Economical The Basis Of Economy Change example essay topic

Introduction Power, revolutions, left and right? We have heard a lot all those concepts, but what do they really mean to us? In this work we " ll develop all those concepts and much more, but the most important thing is that we will try to explain their relationship and consequences. But this is not something we just made up as if it were just a story. We try to give good arguments to support our ideas. Mainly we will give examples of facts that happened throughout history (not only from this partial or semester).

What do we understand as power? Having power is the having the right to be, to do or to have something. This means that a person that has power has all the requirements to accomplish something he wants. But of course the power we are mainly interested in is the power somebody has to rule over the others. To explain how this concept was created we have to go back to the Absolutism. According to Thomas Hobbes, in his book Leviathan, there was a way of explaining the fact that somebody should rule over the others.

This theory starts by saying that everybody has the same power just because we " re humans but because of that if there were no rulers, everybody would crush on other people's rights and everything would be a mess because nobody would agree and there would be no evolution. So in order to avoid that, we humans resign to our right to rule over the other in order to keep everything in peace. He is were the legitimacy comes. This is the approval and support of the people who accept a specific person which is supposed to look after the others interests. After Thomas Hobbes, many others developed this social contract.

For example, Rousseau created the Democratic Social Contract, but they were all part of the same with little variants. The problem with this is that this is very utopist idea, it sounds beautiful and perfect, but let's face it, we " re humans and we turn everything to benefit our interests. So when the people is ruling, instead of watching for all the peoples needs, the governors just see how they can get benefits and they try to cover this with speeches and things but the truth is that they are just lying to the people because common people is "not important", or at least they make us believe that. Supposedly people should be able to complain about a bad situation because let's remember that each person gives the legitimacy, and if a governor loses his / her support then they have nothing to do. But they manipulate us to make us believe that we are useless. Sometimes it's not really that the governor wants economical benefits, sometimes the governors want power.

The best example I can mention is Napoleon. What he really wanted was to be the lord and master of everything. The people loved him because of something called the cult of personality, his problem for example was that he sacrificed his people in order to keep conquering lands that he didn't needed. That's when he lost the support and no matter how intelligent he was, he didn't recover from that.

That's also what happened to Porfirio Diaz, he was a great politician and he did many great stuff while he was ruling, giving stability to Mexico was his greatest achievement. His problem was also his ambition, he didn't understand that he had to leave the power. So this ambition is one of the most important problems that big governors have, and it's kind of logical because it must be very hard to leave that position when you had that influence on others. Causes for revolution to happen A revolution is a change, a big one.

It might be economical, political or social. Throughout history there have been several revolutions that have certain goals. It develops when someone disagrees in any of it's living conditions and creates or believes in an idea that will supposedly would improve and solve all his / hers /their disagreements. For example in the French Revolution they change the forms of government, they divided the powers, and they developed philosophies about equality between human beings.

For that time all this ideas were changes of what they use to have. Another example is the Industrial Revolution were they changed completely the means of production. The change as we all know was from handcrafted things to machine made ones. Even the Renaissance can be seen as a revolution of ideologies. With this concept of what a revolution is we can realize that human history has been full of them, and not only about wars but, in general, we tend to change, and to evolve. Hegel said that humanity evolves thanks to the wars, battles, and revolutions that occur, with the fights between the oppressed and the ones who oppress, and that peace and tranquility doesn't make the humans advance.

And actually is related to what we were just saying, and it makes sense because as we were saying, a revolution happens when something is no longer suitable for the people, a war or revolution occurs and then everything goes to stability, which is fine but then some else changes and another war occurs, so from this we conclude that this is like a cycle that repeats over and over again. A revolution is not a result of one thing. According to Marx, revolutions are caused by the contradictions that the systems have in between them. He says that when economical changes are produced, it brakes the balance of the economical structure, the social relationships and the political system. There have to be several things for a revolution to happen. We can divide the causes in three: economical, political and social.

Economical The basis of economy change. We have moved from the fields to the industrialization. Hundreds of years ago we used a self-production system. On feudalism the economy was based on land. It was a self-production system. The majority were the people who worked the most and received the least, so they need a change on that.

For a revolution to happen, economically speaking, we need that people's needs are not satisfied, so that is why they are looking for a change. If not everybody has enough for living, then they will want to do something about it. As Marx said there had to be a contradiction or changed that required new conditions. In feudalism, for example, this change were the crusades in which the economy of the feuds suffered a radical crisis. That's when we could say a revolution occurred, because the serfs moved into the cities and created a new social class called the bourgeoisie, which later became the rich ones. That's a very important point ion our work, but we " ll develop it later.

Another good example of an economical causes of a revolution was in the Industrial revolution. Because everything started with some needs people had, and in order to solve them the created a series of changes (machines) that lead into a new system, the capitalism boosted. Political When a political system is not working anymore, people won't be happy. We have seen throughout history that governments start to corrupt and to be guided by ambition. One of the most important and obvious examples was the French revolution in which some persons tried to imposed their ideas (in this case related on how the government should be and of course according to their interests).

But the basis of this was that the old monarchy wasn't working anymore for France so this cycle ended and a new way of ruling and living had to appear. We also saw this cycle in one of the books by Rius "L'astima de Cuba" and of course this also deals with the theory of the pendulum, At the beginning the ideas of the type of government Fidel wanted were really good. He talked about helping the poorest ones. At the beginning everything seemed fine for poor persons (because for the rich ones it wasn't fine) but as time passed by, he started instead of helping, damaging his country. Nowadays what communism has brought Cuba is that everyone lives in bad conditions. People is not happy.

So people is looking for a revolution but they are so oppressed by the government that they can't and they have to keep living in the same bad conditions. As they can't do anything, they are running out of their country. The bad government of Cuba is leading to another revolution just as the one Fidel headed years ago. Social Any society has needs.

This needs are supposed to be satisfied by the government. For example need of security, of services and of many things. If society is not receiving what it is supposed to (although it is repetitive but) they want change. Also we are looking always for equality and when we receive a different treatment than others is something unjust that we won't allow.

When groups of people start noticing all these they might gather and start fighting against it. Obviously they can't do this in Cuba. Although Fidel says that there is freedom of speech only one newspaper is permitted, and on it, authors can't criticize anything about his government. It is aldo prohibited that more than a certain number of people is gathered. The necessities of Cubans are not satisfied. Yes, they are equal but equally in the same bad life conditions.

The social causes deal also with ideology. When people change their beliefs and this change is transcendental, a revolution might happen. That's what happen after the Middle Age, the people were tired of always believing what the Church said, people began feeling stupid and they wanted to explore new possibilities. And this desire was so important that it lead to a new era in which explaining the causes of things to happen was the basis. But in this example we can see a very interesting phenomenon, from being oppressed by the Church, and form believing every single thing they said, the people went exactly to the other side and they began kind of hating it. Social causes also deal a lot with Nationalism.

That feeling of belonging to a state has caused many revolutions because some persons felt they had to be together. The most recent example that we saw in class we both the German and the Italian Unification. Of course thay had more interests than just their nationalism (economical and dealing with power). But the thing is that this revolutions had many effects because the unite 2 very important nations. As we see the three causes are based on the same: inconformity and a need of change either it be political, economical or social.

It's very important to make a big emphasis on saying that this aren't isolated causes they are always related and many of them combine to really gain force and we can't forget that many times the fact that one of this needs appear is cause of some other to develop. Right and Left (Goals and Achievements) Right Conservatives: These guys were the most closed in what changes means they didn't want any change and were always against the new things - No changes - Very religious - Wanted too much control - Not too much freedom Moderates: These guys also didn't want changes but when changes happened they accepted them. - Don't want changes - But they accepted them Left Reformists: These guys want changes but in what really doesn't work they didn't want changes in things that seemed to be working. - Want changes - Only in what really doesn't function. - Changes step by step. Radicals: These guys want changes sudden and really fast changes, they want to go to the opposite of what they think is wrong.

- Complete change - Sudden and fast During those years we consider that the conservative side was of course the bourgeoisie, all the industrials which had all the capital and the means of production. The liberal side should be the communists which defended the rights of the workers, and that stated that all the money and the richness should be divided. During the nineteenth century, the highest achievement of the right wing was the development and strengthening of capitalism, taking place a lot of improvements specially for the middle and upper classes. Anachronistically, the left wing higher achievement was the development and strengthening of different ideas against capitalism, that wanted to distribute equally the wealth among all the citizens. Of course they gained strength later. Comparing the achievements of both wings during the XX century (the first two decades) the liberals changed completely the political landscape in Europe, installing in a practical way the communism in Russia (after the revolution.) Do revolutions turn into conservative forms of power?

If they succeeded they will surely do. Why? Because if it succeeded the new ideas will be imposed so the new ideology will become official, so everybody will be happy for a while and then people will start finding things they dislike. It's impossible to avoid the evolution and change of society.

So if the persons change then their ideology, politics, economy and all the environment has to change. And it's a never ending cycle. Probably we can't realize it, because sometimes this changes take many years. And even if we find the perfect ideology were everybody is happy and lives in peace of course it will be conservative because it won't want any changes. But this idea is almost impossible. The best example we can mention is the bourgeoisie.

At the beginning, in the Feudalism, they were serfs which worked for the lords. Then the crusades came and these lords had debts so they got their freedom. They created some little cities where they became merchants. After many years, their needs began to grow so they created machines. With these machines they raised their production and they made some capital (money), but they created a new social class because they needed someone who worked for them.

And although they didn't call them slaves, they had (and still have) awful salaries. They created capitalism which is the basis of our world economy nowadays. If you notice it's like a cycle, these new workers could be compared with the serfs or peasants in Feudalism. This is of course related to the Theory of the Pendulum, which says that the power is moving back and forth between conservatives to liberals.

Situation in France is an easy example to proof this point. At the beginning they had a monarchy with all the Louise's, but people got tired and they managed to change the system. They did the first revolution ever and won. The new liberals after a while were even worse than the monarchy because they were so afraid that they created a reign of terror which lead them to a total failure. Napoleon came and helped them, but he saw it was useless and he impulsed a new ideology and after a while he became the ruler and emperor. Everything was fine until Napoleon started losing confidence of they people because they were tired of all his wars.

Later he was exiled to an island and then they had the restoration epoch in which the Monarchy was reestablished. And we could go on... but the point here is to show how the ideas change but everything follows a cycle. Each of the ideas were new when they first appeared, but as we can se, every single one turned to be conservative. And it logical because once you achieve your goals, and you have all the power, then you won't want any change and you " ll do whatever it takes to keep the power.

But it's only the people with it's legitimacy which will decide at the end what will be the situation. Book Opinion Through this work we have made several comments about the book, but in this space we want to express our impressions about this books. For this partial work we read 2 books, L'astima de Cuba and Marx para Principiantes. We found the quite original because it's not usual to see a book with that many pictures (unless of course it's a book for little kids). The great thing about this pictures was that they made you understand even better the story which, by the way, was told in a very funny way. The thing is than nowadays we consider to be funny everything that says the real situation directly.

We found the one about Marx very useful because, as you know, we " re studying his ideology so this book really helped us understand what he was talking about. And Cuba has always been a very polemic topic. We hope that for the next partials we read books as interesting and useful as this ones. Reference 1. web 2. web 3. web 4. Karls, F. (2001). World History, the modern era.

USA: McGraw-Hill 5. Marx para Principiantes. Rius 6. L'astima de Cuba. Rius 7.

Lutz notes from the first and second semester Reference 1. web 2. web 3. web 4. Karls, F. (2001). USA: McGraw-Hill 5. Marx para Principiantes. Rius 6.

L'astima de Cuba. Rius 7. Lutz notes from the first and second semester.