Moreno 1

Jared Moreno

20 October 2009

Bill Jones

Two Views on the Industrial Revolution

The Industrial Revolution and the new economic system, capitalism, changed everything

from previous epochs. The way people produced, the way people survived, the way people lived

and the ideas that people had were completely revolutionized in an extremely short period of

time. Both Adam Smith and Karl Marx observed this new system. Adam Smith wrote about this

system as it started and Karl Marx a hundred years after once the consequences were revealed.

Adam Smith brought the idea of capitalism into being with his book Wealth of Nations. Karl

Marx critically critiqued this new system in his pamphlet called “The Communist Manifesto.”

The debate between the two philosopher's ideas continues long after their deaths.

There would have to be conditions met for the Industrial Revolution and the new

economic system to be established. There needed to be large populations living in centralized

areas, so they could work in factories. A problem with this was that the majority of people lived

out in the farmlands living as peasants. They worked in agriculture, so they could feed

themselves and their families. Technology and changes in how agriculture was handled helped

liberate people from this laborious task of farming. With the level of food production increasing

and because of advances in agriculture, less people were needed to work as farmers. Therefore,

farmland became concentrated among a few large landowners and the rest of the people moved

to urbanize cities to find new ways of living. These people became the first workers in a new

kind of society advanced in technology and production.

 Moreno 2

What encouraged the Industrial Revolution more than the advances in agriculture was

the improvement in technology. It was the change in technology which greatly contributed to the

increase of production. New technological advancements made factory work and production

faster. Technology also helped the transportation of products and resources. Some of the earliest

inventions took place in Britain. The first inventions were used to increase cotton textile

production. The Flying Shuttle was invented in 1733 and the Spinning Jenny in 1764. Along

with these inventions, Strayer stated how “the great breakthrough was the steam engine, which

provided an inanimate and almost limitless source of power beyond that of wind, water, or

muscle and could be used to drive any number of machines as well as locomotives and

oceangoing ships.”1 Combined with the invention of steel, railroads and steamships provided a

fast transportation of goods and resources. Inventions also helped the extraction of resources

such as iron and coal. In every area of life, technology greatly improved the production

capabilities of Europe, especially Britain, at the start of the Industrial Revolution.

Another step in improving production beyond the advancement in technology was Adam

Smith’s ideas on the division of labor. Smith describes about how this new style of production

when he says “the greatest improvement in the productive powers of labour, and the greater part

of the skill, dexterity, and judgment with which it is anywhere directed, or applied, seem to have

been the effects of the division of labour.”2 The division of labor was the assigning of specific

tasks in the development of a product to one person instead of that one person making the entire

product. To make a product today, it goes through an assembly line where every worker

1 Robert W. Strayer Ways of the World A Brief Global History (Bedford/St. Martin's, 2009)
528.

2 Adam Smith “From the Wealth of Nations” in Worlds of History A Comparative Reader, 3rd
Ed., Kevin Reilly (Bedford/St. Martin's, 2007) 235.
 Moreno 3

contributes to a specific job in building that product. It takes more than one person doing a

repetitive task to make a shoe today. This division speeds the time of production because the

worker does not waste time switching from one task to another. As well, each worker becomes

exceptionally good at doing one specific task, over and over again, without tiring. Division of

labor successfully made workers far more productive than at any other time in history.

As well as the concept of division of labor, Smith created the idea of the “Invisible

Hand.” When comparing importation of products from foreign countries in contrast to producing

the same products within the country, Smith said:

He generally, indeed, neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how

much he is promoting it. By preferring the support of domestic to that of foreign industry, he

intends only his own security; and by directing that industry in such a manner as its

produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, . . .

led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention.3

According to Smith, those who could produce goods within their own country could better their

wealth by seeking their interests, but they also promoted the interests of the rest of their country

and all the people who lived there, even unknowingly to the producer. With the assistace of the

invisible hand, they were able to promote the wealth of everyone because they promoted their

own interests.

Although it almost seemed like the ideal world of Smith was coming true, this new

system left many people behind. His ideas encouraged new levels of production far greater than

any previous system. The wealth of the world was increasing rapidly. Instead of all this wealth

3 Adam Smith “From the Wealth of Nations” in Worlds of History A Comparative Reader, 3rd
Ed., Kevin Reilly (Bedford/St. Martin's, 2007) 239
 Moreno 4

falling to the majority of people, the wealth became concentrated in only a few hands of society.

The increased in wealth divides the world into two social classes. The consequences of this

system increasingly became revealed about seventy-five years after Smith in Karl Marx and

Frederick Engels' pamphlet, “The Communist Manifesto.“

Karl Marx wrote about capitalism, the problems it created, and the new class of workers

living in it. These people lived in high density areas in which terrible diseases killed many. They

worked nearly the entire day in horrible conditions. The water systems were poisoned with

pollution. In a cartoon in Strayer, for example, death is seen giving water from a polluted public

well to a poor family.4 A capitalist at the time might have asked, “Why waste money and

temporarily stop production to create healthy sewer system for the poor laborers?” Children even

had to work with their parents at the age of five. The new economic system did not seem to be

bringing a better life for a large population, unlike what Smith predicted.

The poverty that labor workers endeared was created because they were hired in a wage

system. Marx observed that the wage system had effectively increased the profits of the rich

through the exploitation of the poor. Marx stated that the worker:

becomes an appendage of the machine, and it is only the most simple, most

monotonous, and most easily acquired knack, that is required of him. Hence, the cost of

production for a workman is restricted, almost entirely, to the means of subsistence that

he requires for his maintenance, and for the propagation of his race.5

The wage given to the workers were not the entire profit gained for the amount they had

4 “The Urban Poor of Industrial Revolution” The Granger Collection, New York in Robert W.
Strayer Ways of the World A Brief Global History (Bedford/St. Martin's, 2009) 538

5 Karl Marx The Communist Manifesto (International Publishers Co., Inc. 1948) 16.
 Moreno 5

produced. The workers were given only the bare minimum wage for their survival. The rest of

the profit was kept for the employer. The employer took profit from every worker. This

exploitation created a large division in the wealth of the workers and the employers who hired

them. Over the entire society, the wealth was kept for a small group of people. This separation of

employer and worker divided people into two classes, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. The

bourgeoisie were those who owned the means of production, the rich capitalist class. The

proletarians were the urban wage workers who often worked in the factories for the bourgeoisie.

These two classes represented the oppressors and the oppressed. The bourgeoisie exploited the

proletariat for their own profit and wealth. In the invisible hand, Smith stated that it would be in

the best interests of the bourgeoisie to seek the interests of the rest of society. What bourgeoisie

saw in their best interests was, however, to increase their wealth as much as possible at the

expense of the rest of society.

Through exploitation, the wealth of the capitalist increased, which allowed them to

invest so much in industry that production had increased beyond the rate that society could

consume. Society faced a situation unlike any time in history; there was too much production.

There was too much food to be consumed and too many houses for people to buy or live in.

Marx said that society:

has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer

who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up

by his spells. . . In these crises there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs,

would have seemed an absurdity –the epidemic of over-production.6

Over-production placed the entire economic system into a crisis. How could the economic

6 Ibid., 14-15.
 Moreno 6

system grow if there was no longer a market for the products being made? According to Marx, to

recover the economic system, the means of production must be destroyed, new markets created,

and increased exploitation of old markets.7

One of the methods used for recovery was that of the destruction of the means of

production. The economic system needed to stop producing. In this period, factories could be

shut down or even destroyed and products would be thrown away. Marx states that the workers

were “a class of laborers, who live only so long as they find work, and who find work only so

long as their labor increases capital.”8 Once capital could no longer be increased because of

overproduction, laborers lost their jobs. They were left to starve to death despite the fact that

there was too much food.

Despite the crisis of over-production, one thing that both Smith and Marx agreed on was

that the increase of industry and technology would benefit the life of all people. They saw that

this new world of production would solve the many problems of the past such as disease,

starvation, and more. They also saw that technology would release the restraints of work from

people, and that people would be able to have more free time to do the things they desired.

Capitalism, they thought, would benefit the majority of the people.

Unlike Smith, Marx believed that the proletariat would have to struggle with the

bourgeoisie before the benefits of capitalism would actually reach them. Smith did not realize

that the two classes would develop into two separate classes. The two classes were opposing

forces that stayed in constant strife. As Marx and Engels was writing and publishing The

Communist Manifesto, the working class was rising up and demanding a better life. The

7 Ibid., 15.

8 Ibid.
 Moreno 7

revolution that Marx predicted seemed possible. He saw that capitalism would be turned into a

democratic force the workers controlled for their own benefit instead of the for the benefit of the

bourgeoisie. Many workers movements were derived from the ideas of Marx as seen in the

“mounting wave of strikes from 1910 to 1913 testified to the intensity of class conflict,”9 as

Strayer described them. Instead of revolution, history demonstrated that the capitalist class was

not so easily overthrown. The uprisings of the proletariat were smashed, but because they

agglomerated into a collective struggle, they were able increase their benefits and improve their

working and living conditions. Through their struggles, workers of all societies had some

victories, which included an end of child labor, universal suffrage, eight hour work days, and

much more.

The world we live in has been pushed to the edge of resources. For the first time, the

actually possibility of the end of human life is within our horizons. The speed in which

capitalism produces has left the Earth with such a toll that it is now possible to conjure the idea

that we may not be here much longer. The environmental crisis we have created can end all

human life. To me it seems that we must either move on to a world where we not only stop the

damage we are doing to the Earth, but we figure out ways of reversing it as fast as possible.

Capitalism is a machine stripping the Earth of everything we need; however, we can use this

machine for the purpose of replenishing the Earth. We must come together in using the industrial

machine in helping the Earth and all life on it. Otherwise, it might have been better if we never

had the Industrial Revolution.

9 Robert W. Strayer Ways of the World A Brief Global History (Bedford/St. Martin's, 2009)
540.
 Moreno 8

Work Cited

1. Strayer, Robert W. Ways of the World A Brief Global History 528. Bedford/St.

Martin's, 2009.

2. Smith Adam “From the Wealth of Nations,” in Worlds of History A Comparative

Reader, 3rd Ed., Kevin Reilly 235. Bedford/St. Martin's, 2007.

3. Ibid., 239.

4. “The Urban Poor of Industrial Revolution,” The Granger Collection, New York in

Robert W. Strayer, Ways of the World A Brief Global History 538. Bedford/St. Martin's, 2009.

5. Marx, Karl, The Communist Manifesto 16. International Publishers Co., Inc. 1948.

6. Ibid., 14-15.

7. Ibid., 15

8. Ibid.,

9. Strayer, Robert W., Ways of the World A Brief Global History 540. Bedford/St.

Martin's, 2009.