In France, the bourgeois revolution assumed its clearest political expression, whilst, in Britain, it was its economic and social expression that was paramount.
“Steam and the new tool-making machinery were transforming manufacture into modern large-scale industry, and thus revolutionising the whole foundation of bourgeois society. The sluggish march of development of the manufacturing period changed into a veritable period of storm and stress in production. The division of society into big capitalists and propertyless proletarians went on with ever-increasing rapidity; between these, instead of the former stable middle estate, an unstable mass of artisans and small shopkeepers, which constituted the most fluctuating portion of the population, now led a precarious existence.” (p 335)
It is an indication of the over-ripe conditions for socialist revolution that, in the advanced economies at least, those same poor and precarious petty-bourgeois, whose size and significance continually declined for 200 years, have, since the 1980's, increased by 50%, and, now, play a dominant role in relation to elections and the political regime, as seen with Brexit, Trump etc.
At the time of the bourgeois revolution, the capitalist mode of production was only at the start of its upward phase.
“Nevertheless, even then it was producing crying social abuses”. (p 335)
Engels described them in his “The Condition of The Working Class”, but, noted in his later Prefaces to that work, also, how the very progress of capitalism did away with most of those abuses. The critique of the capitalist mode of production, from a Marxist perspective, could not be based upon a moralistic concern for those abuses, particularly as its own development, not only put an end to the worst of them, but, also, provided the greatest increase in the living standards of workers, and potential for real freedom ever seen.
No, as Marx set out in The Critique of The Gotha Programme, the Marxist critique is not this moralistic concern.
“It is as if, among slaves who have at last got behind the secret of slavery and broken out in rebellion, a slave still in thrall to obsolete notions were to inscribe on the program of the rebellion: Slavery must be abolished because the feeding of slaves in the system of slavery cannot exceed a certain low maximum!”
In other words, although output resolves into c, v and s, and although, in absolute terms, each of these gets bigger, v falls relative to s, and both v and s fall relative to c. This is the material basis of Marx's Law of The Tendency For The Rate of Profit To Fall. To put numbers to it, if we started with c 100 + v 200 + s 100 = 400, we might, then have c 750 + v 250 + s 250 = 1250. Each has grown absolutely, but, now, the rate of surplus value s` has risen from 50% to 100%, whilst the rate of profit has fallen from 33.3% to 25%.
Beneath these numbers resides a host of other quantitative changes. What is the basis for the disproportionate rise in c, compared to v + s, and so total output? As Marx describes in Theories of Surplus Value, Chapter 21 and 23, if output simply expanded on the same technological basis, there is no possibility of these proportions changing, simply as a result of increased output. However, as he sets out in Theories of Surplus Value, Chapter 21, and this point was made, also, by Adam Smith, as discussed by Marx in Theories of Surplus Value, Chapter 17, as output expands, the demand for labour grows at a faster pace than the supply of labour/social working-day. Capital can respond, in the short-term, by increasing absolute surplus value, that is by increasing the length of the working-day, but there are limits to that. There are only 24 hours in a day.
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