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ENGELS: THE CONDITION OF THE WORKING CLASS IN ENGLAND IN 1844 AND THE HOUSING QUESTION (1872) REVISITED; THEIR RELEVANCE FOR URBAN ANTHROPOLOGY

Bernard Magubane

THE GHETTO

Is it well that while we range with Science, glorying in the time, City children soak and blacken soul and sense in city slime? There among the gloomy alleys Progress halts on palsied feet, Crime and hunger cast our maidens by the thousand on the street;

There the master scrimps his haggard seamstress of her daily bread; There a single sordid attic holds the living and the dead; There the smouldering fire of fever creeps across the rotted floor, And the crowded couch on incest, in the warrens of the poor.

Tennyson

The fundamental causes of this apparent paradox are in- deed very difficult to decide. Basically, the poverty and suffering which reached a critical level after 1815 were the consequence of the establishment of a capitalist order in farming: that long transformation which was already decisively established by the mid-eighteenth century. We have had enough experience, since, of the economics of capitalism to know that it is no paradox, within its terms and its order, to have rising production coexistent with wide-spread unemployment and substantial pauperisation. For in subjecting an economy to the disciplines of wage- labour and the market, it exposes men to new kinds of hazard, as its crises of credit and of prices work through.

Raymond Williams

The Conditions Of The Working Class In England written in 1844" and The Housing Question (HQ) written in 1872-73 as a series of articles, are generally argued to be "clas- sics." This article re-examines the two works

Bernard Magubane is Professor of Anthropology at the Uni- versity of Connecticut, Storrs, Ct.

*All quotes from Engels' book, hereafter CWC, are taken from Marx and Engels', On Great Britain (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1962).

0304-4092/85/$03.30 9 1985 Elseviers Sience Publishers B.V.

not only to demonstrate their historical im- portance for urban anthropology, but also to re-establish their historic importance for cur- rent urban studies and the understanding of the poor and working class in capitalist society in the modem world.

Frederick Engels was the first and for a long time the only person to provide a dialec- tical and historical materialist analysis of the evolution of the bourgeois city and its endem- ic crisis. Engels' methodology and theory re- mains a shining example of the superiority of the dialectical materialist analysis. In the mid 1840s, he already understood the role eco- nomic factors play in the development of society. He examined the capitalist mode of production, showing how it spawned the industrial urban forces with its contradictions. He showed how the bourgeois affluence was the dialectical opposite of the poverty of the masses of the people who languished in the urban slums.

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A SOCIALIST CLASSIC

Marx and Lenin held both the CWC and the HQ in the highest esteem. In these books Engels not only surveyed the origin and history of the Industrial Revolution, but even more he asked the crucial question in scien- tific discourse: "How did this state of affairs arise?" and "How will it end?" By studying the character of English society prior to the Industrial Revolution, Engels was able to show how the situation that he was describing and analyzing was the inevitable outcome of a mode of production whose dynamic de- prived the immediate producers of their means of livelihood and reduced them to a situation where their only option was either death through starvation or the sale of their labor to the capitalist. The monopolization of all means of subsistence by the capitalist class was the source of the injustice and distress of the working class in the atrocious slums in English cities during the Industrial Revolution.

In 1883, in an introduction to a new edi- tion of the Communist Manifesto of 1848, Engels wrote that even before 1845 he had been approaching the materialist conception of history. "My book on The Conditions Of The Working Class In England, shows how far I had travelled along the road by myself." In 1867 Marx declared that "the fullness of Engels's insight into the nature of the capital- ist method of production has been shown by the factory reports, the reports on mines, etc., that have appeared since the publication of his book" [ 1 ]. Lenin expressed the view that: "The book (The Conditions Of The Working Class In England) was a terrible indictment of capitalism and the middle classes ... It made a profound impression upon the minds of all who read it. Everywhere Engels's study came to be regarded as the best available contemporary account of the condition of the proletariat. And indeed neither before nor after 1845 had the depressed conditions of the workers been so sharply and accurately delineated" [2].

Frantz Mehring said that "The most ad- mirable and at the same time the most note- worthy historical feature of the book is the thoroughness with which the twenty-four year old author [Engels] understood the spirit of the capitalist mode of production and succeeded in explaining it from not only the rise, but also the decline of the bour- geoisie, not only the misery of the proletariat but also its salvation. The aim of the book was to show how large-scale industry created the modem working class, as a dehumanized, physically shattered race, degraded intellec- tually and morally to the point of bestial- ity ..." [3].

Are these fullsome praises of Engels' works deserved? What can urban anthropologists learn from it? For Hobsbawm the CWC deserves a number of accolades first as a sociological investigation. Firstly, it was, as Engels himself justly claimed, the first book in Britain or any other country which dealt with the working class as a whole and not merely with particular sections and industries. Secondly, and more important, it was not merely a survey of working-class conditions, but a general analysis of the evolution of industrial capitalism, of the social impact of industrialization and its political and social consequences - including the rights of the labor movement. "In fact it was the first large-scale attempt to apply the Marxist method to the concrete study of society" [4].

With the cities everywhere facing crises, the study of Engels' works is more than a fasci- nating diversion. The possibilities and limita- tions of urban anthropology and sociology are revealed in Engels' work. Yet, with a few notable exceptions, urbanologists have re- mained indifferent to the questions Engels raised. What Engels achieved almost a hun- dred and fifty years ago was to suggest a way to understand the urban crises and slum for- mation in capitalist society based upon a close study of empirical material informed by the newly emerging materialist perspective.

In that sense the CWC provides the guidelines for a future Marxist interpretation of the process of urbanization.

"COUNTRY" AND "CITY" IN HISTORY

"Country" and "City," Raymond Williams [5] tells us, are powerful words, and anthro- pologists and sociologists often contrast them in terms of their meaning and implication for human existence. Among those social scien- tists who have attempted to define urban society and contrasted it with rural commun- ity are T~Sennies, Weber, Durkheim, Cooley, Redfield, etc. The "Country" and "City" are often seen as ideal types or poles and societies are ranged along the two poles according to their complexity and development. TiSennies distinguished Gemeinschaft from Gesellschaft type societies, Weber called his two poles Wesenwille and Kfirwille, Durkheim distin- guished mechanical from organic solidarity; Cooley distinguished between societies with primary and those with secondary relations and Redfield between folk and urban society. Currently, for some, North America and Europe represent "the City" and Africa, Asia and Latin America "the Country." These formal distinctions are however ahistorical ab- stractions and do not tell us how change itself came about from one pole of existence to the other. In point of fact, these dichotomies tend to shift our attention away from real historical processes and have become an element of a very powerful myth of urban sociology and anthropology in which the transition from a rural to an industrial society is seen (depending on one's ideological pre- disposition) either as a movement from back- wardness to modernity or as a kind of fall, the true cause and origin of social and moral decay.

For Engels, scientific analysis of industrial capitalism had to begin with what Therborn calls the historico-material and concrete ex- perience, i.e., the study of social reality as

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motion and process [6]. There took place in England a series of interlocking and mutually enhancing changes and developments in the seventeenth century that culminated in the Industrial Revolution in the early nineteenth century. The consequences of the technol- ogies and innovations of the middle of the eighteenth century were of an unprecedented magnitude, for they ushered in a revolution that "transformed the entire structure of civil society."

Bourgeois social scientists never tire of accusing Marx and Engels of arriving at these conclusions a priori, and of ignoring empirical facts. The CWC shows that this charge is untenable. Long before the appearance of "empirical sociology and anthropology" Engels engaged in concrete social research and based his theoretical conclusions on the analysis and summing-up of facts which bourgeois sociologists usually ignored [7 ].

In his historical survey of pre-industrial Britain, Engels focused on the unique eco- nomic transformations that occurred from the fifteenth century and its social consequences not only for rural England but for the entire part of the world that was brought within the orbit of British influence. He found that an increasingly capitalist form of agriculture had in effect become the pacesetter for the capi- talist development of England and the world.

Since England was the classical ground of the Industrial Revolution and where the gigantic thrust of concentration and polariza- tion took place, Engels used it as a case to study in all its fullness the development of its principal result, the proletariat. The indus- trial revolution was thus more than a revolu- tion in machinery, its most important result was the creation of the revolutionary prole- tariat. "It was this emergence, this produc- tion, this creation of a new human being and of the new class of social beings that was the explicit object of the CWC" [8].

Although it was not Engels' aim to write the history of the Industrial Revolution, he believed it necessary to establish some con- ception of the pre-historic state of English

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rural society and of the general conditions be- fore the great transformation. The kind of life he describes is a familiar one to sociologists and anthropologists; it was of small-scale farming and domestic industry. The basic form of property was land, and competition of the peasant producers among themselves did not exist because of rural dispersion of their homes and the economy that supported them. The peasant lives were comfortable, peaceful and uneventful; they were pious and honest men; and their material condition was better by far than that of their successors. Their hours of work were not excessive; they had time for traditional recreation, and their health and that of their children were good. Socially their world was laid out for them: it was prescriptive and patriarchal [9]. This is how Engels described it:

They regarded their squire, the greatest landholder of the region, as their natural superior; they asked for advice from him, laid their small disputes before him for settle- ment, and gave him all honor, as this patriarchal relation involved. They were "respectable" people, good husbands and fathers, led moral lives because they had no tempta- tion to be immoral, there being no groggeries or low houses in their vicinity and because the host, at whose Inn they now and then quenched their thirst, was also a respectable man, usually a large tenant farmer who took pride in good order, good beer and early hours (p. 37).

The development of the capitalist urban- industrial order disrupted this mode of exis- tence: in many ways the destruction was comparable in terms of its impact to the inva- sion of the colonial world by capitalism. The enclosure movement dislodged thousands of families from the country and they had no alternative but to flock to the towns. For Engels the most important result of these developments was the separation of the direct producers from the land and their settlement in urban centers as proletarians where they were ranged against the capitalist owners of the factories where they worked.

The rapid extension of manufacturing demanded hands, wages rose, and troops of workmen migrated from the agricultural districts to the towns. Population multiplied enormously, nearly all the increase took place in the proletariat. Thus arose the great manufacturing and com- mercial cities of the British Empire, in which at least three-fourths of the population belong to the working- class, while the lower middle-class consists only of small shop-keepers, and very few handicraftsmen (pp. 49-50).

Engels did not bemoan the passing away of "traditional" society. He characterized the mode of human existence in pre-industrial Britain as follows:

They [the rural dwellers] were comfortable in their silent vegetation, and but for the Industrial Revolution they would never have emerged from this existence, which, cosily romantic as it was, was nevertheless not worthy of human beings. In truth, they were not human beings; they were merely toiling machines in the service of the few aristocrats who guided history down to that time. The Industrial Revolution has simply carried this out to its logical end by making the workers machines pure and simple, taking from them the last trace of inde- pendent activity, and so forcing them to think and demand a position worthy of men (pp. 37-38).

Having characterized the social structure of pre-industrial England, Engels then proceeded to logically summarize the early history of the Industrial Revolution. The aim of this resum6 was to show the impact of the new industrial technology. The first group of technological innovations set in motion a series of elaborate differentiations. For example, the invention of the spinning and the power-loom not only altered the relations between weaving and spinning, and weavers and spinners; it affected the division of labor in the family as well, and therefore had consequences in the structure of the household, and its internal balance of force. Other developments that followed were the assembly of large numbers of power driven machines in the factories. These machines required large numbers of workers to man them. As a result shifts took place, population increased, conditions of employ- ment altered and the nature of wealth chang- ed as well [ 10].

Even though Engels focused on the growth of the cotton industry - the prime mover of industrial development - he did not neglect parallel developments in other branches of textile manufacture; in metal work, minerals and mining, in agriculture, and in transport - roads, canals, and railways - nor did he fail to mention developments in commerce and the expansion of overseas and colonial markets. All these developments were connected in the sense that they formed part of a large com- plex and continually changing coherent whole now called industrial society [ 11 ].

The history of the Industrial Revolution was thus cumulative and was produced by a process of conquest of the country by the urban-based bourgeoisie. Williams [ 12] says that before and during the Industrial Revolu- tion rural England was characterized by an in- creasing penetration by capitalist social rela- tions and dominance of the market, because these had been powerfully evolving within its own structure for a long time. By the late eight- eenth century there existed in England an organized capitalist society, in which what happened to the market, anywhere, whether in industrial or agricultural production, worked its way through to the town and country alike, as parts of a single crisis.

Engels' investigation of the evolution of capitalism in England brought into silent relief the role of technology in the industrial revolution and its implication for a basic industry - cotton. With the increased mecha- nization of the spinning process, the work of spinning was further rationalized by the machines driven by mechanical rather than human power. Water power, a source of mechanical energy, brought men together in large numbers in cities like Manchester.

These immense cotton spinning factories or mills of the late eighteenth century were something new in the world. After 1815 weaving was increasingly brought into fac- tories as well, and within a short time cotton became the first industry in which production was wholly mechanized.

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The next step was to adopt the men, women, and children who worked at the machines to the unvarying require- ments of those instruments, and this too was achieved, although the adopters ran into some resistance on the part of adoptees [ 13].

The historical experience of industrializa- tion according to Engels was not to be sep- arated from that of urbanization. The two in the case of England happened together and reinforced one another; the reciprocating effects of each upon the other being further intensified by the demographic escalation. To form some idea of how the capitalist city shaped human life, it is important to study the dialectic of the commodity relationship and the mode of urban existence it yields:

The industrial disciplines, the conditions of work, of employment, continual insecurity and continual com- petition, are not to be segregated, in their effects as formative experience, from the conditions of living in the new industrial towns, from the housing, sanitary provi- sions - or lack of them - institutions of relief or welfare or lack of them - from all the new densities and stresses of existence in these unparalleled circumstances. The working men and women who came out at the end of their process were the first to go through what we now understand as a world historical experience. As a group they bear the marks of survivors. They bear those marks to this very day [14].

The internal dynamic of economic trans- formation in England became linked as well to the colonialization movement. Within the developing territorial division of labor, the towns and cities of England had unlimited elbow room to grow as "workshops of the world." Elaborating on the historical impact of the Industrial Revolution for England Engels wrote:

Sixty, eighty years ago England was a country llke every other, with small towns, few and simple industries, and a thin but proportionally large agricultural population. Today it is a country like no other, with a capital of two and a half million inhabitants; with vast manufactur- ing cities; with an industry that supplies the world, and produces almost everything by means of the most com- plex machinery; with an industrious, intelligent, dense population, of which two-thirds axe employed in trade

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and commerce, and composed of classes wholly different; forming, in fact, with other customs and other needs, a different nation from England of those days. The indus- trial revolution is of the same importance for England as the political revolution for France, and the philosophical revolution for Germany; and the difference between Eng- land in 1769 and in 1844 is at least as great as that be- tween France, under the ancient regime and during the revolution of July. But the mightiest result of this indus- trial transformation is the English proletariat (p. 49).

Engels goes on to discuss the centralizing tendency of manufacture; which brought to- gether "those vast masses who now fill the whole of the British Empire, whose condition forces itself everyday more and more upon the attention of the civilized world. The con- dition of the working class is the condition of the vast majority of English people" (p. 51). The nexus of the city was large-scale mecha- nized industry which required growing capital investment, and its division of labor required the accumulation of masses of proletarians. Such large units of production, even when built in the countryside attract communities around them, which will produce a surplus labor force [151. The industrial city became the focus of mobilized abstract labor, of labor power as a commodity placed in the service of commerce as well as production [16]. As Engels put it:

Population becomes centralized just as capital does; and, very naturally, since the human being, the worker, is regarded in manufacture simply as a piece of capital for the use of which the manufacturer pays interest under the name of wages. A manufacturing establishment re- quires many workers employed together in a single build- ing, living near each and forming a village of themselves in the vicinity of a good-sized factory. They have needs for satisfying which other people are necessary; handi- craftsmen, showmakers, tailors, bakers, carpenters, stone- makers, settle at hand. The inhabitants of the village, especially the younger generation, accustom themselves to factory work, grow skillful in it, and when the first mill can no longer employ them all, wages fall and the immigration of fresh manufacturers is the consequence. So the village grows into a small town, and the small town into a large one. The greater the town, the greater its advantages. It offers roads, railroads, canals; the choice of skilled labour increases constantly, new establishments can be built more cheaply because of the competition among builders and machinists who are at hand, than in

remote country districts, whether timber, machinery, builders, and operatives must be brought; it offers a market to which buyers crowd and direct communication with the markets supplying raw material or demanding finished goods. Hence the marvelously rapid growth of the great manufacturing town (pp. 54-55).

The urbanization bound up with the industrial revolution, and accompanying the development of the capitalist mode of pro- duction is thus a process of organizing space based on two fundamental facts: the develop- ment of capitalism in the countryside and the consequent immigration of the population to urban areas; the destruction of a domestic economy of direct commodity producers, which forced them at the same time to move into cities where they were confined into the ranks of the proletariat which in time be- comes a definite class in the population, whereas it had only been a transitional stage toward entering the middle class [ 17]. What the slums of Manchester actually indicated was the true condition and development of the surplus labor force. If the slums are seen as a monstrous or a diseased growth, this had logically to be traced to the whole social order that produced such cities - the capi- talist mode of production.

As a study of industrialization and urbani- zation, the CWC was primarily a study of the development of social patterns (Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft), of modes of production and class relations characterized by conflict. Engels examined the changes from Gemein- schaft to GeselIschaft in its concrete historical development rather than abstractly. To speak of Gemeinschaft and/or Gesellschaft, then, is to speak of social arrangements determined in the last instance by the specific combina- tion of forces and relations of production shaped by the capitalist mode of production.

METHODS OF INVESTIGATION

Participant Observation

To get an intimate acquaintance with Manchester, Engels used various strategies which have since become the common stock of anthropologists. In a dedication to "The Working Class Of Great Britain" which he wrote in English and prefixed to the original German edition of 1845, Engels wrote that during his stay in England he purposefully "forsook the company and dinner parties, the portwine and champagne of the middle-classes, and devoted my leisure hours almost exclu- sively to the intercourse with plain working men; I am both glad and proud of having done so." He wanted, he says, "to see you in your own homes, to observe you in your every-day life, to chat with you on your con- dition and grievances, to witness your strug- gles against the social and political power of your oppressor." That is, Engels' study was based on the study of living people and their living conditions. And because he had acted consciously upon that desire, he "was induced to spend many a happy hour in obtaining a knowledge of the realities of life" (pp. 336- 337).

Engels also gained the intimacy of Man- chester by taking to the streets; at all hours of the day and night, on weekends and holidays. He took to the network of pathways along which the city moves and that constitutes the principal means for observing and under- standing it. Engels did not venture into the nooks and by-ways of Manchester alone. He was accompanied on his expeditions into the inner recesses of the city by Mary Burns (cure informants) and it was she who induct- ed Engels into certain working class circles and into the domestic lives of the Manchester proletariat. Thus Engels learned how to read a city in the company or through the media- tion of an illiterate Irish factory woman. He learned to read the life of the citY with his

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eyes, ears, nose and feet. He learned to read it with his senses, the chief inlets of mind in the present age [18].

Library Research

In addition to his personal impressions Engels drew on literary authorities (the works of Peter Gaskell, Jon Wade, George Richard, Richardson Porter, Edward Baines, Andrew Ure, the brothers Archibald and William Pul- teney Alison, Thomas Carlyle, and others were consulted), and he also used official records, parliamentary commissions, factory inspectors' reports, and official statistics. Engels also read many newspapers including the Chartist North Star, which published workers' letters and articles. "I am buried up to my neck in English newspapers and books," he wrote to Marx on November 19, 1844, "from which I am compiling my book on the condition of the English proletariat." The CWC thus abounds in facts, collected from a variety of sources using a variety of research strategies which have become the stock in trade for modern scholars.

Engels' analytical procedure in writing the CWC is that which Sweezy [19] has termed the method of "successive approximation." This consists in moving from the abstract to the more concrete in a step by step fashion. Engels' method, was not however, simply one of abstraction; the logical stages in this successive approximation correspond to the historical stages in the development of capi- talism - the CWC is based on a vast array of facts gathered by a variety of methods.

THE GREAT TOWNS

In his study of the development of capi- talism, Engels begins with the Great Towns and especially London, the capital of Britain. In a memorable message Engels recorded his first impressions of London from Autumn of 1844. He speaks of the enormity of this metropolis

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where a man may wander for hours together without reaching the beginning or the end, without meeting the slightest hint which could lead to the inference that there is open country within reach, is a strange thing. This colossal centralization, this heaping together of two and a half millions of human beings, at one point, has multiplied the power of this two and a half millions a hundred fold; has raised London to the commercial capital of the world, created the giant docks and assem- bled the thousand vessels that continually cover the Thames ... all this is so vast, so impressive, that a man cannot collect himself, but is lost in the marvel of Eng- land's greatness before he sets forth upon the English soil (p. 56).

It was not long before Engels understood the price the Londoners had to pay for living in such a dense metropolis. In one of the great passages on the meaning of size, density, and heterogeneity which for Wirth summed up what he called "urbanism as a way of life," Engels drew important theoretical conclu- sions. The passage is so significant that it deserves quoting at some length.

After roaming the streets of the capital a day or two, making headway with difficulty through the human tur- moil and the endless lines of vehicles, after visiting the slums of the metropolis, one realises for the first time that these Londoners have been forced to sacrifice the best qualities of their human nature, to bring to pass all the marvels of civilisation which crowd their city; that a hundred powers which slumbered within them have re- mained inactive, have been suppressed so that a few might be developed more fully and multiply through union with those of others. The very turmoil of the streets has some- thing repulsive, something against which human nature rebels. The hundred of thousands of all classes and ranks crowding past each other, are they not all human beings with the same qualities and powers, and with the same interest in being happy? and have they not, in the end, to seek happiness in the same way, by the same means? And still they crowd by one another as though they had nothing in common, nothing to do with one another, and their only agreement is the tacit one, that each keep to his own side of the pavement, so as not to delay the opposing streams of the crowd, while it occurs to no man to honour another with so much as a glance. The brutal indifference, the unfeeling isolation of each in his private interest becomes the more repellent and offensive, the more these individuals are crowded together, within a limited space. And, however much one may be aware that this isolation of the individual, this narrow self-seek- ing is the fundamental principle of our society every- where, it is nowhere so shamelessly bare-faced, so self-

conscious as just here in the crowding of the great city. The dissolution of mankind into nomads, of which each one has a separate principle and a separate purpose, the world of atoms, is here carried out to its utmost extreme.

Hence, it comes, too, that the social war, the war of each against all, is here openly declared ... [P] eople regard each other only as useful objects; each exploits the other, and the end of it all is, that the stronger treads the weaker under foot, and that the powerful few, the capitalists, seize everything for themselves, while to the weak many, the poor, scarcely a bare existence remains.

What is true of London, is true of Manchester, Birming- ham, Leeds, is true of all great towns. Everywhere barbar- ous indifference, hard egotism on one hand, and nameless misery on the other, everywhere social warfare, every man's house in a state of siege, everywhere reciprocal plundering under the protection of the law, and all so shameless, so openly avowed that one shrinks before the concernings of our social state as they manifest them- selves here undisguised, and can only wonder that the whole crazy fabric still hangs together (pp. 57-58) [20].

This passage reveals Engels' great insight into the impact of the capitalist industrial city on the life of its occupants. His analytic de- scriptive thrust locates urban alienation in the historical evolution of the capitalist mode of production - a society that is dominated by the production of commodities and thus stifles the fulfillment of human potentialities for those from whom capitalists extract sur- plus value. In such a society, respect for the individual and human dignity cannot be implemented, it only remains in the realm of ideas and philosophic pronouncements about

human dignity and the sanctity of life. This passage, I believe, was also the first

expression of what has since become a dom- inant experience of the city. Blake saw a common condition of "weakness and woe." Wordsworth saw strangeness, a loss of connec- tion, not at first social but in perceptual ways, a failure of identity in the crowd of others which worked back to a loss of iden- tity in the self, and then, in these ways, a loss of society itself, its overcrowding and replace- ment by a procession of images: the "dance of colours, lights and forms .... face after face" and there are no other laws" [21].

George Simmel, in his essay "The Metro- polis and Mental Life," undertook to analyze and explain the characteristic mental attitude of modem city dwellers towards one another. For Simmel the attitude of the metropolitan toward others tends to be one of reserve and formality. The inner aspect of this reserve is not only indifference but a slight aversion or at least mutual strangeness and repulsiveness [22].

The London Slums

What kind of living quarters does capital provide for those it exploits? Having discussed the mass anonymity of London, Engels pro- ceeds to make a "more detailed examination of the conditions in which the social war creat- ed by capitalism has placed the propertyless class." The picture Engels paints is one of in- difference and utter disregard of the welfare of the proletariat by the bourgeoisie. He regarded the plight of the proletariat as a law- governed result of the domination of private property and capital.

Since capital, the direct or indirect control of the means of subsistence and production, is the weapon with which the social warfare is carried on, it is clear that all the dis- advantages of such a state must fall upon the poor. For him no man has the slightest concern. Cast into the whirl- pool, he must struggle through as well as he can. If he is so happy as to find work, i.e., ff the bourgeoisie does him the favor to enrich itself by means of him, wages await him which scarcely suffice to keep body and soul to- gether; if he can get no work he may steal, if he is not afraid of the police, or starve, in which case the police will take care that he does so in a quiet an inoffensive manner (p. 58).

Engels then describes the English slums in a general way, such as those of the most bitter poverty that are to be found "nearby to the splendid mansions of the wealthy" and "with- in the most respectable districts of town." About the condition of human existence in these slums he cites from his substantial col- lection of reports, documents and newspaper clippings which provided shockirrg statistics

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about rent and densities including quotes from coroners' inquests on persons who had died of starvation and in circumstances of utter destitution. He also has something to say about the homeless. He had visited a number of infamous cheap lodging houses, and writes a heart rending paragraph about what he saw. Then there were the literally unhoused and unaccommodated, those who slept in passages and arcades or who found shelter in parks or on the embankment [23].

Urban slums were not simply an aberration, they were the physical expression of the class structure of the cities in the era of industrial capitalism:

Every great city has one or more slums, where the work- ing-class is crowded together. True, poverty often dwells in hidden alleys close to the palaces of the rich; but, in general, a separate territory has been assigned to it, where, removed from the sight of the happier classes, it may struggle along as it can. These slums are pretty equally arranged in all the great towns of England, the worst houses in the worst quarters of the towns; usually one or two-stories cottages in long rows, perhaps with cellars used as dwellings, almost always irregularly built. These houses of three or four rooms and kitchen form, through- out England some parts of London excepted, the general dwellings of the working-class. The streets are generally unpaved, rough, dirty, filled with vegetable and animal refuse, without sewers or gutters, but supplied with foul, stagnant pools instead. Moreover, ventilation is impeded by the bad, confused method of building of the whole quarter, and many human beings here live crowded into small space, the atmosphere that prevails in these work- ing-men's quarters may readily be imagined. Further, the streets serve as drying grounds in fine weather; lines are stretched across from house to house, and hung with wet clothing (p. 59) [24].

Manchester

All the above is preliminary to a discussion in detail of Manchester, the "classic ground on which English industry has wrought its masterpiece." What sort of masterpiece was Manchester? In the description and analyses of the workers' living conditions Engels makes his seminal contribution to the sociology of the urban condition - the impact of capitalist industrialization and urbanization which in many respects rings true today as it did when it was written.

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Everything which here aroused horror and indignation is of recent origin, belongs to the industrial epoch. The couple of hundred of houses, which belong to old Man- chester, have long since been abandoned by their orig- inal inhabitants; the industrial epoch alone has crammed into them the swarms of workers which they now shelter; the industrial epoch alone has built up every spot between their old houses to win a new covering for the masses whom it has conjured hither from the agriculture districts and from Ireland; the industrial epoch alone enabled the owners of these cattlesheds to rent them for high prices to human beings, to plunder the poverty of the workers, to undermine the health of thousands, in order that they alone, the owners, may grow rich. In the industrial epoch alone it has become possible that the worker scarcely freed from feudal servitude could be used as mere mate- rial, a mere chattle; that he must let himself be crowded into a dwelling too bad for every other, which he for his hard-earned wages buys the right to let go utterly to ruin (p. 87).

Capitalism "pitchforked" the new proletar- iat, often composed of immigrants from pre- industrial backgrounds, into a social hell in which they were ground down, despised, underpaid (if they had a job) or starved, left to rot in the slums [25]. The description of this offers insight into the class structure of the city that has endured and still character- izes modem urban areas. Manchester con- tained then about four hundred thousand inhabitants. The town itself was peculiarly built "so that a person may live in it for years, and go in and out daily without coming into contact with working-people's quarters or even with workers," that is, so long as he confines himself to his business or to pleasure walks:

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 middie-class; or, if this does not succeed, they are con- cealed with the cloak of charity (p. 78).

The description of the spatial structure of Manchester by Engels anticipated by some eighty years what has come to be known as the concentric zone theory of the city, as formulated by Park and Burgess.

Manchester contains, as its heart, a rather extended com- mercial district, perhaps half a mile long and about as broad, and consisting almost wholly of offices and ware- houses. Nearly the whole district is abandoned by dwell- ers, and is lonely and deserted at night; only watchmen and policemen traverse its narrow lanes with their dark lanterns. This district is cut through by certain main thoroughfares upon which the vast traffic concentrates, and in which the ground level is lined with brilliant shops. In these streets the upper floors are occupied, here and there, is a good deal of life upon them until late at night. With the exception of this commercial district, all Man- chester proper, all Salford and Hulme, a great part of Pendleton and Chorlton, two-thkds of Ardwick, and single stretches of Cheetham Hill and Broughton are all unmixed working-people's quarters, stretching like a girdle, averaging a mile and a half in breadth, around the commercial district. Outside, beyond this gkdle, the upper and middle bourgeoisie live in regularly laid out streets in the vicinity of the working quarters, especially in Chorlton and lower lying portions of Cheetham Hill; the upper bourgeoisie in remoter villas with gardens in Chorlton and Ardwick, or on the breezy heights of Cheet- ham Hill, Broughton, and Pendleton, in free, wholesome country air, in fine, comfortable homes, passed once every half or quarter hour by omnibus going into to city. And the finest part of the arrangement is this, 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 seeing that they are in the midst of the grimy misery that lurks to the right and the left. For the thoroughfares leading from the ex- change 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. True, these shops boar some relation to the district which lie behind them, and are more elegant in the commercial and residential quarters than when they hide grimy working-men's dwel- lings; but they suffice to conceal from the eyes of the wealthy men and women of strong stomaches and weak nerves the misery and grime which form the complement of their wealth (p. 79).

Engels then proceeds to a concrete demon- stration and conducts the reader along a number of the main streets, showing how the changes in the character of the buildings that front the streets indicates what is to be found behind them. "He is in fact charting one series of connected and stratified variables within the social topography of the city" [26]. Engels concludes this spatial analysis of Man-

chester with the observation (p. 110) that:

[A] ny one who knows Manchester can infer the adjoining district, from the appearance of the thoroughfare, but one is seldom in a position to catch from the street a glimpse of the real labouring districts. I know very well that this hypocritical plan is more or less common to all great cities; I know, too, that the retail dealers are forced by the nature of their business to take possession of the great highways; I know that there are more good build- ings than bad ones upon such streets everywhere, and that the value of land is greater near them than in remote dis- tricts; but at the same time I have never seen so system- atic a shutting out of the working-class from the thor- oughfares, so tender a concealment of everything which might affront the eyes and the nerves of the bourgeoisie, as in Manchester.

Such are the physical arrangements of Man- chester. The general laws that define the history of urban development and their links to the dynamics of capitalist wealth accumu- lation and distribution are basic to the science of the city. David Harvey [27] points out that this approach followed by Engels in 1844 was and still is far more consistent with the hard economic and social realities than is the culturalist approach adopted by urbanologists who write on the ghetto and urban poverty. "In fact with certain obvious modifications, Engels' description could easily be made to fit the contemporary American city" [28].

In Manchester, like in modem bourgeois cities, the slum, poverty and other urban dis- orders were a permanent feature of this city, embedded in its class relations. The separation of the rich and the poor had been built into the very spatial structure of the city, by insur- ing that differential access to scarce resources perpetuated the inequalities that formed capitalism. The imperatives of capitalist logic - land speculation, income concentration, political power - combine to exclude the poor and certain sections of the working class from the benefits of capitalist economic growth. Worse still, the working-class district is always liable for demolition because of built-in obsolescence of its housing. The "contractors, usually carpenters anal builders,

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or manufacturers, spend little or nothing in repairs partly to avoid diminishing their rent receipts, and partly in view of the approach- ing surrender of the improvement to the land owners; while in consequence of commercial crises and loss of work that follows them, whole streets often stand empty, the cottages falling rapidly into ruin and uninhabitable- ness" (p. 92).

Since Engels wrote the CWC, the city has enormously expanded as an organization of production and a concentrated center of power and wealth, it has also deteriorated as a place in which to conduct other human and civilized activities. "As the wealthier popula- tion have fled the center, they have leap- frogged over the vast working-class and left them there massed, as it were, about that alternatively dense and hollow core, in an immense unbroken belt in which they work and live" [29]. Other spatial aspects of urban growth dealt with by Engels concern the physical separation between the place of work and the place of residence.

THE SOCIAL LIFE OF THE WORKING CLASS

What kind of existence does the working class lead? That is, what are the conditions of life and existence like for the working class in general and for workers in particular? Engels gives a shocking picture of the plight of the English workers. Life in the urban slums for the low paid and unemployed was characterized by demoralization and aliena- tion, by the most profound social and per- sonal distress. It approximated the Hobbesian "war of each against all."

Engels begins by tracing the results of com- petition of single workers with one another. "Competition is the completest expression of the battle of all which rules modem civil society. This battle, a battle for life, for exis- tence, for everything, in case of need a battle for life and death, is fought not between the different classes of society only, but also be- tween the individual members of these classes.

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Each is in the way of the other, and each seeks to crowd out all who are in his way, and to put himself in their place" (p. 110).

The mode of conflict Engels is describing is spawned in the interstices of the jungle capitalist; its values and relations are reflected in human behavior.

In the struggle for existence; the proletariat is helpless; left to himself, he cannot live a single day. The bour- geoisie has gained a monopoly of all means of existence...; what the proletariat needs he can obtain only from this bourgeoisie, which can decree his life or death. If offers him the means of living, but only for an "equivalent" for his work. It even lets him have the appearance of acting from a free choice, of making a contract with free, un- constrained consent, as a responsible agent who has attained his majority (p. 110).

Engels spends many pages setting down in detail what can only be called conditions of social hell under which the workers and the poor lived. In the great towns disease of every kind flourished. Lung disease and various grades of fever were common. He also gives a summary of diseases connected both directly and in a secondary way with diet deficiency, such as scrofula, rickets and a variety of ali- mentary troubles [30].

Engels was the first to discuss what urban anthropologists call the Culture of Poverty - a group of circumstances and kinds of be- havior patterns which when acting in concert create a viscious circle for the poor, the unem- ployed and the unemployable. First there was unemployment which produced helplessness and drunkeness; which as symptoms of this state, are an effort on the part of the poor to gain temporary release from their life, and a further auxiliary cause in its worsening. The cause of poverty, contrary to liberal assump- tions, is created by capitalism and should not be explained by the weakness and shiftless- ness of individuals. Capitalism as a mode of production creates a class structure of the employed and the unemployable. The latter class is put in a situation where it cannot help but acquire and develop certain attitudes.

Then these acquired attitudes are taken to be their nature and to determine their roles in society. So dirty, temporary and seasonal jobs are assigned to this class and when their serv- ices are no longer needed, they are then blamed for being shiftless and not deserving. What is called culture of poverty, is thus a "life-style" that is more the result of poverty than its cause.

For instance, on top of everything else the working class areas suffered from a complete absence of almost all facilities for sociability and recreation. As Engels puts it;

The failing of the workers in general may be traced to an unbridled thirst for pleasure, to want of providence, and of flexibility in fitting into the social order, to the general inability to sacrifice the pleasure of the moment to a remote advantage. But is that to be wondered at? When a class can purchase few and only the most sensual pleas- ures by wearying toil, must it not give itself over blindly and madly to those pleasures? A class about whose educa- tion no one troubles himself, which is a playball to a thousand chances, knows no security in life - what in- centives has such a class to providence, to "respectabil- ity," to sacrifice the pleasure of the moment for a re- moter enjoyment, most uncertain precisely by reason of the perpetually varying, shifting conditions under which the proletariat lives? A class which bears all the disad- vantages of the social order without enjoying its ad- vantages, one to which the social system appears in purely hostile aspects - who can demand that such a class respect this social order? Verily that is asking much! But the working man cannot escape the present arrangement of society so long as it exists, and when the individual worker resists it, the greatest injury falls upon himself (p. 162).

In the English cities there was thus a strik- ing contrast between the extraordinary af- fluence of the middle classes and the poverty of the unemployed and unemployable; in the dispossessed and vagrants, the old, the sick and the disabled, who, because they were unable to work in the towns created by the capitalist, were seen merely as negative and unwanted burdens. In analyzing the position of the Irish, Engels made a point basic to the understanding of the poor in cities under capitalism - the need of the capitalist for a reserve army of labor. "The rapid expansion

of English industry could not have taken place if England had not possessed in the numerous and impoverished population of Ireland a reserve at command ... There are in London 20,000; in Manchester 40,000; in Liverpool 34,000 poor Irish people." (p. 124) The surplus population serves definite func- tions under capitalism: it can be drawn upon during the periodic cycles of prosperity and let go during the inevitable downturn. The slums are the physical expression that the reserve army is a permanently essential part of capitalism. The reserve army was composed partly of proletarians, partly of potential proletarians - countrymen, Irish immigrants, people from the economically dynamic areas and less dynamic occupations [31 ].

The important institutional casuality of urban capitalist development was to be none other than tile working-class family. The demand capitalism made on the various mem- bers of the working-class family made family life almost impossible for the workers. As Engels (p. 162) put it

In a comfortless, filthy house, hardly good enough for mere nightly shelter, ill-furnished, often neither rain-tight nor warm, a foul atmosphere filling rooms overcrowded with human beings, no domestic comfort is possible. The husband works the whole day through, perhaps the wife also and the elder children, all in different places; they meet night and morning only, all under perpetual tempta- tion to drink; what family life is possible under such conditions? Yet the working-man cannot escape the family, must live in the family, and the consequence is a perpetual succession of family troubles, domestic quar- rels, most demoralising for parents and children alike. Neglect of all domestic duties, neglect of the children, especially, is only too vigorously fostered by the existing institutions of society. And children growing up in this savage way, amidst these demoralising influences, are ex- pected to turn out goody-goody and moral in the end! Verily the requirements are naive, which the self-satisfied bourgeois makes upon the working-man!

On top of all these problems, the working- man, who was lucky enough to have a job was no better off - the work he did was not of a self-fulfilling kind. It was work imposed on the working class as a necessity. Engels states

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that the machine-tending work of a spinning operative was guaranteed, if nothing else, to break the spirit. It prevented the worker from occupying his mind with anything else.

The supervision of machinery, the joining of broken threads, is no activity which claims the operative's think- ing, yet it is of a sort which prevents him from occupying his mind with other things ... this work affords the muscles no opportunity for physical activity. Thus it is, properly speaking, not work, but tedium, the most deadening, wearing process conceivable. The operative is condemned to let his physical and mental powers decay in this utter monotony, it is his mission to be bored every day and all day long from his eighth year. Moreover, he must not take a moment's rest; the engine moves increasingly, the wheels, the straps, the spindles hum and rattle in his ears without a pause, and if he tries to snatch one instant, there is the overlooker at his back with the book of fines. This condemnation to be burned alive in the mill, to give constant attention to the tireless machine is felt as the keenest torture by the operatives, and its action upon mind and body is in the long run stunting in the highest degree (p. 211).

Since Engels wrote CWC, factory work has become worse. It has been reduced to a series of operations that are even more deadening to the senses. The machine tending in the textile mills, copy typist work, key-punch operators and computer programmers, bank clerks - the watchers and tenders of new electronic technology - all confront a working life whose quality is to say the least unappetizing [32]. Bookchin makes the point that the aim of capital is to reduce human labor into an aggregate of muscular and mental energy and to make it lose its identity as an expression of human powers [33].

Though the development of capitalist science and technology provides the material prerequisites for the emancipation of labor, by reducing necessary labor time and im- mensely increasing productivity, the actual consequences are not liberating but enslaving. The individual worker is no longer identifiably productive; established skills are eroded and displaced; the worker is subordinated to the machine; wages are depressed; both the in- tensity and the length of the working day are

56

increased. Marx summed up the consequences of factory work as follows:

Factory work exhausts the nervous system to the utter- most; at the same time, it does away with the many-sided play of the muscles, and confiscates every atom of free- dom, both in bodily and in intellectual activity. Even the lightening of the labour becomes an instrument of tor- ture, since the machine does not free the worker from the work, but rather deprives the work itself of all content.

. Every kind of capitalist production, in so far as it is not only a labour process but also capital's process of valori- zation, has this in common, but it is not the worker who employs the conditions of his work, but rather the reverse, the conditions of work employ the worker. How- ever, it is only with the coming of machinery that this inversion first acquires a technical and palpable reality. Owing to its conversion into an automaton, the instrument of labour confronts the worker during the labour process in the shape of capital, dead labour, which dominates and soaks up living labour-power. The separation of the intel- lectual faculties of the production process from manual labour, and the transformation of those faculties into powers exercised by capital over labour, is, as we have already shown, finally completed by large-scale industry erected on the foundation of machinery. The special skill of each individual machine-operator, who has now been deprived of all significance, vanishes as an infinitesimal quantity in the face of the science, the gigantic natural forces, and the mass of social labour embodied in the sys- tem of machinery, which, together with those three forces, constitutes the power of the 'master' [34].

What does this tell us? That the process that has produced vast "material wealth is simultaneously reproduced as absolute aliena- tion, that it has produced this wealth on the backs of workers who had been reduced to what C. Wright Mills called "cheerful robots." In the language of the factory, workers are "hands" and "operatives"; and individuality in work is reduced to a numerical expression. The fragmentation of the work process is to ensure that capital through its hired managers had the greatest possible degree of control over the living labor it employs [35].

In the bourgeois city the very bases of human association have been distorted and reduced into harsh commodity relations; everyone becomes an enemy of everyone else.

In this country, social war is under full headway, every one stands for himself, and fights for himself against all comers, and whether or not he shall injure all the others who are his declared foes, depends upon a cynical calcula- tion as to what is more advantageous for himself. It no longer occurs to any one to come to a peaceful under- standing with his fellow-man; all differences are settled by threats, violence, or in a court of law. In short, everyone sees in his neighbor an enemy to be got out of the way, or, at best, a tool to be used for his own advantage. And this war grows from year to year, as the criminal table shows, more violent, passionate, irreconcilable. The ene- mies are dividing gradually into two great camps - the bourgeoisie on the one hand, the workers on the other. This war of each against all, of the bourgeoisie against the proletariat, need cause us no surprise, for it is only the logical sequel of the principle involved in free competi- tion (pp. 165-166).

Engels also discussed such currently perti- nent problems of capitalism as depression and trade cycles, the question of the "reserve army of labor," the theoretical problems of surplus labor, and the actual existence of sur- plus laborers, largely in the form of an im- mense pool of casual laborers in the cities and beneath them of an almost as large group of unemployed and unemployable members of the proletariat [36].

THE CLASS STRUGGLE

Engels understood the progressive role of cities in history as centers of economic-cul- tural development and incubators of the modern revolutionary working class. In the industrial towns, the working men and women were faced with many difficult prob- lems. Millions of hitherto independent pro- ducers had been "pitchforked" from the "natural" economy and rendered destitute. Those who found work consumed today what they made yesterday. The men and women who by their toil created the greatness of Eng- land were living on the margins of poverty; receiving less and less of the surplus value they produced. The working class soon real- ized that their situation was not temporary: they came to understand that they were an integral and permanent part of the property-

less urban population. It dawned on them that their children would be born to toil, would have no other prospect than remaining toilers all their lives. To defend themselves the workers formed themselves into trade unions. The industrial urban milieu forced them to learn the meaning of their situation and by concentrating them in the urban space, made them learn the power of collec- tive action.

The great cities are the birthplaces of labour movements; in them the workers first began to reflect upon their own condition, and to struggle against it; in them the opposition between proletariat and bourgeoisie first made itself manifest; from them proceeded the Trade Unions, Chartism, and Socialism. The great cities have trans- formed the disease of the social body, which appears in chronic form in the country, into an acute one, and so made manifest its real nature and the means of curing it. Without the great cities and their forcing influence upon population intelligence, the working-class would be far less advanced than it is. Moreover, they have destroyed the last remnant of patriarchal relation between working- men and employers, a result to which manufacture on a large scale has contributed by multiplying the employees dependent upon a single employer (p. 153).

A great part of the CWC is devoted to the working-class movement, its forms and meth- ods of struggle. It is thus no accident that some of the most profound and enduring in- sights about working consciousness derived from the CWC. For Engels the working class movement was a necessary expression of the antagonistic contradictions of the main classes of capitalist society.

Working-class consciousness and struggle under capitalism has gone through many phases. The earliest and crudest form of struggle was that of crime and was induced by want, distress or necessity. "The working-man lived in poverty and want, and saw that others were better off than he. It was not clear to his mind why he, who did more for society than the rich idler, should be the one to suffer under these conditions. Want conquered his inherited respect for the sacredness of proper- ty, and he stole ... crime increased with the extension of manufacture, ... the yearly num-

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ber of arrests bore a constant relation to the number of bales of cotton annually consum- ed" (p. 248).

Soon the workers realized that crime did not help their cause. That is to say, the struc- ture of crime reproduces the structure of the existing social injustice as much as it pro- tested against them.

The criminal could protest against the existing order of society only simply, as one individual; the whole might of society was brought to bear upon each criminal, and crushed him with its immense superiority. Besides, theft was the most primitive form of protest, and for this reason, if for no other, it never became the universal expression of the public opinion of the working-men, however much they might approve of it in silence. As a class, they first manifested opposition to the bourgeoisie when they resisted the introduction of machinery at the very beginning of the industrial period (p. 249).

The political significance of crime for Engels showed a lack of political conscious- ness on the part of the urban proletariat. The next stage in the development of political awareness among the newly proletarianized workers was the revolt against the machinery in the cause of which factories were demol- ished. This form of opposition was too nar- rowly focused and, like crime, self-defeating: "When the monetary end was attained, the whole might of social power fell upon the un- protected evil doers and punished them to its heart's content, while the machinery was introduced none the less" (p. 259).

The third stage reached by the working class was the political form of struggle. The reform bill of 1824 opened the way for this phase in working-class political development. The reform bill gave the working class a right previously restricted to the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie, the right of free association. The hitherto secret organizations of the workers could now be organized openly. "In all branches of industry Trade Unions were formed with the outspoken intention of protecting the single working-men against the tyranny and neglect of the bourgeoisie. The

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objects were: to fix wages and to deal, en masse, as a power, with the employers; to regulate the rate of wages according to the profit of its latter, to raise it when opportun- ity offered, and to keep it uniform in each trade through out the country" (p. 250).

Although the proletarianization of the peasants had been a universal negation, with the growth of the labor movement the work- ers began to discover their power and their humanity as well. In the trade union move- ment the working-men discovered a new state of consciousness and the beginnings of a new kind of solidarity. The great urban centers, the house of modern industry, by concentrat- ing further both the increase of middle-class wealth and power on the one hand and work- ing-class poverty and helplessness on the other was the main source of working-class move- ment and class consciousness. That is, urban development was a gigantic process of class segregation, which put the new laboring poor into great morasses of misery outside the centers of government and business and the newly specialized residential area of the bour- geoisie. The almost universal European divi- sion into a "good" west end and a "poor" east end of large cities could not help but produce this solidarity [ 37 ].

The labor movement of the first half of the nineteenth century was not either in composi- tion or in its ideology and program a strictly "proletarian" movement, i.e., one of indus- trial and factory workers or even one con- fined to wage earners. It was rather a common front of all forces and tendencies representing the (mainly urban) laboring-poor [38]. Its importance lay not in its effectiveness, but in the lessons of solidarity and class conscious- ness which it taught.

Engels examined in detail the life experi- ences and struggles in specific production processes and production relations to reveal the forms of existence in these branches: the spinners and weavers, workers in knitting and embroidery, tailors and dressmakers, glass-

blowers, metal workers, miners, and farm laborers. He shows the workers' tribulations and struggles against impossible odds. The misery had impelled the workers to grapple with their condition. Engels found that the workers in industry were more conscious of their class interest than others. Under capi- talism, the proletarians' human dignity is expressed only in struggle against the existing conditions. Hence the importance of trade unions and economic strikes as instruments for advancing the interests of the workers, and as a means of uniting the workers and generating militancy.

These strikes, at first skirmishes, sometimes resulted in weighty struggles; they decide nothing, it is true, but true they are the strongest proof that the decisive battle between bourgeoisie and proletariat is approaching. They are the military school of the working-men in which they prepare themselves for the great struggle which cannot be avoided; they are the pronounciamentos of single branches of industry that these too have joined the labour move- ment ... and as a school of war, the unions are unexcelled (p. 260).

Engels illustrated the political conscious- ness of the miners by describing the coal miners' efforts to form a trade union and to organize a strike which they launched in March 1844. The miners had collected a strike fund large enough to assure each miners' family of strike pay of half a crown a week for several months. The miners nineteen-week experience was a great triumph; workers unity struck fear in the hearts of the bourgeoisie.

The great five months' battle of the coal miners against mine owners, a battle fought on the part of the oppressed with an endurance, courage, intelligence, and coolness demands the highest admiration. What a degree of true human venture, of enthusiasm and strength of character, such a battle implies on the part of men who ... were described as late as 1840, as being thoroughly brutal and wanting in moral sense (p. 204).

What gives these Unions and the strikes arising from them their real importance is this, that they are the first at- tempt of the workers to abolish competition. They imply the recognition of the fact that the supremacy of the bourgeoisie, is based wholly upon the competition of the

workers among themselves; i.e., upon their want of cohesion. And precisely because the Unions direct them- selves against the vital nerve of the present social order, however one-sidedly, in however narrow a way, are they so dangerous to this social order. The working-men can- not attack the bourgeoisie, and with it the whole existing order of society, at any sorer point than this. If the com- petition of the workers among themselves is destroyed, if all determine not to be further exploited by the bour- geoisie, the rule of property is at an end (pp. 218-219).

The industrial capitalist city by its very nature creates a new consciousness among workers and a will to resist the injustices of capitalism. It functions as an organizing con- tainer; the source of Blake's "mind-forg'd monacles." That is, it is a focus of all connec- tions - social, political and economic. The workers "saw plenty of wealth around them, and the law protecting its gross inequities. They wanted enough to live on, "and by fair means or foul we will have it" [39].

For Engels the working-class movement was an imperative and an expression of the antagonism of capital. He saw the Chartist movement as having the potential of becom- ing a proletarian and a socialist movement. Why? Because "Chartism is the compact form of the opposition to the bourgeoisie" (p. 263). Prior to that "opposition always remained isolated. It was single working men or sections who fought a single bourgeois. If the fight became general, this was scarcely by intention of the working men or when it did happen intentionally, Chartism was at the bottom of it. But in Chartism it is the whole working- class which arises against the bourgeoisie, and attacks, first of all the political power, the legislative rampart with which the bourgeoisie has surrounded itself."

But in England of the 1840s, socialism was still unconnected to the working-class move- ment and those who advocated socialism did not advocate an implacable class struggle. "English Socialism arose with Owen, a manu- facturer, and proceeds therefore with great consideration toward the bourgeoisie and great injustices toward the proletariat in its methods, although it culminates in demanding

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the abolition of the class antagonism between bourgeoisie and proletariat. The socialists are thoroughly tame and peacable, accept our existing order, bad as it is, so far as to reject all other methods but that of winning public opinion" (pp. 272-273).

How was Chartism to overcome its limita- tions? It had to be purified of its bourgeois elements and merge with the working class. This process had already begun and many Chartist leaders had embraced socialism. Capitalist development was producing prole- tarian socialism, whose historical necessity was determined by the antagonistic character of capitalism and the advance of philosophical and sociological thought. Through the study of the objective conditions Engels was able to demonstrate how the progress of capitalist production induced the proletarians to unite in a single powerful army which was increas- ingly conscious of the fact that its interests were incompatible with those of the capitalist. "The war of the poor against the rich now carried on in detail and indirectly will become direct and universal. It is too late for peaceful solution. The classes are divided more and more sharply, the spirit of resistance pene- trates the workers, the bitterness intensifies, the guerilla skirmishes become concentrated in more important battles, and soon a slight impulse will suffice to set the avalanche in motion" (p. 335).

THE MIDDLE CLASSES

In analyzing the poverty of the working class, Engels knew that he was dealing with a society where poverty and affluence are in- separably joined; where the production of wealth takes place on condition of the social or absolute impoverishment of the producers. The poverty of the working class had thus always to be compared with the affluence of the middle classes. As Bentham put it:

In the highest stage of social prosperity, the great mass of the citizens will most probably possess few other re-

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sources than their daily labour, and consequently will always be near to indigence [40].

Engels had nothing but contempt and scorn for the middle classes. The bourgeoisie as a class neglected its workers and regarded them as objects and not as human like itself. "Among the middle classes the cultivation of the reasoning power has most significantly developed their self-seeking predisposition. It has made selfishness the ruling passion. It has concentrated all the power of feeling upon the sole concern of greed for money" [41]. Engels was quite cognizant of the fact that this distortion of energy was the requisite accompaniment to the heroic phase of the middle class's economic and social trans- formation of the modern world; but for such acquisitive instinct the bourgeois world could never have been born. But he now argues that the heroic phase of the age of this class had passed. The struggle of the bour- geoisie against the feudal order had by the early nineteenth century been completely distorted. Whatever claim the bourgeoisie made to human progress, it seemed to Engels like a survival of a dead age, the ghost that would haunt the bourgeoisie in its attempt to com- pete with the new forces of development. He summed up his attitude towards the English bourgeoisie as follows:

I have never seen a class so deeply demoralised, so incur- ably debased by selfishness, so corroded within, so in- capable of progress, as the English bourgeoisie; and I mean by this, especially the bourgeoisie proper, partic- ularly the liberal, Corn Law repealing bourgeoisie. For nothing exists in this world, except for the sake of money, itself not excluded. It knows no bliss save that of rapid gain, no pain save of the losing of gold. In the presence of this avarice and lust of gain, it is not possible for a single human sentiment or opinion to remain untainted. True, these English bourgeoisie are good husbands and family men, and have all sorts of private virtues, and appear, in ordinary intercourse, as decent and respectable as all other bourgeoisie; even in business they are better to deal with than the Germans; they do not higgle and haggle so much as our own pettifogging merchants, but how does this help matters? Ultimately it is self-interest, and money gain, which alone determines them. I once went into Manchester with such a bourgeoisie, 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". It is utterly indifferent to the English bourgeoisie whether his working-men starve or not, if only he makes money (pp. 313-314).

To justify its inhuman treatment of the urban poor and the unemployed, the bour- geoisie evolved pseudo-social theories like the Malthusian population theory and imposed on the victims of the system of capitalist development the Malthusian "New Poor Law" of 1834.

For Engels both the proletariat and the bourgeoisie are victimized by the same capi- talist relations of production in which they find themselves. The demoralization that Engels ascribes to the middle classes is the structural counterpart of that suffered by the working classes. In Manchester the anatomy of the city revealed to Engels that the isolated and denied classes were in fact parts of a total whole. The middle class too was enstranged; they too had lost their real human existence and could recognize it only in "objectified" entities; the middle class had undertaken to appropriate a world through means which rendered it permanently alien to them as well [421.

The bourgeoisie and the proletariat were thus the bearers of the same exploitative mode of production. The two classes of such a mode of production presuppose and precon- dition each other and their relationship is not just logical, but material - between exploiter and exploited, oppressor and oppressed. Their relations are moderated only by the cash nexus. For the bourgeoisie, as Engels put it:

All the conditions of life are measured by money, what brings no money is nonsense, unpractical, idealistic bosh ... The relation of the manufacturer to his operatives has nothing human in it, it is purely economic. The manu- facturer is Capital, the operative Labour. And ff the operative will not be forced into this abstraction, if he in- sists that he is not Labour but a man, who possesses,

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among other things, the attributes of labour-force, if he takes it into his hands that he need not allow himself to be sold and bought in the market, as the commodity "Labour", the bourgeois reason comes to a standstill (p. 34) [43].

In the bourgeois city the commodity, like a mysterious external force, rises above humanity and alters its destiny according to the commodity's suprahuman and autonom- ous laws. That is, the imperative of class (i.e., uneven distribution of the social product) translates itself into urban spatial relations. The bourgeoisie realizes itself through its neighborhood enclaves that are defined by property values. Into these walled enclaves the bourgeoisie and its assets retreat in order to enjoy the fruits derived from exploiting the working class, that is left to sink or swim in the inner city core. But class antagonism, despite the effort to "cage" the working class in old run down neighborhoods has a way of defying the bourgeois and reasserting itself in the form of struggle for inner city real estate. The characteristic urban conflict is due to what Harvey calls the "compulsive power of fixed capital," that remains in the down- turn core when the bourgeoisie leap-frogs poor neighborhoods to settle in suburbia. The banks, the museums, the art galleries and various accumulated treasures of human achievement cannot be moved to the suburbs, so the working-class districts in the inner city must be bulldozed to make room for office glass towers celebrating the power of cor- porate wealth. The bourgeoisie, which sees everything in terms of "how much," will seek to undermine and dismantle working-class communal patterns which impede their eco- nomic ends, and will seek to create new inner city forms more in keeping with the needs for accumulation. The bourgeoisie, by reducing land into a commodity, moves all aesthetic restraints that held the growth of earlier cities in check.

The concept of social responsibility, once intuitive to precapitalist communities, is replaced by a single goal: plunder. Every entity and human capacity is conceived as a resource for the acquisition of profit: the land, forests, seas, rivers, the labour of others, and ultimately all the varieties of social life from ... the family to the community itself. The new industrial and commercial classes fall upon the social body like ravenous wolves on a helpless prey, and what remains of a once vital social organism are the torn fragments and indigestible sinews that linger more in the memory of humanity than in the realities of social intercourse. The American urban lot with its rusted cans, broken glass, and debris strewn chaotically among weeds and scrub reflects, in the minus- cule, the ravaged remains of forests; waters, shorelines, and communities [44].

Capitalism is thus an economic system which feeds callousness. The unexampled in- humanities suffered by the working class and the urban poor were not the work of weak or consciously malign men. "Their gigantic horror is in considerable measure precisely found in the circumstances that those who can be held historically responsible for the perpetuation of the unforgivable things are generally virtuous, hardworking, law abiding and upright men of character and strength of purpose" [451.

Given its vested interest in the status quo, it was unrealistic to expect the bourgeoisie to abolish slums and poverty. Socialism was in- compatible with the interests of the bour- geoisie. The bourgeoisie, enslaved by social conditions and the prejudices involved in them, trembles, blesses and crosses himself before everything which really paves the way for progress; the proletariat has open eyes for it, and studies it with pleasure and success (p. 296). The bourgeois answer to working class poverty is charity. But the bourgeoisie required dependence, in social and political quite as much as in directly economic terms. And Engels was scathing in his criticism of such charities.

The English bourgeoisie is charitable out of self-interest; it gives nothing outright, but regards gifts as a business

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matter, makes a bargain with the poor, saying: "If I spend much upon the benevolent institutions, I hereby pur- chase the right not to be troubled any further, and you are bound thereby to stay in your dusky holes and not to irritate my tender nerves by exposing your misery. You shall despair as before, but you shall despair unseen, this 1 require, this I purchase with my subscription of twenty pounds for the infirmary! (p. 316) [46].

Such are the basic ideas of Engels' The Condition of the Working Class in England. It is not free of imprecise and incorrect prop- ositions, which were mainly due to youthful bravado and to the fact that Marxist econom- ic and political theory was still embryonic. Engels assumed that capitalism had already worked out its potentialities as the cyclical crises of overproduction seemed to indicate, while the growing impoverishment of the proletariat was a certain sign that the bour- geoisie was losing its footing [471.

Whereas The Condition Of The Working Class In England in 1844 gives a detailed description of urban conditions in English cities, The Housing Question 1872-73, con- tains the essential proposition of a Marxist approach to the housing and urban systems. Written as a critical response to reform pro- posals that appeared in the Volkestaat, the organ of the German Social Democratic Party, it criticized Mulberger, a Proudhonist who had claimed that home ownership was the solution to the housing question, and Dr. Emil Sax, who saw legal reforms, philan- throphy and moral appeals as the answer to the housing shortage.

Mulberger, like modern urban reformers, had bewailed the lot of the population caught in the modern cities. He was deeply distressed by the shortage of housing. To eliminate the gross injustice of the people who lived "below the savages" he wished to turn society into a "totality of free and independent owners of dwellings" (p. 31) through the gradual pay- ment of the cost of his house by the tenant to the original house-owner. The aim was to make the worker an owner of property.

That the condition of the workers had in general worsened materially since the intro-

duction of capitalist production on a large scale was not in doubt for Engels. But he asked if that necessitated looking back to the past longingly and mourning the passing of rural small-scale industry? The housing short- age, though but one of the evils of capitalism, had a silver lining. "Only the proletariat creat- ed by modern large-scale industry, liberated from all inherited fetters, including those which chained it to the land, and driven its herds into big towns, is in a position to ac- complish the great social transformation which will put an end to all class exploitation and class rule. The old rural hand weaver with hearth and home would never have been able to do it; they would never have been able to conceive such an idea, much less able to desire to carry it out" (p. 24).

Engels used the concrete example of Dr. Emil Sax, The Conditions Of The Working Class And Their Reform, published in 1869, because it had attempted to summarize as far as possible the bourgeois literature on the subject. And Sax claimed to have discovered a new science - social economy - which hoped to devise ways of preserving capitalism by turning all wage workers into capitalists. While Mulberger claimed that once workers owned their dwellings, capitalism would cease to exist, Sax held that by acquiring his own little house the "so called propertyless classes" were to be raised "to propertied classes ... all wage workers can be turned into capitalists without ceasing to be wage work- ers" (p. 45).

This kind of reasoning, Engels argued, was really the ideological prop of the status quo, i.e., the bourgeois order of things. It wanted to eliminate the evils of bourgeois society, yet intended to preserve the economic basis of their evils. He then asked rhetorically: "Whence then comes the housing shortage? How did it arise?" He reminded Dr. Sax that the housing shortage was a necessary product of the bourgeois social order; that it could not fail to be present in a society in which the great masses of the workers were exclusively dependent upon wages;

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[T] hat is to say, on the sum of foodstuffs necessary for their existence and for the propagation of their kind; in which improvements of the existing- machinery contin- ually throw masses of workers out of employment; in which violent and regularly recurring industrial vacilla- tions determine on the one hand the existence of a large reserve army of unemployed workers, and on the other hand drive large masses in the big towns, at a quicker rate than dwellings come into existence for them under exist- ing conditions; in which, therefore there must always be tenants even for the most infamous pigsties; and in which finally the house owner in his capacity as a capi- talist has not only the right, but in view of the competi- tion, to a certain extent also the duty of ruthlessly making as much out of his property in large rents as he possibly can. In such a society the housing shortage is no accident; it is a necessary institution and it can be abol- ished together with all its effects on health, etc., only if the whole social order from which it springs is fundamen- tally refashioned (pp. 46-47).

Thus, for Engels, the housing question was of a secondary nature - the essence of the problem was the capitalist mode of produc- tion itself. That is, the evils that arise around the housing shortage and in the slums of the major cities are a built-in feature of the capi- talist mode of production. The argument that by acquiring his own little house the wage worker would "become a capitalist" and capi- talism would change from an evil into an ideal society revealed the limits of bourgeois "socialism." To solve the problem that is caused by capitalism, the workers must have more of the disease!

The answer for Engels lay in an attack on the capitalist system at its vital point; only in that way could the evils that arose from it, like the housing shortage and slums, be elim- inated. However these were questions that the bourgeois socialists a la Proudhonist chose not to counternance.

It does not explain the housing shortage from the existing conditions ... who ever declares that the capitalist mode of production, the "iron laws" of present-day bourgeois society, axe inviolable, and yet at the same time would like to abolish their unpleasant consequences, has no other resource but to deliver moral sermon to the capital- ist, moral sermons whose emotional effects immediately evaporate under the influences of private interests and, ff necessary of competition (pp. 46-47).

CONTEMPORARY RELEVANCE

Can the concepts dev