In bourgeois society capital is independent and has individuality, while the living person is dependent and has no individuality.

This line comes from Marx and Engels’ polemical manifesto written on the eve of the 1848 revolutions, when industrial capitalism and the modern bourgeois class were rapidly consolidating power across Europe. In the section critiquing bourgeois property relations, Marx argues that capitalist society reverses the proper relation between people and things: accumulated capital (money, machinery, property) appears to act with autonomy and social power, while workers—who must sell their labor to live—are subordinated. The remark is part of a broader attack on how wage labor and private ownership shape social life, reducing human beings to instruments of accumulation.

Marx is describing a social inversion characteristic of capitalism. “Capital” is not merely wealth but a social relation that, through ownership and the market, acquires effective agency: it “moves,” “commands,” and “reproduces” itself. Individuals without property, by contrast, are compelled to adapt to capital’s needs—employment, wages, and survival depend on it—so their lives are constrained and standardized. The claim about “no individuality” points to alienation: workers’ creative capacities and personal development are subordinated to repetitive labor and market dependence. The sentence crystallizes Marx’s critique of reification, where human powers are transferred to things and institutions that then dominate their creators.