ipl-logo

Karl Marx Communist Manifesto

773 Words4 Pages

conflicts. In a view similar to this, revolutionary Karl Marx's extract from his communist manifesto describes the views shared by many over the time of the conditions labourers faced. He emphasises on how they were treated like 'soldiers' placed under a 'hierarchy' in order to be exploited by the bourgeoise class who owned the means of production referring to factory owners. Produced in 1848, this extract captures the plight of the working class which had begun to feel the effects of the revolution. As a popular revolutionary and founder of communism,so he could be criticised for exaggeration over the period and failure to oversee success and advances brought to working class life with many given new opportunities to move class and start …show more content…

The letter by the cloth merchants of the major wool and textile manufacture powerhouse Leeds defends the use of machinery. The source highlights the advantages that the industrial revolution had brought- the major one brought by the industrial revolution being the increase in ‘internal and foreign demand’ which gave the Britain the platform to join trade overseas and benefitted the country as a whole with the increased demand for Britain to export. The letter shows how the machinery has in fact helped workers by reducing manual labour by ‘nearly one third’ of before and has in reality ‘contributed to advance the wages’ of the labourers. This ultimately contrasts with source 2 in which Marx argues that the labour force is exploited by low wages by implying that their wages on a whole did increase which ultimately would have led to a better quality of life for the working classes and gave them a platform to increase their life opportunities. This gives a different perspective into the impact of the industrial revolution but as it was written at an earlier date of 1791, it may not capture the full effects the machinery brought onto labourers that may have been the case if written in the year 1850. Also the fact that it is a letter defending machinery use may have been used as advertising to convince and attract new workers towards

Open Document