Marx Historical Context Classical Sociological and Economic Essay

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Marx Historical Context

Classical sociological and economic theories like those of Karl Marx emerged in Western Europe when it was experiencing the Enlightenment, the emergence of scientific method, a growing sense of individual autonomy over one's life conditions, the emergence of private property, urban growth, and a total shattering of the social balance of relations among peoples that had been in place for centuries if not millennia. Christianity and other traditional religions were being undermined by the new developments in science and technology, while urban, industrial capitalism was breaking up the old feudal-agrarian order in Europe and the Americas. All the founders of modern sociology had to deal with this radically new society, and attempted to describe its historical origins, the new social and economic problems of industrial capitalism, and how governments and societies should deal with them. Karl Marx received his PhD in economics in Germany during the dawn of industrialization and the factory system. He predicted that the socialist revolutions would occur first in the advanced Western nations like Britain, France and the U.S., and belied that the 1848 revolutions were harbingers of these. When they failed he exiled from Germany, however, and spent the rest of his life in England.

In classical Marxist theory, changes in technology, transportation and communications led to the rise of the capitalist class or bourgeoisie, which first began to take political power in Europe and the Northern United States in the 17th and 18th Centuries. As certain regions of these countries became urbanized and industrialized, a new working class or proletariat began to emerge among the displaced and landless peasants who flocked to the cities in search of work. In the 19th Century, the hours of work in the new factories were very long and "the wages earned by laborers left families on the brink of beggary," while living conditions in cities like Manchester were hell on earth.[footnoteRef:1] For Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, then, the three main classes of society were workers, capitalists and landowners, while the older classes of peasants and artisans were gradually disappearing and being absorbed into the proletariat.

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Class struggle was "the prime mover of history" and like other socioeconomic systems in the past, capitalism had unintentionally produced the class that would end up destroying it in a violent revolution.[footnoteRef:2] [1: S. Appelrouth, S. And L.D. Edles, Sociological Theory in the Classical Era: Text and Readings, 2nd Edition (SAGE Publications, 2010), p. 20] [2: Applelrouth and Edles, p. 22]

Marx and Engels regarded the Glorious Revolution of 1688, the American Revolution of 1776 and the French Revolution of 1789 as liberal or bourgeois revolutions that opened the door to a capitalist phase of economic development. At the time these revolutions began, the new middle class was in the vanguard and represented a progressive force whose task was to sweep away the old feudal order. Liberal revolutions broke out in Europe in 1830 and again in 1848, although most were defeated by the forces of conservatism as well, but capitalist industrialization continued to expand as did the urban working class or proletariat. Unlike Hegel, Marx was a historical materialist who argued that class conflict rather than ideology was that driving force of history. He confined religion and ideology to the superstructure of society, and regarded them as expressions and reflections of the ruling social class in any given historical. Marx and Engels were premature in 1848 when they wrote in The Communist Manifesto that Communism was a specter haunting Europe, although socialist and working class parties were appearing in all the Western nations by this time, and the second phase of the 1848 revolution in France led to the brief creation of a Red Republic that was harshly repressed by the military. They realized that this particular event was indeed a harbinger of socialist revolutions in the future, although in the end none of these occurred in the Western capitalist core as they expected. When these revolutions took power, the workers would end up in control of the state….....

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