Communist Manefesto
The Mid-Nineteenth century in Europe was a melting pot of activity. The industrial revolution was in full swing in Great Britain, while the Prussian empire slowly grew in size. Over most of the continent the people were poverty stricken while few thrived in the economy. Rebellions of the middle classes were common in this era. Liberal philosophies were showing up in a few different political radicals. Due to this liberal thinking political philosophers such as Karl Marx and Friedrich Engles had the ability to express their opinions over a broad variety of people and this is the time in which the Communist Manifesto came to be. Karl Heinrich Marx was born on May 5th, 1818 in the city of Trier, Germany to a comfortable middle-class, Jewish family. His father, a lawyer and ardent supporter of Enlightenment liberalism, converted to Lutheranism when Marx was only a boy in order to save the family from the discrimination that Prussian Jews endured at the time. Marx enjoyed a broad, secular education under his father, and found an intellectual mentor in Freiherr Ludwig von Westphalen, a Prussian nobleman with whom Marx discussed the great literary and philosophical figures of his day. Notably, it was Westphalen who introduced the young
In 1842 Engels moved to England to work in his father's firm in the city of Manchester. Here he stayed until 1870, financially subsidizing Marx and continuing their scholarly and political collaboration. His stature as the former leader of the International, though, did make him a sought after resource for new revolutionary groups throughout Europe and, in particular, in Russia. Additionally, the development of bourgeois industries causes a proportional deterioration in the condition of the proletariat. In 1847 the Communist League commissioned Marx and Engels to pen a statement of their beliefs and aims. I cannot say how I would react to the idea if I were ignorant of God. This deterioration, which can be slowed but not stopped, creates within the proletariat a revolutionary element, which will eventually destroy their bourgeois oppressors. With the discovery of America and the subsequent expansion of economic markets, a new class arose, a manufacturing class, which took control of international and domestic trade by producing goods more efficiently than the closed guilds. As a student in Bonn and Berlin, Marx was greatly influenced by the philosophy of Hegel. Most significantly, though, it was in Paris that Marx met Friedrich Engels, the son of a wealthy textile manufacturer in England who had become a socialist after observing the deplorable condition of workers in his father's factories. Although Marx desired a career as an academic at the time, his political sympathies prevented him from receiving a position in the state-controlled university system. The Communist Manifesto opens with the famous words "The history of all hitherto societies has been the history of class struggles. When revolution did begin in Germany in 1848, Marx traveled to the Rhineland to encourage its progress. Marx to the ideas of the early French socialist Saint-Simon.
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