Marx and Industrialization

Karl Marx and Industrialization The 1800s arranged the foundation for today 's world and witnessed the growth of big business, government development, advancement of new technologies and formation of novel philosophies about social order. Karl Marx, a German philosopher and politician made it his life’s work to logically understand capitalism and nurture revolutionary groups during this industrializing period. The idea of capitalism is one where there is private ownership over any product or service. Marx and socialists of the time criticized the new industrial order for dividing society into the new middle class, capitalists who owned all the wealth and the working class who lived in poverty. Marx was a proponent of industrialization for the reason that he assumed it would ultimately bring on the proletarian revolution and certainly instigate the abolition of exploitation, private property, and class society. According to Marx, communists must aim for the “downfall of the bourgeoisie (capitalist class) and the ascendancy of the proletariat (working class), the abolition of the old society based on class conflicts and the foundation of a new society without classes and without private ownership” (Hunt, Martin, Barbara, & Smith, 2010). The Industrial Revolution during the time of Karl Marx produced an apparently perpetual dehumanized class of workers (proletariats), poverty stricken and employed under appalling working environments and on the other side, the bourgeoisie who instinctively chased the accrual of wealth without any thought or care to the quality of life of those they employed (Lawall, 2006). According to Marx, “the unceasing improvement of machinery….the collisions between individual workmen and individual bourgeois take more and more the character of collisions between two classes…the workers begin to form combinations (Trade Unions) against bourgeois” (Marx, 1848). The industrialization is actually causing the bourgeois to crack under the

Cited: Hunt, L., Martin, T., Barbara, R., & Smith, B. (2010). The Making of the West: Peoples and Cultures A Concise History 3rd Edition. Boston: Beford/St. Martin 's. Lawall, S. (2006). The Norton Anthology Western Literature Volume 1 18th Edition. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. Marx, K. (1848). Manifesto of the Communist Party. Paris.