Non-fictional narrative essay techniques and applications

Karl Marx and Industrialization

The worker's product confronts him, hostile and alien." -Karl Marx, the Communist Manifesto.

In a way, Marxism can be seen as a reaction to industrialization in the Western world. Before industrialization people lived on farms. Nearly everything they needed, they made for themselves. Their clothing, for instance, they made by first growing the cotton, then spinning the cotton into thread, then weaving the thread into cloth and finally cutting and sewing the cloth into clothing. The left-over scraps they pieced into blankets. It was a lot of work and people didn't own as much stuff as they do now, but they felt a greater connection to the things they did have because they designed and made them themselves. Their work was meaningful because it was to provide something useful that they needed. Those things they had to pay for were made by people they knew. For instance, their dishes were made by a potter. The horse's shoes were made by a blacksmith nearby. This way of life completely changed during the industrial revolution.

Industrialization brought factories and assembly lines where people left their homes to go to work for pay. Workers on an assembly line were assigned one small task which they had to do over and over again all day long. The task presented itself to them on a conveyor belt, they did the task, and it moved on, another taking its place. The boredom of standing in one place for hours on end doing the same thing repetitively was, for some people, agonizing. The worker had no sense that he had designed, created, or completed a product that he could point to and say, "Look, I made that!" The factory system took all the pride and sense of accomplishment out of the work and separated the worker from the work of his hands. This made the product "hostile' and "alien" because the worker had no real connection to it. Maybe a female worker sewed the seam of a pocket for a coat several hundred times a day. But she didn't make the coat. Maybe a man tightened a bolt on the bumper of a car hundreds of times each day, or connected two wires, but he didn't make the car. The product was "hostile" because when the worker looked at it, he or she was only reminded of the hours spent in drudgery doing a seemingly meaningless task. Receiving a paycheck didn't make up for the loss of meaning and the pride of accomplishment, and it led to consumerism, that is, people working in order to buy things that are supposed to make them happy.