What drove this process of alienation, what stood at the root of political economy, and what the Owenites, Fourierists and Chartists had all overlooked was the role of private property. This was the essential insight of Engels's ‘Outlines’ and owed not a little to his recent reading of the French socialist-cum-anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon's What is Property? (1840) – which he had answered with the celebrated response, ‘It is theft.’ It was private property in the form of unearned interest and rents from land which, Proudhon suggested, enabled one man to exploit another and underpinned the iniquities of modern capitalism. Taking aim at the parasitical, unproductive oisifs of the July monarchy, Proudhon's stress on the correlation of labour with ownership – alongside his conviction that political equality necessitated the abolition of private property – struck an immediate chord with the young Engels (despite the unacceptably anarchist trajectory of Proudhon's thinking). ‘The right of private property, the consequences of this institution, competition, immorality, misery, are here developed with a power of intellect, and real scientific research, which I never since found united in a single volume,’ he wrote of Proudhon's book.71
However, Engels took his conception of private property further than Proudhon had allowed himself and had it encompass all the myriad apparatus of political economy, ‘e.g., wages, trade, value, price, money, etc., which he had seen at work in Manchester.72 He concluded that private property was the essential prerequisite of political economy and it too had to be eliminated: ‘If we abandon private property, then all these unnatural divisions disappear.’ Discord and individualism would melt away and the true nature of profit and value clarified. ‘Labour becomes its own reward, and the true significance of the wages of labour, hitherto alienated, comes to light – namely, the significance of labour for the determination of the production costs of a thing.’ The end of private property and personal avarice would conclude, in Hegelian fashion, with the end of history and arrival of communism: ‘the great transformation to which the century is moving – the reconciliation of mankind with nature and with itself’.73 All this in a short, precocious essay by a scarcely known 23-year-old apprentice manufacturer – no wonder, in his Left Bank apartment, Marx was taking notes on this ‘brilliant essay’.74 But ‘Outlines’ was just a foretaste of Engels's true monument to Manchester.
I have read your book again and I have realized that I am not getting any younger. What power, what incisiveness and what passion drove you to work in those days. That was a time when you were never worried by academic scholarly reservations! Those were the days when you made the reader feel that your theories would become hard facts if not tomorrow then at any rate on the day after. Yet that very illusion gave the whole work a human warmth and a touch of humour that makes our later writings – where ‘black and white’ have become ‘grey and grey’ – seem positively distasteful.75
So wrote Marx to Engels almost twenty years after the publication of The Condition of the Working Class in England. And he was right. Today, its uncompromising passion means it remains one of the most celebrated polemics in Western literature as well as a leading text – alongside Disraeli's Sybil, or the Two Nations, Carlyle's Past and Present, Dickens's Hard Times and Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary Barton – within the ‘condition of England’ canon. But what separated the work from those novels (with their milky Christian hopes for an eirenic absolution of class division) was its relentless condemnatory tone. It challenged the reader, as few other contemporary accounts dared, with the full, unvarnished horrors of laissez-faire industrialization and urbanization. ‘I shall be presenting the English with a fine bill of indictment,’ Engels announced mid-composition, ‘I accuse the English bourgeois before the entire world of murder, robbery and other crimes on a massive scale.’76 The work thus races across a range of subjects, mixing history and statistics, from ‘The Great Towns’ to ‘Irish Immigration’ to ‘The Mining Proletariat’, each of which encompasses a litany of crimes to be laid at the feet of the bourgeois. Alongside his own first-hand narratives and those culled from Leach, Engels especially enjoyed deploying the reams of official documentation coming out of Whitehall. And when there were no Blue Books available, ‘I always preferred to present proof from Liberal sources in order to defeat the liberal bourgeoisie by casting their own words in their teeth.’77 It was a polemical trick which Marx would perfect in Das Kapital. Thus the Condition is jam-packed with factory commission reports, court records, articles from the Manchester Guardian and Liverpool Mercury, and rosy accounts of merry, industrializing England from liberal protagonists such as Peter Gaskell and Andrew Ure.
The Condition's strength lies in both its intellectual trajectory and empirical richness. What leaps off the page is the detailed accounts of the Manchester he had met with Mary Burns: its stink, noise, grime and human horror. ‘Friedrich Engels had a clear bright head, free from any romantic or sentimental haze, that did not see men and things through coloured glasses or a misty atmosphere but always in clear bright air, with clear bright eyes, not remaining on the surface but seeing to the bottom of things, piercing them through and through,’ was how the German social democrat Wilhelm Liebknecht would later describe Engels's approach.78 The Condition was a shining product of this intellectual incisiveness combined with some obvious journalistic licence and his fierce urge to contrast the ‘phantasms’ and ‘theoretical twaddle’ of the Young Hegelians with ‘real, live things’.79 This combination of political philosophy with material reality would set the precedent for much of his polemical work. ‘A knowledge of proletarian conditions is absolutely necessary to provide solid ground for socialist theories,’ he declared.80
Engels's rhetorical blows, ‘though aimed at the panniers, are meant for the donkey, namely the German bourgeoisie’.81 For it was only a matter of time before the social crisis wrought by industrialization made its way on to the continent. ‘While the conditions of existence of Germany's proletariat have not assumed the classical form that they have in England, we nevertheless have, at bottom, the same social order, which sooner or later must necessarily reach the same extremes as it has already attained across the North Sea, unless the intelligence of the nation brings about the adoption of measures that will provide a new basis for the whole social system.’82
Written back at his parents’ house in Barmen in late 1844, the Condition was published in Leipzig in 1845 and primed for a German audience – being translated into English for an American edition only in 1885 and then for the British market in 1892. It was a tour de force of urban-industrial horrorism. In a passage that recalls his earlier account of Barmen's waterways in ‘Letters from Wuppertal’, Engels ascends Ducie Bridge overlooking Manchester's Irk to record a view ‘characteristic for the whole district’. ‘At the bottom flows, or rather stagnates, the Irk, a narrow, coal-black, foul-smelling stream, full of debris and refuse which it deposits on the lower right bank. In dry weather, an extended series of the most revolting brackish green pools of slime remain standing on this bank, out of whose depth bubbles of miasmatic gases constantly rise and give forth a stench that is unbearable even on the bridge forty or fifty feet above the level of the water.’ Nearby, Engels retraces the steps of James Phillips Kay inside some of the insanitary hovels. ‘In one of these courts there stands directly at the entrance, at the end of the covered passage, a privy without a door, so dirty that the inhabitants can pass into and out of the court only by passing through foul pools of stagnant urine and excrement.’ Surrounding it are hundreds more of these ‘cattle-sheds for human beings’, where men are reduced to the state of animals, pigs share sties with children, hundreds cramp into dank cellars, railways slash through neighbourhoods, and privies, rivers and water supplies all seem to merge into one deadly mix.
Such is the Old Town of Manchester, and on re-reading my description, I am forced to admit that instead of being exaggerated, it is far from black enough to convey a true impression of the filth, ruin, and uninhabitableness, the defiance of all consid
erations of cleanliness, ventilation, and health which characterise the construction of this single district, containing at least 20–30,000 inhabitants. And such a district exists in the heart of the second city of England, the first manufacturing city of the world.83
Cover of the first edition of The Condition of the Working Class in England.
There was worse to come. On the south side of the city, just off Oxford Road, was where some of Manchester's 40,000-strong Irish immigrants huddled. Mary Burns's confrères were the most exploited, lowly paid and abused of all the city's residents; the most lumpen of the proletariat.
The cottages are old, dirty, and of the smallest sort, the streets uneven, fallen into ruts and in part without drains or pavement; masses of refuse, offal and sickening filth lie among standing pools in all directions… The race that lives in these ruinous cottages, behind broken windows, mended with oilskin, sprung doors, and rotten door-posts, or in dark, wet cellars, in measureless filth and stench, in this atmosphere penned in as if with a purpose, this race must really have reached the lowest stage of humanity.84
Despite having ‘Tipperary’ Mary Burns as his guide, Engels unquestionably acceded to the mid-Victorian caricature (much of it codified by Thomas Carlyle) of the immature, drunken, filthy Irish. Ignoring both the internal differences within Manchester's highly varied Irish community and their vital contribution to the Chartist movement (under the leadership of Feargus O'Connor and James Bronterre O'Brien), Engels depicted them en masse as a dissolute lumpenproletariat. ‘The Irishman is a carefree, cheerful, potato-eating child of nature,’ Engels explained, who was wholly unable to deal with the ‘mechanical, egoistic, ice-cold hurly-burly of the English factory towns’.85 The result was a swift descent into alcoholic torpor: ‘The southern facile character of the Irishman, his crudity, which places him but little above the savage, his contempt for all humane enjoyments… his filth and poverty, all favour drunkenness.’ His other weakness was livestock: ‘The Irishman loves his pig as the Arab his horse… he eats and sleeps with it, his children play with it, ride upon it, roll in the dirt with it.’86 But the Irish effect on urban life was far from benign since their minimal sustenance requirements inevitably forced down local wage rates. In every part of the economy where these ‘wild Milesians’ competed for jobs, impoverishment was the end result.
It was the base, insensate characteristics of the Irish which allowed them to cope with the terrible demands of industrial employment. With almost vicarious pleasure, Engels systematically listed the maiming and physical disfigurements that accompanied life on the factory floor. ‘The knees are bent inward and backwards, the ankles deformed and thick, and the spinal column often bent forwards or to one side,’ he wrote of the effects of the long hours spent in the cotton mill. In the mining industry, so heinous was the system of transporting coal and iron-stone that children's puberty was unnaturally delayed. And then there was the tyranny of time-management. ‘The slavery in which the bourgeoisie holds the proletariat chained, is nowhere more conspicuous than in the factory system.’ Engels had before him a copy of factory regulations, ‘according to which every operative who comes three minutes too late, forfeits the wages for a quarter of an hour, and every one who comes twenty minutes too late, for a quarter of a day. Every one who remains absent until breakfast forfeits a shilling on Monday, and sixpence every other day of the week, etc.’ But, as James Leach had first revealed, time was a variable phenomenon. ‘… operatives find the factory clock moved forward a quarter of an hour and the doors shut, while the clerk moves about with the fines-book inside, noting the many names of the absentees’. All of which meant that, in the radical idiom of the day, the working classes were ‘worse slaves than the Negroes in America, for they are more sharply watched, and yet it is demanded of them that they shall live like human beings, shall think and feel like men’!87
The result of such mental and physical torture – ‘Women made unfit for childbearing, children deformed, men enfeebled, limbs crushed, whole generations wrecked, afflicted with disease and infirmity, purely to fill the purses of the bourgeoisie’ – combined with filthy housing and debilitating hand-to-mouth existence, was an animalistic retreat into drinking and prostitution.88 This was certainly the case in Sheffield. ‘The younger generation spend the whole of Sunday lying in the street tossing coins or dog-fighting, and go regularly to the gin palace… No wonder, then, that, as all witnesses testify, early, unbridled sexual intercourse, youthful prostitution, beginning with persons of 14–15 years, is extraordinarily frequent in Sheffield. Crimes of a savage and desperate sort are of common occurrence…’ The predicament facing the residents of the industrial city was exactly the sort of social disintegration Carlyle had warned of. ‘The brutal indifference, the unfeeling isolation of each in his private interest becomes the more repellent and offensive… The dissolution of mankind into monads, of which each one has a separate essence, and a separate purpose, the world of atoms, is here carried out to its utmost extreme.’89 And what did the middle classes think of this wretched state of society? ‘I once went into Manchester with such a bourgeois, and spoke to him of the bad, unwholesome method of building, the frightful condition of the working people's quarters, and asserted that I had never seen so ill-built a city. The man listened quietly to the end, and said at the corner where we parted: ‘‘And yet there is a great deal of money made here; good morning, sir.” ’90
On the surface, Engels's Manchester appeared to have no purpose or structure – ‘a planless, knotted chaos of houses’ – but, in reality, there existed a terrible logic behind the city's suffocating form. As Marx would later go beneath the veneer of freedom, equality and property in Das Kapital to depict capitalism's ‘hidden abode of production’, so Engels, in good Hegelian fashion, transcended the appearance of the city to elucidate its true essence. Yes, slum tenements went up haphazardly on the crumbling side of river banks and railways piled through old neighbourhoods, but these developments were part of a broader urban form which perfectly reflected the class divisions of industrial society. Like few before him, Engels appreciated the city's spatial dynamics – its streets, houses, factories and warehouses – as expressions of social and political power. The struggle between bourgeois and proletariat was not limited to the throstle room or Chartist rally, it was there in the street layouts, transport systems and planning process. ‘The town itself is peculiarly built, so that a person may live in it for years, and go in and out daily without coming into contact with a working people's quarter or even with workers… This arises chiefly from the fact, that by unconscious tacit agreement, as well as with outspoken conscious determination, the working people's quarters are sharply separated from the sections of the city reserved for the middle class.’ The social divides wrought by private property were embedded in the very flagstones of the city.
Engels's analysis of class zoning begins along the main thoroughfare of Deansgate, where the merchant princes and cotton lords came to make their deals. Like today, the road was in the 1840s a retail and commercial hub lined with high-end shops and showy warehouses. And, as with so many modern city centres, ‘the whole district is abandoned by dwellers, and is lonely and deserted at night; only watchmen and policemen traverse its narrow lanes with their dark lanterns’. But surrounding it, in the inner suburbs, lay the ‘unmixed working people's quarters’ of Manchester proper – Salford and Hume, Pendleton and Chorlton – ‘stretching like a girdle… around the commercial district’. And beyond that, ‘outside this girdle, lives the middle bourgeois… in regularly laid out streets in the vicinity of the working quarters; the upper bourgeois in remoter villas with gardens in Chorlton and Ardwick, or on the breezy heights of Cheetham Hill, Broughton, and Pendleton, in free, wholesome country air, in fine, comfortable homes’. And the finest part of the arrangement was that
the members of this money aristocracy can take the shortest road through the middle of all the labouring districts to their places of business, without ever s
eeing that they are in the midst of the grimy misery that lurks to the right and the left. For the thoroughfares leading from the Exchange in all directions out of the city are lined, on both sides, with an almost unbroken series of shops, and are so kept in the hands of the middle and lower bourgeoisie, which, out of self-interest, cares for a decent and cleanly external appearance and can care for it… they suffice to conceal from the eyes of the wealthy men and women of strong stomachs and weak nerves the misery and grime which form the complement of their wealth.91
Engels, who in his Barmen corporate village had shared his neighbourhood with the local dyers, weavers and operatives, declared himself properly shocked: ‘I have never seen so systematic a shutting out of the working class from the thoroughfares, so tender a concealment of everything which might affront the eye and the nerves of the bourgeois, as in Manchester.’ And he was convinced this manipulation of urban form was not some accidental piece of planning: ‘I cannot help feeling that the liberal manufacturers, the bigwigs of Manchester, are not so innocent after all, in the matter of this sensitive method of construction.’ 92
Of course, this notion of two nations in one city was a familiar one and Léon Faucher had earlier drawn attention to Manchester's geography of class division. But no one prior to Engels had managed to describe it with such acute percipience. He established a mode of reading the city through an entirely different lens: an appreciation that class power was the ultimate determinate of urban form. It was a subject he returned to some thirty years later in an analysis of Second Empire Paris which, thanks to the urban improvement of Baron Eugéne Haussmann, had been transformed from a cobbled, decaying medieval city into a metropolis worthy of Emperor Napoleon III. Markets were erected, sewers laid, trees planted, churches and museums redecorated and, most monumentally of all, a series of boulevards driven through the traditional, working-class arrondisse-ments. In the process some 27,000 houses were demolished and tens of thousands of workers either forced or priced out of the city centre. In whatever way the scheme was dressed up – in terms of public health or transport efficiency – it was a far more obvious example of class-based urban planning in which the fabric of the city constituted a reification of bourgeois values. Engels termed it simply ‘Haussmann’
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