Texts comparison:

1.The article “A Crisis of Capitalism” by Riccardo Bellofiore

2.The text “The Chief Features of the Industrial Revolution” by Arnold Toynbee;

3.The article “An A-Z business quotations”, from The Economist.

4. The second chapter of the book “Why be Happy When You Could be Normal?”, by Jeanette

Reading these text we can find some interesting facts about Capitalism and the Industrial Revolution with some analogies.

In particular, in the second chapter of “Why be Happy When You Could be Normal?”, Mrs Winterson describes the contradiction of the city of Manchester using a list of (apparently) antithetic expressions. The city archetype of the industrialization progress becomes a “living contradiction”: a city where even North and South are mixed.

We can find a similar description of Capitalism in the article “An A-Z business quotations” where Capitalism is descripted as so multifaceted and unpredictable that every single man can give it a different connotation.

In the text “The Chief Features of the Industrial Revolution” Arnold Toynbee, explains how the Industrial Revolution and Capitalism changed people’s lives. He describes the conditions of labour as unsustainable (as Mrs Winterson does) showing why the new system of thought can product wellness without caring at people sufferance. Mrs Winterson describes with horror the people “ill-clad, exhausted drunken and sikly”,”loosing arms, legs and children” got lost in the dirty roads; she also brings an Engels’ quotation to underline this terrible situation.

Riccardo Bellofiore, instead, after Marx’s quotation condemning capitalism, describes the effects of the capitalistic society in Europe, explaining how some counties take advantage from others only for profit.

Reading these texts we can understand how Industrial revolution and Capitalism are connected, and how the growth of industries and the increase of the production brought us to the modern capitalistic society.