Karl Marx and Friedrich Engles

Essay by King646A, September 2006

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Karl Marx lived from 1818-1883, he organized revolutionary socialists through active campaigning, polemical tracts calling for revolution, such as the Communist Manifesto, which he wrote with Friedrich Engles, and three volumes of scholarly analysis and critique of he capitalist system called Das kapital. One of Marx's well-known ideas that have been more cultural then economic is that "...wealth is produced no so much by capitalists, who control the finances, but by the proletariat-the laborers-who do the actual physical work of the production." Since this is not well known, the workers are getting underpaid relative to the amount of work they are doing. Karl Marx believed that the only other option was violent revolution.

Before the revolution, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engles worked together are shorter term legislative goals, which included, "a heavy progressive or graduated income tax, ... free education for all children in public schools... and ... abolition of child factory labor in its present form."

Marx and Engle's have had lasting views, which have been more cultural then economic. They observed four areas of social-cultural tension during the industrial revolution, "...the challenge of coping with rapid changed, observing in the Communist Manifesto that "all that is solid melts into air...the alienation of factory workers from their work, as they became insignificant cogs in great systems of production... the alienation of workers from nature, as farmers left the countryside to find jobs in urban industries; and the dominance of the husband over the wife in the modern family and the need to create real equality between them."