Altruists with Ragged Trousers - II

For Engels, the classic labour movement passes through various stages. Individual revolt – crime – may be one, machine-wrecking another, though neither are universally found. Trade unionism and strikes are the first general forms taken by the movement. Their importance lies not in their effectiveness but in the lessons of solidarity and class consciousness which they teach. The political movement of Chartism in Britain marks a yet higher level of development. Side by side with these movements socialist theories were evolved by middle-class thinkers who had, Engels argues, remained largely outside the labour movement until 1844, though capturing a small minority of the best workers. But the movement must move towards socialism, as the crisis of capitalism advances.

As Engels saw it in 1844, this crisis would inevitably develop in one of two ways. Either American (or possibly German) competition would put an end to the British industrial monopoly and precipitate a revolutionary situation, or the polarization of society would proceed until the workers, by then the great majority of the nation, would realize their strength and seize power. (It is interesting to observe that Engels’ argument lays no stress on the absolute long-term pauperization of the proletariat.) However, given the intolerable conditions of the workers and the crisis of the economy, a revolution was likely before these tendencies had worked themselves out. Engels expected it to occur between the next two economic depressions, i.e. between 1846-7 and the middle 1850s.



Immature though the work is, Engels’ scientific achievements are nevertheless remarkable. His faults were chiefly those of youth and to some extent of historical foreshortening. For some of the mistakes there is a sound historical explanation. At the time when Engels wrote, British capitalism was at the most acute stage of the first of its great periods of secular crisis, and he came to England at almost the worst period of what was certainly the most catastrophic economic slump of the 19th century, that of 1841-2. It was by no means entirely unrealistic to think of the crisis period of the 1840s as the final agony of capitalism and the prelude to revolution. Engels was not the only observer who thought of it in this way.

We now know that this was not the final crisis of capitalism, but the prelude to a major period of expansion, based partly on the massive development of capital goods industries – railways, iron and steel, as against the textiles of the earlier phase – partly on the conquest of yet wider spheres of capitalist activity in hitherto undeveloped countries, partly on the defeat of the agrarian vested interests, partly on the discovery of new and effective methods of exploiting the working classes which, incidentally, made it possible eventually for their real incomes to rise substantially. We also know that the revolutionary crisis of 1848, which Engels foresaw with considerable accuracy, did not affect Britain. This was largely due to a phenomenon of uneven development, which he could hardly have foreseen. For while on the continent the corresponding stage of economic development reached its most acute crisis in 1846-8, in Britain the equivalent point had been reached in 1841-2. By 1848 the new period of expansion, whose first symptom was the vast ‘railway boom’ of 1844-7, was already under way. The British equivalent of the 1848 revolution was the Chartist general strike of 1842. The crisis which precipitated continental revolutions, in Britain merely interrupted a period of rapid recovery. Engels happened to be particularly unfortunate in writing at a time when this could not be clear. Even today statisticians still argue about exactly where, between 1842 and 1848, to place the boundary mark which separates the ‘bleak years’ from the golden Victorian boom of British capitalism. We can hardly blame Engels for not seeing it more clearly.

It was by no means entirely unrealistic to think of the crisis period of the 1840s as the final agony of capitalism and the prelude to revolution. Engels was not the only observer who thought of it in this way

Nevertheless, the unbiased reader can only regard the shortcomings of Engels’ book as incidental, and must be far more impressed with its achievements. These were due not only to Engels’ obvious personal talent, but also to his communism. It was this which gave him an economic, social and historical perspicacity so signally superior to the contemporary champions of capitalism. The good social scientist, as Engels showed, could only be a person free from the illusions of bourgeois society.



Engels’ Description of England in 1844

How far is Engels’ description of the British working class in 1844 reliable and comprehensive? How far has subsequent research confirmed his statements? Our judgement of the historical value of the book must depend largely on the answer to these questions. He has often been criticized, from the 1840s, when V.A. Huber and B. Hildebrand agreed with his facts, but thought his interpretation too gloomy, to the Cold War years when editors argued that “historians may no longer regard Engels’ book as an authoritative work which gives a valuable picture of social England in the 1840s.” The first view is tenable, the second is nonsense.

Engels’ account is based on first-hand observation and on other available sources, He evidently knew industrial Lancashire intimately, particularly the Manchester area, and paid visits to the main industrial towns of Yorkshire – Leeds, Bradford, Sheffield – as well as spending some weeks in London. Nobody has seriously suggested that he misrepresented what he saw. Of the descriptive chapters it is clear that a large part of III, V, VII, IX and XII are based on first-hand observation, and such knowledge plainly illuminates the other chapters also. It must not be forgotten that Engels was (unlike most other foreign visitors) no mere tourist, but a Manchester businessman who knew the businessmen among whom he lived, a communist who knew and worked with the Chartists and early socialists, and – not least through his relations with the Irish factory girl Mary Burns and her relatives and friends – a man with considerable first-hand knowledge of working-class life. His book is thus an important primary source for our knowledge of industrial England at this time.

The careful reader will find no basis for the contention that Engels described all workers as destitute or starving, their standard of living as one of bare subsistence, the proletariat as an undifferentiated mass of paupers, or for many of the other extreme statements that have been ascribed to him by critics

For the rest of the book, and for confirmation of his own observations, Engels relied on other informants as well as on printed evidence, taking care to allow for the political bias of such evidence, by quoting where possible from sources sympathetic to capitalism. (See the last paragraph of his preface.) Though not exhaustive, his documentation is good and full. Though there are a number of slips in transcribing it (some later corrected by Engels) and a tendency to summarize the authorities rather than to quote verbatim, the accusation that he selects and misquotes his evidence is untenable. His hostile editors have been unable to find more than a handful of examples of what they consider ‘misrepresentation’ in a large volume, and most of these accusations are either trivial or wrong. There are indeed available sources which he did not utilize, but some of these present if anything an even more scarifying picture. By all sensible standards the Condition is an excellently documented work, handled with a sound grasp of evidence.

Accusations such that he painted proletarian conditions in unnecessarily dark colours or failed to appreciate the benevolence of the British bourgeoisie can be shown to be wrong. The careful reader will find no basis for the contention that Engels described all workers as destitute or starving, their standard of living as one of bare subsistence, the proletariat as an undifferentiated mass of paupers, or for many of the other extreme statements that have been ascribed to him by critics who have not always read his text. He did not deny that improvements in working-class conditions had been made (see the summary at the end of chapter III). He did not present the bourgeoisie as a single black-hearted mass (see the long footnote at the end of chapter XII). His hatred of what the bourgeoisie represented and what made it behave as it did was not a naïve hatred for men of ill will as distinct from men of good will. It was part of the critique of the inhumanity of capitalism which automatically turned the exploiters collectively into a “deeply demoralized class, incurably corrupted by selfishness, corroded in their very being.”

The critics’ objection to Engels is often merely their reluctance to admit his facts. No man, Communist or otherwise, could have visited England from abroad in those years without a sense of shocked horror, which plenty of respectable bourgeois liberals expressed in words as inflammatory as Engels’ own – but without his analysis.



“Civilization works its miracles,” wrote de Tocqueville about Manchester, “and civilized man is turned back almost into a savage.”

“Every day that I live,” wrote the American Henry Colman, “I thank Heaven that I am not a poor man with a family in England.”

We can find plenty of statements about the harsh utilitarian indifference of the industrialists to set beside Engels’.

The truth is that Engels’ book remains today, as it was in 1845, by far the best single book on the working class of the period. Subsequent historians have regarded and continue to regard it as such, except for a recent group of critics, motivated by ideological dislike. It is not the last word on the subject, for 175 years of research have added to our knowledge of working-class conditions, especially in the areas with which Engels had no close personal acquaintance. It is a book of its time. But nothing can take its place in the library of every 19th-century historian and everyone interested in the working-class movement. It remains an indispensable work and a landmark in the fight for the emancipation of humanity.

Raza Naeem is a Pakistani social scientist, book critic and award-winning translator and dramatic reader, currently based in Lahore, where he is also the president of the Progressive Writers Association. He can be reached at: razanaeem@hotmail.com