Did Marx underestimate the power of the middle class ?

[joshcryer]

34. What do you think "new productive faculties" are?

We have seen above, that the first step in the revolution by the working class is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class to win the battle of democracy.

The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e., of the proletariat organised as the ruling class; and to increase the total productive forces as rapidly as possible.

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch02.htm

He doesn't discuss changing the way production works in relation to the worker and the industry. I already quoted him being wrong in that "new productive faculties" did not result in "changing all the economic relations that were but necessary relations of that particular mode of production."

For Marx, production relations are literally tied to a given technology, he doesn't see technology as an emancipating force.

M. Proudhon the economist understands very well that men make cloth, linen, or silk materials in definite relations of production. But what he has not understood is that these definite social relations are just as much produced by men as linen, flax, etc. Social relations are closely bound up with productive forces. In acquiring new productive forces men change their mode of production; and in changing their mode of production, in changing the way of earning their living, they change all their social relations. The hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill society with the industrial capitalist. The same men who establish their social relations in conformity with the material productivity, produce also principles, ideas, and categories, in conformity with their social relations. Thus the ideas, these categories, are as little eternal as the relations they express. They are historical and transitory products. (...) The production relations of every society form a whole.

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/poverty-philosophy/ch02.htm

I say that is completely wrong and utterly ludicrous, completely unsupportable. A hand mill is merely an advancement on the mortar and pestle, reducing labor and allowing one to make grain more efficiently. It doesn't magically enable feudal society.