How Does Edwin Markham Dehumanize Social Work

One would like to believe that justice is attainable for everybody. One likes to believe that our governments seek justice for everybody. However, justice is not always objective. The literary works “The Man with the Hoe” by Edwin Markham and Mary Barton by Elizabeth Gaskell, both call for justice of the lower class/work force. In the “The Man with the Hoe” the author calls for social justice of the agrarian workers while in Mary Barton the author calls for social justice for the mill workers. They both call for equality. In the poem “The Man with the Hoe” by Edwin Markham, the author tries to portray the dehumanization of agrarian workers. Markham achieves this by comparing laborers to animals, successfully taking away their humanity. This …show more content…
Markham effectively dehumanizes the workers in line seven of his poem “…a brother to the ox?” (Markham.7). By using a working animal such as the ox he further portrays that these human beings, these workers loose what makes them human under the harshness they face or that is imposed upon them by the people above them. He goes on to say that they are slaves, “Slave of the wheel of labor” (Markham.23). Markham further accuses the “masters” of these people that they make these people the way they are. He goes on by questioning the injustice they impose upon their workers. He argues that “There is no shape more terrible than this” (Markham …show more content…
Both authors argue that workers are essentially slaves, they do strenuous jobs to receive so little in return for the job. Markham argues that the agrarian workers are “slave of the wheel of labor, …” (Markham.23) and Mary Barton realizes that she is merely a slave herself, that for her in order to somewhat sustain herself in the workforce she has to sell her skills at a really low wage. “…Mary was to work for two years without any remuneration, on consideration business, … with a small quarterly salary…”(Gaskell.27). This ties with the Marxist idea that the owner buys the labor of the worker, “The capitalist, it seems, therefore, buys their labor with money. They sell him their labor for money.” (Marx). Marx argues that while the workers, like the ones mentioned in both works of literature loose themselves to the capitalist system, doing strenuous labor in exchange for money, money that is used to buy the product they themselves helped produced. “The worker receives a part of the available means of subsistence from the capitalist. For what purpose do these means of subsistence serve him? For immediate [664] consumption.”