Communism During The Gilded Age

“The external glitter of wealth conceals a corrupt political core that reflects the growing gap between very few rich, and the very many poor”-Mark Twain. This quote sums up the political, economic, and social relations between the employer and the employee which were strained, and was often devised to benefit the manufacturer during the Gilded Age. Employers were exploiting worker by providing them low wages, exacerbating unsafe working conditions, and providing inadequate benefits to their workers. During these times radical new ideas were beginning to pull the working class together, with the foremost being Communism, which can be summed up in this quote by Karl Marx “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs”. The …show more content…
Under communism, it's just the opposite”John Kenneth Galbraith. Communism is the social economic, and political philosophy that states that all the people should have the right to be able to have a share in all the resources. Everyone should work for the same amount of money, or more accurately everyone will receive the same amount of rations from a centrally planned economy. It also states that the proletariat will one day rise and up, and try the bourgeoisie. The government is supposed to take care of its citizens but instead, the government takes suffer from a certain group of the citizenry and gives it to another.The government will take food from the farmer, sometimes by force, and give it to the urban worker, who will then give goods to the farmers. In Communism, there is no concept of public property, and all the property belongs to the people. Labor Unions wanted Communism understandably as Communism will have given them the ability to share all the resources that they produce. The few labor unions that were communist were often heavily suppressed, with violence, and destruction caused b.y both sides. An example would be the “Worker strikes occurred throughout the United States in support of the Bolsheviks. One strike led by a future radical communist, William Z. Foster, caused hundreds of thousands of steelworkers to walk off their jobs. In Seattle, a general strike led to the entire city being shut down for a lack of workers. Terrorism and violence led to injuries of hundreds across the nation and dozens of deaths”(Eliot David, 2017). Immigrants were often blamed for these catastrophes, with most of the communist perceived to be immigrants. This led to strong distrust of Labor Unions as they were perceived as anti-American, and were against the interests of the USA and