The Little Engine That Could Analysis

For hundreds of years society has been divided into various economic, power, and social classes that represent the worth of individuals. Often there are three social classes depicted, the most common being: upper, middle, and lower class. Social status has become an essential part in the way mankind treats one another. The social class system in Watty Piper’s The Little Engine That Could can be analyzed through the conventional symbolism of color used to illustrate a small train’s journey to the other side of the mountain. In 1848, German philosophers, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels published a look into the social classes of the Bourgeois and Proletariat known as the Communist Manifesto. R. J. Ormerod quotes the daughter of Karl Marx in The History and Ideas of Marxism: The Relevance for OR:

It goes on to show how gradually the old feudal division of classes has disappeared, and how modern society is divided simply into two classes, that of the capitalists or bourgeois class, and that of the proletariat; of the expropriators and expropriated; of the bourgeois class possessing wealth and power and producing nothing, of the labor-class that produces wealth but possesses nothing. The bourgeoisie, after using the proletariat to fight its political battles against feudalism, has used the power thus acquired to enslave the proletariat. (Ormerod, 2-3)

In similar terms stated by Vladimir G. Simkhovitch in Marxism Versus Socialism. IV, “Division of labor produces a division of classes, with the lower class in constant struggle against the upper class” (641). In other words, Marxism as a whole concludes that the driving force of historical development comes from the corruption and oppression of one class by another. In The Little Engine That Could, each train represents a different social class which has an impact on the outcome on the red train’s travel to the other