Strayer, Marx

There were a variety of ways that the working class addresses the monotony of industrial life. By 1815, the end of the Napoleonic Era, about one million workers, mostly artisans had created a series of societies that acted as self-help groups for workers. These organizations seem to be the framework for the notion of unions that would come about legally a few years later. The first labor unionists were mostly artisans. These unions at first weren’t fighting for labor rights, but merely helping the defray the shared costs of such things as insurance and paying for funerals. Others within the political spheres of influence joined to achieve lasting change in the areas of better working conditions and better wages for example, once the laws of England permitted unions to be legalized by 1824. Local strikes were fermented, but ultimately, national strikes in Britain were aimed for. The British upper classes were quite alarmed and not really understanding the union movements, first the newspapers perpetuated the believe amongst the upper classes that the unions were a threat to society even though the unions became more respectable organizations over time. Socialist ideas don’t seem to have began with Karl Marx interestingly. A textile mill owner named Robert Owen seems to have promoted the idea of a cooperative, in which the workers decided collectively by vote what the means and mode of production were in terms of conditions, hours and pay et cetera. He established a 10 hour work day, housing for workers, standardized wages, and even education for the workers children.

Marx, however would have a more last impact the trajectory of labor rights. Although he was German by birth, most of his life experience that dealt with the consequences of the industrial revolution occurred while he lived in England. He wrote extensively of these labor conditions that he witnessed as well as economic ideas and economic critiques that he formulated in his books such as the Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital. For Marx, religion had to be removed from the equation to realize that man’s trajectory wasn’t in God’s hands, but rather if there was no God then mans existence must therefore be based on the idea of class struggle. The hostilities began between the bourgeoisie who owned the industrial capital and the proletariat, his term for the industrial labor class. Class struggle was at the heart of socio-economic problems in society according to Marx. Marx felt that capitalist societies could never deliver utopian ideals of freedom, democracy, and equality that the working classes yearned for because in capitalism societies the division of labor, resources, property rights could never be equally distributed amongst the classes, which created hostility between the classes. He felt that capitalism was doomed to collapse inevitably. Marx thought that once revolutions overthrew the capitalist societies that the technological innovations of the Industrial Revolution would be implemented to serve the best interests of the entire labor force. By the later part of the 19^th Century radical trade unionists, intellectuals, from the middle class embraced Marx’s ideas. And as other European countries like German caught up with the Industrial Revolution, his ideas spread to those countries. And soon labor rights parties sprung up to address the problems of the industrial age, workers rights along the lines of Marx’ ideas.