The Product of Wealth at the Expense of the Unprotected
Throughout the human history, communities, countries, and civilization made wealth sacrificing the weakest and the poorest. Societies perform different predatory practices to enrich the most powerful. In the past, slavery, child labor, and lack of human rights were the protagonists of the human exploitation. The face of the oppressor has changed throughout the time; during the feudalism, the land was from the feudal lord; during the monarchies the people were servants of the king; on the modernism; the working class receives a fraction of the total profit. In 1848, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels published the well-known The Communist Manifesto. This work was a presentation of the communist
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party and severely critique the capitalistic society. After the tremendous impact of these ideas the term Marxism arrived. Marxism is the system of socialism where the class structures are overthrow and people equally owns the wealth. As well as Marx and Engels many others philosophers, writers, poets, artist, freethinkers, and others have been a voice for those who no one listens. This essay will analyze “A Modest Proposal,” by Jonathan Swift and the poem “The Chimney Sweeper,” by William Blake in a critical approach of Marxism. Jonathan Swift was born in 1667 in Dublin, kingdom of Ireland.
“The abdication and invasion of James II to Ireland drove Swift to England (Greenblatt, 1055).” “In 1729, Swift wrote his famous essay “A Modest Proposal,” a satirical portrait of the social and devastation of Ireland. This work mocks the commodification of poor by the wealthy landlords of both Ireland and England (Foster & Porter, 219). Swift dislikes the situation of his Irish people and by writing “A Modest Proposal” he raises his voice. The pamphlet opens with a reasonable statement: “For preventing the children of poor people in Ireland from being a burden to their parents or country and for making them beneficial to the public” (Swift, 1199). This essay outrageous proposes to fix the extreme famine and Ireland’s economic turmoil by fatten up children and sell them at the age of one. Swift forms a plan that would battle unemployment and overpopulation. The details of scheme will solve poverty because poor families will have extra income and less children to feed. Another issue that will solve the initiative is the prevention of voluntary abortions. In addition, the baby market will provide fashionable accessories and new gourmet cuisine of tender baby meat. Swift even provides information of about how many children need to be sell and the net profit for the business (Swift, 1200-
1204). In Swift proposal we can see a model of a selfish capitalistic landlord behavior. In Ireland, the landlords exploit their Irish workers to the extent that their families where dying of hunger. Swift observes a large number of children that requires care severely maltreated but the society ignored them. Swift ventilates the cruelty of the British and the hypocrisy of the rich lords of Ireland because the wealthy only seek for their own interest and the poor suffered the abuse (Machan, 104). “Marx criticizes all the categories of the bourgeois society,” as well as Swifts. (Korsch, 16). The purpose of “A Modest Proposal” was to directly call the attention of the English landlords and the Irish because they let their countrymen to be abused. The capitalistic lords motivations is far away from benevolence but they self-serving themselves wealth (Machan, 105). Swift shocks the people with his grotesque proposal but it same time they understood the degradation of how they lived.
In “A Modest Proposal,” Jonathan Swift writes of the poor men, women, and children of Dublin, Ireland crowding the streets due to the years of drought and crop failure. He estimates that 120,000 children are born each year and asks the question of how these people are to be provided for. Then he tells of his proposal. He states that 20,000 of the 120,000 may be reserved for breeding purposes, while the other 100,000 be sold to dine on. Swift offers several advantages to his proposal some being: the poor tenants will have something of value in their home, the wealth of the nation will greatly increase as well as the cost of caring for the child will be eliminated after a year, and eliminating the food shortages the nation is undergoing. The only counter argument he offers is that killing and eating those infants will decrease the population so much that it will make it easier for England to concur them. He finishes his proposal with a statement that he himself is not interested in making a profit since his own children are past the right age and his wife not being able to have any more children.
“A Modest Proposal” was written in 1729 by a satirical author by the name of Jonathan Swift. Swift studied at the University of Oxford and was also know for his popular writing in Gulliver’s Travel. The purpose for his satire “A Modest Proposal” was to enlighten the citizens of Ireland about their hardship and suffering. He informed them about their scares of food, money, and property, but provided a possible solution to their problem. To persuade the people Swift adopts a comforting and friendly tone to his audience for the people to react to his solution.
In the time frame that Swifts’ A Modest Proposal was written Ireland was going through political, economic, and religious struggles. In 1729 England had contrived, with the help of Irish venality, to wreck Ireland’s merchant marine, agriculture, and wool industry. Prostitutes in Swift’s paper are having kids like senseless people, but yet they can’t afford to feed them. Jonathan Swift proposes that his people should sell the babies and eat them. He thinks this would help solve the problem of over population. Swift tried to give his people pamphlets on how to fix the problem that was plaguing their country, but they ignored them. Swift says “These mothers, instead of being able to work for their honest livelihood, are forced to employ all their time in strolling to beg sustenance for their helpless infants.”(1) Swift proposes that the mothers sell the babies for 8 shillings; the rich would find the child to be a delicacy and the extra money would go to the landlord. So everyone would benefit from this proposal. He does this as a way of making his people aware of what is going on in their
Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal is an attempt to bring attention to horrible the condition in which the poor or destitute people in Ireland are living in. His argument that children of these improvised people should be sold to “the persons of quality and fortune” (A Modest Proposal) for consumption, is Swift’s gruesome way of saying you might as well eat the babies, if no one is going to actually try to fix the problems of the poor in Ireland.
In Jonathan Swift’s story, “A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People in Ireland from Being a Burden to Their Parents or Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Public”, he made a satire to talk about how the poor people in Ireland can’t afford to have children and that they have found a solution to that problem by using a very cold-hearted treatment to the poor people. The story is mainly about finding a reasonable, stress-free, and an inexpensive solution to help the starving children of Ireland become more useful to the wealthier people in the country. The story tells us that the solution is to fatten up all the children from poor families and feed them to Ireland’s land-owners that are very rich. Children from the poor could be sold at one year of age to a meat market (Swift). Swift’s argument in this story is that by the poor people giving up their children to the rich will give them an income that will be very helpful and by doing this it will fight overpopulation and
In 1729, Jonathan Swift published a pamphlet called “A Modest Proposal”. It is a satirical piece that described a radical and humorous proposal to a very serious problem. The problem Swift was attacking was the poverty and state of destitution that Ireland was in at the time. Swift wanted to bring attention to the seriousness of the problem and does so by satirically proposing to eat the babies of poor families in order to rid Ireland of poverty. Clearly, this proposal is not to be taken seriously, but merely to prompt others to work to better the state of the nation. Swift hoped to reach not only the people of Ireland who he was calling to action, but the British, who were oppressing the poor. He writes with contempt for those who are oppressing the Irish and also dissatisfaction with the people in Ireland themselves to be oppressed.
In eighteenth century Ireland, the nation was in a famine and an epidemic of poverty due to the high prices of land and food. Jonathan Swift saw a problem, so h wrote and spread what we call today, A Modest Proposal. Swift’s essay is satirical. He exaggerates and gives inaccurate statistics to deliver a thesis that runs deeper than the explicit one about eating babies. While much of the essay seems to imply that Swift’s persona eats babies, there are some instances where Jonathan hints at the ironic themes of the writing.
Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal is a shocking satire that discusses the dire poverty in Ireland. It says if one is born poor they will stay that way unless society puts them to use. Children are food to be eaten. In an economic slump children will be used to feed and clothe Ireland’s population. Swift’s purpose for writing A Modest Proposal was to call attention to the exploiting and oppressing by the English to the Irish. He wanted to shock his readers by proposing his “modest” proposal. He presents selling babies as food to reduce overpopulation. This causes the reader to disregard this suggestion. Swift wanted to raise awareness on the issue that was haunting Ireland. Throughout A Modest Proposal, Swift effectively uses verbal irony, diction, and sentence structure to achieve his purpose of making people realize that there are problems in society that needed to be handled in a reasonable manner. He also wanted to help advance the country’s trade, provide for infants, relieve the poor and help the rich. Swift ultimately wanted to get people thinking about actual solutions that could solve their current problems.
Desperate times often call for desperate measures, and proposals of desperate measures are often met with swift criticism if they are found to be without rational thought and merit. It is unlikely that anyone in their right mind would consider, for any amount of time, the proposal of rearing children, or properly raising them, as food to help alleviate poverty-stricken Ireland in 1729. Yet, Jonathan Swift’s suggestion was satirical brilliance, and it was a modest proposal for illuminating the cause of Ireland’s woes. The proposal was not actually eating children but placing a mirror for the reader to reflect upon. The target audience of landlords, gentlemen, and other people of stature were more than accustomed to stepping on the poor on their way to the top. The solution was tailored to appeal to those who he implied are the responsible parties for perpetuating the disadvantages of the Irish people.
During the time period in which Jonathan Swift wrote his proposal, the disoriented economic state of Ireland had the citizens--to a certain extent--uninformed of governmental actions, and were mostly self-reliant or dependent on those of higher social status. Women often resorted to begging as an occupation to feed their children.
The major goal of writing a work of satire is to subversively expose social ills through exaggerations. The satirist holds a social and moral responsibility to inspire resistance, and that responsibility is to draw attention to failings of the government and often the people. Generally, people learn through absurdities. It is the absurdities that are memorable, because they offer a new perspective on issue that would otherwise not be given second thought. Swift’s A Modest Proposal highlights how absurd language can be an effective educational and revolutionary tool as it speaks to the audience both emotionally and intellectually. The mind may be tricked by the absurdities, but the emotions of the reader created a sort of disequilibrium. The
In A Modest Proposal, author Jonathan swift begins by discussing the dire poverty that is rampant in Ireland due to England’s exploitation, and the terrible state of the social classes. Swift then proposes that the poor people of Ireland sell their babies as food to the rich to ease their economic troubles as well as to improve Ireland’s economy and standard of living. Swift says this because the women in Ireland continued to have babies, but were unable to provide for them. He states his proposal will make the babies “beneficial to the public” (Swift 2). Swift also, blames the politicians for Irelands grim living standards because of the lack of concern they presented in the decision making process to resolve the poor conditions.
The parents spend all their time trying to feed their large families. Swift suggests that the poor Irish families should fatten up their undernourished children and sell them as food to the wealthy English landowners. In the beginning of ‘A Modest Proposal’, the problem is noticed by how crowded the streets are with women beggars that are followed by many children. The proposer has put a lot of thought into this important subject trying to find a fair, cheap, and easy solution to this poverty problem. He did take other proposals into consideration but found that those solutions were insufficient. He proposed that Irish children should be sold to the English landowners by age one, giving poor families some much needed income. He hopes his solution will not only help starvation, but overpopulation and unemployment in Ireland. Then, he continues to offer specific data for his proposal, which suggests the number of children to be sold, their weight and price, and projected eating patterns of their consumers. ‘A Modest Proposal’ ends with his argument stating that the practice of selling and eating children will have positive outcomes for the Irish families such as husbands having more respect for their wives and the parents valuing their children more. He believes this proposal will solve Ireland’s social, political, and economic problems. Once he has listed all the benefits of this solution, the proposer lists one possible objection to his proposal. Howard Bromberg states, “It is true, he says, that this proposal would greatly reduce the population of Ireland, but this very reduction of population would be beneficial, as there is no hope of more humane measures being taken to alleviate Irish misery, such as taxing absentee landlords, replacing profligacy with industry, or cultivating a spirit of mercy from landlords toward their tenants.” The proposer hopes to
Jonathan Swift’s, “A Modest Proposal” by is a sardonic piece of work that provides an overwhelming sarcastic solution to the poverty and overpopulation issues that Ireland was having in the 1700s. He gives a sequence of nonviable and simply foolish solutions to the harsh treatment of children. The entire title of this work is, "A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People from Being a Burden to their Parents, or the Country, and for Making them Beneficial to the Public." This can sort of hint an idea on the bizarre insights that the writer is going to display. His resolution is to “fatten up” the undernourished, unfed children and sell them to a meat market where they will be sold for food. Thus, solving the economic and population problems in Ireland. Swift does this through a very sarcastic and harsh style that was advanced for the time that he wrote it.
During the eighteenth century, Jonathan Swift was distributing pamphlets around Ireland in hopes of promoting intellectual growth in his homeland. As he noticed this was not making an impact, he decided to address the problems in Ireland with a different approach. Jonathan Swift took to paper and constructed “A Modest Proposal”, a satirical piece that proposes a humorous solution to the social, economic, and political problems in Ireland. Swift’s proposal suggests that babies who are born to poor families become a source of food for public, which benefits Ireland by reducing the overpopulation and adding to the food supply. In “A Modest Proposal”, Jonathan Swift uses satire to draw attention to his argument that the problems in Ireland are greatly affecting his homeland; in doing so, he portrays the themes of class division, suffering, and greed.