Summary Of The Communist Manifesto By Karl Marx

A man stands in the middle of an industrial factory, while several men work behind him. In the attached image we see what seems like an ordinary industrial setting, with industrial workers and an overseer. While one can take no care into analyzing the image, there are a diversity of perspectives, but Adam Smith, Charles Dickens, and Karl Marx can provide the strongest ideas. The ideas of human labor, progress, and happiness are strong concepts in the writings of all three men, and within their scriptures they often contradict each other’s ideas. In discussion of human labor, the idea of equality in all aspects has been controversial. On the one hand, Adam Smith and Dickens would agree that the image provides an exact portrayal of how human labor within …show more content…
Marx divides society into two classes, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. The proletarians are society’s working class, and the bourgeois are those who own the land, industries, etc. that the proletarians work on. This image falls hand in hand with Marx’s argument about the power the bourgeois have over the proletarians. In this image we see a man who is merely standing in the middle doing nothing, while several men behind him work. It is only obvious, that he who stands in the middle, is the chief or in other words, the boss. Marx would argue that this image reinforces social inequality, and that the men who are working cannot achieve happiness if instead of progressing into a Communistic society remain with class division. “Not only are they slaves of the bourgeois class, and of the bourgeois state; they are daily and hourly enslaved by the machine, by the overlooker, and, above all, by the individual bourgeois manufacture himself” (Marx 16). Marx’s quote suggests that through being enslaved by both men and machinery, one [proletarian] has no place to be