The Industrial Revolution was a sign of the climax of the feudalism to capitalism transitions. This took place in the nineteenth century where capital went into the productive process and made a transformation to the means of production. The arrival of this revolution created the possibility of bringing to an end natural scarcity which would be the very first time in the history of human beings. The global power of the West was primarily extended by the Industrial Revolution creating superiority of the European people over the non-European people.
Marxist and non-Marxist scholars have written much history about this Revolution using empirical researches, novel perspectives, and quantitative methodology. They have agreed and shared some common themes in their explanation of Marxist socialism, but at the same time, points of division came up from these Marxist threads. The purpose of this paper is to describe perspectives that were common as well as the points of division and the critical differences depicted in the Marxist socialism of Europe in the nineteenth century.
Rousseau, a socialist communist, had made an argument that real democracy cannot grow and survive in societies that have extreme wealth and poverty levels due to the reason that power will always flow naturally in the direction of the people who are wealthy despite the electoral system used. The most significant struggles in the nineteenth century were the struggle for gradually expanding the votes to working men and women in a much later phase. Scholars have created several arguments where they have insisted on a need for a new democracy that is reserved for property owners, bankers among others such as manufacturers and bankers (Klar©n, 2018).
Liberty was insisted by many liberals in the nineteenth century where those that held opinions that followed a conservative notion argued that for freedom to be secured, there was a need for independence of the economy and security. Greed was agreed in unison to be the engine that powered the economy and created work opportunities and prosperity for everybody. Dependency was seen to be a self-destructive feature, and the poor people were subjected to punishments through the use of harsh laws that made them work and eradicate their poverty.
Although the poor people did not become successful, they now could ultimately do away with a situation where some of them were homeless and lacked food. The reason behind this is that they lived in places where nobody, not even the government could forcefully evacuate them without them being willing to move out of those areas. Industrialists also had the common perspective that the capitalist economy and its wild cycles needed to be stabilized through creating regulations, setting wages that were maximum for the highest paid worker and doing away with labor unions to conserve profits (Klar©n, 2018). They also shared common grounds on the regulation of imports to preserve advantages of the national commercial services and combining monopolistic trusts that were designed to either lead to the reduction or elimination of competition.
The socialists also had a standard view and worked together in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to create a labor movement that was successful in destroying the system which they reshaped substantially. Members of this union went through several mistreatments which were inhumane such as being beaten in very rough ways, thrown into prisons for what was deemed to be their mistakes, and thrown out of their places of work. All these inhumane treatments happened because these members fought for their rights where they wanted their working hours and days to be reduced, and an increase in the salary each of them got. These union members also wanted improvement of their working environments and good conditions in which both they and their families could live in in the workplaces.Points of DivisionThis type of revolution was expected to cause adverse reactions as well because not all people believed that shifting power to the hands of the rich was a good move. When the nineteenth century began, the people who were working in industrialized countries in both Germany and England were exploited in several diverse ways. The old restrictions which had given the poor a chance in the country leading to their income limitation had also given them another opportunity in the world (Mosse, 2018).
The doing away with the old order made a new revolution where workers could now be hired or fired anyhow according to how the rich willed. The past rules that protected the workers got abolished making factories to start running for twenty-four hours each day and seven days each week without giving the workers any free time to rest. Women and children were also allowed to be part of them, and they were often hired with no doubt because they were cheaper than men in their offering of services. The standards of living of the workers, as well as the levels of education among the people, actually declined over the years. New industries contributed to the pollution of the environments in a diverse way, the food in the towns where the new factories were located went down because it was in short supply and of low quality and the machinery of these industries caused several health hazards and led to the deaths of many workers.
The socialists argued that the old economy had been an economy that was regulated and was least predictable except the natural crises that were caused by unavoidable circumstances such as drought, war, and plague. The new economy, on the other hand, created a bust which was a new predictable type of crisis that had no rational or natural basis (Tilly, 2017). The business cycle reached a level where it was beyond the control of anyone, and there emerged more or fewer periods of the growth of the economy that was prolonged. Many jobs were created, and the wages rose to make most people prosper, but after a short period, those same profits and wages would fall leading to millions of people being plunged into poverty and unemployment.
The rich were not also spared in such situations, and they found themselves wholly impoverished or less well off. Marx welcomed the idea that the link between organizing of labor and socialism was contributed by the capitalists’ efforts to lead to a suppression of all movements of employment where he viewed all forms of unionization to pose a threat to revolution no matter how mild it was. Marx’s notion of how the revolution should be was the notion of a vast majority of people in the society taking power from a small group of the capitalists’ minority for the overall good of all people. He thought that large workers’ masses that were drafted into industrial capital armies tormented by insecurity and poverty that was born out of the business cycle’s wild fluctuations would grow to become a dominant societal force and outnumber all other people (Tilly, 2017).
The radical change pressure would lead to confrontations where the capitalist societal rulers would abandon all democracy pretense and therefore become targets of an armed uprising. Marx’s notion was completely different from Ferdinand Lassalle’s notion because Lassalle argued that to create a basis of socialism, there should be a formation of cooperatives of voluntary workers. This approach of reformation was a complete difference from Marx’s ideas of revolution, but many socialists such as Lantier became attached to them. The cooperatives of Lassalle have been existent since then till the current century where those ideas are being used by many organizations that are thriving today even as capitalism still exists in the society today.ConclusionMarx and Lassalle were the socialists who both lead and were feuds in influencing the formation of a democratic party which for several decades was the first Socialist organization in the universe.
These Democrats were most successful in Europe due to a gradualist approach that involved taxes that were high to create enforcement of equality in the economy, industry regulations by the government, social welfare and large industries being nationalized. Two centuries down the line, elements of such ideas are still used in many parts of Europe although they are continuously under attack so that they can be dismantled. This will, however, be faced by infinite resistance from a large percentage of workers who have for a long time benefited from these systems. This paper has been a success in describing the perspectives that were common as well as the points of division and the critical differences depicted in the Marxist socialism of Europe in the nineteenth century.
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