The workers toil through long shifts, with horrible working conditions and poor wages. Marx and Engels describe them as "a commodity, like every other article of commerce, and are consequently exposed to all the vicissitudes of competition, to all the fluctuations of the market" (Marx and Engels 72). Judging by this description, it seems that workers are considered to be items, rather than human beings. While most people probably view the typical working class as an important part of society, in the world that Marx and Engels describe, the working men are essentially a nuisance.
Keeping that in mind, the next term that needs to be broken down and examined more closely is "country." Normally, when one thinks of a country, one imagines a unified group of people living and working together in the same area. In an ideal country, everybody is contributing to a certain cause, whatever that cause may be. However, in the context of the Manifesto, this definition does not apply, because there is no sense of unity of among the people. "At this stage the labourers still form an incoherent mass scattered over the whole country, and are broken up by their mutual competition" (Marx and Engels 74). What the authors are trying to say is that society in the Manifesto is broken into two "hostile camps", and the proletariat is the only group doing any work at all (Marx and Engels 63). Therefore, the concept of a country did not really apply to the proletariat in the first place. The only things that the proletariat really has are their labor and their fellow workers. In response to the opposition and criticisms against the abolition of country, Marx and Engels point out that there is really nothing to take away from the proletariat since they have nothing to lose in the first place. .
After discussing the abolition of country, Marx and Engels go on describe what needs to happen in order for the proletariat to put an end to their continual class struggle with the bourgeoisie.
