Economic problems
According to the article, Answer these two questions.
Why did Marx believe that capitalism would fall on its own? Why did his predictions not come true? (hint: how has the economy changed since Marxs time?
Describe Robert Owens New Lanark community? What were his innovations? Did he suspend either private property or market economics? Are there people today who follow a similar business model?
According to the articleanswer these two questions (Each question about 100 words)
1. Why did Marx believe that capitalism would fall on its own? Why did his predictions not come true? (hint: how has the economy changed since Marxs time?
2. Describe Robert Owens New Lanark community? What were his innovations? Did he suspend either private property or market economics? Are there people today who follow a similar business model? – – :;:::;, ilr z;;;nrr:
104 THE WORLDLY PHILOSOPHERS
universe of mankind as an arena in which the natural forces
of society would inevitably bring about a better life for every-
one. On the contrary, those natural forces that once seemed
teleologically designed to bring harmony and peace into the
world now seemed malevolent and menacing. If humanity
did not groan under a flood of hungry mo~~s, i~ seemed that
it might suffer under a flood of commodities without takers.
And in either event, the outcome of a long struggle for
progress would be a gloomy s!at~ where the worker just
barely subsisted, where the capitalist W!!5 cheated of his ef-
forts , and where the landlord gloated.
Indeed, here is another common element to be recog-
nized in the visions of Smith as well as Malthus and Ricardo
besides the structure of what we would call a capitalist econ~
omy. This was the vision of the working class as essentiall
passive. There is no hint in any of the three that the laborin~
poor might ever take it into their heads to introduce changes
in the system-indeed, to build a new system of their own
But that leads us into the next chapter, where we will watch
new vision guide the course of the worldly philosophy. a
,!.
V
The Dreams of
the Utopian Socialists
It is not difficult to understand why Malthus and Ricardo
should have conceived of the world in gloomy terms. En-
gland in the 1820s was a gloomy place to live; it had emerged
triumphant from a long struggle on the Continent, but now it
seemed locked in an even worse struggle at home. For it was
obvious to anyone who cared to look that the burgeoning fac-
tory system was piling up a social bill of dreadful proportions
and that the day of reckoning on that bill could not be de-
ferred forever.
Indeed, a recital of the conditions that prevailed in those
early days of factory labor is so horrendous that it makes a
modem reader’s hair stand on end. In 1828, The Lion, a radi-
cal magazine of the times, published the incredible history of
Robert Blincoe, one of eighty pauper-children sent off to a
factory at Lowdham. The boys and girls-they were all about
ten years old-were whipped day and night, not only for the
slightest fault , but to stimulate their flagging industry. And
compared with a factory at Litton where Blincoe was subse-
quently transferred, conditions at Lowdham were rather hu-
mane. At Litton the children scrambled with the pigs for the
slops in a trough; they were kicked and punched and sexually
ab?s_ed; and their employer, one Ellice Needha~, ~ad 0e
chilling habit of pinching the children’s ears until his nru ls
met through the flesh. The foreman of the plant was even
105
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1o6 THE woRLDLY PHILOSOPHERS
H h B
lincoe up by bis wrists over a machine so
worse e ung h t d h h
h h
: kn es were bent and then e pi e eavy we1g ts on
t at 1s e l k al . h ld The child and us co-wor ers were most
his s ou ers. . l l naked in the cold of winter and (seeming y as a pure y gratu-
. di ti’ flounsh) their teeth were filed down!
1tous sa s c at th Without a doubt such frightful brut 1ty ~as e excep-
. th r than the rule indeed we suspect a httle of the re-
tton ra e , . fonner’s zeal has embellished the account. But with full
discount &!:~~011,.,the_stQ!Y.~as none_theless all toou-
lustrative ~f -~ _climate m which 1Kiactices of the most-
/ callousinhumanity were ac<:_eptea as e ~ tural order of
ev-enfsciiict,even more important, as noboays ousmess .- A six-
- teen-hour workfngday was nocuncommon, witln he working
force tramping to the mills at six in th~ m?m~ng_ and trudging
home at ten at night. And as a crowning mdigmty, many fac-
tory operators did not permit their work-people to carry their
own watches, and the single monitory factory clock showed a .
strange tendency to accelerate during the scant few minutes
allowed for meals. The richest and most farsighted of the in-
dustrialists might have deplored such excesses, but their fac-
tory managers or hard-pressed competitors seem to have
regarded them with an indifferent eye.
And the horrors of working conditions were not the only
cause for unrest. Machinery was now the rage, and machin-
ery meant the displacement of laboring hands by uncom-
plaining steel. As early as 1779 a mob of eight thousand
workers had attacked a mill and burned it to the ground in
unreasoning defiance of its cold implacable mechanical effi-
ciency, and by 1811 such protests against technology were
sweeping England. Wrecked mills dotted the countryside,
and in their wake the word went about that "Ned Ludd had
passed." The rumor was that a King Ludd or a General Ludd
was directing the activities of the mob. It was not true, of
course. The Luddites, as they were calleRelated Questions: