Marx and the Industrial Revolution: Class Struggle and Social Change
Karl Marx and the Industrial Revolution
Karl Marx (1818-1883) lived during a period when the First Industrial Revolution was consolidating in England. Around 1830, France and Belgium joined the process, and about 1870, the Second Industrial Revolution began, with Germany and the U.S. taking prominence. The agrarian revolution and improvements in hygiene and medicine led to population growth, resulting in migration to industrial centers. This gave rise to the modern city with its problems of overcrowding and lack of infrastructure and sanitation.
Industrialization enriched the bourgeoisie, which became the ruling class, but workers suffered exploitation and marginalization. These social problems explain the emergence of labor movements.
Without industrialization and its consequences, the criticism of modern bourgeois society cannot be understood. Improvements in transportation shrank the globe. Industrialization required abundant materials and new markets. To obtain them, the bourgeoisie pushed states to develop a colonial policy that would benefit their industries. For Marx, colonization was the internationalization of the exploitative relationship between owners and employees, and he also studied this phenomenon.
The bourgeoisie’s new economic position allowed them to gain new rights through the 1830 liberal revolution and nationalism. Liberalism and nationalism were fueled by the exaltation of individual freedom and the people, embodied by Romanticism, a movement that reached its peak in literature, painting, and music. However, Marx understood that the new states generated by nationalism were structures that benefited the bourgeoisie. He proposed the International Workers Association, which sought unity among people not from the same state but from the same class. Secondly, the failure of the 1848 revolution convinced Marx that workers would never improve through this means.
Marx aimed to achieve a decent, free, and happy human being, but he realized that the means to achieve this could not be the ones previously proposed. The eighteenth-century society was not the industrial century. At the University of Berlin, Marx encountered the idealism of Hegel. Although his intellectual development was a progressive departure from Hegel, his influence was critical. Marx assumed that reality and knowledge have a dialectical structure. However, Marx distanced himself from Hegel’s idealistic vision: for Hegel, the history of mankind is the history of the manifestations of her free spirit seeking to realize their ideal.
Probably the most influential member of the Left Hegelian movement on Marx was Feuerbach. He believed that man is not defined by being spirit, but by his nature, his body, feelings, desires, and wishes. He also accused Hegel’s philosophy of being a rationalized theology that reflects on a single being, the Spirit. For Feuerbach, God is simply a projection of man. Marx adopted this criticism but also distanced himself from Feuerbach.