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View allThe Condition of the Working-Class in England
Engels
1845
A 24-year-old walks Manchester's slums and writes down what industrialization actually cost.
The Condition of the Working-Class in England
Friedrich Engels · 1845
In 1844 Engels spent his days in a Manchester cotton firm and his nights walking the streets the factory system built, cross-checking what he saw against the government's own commission reports. The result is the empirical foundation under everything he and Marx wrote afterward — class struggle here is not a theory but a walked geography of courts, cellars, mills, and mines. And the book comes with its own 50-years-later verdict: the 1892 preface, written by the aging Engels, on what came true, what improved, and why he still thought the cause lay in the system itself.
13 chapters · 116,040 words · ~8.8 hr read
Contents
The Prefaces
Engels's 1892 preface — his own verdict on the book fifty years on — and the Introduction's history of how the factory system unmade the old weaver's world.
The Survey
The evidence, trade by trade and town by town: the great towns, competition and immigration, the factory hands, the mines, and the fields.
The Verdict
The closing indictment of the bourgeoisie — and the prediction of a revolution that the 1892 preface would have to answer for.