Written Reflection #2
For this written reflection you will synthesize information from the last five classes. You will write a 2,
000 – 2,500 word reflection that addresses the question below. This assignment is to be handed in (not emailed) on WEDNESDAY JULY 20. You must use your notes, the textbook and the primary sources
discussed in class.
Remember:
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Synthesis requires you to compile information to come to a conclusion.
You must compose a response that develops a position on the issue and incorporates perspectives
from at least six of the primary sources we read for this topic (cite them appropriately using MLA
format).
You must also draw upon background knowledge taken from your reading and from class
discussion (Textbook information must be cited correctly using MLA format).
Compare and contrast the main features of Liberalism, Communism and Fascism. Explain the
history of each of the ideologies and each ideology’s arguments against the others. Support all your
claims with appropriate and substantial evidence from at least six of the primary sources examined
in class. Please use your textbook as a secondary source.
Your essay will be evaluated using the following criteria:
A+: This essay exhibits a complex and nuanced understanding of the time period. It illustrates understanding of historical
context and causation. It uses the sources appropriately and effectively to support the strong, lucid historical argument
being made. Sources are cited correctly. The essay accounts for historical interpretation and contrasting views and makes
connections that illustrate thorough engagement with the material.
A and A-: This essay exhibits a thorough understanding of the time period. It illustrates an understanding of historical context
and causation. It uses the sources appropriately and effectively to support the historical argument being made.
Sources are cited correctly. The essay accounts for historical interpretation and contrasting views and makes
connections that illustrate appropriate engagement with the material.
B+: This essay exhibits an understanding of the time period. It illustrates an understanding of historical context and causation.
It uses the sources appropriately to support the historical argument being made. Sources are cited correctly. The essay
accounts for historical interpretation and makes connections that illustrate a high-level of engagement with the material.
B and B-: This essay exhibits an understanding of the time period. It illustrates an understanding of historical context and
causation. It uses the sources appropriately to support the historical argument being made. Sources are cited correctly. The
essay accounts for historical interpretation and makes connections that illustrate appropriate engagement with the material.
C+: This essay exhibits an understanding of the time period. It illustrates an understanding of historical context and causation.
It uses the sources appropriately to support the historical argument being made. The essay makes connections that illustrate
appropriate engagement with the material.
C and C-: This essay exhibits an understanding of the time period. It illustrates some understanding of historical context. It
uses the sources appropriately to support the historical argument being made. The essay illustrates engagement with
the material, but lacks sophistication in its argument.
D: This essay lacks coherency. It fails to illustrate, or has limited, understanding of historical context. It uses the sources in an
indirect manner. The essay does not account for historical interpretation and makes few connections that illustrate
appropriate engagement with the material.
F: The essay is not completed.
NAME: ______________________________________________________________________________
Written Reflection #2
Rules for Academic Writing
1. DO NOT cut and paste from the internet – this can be construed as academic dishonesty.
2. Cite all sources – failure to do so can also be construed as academic dishonesty – a Works Cited
page is ALWAYS required in college writing.
3. In these written reflections use the textbook as a source – you do not need to do additional
research for this assignment.
4. Remember to use at least six primary sources in the Written Reflections – these are all on
Blackboard.
5. DO NOT use long direct quotations – put the idea you want to express in your own words. Direct
quotations weaken your voice in the essay.
6. Proof-read your essay – do not hand in work with spelling mistakes and problems with the page
layout – it makes grading difficult and implies lack of effort.
7. DO NOT say “I feel,” “I believe” or in “my opinion” – these phrases are redundant and weaken
your writing. The reader assumes you believe something or you would not be writing it. Just
make the statement.
8. History requires an analytical thesis – see guidelines on Blackboard.
9. Academic writing requires a formal use of language.
Excerpts: Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England (1844)
THE INDUSTRIAL PROLETARIAT.
. . . It has been already suggested that manufacture centralises property in the hands of the few. It requires
large capital with which to erect the colossal establishments that ruin the petty trading bourgeoisie and
with which to press into its service the forces of Nature, so driving the hand labour of the independent
workman out of the market. The division of labour, the application of water and especially steam, and the
application of machinery, are the three great levers with which manufacture, since the middle of the last
century, has been busy putting the world out of joint. Manufacture, on a small scale, created the
middle-class; on a large scale, it created the working-class, and raised the elect of the middle-class to the
throne, but only to overthrow them the more surely when the time comes. Meanwhile, it is an undenied
and easily explained fact that the numerous, petty middle-class of the "good old times" has been
annihilated by manufacture, and resolved into rich capitalists on the one hand and poor workers on the
other. {20}
The centralising tendency of manufacture does not, however, stop here. Population becomes centralised
just as capital does; and, very naturally, since the human being, the worker, is regarded in manufacture
simply as a piece of capital for the use of which the manufacturer pays interest under the name of wages.
A manufacturing establishment requires many workers employed together in a single building, living near
each other and forming a village of themselves in the case of a good-sized factory. They have needs for
satisfying which other people are necessary; handicraftsmen, shoemakers, tailors, bakers, carpenters,
stonemasons, settle at hand. The inhabitants of the village, especially the younger generation, accustom
themselves to factory work, grow skilful in it, and when the first mill can no longer employ them all,
wages fall, and the immigration of fresh manufacturers is the consequence. So the village grows into a
small town, and the small town into a large one. The greater the town, the greater its advantages. It
offers roads, railroads, canals; the choice of skilled labour increases constantly, new establishments can
be built more cheaply because of the competition among builders and machinists who are at hand, than in
remote country districts, whither timber, machinery, builders, and operatives must be brought; it offers a
market to which buyers crowd, and direct communication with the markets supplying raw material or
demanding finished goods. Hence the marvellously rapid growth of the great manufacturing towns. The
country, on the other hand, has the advantage that wages are usually lower than in town, and so town and
country are in constant competition; and, if the advantage is on the side of the town today, wages sink so
low in the country tomorrow, that new investments are most profitably made there. But the centralising
tendency of manufacture continues in full force, and every new factory built in the country bears in it the
germ of a manufacturing town. If it were possible for this mad rush of manufacture to go on at this rate
for another century, every manufacturing district of England would be one great manufacturing town,
and Manchester and Liverpool would meet at Warrington or Newton; for in commerce, too, this
centralisation of the population works in precisely the same way, and hence it is that one or two great
harbours, such as Hull and Liverpool, Bristol, and London, monopolise almost the whole maritime
commerce of Great Britain.
THE GREAT TOWNS.
. . . Hence it comes, too, that the social war, the war of each against all, is here openly declared. Just as in
Stirner's recent book, people regard each other only as useful objects; each exploits the other, and the end
of it all is, that the stronger treads the weaker under foot, and that the powerful few, the capitalists, seize
everything for themselves, while to the weak many, the poor, scarcely a bare existence remains.
What is true of London, is true of Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds, is true of all great towns. Everywhere
barbarous indifference, hard egotism on one hand, and nameless misery on the other, everywhere social
warfare, every man's house in a state of siege, everywhere reciprocal plundering under the protection of
the law, and all so shameless, so openly avowed that one shrinks before the consequences of our social
state as they manifest themselves here undisguised, and can only wonder that the whole crazy fabric still
hangs together.
Since capital, the direct or indirect control of the means of subsistence and production, is the weapon with
which this social warfare is carried on, it is clear that all the disadvantages of such a state must fall upon
the poor. For him no man has the slightest concern. Cast into the whirlpool, he must struggle through as
well as he can. If he is so happy as to find work, i.e., if the bourgeoisie does him the favour to enrich
itself by means of him, wages await him which scarcely suffice to keep body and soul together; if he can
get no work he may steal, if he is not afraid of the police, or starve, in which case the police will take care
that he does so in a quiet and inoffensive manner. During my residence in England, at least twenty or
thirty persons have died of simple starvation under the most revolting circumstances, and a jury has rarely
been found possessed of the courage to speak the plain truth in the matter. Let the testimony of the
witnesses be never so clear and unequivocal, the bourgeoisie, from which the jury is selected, always
finds some backdoor through which to escape the frightful verdict, death from starvation. The
bourgeoisie dare not speak the truth in these cases, for it would speak its own condemnation. But
indirectly, far more than directly, many have died of starvation, where long continued want of
proper nourishment has called forth fatal illness, when it has produced such debility that causes which
might otherwise have remained inoperative, brought on severe illness and death. The English workingmen call this "social murder," and accuse our whole society of perpetrating this crime perpetually. Are
they wrong?
True, it is only individuals who starve, but what security has the working-man that it may not be his turn
to-morrow? Who assures him employment, who vouches for it that, if for any reason or no reason his
lord and master discharges him to-morrow, he can struggle along with those dependent upon him, until he
may find someone else "to give him bread?" Who guarantees that willingness to work shall suffice to
obtain work, that uprightness, industry, thrift, and the rest of the virtues recommended by the bourgeoisie,
are really his road to happiness? No one. He knows that he has something to-day, and that it does not
depend upon himself whether he shall have something to-morrow. He knows that every breeze that
blows, every whim of his employer, every bad turn of trade may hurl him back into the fierce whirlpool
from which he has temporarily saved himself, and in which it is hard and often impossible to keep his
head above water. He knows that, though he may have the means of living to-day, it is very uncertain
whether he shall to-morrow.
Edward D. Morel, The Black Man’s Burden (1903)
Edward Morel (1873-1924) was a French-born British journalist and socialist who drew
attention to imperial abuses and led a campaign against slavery in the Belgian Congo. While
working for a Liverpool shipping firm in Brussels, Morel noticed that the ships leaving Belgium
for the Congo carried only guns, chains, and ammunition, but no commercial goods, and that
ships arriving from the colony came back full of valuable products such as rubber and ivory,
which led him to surmise that Belgian King Leopold II's colony was exploitative and relied on
slave labor. Morel wrote The Black Man’s Burden (1920), from which the following excerpt is
taken, as a response to Rudyard Kipling’s poem, “The White Man’s Burden.”
It is [the Africans] who carry the “Black man’s burden.” They have not withered away before the
white man’s occupation. Indeed… Africa has ultimately absorbed within itself every Caucasian...
In hewing out for himself a fixed abode in Africa, the white man has massacred the African in
heaps. The African has survived, and it is well for the white settlers that he has.
In the process of imposing his political dominion over the African, the white man has
carved broad and bloody avenues from one end of Africa to the other. The African has resisted,
and persisted.
For three centuries the white man seized and enslaved millions of Africans and
transported them, with every circumstance of ferocious cruelty, across the seas. Still the African
survived and, in his land of exile, multiplied exceedingly.
But what the partial occupation of his soil by the white man has failed to do; what the
mapping out of European political “spheres of influence” has failed to do; what the Maxim
[machine gun] and the rifle, the slave gang, labor in the bowels of the earth and the lash, have
failed to do; what imported measles, smallpox and syphilis have failed to do; what even the
oversea slave trade failed to do, the power of modern capitalistic exploitation, assisted by
modern engines of destruction, may yet succeed in accomplishing.
For from the evils of the latter, scientifically applied and enforced, there is no escape for
the African. Its destructive effects are not spasmodic: they are permanent. In its permanence
resides its fatal consequences. It kills not the body merely, but the soul. It breaks the spirit. It
attacks the African at every turn, from every point of vantage. It wrecks his polity, uproots him
from the land, invades his family life, destroys his natural pursuits and occupations, claims his
whole time, enslaves him in his own home…
In Africa, especially in tropical Africa, which a capitalistic imperialism threatens and has,
in part, already devastated, man is incapable of reacting against unnatural conditions. In those
regions man is engaged in a perpetual struggle against disease and an exhausting climate, which
tells heavily upon child-bearing; and there is no scientific machinery for salving the weaker
members of the community. The African of the tropics is capable of tremendous physical labors.
But he cannot accommodate himself to the European system of monotonous, uninterrupted labor,
with its long and regular hours, involving, moreover, as it frequently does, severance from
natural surroundings and nostalgia, the condition of melancholy resulting from separation from
home, a malady to which the African is especially prone. Climatic conditions forbid it. When the
system is forced upon him, the tropical African droops and dies.
Nor is violent physical opposition to abuse and injustice henceforth possible for the
African in any part of Africa. His chances of effective resistance have been steadily dwindling
with the increasing perfectibility in the killing power of modern armament…
Thus the African is really helpless against the material gods of the white man, as
embodied in the trinity of imperialism, capitalistic-exploitation, and militarism. If the white man
retains these gods and if he insists upon making the African worship them as assiduously as he
has done himself, the African will go the way of the… Amerindian, …the aboriginal Australian,
and many more. And this would be at once a crime of enormous magnitude, and a world
disaster…
To reduce all the varied and picturesque and stimulating episodes in savage life to a dull
routine of endless toil for uncomprehended ends, to dislocate social ties and disrupt social
institutions; to stifle nascent desires and crush mental development; to graft upon primate
passions the annihilating evils of scientific slavery, and the bestial imaginings of civilized man,
unrestrained by convention or law; …to kill the soul in a people – this is a crime which
transcends physical murder…
It is often argued that the agricultural… methods of the African are capable of
improvement. The statement is undoubtedly true. It applies with equal force to the land of
Britain…Why, it is only since the beginning of the 18th century that the rotation of crops has
been practiced in England! But the Kano farmers in Northern Nigeria have understood rotation
of crops and grass manuring for at least five hundred years. To advance such truisms as an
excuse for robbing the native communities of their land, degrading farmers in their own right to
the level of hired laborers urged on by the lash, and conferring monopolistic rights over the land
and its fruits to private corporations, is to make truth the stalking horse of oppression and
injustice. The statement of fact may be accurate. The claim put forward on the strength of it is
purely predatory.
Those who urge this and kindred arguments only do so to assist the realization of their
purpose. That purpose is clear. It is to make of Africans all over Africa a servile race; to exploit
African labor, and through African labor, the soil of Africa for their own exclusive benefit…
For a time it may be possible for the white man to maintain a white civilization in the
colonizable, or partly colonizable, areas of the African Continent based on servile or semi-servile
labor: to build up a servile State. But even there the attempt can be no more than fleeting. The
days of Roman imperialism are done with forever. Education sooner or later breaks all chains,
and knowledge cannot be kept from the African… [When] he becomes alive to his power the
whole fabric of European domination will fall to pieces in shame and ruin. From these failures
the people of Europe will suffer moral and material damage of a far-reaching kind…
Why cannot the white imperial peoples, acknowledging in some measure the injuries they
have inflicted upon the African, turn a new leaf in their treatment of him? For nearly two
thousand years they have professed to be governed by the teachings of Christ. Can they not begin
in the closing century of that era, to practice what they profess – and what their missionaries of
religion teach the African? Can they not cease to regard the African as a producer of dividends
for a selected few among their number, and begin to regard him as a human being with human
rights? Have they made such a success of their own civilization that they can contemplate with
equanimity the forcing of all its social failures upon Africa – its hideous and devastating
inequalities, its pauperisms, its senseless and destructive egoisms, its vulgar and soulless
materialism? It is in their power to work such good to Africa – and such incalculable harm! Can
they not make up their minds that their strength shall be used for noble ends? Africa demands at
their hands, justice, and understanding sympathy-not ill-informed sentiment. And when these are
dealt out to her she repays a thousandfold…
Friedrich Nietzsche
“Beyond Good and Evil”
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