Karl Marx BELLWORK  What were some of the downsides of the Industrial Revolution and early Capitalism?

Answer Really horrible working conditions and child labor being used? A rapid growth in business owners’ wealth while workers continued to suffer.

REVIEW Advances in medical technologies as well as agricultural increases led to a massive increase in the European population. 1760-1850 The Invention of the Steam Engine Led to Factories Led to the birth of the locomotive

Factories Dramatically increased the amount of goods that a business could produce in a given day/given week/given year. Division of Labor Steam Engine powered machinery within the factories Employed the ever-increasing population moving into the bigger cities of Europe. Made products easier to purchase for the average citizen

Locomotive Trains allowed businesses to transport their goods between the various countries and cities throughout Europe. The network of railways allowed goods, ideas, and people to travel around Europe at an unprecedented rate. Capitalism (private ownership of the means of production) began to spread around the world.

Karl Marx and Frederick Engels (1848) Upset with the increasing mistreatment of the working class by those who owned the businesses, Karl Marx and Frederick, two German political scientists and philosophers, co-authored a piece called Manifesto of the Communist Party. They begin with this quote “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.”

Manifesto of the Communist Party Bourgeoisie and Proletarians Bourgeoisie  Modern Capitalists, owners of the means of social production and employers of wage labor. Proletariat  Modern wage laborers who, having no means of production of their own, are reduced to selling their labor power in order to live.

Bourgeoisie and Proletarians Marx argues that this relationship has existed for thousands of years with the richer classes oppressing the lower classes by exploiting their labor. Used the present day examples of horrible working conditions placed on the working class.

Excerpt: “The essential conditions for the existence and for the sway of the bourgeois class is the formation and augmentation of capital; the condition for capital is wage labor. Wage labor rests exclusively on competition between the laborers. The advance of industry, whose involuntary promoter is the bourgeoisie, replaces the isolation of the laborers, due to competition, by the Revolutionary combination, due to association. The development of Modern Industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products. What bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.”

Proletariat and Communism Wage Labor  The average wage labor is the minimum wage! Minimum wage = the wages which are absolutely necessary to keep the worker in bare existence. Leads to a very bare existence with the ruling class getting wealthier all the time

Private Property Marx explains the necessity of doing away with private property as, “You are horrified at our intending to do away with private property. But in your existing society, private property is already done away with for nine-tenths of the population; its existence for the few is solely due to its non-existence in the hands of the nine-tenths. You reproach us, therefore, with intending to do away with a form or property, the necessary condition for whose existence is the non-existence of any property for the immense majority of society.”

Private Property Marx believed that “Communism deprives no man of the power to appropriate the products of society; all that it does is to deprive him of the power to subjugate the labor of others by means of such appropriations.” Everyone would still have access to all the goods of a society but no one individual would be better off by making those beneath him worse off.

Overthrowing the Bourgeoisie Marx and Engels argue that one commonality across all time has been that one part of society has always exploited another. They believed the only way to stop this cycle would be to totally abolish class warfare and have a one-class society centered around the proletarians. They advocated a revolutionary takeover. “The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralize all production into the hands of the state…with the proletariat organized as the ruling class.”

10 Steps to take Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax. Abolition of all rights of inheritance. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels Centralization of credit in the banks of the state Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the states; the bringing into cultivation of waste land, and improvement of soil.

10 Steps to Take Equal obligation of all to work. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of all the distinction between town and country by a more equable distribution of the populace over the country. Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children’s factory labor in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production, etc.

Conclusion “In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.”

Preview COLD WAR  Capitalism vs. Communism