How Did Karl Marx Contribute To The Age Of Enlightenment

Enlightenment was a huge part of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. During this time we see a lot of writes who are able to form their own ideologies and use their own understanding to confront issues they see in the world. Writes like Karl Marx, Edward Bellamy, Pope Leo XIII, and many more like them made great contributions to the “Age of Enlightenment.” These writers allowed themselves to become enlightened and wrote from an enlightened point of view. In the wake of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, however, our current society has failed to become enlightened. Society has not adopted many key ideologies brought about by the enlightenment and as a result we have not become enlightened. Many of the ideas presented by these writes

Often times people will do whatever it takes to make their own living situation better that they try and emulate the people above them. I do not feel that this aspect of our society is something that is conducive to enlightened thought. Karl Marx addresses this issue in a more extreme way than many other writers of the time. Marx would say that in a society such as ours that “if the wealth of society declines the worker suffers most of all.”(Marx,1844,21-22) Marx also says that in a society of increasing wealth and prosperity it is “The inevitable result for the worker is overwork and premature death, decline to a mere machine, a bond servant which piles up dangerously over against him, more competition, and for a section of the workers starvation or beggary”(Marx,1844,23) This current system is one that benefits only one social class, the upper class. It does not matter if the country with increasing wealth or decreasing wealth, the lower class will always suffer. The lower class will never benefit from increasing wealth because the upper class controls this wealth and takes it for itself. Marx calls for a system that would bring about “the abolition of bourgeois property.”(Marx,1848, 223) Marx feels that by getting ride of the ruling classes’ private property it would bring everyone onto an even playing field. In doing so, this would allow the lower class to break out of this situation in which they are being controlled by the need to acquire wealth and by the small percentage of society that holds the wealth. I feel that this type of society would be more advantageous for the advancement of enlightened though. If there is no longer a division of social class then people would no longer be striving for economic advancement and will have more time to advance their understanding. If people are no longer trying to emulate the wealth in hopes