Question

Industrial Society “May truly be said to be a miserly, selfish system” which socialist thinker wrote these words in 1857?
1. Robertowen
2. Pierre Joseph Proudhan
3. Friedrich engles
4. Karlmarx

Answer 1

Correct Answer - Option 1 : Robertowen

Robertowen wrote the words “May truly be said to be a miserly, selfish system” in 1857.

• He said these lines while talking about the free traders doing free and friendly communication with the distant nations.
• He is of the view that there is no friendship in trade. It cultivates all the lowest faculties of humanity and discourages all the superior.
• Then he commented that it may truly be said to be a miserly, selfish system.

•  Robertowen was a Welsh textile manufacturer, philanthropist and social reformer who was the founder of utopian socialism and the cooperative movement.
  • He is known among other things for efforts to improve his factory's working conditions, promoting experimental socialistic communities, and proposing a more collective approach to child-rearing, including government control of education.
• Pierre-Joseph Proudhon was the first political thinker and activist to embrace the term ‘anarchist’ and is often seen as the ‘father of anarchism’.
  • He defined anarchism as the ‘absence of a master, of a sovereign and developed the idea of mutualism which forms an important link between individualist and collectivist anarchism.
• Friedrich Engels was a German philosopher, social scientist, journalist, and businessman who lived from 1820 to 1895.
  • His collection of work done with Karl Marx laid the groundwork for modern communism.
  • Engels and Marx wrote and published many articles and books together that attempted to expose the uneven distribution of wealth gained during the Industrial Revolution.
  • Their writings see capitalism as an exploitative system that benefits the owners of the land, capital, and means of production more than the workforce.
  • Specifically, Engels and Marx claimed that the surplus value created by workers in excess of wages produced significant profits for owners of capital—a central theme in Engel's contributions to modern communism.
• Karl Marx (1818-1883) was a philosopher, author, social theorist, and economist.
  • He is famous for his theories about capitalism and communism.
  • Marx, in conjunction with Friedrich Engels, published The Communist Manifesto in 1848.
  • Later in life, he wrote Das Kapital (the first volume was published in Berlin in 1867; the second and third volumes were published posthumously in 1885 and 1894, respectively), which discussed the labour theory of value.