Vocabulary
Terms used in the texts, what they meant, and how the plain English layer renders them. Several renderings can be valid; the project default is a reviewed choice, not a claim that the others are wrong.
- bourgeoisie
- The class of modern capitalists, owners of the means of social production and employers of wage labour.
- burgher
- A citizen of a medieval town, holding the rights granted by the town's charter, usually a merchant or master craftsman.
- capital
- Wealth used to produce more wealth, above all money invested in production that employs wage labour.
- class antagonism
- Opposed and conflicting interests between social classes, open or hidden.
- commodity
- A good or service produced in order to be sold or exchanged, not for the producer's own use.
- guild-master
- A full member of a guild, a master within, not a head of a guild.
- journeyman
- A trained craftsman who worked for a guild-master for wages but had not yet become a master himself.
- lumpenproletariat
- Marx and Engels's term for the declassed poor outside regular wage labour, whom they saw as politically unreliable.
- manufacture
- Production in workshops by hand, with the work divided among many workers, before machinery took over.
- means of production
- The things needed to produce goods: land, raw materials, tools, machines and buildings.
- Modern Industry
- Large-scale industry driven by machinery and steam power: the factory system that replaced manufacture.
- proletariat
- The class of modern wage labourers who, having no means of production of their own, are reduced to selling their labour power in order to live.
- serf
- A peasant legally bound to a lord's land, owing the lord labour or dues, and not free to leave.
- wage labour
- Work done for a wage by people who own no means of production and so must sell their ability to work.
- world market
- A market spanning the whole world, in which goods, raw materials and capital move across borders.