Karl Marx was born in Trier, a German city on the Rhine River that had been occupied by Napoleon in 1803 and assigned to the Kingdom of Prussia by the Congress of Vienna in 1815. Marx’s parents both came from long lines of Jewish rabbis, but in 1817 his father, Herschel Levi, converted the family to Christianity and changed its name to Marx to protect his career as a lawyer. Young Marx studied law at the University of Bonn before enrolling at the University of Berlin, where he was influenced by the thought of the famous philosopher G.W.F. Hegel, especially his theory that history unfolded toward a specific goal in an ongoing process driven by the clash and resolution of antagonistic ideas. After losing his job as a journalist for a Cologne newspaper because of his political views, in 1844 Marx moved to Paris, where he argued doctrine with other radicals and would-be revolutionaries and continued his studies of economics and history. He also made the acquaintance of another German, Friedrich Engels, an ardent critic of capitalism despite the fortune he amassed from managing a textile mill in Manchester, England. In 1847, Marx and Engels joined the Communist League, a revolutionary society dominated by German political exiles in France and England. In 1848, a year of revolution in France, Germany, Austria, Hungary, and Italy, the two men wrote The Communist Manifesto to publicize the League’s program. It soon became the most widely read socialist tract in history (you can read excerpts from it by clicking here).After 1848, Marx and Engels remained friends, with Engels giving the impoverished Marx enough money to continue his writing and political activities while living in London. Both men continued to write on behalf of socialism, but Marx’s works, especially his masterpiece, Das Kapital (Capitalism), assumed the far greater role in shaping modern socialist thought. Furthermore, Marx’s views of history, human behavior, and social conflict have influenced not only politics but also philosophy, religion, literature, and all the social sciences.
After you are finished reading the document, I would like you to reflect on and discuss the following: How do Marx and Engels define class, and what do they mean by the “class struggle?” According to Marx and Engels, how does the class struggle in nineteenth-century Europe differ from class struggles in previous eras? According to Marx and Engels, what are the characteristics of the bourgeoisie? Marx and Engels believe that bourgeois society is doomed and that the bourgeoisie will be the cause of their own destruction? Why? The authors dismiss the importance of ideas as a force in human affairs. On what grounds? Ultimately, what is the cause of historical change in their view? What may explain the popularity of The Communist Manifesto among workers and those who sympathized with their plight? How does The Communist Manifesto’s vision of the past and future resemble that of Condorcet’s Sketch of the Progress of the Human Mind? How does is differ? How would Marx and Engels have responded to the point of view represented by Samuel Smiles in Self-Help and Thrift? Your thoughts…
6 comments:
He divided all the classes into two groups, the oppressor and the oppressed. The classes are fighting to be the ones in control, the oppressor to remain in control and the oppressed to obtain control. There are simplifyed class antagonisms, with two very distinct groups and understandable causes to fight. The bourgeoisie are the people to immediately make the changes if something is not going right and they are not doing very well, because they know a lot more than the common people on an average basis. The bourgeois will cause their own downfall because they cannot trule control the rate at which they are growing. Eventually they will reach a point where they will be unable to grow anymore and then go on a downward spiral. Many common people probably enjoyed the beating that their bosses were getting and that the concepts these men were putting forward had a lot of substance to it.
From this document, i really only comprehended the last half. i think he was stating that the bourgeoisie brought enlightened though to their societies, and that will cause it's downfall. the wealthier classes were the ones to rebel the control of the monarchy, and now they are in a sense, the capitalist monarchs. marx is addressing this to the bourgeoisie because in the last half he says 'your' property. meaning that he wants the proletariat to rise up and gain the property and divide it where it rightfully belongs.
he's basically stating the founding principle of communism, everything shared among everyone who rightfully deserves it. [duh.] so this principle seems very good in theory. the working class that gets increasingly larger, despite the facts that jobs are continually being replaced by machinery, rising up to seize the property and divide it amongst themselves so that they all have compensation for their labors, along with actual wages that can sustain them.
Animal Farm interprets communism exactly in the form of animals. The people rule the society. All the benefits are helpful for the working class people, but one person takes charge and organizes all the doings of the society. That person gets greedy for power and the working class gets it worse than before communism. On paper, communism is a great system, but as Mr. Prill says (speaking in his father's tone of voice), "Rodge, if it looks too good to be true, it probably is too good to be true." And that is the truth, because many communist leaders got too big for their boots.
Did my post just go through, Mr. Prill? It didn't pop up the message that said it went through, and it erased my post.
it's up here... where are all the posts on this topic folks? i figured you guys would be lighting up the blog with this one tonight. let's get on it!
The bourgeoisie are the top 10% of the people, and they're the ones who are running things, like the noble estate in France. The Manifesto says that they're the ones that are coming up with the ideas for the weapons (they are the ones who want to war and conquer), and all the bourgeoisie are doing is just using the proletariat as mindless labor to build this idea for them and make it a reality. The proletariat are the tools of the bourgeoisie- they don't even have private property of their own. That would mean 10% of the people own 100% of the land. All Marx and Engels want to do is redistribute this land equally between the people (sound like what's happening today? redistribution of wealth...)
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