This may be the point where I should stress something that is often overlooked by students of Marx, and sometimes even by Marx himself, when he gives into the pleasure of writing in a very polemical fashion. The exploitation of the proletariat has nothing to do with evil intentions of the capitalists, or their sadistic lust to oppress powerless people. Those capitalists may actually be very friendly people who go to church every Sunday, who do not want to impoverish or to squeeze their workers. They may give some of their income to charities. They may support the arts and the sciences. The problem is that they also are captives of this system that forces them, whether they like it or not, to exploit their employees. Because they are members of an extremely competitive network of factory owners, we're all focused on one goal only. And no, that goal is not to make as much money as you can. That goal is to make money in a systematic way, and to make more money than your colleagues, to stay ahead of the competition. And the penalty for not staying ahead is terrible. Whoever lags behind will go bankrupt, factory will have to close, and the owner and all the members of his family will fall into the class of the proletarians. And from that moment on, they will have to sell the only thing that they are left with, their labor power, and they have to sell it to their former fellow entrepreneurs. So all their actions are motivated by that burning fear that this, one day, might happen to them. In this respect, but in this respect only, Marx reminds me a bit of Tocqueville. In a class system with a lot of mobility, everybody is scared to death to fall from a high class into a low class. But of course, Marx is the opposite of Tocqueville in his prediction that the middle classes will be, so to speak, eaten up by the remaining two classes, bourgeoisie and proletariat. That is not at all what Tocqueville thought. In fact, the system is stable because it does not depend on the evil intentions, or the bad character, of the capitalists. It's the capitalism, itself, that takes care of its own continuation. And this, again, is an element in Marx that sociologists admire. Social systems may have a dynamic all of their own. They develop according to laws that individual people cannot influence, even if they understand those laws, even if they would have studied the books written by Marx and Engels. This is how it was in the short run, but in the long run, capitalism goes slowly but surely into the direction of its own destruction. And the strangest thing is that the entrepreneurs who profit most from the system are also the ones who are instrumental in its downfall. Forced by cutthroat competition, they force their laborers to work harder and harder to make longer working days, to accept lower wages. Workers become so poor that their wives have to work in the factory to make ends meet, and if that is not enough, their children have to do the simple, repetitive tasks in the factory that we remember from the paint factory. Adding, in that way, their meagre wage to the family income. But the owners of the factories are forced to continue to squeeze the labor force, so the workers do not have enough to eat. Their houses are unhygienic, the roof is leaking, they become ill, they see how their own children die. And then, one day, they realize that things cannot get worse. That their situation has become so terrible that the conclusion becomes inevitable. We have nothing to lose but our shackles. The capitalists have created a class of people that will bring capitalism to its end. They have raised their own grave diggers. But for that to happen, the workers have to become aware of their objective situation. They have to develop class consciousness. All of a sudden, they see through the ideological myths about a wonderful world of capitalism that the politicians and the industrial leaders and the parish priest propagate day in, day out. They break away from that spell, they open their eyes, they confront reality. And then, they may develop a feeling of solidarity, a deep sentiment that they share their fate with the members of their own class, and not with the members of the class above them, the class that exploits them. And then they conclude that the only road to a better future is to rise up against their oppressors, all together in one huge movement. And that, according to Marx is the moment when revolutionary consciousness takes hold of the hearts and minds, and from that moment on, the revolution is inescapable. The means of production will be torn away from the former owners and they will be given to the collectivity. And from then on, all the wealth that has become possible in modern industrial society will be distributed in a fair and in an honest way among the members of the new society.
