Engels, Marx, Malthus, and the Machine

Abstract

HISTORIANS HAVE BEGUN OF LATE TO NOTE the influence of Friedrich Engels in his early writings on Karl Marx and on Marxism in general. Gareth Stedman Jones and Terrell Carver have traced the origin of many of Marx's ideas to the works of his colleague.' They have shown that Engels provided part of the theoretical foundation on which Marx built his view of the capitalist exploitation of labor. What has not been noted, until now, is that Engels developed in his first work, The Condition of the Working Class in England, theories of technological determinism and unemployment from which Marx derived his concepts of the industrial reserve army and the inability of a capitalist economy ever to improve the conditions of workers. Engels's book, furthermore, provided the original empirical foundation for the Marxist belief in the inevitability of revolution. What has also not been noted, until now, is that Engels espoused a theory of population growth derived from the much:denounced population theory of Thomas Malthus. Engels published Condition of the Working Class in England in 1845, when he was only twenty-four. Born the son of a German textile manufacturer, Engels witnessed as a youth the changes wrought by early industrialization. In 1842 he was sent to Manchester to work in a British textile firm in which his father was a partner. He arrived at almost the worst period of what was certainly the most catastrophic economic slump of the nineteenth century.2 As one contemporary noted in 1843, has the distress in the manufacturing towns been so severe, so penetrating, or so prolonged, as during the last two years. Never has