Karl Marx Communism PSA

Marx, Karl and Frederich Engels. The Communist Manifesto.  Modified from the Avalon Project.  1848. Yale University. http://avalon.law.yale.edu/subject_menus/mancont.asp(accessed September 28, 2013).

Karl Marx believed that everyone should be paid equally by working to the best of their ability. To inform people of these ideas, he wrote The Communist Manifesto, with the guidance of Frederich Engels. It explains Marx’s “revolutionary social change” ideas intended for German workers who were called the Communist League. Marx was raised as a Protestant in Treves by a father who dreamed of his son to study law. After doing so at the University of Bonn for one year, he transferred to the University of Berlin and studied philosophy, history and literature. These subjects helped Marx become an expert at discovering new ideas to improve society. Joining the group called the Young Hegals, who were influenced by the philosopher, Hegal, guided Marx to create the idea of communism. In addition to his educational background, Marx had many radical writings other than The Communist Manifesto, including an article in the Rheinische Zeitung, The Class Struggle in France, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, and A Contribution to the Critique Political Economy. He was known for expressing his ideas, even though they were different from most peoples’ thoughts in that time. He married Jenny von Westphalen, whose father was an important government official. Even though he was surrounded with people who are involved with the government, he still displayed his beliefs.  Marx grew up in poverty, so he was not part of the bourgeois.  However, he did not work in a factory; he spent most of his time writing. During that time, people were either extremely wealthy or in poverty in Europe. Proletarians, the working class, got paid little to nothing while spending long hours in harsh conditions, like cotton mills with almost no air or breaks. The bourgeois, property owners, were paid in high amounts. In the Communist Revolution, Marx desired for proletarians to standup to the bourgeois in order to protest for communism. From the manifesto, readers understand these wishes of Marx, although it is written only in the perspective of someone who grew up in poverty. Engels had money, but the writing piece of the manifesto came from Marx, and not Engels. Marx was a philosopher, not a mill worker. This document does not show the thoughts of the factory workers or the bourgeois. However, readers do know that Marx wanted all citizens to have the same wealth and the government should not be involved with the economy. As evidence of the unfair economy, Marx explained how the proletarian population was greater than the bourgeois population, yet the smaller population received higher wages.  Owners were paid more than workers by doing less labor than the workers. To display this evidence, Marx uses words like “spectre” and “Power” to describe communism. He compares the difference between the proletarian and the bourgeois class during capitalism with “freeman and slave, patrician and plebian, lord and serf, guild master and journeyman” to show the wide gap between the two.

 

***Dear Ms. Gallagher,

I know that all lines after the first should be indented. However, the blog would not allow me to format the PSA that way.