Engels’s Condition of the Working Class in England in the Context of Its Time (1845–1892)

Abstract

This paper, on the one hand, explores the sources which Friedrich Engels used for his analysis in the Condition of the Working Class in England, focusing on the role of technology. On the other hand, it evaluates Engels’s claims from today’s position, discussing their validity as well as limits. In contrast to most of his contemporaries, Engels located the fundamental changes of the economy since the eighteenth century in the Industrial Revolution. In 1845, investigating the results of new machinery, Engels emphasized the negative consequences such as unemployment and falling wages, often accompanied by an increasing number of children and women in the factories. Engels claimed that the work of women resulted in breaking up family ties, apart from many other harmful concomitant effects of female labor. In the 1880s, he still expected a social revolution because he continued to identify an ever-deepening gulf between the two classes of laborers and capitalists in spite of essential transformations in economy and society since the 1840s.