Abstract
This paper, on the one hand, explores the sources which Friedrich Engels used for his analysis in the Condition of the Working Class in England, focusing on the role of technology. On the other hand, it evaluates Engels’s claims from today’s position, discussing their validity as well as limits. In contrast to most of his contemporaries, Engels located the fundamental changes of the economy since the eighteenth century in the Industrial Revolution. In 1845, investigating the results of new machinery, Engels emphasized the negative consequences such as unemployment and falling wages, often accompanied by an increasing number of children and women in the factories. Engels claimed that the work of women resulted in breaking up family ties, apart from many other harmful concomitant effects of female labor. In the 1880s, he still expected a social revolution because he continued to identify an ever-deepening gulf between the two classes of laborers and capitalists in spite of essential transformations in economy and society since the 1840s.
I would like to thank Joel Rasbash for his very careful translation of a German version of my text into English, and Jef van Heijsters for putting the finishing touches to the text. Responsibility for the final text is, of course, my own.
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Notes
- 1.
Emma Griffin, A Short History of the British Industrial Revolution. 2nd ed. (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 84.
- 2.
Carl B. Frey, The Technology Trap: Capital, Labor, and Power in the Age of Automation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019), 112.
- 3.
See Friedrich Engels, Korrespondenzen aus Bremen, in MEGA I/3, 192–198.
- 4.
See the Cotta’s letter to Engels, 8/7/1840 in MEGA I/3, 673. The five articles are published in MEGA I/3, 134–150, 199–202, 208–209, see also 679–680.
- 5.
Friedrich Engels, Briefe aus dem Wuppertal, in MEGA I/3, 32–51, 666–667.
- 6.
See MEGA I/3, 671–672.
- 7.
Engels, Briefe aus dem Wuppertal, in MEGA I/3, 35. See also Engels’s critical remarks in his article about migrants in Bremerhaven, in MEGA I/3, 143.
- 8.
Engels used in the title of his article the term “Nationalökonomie” which was frequently employed in nineteenth-century German to translate the term “Political Economy.”
- 9.
Friedrich Engels, Umrisse zu einer Kritik der Nationalökonomie, in MEGA I/3, 478–479, 486, 490.
- 10.
Tristram Hunt, The Frock-Coated Communist: The Life and Times of the Original Champagne Socialist (London: Penguin, 2009), 207, 285.
- 11.
Jürgen Osterhammel, Die Verwandlung der Welt. Eine Geschichte des 19. Jahrhunderts (München: C.H. Beck, 2009), 57; Matthias Bohlender, Metamorphosen des liberalen Regierungsdenkens. Politische Ökonomie, Polizei und Pauperismus (Weilerswist: Velbrück Wissenschaft, 2007), 296, 348.
- 12.
Lawrence Goldman, “The Origins of British ‘Social Science’: Political Economy, Natural Science, and Statistics, 1830–1835,” The Historical Journal 26 (1983).
It should be added that the London society eventually developed an agenda that focused on using statistics to create practical measures to alleviate social problems.
- 13.
Michael Levin, The Condition of England Question. Carlyle, Mill, Engels (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998), 42–43.
- 14.
Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England (New York: John W. Lovell, 1887), 10.
- 15.
Jakob Venedey, England vol. 3 (Leipzig: F.A. Brockhaus, 1845), 252, 263, 271; Harry Schmidtgall, Friedrich Engels’s Manchester-Aufenthalt 1842–1844 (Trier: Karl-Marx-Haus, 1981), 60; Gregory Claeys, Machinery, Money and the Millennium: From Moral Economy to Socialism, 1815–60 (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987), 34, 166.
- 16.
Regina Roth, “Engels’s Irlandbild in seiner Lage der arbeitenden Klasse in England von 1845” Marx-Engels-Jahrbuch 2011; Hunt, The Frock-Coated Communist, 107.
- 17.
Engels, The Condition, 19.
- 18.
Asa Briggs, Victorian Cities (Harmondsworth: Ed. Penguin, 1992), 56, 88; Osterhammel, Die Verwandlung der Welt, 399.
- 19.
Andrew Lees, Cities Perceived. Urban Society in European and American Thought, 1820–1940 (Columbia University Press, 1985), 16.
- 20.
Briggs, Victorian Cities, 93–94.
- 21.
Lees, Cities Perceived, 66–68. Encyclical SPE SALVI from Pope Benedict XVI to the bishops ... 30/11/2007, 28.
- 22.
Briggs, Victorian Cities, 33–35; Osterhammel, Die Verwandlung der Welt, 400–401; Martin Daunton, “Introduction,” in The Cambridge Urban History of Britain. 3. 1840–1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 3–12.
- 23.
Osterhammel, Die Verwandlung der Welt, 399.
- 24.
Alan Kidd, Manchester. 3rd ed. (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2002), 17.
- 25.
Engels, The Condition, 32.
- 26.
Briggs, Victorian Cities, 82, 95–96.
- 27.
Daunton, “Introduction,” 29–30.
- 28.
Engels, The Condition, 15.
- 29.
Ibid., 90.
- 30.
Andrew Ure, The Philosophy of Manufactures: Or, An Exposition of the Scientific, Moral, And Commercial Economy of the Factory System of Great Britain (London: Charles Knight, 1835), 23.
- 31.
Engels, The Condition, 74–75.
- 32.
Ibid., 119, 168 and 177.
- 33.
Ibid., 72.
- 34.
Ibid., 96, 139.
- 35.
Venedey, England vol. 3, 257; Joyce Burnette, Gender, Work and Wages in Industrial Revolution Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 1–3.
- 36.
Engels, The Condition, 97. See Marx-Engels Collected Works 6, 354. Engels adds another reason to dismantle the dependence of women on men that is the role that the whole community should play in educating children. It is notable that Marx did not continue with this line of thought in The Communist Manifesto.
- 37.
Ibid., 54, 124.
- 38.
James Leach had spent many years as a factory worker in different parts of England and had been able to gather information and other material concerning wages and working hours. He has come to be seen as one of the earliest statisticians of the workers’ movement. See Schmidtgall, Manchester-Aufenthalt, 66–67.
- 39.
Robert, Gray, The Factory Question and Industrial England, 1830–1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 21.
- 40.
Tuttle, Carolyn and Simone A. Wegge, “Regulating Child Labor,” in Institutions, Innovation and Industrialization, eds. Avner Greif et al., (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), 337, 358; Peter Kirby, Child Labor in Britain, 1750–1870 (Basingstoke, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 2–3, 55–56.
- 41.
Peter N. Stearns, “Child Labor in the Industrial Revolution,” in The World of Child Labor: An Historical and Regional Survey, ed. Hugh D. Hindman (Amonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2009), 38.
- 42.
Ibid., 39–40; Kirby, Child Labor, 3–4, 31–32; Carolyn Tuttle, “A Revival of the Pessimist View. Child Labor in the Industrial Revolution,” Research in Economic History 18, 62–63, 69–77.
- 43.
Burnette, Gender, 16; Joyce Burnette, “Changing Economic Roles of Women,” in Routledge Handbook of Modern Economic History, eds. Robert Whaples and Randall E. Parker (London: Routledge, 2013), 306.
- 44.
Carol E. Morgan, Women Workers and Gender Identities, 1835–1913: The Cotton and Metal Industries in England (London: Routledge, 2001), 2.
- 45.
Griffin, Short History, 84.
- 46.
Moses Hess, Die Europäische Triarchie (Leipzig: Otto Wigand, 1841), 150–151, 173; Engels, The Condition, 12.
- 47.
Karl Marx, Capital. A Critical Analysis of Capitalist Production. Vol. 1 (London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1887), 223.
- 48.
Ibid., 397.
- 49.
Ibid., 228, 239, 422–423.
- 50.
Translator’s note—the Arnold Toynbee referred to here was the father of the Arnold Toynbee who wrote on international affairs and developed a philosophy of history that was particularly influential in the mid-twentieth century.
- 51.
Donald C. Coleman, “Myth, History and the Industrial Revolution,” in Myth, History and the Industrial Revolution, ed. D.C. Coleman (London, Hambledon Press, 1992), 22.
- 52.
See Robert C. Allen, “Engels’s Pause: Technical Change, Capital Accumulation, and Inequality in the British Industrial Revolution,” Explorations in Economic History 46 (2009).
- 53.
Griffin, Short History, 147.
- 54.
Engels had also noted in the introduction to his work that there had been a previous phase when the workers had better wages. See Engels, The Condition, 15.
- 55.
See Robert C. Allen, “The Hand-Loom Weaver and the Power Loom: A Schumpeterian Perspective,” European Review of Economic History 22 (2018).
- 56.
Frey, The Technology Trap, 18–19.
- 57.
Ure, The Philosophy, 18, 307, 321; Engels, The Condition, 150; Coleman, “Myth,” 12.
- 58.
Ibid., 28.
- 59.
Ibid., 31–32.
- 60.
Griffin, Short History, 85, 95; Osterhammel, Die Verwandlung, 909.
- 61.
Engels, The Condition, appendix, II–V, VIII.
- 62.
Ibid., III, V.
- 63.
Ibid., VIII–IX.
- 64.
Engels, “Preface,” XVIII. “Preface” is in the 1892-edition (British edition).
- 65.
Engels, The Condition, VI. This quote is in the 1887-edition (American edition).
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Roth, R. (2021). Engels’s Condition of the Working Class in England in the Context of Its Time (1845–1892). In: Saito, K. (eds) Reexamining Engels’s Legacy in the 21st Century. Marx, Engels, and Marxisms. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55211-4_1
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