Our task was to see how Communism shaped the city, after researching into many different places with a history of the system we eventually chose Manchester. Manchester seemed the best chose as it has a strong history, we were happy with making our Korsokow video in the city.
Friedrich Engles lived in Manchester who Karl Marx partnered in writing communist manifesto. Initially they wasn’t too keen on each other but as they both had the same intentions and beliefs for an equal system of class amongst the people, they soon joined forces. Karl Marx travelled down to Manchester where they wrote the iconic Communism manifesto. The journey to Manchester was really beneficial in understanding more in depth about the subject of communism and how it affected the city. It was really strange after researching these iconic figures, being in the same surrounding where Engles and Marx’s would sit down and research the conditions of the city, looking for a change. Fergus Wild a librarian at Chetham library gave us a really interesting insight on the history of the two.
Chetham Library was founded in 1653 and is the oldest public library within Britain.
This book in the picture was written in 1699, but other places state otherwise, according to Fergus Wild this was a key book studied by Marx and Engles throughout their rein. The book covers economics, population and growth. It also focused on the development of London and statistics oppose to others cities.
Although Manchester is known as one of places where communism had a strong history, Engles and Marx’s philosophy of equality are completely inexistent in the city today due to the capitalism approach. Conventions of communism were to get rid of categorising people in classes, whereas its back to the start, being even worse due to more revenue being made by corporations, banks, shopping centres. This is why there is still poverty as the money is kept within, oppose to communism equally structured way.
This a picture taken from the People Museum also in Manchester, which we visited just to get more of understanding about communism in the city.
Bibliography:
internet Archive (no date) Several essays in political arithmetick: Petty, William, Sir, 1623-1687: Free Download & Streaming: Internet Archive. Internet Archive. Available at: https://archive.org/details/severalessaysin00pettgoog (Accessed: 6 March 2015).
Camara Beckford 