SAMANTHA'S DBQ PAGE
| By using
the documents and your knowledge of nineteenth century European history, assess the
validity of the following statement: Marxism was a response to the failure of European society to address the problems created by industrialization during the last half of the nineteenth century. |
| What is your business? -- I follow
the clothdressing at present. What is your age? -- I was eight-and-twenty last February. When did you first begin to work in mills or factories? -- When I was about ten years of age. And you gave over at nine o'clock? -- At nine at night. At what distance might you have lived from the mill? -- About a mile and a half. Every morning? -- Every morning. Had you no tim for breakfast? -- No, we got it as we could while we were working. What intermissions had you for meals? -- When we began at five in the morning, we went on until noon, and then we had 40 minutes for dinner. Is there not considerable dust in the flax mills? -- A flax mill is very dusty indeed. Was not your food therefore frequently spoiled? -- Yes, at times with the dust; sometimes we could not eat it, when it had got a lot of dust on it. To keep you at your work for such a length of time, and especially towards the termination of such a day's labour as that, what means were taken to keep you awake nd attentive? -- They strapped (beat) us at times, when we wee not quite ready to be doffing the frame when it was full. Were you frequently strapped? -- At times we were frequently strapped. What sort of strap was it? -- About this length (describing it). What was it made of? -- Of leather. Were you occassionally very considerably hurt with the strap? -- Sometimes it hurt us very much, and sometimes they did not lay on so hard as they did others. Were the girls strapped in that sort of way? -- They did not strap what they called the grown-up women. Were any of the female children strappped? -- Yes; they were strapped in the same way as the lesser boys. What were your wages at 10 years old at Mr. Benyon's? -- I think it was 4s (shillings) a week. Sadler
Commission Report on Child Labor |
|
| The account
of the physical condition of the manufacturing population in the large towns in the
North-eastern District of England is less favourable. It is of this district that the
Commissioners state, "We have found undoubted instances of children five years old
sent to work thirteen hours a day; and frequently of children nine, ten and eleven
consigned to labour for fourteen and fifteen hours." The effects ascertained by the
Commissioners in many cases are, "deformity." and in still more "stunted
growth, relaxed muscles, and slender conformation:" "twisting of the ends of the
long bones, relaxation of the ligaments of the knees, ankles, and the like."
"The representation that these effects are so common and universal as to enable some
persons invariably to distinguish factory children from other children is, I have no
hesitation in saying, an exaggerated and unfaithful picture of their general condition; at
the same time it must be said, that hte individual instances in which some one or other of
those effects of severe labour are discernible are rather frequent than rare.... . . . . In conclusion, I think it has been clearly proved that children have been worked a most unreasonable and cruel length of time daily, and that even adults have been expected to do a certain quantity of labour which scarcely any human being is able to endure. Testimony for the
Factory Act of 1833: Working Conditions in England |
| It was a
town of red brick, or of brick that would have been red if the smoke and ashes had allowed
it; but as matters stood it was a town of unnatural red and black like the painted face of
a savage. It was a town of machinery and tall chimneys, out of which interminable serpents
of smoke trailed themselves for ever and ever, and never got uncoiled. It had a black
canal in it, and a river that ran purple with ill-smelling dye, and vast piles of building
full of windows where there was a rattling and a trembling all day long, and where the
piston of the steam-engine worked monotonously up and down like the head of an elephant in
a state of melancholy madness. It contained several large streets all very like one
another, and many small streets still more like one another, inhabited by people equally
like one another, who all went in and out at the same hours, with the same sound upon the
same pavements, to do the same work, and to whom every day was the same as yesterday and
tomorrow, and every year the counterpart of the last and the next.... an excerp from the
novel Hard Times, 1854 |
| The last
rays of sun contending with clouds of smoke that drifted across the country, partially
illumined a peculiar landscape. Far as the eye could reach,....a wilderness of cottages,
or tenements that were hardly entitled to a higher name, were scattered for many miles
over the land; some detached, some connected in little rows, some clustering in
groups,....interspersed with blazing furnaces, heaps of burning coal, and piles of
smouldering ironstone; while forges and engine chimneys roared and puffed in all
directions, and indicated the frequent presence of the mouth of the mine, and the bank of
the coal-pit. . . . . They come forth: the mine delivers its gang and the pit its bondsmen; the forge is silent and the engine is still. The plain is covered with the swarming multitude: bands of stalwart men, broad-chested and muscular, wet with toil, and black as the children of the tropics; troops of youth, alas! of both sexes, though neither their raiment not their language indicates the difference; all are clad in male attire; and oaths that men might shudder at issue from lips born to breathe words of sweetness. Yet these are to be, some are, the mothers of England! . . . . See, too, these emerge from the bowels of the earth! Infants of four and five years of age, many of them girls, pretty and still soft and timid; entrusted with the fulfillment of responsible duties, the very nature of which entails on them the necessity of being the earliest to enter the mine and the latest to leave it. Their labour indeed is not severe, for that would be impossible, but it is passed in darkness and in solitude. They endure that punishment which philosophical philanthropy has invented for the direst crminals, and which those criminals deem more terrible than the death for which it is substituted. Sybil, or the Two
Nations: Mining Towns,1845 |
| The history
of all hithero existing society is class struggle. Freeman and slave, patrician and
plebian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed,
stood in constant oppostion to one another, carried on an unninterrupted, now hidden, now
open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstruction of
society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes....The modern bourgeois
society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done away with class
antagonisms. It has but established new classes, new conditons oppression, new forms of
struggle in place of old ones. . . . . Owing to the extensive use of machinery and to division of labor, the work of the proletarians has lost all individual character, and, consequently, all charm for the workman. He becomes an appendage of hte machine, and it is only the most simple, most monotonous, and most easily acquired knack, that is required of him. . . . . When, in the course of development, class distinctions have disappeared and all production has been concentrated in the hands of a vast association of the whole nation, the public power will lose its political character....If the proletariatduring its contest with the bourgeoisie is compelled, by the force of circumstances, to organize itself as a class, if, by means of a revolution, it makes itself the ruling class, and, as such, sweeps aaway by force the old conditions of production, then it will, along with these conditions, have swept away the conditions for existence of class antagonism and of classes generally, nd will thereby have abolished its own supremacy as a class. Communist
Manifesto, 1848 |
| The
production of surplus value, or the extraction of surplus-labour, is the specific end and
aim, the sum and substance, of capitalist production quite apart from any changes in the
mode of production, which may arise from the subordination of labour to capital. He will
remember that as far as we have at present gone, only the independent labourer, and
therefore only the labourer legally qualified to act for himself, enters as a vendor of a
commodity into a contract with the capitalist. If, therfore, in our historical sketch,
modern industry, on the one hand; the labour of those who are physically and legally
minors, on the other, play imprtant parts, the former was to us only a special department,
and the latter only a specially striking example of labour exploitation. Without, however,
anticipating the subsequent development of our inquiry, from the mere connexion of the
historic facts before us... Das Capital, 1867 |
|
| From this
it follows that the social conflict - the war or all against all - is fought in the
open....Here men regard their fellows not as human beings, but as pawns in the struggle
for existence. Everyone exploits his neighbour with the result that the stronger tramples
the weaker under foot. The strongest of all, a tiny group of capitalists, monopolise
everything, while the weakest, who are in the vast majority; succomb to the most abject
poverty. Every great town has one or more slum areas into which the working classes are packed. Sometimes, of course, poverty is to be found hidden away in alleys close to the stately homes of the wealthy. Generally, however, the workers are segregated in separate districts where they struggle through life as best they can out of sight of the more fortunate classes of society. The slums of the English towns have much in common - the worst house in a town being found in the worst districts. The Condidtion of
the Working Class in England, 1844 |
| Having
outlived its social usefulness, capitalism must give way to a new social order--a social
order wherein government shall rest on industry, on the basis of useful occupations,
onstead of resting on territorial (political) representation. This new system can only be
the Socialist form of government if the needs of the vast majority are to be served and if
progress is to be the law of the furture as it has been in the past. Socialist Labor party, |
