Karl Marx's History Is Still Relevant Today

Karl Marx was born the Prussian city of Trier in 1818. Although his family converted to Christianity due to the antiemetic laws of Prussia, they were originally a German Jewish family. Much like Hegel before him, Marx saw reality as an ongoing process of history. For Marx that history was a history of class conflict. His conclusion was not only relevant in his time, but it is still relevant today. Marx said there were two classes of people in the world. The first was the ruling class or as he called them the bourgeoisie [bo͝orZHwäˈzē]. The second was the workers of the world which he called the proletariat [prōləˈterēət] (Kishlansky, 2009). During his lifetime he saw that the bourgeoisie had set up a system were the proletariat were set in a system of wage slavery. As he put it, they were paid a minimum wage for their labor that only gave them enough capital to cover the bare minimum of existence. That included food, rent, and a few other meager items. They could never earn enough capital to own the means of production of their own labor or even their own home. Ownership was something that only the bourgeoisie had the …show more content…
Free trade is a policy that the ruling class keeps saying is the backbone of capitalism and good for the American people. Yet, any investigation into free trade will show that it increases the wealth of the ruling class or as Bernie Sanders has coined the phrase the “billionaire class” while taking good paying jobs from the American people. The factories that used to pay $20 an hour now have been replace by Walmart and McDonalds who pay from $7.25 an hour to $10 an hour. Since the 1970’s, when Nixon opened trade to China, the average working has only seen a 6% increase in his wages while the coast of living has gone up astronomically, and the average CEO has seen a 900% increase in his wages. All free trade dose is let the ruling class take advantage of third world nations with horrible labor conditions a