Prompt: Compare various arguments that emerged over the course of the nineteenth century about how to improve the lives of European workers.
Historical Background: Economic changes in the nineteenth century dramatically increased the number of European industrial workers and transformed the conditions under which they lived and worked.
Documents:
Document 1: Thomas Malthus, English economist, An Essay on the Principle of Population, second edition, 1803.
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The principal and most permanent cause of poverty has little or no relation to forms of government, or the unequal division of property; and as the rich do not in reality possess the power of finding employment and maintenance for [all] the poor, the poor cannot, in the nature of things, possess the right to demand them; [these] are important truths flowing from the principle of population. . . . And it is evident that every man in the lower classes of society, who became acquainted with these truths, would be disposed to bear the distresses in which he might be involved with more patience.
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Document 2: Saint-Amand Bazard, French social theorist, public lecture, 1828.
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This fundamental principle of laissez-faire presupposes a personal interest that is always in harmony with the general interest, a supposition that innumerable facts tend to disprove. . . . It is said, “everything balances out in the end.” But until this balancing process has run its course, what do we do with the thousands who are starving? Will they endure their misery with patience because the statistical tables assure them that they will have bread in a few years?
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Document 3: Pauline Roland, French writer and political activist, letter to the editor of the French newspaper Universal Well-Being, 1851.
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Woman is entitled to work as is Man, and to have productive, independent employment which will emancipate her from all dependence. She has the right to choose her work herself as well as a man and no one can legitimately confine her to the house if she feels she is called to live otherwise. Finally, as soon as a woman comes of age, she has the right to arrange her life as she wishes.
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Document 4: Ferdinand Lassalle, German political activist, “The Workers’ Program,” public speech delivered in Berlin, 1862.
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It is the state whose function is to carry on . . . the development of the human race until its freedom is attained. The state is this unity of individuals into a moral whole, a unity which increases a million-fold the strength of all individuals . . . and makes them capable of acquiring an amount of education, power, and freedom which would have been wholly unattainable by them as individuals. . . . A state ruled by the ideas of the working class . . . would make this moral nature of the state its mission.
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Document 5: Announcement Poster, Conference of the International, 1864
The workers who created the International in 1864 did so on their own initiative, without ideological guidance from any particular political faction. Although Marx was eventually delegated the task of drafting the Inaugural Address and founding Statutes of the International, he had only been formally invited to attend the Inaugural Meeting in September 1864 hours before it began. As Benoît Malon (1841-1893) later put it, the International had no founders: rather “it came into existence, with a bright future, out of the social necessities of our epoch and out of the growing sufferings of the working class” |