class are the source of the capitalists’ profits, and so, by withdrawing their labour and going on strike, their collective action can exert pressure on their employers.

The Manifesto describes how local struggles became linked together into national struggles and trade union action would sometimes win victories – if “only for a time”. After all, victories over jobs, pay and conditions are always temporary gains while the pursuit of capitalist profit requires the working class to be squeezed ever harder. Wage rises are soon clawed back through inflation for example.

3. The Manifesto stresses, however, that even when workers’ struggles are defeated, “the real fruit of their battles lies, not in the immediate result, but in the ever expanding union of the workers”. What do you think Marx and Engels mean by that?