The industrial revolution wasn't the only thing that Manchester played a big part in. In fact, as the world's first industrial city, it was also one of the first to suffer many of the side effects of the newly emerging capitalism. Sudden wage labour jobs brought with them extreme poverty, exploitation, and ill health, and made many working people expendable in the eyes of the ruling class.
The problem was, ordinary people didn't have any real rights. Decades of collective action and social activism slowly began to introduce a new side to the political spectrum. The emergence of Britain's political left empowered ordinary people, but there different ideas about how economies should work and what the world would look like. Manchester became a hub to radical thinking, from free marketeers like Richard Cobden to utopian socialists like Robert Owen.
And it also in a small window alcove of a small Manchester library that two philosophers from Germany studied and formed the foundations of their own version of socialism: Communism. They were Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels and their ideas would revolutionise the world in years to come.
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