Frederick Engels - The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844

F >> Frederick Engels >> The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28

The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844
With a Preface written in 1892

by
FREDERICK ENGELS

_Translated by Florence Kelley Wischnewetzky_

_London_

GEORGE ALLEN & UNWIN LTD

_Museum Street_

PREFACE

The book, an English translation of which is here republished, was first
issued in Germany in 1845. The author, at that time, was young, twenty-
four years of age, and his production bears the stamp of his youth with
its good and its faulty features, of neither of which he feels ashamed.
It was translated into English, in 1885, by an American lady, Mrs. F.
Kelley Wischnewetzky, and published in the following year in New York.
The American edition being as good as exhausted, and having never been
extensively circulated on this side of the Atlantic, the present English
copyright edition is brought out with the full consent of all parties
interested.

For the American edition, a new Preface and an Appendix were written in
English by the author. The first had little to do with the book itself;
it discussed the American Working-Class Movement of the day, and is,
therefore, here omitted as irrelevant, the second--the original
preface--is largely made use of in the present introductory remarks.

The state of things described in this book belongs to-day, in many
respects, to the past, as far as England is concerned. Though not
expressly stated in our recognised treatises, it is still a law of modern
Political Economy that the larger the scale on which Capitalistic
Production is carried on, the less can it support the petty devices of
swindling and pilfering which characterise its early stages. The
pettifogging business tricks of the Polish Jew, the representative in
Europe of commerce in its lowest stage, those tricks that serve him so
well in his own country, and are generally practised there, he finds to
be out of date and out of place when he comes to Hamburg or Berlin; and,
again, the commission agent, who hails from Berlin or Hamburg, Jew or
Christian, after frequenting the Manchester Exchange for a few months,
finds out that, in order to buy cotton yarn or cloth cheap, he, too, had
better drop those slightly more refined but still miserable wiles and
subterfuges which are considered the acme of cleverness in his native
country. The fact is, those tricks do not pay any longer in a large
market, where time is money, and where a certain standard of commercial
morality is unavoidably developed, purely as a means of saving time and
trouble. And it is the same with the relation between the manufacturer
and his "hands."

The revival of trade, after the crisis of 1847, was the dawn of a new
industrial epoch. The repeal of the Corn Laws and the financial reforms
subsequent thereon gave to English industry and commerce all the elbow-
room they had asked for. The discovery of the Californian and Australian
gold-fields followed in rapid succession. The Colonial markets developed
at an increasing rate their capacity for absorbing English manufactured
goods. In India millions of hand-weavers were finally crushed out by the
Lancashire power-loom. China was more and more being opened up. Above
all, the United States--then, commercially speaking, a mere colonial
market, but by far the biggest of them all--underwent an economic
development astounding even for that rapidly progressive country. And,
finally, the new means of communication introduced at the close of the
preceding period--railways and ocean steamers--were now worked out on an
international scale; they realised actually, what had hitherto existed
only potentially, a world-market. This world-market, at first, was
composed of a number of chiefly or entirely agricultural countries
grouped around one manufacturing centre--England--which consumed the
greater part of their surplus raw produce, and supplied them in return
with the greater part of their requirements in manufactured articles. No
wonder England's industrial progress was colossal and unparalleled, and
such that the status of 1844 now appears to us as comparatively primitive
and insignificant. And in proportion as this increase took place, in the
same proportion did manufacturing industry become apparently moralised.
The competition of manufacturer against manufacturer by means of petty
thefts upon the workpeople did no longer pay. Trade had outgrown such
low means of making money; they were not worth while practising for the
manufacturing millionaire, and served merely to keep alive the
competition of smaller traders, thankful to pick up a penny wherever they
could. Thus the truck system was suppressed, the Ten Hours' Bill was
enacted, and a number of other secondary reforms introduced--much against
the spirit of Free Trade and unbridled competition, but quite as much in
favour of the giant-capitalist in his competition with his less favoured
brother. Moreover, the larger the concern, and with it the number of
hands, the greater the loss and inconvenience caused by every conflict
between master and men; and thus a new spirit came over the masters,
especially the large ones, which taught them to avoid unnecessary
squabbles, to acquiesce in the existence and power of Trades' Unions, and
finally even to discover in strikes--at opportune times--a powerful means
to serve their own ends. The largest manufacturers, formerly the leaders
of the war against the working-class, were now the foremost to preach
peace and harmony. And for a very good reason. The fact is, that all
these concessions to justice and philanthropy were nothing else but means
to accelerate the concentration of capital in the hands of the few, for
whom the niggardly extra extortions of former years had lost all
importance and had become actual nuisances; and to crush all the quicker
and all the safer their smaller competitors, who could not make both ends
meet without such perquisites. Thus the development of production on the
basis of the capitalistic system has of itself sufficed--at least in the
leading industries, for in the more unimportant branches this is far from
being the case--to do away with all those minor grievances which
aggravated the workman's fate during its earlier stages. And thus it
renders more and more evident the great central fact, that the cause of
the miserable condition of the working-class is to be sought, not in
these minor grievances, but _in the Capitalistic System itself_. The
wage-worker sells to the capitalist his labour-force for a certain daily
sum. After a few hours' work he has reproduced the value of that sum;
but the substance of his contract is, that he has to work another series
of hours to complete his working-day; and the value he produces during
these additional hours of surplus labour is surplus value, which cost the
capitalist nothing, but yet goes into his pocket. That is the basis of
the system which tends more and more to split up civilised society into a
few Rothschilds and Vanderbilts, the owners of all the means of
production and subsistence, on the one hand, and an immense number of
wage-workers, the owners of nothing but their labour-force, on the other.
And that this result is caused, not by this or that secondary grievance,
but by the system itself--this fact has been brought out in bold relief
by the development of Capitalism in England since 1847.

Again, the repeated visitations of cholera, typhus, smallpox, and other
epidemics have shown the British bourgeois the urgent necessity of
sanitation in his towns and cities, if he wishes to save himself and
family from falling victims to such diseases. Accordingly, the most
crying abuses described in this book have either disappeared or have been
made less conspicuous. Drainage has been introduced or improved, wide
avenues have been opened out athwart many of the worst "slums" I had to
describe. "Little Ireland" has disappeared, and the "Seven Dials" are
next on the list for sweeping away. But what of that? Whole districts
which in 1844 I could describe as almost idyllic, have now, with the
growth of the towns, fallen into the same state of dilapidation,
discomfort, and misery. Only the pigs and the heaps of refuse are no
longer tolerated. The bourgeoisie have made further progress in the art
of hiding the distress of the working-class. But that, in regard to
their dwellings, no substantial improvement has taken place, is amply
proved by the Report of the Royal Commission "on the Housing of the
Poor," 1885. And this is the case, too, in other respects. Police
regulations have been plentiful as blackberries; but they can only hedge
in the distress of the workers, they cannot remove it.

But while England has thus outgrown the juvenile state of capitalist
exploitation described by me, other countries have only just attained it.
France, Germany, and especially America, are the formidable competitors
who, at this moment--as foreseen by me in 1844--are more and more
breaking up England's industrial monopoly. Their manufactures are young
as compared with those of England, but increasing at a far more rapid
rate than the latter; and, curious enough, they have at this moment
arrived at about the same phase of development as English manufacture in
1844. With regard to America, the parallel is indeed most striking.
True, the external surroundings in which the working-class is placed in
America are very different, but the same economical laws are at work, and
the results, if not identical in every respect, must still be of the same
order. Hence we find in America the same struggles for a shorter working-
day, for a legal limitation of the working-time, especially of women and
children in factories; we find the truck-system in full blossom, and the
cottage-system, in rural districts, made use of by the "bosses" as a
means of domination over the workers. When I received, in 1886, the
American papers with accounts of the great strike of 12,000 Pennsylvanian
coal-miners in the Connellsville district, I seemed but to read my own
description of the North of England colliers' strike of 1844. The same
cheating of the workpeople by false measure; the same truck-system; the
same attempt to break the miners' resistance by the capitalists' last,
but crushing, resource,--the eviction of the men out of their dwellings,
the cottages owned by the companies.

I have not attempted, in this translation, to bring the book up to date,
or to point out in detail all the changes that have taken place since
1844. And for two reasons: Firstly, to do this properly, the size of the
book must be about doubled; and, secondly, the first volume of "Das
Kapital," by Karl Marx, an English translation of which is before the
public, contains a very ample description of the state of the British
working-class, as it was about 1865, that is to say, at the time when
British industrial prosperity reached its culminating point. I should,
then, have been obliged again to go over the ground already covered by
Marx's celebrated work.

It will be hardly necessary to point out that the general theoretical
standpoint of this book--philosophical, economical, political--does not
exactly coincide with my standpoint of to-day. Modern international
Socialism, since fully developed as a science, chiefly and almost
exclusively through the efforts of Marx, did not as yet exist in 1844. My
book represents one of the phases of its embryonic development; and as
the human embryo, in its early stages, still reproduces the gill-arches
of our fish-ancestors, so this book exhibits everywhere the traces of the
descent of modern Socialism from one of its ancestors,--German
philosophy. Thus great stress is laid on the dictum that Communism is
not a mere party doctrine of the working-class, but a theory compassing
the emancipation of society at large, including the capitalist class,
from its present narrow conditions. This is true enough in the abstract,
but absolutely useless, and sometimes worse, in practice. So long as the
wealthy classes not only do not feel the want of any emancipation, but
strenuously oppose the self-emancipation of the working-class, so long
the social revolution will have to be prepared and fought out by the
working-class alone. The French bourgeois of 1789, too, declared the
emancipation of the bourgeoisie to be the emancipation of the whole human
race; but the nobility and clergy would not see it; the
proposition--though for the time being, with respect to feudalism, an
abstract historical truth--soon became a mere sentimentalism, and
disappeared from view altogether in the fire of the revolutionary
struggle. And to-day, the very people who, from the "impartiality" of
their superior standpoint, preach to the workers a Socialism soaring high
above their class interests and class struggles, and tending to reconcile
in a higher humanity the interests of both the contending classes--these
people are either neophytes, who have still to learn a great deal, or
they are the worst enemies of the workers,--wolves in sheeps' clothing.

The recurring period of the great industrial crisis is stated in the text
as five years. This was the period apparently indicated by the course of
events from 1825 to 1842. But the industrial history from 1842 to 1868
has shown that the real period is one of ten years; that the intermediate
revulsions were secondary, and tended more and more to disappear. Since
1868 the state of things has changed again, of which more anon.

I have taken care not to strike out of the text the many prophecies,
amongst others that of an imminent social revolution in England, which my
youthful ardour induced me to venture upon. The wonder is, not that a
good many of them proved wrong, but that so many of them have proved
right, and that the critical state of English trade, to be brought on by
Continental and especially American competition, which I then
foresaw--though in too short a period--has now actually come to pass. In
this respect I can, and am bound to, bring the book up to date, by
placing here an article which I published in the _London Commonweal_ of
March 1, 1885, under the heading: "England in 1845 and in 1885." It
gives at the same time a short outline of the history of the English
working-class during these forty years, and is as follows:

"Forty years ago England stood face to face with a crisis, solvable to
all appearances by force only. The immense and rapid development of
manufactures had outstripped the extension of foreign markets and the
increase of demand. Every ten years the march of industry was
violently interrupted by a general commercial crash, followed, after a
long period of chronic depression, by a few short years of prosperity,
and always ending in feverish over-production and consequent renewed
collapse. The capitalist class clamoured for Free Trade in corn, and
threatened to enforce it by sending the starving population of the
towns back to the country districts whence they came, to invade them,
as John Bright said, not as paupers begging for bread, but as an army
quartered upon the enemy. The working masses of the towns demanded
their share of political power--the People's Charter; they were
supported by the majority of the small trading class, and the only
difference between the two was whether the Charter should be carried
by physical or by moral force. Then came the commercial crash of 1847
and the Irish famine, and with both the prospect of revolution

"The French Revolution of 1848 saved the English middle-class. The
Socialistic pronunciamentos of the victorious French workmen
frightened the small middle-class of England and disorganised the
narrower, but more matter-of-fact movement of the English
working-class. At the very moment when Chartism was bound to assert
itself in its full strength, it collapsed internally, before even it
collapsed externally on the 10th of April, 1848. The action of the
working-class was thrust into the background. The capitalist class
triumphed along the whole line.

"The Reform Bill of 1831 had been the victory of the whole capitalist
class over the landed aristocracy. The repeal of the Corn Laws was
the victory of the manufacturing capitalist not only over the landed
aristocracy, but over those sections of capitalists, too, whose
interests were more or less bound up with the landed
interest,--bankers, stock-jobbers, fund-holders, etc. Free Trade
meant the re-adjustment of the whole home and foreign, commercial and
financial policy of England in accordance with the interests of the
manufacturing capitalists--the class which now represented the nation.
And they set about this task with a will. Every obstacle to
industrial production was mercilessly removed. The tariff and the
whole system of taxation were revolutionised. Everything was made
subordinate to one end, but that end of the utmost importance to the
manufacturing capitalist: the cheapening of all raw produce, and
especially of the means of living of the working-class; the reduction
of the cost of raw material, and the keeping down--if not as yet the
_bringing down_--of wages. England was to become the 'workshop of the
world;' all other countries were to become for England what Ireland
already was,--markets for her manufactured goods, supplying her in
return with raw materials and food. England the great manufacturing
centre of an agricultural world, with an ever-increasing number of
corn and cotton-growing Irelands revolving around her, the industrial
sun. What a glorious prospect!

"The manufacturing capitalists set about the realisation of this their
great object with that strong common sense and that contempt for
traditional principles which has ever distinguished them from their
more narrow-minded compeers on the Continent. Chartism was dying out.
The revival of commercial prosperity, natural after the revulsion of
1847 had spent itself, was put down altogether to the credit of Free
Trade. Both these circumstances had turned the English working-class,
politically, into the tail of the 'great Liberal party,' the party led
by the manufacturers. This advantage, once gained, had to be
perpetuated. And the manufacturing capitalists, from the Chartist
opposition, not to Free Trade, but to the transformation of Free Trade
into the one vital national question, had learnt, and were learning
more and more, that the middle-class can never obtain full social and
political power over the nation except by the help of the
working-class. Thus a gradual change came over the relations between
both classes. The Factory Acts, once the bugbear of all
manufacturers, were not only willingly submitted to, but their
expansion into acts regulating almost all trades, was tolerated.
Trades' Unions, hitherto considered inventions of the devil himself,
were now petted and patronised as perfectly legitimate institutions,
and as useful means of spreading sound economical doctrines amongst
the workers. Even strikes, than which nothing had been more nefarious
up to 1848, were now gradually found out to be occasionally very
useful, especially when provoked by the masters themselves, at their
own time. Of the legal enactments, placing the workman at a lower
level or at a disadvantage with regard to the master, at least the
most revolting were repealed. And, practically, that horrid 'People's
Charter' actually became the political programme of the very
manufacturers who had opposed it to the last. 'The Abolition of the
Property Qualification' and 'Vote by Ballot' are now the law of the
land. The Reform Acts of 1867 and 1884 make a near approach to
'universal suffrage,' at least such as it now exists in Germany; the
Redistribution Bill now before Parliament creates 'equal electoral
districts'--on the whole not more unequal than those of Germany;
'payment of members,' and shorter, if not actually 'annual
Parliaments,' are visibly looming in the distance--and yet there are
people who say that Chartism is dead.

"The Revolution of 1848, not less than many of its predecessors, has
had strange bedfellows and successors. The very people who put it
down have become, as Karl Marx used to say, its testamentary
executors. Louis Napoleon had to create an independent and united
Italy, Bismarck had to revolutionise Germany and to restore Hungarian
independence, and the English manufacturers had to enact the People's
Charter.

"For England, the effects of this domination of the manufacturing
capitalists were at first startling. Trade revived and extended to a
degree unheard of even in this cradle of modern industry; the previous
astounding creations of steam and machinery dwindled into nothing
compared with the immense mass of productions of the twenty years from
1850 to 1870, with the overwhelming figures of exports and imports, of
wealth accumulated in the hands of capitalists and of human working
power concentrated in the large towns. The progress was indeed
interrupted, as before, by a crisis every ten years, in 1857 as well
as in 1866; but these revulsions were now considered as natural,
inevitable events, which must be fatalistically submitted to, and
which always set themselves right in the end.

"And the condition of the working-class during this period? There was
temporary improvement even for the great mass. But this improvement
always was reduced to the old level by the influx of the great body of
the unemployed reserve, by the constant superseding of bands by new
machinery, by the immigration of the agricultural population, now,
too, more and more superseded by machines.

"A permanent improvement can be recognised for two 'protected'
sections only of the working-class. Firstly, the factory hands. The
fixing by Act of Parliament of their working-day within relatively
rational limits has restored their physical constitution and endowed
them with a moral superiority, enhanced by their local concentration.
They are undoubtedly better off than before 1848. The best proof is
that, out of ten strikes they make, nine are provoked by the
manufacturers in their own interests, as the only means of securing a
reduced production. You can never get the masters to agree to work
'short time,' let manufactured goods be ever so unsaleable; but get
the workpeople to strike, and the masters shut their factories to a
man.

"Secondly, the great Trades' Unions. They are the organisations of
those trades in which the labour of _grown-up men_ predominates, or is
alone applicable. Here the competition neither of women and children
nor of machinery has so far weakened their organised strength. The
engineers, the carpenters, and joiners, the bricklayers, are each of
them a power, to that extent that, as in the case of the bricklayers
and bricklayers' labourers, they can even successfully resist the
introduction of machinery. That their condition has remarkably
improved since 1848 there can be no doubt, and the best proof of this
is in the fact, that for more than fifteen years not only have their
employers been with them, but they with their employers, upon
exceedingly good terms. They form an aristocracy among the working-
class; they have succeeded in enforcing for themselves a relatively
comfortable position, and they accept it as final. They are the model
working-men of Messrs. Leone Levi & Giffen, and they are very nice
people indeed nowadays to deal with, for any sensible capitalist in
particular and for the whole capitalist class in general.

"But as to the great mass of working-people, the state of misery and
insecurity in which they live now is as low as ever, if not lower. The
East End of London is an everspreading pool of stagnant misery and
desolation, of starvation when out of work, and degradation, physical
and moral, when in work. And so in all other large towns--abstraction
made of the privileged minority of the workers; and so in the smaller
towns and in the agricultural districts. The law which reduces the
_value_ of labour-power to the value of the necessary means of
subsistence, and the other law which reduces its _average price_, as a
rule, to the minimum of those means of subsistence, these laws act
upon them with the irresistible force of an automatic engine, which
crushes them between its wheels.

"This, then, was the position created by the Free Trade policy of
1847, and by twenty years of the rule of the manufacturing
capitalists. But, then, a change came. The crash of 1866 was,
indeed, followed by a slight and short revival about 1873; but that
did not last. We did not, indeed, pass through the full crisis at the
time it was due, in 1877 or 1878; but we have had, ever since 1876, a
chronic state of stagnation in all dominant branches of industry.
Neither will the full crash come; nor will the period of longed-for
prosperity to which we used to be entitled before and after it. A
dull depression, a chronic glut of all markets for all trades, that is
what we have been living in for nearly ten years. How is this?

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28