Marx and Engels Marx, Engels, and Industrialization

Marx and Engels

Marx, Engels, and Industrialization

It is widely known that the philosophies of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels influentially spurred forth the creation of The Communist Manifesto, a manuscript solely detailing the purposes of communist thought and the problems of capitalistic society. Marx and Engels discuss the problems of society that hinges on class, and predicts a more potentially positive outcome in a classless world. Yet their arguments toward the negative aspects of industrialization can be used, in a sense, to argue for capitalism as well.

The Communist Manifesto is the collaborated idea between two philosophers arguing against what they call the "bourgeoisie," a society responsible for putting the huge divide between its high-class organization and the working-class proletariat (Marx and Engels). In the manuscript, the authors call for the abolition of the social class and the creation of one organization -- namely the State -- in order to maintain a classless society. The Manifesto proclaims that, because of this history of the bourgeoisie's continued increase in power and dependency on capital towards private land ownership, the middle, working-class society suffers. With the onslaught of industrialization, capitalists have risen to a higher level, becoming "industrial millionaires, the leaders of the whole industrial armies, the modern bourgeois" (Marx and Engels). Thus, to them, industrialization only further creates a divide, tearing "away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation" (Marx and Engels).

Marx expresses the same concerns in the Manifesto that he does in his essay on "Estranged Labour," which also raises the conception of the middle-class worker in the age of industrialization. He states specifically that the more the worker "exerts himself in his work," the more dehumanized the worker (Marx). Thus he links the increase of labor hours and the minimum wage of industrialization as a form of dehumanization, and capitalism becomes a form of the loss of soul. Likewise, Engels mentions the so-called plight of the weakened, pitiable middle-class worker in his observations of the working class of England. While the capitalist enjoys the luxuries and healthy competition of other wealthy capitalists, the proletariat has to accept what "the bourgeoisie offers him," otherwise the proletariat "[starves], [freezes] to death, [and sleeps] naked among the beasts of the forests" (Engels). In the same way, Marx and Engels are concerned of the loss of soul of the human laborers, that they liken these laborers to dehumanized animals.