Adam Smith (1723–1790) wrote The Wealth of Nations in 1776. Smith believed that a state’s wealth should be measured, not by stores of wealth in gold and silver, but in the total measure of production and commerce. Smith championed a free market economy, in which individual self-interest would achieve the greatest economic prosperity for all. He argued against the regulation of commerce and trade in favor of a laissez-faire system, which would balance the interests of both laborers and employers.
What are the common wages [payment] of labor depends everywhere upon the contract usually made between those two parties, whose interests are by no means the same. The workmen desire to get as much, the masters; to give as little as possible. The former [the workmen] are disposed to combine in order to raise, the latter [the masters] in order to lower, the wages of labor.
It is not, however, difficult to foresee which of the two parties must, upon all ordinary occasions, have the advantage in the dispute, and force the other into a compliance with their terms. The masters, being fewer in number, can combine [work together] much more easily; and the law, besides, authorizes, or at least does not prohibit [prevent] their combinations, while it prohibits those of the workmen. We have no acts of Parliament against combining to lower the price of work; but many against combining to raise it. In all such disputes the masters can hold out much longer. A landlord, a farmer, a master manufacturer, or merchant, though they did not employ a single workman, could generally live a year or two upon the stocks which they have already acquired. Many workmen could not subsist [survive] a week, few could subsist a month, and scarcely any a year without employment. In the long run the workman may be as necessary to his master as his master is to him, but the necessity is not so immediate . . .
Is this improvement in the circumstances of the lower ranks of the people to be regarded as an advantage or as an inconveniency to the society? The answer seems at first sight abundantly plain. Servants, labourers and workmen of different kinds, make up the far greater part of every great political society. But what improves the circumstances of the greater part can never be regarded as an inconveniency to the whole. No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable. It is but equity, besides, that they who feed, cloath and lodge the whole body of the people, should have such a share of the produce of their own labour as to be themselves tolerably well fed, cloathed and lodged.
Karl Marx (1818–1883) and Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) wrote The Communist Manifesto in 1848. Marx and Engels believed that capitalism, the economic system in which people work for owners of land or companies to earn money, “enslaved” the workers. They believed that to stop capitalism, that workers (the proletariat) needed to rebel against the wealthy owners (the bourgeoisie) and take the land and resources for themselves. People who believe this philosophy are known as Communists.
The Communist Manifesto and other writings by Marx and Engels inspired revolutions in countries like Russia, Cuba, and China and have heavily influenced workers-rights groups to today.
The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.
. . . Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other: Bourgeoisie and Proletariat . . .
Modern industry has converted the little workshop of the patriarchal master into the great factory of the industrial capitalist. Masses of laborers, crowded into factories, are organized like soldiers. As privates of the industrial army they are placed under the command of a perfect hierarchy of officers and sergeants. Not only are they the slaves of the bourgeois class, and of the bourgeois State, they are daily and hourly enslaved by the machine . . . and, above all, by the individual bourgeois manufacturer himself . . .
But with the development of industry the proletariat not only increases in number, it becomes concentrated in greater masses, its strength grows, and it feels that strength more . . .
It has become evident that the bourgeoisie is unfit any longer to be the ruling class in society and to impose its conditions of existence upon society as an over‐riding law. . . . Society can no longer live under this bourgeoisie, in other words its existence is no longer compatible with society . . .
The immediate aim of the Communists is the same as that of all the other proletarian parties: formation of the proletariat into a class, overthrow of the bourgeois supremacy, conquest of political power by the proletariat . . .
The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at the Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.
Workingmen of all countries, unite!
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