2.8 — The Marxist Challenge

# 2.8 — The Marxist Challenge

## ECON 452 • History of Economic Thought • Fall 2022

### Ryan Safner Associate Professor of Economics <a href="mailto:safner@hood.edu">safner@hood.edu</a> <a href="https://github.com/ryansafner/thoughtF22">ryansafner/thoughtF22</a> <a href="https://thoughtF22.classes.ryansafner.com"> thoughtF22.classes.ryansafner.com</a>

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# Outline

## [Background Events: Reform and Revolution](#3)

## [Marx’s Methodology and Theory of History](#31)

## [Marx’s Economic Analysis of Capitalism](#36)
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# Karl Marx

1818-1883
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- Perhaps the most consequential thinker who ever lived; testament to the real world power of ideas

- A historian and philosopher (Ph.D in philosophy); journalist in early days

- Born and educated in Prussia (Germany), but his radical views got him kicked out of the country
  - Same in Paris and Brussels
  - Finally settled in London for rest of his life, working in British Museum
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# Karl Marx

1818-1883
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- A philosopher and historian first, an economist only as a means to those ends

- Partisan advocate but made some objective contributions

- Wrote primarily about the flaws of capitalism, very little on how the economics of a socialist or communist society would (or should) work
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# Friedrich Engels

1820-1895
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- Prussian born businessman and journalist in Britain

- Father owned large textile factories in Manchester, England

- Published *The Condition of the Working Class in England* (1845) based on his personal observations

- Meets Marx, they write the *Communist Manifesto* together in 1848

- Engels would financially support Marx for the rest of his life using his (Engels’s) father’s factory profits
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# Background Events: Reform and Revolution

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# The Industrial Revolution in Britain

- .hi[Industrial revolution] (c.1740s-c.1840) in England
  - major innovations and technological improvements:
  - steam power, coal, factory system, mechanization, railroads, mass production

- Countless ink has been spilled writing about the origins and explanation for why the IR happened in Britain in 19th century
 - one of the greatest questions in all of social science

- Nonetheless, changing industrial landscape of major cities: London, Birmingham, Manchester
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# The Industrial Revolution in Britain

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# The Industrial Revolution in Britain: Living Standards

- The benefits of the IR were far from widely shared for a long time

- Working conditions were very poor (“the condition of England question”)
  - child labor
  - urban poverty, disease, pollution & squalor as many people moved from countryside to cities

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# The Industrial Revolution in Britain: Living Standards

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- Eventually, wages and living standards would *continually rise* for *most* people, for the first time in human history
  - Classical economists thought this was impossible!

- Benefits *would* be widely shared in late 19th century
 - Massive declines in malnutrition, childhood mortality, increase in life expectancy in Britain
 - British people grew taller than others
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