Working Conditions of the \"Lowell

¶ … Working Conditions of the "Lowell Mills Girls" on Marx and Engels

In the Communist Manifesto Karl Marx and Fredrick Engels frame the history of society as the struggle for class dominance, an uninterrupted struggle between oppressor and the oppressed.

In her autobiography Harriet Robinson recounts the working conditions of the textile mills in Lowell, Massachusetts between 1832 and 1848.

The working conditions Robinson describes are indicative of the struggle depicted by Marx and Engel.

Marx and Engels' assert modern Industrial society (1848) is only different from past societies in that now the social order has been reduced down to two classes. They briefly recount the transition from Roman social order; patricians, knights, plebeians, and slaves, into the feudal society of the Middle Ages with lords, vassals, guild-masters, journeymen, apprentices and serfs into the bourgeoisie, or those whose income comes from doing business, and the proletariat, those whose income comes from wages.

In her autobiography Robinson speaks of the changes the industrial revolution brought to north east. She describes a labor shortage that attracted farmers, mechanics sons, and lonely and dependent woman from all over New England and Canada to labor in the mills with the promise of high wages offered to workers regardless of class. Furthermore she tells how the wages earned at the mills influenced the character and status of woman integrating people of various backgrounds into a common class,

the proletariat described by Marx and Engels.

Marx and Engels describe the antagonism between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat as ongoing and uninterrupted, sometimes overt, sometimes covert.

In Robinson's portrayal of the life of a mill girl in the early 1830's she mentions that since help was too valuable to be mistreated and there was no need to promote the principle of proper relations between employer and employee.

This statement implies that in future times, as the shortage of labor abated, the employers at the mills could and did take advantage of their workers.

Marx and Engels maintain that the executive of the modern estate is in place only to protect the welfare of the bourgeoisie. The rise of the bourgeoisie ended the feudal ties that once bound men and left in its place self-interest and cash payment.

Robinson tells of the one of the first strikes to take place in this country, in the Lowell Mills in 1836. The strike began when it was announced that wages were to be cut. She tells of the great indignation that propelled the workers to strike en mass causing the mills being forced to close down.

The result of the strike was futile. Speeches were made and feelings were vented but the corporation would not come to terms and in the end the workers returned to the mills at the lower wages. Robinson notes that in her opinion the failure of this early attempt to bargain with management seemed to have started a pattern of failure for the issue of many strikes thereafter.

Marx and Engels spoke of this type of exploitation of labor by management in the Communist Manifesto.

It is interesting that Robinson reveals an awareness of a caste system in the factories of England and France, noting that the factory girl in those countries was among the lowest employments of woman. Yet, in her story of the woman who worked the in the Lowell Mills she asserts that the labor benefited them both financially, opening up new venues to gainful employment, and by implication socially, giving as an example the first time a woman spoke in public in Lowell to protest the cutting of wages at the factories.