180 years since the publication of Engels, Condition of the Working Class in England (in German)
It is one 180 years since the publication of Engels, Condition of the Working Class in England, on 15th March 1845.
Its impact in this country was nil directly as it wasn’t translated into English until 1885 and not published in a UK edition until 1892, although Engels did a deal with the US Publisher to import copies in late 1887, and Commonweal then carried extracts
Engels had spent two years in England, primarily Manchester where of course his family had a company, studying working-class life. He had then returned to write the book in Germany and it was published in Leipzig.
Its indirect influence at the time was significant since the book cemented Engels relationship with Marx and informed their work with the Chartists and others in the later 1840s and beyond.
The 180th anniversary seems particularly apt in present circumstances since the book focuses on the importance of the working class in the capitalist economy and the conditions they lived in. Its something that Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves might care to familiarise themselves with if they havent already of course..
E.P. Thompson in the Making of the English Working Class (section on exploitation) noted of the book that:
The first proletarians were connected with manufacture, were engendered by it…the factory hands, eldest children of the industrial revolution, have from the beginning to the present day formed the nucleus of the Labour Movement’
He then goes on to qualify that it was rather more complex than that. This too is a challenge of understanding for our times 180 years on.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/condition-working-class-england.pdf
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