Paul Blackledge: Engels and the English Working Class
Despite persistent attempts to distinguish Marx's intellectual legacy from Engels’s "Marxism" (the so-called "Marx-Engels divergence" thesis), almost everyone—whether they view Marx and Engels as an inseparable unity or insist on a serious divergence in the worldviews of these two friends—highly evaluates Engels’s work The Condition of the Working Class in England. For instance, although Terrell Carver and Paul Thomas attempt to view the works of Engels’s late period as a failed attempt to reduce Marxism to a pseudo-scientific system, they still regard The Condition of the Working Class in England as Engels’s masterpiece. This is a paradoxical situation because it is evident that a consistent intellectual thread runs from The Condition of the Working Class in England to The German Ideology and The Communist Manifesto, and the same applies to the mature works of Marx and Engels. Therefore, the praise for The Condition of the Working Class in England stands in sharp contrast to the criticism of Engels’s mature works.
I believe the aforementioned divergence in perspectives reflects the lens through which Engels’s critics tend to view his mature works. The criticisms of the mature Engels’s thought seem blinded by an interpretation that distorts his account of the historical relationship between society and nature. Building upon my challenges to this blind distortion elsewhere, I further propose here that when we read Engels’s mature self-criticism of The Condition of the Working Class in England alongside his letters elucidating the historical materialist [1] conception of history, we can clarify the profound problems faced when attempting to draw a line of demarcation between the thought of Marx and Engels.
I. Critics and Apologists
Both critics and scholars of Engels regard The Condition of the Working Class in England as a direct critique of nineteenth-century British capitalism. To some extent, these individuals' appreciation for Engels’s early work is perfectly understandable, as critics like Carver tend to view Engels’s 1859 review of Marx’s Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy as a turn in Engels’s thought—away from Marx toward "the absorption of the causal laws of physics, using them as a model for the obscure academic study of history."
The key problem with the above argument is not merely that Engels believed that in Anti-Dühring, Dialectics of Nature, and Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy, he was defending, constructing, and extending the framework he and Marx had jointly formulated immediately after the publication of The Condition of the Working Class in England and The Holy Family. More importantly, the questions Engels raised in his mature works stemmed directly from the questions he and Marx began to pose in the mid-1840s. As Sven-Eric Liedman noted, the questions regarding science and method studied by Engels in his mature works were "almost the same questions" Marx considered when he began writing Capital. Moreover, Engels’s attempt in his mature works to use a monist method to study nature and society undoubtedly resonates with the view in The German Ideology that "We know only a single science, the science of history. One can look at history from two sides and divide it into the history of nature and the history of men. The two sides are, however, inseparable."
Marx once described the process of forming their common concept: "From the time when Friedrich Engels… published his genius-like sketch [2] on the criticism of economic categories (in the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher), I was constantly exchanging ideas with him by mail; he arrived at the same result as I through another path (see his The Condition of the Working Class in England). When in the spring of 1845 he also settled in Brussels, we decided to jointly set forth our view in opposition to the ideological view of German philosophy—in fact, to settle accounts with our former philosophical conscience. This intention was carried out in the form of a critique of post-Hegelian philosophy. The manuscript, in two large octavo volumes, had long ago reached the publisher in Westphalia when we received the news that altered circumstances did not allow of its being printed. We abandoned the manuscript to the gnawing criticism of the mice all the more willingly as we had achieved our main purpose—self-clarification."
Undoubtedly, Engels’s The Condition of the Working Class in England constitutes the foundation of this new worldview. In this sense, the responses of William O. Henderson and William H. Chaloner to the work can only be understood from the perspective of apologists for capitalism. They argued that although "socialists and communists have long regarded this work as a great socialist classic," the facts show that Engels was "not a historian" but rather restated historical myths about "The Hungry Forties" [3] and the "Golden Age" of England, while simultaneously creating his own myth of the working class. They also contended that Engels’s understanding of economic crises, child labor, and the possibility of achieving the People's Charter was mistaken, and that he was an unreliable witness who often substituted "vivid imagination... for facts." In short, they viewed Engels as "an ill-natured young man who vented his rage by fiercely condemning the English factory system as he then saw it in England."
Eric Hobsbawm considered the criticisms of Engels "nonsense"; he not only saw The Condition of the Working Class in England as a text that reached the "standard" of that period but also called it "by far the best monograph on the working class of that period." Tristram Hunt argued that "the merit of The Condition of the Working Class in England lies both in its rigorous thinking and its rich argumentation," and that it "presents a spectacular and horrific vision of the industrial city." Similarly, Hans Frambach viewed the work as "a pioneering work of empirical social research," while Steven Marcus regarded it as a "new mode of conceptual reflection and analysis." Meanwhile, Dill Hunley and David McLellan pointed out that Engels’s use of government publications prefigured the way Marx cited Blue Books [4] in Capital. McLellan viewed The Condition of the Working Class in England as "a concise and coherent masterpiece, with the only flaw being the absurdly idyllic picture of 18th-century English rural life depicted at the beginning, which had long been submerged in the industrial tide." In a more general sense, McLellan regarded the work as "a pioneering work in the fields of modern urban geography and sociology, and although Engels was only 24 at the time, he was quite capable of writing this book." John Rex added that what made Engels’s work stand out was not only his keen observation of specific details but, more importantly, his method of grasping those details. Carver also added to his previous praise of the work: "Engels’s academic level is beyond doubt and deserves commendation. At that time, almost no university could fully undertake a project investigating the condition of the working class, whether in terms of social history or human geography, or by applying the clearly non-philosophical, even anti-philosophical method Engels adopted here."
This is a very important point. However, Carver opposes that teleology which believes the young Engels’s thought was destined to converge with Marx’s, to the extent that Carver overlooks the real and profound continuity between the themes of the young Engels’s works and the Marx-Engels "worldview" in The German Ideology. In this sense, the preface Engels wrote in 1892 for the American edition of The Condition of the Working Class in England is more revealing. Engels noted: "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 classical philosophy."
The brilliance of The Condition of the Working Class in England is obvious, or ought to be. Although Engels was not the first commentator to notice the British Industrial Revolution, he was the first to write a book analyzing its truly revolutionary impact. Engels was the first to recognize that what was happening in Britain, especially the rise of the working-class movement against capitalism, was both unique and universal. He believed that the British Industrial Revolution created something unique in world history for the proletariat: industrialization was a unity of opposites, bringing misery and degradation to the working class while laying the foundation for "a newer, truly human form of society based on" the growing class consciousness of this new class. Although Engels tended toward "true socialism" [5] in The Condition of the Working Class in England, the following argument is a central part of his and Marx’s discourse in The German Ideology: socialism is not an abstract ideology transmitted to workers from the outside, but rather their own "real movement which abolishes the present state of things."
In his book Marx’s Politics, Alan Gilbert pointed out several contradictions in Engels’s The Condition of the Working Class in England: first, his view that trade unions cannot force wages above subsistence levels, which conflicts with his support for unions; second, his acceptance of the deliberate disparagement of Britain by Irish immigrants; third, his realization that class struggle tends toward violent revolution, which conflicts with his stance against violence; and fourth, his view that women are politically passive, which diverges from his stance against the capitalist enslavement of women.
Gilbert argued that The Condition of the Working Class in England remains important nonetheless because it outlines the key stages of the new working-class movement against capitalism:
Resistance against exploitation through theft was the most primitive form of worker resistance and was considered the least successful, as it left individual workers entirely at the mercy of the government. Therefore, workers turned to a second, more collective form of resistance: destroying machines in the manner of Luddism. Although this broke out in different trades and places, the result was always severe punishment. Engels believed that with the repeal of the Combination Acts [6] in 1824, a third stage emerged: workers organized trade unions in specific industries to resist capitalists.
This picture of the logical (though not necessarily historical) development of forms of working-class struggle implies that Engels was the first to recognize that "strikes are a constant protest against capitalist oppression and a training ground for revolution." In this sense, as Hal Draper and Eric Wolf respectively pointed out, The Condition of the Working Class in England can be regarded as a "storehouse of the seeds of later Marxism" and a "landmark" of social history.
II. The Condition of the Working Class in England
The Condition of the Working Class in England was not a scholarly work; its target audience was German left-wing intellectuals, and its purpose was to provide an internal strategic reference for the German socialist movement. In the preface, Engels points out: "The condition of the working-class is the real basis and point of departure of all social movements of the present because it is the highest and most unconcealed pinnacle of the social misery existing in our day. French and German working-class Communism are its direct, Fourierism and English Socialism, as well as the Communism of the educated German bourgeoisie, are its indirect products." Therefore, if left-wing intellectuals wished to provide a solid theoretical foundation for socialism and seek a basis for its legitimacy, a study of proletarian conditions was essential. More specifically, the condition of the English working class carried particular significance because it was in England that these conditions assumed their classical form. Conversely, the theoretical nature of German socialism and communism suggested that the German Left "knew too little of the real world."
Interestingly, in the original 1845 edition of The Condition of the Working Class in England, only the dedication "To the Working-Classes of Great-Britain" was in English. In it, Engels wrote: "I forsook the company and the dinner-parties, the port-wine and champagne of the middle-classes, and devoted my leisure-hours almost exclusively to the intercourse with plain Working Men." He felt both "glad" and "proud" to have done so because, in sharp contrast to the "term of narrow self-interest" and the general conduct of "your middle-class fortune-hunters," the working class truly consisted of "human beings, members of the great family of mankind, who know their interest and that of all the human race to be the same." These words reveal the moralism held by the young Engels—a moralism with a class orientation. He insisted that the middle class was the "enemy" of the working class and, by extension, the "enemy" of the universal interests of humanity, because "their interests are diametrically opposed to yours."
In Engels's early article "Letters from Wuppertal," we can foresee some of the themes he would expound upon in The Condition of the Working Class in England. Published in the Telegraph für Deutschland when Engels was only 18, the article notes that industrialization led to the physical and moral "decay" of German workers, and that Pietism [7] played a major role in justifying these wretched conditions. Under the pretext of preventing workers from drinking, they sought every means to lower wages, to the extent that workers either indulged in drunkenness and debauchery or internalized religious fundamentalism as a narcotic to alleviate the pains of life—or, more commonly, practiced a hypocritical combination of both coping strategies. As Carver observed, the author of these letters possessed a keen eye for detail, a thirst for knowledge, and a hatred of dogmatism. These letters were also clearly written by a scholar who had seriously studied German society, recognizing both his strengths as an author and his deficiencies as a researcher regarding the subjects he treated. It was precisely to remedy this deficiency that Engels announced his intention to devote more time to study.
In the article "The English View of the Internal Crisis," Engels deepened his views on class society. He proposed that the English upper and middle classes regarded the Chartists’ call for universal suffrage as a revolutionary demand because, through it, the "propertyless... masses of the proletariat" threatened the power of those classes. In "The Internal Crisis," published two days later, Engels added that although England's industrial development had made the country wealthy, this was achieved at the cost of creating a proletarian class—a class of the destitute. Nevertheless, unlike Hegel, who viewed this class as mere victims of industrialization, Engels believed that the great strike movement [8] of that summer proved not only the independence of the class's actions but also showed that workers were increasingly aware that "the material condition of the proletariat can only be improved by a violent change in the present unnatural relations, and the fundamental overthrow of the aristocracy of birth and the aristocracy of industry."
Notably, Engels also wrote that while "the law-abiding nature peculiar to the Englishman prevents them from engaging in such a violent revolution," the existence of economic crises would place unbearable pressure on the ideologies hindering radical change: "this revolution is inevitable for England," for "the fear of starving to death must surely be greater than the fear of the law." Thus, in sharp contrast to the idealism of the Young Hegelians, Engels arrived at the materialist view that "this revolution will be initiated and carried out for the sake of interests, not for the sake of principles... the revolution will be not a political but a social revolution."
These embryonic ideas of the materialist conception of history were further deepened in Engels’s "Letters from London." In May 1843, this letter was published in the radical Zurich weekly Der Schweizerischer Republikaner. Despite the failure of the previous summer's general strike, Engels still claimed: "The democratic party is making rapid progress in England... Socialism, which is looked down upon and mocked, is advancing calmly and confidently, and is gradually forcing its way into public opinion... A numerous new party has been formed in a few years under the banner of the People’s Charter."
Subsequently, Engels referred again to the moment the English working class emerged as an independent political force at the 1843 Chartist convention—a scene of radical workers' definitive break with the moderate middle class. In an article written some forty years later, Engels mentioned the vital lesson he learned in Manchester in the early 1840s: "Economic facts, which have so far played no role or only a minimal one in historical writing, are, at least in the modern world, a decisive historical force; these economic facts form the basis for the emergence of modern class antagonisms; these class antagonisms, in countries where they have reached full development due to large-scale industry, and therefore especially in England, are in turn the basis of political party formation, of party struggles, and thus of all political history."
Engels's thought developed in this critical direction through a critical reading of Thomas Carlyle’s romantic critique of capitalist industrialization, Past and Present. Engels’s "The Condition of England" was published in the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher (German-French Annals), edited by Marx and Arnold Ruge. Engels begins the piece by praising Carlyle as a "German-style theorist," yet argues that Carlyle failed to fulfill the promise of his theoretical insights because, in his work, these insights are muddled and accompanied by a counter-tendency toward superficial "empiricism." Regarding empiricism, Engels argued that facts must be selected and interpreted, and that "a conclusion is worth nothing without the process of development that led to it; we have known this since Hegel." The problem with Carlyle’s study was that, while he powerfully described the essentially soulless state of modern society, he misjudged the cause, believing that the inhumanity of modern society was due to the rise of atheism. Consequently, he mistook a part of the problem of modern life for the solution itself. Following Ben Jonson, Carlyle claimed that "man has lost his soul." To this, Engels countered: "In religion man has lost his own constituent being, he has alienated his humanity; now that religion has been shaken by historical progress, he notices his emptiness and instability. But there is no other salvation for him... than through the total overcoming of all religious ideas and a resolute, sincere return not to 'God,' but to himself, can he regain his humanity, his own being."
The humanist moral philosophy contained in this passage stems from Engels's vital observation: the moral and intellectual decay of England’s "upper classes" meant that "only the workers, the pariahs of England, the poor" became the agents through whom "England’s salvation depends." This humanist-tinted perspective distinguished Engels from the German "True Socialists" [9], for whom socialism was a moral, rational deduction of humanism. This does not mean that Engels had already formed a mature political outlook at this point. His work was not simply limited to the Feuerbachian notion that socialism conforms to the common interests of humanity. Stephen Rigby’s commentary on The Condition of the Working Class in England also applies to the early article "The Condition of England": its characteristic lies not in utopian themes, but in Engels’s focus on the redemptive potential of the English labor movement, which "foreshadowed the views developed in The German Ideology and the Communist Manifesto."
III. Humanism and Socialism
Engels's detailed observations of English social conditions in "Letters from London" were the starting point for his theoretical maturation. Hal Draper argued that, aside from abstract humanist elements, the most important difference between these letters and the Communist Manifesto was that, at the time of the former, Engels had not yet generalized his analysis of the proletariat’s revolutionary role from England to the European continent. Although he remained convinced that the German middle class could play a progressive role if they believed in the rationality of socialism, his analysis of English social relations already differed from his contemporaries. This was rooted in his more concrete and practical understanding of the link between socialism and the interests formed through existing social relations. In sharp contrast to the German Young Hegelians, Engels praised the English socialists for being "more principled and more practical" than the French. Engels remarked that English socialism also had a weakness in its practical aspect: a lack of internal knowledge regarding left-wing movements on the European continent. To remedy this, in 1843, Engels set himself the research task of writing "Progress of Social Reform on the Continent," to explain how the English, French, and German Left—who actually encountered socialism "due to the rapid increase of poverty, demoralization and pauperism in their own countries"—arrived at the same conclusions through "politics" (for the French) and "philosophy" (for the Germans).
Engels believed that European socialism’s philosophical, political, and practical convictions were converging. This was confirmed in 1844 when Silesian weavers rose up against their German factory owners [10]. Engels's response to this uprising was keen and profound. In a June 1844 article for the Chartist newspaper The Northern Star, he wrote: "The factory system and all its consequences oppressed the Silesian weavers just as it formerly and currently oppresses the English factory workers and hand-loom weavers." This profound insight prompted Engels to write The Condition of the Working Class in England over the following months. He believed the German Left needed to learn lessons from England’s social development because the English workers' struggle against inhuman treatment had universal significance.
According to Engels, "The history of the working-class in England begins... with the invention of the steam-engine and of machinery for working cotton." Interestingly, although he noted that these "notoriously" well-known inventions drove the Industrial Revolution—which in turn drove the transformation of civil society—the concept of the "Industrial Revolution" was not yet in use in English or German at that time; it is likely that Engels borrowed it from contemporary French literature. Undoubtedly, Engels was correct in his view that the "world-historic significance [of the Industrial Revolution] is only now beginning to be recognized."
Engels foresaw the analysis of the peasantry that Marx would later develop in The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, which subsequently became widely known. Despite the numerous ills brought by industrialization, it succeeded in shattering the previous patterns of life in agrarian society—a society that produced "strong and sturdy" individuals but who were "intellectually... dead." This revolution developed rapidly and dramatically. In passages that prefigured the famous assertion in the Communist Manifesto regarding capitalism—that "all that is solid melts into air"—Engels described the Industrial Revolution as a great whirlpool drawing everything into its vortex.
Engels argued that all "parliamentary debates of any importance" concerned the future of the emerging working class. Nonetheless, there was at that time no rigorous study of the British working class, and thus no understanding of the "intense wrath of the whole working class against the wealthy, by whom they are systematically exploited and then ruthlessly left to their fate. This wrath before long (the time may be almost calculated) must break out into a revolution, in comparison with which the first French Revolution and 1794 will be child's play." Somewhat curiously, the actual chapter Engels wrote on the industrial proletariat is only three pages long—though it does paint an intriguing picture wherein the intellectual level of modern workers is directly proportional to their relationship with manufacturing, with factory workers becoming the core of the movement by virtue of their role in production. In fact, the new social formation that Engels advocated as being suited to this class was a concrete alternative to that atomized society [11] that cared nothing for the condition of the poor.
Thus, Engels began to outline a humanism [12] that united workers in an unprecedented way. Although this phenomenon originated from the transformations brought by industrialization, its social potential was realized through the concrete struggles of the workers—particularly participation in trade union activities: striking for the common interest "deepened the workers' hatred and wrath toward the property-holding class." The struggle of the unions was directed against the primary driver of capitalism—namely, the forced competition between workers. Engels was the first socialist to emphasize the importance of trade unions in the socialist struggle, an insight derived from his historical humanism.
Engels developed his historical conception of human nature and morality when discussing gender relations. Commenting on the movement of women into the factories, Engels noted that many (especially unemployed) male workers felt "wrath" at this role reversal. He condemned it: "This most shameful degradation of the two sexes and of the human dignity inherent in both is the ultimate consequence of our much-vaunted civilization, the final result of all the efforts of hundreds of generations to improve their own condition and that of their posterity!" However, Engels did not end his analysis at this descriptive and moralistic level, but further elucidated his own claim:
We must admit that so total a reversal of the relation of the sexes can happen only because the relation has been an unnatural one from the very beginning. If the reign of the wife over the husband, as inevitably brought about by the factory system, is inhuman, then the pristine rule of the husband over the wife must have been inhuman too.
Engels argued that family roles could be reversed, and even that the family itself would disappear, because it too is a historical product. Specifically, the modern family exists because of "private interest lurking under the cloak of a community of goods."
If the dissolution of the family under the pressure of market forces is one aspect of the increasing atomization of society, then Engels’s viewpoint—derived from his Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy—is that "competition is the most complete expression of the war of all against all prevalent in modern civil society." Under these conditions, the proletarian is dehumanized, while the bourgeoisie grows rich because "the bourgeoisie has a monopoly of all means of existence." This is a system of "murder." This is not a trivial discussion of individual capitalists killing individual workers, but a more profound revelation of a society operating in a way that causes workers to meet "an inevitable premature and unnatural death." Facing the middle-class moralistic temperance and teetotalism movements that rose in the 1820s and 1830s, Engels insisted that in the savage environment of poverty and insecurity in Britain at that time, it was better not to view alcoholism (and sexual indulgence) merely as vices, but rather as necessary consequences of that environment. In fact, it was precisely this social environment that produced a sense of demoralization [13] among the working class.
However, Engels did not paint a one-sided picture of working-class demoralization. He believed that this condition provoked among the workers what Carlyle called an increasingly widespread "feeling" (or mood), namely that they "respect less and less the commands of their secular superiors, and believe less and less the preachings of their ecclesiastical superiors." While Carlyle noticed this mood, he did not identify with this "fatal" sentiment. In contrast, Engels insisted that this mood was the foundation of hope against the inhumanity of the capitalist system:
Carlyle is perfectly right, but he is wrong in condemning the fierce hatred of the workers for the upper classes. This hatred, this wrath, is rather the proof that the workers feel the inhumanity of their situation, that they refuse to be degraded to the level of brutes, and that they will one day free themselves from the yoke of the bourgeoisie.
Engels emphasized once again that workers are not only victims of the capitalist system but also its potential subverters, capable of overthrowing the system and realizing their own emancipation. He believed that, in sharp contrast to the mean and selfish behavior of individual members of the bourgeoisie, workers were often more "benevolent" [14] in their interpersonal relations, an observation he supported with the words of a Manchester clergyman.
If a spirit of resistance and interpersonal human concern were ways for the working class to resist demoralization (while behaviors like alcoholism were another), the bourgeoisie often fell completely into their own moral bankruptcy, which manifested as an incurable selfishness. Engels once cited a conversation he had with a Manchester capitalist. After Engels spoke of the wretched housing and social conditions endured by the Manchester working class, the capitalist replied as he left in a simple and direct manner: "And yet there is a great deal of money made here. Good morning, sir!"
Engels believed this brief reply encapsulated the attitude of the bourgeoisie toward the inhuman consequences of poverty—the bourgeoisie used wealth and state power to maintain and reproduce these "interests" of degradation and moral decay. These views of Engels prefigured the classic Marxist perspective of treating the modern state as a capitalist structure, while also opening space for his complex exposition of the process of the working-class struggle against capitalism. Engels examined real-world labor movements, including their flaws. He maintained that, besides strikes, acts like crime and machine-breaking [15] also represented historical moments of workers' resistance against slavery. While this narrative of the real movement did not attempt to glorify crime, it similarly (and more importantly) did not engage in a pseudo-radical moral critique of criminal acts, which is often easily used to justify the strengthening of state power.
Furthermore, Engels's discourse on the power used by the bourgeoisie to maintain its rule included not only treating the state as a capitalist system but also seeing the law as "the whip which the bourgeois has prepared for him [the worker]." For example, he viewed the New Poor Law of 1834 [16] as the "most open declaration of war of the bourgeoisie upon the proletariat." The theoretical foundation of the New Poor Law was Malthus's theory of population; passed in the 1830s, this law—much like today's legislation regarding unemployment—assigned responsibility for capitalist crises to the impoverished population.
Commenting on Malthus's population theory, Engels argued that Malthus's views were "in many respects appropriate to existing relations." But whereas Malthus attributed the existence of a surplus population and the resulting ineradicable poverty to natural phenomena, Engels pointed out that the surplus population, or "industrial reserve army," was not a product of nature but a product of the capitalist trade cycle. Like any other commodity, the population would be relatively scarce during periods of economic prosperity and surplus during economic downturns. This situation is a characteristic of labor-power as a commodity, not a characteristic of labor itself. Engels noted that Malthus’s theory "has now become the pet theory of all genuine English bourgeois." The bourgeoisie’s acceptance of this theory reflected their desire to justify their own selfish behavior and, more importantly, their inability to develop a scientific understanding of social reality. Bound by the standpoint of civil society, the bourgeoisie treated capitalist social relations as a state of nature, and thus believed the condition of the poor under capitalist conditions was natural. From this perspective, the emergence of workhouses was a rational response to the problem of poverty.
If the New Poor Law was a fierce institutionalized form of class struggle, then from the perspective of civil society, it manifested ideologically as a common-sense response to a natural problem. Engels pointed out that the united struggle of workers was the core content of a concrete socialist alternative. The Chartists [17] were crucially important for achieving this unity because they were the true vanguard of the labor movement. Engels recognized that in a specific context, accompanied by the rising class consciousness of the working class, the six points of the People's Charter—universal manhood suffrage, annual parliaments, payment of members, vote by secret ballot, equal electoral districts, and the abolition of property qualifications for candidates—were "sufficient to overthrow the whole English Constitution, Queen and Lords included." If this significant point was the core of Engels's scientific methodology—namely, perceiving essence through phenomena—then as mentioned above, he also applied this method to trace the developmental trajectory of the Chartists. The Chartists began as an alliance between the working class and middle-class radicals, but later split as the struggle intensified, thereby making Chartism a "purely working-class cause, free from all bourgeois elements"—and it was precisely this that terrified the bourgeoisie.
If, according to Engels's argument, the primary strength of Chartism lay in its proletarian nature—that Chartist workers were "the real representatives of the proletariat"—then the movement's primary weakness was its relative theoretical backwardness. In contrast, the Socialists "see further," but because they originated in the middle class, they had not yet been able to "fuse with the working class." Engels welcomed the beginning of this process and asserted that only through the "fusion of Socialism with Chartism" would "the working class... be the true master of England." He also suggested that this process was not as inevitable as his earlier thought might have explained. He argued that history is open-ended: "If men are placed in a situation which fits only brutes, they have no choice but either to revolt or to actually succumb to brutishness." This sentence calls to mind his later assertion in Anti-Dühring: "If the whole of modern society is not to perish, a revolution in the mode of production and distribution must take place, a revolution which will put an end to all class distinctions." Rosa Luxemburg also referred to this viewpoint when calling on humanity to choose "socialism or barbarism." Similarly, this early view of Engels can be interpreted as an important call to arms.
IV. Retrospect and Development
Despite this, a certain sense of fatalism still clung to Engels's belief in the ultimate victory of socialism. Upon rereading The Condition of the Working Class in England twenty years later, Marx lamented with a touch of nostalgia:
How freshly and passionately and with what bold anticipations the book is written, and without scholarly or scientific doubts! Even the illusion that one would see the historical result with one's own eyes on the morrow or the day after gives the whole work a warmth and optimistic color, in comparison to which the later ‘gray in gray’ [18] is extremely unpleasant.
Engels also commented in the preface to the 1892 edition of The Condition of the Working Class in England that the book bore "the stamp of the author’s youth, reflecting both the merits and defects of his youth."
In The Condition of the Working Class in England, the most incoherent and glaringly "flawed" feature reflecting the fact that Engels had not yet become a Marxist is found in its concluding recommendations. Specifically, Engels pinned his hopes on the rise of communism within the Chartist leadership to mitigate the possibility of a bloody revolution. Engels believed it was self-evident that a revolution was imminent; the only question was whether British capitalism could survive one or more crisis-prone economic cycles before a revolution triumphed. Since communism is an ideology for "not only the workers, but all of humanity" and is "elevated above the antagonism between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat," [19] Engels argued that if communists were sufficiently strong, they could act as a restraining force on the "vengeful" tendencies of the proletariat. "A revolution is inevitable; it is now too late to find a peaceful solution to the problem; but the revolution can be conducted more mildly than predicted above." In fact, communism was the only hope for the bourgeoisie; otherwise, the proletarian terror predicted by The Times would become the future of the British bourgeoisie—a scenario as terrifying as Robespierre’s "war to the palaces, peace to the cottages." [20] Fortunately, as Engels wrote to Marx in October 1844, German workers would follow the example of their English counterparts: these proletarians would realize that "this method of opposing the old social system as individuals and with violence is useless, and they will oppose it through communism as people with their own collective capacity."
In The Condition of the Working Class in England, Engels also noted the problems with the predictions he made in his youth: "I have intentionally not deleted many of the prophecies in this book, especially the prophecy of an imminent social revolution in England, which the fervor of youth boldly led me to make." The incoherent arguments presented at the end of The Condition of the Working Class in England reflect the contradictions in Engels's thought at that time. Although his analysis of the English experience powerfully pointed to the necessity of revolution, he too quickly translated this analysis into an optimistic prediction of the revolution’s inevitable development. At that stage, his "communism" remained a superficial ideology. He advocated for peaceful reform through persuasion and hoped this approach could mediate the excesses of revolution. However, as the passage quoted above from Anti-Dühring demonstrates, he and Marx not only overcame these weaknesses in the months that followed but also achieved a complete break with socialist moralism [21] as well as mechanical materialism and political fatalism in 1845.
(About the Authors: Paul Blackledge: School of Social Sciences, London South Bank University, UK; Yan Peiyu: Institute of Philosophy, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences)
(This article is translated from Chapter 2 of Paul Blackledge’s book, Friedrich Engels and Modern Social and Political Theory, Albany: State University of New York Press, 2019, pp. 39-49. The translation has been abridged, and the subheadings in the text were added by the translator.)
Web Editor: Tongxin Source: Foreign Theoretical Trends [22], Issue 2, 2024.