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The Communist Manifesto, And Karl Marx And Rerum Novarum

Decent Essays

The Communist Manifesto is written by the philosophers Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, it was published on February 21, 1848. The Rerum Novarum was published on May 16, 1891 by Pope Leo XIII. They are two documents that talk about an issue in two very different ways. These two works have similar general ideas, like the weakening of the old order, class conflicts, and thinking about violent outbursts among the people. The Communist Manifesto was published in Germany as the guiding principles of communist thought. During this time, laborers from many industries were being oppressed by the bourgeois. Marx defined the bourgeois as those who own the means of production. There was a lot of industrialization going on during that era and there …show more content…

What the Pope is saying seems to be a solution for what the Communist Manifesto has to say about the family structure. The Rerum Novarum was released not just to address the labor issues that common laborers were facing at that time but also to contradict the work of Karl Marx. Both works tackle the issue on the rights of the common laborer to the just fruits of his or her labors. In the Communist Manifesto, it was discussed that all laborers deserved an equal share of the production output and that the means of production should be owned by no one except by the population as a whole. The Rerum Novarum discusses the rights and responsibilities of both the working class and those who hold the means of production, he explains this by saying "the misery and wretchedness pressing so unjustly on the majority of the working class”.

Marx goes on to say that the Bourgeoisie made many types of changes with the current wave of productivity, which resulted in the breaking down of the proletariat. The workers were still disorganized. When they did ended up forming into unions, they were under the influence of the bourgeois, and actually served to the Bourgeoisies objectives. He describes that a similar movement of the breaking down of the older order is taking place in the modern society. In the Rerum Novarum, the weakening of the older order can be seen by the Pope detailing how the government should really

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