![]() Engels' father owned a share in several textile mills in Manchester, England. While in Paris, Marx befriended Friedrich Engels, also a German. The workers would then replace capitalism with a communist economic system, in which they would own property in common and share the wealth they produced. To correct this injustice and achieve true freedom, Marx said the workers must first overthrow the capitalist system of private property. In 1844, Marx wrote that the worker was alienated, or separated, from the fruits of his own labor. He reached the conclusion that the new industrial workers labored for wages that barely kept them alive while creating enormous wealth for their capitalist employers. The young couple soon moved to Paris, where Marx found work as a journalist. In 1843, Marx married Jenny von Westphalen, the attractive daughter of a liberal-minded aristocratic father and middle-class mother. Marx was indifferent about religion all of his life. Although Marx's parents were born Jews, his father converted to Christianity. In one of them, Marx coined one of his most memorable phrases, calling "religion the opium of the people." By this he meant that religion acts like a narcotic, easing the pain of the poor and oppressed in a "heartless world." But like a narcotic, it failed to cure the oppression. For a brief time, he wrote for a German newspaper, attacking Prussian censorship laws. Marx earned his doctor's degree in philosophy at age 23. Later in his career, Marx would build on Hegel's philosophy to explain how class struggle in history leads to a final, perfect society. The resulting conflict or struggle between them resulted in an entirely new idea (synthesis). Hegel taught that every important idea (thesis) produced another idea that was its opposite (antithesis). ![]() Marx joined a group of students who studied the German philosopher, Georg Hegel. As a young university student, he spent a lot of time drinking and getting into bar fights. Karl Marx was born in 1818 in a part of Germany then called Prussia. He focused on the exploited and impoverished industrial workers. He had a far different vision than Smith. ![]() Smith had called for the freedom of capitalists to operate their businesses as they saw fit with little interference from government.Ī German philosopher, Karl Marx came to live in England at the peak of its Industrial Revolution. In 1776, the year the American Revolution began, Adam Smith had written Wealth of Nations, the first complete description of a new economic system called capitalism. The increasingly powerful capitalists pointed to the economic ideas of Adam Smith to support their vision of freedom. New legislation made worker attempts to form labor unions illegal under criminal conspiracy laws. In the English industrial cities, 25 percent of all children under age 5 died of disease and malnutrition.Īs the new industrial owners, called capitalists, gained more political power, the English Parliament repealed worker protection laws going back to the time of Queen Elizabeth I. Dirt, garbage, sewage, industrial wastes, foul air, and polluted water poisoned the environment. Entire families crowded into single-room apartments. Up to about the 1880s, worker living conditions were awful in English industrial cities such as Manchester. Children under 10 commonly worked in the factories and coal mines. The typical workday was 12 hours not counting meal times. ![]() A new class of business people-merchants, bankers, and industrialists-rose to power.ĭuring the early years of industrialization in England, workers had no say in what their wages or working conditions would be. ![]()
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