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The Condition of the Working Class in England (Worlds Classics)

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In this book, Karl Marx's friend and collaborator Friedrich Engels describes the lives of England's laboring classes in the worst days of the industrial revolution. This includes dangerous working conditions, meager pay, child labor and explotation. Being the son of the owner of a textile factory, Engels knew of these conditions first hand. In these days it was said that the fastest way out of Manchester was a bottle of gin. This book contains images that are pathetic in the true sense of word, one catches glimpes of life so wretched that they are scarely belivable. Writings such as this one eventually exposed the misery of the working classes and had a profound influence on socialists and labor movement leaders. The book is a tour-de-force and truly speaks for it's self.

Engels was the engine behind Karl Marx, one that gave him all the support he could, so to permit Marx to dedicate himself almost completely to the completion of his works. Judging himself many degrees bellow Marx in terms of intelect, Engels nonetheless is capable of writting a book such as this which describes all the impoverishment of the working class in the beginning of the industrialization in England, being helped by some well porputed factories labor fiscalization agents who allowed Engels to flip trough their reports. Strong terms like "the dark satanic mills" describe fully what were the working conditions of the time in a so rich country as England. An historical document lest no one forget what can happen again if the free hand of capitalism is allowed to run free of any barriers.

Fabuous book. Engels wrote this when he was only 24- and what a tour de force.

The work is detailed, beautifully observed and elegantly written. Despite the depressing nature of the subject matter, the tone is always possible about a better world beyond the evils of capitalism.

Unfortunately 150 years after this masterpiece was written things dont seen to have gotten better under capitalism. Rather, the old evils of poverty, infectious diseases, starvation have been replaced by the modern evils of capitalism: obesity, alienation, mass materialism, depression, plunging fertility and marriage rates and so on...

Friedrich Engels' classic "The Condition of the Working Class in England" was written when he was only twenty-four, and had but recently abandoned his Calvinist upbringing for a more critical, socialist, point of view. Yet this book reads as if it were written by an experienced political commentator or a radical sociologist, without actually at any point becoming melodramatic or dense.

Engels' main purpose is to confront the bourgeoisie with the reality of their mode of production and to contrast this with the rhetoric of "free choice" and "civil liberties", as well as the capitalist apologia of the political economists of his day, in particular Andrew Ure. With great insight into both the causes and effects of the capitalist system, Engels catalogues the endless want, filth, despair and misery experienced by millions of labourers every day in 19th century England. He pays attention to housing, to factory safety, to unionism, to the physical condition of the workers, to alcoholism, the state of the Irish underclass, to prostitution and disease; in short, all the ills attendant on industrialization.

What gives this book such power is that Engels on the one hand proceeds in an analytical manner, making use above all of sources from the bourgeoisie itself and from Parliamentary reports, in explaining the functioning of the capitalist system and the competition between capitalists and between labourers. On the other hand, he writes in a particularly readable manner and at no point bores the reader with the mere summing-up of statistics. On the contrary, every analytical truth is accompanied by a vivid description, taken from Engels' excursions into working-class neighbourhoods, of the terrible state of humanity that the economic laws of capitalism cause for a great number of people.

For those interested in political economy, it may come as a surprise to see how much of the functioning of capitalism Engels already understood at such an early point in the development of theory. This gives the lie to the many theorists who would later claim that it was Marx only who worked on economics and that Engels was a mere epigone; this book should be a vindication of Engels. His later sketches of the political economy and of the historical development of capitalism would lay the foundation for both the Communist Manifesto and Marx' economic works. But the core insights that would create the modern theory of socialism are for the first time fully expressed here, and in a most appealing and shockingly effective manner.

In other words, an absolute must read for every person of intelligence.

This chilling book is the real-life Oliver Twist exposed.I think Fredrick Engels wrote this book,in part to clear his conscious.And largely, to shed light on the fetid ,wretched underbelly of the 19th century industrial-age society.The nameless toilers working ten to twelve hour shifts,in a factory operation they had no vote or control over.Marx and Engels had many valid arguments for improving the workers lives.Did their end-results justify their means of social revolution? Engels would be amazed at the former textile towns,like Manchester,absorbing the large influx of Asians,Moslims and Africans today.It is still being debated,whether history has proven Engels & Marx right.This book is still a historical classic,thats presumptive findings give the modern reader,reason to pause. So,look all around you. -A Great Book !

Written in the 1840s when Engels was still in his 20s, "The Condition of the Working Class in England" combines razor sharp observations of slum life and factory conditions with scathing commentary on the callouness of British factory owners. It's a landmark in labor history and Marxist thought. It is also genuinely awareness-raising: few readers will ever think of "labor markets" -- a term Engels would have hated -- in quite the same way again, as the book shows vividly how workers became semi-slaves in the workshops and poorhouses of 19th-century industrial Britain.

That said, "The Condition of the Working Class in England" is wildly unbalanced and shouldn't be treated as a serious history of the industrial revolution. It isn't even a good read -- the repetitions, sloppy organization, references to obscure events and personalities, and non-stop sarcasm and indignation get tiresome after 200 pages. The book is best dipped into rather than read from cover to cover. But anyone who reads even parts won't be disappointed.

The condition of the working class in England is bad. Not the book,this book is compelling and sad. The actual material conditions the workers of England must live and toil in are enough to dehumanize the most hardy soul. Reading the work, I am reminded about the irrational hatred and even the opinions of the socially aware are against them. Anti-Irish sentiment runs from Edmund Spenser to Friedrich Engels. That is not the main issue but one that kept popping into my head.

The main issue is that the material conditions of the workers is bad. Engels paints vividly why the revolution will come to England as soon as 1846 or 1847. Man cannot live as slave, no matter what you call the master. Most striking is that as I was reading, I could easily call forth a sense of righteous indignation against the crimes of the bourgeoisie. These were not against the bourgeoisie of Engels's observed industrial England, but of the employing class of today's America. On many of the crimes he speaks of, it is still too easy to find analogues in contemporary society. I have suffered the same as the poor souls in a different time and place. I have lived the benefits of reform, but I still toil in the same system

In this rightly called classic text, Marx's philosophical companion gives an in depth analysis of the ideology, the organization of the State and the working conditions in the first decades of the Industrial Revolution in Great-Britain.

Engel`s (not Engels's) law
The Industrial Revolution (IR) provoked one of the main massive population shifts in human history: from the village (agriculture) to the city (industry). It created thereby a nearly never ending stream of poor people looking for work, which permitted the industrialists-capitalists to keep the wages extremely low, just above the starvation limit (Engel's law). In one word, the proletariat was born.
The owners were now in a far better situation than under feudalism (the slave system) because they could simply throw their employees on the street.

Ideology
The first decades of the IR were a period of pure capitalism, pure competition and laissez-faire, which meant a battle of all against all. Not only the owners of the means of production and subsistence (the haves) battled against the mass of the wage-workers (the have-nots), but also the owners and the wage-workers fought among themselves. The outcome was easy to foresee: fewer and fewer owners and more and more proletarians.
Malthus's demographic theory served as an excuse for the owners to let the have-nots starve to death.

Organization of the State
A perfect society for the owners would have been one of total anarchy, but they easily understood that this was not possible because it was necessary to control the proletariat. They used the State, the government for that. There was free choice, but of course only theoretically; there was no compulsory education, no social safety net, and certainly no democracy. As J. Swift stated in `Moll Flanders': the out-of-work had only one option `to steal to be hanged'.

The working conditions
The working conditions were abysmal. It was Hell upon Earth. A miner of 50 years of age was a great rarity. Children of 4 years of age were working in coal mines.

Reactions
The have-nots tried to improve their working conditions by organizing (at first secretly) trade unions and to impose collective bargaining.
The People's Charter (communist oriented) fought for universal suffrage and regular elections, for secret voting, for payment of the members of Parliament and for equilibrated electoral districts.
But the owners also began to understand that even they had a certain interest in the improvement of the living conditions of the poor, if they wished to save their families from deadly epidemics like cholera, typhus or smallpox.

This book shows F. Engels, extremely appalled by the inhumanity of the system of industrial exploitation, as a true moralist defending with exhortations and adequate advice the `Cause of Humanity'.
His book is a reminder for nearly every one of us of where we come from and how still today major parts of the Third World are exploited. It is a must read for all those interested in the history of mankind.

For most, Charles Dickens is the only source we've encountered regarding the awful human misery of the early industrial revolution. However, Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx reported on it, too. Indeed, most of their criticisms were far more applicable to the raw capitalism of contemporary England than their native Germany.

Engels stayed in Manchester, the premier industrial city of the time, during the early 1840's to research his book. And he produced a devastating indictment of the truly miserable and life-threatening living conditions he found. Unlike Marx, Engels had a pronounced flair for writing; he makes it a fascinating, eye-opening journey back through time.

The topics he includes cover: struggling labor movements, the denigrating effects of immigration on domestic workers (due to competing subsistence-cost labor), the ignorance and crippling of child workers, the sexual exploitation of women workers, the displacement of male heads of household by lower-cost and more pliant women/children, the unbelievable filth and subhuman housing conditions workers endured, the dangerous and unhealthy working conditions of miners/factory workers, rampant substance abuse, doping of children by babysitters, the total lack of legal redress for the poor, the displacement of labor by machinery, and the role of unbridled competition in perpetrating economic distress.

While we all know communism has failed, its rise was due to these very real and serious problems, some of which remain with many Western workers today. And most of these conditions do very much persist in emerging economies right now. So, even though the book is well over 150 years old it is still highly valid!

The main fault of course with Marx/Engels' communist philosophy is that ALL humans are greedy and lazy - it's just that the clever ones (whether they originate from 'bourgeous' or 'working' classes) will always exploit the others. And it doesn't matter whether the system is capitalist or communist - those at the top will always exploit those below for personal advantage. Probably the best response has been the progressive social reform in Western nations over the last 100 years. (Revolutions and dictatorships usually only lead to mass murder.)