67
See also: Karl Marx 28–31 ■ Peter Townsend 74 ■ Richard Sennett 84–87 ■ Max Weber 220–23 ■
Harry Braverman 226–31 ■ Robert Blauner 232–33
SOCIAL INEQUALITIES
undergoing a massive but silent
transformation that had altered
the whole of English civil society.
Industrialization had driven
down prices, so handcrafted work,
which was more expensive, was
less in demand; workers moved
to the cities only to endure harsh
conditions and financial insecurity.
The industrialized, capitalist
economy lurched from boom to
bust, and workers’ jobs could
quickly disappear. Meanwhile, the
bourgeoisie grew richer by treating
the workers as disposable labor.
The legacy of industrialism
In Engels’ first book, The Condition
of the Working Class in England
in 1844, he described the appalling
way of life of the workers, or
proletariat, in Manchester, London,
Dublin, and Edinburgh, and found
similar situations in all these cities.
He reported filthy streets with pools
of stagnant urine and excrement,
filled with the stench of animal
putrefaction from the tanneries.
Widespread cholera outbreaks
occurred, along with constant
epidemics of consumption and
typhus. Workers were packed
into one-room huts or the cellars
of damp houses that had been
built along old ditches to save
the house-owner money. They
lived in conditions that defied
all consideration of cleanliness
and health, Engels said—and this
in Manchester, “the second city of
England, the first manufacturing
city of the world.”
The proletariat were worked to
the point of exhaustion, wearing
cheap clothing that gave no
protection against accidents
or the climate. They could buy
only the food spurned by the
bourgeoisie, such as decaying
meat, wilted vegetables, “sugar”
that was the refuse of soap-boiling
firms, and cocoa mixed with earth.
When work disappeared and
wages failed, even this meager
diet proved impossible, and many
workers and their families began
to starve; this caused illness and a
continued inability to work, should
work become available. Doctors
were unaffordable, and very oftenentire families starved to death.
The worker, Engels explained,
could only obtain what he needed—
healthy living conditions, secure
employment, and a decent wage—
from the bourgeoisie, “which
can decree his life or death.” He
was insistent that this hugely
exploitative, capital-owning class
should therefore take immediate
steps to change workers’ conditions
and stop its careless murder of an
entire social class. ■Working-class families in England
during the 1840s endured social
deprivation, crippling financial
instability, and terrible sickness due
to the effects of industrial capitalism.Friedrich Engels Political theorist and philosopher
Friedrich Engels was born in
Germany in 1820. His father
was a German industrialist who
struggled with Engels’ reluctance
to attend school or work in the
family business. As a teenager,
he wrote articles under the
pseudonym Friedrich Oswald,
which gained him access to a
group of left-wing intellectuals.
After working for a short time
in a family factory in Manchester,
England, he became interested in
communism. In 1844 he traveled
to Paris, where he met Karl Marx
and became his colleague andfinancial sponsor. They
jointly wrote The Communist
Manifesto, and worked together
until Marx’s death in 1883, after
which Engels completed the
second and third volumes of Das
Kapital, along with many books
and articles of his own.Key works1845 The Condition of the
Working Class in England
in 1844
1848 The Communist Manifesto
1884 The Origin of the Family,
Private Property and the State