Socialism, Utopian and ScientificEngels, Friedrich
Philosophy
Socialism, Utopian and Scientific
Engels, Friedrich
Socialism
While the Revolution ensured the political triumph of the bourgeoisie
in France, in England Watt, Arkwright, Cartwright, and others,
initiated an industrial revolution, which completely shifted the
center of gravity of economic power. The wealth of the bourgeoisie
increased considerably faster than that of the landed aristocracy.
Within the bourgeoisie itself, the financial aristocracy, the bankers,
etc., were more and more pushed into the background by the
manufacturers. The compromise of 1689, even after the gradual changes
it had undergone in favor of the bourgeoisie, no longer corresponded
to the relative position of the parties to it. The character of these
parties, too, had changed; the bourgeoisie of 1830 was very different
from that of the preceding century. The political power still left to
the aristocracy, and used by them to resist the pretensions of the new
industrial bourgeoisie, became incompatible with the new economic
interests. A fresh struggle with the aristocracy was necessary; it
could end only in a victory of the new economic power. First, the
Reform Act was pushed through, in spite of all resistance, under the
impulse of the French Revolution of 1830. It gave to the bourgeoisie a
recognized and powerful place in Parliament. Then the Repeal of the
Corn Laws, which settled, once for all, the supremacy of the
bourgeoisie, and especially of its most active portion, the
manufacturers, over the landed aristocracy. This was the greatest
victory of the bourgeoisie; it was, however, also the last it gained
in its own, exclusive interest. Whatever triumphs it obtained later
on, it had to share with a new social power, first its ally, but soon
its rival.
The industrial revolution had created a class of large manufacturing
capitalists, but also a class--and a far more numerous one--of
manufacturing work-people. This class gradually increased in numbers,
in proportion as the industrial revolution seized upon one branch of
manufacture after another, and in the same proportion it increased in
power. This power it proved as early as 1824, by forcing a reluctant
Parliament to repeal the acts forbidding combinations of workmen.
During the Reform agitation, the working-men constituted the Radical
wing of the Reform party; the Act of 1832 having excluded them from
the suffrage, they formulated their demands in the People's Charter,
and constituted themselves, in opposition to the great bourgeois
Anti-Corn Law party, into an independent party, the Chartists, the
first working-men's party of modern times.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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