Engels, Friedrich (1820–95)

FRIEDRICH ENGELS WAS BORN into a wealthy family of a textile manufacturer in Barmen, Germany. He left grammar school early to attend commercial training as an apprentice in Bremen. To gain foreign experience in commerce he was sent to Manchester, England. There he made the acquaintance of Robert Owen, [Page 310]a leading figure of the utopian socialist movement of the first half of the 19th century. During a stay in Paris, France, in 1844, Engels met Karl Marx, a meeting that changed his life (and history) forever, as he became the close associate, collaborator, and financial sponsor of Marx.

In 1845 Engels published his famous report about the social condition of the working class in England, whereby he analyzed the empirical findings of his personal experience in Manchester from 1842 to 1844. England, at that point, had experienced the Industrial Revolution for nearly a century, whereas the eventually heavily industrialized Ruhr area, where Engels was born, was still at the very beginning of industrialization. The account of Engels's England drew much of its insights from the comparison of the ongoing industrialization in Britain and the takeoff of industrialization in Germany.

Engels's focus was the interaction between the emerging industrial techniques and the social transformations linked to the new necessities of production. He outlined that even the preindustrial mechanization in the late 17th and 18th centuries not only had formed an industrial proletariat within the cities, but also led to a proletarization of the agricultural workforce. Engels was most concerned with the industrial proletariat, which in his opinion was an exploited workforce that was forced to unite in organizations like trade unions and political parties. He surmised that the history of those movements had by then been a history of many defeats and a very small number of victories.

In England he had witnessed many disputes in the workplace, sometimes even strikes, which in his opinion were the future for any society in the process of industrialization. He showed that the bourgeois democracy, still established in Britain and France, tried to limit the political influence of the working class by fiscal and other restrictions. Within the working class, Engels identified the most skilled workers as the leading figures in the emerging movement.

For the German and European (non-British) public, probably the most important lesson from Engels's analytic description of the social status of the working class in England was that the rural pauperism was transformed into the “Social Question” during the process of industrialization.

Pauperism was caused by an explosion in the rise of population whereby the traditional economy did not provide enough working possibilities for this increased population. What Engels witnessed during his stay in Manchester was a new phenomenon: there was a large increase in jobs within the emerging industries, but despite the work possibilities, most workers did not earn enough money to live a decent life from their work. That led Engels and Marx in 1848 to write the Manifesto of the Communist Party. In that manifesto, they identified the exploiting modus of the capitalist society, as robbing the worker of a large part of his earnings (“Mehrwert”) for the benefit of the owner of the means of production.

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