Tendencies in Capitalism according to the Manifesto

• Simplification of class structure to capitalist vs. workers (see also #8)
• Technical "progress" in manufacturing technique (revolutionizing the instruments of production. (161)
• World-wide expansion of capitalism in search of markets and raw materials. (162)
• Creation of new want and needs more difficulty to satisfy.
• Concentration of property and ownership in few hands. (162)
• Periodic crises and recessions/depressions--"boom and bust"-crises of overproduction (163)
• Larger, more uniform working class, trade unionism. (166)
• Destruction of small business; middle class sinks into the working class.
• Labor more burdensome, more alienating. 164
• More uniform, lower wages: "iron law" of wages (not Marx' term) (164,166)
• Capitalists give workers a political education. (167)
• Some bourgeois ideologists side with workers.
• Increased pauperism (unemployment, welfare roles) (168)
• Workers inevitably overthrow capitalism. (169)

Notes:

• Tendency 10. is sometimes called the "iron law of wages". It says that as capitalism industrializes, the long-term tendency is for wages to fall to a subsistence level determined by biology and climate, which is just enough to keep the worker alive, working, and reproducing the working class for the future. Marx later opposed this idea, maintaining that the average wage is subsistence, but "subsistence" is a socially determined amount, that varies from country to country, and from time to time. Subsistence is higher now in the U. S. than it was 100 years ago, and is higher now than subsistence in Mexico, Korea, or South Africa, for example.
• Tendency 13. is much expanded by Marx in later work, into his General Law of Capitalist Accumulation. This says that the Industrial Reserve Army of the unemployed or underemployed tends to become a larger and larger percentage of the population.
• Tendency 9., alienation of labor is developed further in the readings from the 1844 manuscripts. Marx maintains that exploitation of labor turns that labor from creative activity that each person needs to do for its own sake, to a hated activity that people will do as little of as they can. Alienation can only be ended by ending exploitation, i. e., in communist society.