Communist Manifesto And Abraham Kuyper s The Problem Of...

The skies are an eternal grey, the sun is hardly seen, and people hurriedly rush to a meaningless job only to stumble back to a home in squalor. The grey of the skies is a perfect match for the people’s spirits. Hope, like the sun, becomes shrouded in a smoky cloud as the jobs provided to these people offer little in wages and even less in purpose. This is the life facing the proletariat, wage-labor social class or working poor. In contrast, the employers of the poor caste live rather lavish lives of wealth and stature. The bourgeois, upper middle-class consisting of business owners, shop owners, landlords, otherwise known as the wealthy employers. It is this contrast of social struggle that produced Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto and Abraham Kuyper’s The Problem of Poverty. Both Marx and Kuyper’s writings focus on the social struggle between the privileged, wealthy, and unprivileged, poor; however, Marx presents the struggle and his solution from an econ omic viewpoint while Kuyper presents the struggle and his solution from a religious viewpoint. Marx begins his presentation with a defining of both socio-economic groups then presents the political movement of Communism as a solution to the contrast. Kuyper, on the other hand, focuses his presentation on the idolization of monetary wealth over the sovereignty of God beginning at the conclusion of the French Revolution. Kuyper’s writing not only presents a religious solution to class struggle, but is also a response of