Urbanization and Migration
- By 1990, there were more than 150 large cities in Europe and North America combined
- The financiers and captains of industry lived in big houses and mansions, while the workers all lived in small houses and little to no comfort.
- The city air became so polluted, that people would escape to parks or the suburbs on the weekends.
- Unsanitary living conditions led to epidemics of diseases such as typhus, cholera, and tuberculosis.
- City authorities began improving the water supply, expanded sewage systems, and helped accommodate poorly paid workers.
- This helped make the cities safer and better to live in.
- During the nineteenth and twentieth century, 50 million european migrated to the west.
- This increased the population and caused a rapid demographic growth.
- Most migrants intended to return back to their homelands after a few years with a big fortune, but the majority ended up staying.
- Many of the migrants left Europe to escape harsh factories, potato famine, and because of anti-Semitic policies
The Socialist Challenge
- Charles Fourier and Robert Owen worked to establish ideal communities.
- Fourier called for social transformations after spending most of his life as a salesman.
- He planned out communities that would stay together because of love instead of coercion or force.
- Owen transformed a small town called New Lanark, into a big industrial city.
- He raised wages, reduced the working hours, built more housing, and opened a shop with reasonably priced goods.
- Owen also helped the children by keeping them out of the factories and sending them to school to get an education.
- Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
- They believed that social problems were unavoidable results of a capitalist economy.
- They believe that capitalism divided people into two classes.
- The capitalists and the proletariat.
- The capitalists owned industrial machinery and factories while the proletariats could only sell their labor.
- Marx and Engels said that the state wanted to keep the capitalists in power and continue the exploitation of the proletariats.
- Marx referred to religion as “the opiate of the masses” because it caused workers to believe in something beyond them rather than try to fix their own society.
- Together, they wrote “Manifesto of the Communist Party”.
- The Manifesto talked about how history has always struggled because of social classes.
- It argued that overproduction, underconsumption, and diminishing profits would cause capitalism to slow to a stop.
- Marx and Engels believed that a social revolution was needed to establish the dictatorship of the proletariat and would abolish private property and destroy the capitalist order.
- Their doctrines began to spread around Europe and social parties grew rapidly.
- Although there were many social parties, many of them disagreed on what the best way to reform society was.
- Revolutionary socialists wanted to seize control of state and distribute the wealth equally while evolutionary socialists believed in representative governments and voted for social reformists as legislators.
- Although socialists did not win any elections until 1917, their critiques were able to persuade the government to provide security for the working class.
- The British government began regulating work hours and conditions in the Factory Act of 1833.
- Germany introduced medical insurance, unemployment compensation, and retirement pensions.
- Trade unions began to seek a more just and equal society.
- Trade unions struggled to eliminate abuses of industrial society and improve the workers’ lives.
- Both employers and governments considered trade unions illegal associations whose purpose was to restrain trade,
- Trade unions became a part of industrial society in the long run because it didn’t try to destroy capitalism, and instead, tried to make employers be more fair.