Capitalism

       Robert Owen (1771–1858) was one industrialist who determined to improve the conditions of his workers. He bought textile mills in New Lanark, Scotland where he forbade children under ten to work, set the workday from 6 a.m. to 7 p.m. and provided evening schools for children when they finished. Such meager measures were still substantial improvements and his business remained solvent through higher productivity, though his pay rates were lower than the national average.He published his vision in The New View of Society (1816) during the passage of the Factory Acts, but his attempt from 1824 to begin a new Utopian community in New Harmony, Indiana ended in failure. One of Marx's own influences was the French philosopher Pierre Proudhon. While deeply critical of capitalism, he also objected to those contemporary socialists who idolized association. In his book The Philosophy of Poverty Proudhon made a political economic attack on the classical subsistence theory of wages.(1846) In his book What is Property? (1840) he argue that property is theft, a different view than the classical Mill, who had written that "partial taxation is a mild form of robbery".

Citation:

Marx, K. (1871). Das kapital.