6
CHAPTER I
THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION IN
ENGLAND.
THE GREAT FRENCH REVOLUTION AND ITS INFLUENCE UPON
GERMANY.
In Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels we have two individuals who have greatly
influenced human thought. The personality of Engels recedes somewhat into the
background as compared to Marx. We shall subsequently see their interrelation. As
regards Marx one is not likely to find in the history of the nineteenth century a man
who, by his activity and his scientific attainments, had as much to do as he, with
determining the thought and actions of a succession of generations in a great number
of countries. Marx has been dead more than forty years. Yet he is still alive. His
thought continues to influence, and to give direction to, the intellectual development
of the most remote countries, countries which never heard of Marx when he was
alive.
We shall attempt to discern the conditions and the surroundings in which
Marx and Engels grew and developed. Every one is a product of a definite social
milieu. Every genius creating something new, does it on the basis of what has been
accomplished before him. He does not sprout forth from a vacuum. Furthermore, to
really determine the magnitude of a genius, one must first ascertain the antedating
achievements, the degree of the intellectual development of society, the social forms
into which this genius was born and from which he drew his psychological and
physical sustenance. And so, to understand Marx -- and this is a practical application
of Marx's own method -- we shall first proceed to study the historical background of
his period and its influence upon him.
Karl Marx was born on the 5th of May, 1818, in the city of Treves, in Rhenish
Prussia; Engels, on the 28th of November, 1820, in the city of Barmen of the same
province. It is significant that both were born in Germany, in the Rhine province, and
at about the same time. During their impressionable and formative years of
adolescence, both Marx and Engels came under the influence of the stirring events of
7
the early thirties of the nineteenth century. The years 1830 and 1831 were
revolutionary years; in 1830 the July Revolution occurred in France. It swept all over
Europe from West to East. It even reached Russia and brought about the Polish
Insurrection of 1831.
But the July Revolution in itself was only a culmination of another more
momentous revolutionary upheaval, the consequences of which one must know to
understand the historical setting in which Marx and Engels were brought up. The
history of the nineteenth century, particularly that third of it which had passed
before Marx and Engels had grown into socially conscious youths, was characterised
by two basic facts: The Industrial Revolution in England, and the Great Revolution in
France. The Industrial Revolution in England began approximately in 1760 and
extended over a prolonged period. Having reached its zenith towards the end of the
eighteenth century, it came to an end at about 1830. The term "Industrial
Revolution" belongs to Engels. It refers to that transition period, when England, at
about the second half of the eighteenth century, was becoming a capitalist country.
There already existed a working class, proletarians -- that is, a class of people
possessing no property, no means of production, and compelled therefore to sell
themselves as a commodity, as human labour power, in order to gain the means of
subsistence. However, in the middle of the eighteenth century, English capitalism
was characterised in its methods of production by the handicraft system. It was not
the old craft production where each petty enterprise had its master, its two or three
journeymen, and a few apprentices. This traditional handicraft was being crowded
out by capitalist methods of production. About the second half of the eighteenth
century, capitalist production in England had already evolved into the manufacturing
stage. The distinguishing feature of this manufacturing stage was an industrial
method which did not go beyond the boundaries of handicraft production, in spite of
the exploitation of the workers by the capitalists and the considerable size of the
workrooms. From the point of view of technique and labour organisation it differed
from the old handicraft methods in a few respects. The capitalist brought together
from a hundred to three hundred craftsmen in one large building, as against the five
or six people in the small workroom heretofore. No matter what craft, given a
number of workers, there soon appeared a high degree of division of labour with all
its consequences. There was then a capitalist enterprise, without machines, without
automatic mechanisms, but in which division of labour and the breaking up of the
8
very method of production into a variety of partial operations had gone a long way
forward. Thus it was just in the middle of the eighteenth century that the
manufacturing stage reached it apogee.
Only since the second half of the eighteenth century, approximately since the
sixties, have the technical bases of production themselves begun to change. Instead
of the old implements, machines were introduced. This invention of machinery was
started in that branch of industry which was the most important in England, in the
domain of textiles. A series of inventions, one after another, radically changed the
technique of the weaving and spinning trades. We shall not enumerate all the
inventions. Suffice it to say that in about the eighties, both spinning and weaving
looms were invented. In 1785, Watt's perfected steam-engine was invented. It
enabled the manufactories to be established in cities instead of being restricted to the
banks of rivers to obtain water power. This in its turn created favourable conditions
for the centralisation and concentration of production. After the introduction of the
steam-engine, attempts to utilise steam as motive power were being made in many
branches of industry. But progress was not as rapid as is sometimes claimed in
books. The period from 1760 to 1830 is designated as the period of the great
Industrial Revolution.
Imagine a country where for a period of seventy years new inventions were
incessantly introduced, where production was becoming ever more concentrated,
where a continuous process of expropriation, ruin and annihilation of petty
handicraft production, and the destruction of small weaving and spinning workshops
were inexorably going on. Instead of craftsmen there came an ever-increasing host of
proletarians. Thus in place of the old class of workers, which had begun to develop in
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and which in the first half of the eighteenth
century still constituted a negligible portion of the population of England, there
appeared towards the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth
centuries, a class of workers which comprised a considerable portion of the
population, and which determined and left a definite imprint on all contemporary
social relations. Together with this Industrial Revolution there occurred a certain
concentration in the ranks of the working class itself. This fundamental change in
economic relations, this uprooting of the old weavers and spinners from their
habitual modes of life, was superseded by conditions which forcefully brought to the
mind of the worker the painful difference between yesterday and to-day.
Dostları ilə paylaş: |