Royal Road to Science — Marx Engels Collected Works Volume 4, Marx and Engels 1844–1845
This entry will be organized in a similar fashion to how I organized the last entry:
I. The introduction you are reading now, including the publisher’s preface to Volume 4
II. Marx and Engels first joint publication, a wide-ranging, challenging polemical book, The Holy Family
III. Engels’ brilliant (especially for a 24 year old) though still somewhat-idealist book, The Condition of the Working-Class in England
IV. Other Works — i.e. the 12 newspaper articles, six letters, and four short drafts in this volume.
So, where did we leave off and where are we heading? From the Preface:
“The fourth volume of the Collected Works of Marx and Engels includes their works written from the time when their close friendship was first established (late August-early September 1844) to the autumn of 1845. Beginning with the present volume, works of both Marx and Engels will be published in this edition in the chronological order in which they were written.
The meeting of Marx and Engels in Paris in August 1844 inaugurated their lifelong partnership. Each of them had independently traversed a difficult path of intellectual development from idealism to materialism, from revolutionary democracy to communism. By the time they met in Paris each was a convinced revolutionary and Communist. With this shared standpoint, their work, while -preserving the- individual features of each, developed thereafter in a spirit of the unbreakable unity of two thinkers. At the same time, their creative co-operation opened up immediately a new stage in the development of their views. Not only did they go on to achieve, during the year that followed their meeting, greater concreteness in the dialectical and materialist principles both had advanced in their works of 1843 and 1844, but they broadened the whole range of their ideas and set themselves and tackled new problems of elaborating the theoretical foundations of the revolutionary world outlook of the proletariat.
Marx and Engels continued their study of existing philosophical, economic and socialist ideas, and their painstaking research into the actual social-economic reality and the working-class movement of the time. They maintained close contacts with democratic and socialist circles in Germany, France, Belgium and other countries, with representatives of the Chartist movement in England, and with members of the League of the Just. And all this increasingly convinced them that the practice of revolutionary struggle demanded profound and comprehensive theoretical work, the creation of an entirely new and self-consistent theory which would be of relevance in all the basic fields of human knowledge. It was to the fulfilment of this task that Marx and Engels together directed their efforts. They sought not only to establish the scientific basis for communism, but to spread communist ideas among the working class and revolutionary intellectuals of Europe. For them, the new revolutionary theory could be consolidated only in struggle against the various non-proletarian trends which had taken shape by that time, and by dissociating itself from them.
A primary task in the autumn of 1844 was to deal with the Young Hegelians, who had given up their former radical convictions and swung to the Right. Indeed, a campaign against socialism and communism was being mounted by the monthly Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung, edited by the Bauer brothers.”
That last paragraph really reminded me of a Star Wars opening crawl, so please enjoy this:
II. The Holy Family: A Critique of Critical Criticism against Bruno Bauer and Co.
I will be critical and self critical upfront. I struggled with The Holy Family. This did not come as a surprise: 1.) I had never read it before. 2.) Even more essays against the Bauers is the last thing I wanted to dive into, especially as I find so many of the arguments dated to more contemporary controversies. 3.) It is 210 repetitive pages. 4.) Even the working title is awkward and infamously unwieldly, as The Young Karl Marx film liked to point out (a…“Critique of Critical Criticism”?) 5.)It was not even translated into English until 1956 — so how important did Marxists consider it to be? (a self criticism of an Anglo-arrogance on my part.) 6.) Its reputation came to me from hearing David McCellan refer to it as “baroque” — rarely a compliment outside of the likes of Bach and Vivaldi.
But there were some reasons I tried to convince myself it is worth the effort. 1.) It is indeed the first joint work of Marx and Engels. 2.) Marx did draw upon his 1844 Economic Manuscripts here, which I dug deeply into in the last volume. 3.) It also further develops Marx’s materialism, especially vis a vis a “royal road” that starts with nominalism. 4.) And related to that, apparently Lenin found it valuable for tracing Marx’s development:
“Marx was the genius who continued and consummated the three main ideological currents of the 19th century, as represented by the three most advanced countries of mankind: classical German philosophy, classical English political economy, and French socialism combined with French revolutionary doctrines in general.
Beginning with the years 1844–45, when his views took shape, Marx was a materialist and especially a follower of Ludwig Feuerbach, whose weak point he subsequently saw only in his materialism being insufficiently consistent and comprehensive. To Marx, Feuerbach’s historic and ‘epoch-making’ significance lay in his having resolutely broken with Hegel’s idealism and in his proclamation of materialism, which already ‘in the 18th century, particularly French materialism, was not only a struggle against the existing political institutions and against… religion and theology, but also… against all metaphysics’ (in the sense of ‘drunken speculation’ as distinct from ‘sober philosophy’, The Holy Family.)” — V.I. Lenin.
Indeed, Lenin was correct that The Holy Family does combine those three ideological currents, and explores further a materialism beyond his earliest works — though apparently notably less so than the more direct link to the mature works that is The German Ideology in MECW V.
My own approach to writing on a longer, often unfocused work that includes much material outside of my realm of knowledge — for example, a 22 page critique of a 1300 page serial novel I haven’t read (Les Mystères de Paris) — will be to focus on illuminating what seems most relevant or at least interesting from the entire work. This will be grouped into two topics (materialism and value.) Which is to say, this will not be a chapter by chapter summary of what Marx or Engels wrote(they took turns writing different sections to make up the complete whole and it can be fun to read and guess who did which section — an easy game as you get to know their writing styles.) So to be clear, entire chapters, such as what Marx sarcastically referred to as “The Jewish Questions 1, 2, and 3” I will not attempt .
So let us start with the materialism, as mentioned above. From a Marx chapter:
“The question arises: Is Locke perhaps a disciple of Spinoza? ‘Profane’ history can answer: Materialism is the natural-born son of Great Britain. Already the British schoolman, Duns Scotus*, asked, ‘whether it was impossible for matter to think?’
In order to effect this miracle, he took refuge in God’s omnipotence, i.e., he made theology preach materialism. Moreover, he was a nominalist. Nominalism, the first form of materialism, is chiefly found among the English schoolmen.
The real progenitor of English materialism and all modern experimental science is Bacon. To him natural philosophy is the only true philosophy, and physics based upon the experience of the senses is the chiefest part of natural philosophy.”
*Marx — or possibly Engels, who edited this section to fit into his 1892 Socialism: Utopian and Scientific — is wrong here. You may have to consult the “MEGA” to find out who exactly is to blame. Regardless, it was William of Ockham (yes, the guy with the most famous razor) was who asked about the ability for matter to think. Duns Scotus was a “realist” in opposition to William of Ockham on this question. Regardless, Marx or Engels were correct in identifying a medieval “British home” that started to lay this road to materialism. Thank you to Warren Montag for pointing out this error in Rethinking Marxism Volume 10 Number 3 in 1998; something International Publishers did not do at least in by 1975 first printing.
Another important element of The Holy Family is Marx and Engels continuing their work on political economy, especially the concept of value. This is especially apparently as Marx contrasted the “the Critical Proudhon” (based on writings of Edgar Bauer, including his article simply titled “Proudhon” from April 1844) to “the real Proudhon” (the man himself, especially his 1840 book Qu’est-ce que la propriété ? ou Recherche sur le principe du Droit et du Gouvernement, famous for declaring “property is theft!”)
I will not pretend to be knowledgeable on the father of anarchism, but the Proudhon debate is at least an effective launching point here for Marx to expand on his developing theories of value. Marx again mentions Engels’ newspaper entry on political economy here:
“Proudhon does not consider the further creations of private property, e.g., wages, trade, value, price, money, etc., as forms of private property in themselves, as they are considered, for example, in the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher (see Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy by F. Engels), but uses these economic premises in arguing against the political economists; this is fully in keeping with his historically justified standpoint to which we referred above.”
From Proudhon, Marx continues to the aforementioned political economists themselves, criticizing them for carving out exceptions to prove the rule of capitalism as opposed to acknowledging the exceptions pointing to the greater contradictions of the system itself: “When, however, the economists become conscious of these contradictions, they themselves attack private property in one or other particular form as the falsifier of what is in itself (i.e., in their imagination) rational wages, in itself rational value, in itself rational trade. Adam Smith, for instance, occasionally polemises against the capitalists, Destutt de Tracy against the money-changers, Simonde de Sismondi against the factory system, Ricardo against landed property, and nearly all modern economists against the non-industrial capitalists, among whom property appears as a mere consumer.
Thus, as an exception — when they attack some special abuse — the economists occasionally stress the semblance of humanity in economic relations, but sometimes, and as a rule, they take these relations precisely in their clearly pronounced difference from the human, in their strictly economic sense. They stagger about within this contradiction completely unaware of it.”
Then back to Edgar Bauer, Marx criticizes him for not saying even a word on political economy while writing about Proudhon. (For a sneak preview, Marx reaches a pro-Ricardo/anti-Proudhon conclusion in regards to value later in 1847’s “The Poverty of Philosophy: “Ricardo shows us the real movement of bourgeois production as that establishes value. M. Proudhon abstracts from this real movement Ricardo’s theory of value is the scientific explanation of the current economic way of life; the theory of value for Proudhon is a utopian interpretation of Ricardo’s theory. Ricardo establishes the truth of his formula by deriving it from all economic processes and in this way explains this phenomena, even those elements which at first appear contradictory.”)
Marx continues in the same section to further take steps towards a more unified theory coming out of German philosophy (especially Feuerbach at this point), French socialism, and British political economy:
“Proletariat and wealth are opposites; as such they form a single whole. They are both creations of the world of private property. The question is exactly what place each occupies in the antithesis. It is not sufficient to declare them two sides of a single whole.
Private property as private property, as wealth, is compelled to maintain itself, and thereby its opposite, the proletariat, in existence. That is the positive side of the antithesis, self-satisfied private property.
The proletariat, on the contrary, is compelled as proletariat to abolish itself and thereby its opposite, private property, which determines its existence, and which makes it proletariat. It is the negative side of the antithesis, its restlessness within its very self, dissolved and self-dissolving private property.”
Marx continues to mention the “propertied class” also suffers from a human self-estrangement like the proletariat, but that it feels confident and powerful in that estrangement. Later we will see in The Condition of the Working-Class in England that Engels has a similar view, going so far down a humanist route as to argue that the bourgeoise may be better off under socialism — something Marx and Engels would later drop or even outright reject as idealist as they observed class struggles intensifying in Europe.
After many diversions, Marx later returns to the question of value, contrasting the real Proudhon to the Bauer version through an interesting intellectual diversion about the value(s) of a work of art, specifically Homer’s The Illiad:
“The real Proudhon supposes that the Iliad has an infinite price (or exchange value, prix), while the Critical Proudhon supposes that it has an infinite value. The real Proudhon counterposes the value of the Iliad, its value in the economic sense (valeur intrinsque), to its exchange value (valeur changeable); the Critical Proudhon counterposes its “value for exchange” to its “intrinsic value”, i,e., its value as a poem.”
The Holy Family concludes with a variety of indeed baroque language in the style of a more traditional Christian (Catholic/Lutheran?) service, pulled in many directions, and united primarily through an incredible level of disagreement with the Bauers. It was still seven years before Edgar Bauer would eventually just punch Karl Marx in the face; though which name is better remembered now?
III. The Condition of the Working-Class in England
For this section, it will be much more simple to summarize a book that was much easer to read. Marx was known to be highly impressed by Engels’ work here, and the level of statistical research and first hand observation created an early example of urban sociology — though one very honest about it biases towards its primary subject, the working class of Great Britain (and Ireland, though more on that later.) I should also note I had read this one previously, though over 15 years ago, and I appreciate it more now than I did then thanks to the “build up” of reading the Young Engels.
This book has five prefaces: the1845 German original, an 1885 English, an 1887 American, an 1892 English, and an 1892 German. In addition, there is a very warm dedication by Engels to the working class of Great Britain, which he mentioned always treated him with warmth, and never as an outsider (Engels says the same of the French as well.) Finishing up the preliminary entries is an introduction chapter as well — one that is compelling from the start:
“The history of the proletariat in England begins with the second half of the last century, with the invention of the steam-engine and of machinery for working cotton. These inventions gave rise, as is well known, to an industrial revolution, a revolution which altered the whole civil society; one, the historical importance of which is only now beginning to be recognised. England is the classic soil of this transformation, which was all the mightier, the more silently it proceeded; and England is, therefore, the classic land of its chief product also, the proletariat. Only in England can the proletariat be studied in all its relations and from all sides.”
Engels continues in the introduction to report on the actual numbers showing the industrialization of the Great Britain and Ireland: population growth in cities, pounds of cotton, flax, and wool imported, number of mule and throwing spindles at work, number of coal mines in operation, tons of pig iron and iron products exported, miles of roadway built, number of bridges constructed, creation of canals, the more recent construction of railroads, and number of steamboats sailing. Throughout the book you can tell he spend significant time on the research.
The results of industrialization? “We have already seen how the proletariat was called into existence by the introduction of machinery. The rapid extension of manufacture demanded hands, wages rose, and troops of workmen migrated from the agricultural districts to the towns. Population multiplied enormously, and nearly all the increase took place in the proletariat. Further, Ireland had entered upon an orderly development only since the beginning of the eighteenth century. There, too, the population, more than decimated by English cruelty in earlier disturbances, now rapidly multiplied, especially after the advance in manufacture began to draw masses of Irishmen towards England. Thus arose the great manufacturing and commercial cities of the British Empire, in which at least three-fourths of the population belong to the working-class, while the lower middle-class consists only of small shop-keepers, and very very few handicraftsmen.”
So what is the point of summarizing this change, and ultimately the point of the book?
“The condition of the working-class is the condition of the vast majority of the English people. The question: What is to become of those destitute millions, who consume today what they earned yesterday; who have created the greatness of England by their inventions and their toil; who become with every passing day more conscious of their might, and demand, with daily increasing urgency, their share of the advantages of society? — This, since the Reform Bill, has become the national question. All Parliamentary debates, of any importance, may be reduced to this; and, though the English middle-class* will not as yet admit it, though they try to evade this great question, and to represent their own particular interests as the truly national ones, their action is utterly useless.”
*Of note through this book, Engels says he uses the English term “middle-class” to refer to the French-equivalent “bourgeoise”. Therefore, it would be a mistake as a reader to entirely conflate this “middle class” with the sociological concept of a “middle class” the way it is often used in the contemporary Anglosphere.
Finishing the introduction with a bang, Engels warns of something he later had to admit he was overly optimistic about the likelihood of:
“…the miracle that the English have as yet no single book upon the condition of their workers, although they have been examining and mending the old state of things no one knows how many years. Hence also the deep wrath of the whole working-class, from Glasgow to London, against the rich, by whom they are systematically plundered and mercilessly left to their fate, a wrath which before too long a time goes by, a time almost within the power of man to predict, must break out into a revolution in comparison with which the French Revolution, and the year 1794, will prove to have been child’s play.”
Engels begins the next chapter, logically, with its subject: “the industrial proletariat.” First, economically:
“It has been already suggested that manufacture centralises property in the hands of the few. It requires large capital with which to erect the colossal establishments that ruin the petty trading bourgeoisie and with which to press into its service the forces of Nature, so driving the hand-labour of the independent workman out of the market. The division of labour, the application of water and especially steam, and the application of machinery, are the three great levers with which manufacture, since the middle of the last century, has been busy putting the world out of joint. Manufacture, on a small scale, created the middle-class; on a large scale, it created the working-class, and raised the elect of the middle-class to the throne, but only to overthrow them the more surely when the time comes.”
But then, also socially:
“The centralising tendency of manufacture does not, however, stop here. Population becomes centralised just as capital does; and, very naturally, since the human being, the worker, is regarded in manufacture simply as a piece of capital for the use of which the manufacturer pays interest under the name of wages. A manufacturing establishment requires many workers employed together in a single building, living near each other and forming a village of themselves in the case of a good-sized factory. They have needs for satisfying which other people are necessary; handicraftsmen, shoemakers, tailors, bakers, carpenters, stonemasons, settle at hand. The inhabitants of the village, especially the younger generation, accustom themselves to factory work, grow skilful in it, and when the first mill can no longer employ them all, wages fall, and the immigration of fresh manufacturers is the consequence. So the village grows into a small town, and the small town into a large one.”
Engels continues in the next chapter to talk of “the great towns.” Here Engels again taps into his strength we saw in Volume II as a romantic travel writer:
“A town, such as London, where a man may wander for hours together without reaching the beginning of the end, without meeting the slightest hint which could lead to the inference that there is open country within reach, is a strange thing. This colossal centralisation, this heaping together of two and a half millions of human beings at one point, has multiplied the power of this two and a half millions a hundredfold; has raised London to the commercial capital of the world, created the giant docks and assembled the thousand vessels that continually cover the Thames. I know nothing more imposing than the view which the Thames offers during the ascent from the sea to London Bridge. The masses of buildings, the wharves on both sides, especially from Woolwich upwards, the countless ships along both shores, crowding ever closer and closer together, until, at last, only a narrow passage remains in the middle of the river, a passage through which hundreds of steamers shoot by one another; all this is so vast, so impressive, that a man cannot collect himself, but is lost in the marvel of England’s greatness before he sets foot upon English soil.”
But unlike the romantic 20 year Engels writing of the Swiss Alps, the 24 year old Engels now saw “that these Londoners have been forced to sacrifice the best qualities of their human nature, to bring to pass all the marvels of civilization which crowd their city.” Likewise, when enters Dublin, Engels returns to his literary ability (and his competing ideologies of specifically anti-Irish racism and anti-capitalist universality) to describe seeing another of the “great towns”:
“Let us leave London and examine the other great cities of the three kingdoms in their order. Let us take Dublin first, a city the approach to which from the sea is as charming as that of London is imposing. The Bay of Dublin is the most beautiful of the whole British Island Kingdom, and is even compared by the Irish with the Bay of Naples. The city, too, possesses great attractions, and its aristocratic districts are better and more tastefully laid out than those of any other British city. By way of compensation, however the poorer districts of Dublin are among the most hideous and repulsive to be seen in the world. True, the Irish character, which under some circumstances, is comfortable only in the dirt, has some share in this; but as we find thousands of Irish in ever great city in England and Scotland, and as every poor population must gradually sink into the same uncleanliness, the wretchedness of Dublin is nothing specific, nothing peculiar to Dublin, but something common to all great towns.”
Engels maintains his contrast-of-extremes thread for Liverpool as well:
“In the other great seaport towns the prospect is no better. Liverpool, with all its commerce, wealth, and grandeur yet treats its workers with the same barbarity. A full fifth of the population, more than 45,000 human beings, live in narrow, dark, damp, badly-ventilated cellar dwellings, of which there are 7,862 in the city. Besides these cellar dwellings there are 2,270 courts, small spaces built up on all four sides and having but one entrance, a narrow, covered passage-way, the whole ordinarily very dirty and inhabited exclusively by proletarians.”
And beyond into many more:
“Precisely the same state of things prevails in the factory towns. In Nottingham there are in all 11,000 houses, of which between 7,000 and 8,000 are built back to back with a rear party-wall so that no through ventilation is possible, while a single privy usually serves for several houses. During an investigation made a short time since, many rows of houses were found to have been built over shallow drains covered only by the boards of the ground- floor. In Leicester, Derby, and Sheffield, it is no better.”
He continues through Glasgow, Leeds, etc. before finally settling into Manchester, where he did the majority of his chronicling of the working class. And with it, its major subject, the working class of Manchester where in regards to wage and conditions “the average is much nearer the worst case than the best.”
The next chapter, shorter but packing a punch, is on “competition”.
Engels says the introduction already covered the “creation” of the proletariat earlier (e.g. increasing wages of weavers to fill demand for woven goods, which encouraged the weaving peasants to abandon their farms for more work on the looms.) But what then is the affect of competition on this proletariat that now exists?
The so-called “labor theory of value” (Marx never uses this term exactly, only that of value theory) had not been elaborated (or even discovered-as-such) as it was in Capital Volume I, and Engels himself may not more instinctively grasp it as he himself was not a proletarian by any means. So in its place is something adjacent and I think somewhat correct but not quite complete — which is an accounting of competition between workers and capitalists and among fellow workers to create a wage level at a “certain grade of civilization.” Engels, casually bigoted against the Irish (even while dating Mary Burns who showed how much of the world of the urban poor!), says this level may be variable:
“True, this limit is relative; one needs more than another, one is accustomed to more comfort than another; the Englishman, who is still somewhat civilised, needs more than the Irishman, who goes in rags, eats potatoes, and sleeps in a pig-sty. But that does not hinder the Irishman’s competing with the Englishman, and gradually forcing the rate of wages, and with it the Englishman’s level of civilisation, down to the Irishman’s level. Certain kinds of work require a certain grade of civilisation, and to these belong almost all forms of industrial occupation; hence the interest of the bourgeoisie requires in this case that wages should be high enough to enable the workman to keep himself upon the required plane.”
Continuing his exploration into wage labor, Engels quotes Adam Smith: “That the demand for men, like that for any other commodity, necessarily regulates the production of men, quickens it when it goes on too slowly, and stops it when it advances too fast.”
Getting to the heart of the British empire and capitalism, Engels elaborates from Smith: “If, in addition to this, the conquest of foreign markets constantly and rapidly increases the demand for manufactured goods, as has been the case in England during the past sixty years, the demand for hands increases, and, in proportion to it, the population. Thus, instead of diminishing, the population of the British Empire has increased with extraordinary rapidity, and is still increasing. Yet, in spite of the extension of industry, in spite of the demand for working-men which, in general, has increased, there is, according to the confession of all the official political parties (Tory, Whig, and Radical), permanent surplus, superfluous population; the competition among the workers is constantly greater than the competition to secure workers.
Whence comes this incongruity? It lies in the nature of industrial competition and the commercial crises which arise from it. In the present unregulated production and distribution of the means of subsistence, which is carried on not directly for the sake of supplying needs, but for profit, in the system under which every one works for himself to enrich himself, disturbances inevitably arise at every moment.”
Engels continues in this chapter to observe the “perpetual” cycle of prosperity, crisis, propriety, crisis, this “perennial” round of English industry, “usually every five to six years.” Which leads him to also observe an unemployed army of surplus workers during the prosperity part of the cycle. This “surplus population” (unclear to me if Engels had read Dickens’ new novel where Ebenezer Scrooge uses that famous term, though he definitely revisits our old friend Malthus again.) This reserve army of labor then takes to “huckstering”, becoming “jobbers” in the informal economy, and ultimately begging in the streets. The Poor Law commissioners estimated an averaged of 1.5 million “surplus population” in England and Wales, which Engels notes it too conservative due to its formal methodology and exclusion of Scotland and Ireland.
Continuing in the next short chapter, as promised, we return to Irish immigration. Those who Thomas Carlyle refers to as “the wild Milesian” (!) Engels says have been calculated to be “more than a million already immigrated, and not far from fifty thousand still come every year, nearly all of whom enter the industrial districts, especially the great cities, and there form the lowest class of the population.”
Engels thinks Carylse goes too far in denigrating the national character of the Irish by suggesting they “drive the Saxon native out, taking possession” of their room, but Engels prejudice is still impressive in its own right: “If we except his exaggerated and one-sided condemnation of the Irish national character, Carlyle is perfectly right. These Irishmen who migrate for fourpence to England, on the deck of a steamship on which they are often packed like cattle, insinuate themselves everywhere. The worst dwellings are good enough for them; their clothing causes them little trouble, so long as it holds together by a single thread; shoes they know not; their food consists of potatoes and potatoes only; whatever they earn beyond these needs they spend upon drink. What does such a race want with high wages?…Filth and drunkenness, too, they have brought with them. The lack of cleanliness, which is not so injurious in the country, where population is scattered, and which is the Irishman’s second nature, becomes terrifying and gravely dangerous through its concentration here in the great cities. The Milesian deposits all garbage and filth before his house door here, as he was accustomed to do at home, and so accumulates the pools and dirt-heaps which disfigure the working- people’s quarters and poison the air. He builds a pig-sty against the house wall as he did at home, and if he is prevented from doing this, he lets the pig sleep in the room with himself…The Irishman loves his pig as the Arab his horse.”
This chapter was not Engels finest moment as even his conclusion can be interpreted as somewhat more anti-capitalist than anti-immigrant per se.
The next chapter was his results of such a society as described so far on its working class. One interesting part of this chapter is Engels continual revisions across his different editions (at one point adding and removing cricket as a game of the working people.) Some revisions in chronological order:
- “When as here and elsewhere I speak of society as a responsible whole, having rights and duties, I mean, of course, the ruling power of society, the class which at present holds social and political control, and bears, therefore, the responsibility for the condition of those to whom it grants no share in such control. This ruling class in England, as in all other civilised countries, is the bourgeoisie. But that this society, and especially the bourgeoisie, is charged with the duty of protecting every member of society, at least, in his life, to see to it, for example, that no one starves, I need not now prove to my German readers. If I were writing for the English bourgeoisie, the case would be different.”– Note by Engels to the German edition of 1845.
- “And so it is now in Germany. Our German capitalists are fully up to the English level, in this respect at least, in the year of grace, 1886.”– Added by Engels to the American edition of 1887.
- “How things have changed in the last fifty years! Today there are members of the English middle-classes who recognise that society has duties to the individual citizen — but as for the German middle-classes?!?” — Added by Engels to the German edition of 1892.
The “results” of the creation of this society of increasing proletarianization, urbanization, etc. is essentially a horror show of maladies:
- Working to the point of exhaustion and alcoholism
- Dwellings and conditions that encourage numerous diseases like typhus and scarlet fever with little medical assistance for the working class
- Bad air quality
- Children that are given opium and alcohol and who are otherwise half starved
What does all that add up to?:
“The result of all these influences is a general enfeeblement of the frame in the working-class. There are few vigorous, well-built, healthy persons among the workers, i.e. among the factory operatives, who are employed in confined rooms, and we are here discussing these only. They are almost all weakly, of angular but not powerful build, lean, pale, and of relaxed fibre, with the exception of the muscles especially exercised in their work. Nearly all suffer from indigestion, and consequently from a more or less hypochondriac, melancholy, irritable, nervous condition. Their enfeebled constitutions are unable to resist disease, and are therefore seized by it on every occasion. Hence they age prematurely, and die early. On this point the mortality statistics supply unquestionable testimony.”
Among those grim life expectancy statistics, still shocking to read today:
“The Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Working-Class contains information which attests the same fact. In Liverpool, in 1840, the average longevity of the upper classes, gentry, professional men, etc., was thirty-five years; that of the business men and better-placed handicraftsmen, twenty-two years; and that of the operatives, day-labourers, and serviceable class in general, but fifteen years. The Parliamentary reports contain a mass of similar facts.”
In addition to ignoring their physical needs, the workers also have their intellectual needs ignored as well. Though there are sectarian religious schools focused on keeping children “for the faith”, compulsory government school attendance does not exist, and such education is generally not funded.
Engels returns to alcoholism via various statistics about the gallons of spirits drank (various millions of gallons seems hard to conceptualize!), the “sexual license” of men seeking prostitutes, the neglect of children by the working men, and higher arrest rates compared to other European countries.
After summarizing such misery, Engels moves into the first of several new chapters that will further investigate each “branch” of the proletariat, starting with factory hands and continuing with their labour movements, the mining proletariat, and the agricultural proletariat. Each of these chapters continue with various reports from The Manchester Guardian, statistics from the census, anecdotes on “grinders’ lung” (silicosis), and conclusions of parliamentary organizations such as the Children’s Employment Commission.
One of the most optimistic (though less of a “prediction” than his view of a likely British workers revolution) passages by Engels regarding the labour movement I found especially warm — and I hope you do as well:
“Hence it is evident that the working-men’s movement is divided into two sections, the Chartists and the Socialists. The Chartists are theoretically the more backward, the less developed, but they are genuine proletarians all over, the representatives of their class. The Socialists are more far-seeing, propose practical remedies against distress, but, proceeding originally from the bourgeoisie, are for this reason unable to amalgamate completely with the working-class. The union of Socialism with Chartism, the reproduction of French Communism in an English manner, will be the next step, and has already begun. Then only, when this has been achieved, will the working-class be the true intellectual leader of England. Meanwhile, political and social development will proceed, and will foster this new party, this new departure of Chartism.
These different sections of working-men, often united, often separated, Trades Unionists, Chartists, and Socialists, have founded on their own hook numbers of schools and reading-rooms for the advancement of education. Every Socialist, and almost every Chartist institution, has such a place, and so too have many trades. Here the children receive a purely proletarian education, free from all the influences of the bourgeoisie; and, in the reading-rooms, proletarian journals and books alone, or almost alone, are to be found.
…
I have often heard working-men, whose fustian jackets scarcely held together, speak upon geological, astronomical, and other subjects, with more knowledge than most “cultivated” bourgeois in Germany possess. And in how great a measure the English proletariat has succeeded in attaining independent education is shown especially by the fact that the epoch-making products of modern philosophical, political, and poetical literature are read by working-men almost exclusively. The bourgeois, enslaved by social conditions and the prejudices involved in them, trembles, blesses, and crosses himself before everything which really paves the way for progress; the proletarian has open eyes for it, and studies it with pleasure and success. In this respect the Socialists, especially, have done wonders for the education of the proletariat. They have translated the French materialists, Helvetius, Holbach, Diderot, etc., and disseminated them, with the best English works, in cheap editions.”
The final chapters are The Attitude of the Bourgeoisie Towards the Proletariat, a Postscript, and an Appendix that only existed in the American Edition of 1877.
So what was Engels attitude towards the attitude of the bourgeoise towards the proletariat? Well, not very positive:
“I have never seen a class so deeply demoralised, so incurably debased by selfishness, so corroded within, so incapable of progress, as the English bourgeoisie; and I mean by this, especially the bourgeoisie proper, particularly the Liberal, Corn Law repealing bourgeoisie. For it nothing exists in this world, except for the sake of money, itself not excluded. It knows no bliss save that of rapid gain, no pain save that of losing gold. In the presence of this avarice and lust of gain, it is not possible for a single human sentiment or opinion to remain untainted. True, these English bourgeois are good husbands and family men, and have all sorts of other private virtues, and appear, in ordinary intercourse, as decent and respectable as all other bourgeois; even in business they are better to deal with than the Germans; they do not higgle and haggle so much as our own pettifogging merchants; but how does this help matters? Ultimately it is self-interest, and especially money gain, which alone determines them. I once went into Manchester with such a bourgeois, and spoke to him of the bad, unwholesome method of building, the frightful condition of the working-peoples quarters, and asserted that I had never seen so ill-built a city. The man listened quietly to the end, and said at the corner where we parted: ‘And yet there is a great deal of money made here, good morning, sir.’”
Engels also realizes something we would later hear from Oscar Wilde and others; that is that the bourgeoisie is philanthropic out of self-interest, not of any purer charitable aims (especially hypocritical considering their policy positions; again with a lengthy discussion of the Corn Laws which have now been quite central in each volume in the MECW.)
I would repeat here the criticism I laid earlier, and Engels would later admit as well — which is his overestimation for a revolutionary situation in the face of the misery he so carefully documented and cataloged:
“Prophecy is nowhere so easy as in England, where all the component elements of society are clearly defined and sharply separated. The revolution must come; it is already too late to bring about a peaceful solution; but it can be made more gently than that prophesied in the foregoing pages.”
Finally, the American appendix I found primarily interesting for this passage about my home state:
“At this very moment I am receiving the American papers with accounts of the great strike of 12,000 Pennsylvanian coal-miners in the Connellsville district, and I seem but to read my own description of the North of England colliers’ strike of 1844. The same cheating of the work-people 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.
There were two circumstances which for a long time prevented the unavoidable consequences of the Capitalist system from showing themselves in the full glare of day in America. These were the easy access to the ownership of cheap land, and the influx of immigration.”
Though I think the organization and topics of the later half of the book could have more effectively just integrated into longer chapters in the first half, this book was a mostly impressive attempt towards combining political economy, public data, journalism, and activism into a digestible volume.
IV. Other Works
One of the most interesting biographical notes so far was in this Volume as well. Four days after his expulsion from France for helping to edit Vorwärts! (our old friend Wilhelm IV protesting about libel in the paper to “the citizen King” Louis Phillipe), Karl Marx, wife-Jenny, and daughter-Jenny (born in Paris) arrived in Brussels. Karl requested asylum to King Leopold I (“the Nestor of Europe”):
“Sire, The undersigned, Charles Marx, Doctor of Philosophy, aged 26, from Trier, in the Kingdom of Prussia, intending to settle with his wife and child in Your Majesty’s domains, respectfully takes the liberty of requesting Your Majesty to grant him permission to establish his residence in Belgium. He has the honour to be, with deepest respect, Your Majesty’s most humble and obedient servant, Dr. Charles Marx.”
Marx received no reply to this request and was placed under the secret police surveillance. The police then summoned Karl to sign this document:
“MARX’S UNDERTAKING NOT TO PUBLISH ANYTHING IN BELGIUM ON CURRENT POLITICS — To obtain permission to reside in Belgium I agree to pledge myself, on my word of honour, not to publish in Belgium any work on current politics. March 22, 1845, Dr. Karl Marx.”
How do you know you are writing something important, politically? You know when you are forced to sign such a document such as this (and then get expelled anyway.) The other thing I immediately though of is how quickly “liberal” Belgium must have established secret police considering the country was only created in 1830–31.
It gets even more messy from here, as Marx then tried to emigrate to the “United States of North America” while the Prussian government pressured Brussels to expel him from Belgium as well. Regardless of whether or not that would have worked, Marx renounced his Prussian citizenship in December 1845 and I am sure we’ll learn more details via primary documents in future volumes about his later moves to Cologne (expelled again), back to Paris (expelled even again!), and then to London.
Another interesting note is this brief fragment by Marx, date unknown but guessed to be 1844, which is the start of an 1844–1847 notebook he used parts of for The Holy Family — but sadly not a planned-but-never-written History of the Convention. It’s very short, so I recommend just taking a look now. The list format here reminds me of later attempts by Gramsci or Althusser to further develop a Marxist theory of state and even of a social whole/social formation starting similar notebook lists of their own. Also of note in that fragment is the sentence “Suffrage, the fight for the abolition of the state and of bourgeois society” showing again the importance of translation, as “abolition” here is used for “aufhebung”— which I maintain should not be translated in these volumes. But regardless of the translation, it’s a powerful sentence showing how radical Marx had become, even before the revolutions of 1848.
