MAMARIL, Shaira Mae A.

PHL 308
4PHL2 Thought Piece #3

Mamaril on: Culture Industry

Modern industry has converted the little workshop of the patriarchal master into
the great factory of the industrial capitalist. Masses of labourers, crowded into the factory,
are organised like soldiers. As privates in the industrial army they are placed under the
command of the perfect hierarchy of officers and sergeants. They are daily and hourly
enslaved by the machine, by the overseer, and, above all, by the individual bourgeois
manufacturer himself. The more openly this despotism proclaims gain to be its end and
aim, the pettier, the more hateful and more embittering it is.1 The development of the
industry becomes parallel with the increase in number of the proletarians but this also
means their jeopardized livelihood. Therefore, the labourers start to form trade unions
against the bourgeois to preserve the rate of wages.

Now and then the workers are victorious, but only for a time. The real fruit of their
battles lies, not in the immediate result, but in the ever expanding union of the workers.
This union is helped by the improved means of communication that are created by modern
industry, and that place workers of different localities in contact with one another. It was
just this contact which was needed to centralise the numerous local struggles, all of the
same character, into one national struggle between classes. This will then turn into a more
or less veiled civil war, raging within existing society, up to the point where that war
breaks out into open revolution.2

The bourgeoisie are aligned with the relations of production since these relations
are what enable them to extract surplus from the workers. But the proletarians want
change – they want the further development of the forces of production in which their
labour makes up a large part and they want a complete reform in the relations of
production. This is to end the exploitation in the work force and they also want the surplus
to benefit them since it is all because of their labour hence, a course for revolution.

1
Marx, Karl, and Frederick Engels. 1848 (1973). ‘Manifesto of the Communist Party.’ Pp. 62–98 in Karl
Marx, Political Writings: The Revolutions of 1848, edited by David Fernback. Harmondsworth UK: Penguin. pp.
73–74, 75–76, 78, 98.
2
Marx, Karl, and Frederick Engels. 1848 (1973). ‘Manifesto of the Communist Party.’ Pp. 62–98 in Karl
Marx, Political Writings: The Revolutions of 1848, edited by David Fernback. Harmondsworth UK: Penguin. pp.
73–74, 75–76, 78, 98.