The Condition of the Working Class in England

The full title is The Condition of the Working Class in England From Personal Observation and Authentic Sources. It is important work by Engels on the social status, struggle course and historical mission of the working class in England. Written between September 1844 and March 1845, first published in March 1845 in Leipzig, Germany.

After the first industrial revolution, great changes took place in the social and economic relations and class structure in Britain, and a massive working class gradually took shape. They earned their living by selling their labor, and created huge social wealth in their hard work, but were often threatened by unemployment, hunger and death, and the workers began a resistance that turned from a spontaneous to conscious struggle. In September, 1842, Engels traveled to Manchester, and in the next twenty-one months, he “gave up the bourgeois social activities and banquets, Porto wine and champagne, and spent almost all his spare time in communication with ordinary workers”, collected practical data, and began to comprehensively investigate the status of the working class, summarized the experience of its movement, and elaborated the urgent tasks of its historical mission.

In the work, Engels examined the history of the emergence and development of the working class in England on the basis of empirical data and exposed the exploitation and oppression of the proletariat by capitalism. Beginning with a description of the image of the British society in the pre-capitalist period, Engels outlined the history of the development of British capitalist industry and the emergence of the proletariat over the past 60 years, explained the objective historical process of the formation of the British working class along with the industrial revolution, and genuinely reproduced the tragic situation of the working class in terms of material life, intellectual life and working conditions. In terms of real life, Engels presented the reality from the aspects of clothing, food, conditions of life, etc., and described all the hunger, disease and death caused by poverty suffered by the working class. In terms of intellectual life, Engels believed that the working class was even more deprived because all their intellectual, spiritual and moral development was neglected in the capitalist society. In terms of labor, Engels pointed out that the adoption of machines put many workers out of work, and the extensive use of child labor and female labor crowded out adult male workers, which led to all kinds of diseases in the bodies of women, children, and men, as a result of the avarice of the bourgeoisie. On this basis, Engels drew his analysis deeper and revealed the social roots of the inhuman treatment of the proletariat—the capitalist political and economic system, leading to the irreconcilability of the contradiction between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie and the inevitability of the intensification of the contradictions of the whole society, and in the analysis, he highly praised the English proletariat, clarified its historical position, and emphasized the historical role of the proletariat in overthrowing the capitalist system and striving for its own ultimate emancipation. It can be said that in The Condition of the Working Class in England Engels exposed the cruel exploitation of the proletariat by the bourgeoisie, made a righteous indictment of the bourgeoisie and proved the historical destiny of the inevitable fall of the capitalist system.

Starting from the industrial development and economic facts in England, The Condition of the Working Class in England made a righteous indictment of capitalism and bourgeoisie, and clarified the antagonism and struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. Although it “exhibits everywhere the traces of the descent of modern socialism from one of its ancestors, classical German philosophy”, it marked basic completion of the transformation of Engels’ world outlook. Lenin called it “one of the best works of world socialist literature”, “a terrible indictment of capitalism and the bourgeoisie”, and “the best picture of the condition of the modern proletariat”.