The Condition of the Working Class in England Book

I've read bits of this before, but never the whole thing. In part, you probably wouldn't read this now, because Marx covers a lot of the same ground in the first volume of Capital - and the stuff here is perhaps what many people would use to say, 'at least Capitalism isn't as bad as it was back then'. And Engels' description of the horrors of the work houses, for instance - how people would literally starve themselves to death rather than go to them - make it difficult to find a comparable place of horror in developed capitalist countries today. But you just need to read a book like No Logo to see that we have exported these horrors of early capitalism to the developing world where these continue on as before. Or Castells' books that make it clear that the role that the Irish played in suppressing the wages of English workers is now being done all over the world today by endless surplus populations, with the added disadvantage that, as Bauman says, the world is now also full - there no longer being an Australia or United States to send our surplus populations off to.

A significant proportion of this book is a catalogue of horrors - but the book sets about ending on an up note. Engels was only 24 when I wrote this book, and he believes that the working class in England, so utterly dejected, simply will not put up with the treatment that is being meted out to them. Rather, they will eventually rise up and end class society forever.

This sort of optimism is evident throughout. In the main he sees two great forces coming into play that will push capitalism aside. The first is the rising levels of education that the working class - mostly due to their own efforts - are achieving. The idea being that an educated working class will have the capacity to be able to understand that the system is stacked against them and to be able to do something about it. He was young - he didn't realise just how much education can be used as a means to indoctrinate as well as liberate. It has proven much better at indoctrination than it has in providing the kinds of critical consciousness skills Engels was hoping it might.

The other was the Chartist movement - he imagined that once working people had the right to vote that would amount to them being able to vote in their interests and therefore vote away both master and king. He was quite convinced that working class life itself made an interest in those who flaunted their wealth - royalty, the clergy, the capitalist class - impossible and that democratic power would be the end of all inequality. If only it could all have been so simple.

You couldn't really write a book like this today. Well, you could, but you couldn't do it focused on only one country. You see, Engels looked at England because it was the most advanced capitalist country and he made it clear that the future of the rest of Europe was what could be witnessed in England at that time. Today, you need to consider the global interconnections of the world. The division of labour is extreme today in ways Engels could never have imagined. But the cruelty and inhumanity of that division of labour he would have no problem in recognising at all.

I don't know if I could 'recommend' this book - it is beautifully written, and often fascinating, but the subject matter is agonising to read - whenever women are mentioned in particular things become unspeakably horrible. This gets criticised in The Making of the English Working Class - mostly for focusing too much on Manchester, the most developed city in terms of 'factory' labour - but this really is quite a book, especially given how young Engels was when he researched and wrote it.