Textile Museum

The famous Karl Marx once stated, “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.” This quote is the first line of his incredible Communist Manifesto says how the power struggle in the economy is the biggest problem in the history of existence. Marx believed in the power of communism and hoped one day the world would turn towards this style of government. Communism is the theory based on the holding of all property in common and stating that the ownership of everything is in the possession of the community or state. The proletariat is the workforce of bourgeois enterprise, "a class of laborers who live only so long as they can find work, and who find work only so long as their labor increases capital."

Karl Marx wanted for the proletariat to overpower the bourgeois and create their own party in the social class. By creating a new party, the proletariat would be able to even out the playing field and the idea of communism would come into play. However, the city of Lowell goes completely against what the communist Marx hoped to happen to the world. Lowell was founded on the base of both cotton and textile mills. Mills are a huge example of capitalism that Karl Marx fought against. Lowell was a working class community and the textile and cotton mills were filled with people who wanted and needed to work. These men and woman struggled and battled for jobs no matter the pay and this is proof of a class struggle. The proletariat was not on the same social level as the bourgeois and this would have enraged Karl Marx.

Above is the entrance to the American Textile Museum in Lowell, Mass.

        Even though the mills were far from anything Karl Marx had wanted, the idea was incredibly influential to the world. Going to the American Textile Mills Museum really opened my eyes to the world of textiles and cloths. I realized that essentially everything has textile materials throughout it. Even objects such as a car and an airplane have more than I ever expected.   

        

          Above on the left is a minivan that is taken apart and above and to the right is an old fashioned airplane each with a significant amount of textiles in the components. 

               At the museum there was a special exhibit about World War II which was opened just for the day and then on the other side there was the normal textile museum displays. My favorite part was the original textile museum because I learned a lot more from it. Not only did I read and learn about each artifact but there were some that we could even try out. There was an astronaut glove, a firefighter suit and I even got to try to lift a bale of cotton using a set of rope pulleys.  One of the coolest aspects about the building was how some of the rooms were actually preserved form the olden days (shown directly below). I got to witness how the men and women lived and worked during the time of the mills' existence and I realized how great I actually have it. I no longer want to take my experiences and personal items for granted. 

  

After just looking around I actually sat and watched a video on the looms at the textile mills and learned more about them (shown below). The last part of the museum that I managed to check out was the part that actually included the University of Massachusetts Lowell. The presentation was about the baseball manufacturing and how all of the Major League’s baseballs are sent to the lab in University of Massachusetts Lowell for testing (shown at bottom). I found that particularly interesting because of the engineering aspect of the whole presentation. Overall, I had a positive experience and learned a lot from the museum and for that reason I would suggest that anybody who has the time to go should go because it is an unforgettable experience!