[In the following essay, Levin analyzes Engels' study of the English proletariat and the effects of factory work on this class. Levin focuses on the factors that affected the development of Engels' thought on socialism and class conflict, maintaining that despite Engels' later emphasis on the proletariat's infiltration of parliament, Engels still saw revolution as necessary.]

I THE PROLETARIAT

Engels regarded the segmentation of the city as merely the product of the segmentation of the social classes. ‘It is not surprising’, he thought,

that the working-class has gradually become a race wholly apart from the English bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie has more in common with every other nation of the earth than with the workers in whose midst it lives. The workers speak other dialects, have other thoughts and ideals, other customs and moral principles, a different religion and other politics than those of the bourgeoisie. Thus they are two radically dissimilar nations, as unlike as difference of race could make them.¹

This passage is clearly similar to the more famous one in Disraeli's Sybil or the Two Nations, also published in 1845. Peter Demetz notes that it was ‘a popular idea of that age’ and had also been used a few years earlier in W. C. Taylor's Notes of a Tour in the Manufacturing Districts of Lancashire (1842).²

The divide between bourgeois and worker was but the consequence of that between the propertied and the unpropertied. The one class controlled; the other was in servitude to it. The worker's life was ruled by compulsion. Just as no one would voluntarily live in their quarter, so also nobody would engage in their work situation except under the direst necessity. ‘Nothing’, says Engels, ‘is more terrible than being constrained to do some one thing every day from morning until night against one's will.’ It is some one thing because the division of labour had reduced the worker's activity ‘to some paltry, mechanical manipulation, repeated minute after minute, unchanged year after year’. Such work could never be done for its own sake. It offered no stimulus to the mind nor exercise for the body. It was ‘the most cruel, degrading punishment’ which left neither the time nor the energy for more satisfying activities, for Engels found instances of young girls having to work from 19 to 22 hours daily. The supervision of machinery neither required thought nor allowed it. The operative is ‘bored all day long from his eighth year’. There is, Engels concluded, ‘no better means of inducing stupefaction than a period of factory-work’.³

It was, thought Engels, of little comfort to the male worker that in the mills his labour was being gradually superseded by women and children, who were thought to be more dexterous in the handling of broken thread. From Lord Ashley's 1844 speech on the Ten Hours Bill, Engels quotes the information that in 1839 nearly half the factory operatives in the British Empire were under 18. Clearly a worker's youth impaired proper physical and mental development. There were ‘few vigorous, well-built, healthy persons among the … factory operatives’. Among the miners Engels found shortness of stature, retardation of puberty, ‘distortions of the legs, knees bent inwards and feet bent outwards’ and ‘deformities of the spinal column … in consequence of the almost universally constrained position during work’. Yet unemployment was no blessing either, for the workers had no property to sustain them. Their wages were their sole means of subsistence yet were as insecure as their employment and so were threatened by both technological change and by the trade cycle. ‘Every working-man, even the best, is therefore constantly exposed to loss of work and food, that is to death by starvation, and many perish in this way.’⁴ When Engels turned to the mortality statistics he found a correlation between class and longevity; the higher the class, the greater the longevity. The worker, then, was deprived of youth and exercised full adult powers for only a few years before being condemned to an early grave.

II THE IRISH

Thus far we have taken the proletariat as one undifferentiated class. Engels knew from both Carlyle and his own experience that this was not the case, for the working class contained its ethnic stratification. Beneath the indigenous working class lay the Irish immigrants. Engels's first depiction of them was somewhat romantic and patronising. ‘The Irishman is a carefree, cheerful, potato-eating child of nature.’ However, ‘he bears the burden of five centuries of oppression with all its consequences’. These include being held below the level of modern civilisation, so producing a ‘contradiction with himself’ when he was driven to work in England. The Irishman, then, needed England, like the proletariat needed the bourgeoisie, but with this difference, that the Irishman was more easily roused to anger against his oppressor. ‘Is it surprising that, like any other half-savage, he strikes out blindly and furiously on every opportunity, that his eyes burn with a perpetual thirst for revenge, a destructive fury.’ This ‘violent hatred of the Gaels against the Saxons’⁵ had already found its political form in demonstrations in Cork, Nepaph and Kilkenny of between 150 000 and 400 000 for repeal of the Union. Their leader Daniel O'Connell had rejected the support of the Chartists but clearly Engels saw the possibility of this primal fury being used for socialist ends. However, agitation in Ireland was not being matched in England. In Manchester the district known as Little Ireland was the worst in the whole city, and ‘the race’ that lived there had ‘reached the lowest stage of humanity’. Engels accepted much of Carlyle's characterisation of the Irish; that they are shoeless, feed only on potatoes and otherwise spend all they have on drink. The squalor of the farmyard found its way into the densest working-class suburbs, for ‘The Irishmen loves his pig as the Arab his horse’ and before killing the pig lives with it, sometimes in the same room, and treats it as a pet for the children. In consequence, ‘Whenever a district is distinguished for especial filth and especial ruinousness’ the visitor may be sure it is inhabited by the Irish. Having no skills or training, the Irish were confined to occupations that required strength alone. They were to be found predominantly among the hand weavers, bricklayers, porters, jobbers, and such workers’. Here their competition with the English working class lowers wages and provides ‘a strong, degrading influence upon their English companions’. This would appear be a negative outcome, but Engels concluded that the Irish further deepened the chasm between workers and bourgeoisie, and [thereby] hastened the approaching crisis’.⁶

That the Irish were in England at all was a consequence of their circumstance in Ireland itself and in The Condition of the Working Class Engels devoted a few pages to the agricultural proletariat in Ireland. As he saw it, competition for land had driven up prices and led to an excessive subdivision of the soil. From the Poor Law Commissioners Report for 1837, Engels noted that Ireland actually had 75 000 more agricultural proletarians than the rest of the United Kingdom. They were unable to escape from the most extreme poverty, which was most liable to arrive in the time between the planting and the harvesting of the potato crop. During this period the family is temporarily broken up, for while the ‘wife and children go forth to beg and tramp the country’⁷ the husband seeks work elsewhere in Ireland or in England. Engels noted that over a quarter of the population were paupers.

Like Mill a few years later, Engels considered some possible solutions to the dilemma of Irish agriculture, though he did so in a far less thorough reasoned manner. Mill's solution, it will be recalled, was to increase peasant proprietorship. Engels had no faith in such remedies. The individual holdings were too small for most people to live off them and any improvements achieved would be nullified by population increase. Again unlike Mill, Engels did not blame the English for Irish conditions. All they had done was to cause the ‘somewhat earlier appearance of the poverty but not… the poverty itself’.⁸ Consequently Engels was not sympathetic to the campaign for repeal of the Act of Union. It merely fed the illusion that the solution to Irish distress lay elsewhere than in Ireland itself. Similarly, the Protestant church in a Catholic country could be seen as a contributor to the woes of the majority of the Irish people, but was not a main cause, for the extent of the tithes it extracted was relatively minor. Ultimately Engels is with Carlyle in relating Irish poverty to the national character. The Irish were said to share the temperament of the Latin nations. ‘Feeling and passion predominate. … Their sensuous, excitable nature prevents reflection and quiet, persevering activity from reaching development—such a nation is utterly unfit for manufacture as now conducted.’ Having rejected currently popular solutions, Engels, who otherwise was not short of answers to all social problems, declined to give one. His way forward was via the industrial working class. This Ireland did not have. Neither Chartism nor socialism had made much headway there. Though he did not say so in 1845, one can easily imagine Ireland being categorised with the ‘non-historic nations’ which he condemned to oblivion a few years later.

Engels's few further comments on Ireland during the 1840s were in brief reports for the Parisian daily La Réforme . In October 1847 he referred both to the starvation and to the consequent ‘alarming’ immigration to England. This was likely to both increase competition between workers and lead the government towards unspecified ‘reforms of a most important nature’. A few months later Irish rioting and refusal to pay the Poor Tax led to the Irish Coercion Bill which, according to Engels, gave the Lord Lieutenant ‘despotic powers’.⁹ This, and the ascent of Feargus O'Connor, gave Engels the whiff of a revolutionary situation. As an Irishman and owner and editor of the Chartist Northern Star, O'Connor campaigned for the association of the Irish struggle with the English working-class movement. Already in 1842 the Chartist petition to parliament had called for the repeal of the Act of Union. Now in 1848 Engels suddenly felt ‘no doubt’ that the mass of the Irish people would act with the English Chartists. This volte-face was in no way linked to his earlier analysis and is just one instance of the tendency of both Engels and Marx to see stirrings of revolutionary socialism behind all manner of protests and riots.

Engels had largely followed Carlyle's characterisation of the Irish and followed him again in comparing modern subjection with its predecessor. ‘Let us’, he says, ‘compare the condition of the free Englishman of 1845 with the Saxon serf under the lash of the Norman barons of 1145.’ Neither condition was enviable. Saxon and modern Englishman were both propertyless, the one tied to the soil, the other to the employer, but the former could not be sold whereas the latter was forced to sell himself; the one in subjection to the land, the other to the ‘necessities of life’— which conditions Engels rather unconvincingly amalgamates, as ‘both are slaves of a thing.’ However, a key difference is that the serf had a guaranteed place within the social order whereas the modern labourer was an outcast when the employing class had no use for him. On balance Engels judged the condition of the serf and the wage labourer as ‘not far from equal’¹⁰ with the former possibly having an advantage. Serfdom, says Engels, was at least honest and unhypocritical, whereas modern exploitation is ‘disguised’ and ‘deceitfully concealed’. However, Britain's advanced state of hypocrisy opened the space through which real liberation would emerge for a slavery that is disguised at least recognises ‘the principle of freedom’. This was an advance on the earlier condition, for the principle being affirmed would lead to the working class eventually carrying it out.

Faith in proletarian self-liberation depended upon an optimistic estimate of either their education or their inherent rationality. Concerning the former, their formal opportunities were strictly limited. Very few schools were open to the working class and they were of low quality; not that it made much difference, for the children working in factories, mills or at home could not be permitted the time to attend them. Yet more education was coming the workers' way, not through formal schooling but through the more immediate lessons of their actual life. Though they were often illiterate and could do little arithmetic the workers still knew where their interests lay. They knew that repeal of the Corn Laws was but a bourgeois trick to bind them more closely to the power of the market. Having himself fought free from the church, Engels was delighted by the workers' natural distance from it. Through lack of education, he says, the workers neither understand religious questions nor trouble themselves about them. ‘All the writers of the bourgeoisie are unanimous on this point, that the workers are not religious, and do not attend church.’¹¹ However, this lack of attention to celestial matters leaves them with a clearer eye for terrestrial ones. Engels, then, reversed the standard notion of an identity between formal education and knowledge and declared the educated bourgeoisie more deluded and ignorant than the uneducated workers. The bourgeoisie are said to be blinded by avarice and deluded by religion. Only one of their insights, it seems, was correct and that was their realisation that urbanisation augments the strength of the labouring class.

Thus far the strength of the workers has not been evident, unless numbers alone weigh in the balance. Otherwise the evidence pointed to their collective weakness. They were poor, insecure, unhealthy and ignorant and even Engels accepted the conventional denigration of them as feckless, improvident, drunken, licentious and criminal. He had, he tells us, been in Manchester on a Saturday evening and seen drunken people staggering about and lying in the gutter. He knew of how despair drives a man to the bottle and how drunkenness destroys marriage. Were not such people bound to grasp any fleeting pleasure rather than plan and save for the future as the middle-class economists instructed? Engels, then, did not deny the unfavourable side of the proletarian character but merely the attempts to remedy it by religious, temperance or philanthropic movements. The workers' morals and behaviour were the consequence of their circumstances and could not be improved without wider social reform.

What, then, could be expected of a class so ground down by disadvantages? The conventional view that Engels must have heard from all sides of his own class was entirely negative, that the workers were potentially disorderly and riotous and liable to believe in absurd panaceas. In short, they were dangerous and needed to be controlled and directed by their natural superiors. However, Engels's whole prior personal development had consisted in rejecting what was conventional. In respect of the workers, perhaps his Hegelianism helped him towards the dialectical paradox of the worse the better, for though industrialisation had degraded the conditions of the labourers it also provided the conditions for their emancipation.

We have so far only suggested their number as a source of working-class hope; that there are more of them than of the bourgeoisie. Yet quantity has appeared to be little more than a multiplication of impoverishment. What turns it into a potential strength are not numbers alone (which the poor had always had against the rich) but aggregation and simplification. Industrialisation had transformed the agricultural labourer into the urban proletariat. The latter developed a greater sense of belonging to a wider class than the former could ever attain. Furthermore, industrialisation simplified the class structure and removed the ladder that offered ascent into the middle class. In place of the multiple gradations of a society dependent on handicraft, the factory system produced the homologous, interchangeable, unskilled worker. This worker is essentially the same as all others, a realisation that leads to the perception ‘that, though feeble as individuals, they form a power united’. In the countryside the classes mingled and so the labourers were suffused with the deferential culture that their masters inculcated. In the cities this was lost. The scale of the modern factory increased the number of workers per employer. A patriarchal and personal relationship was no longer possible. Corresponding with distance within the workplace, the social segmentation outside of it strengthened the chance for the workers to develop their own culture. ‘Without the great cities’, says Engels, ‘and their forcing influence upon the popular intelligence, the working-class would be far less advanced than it is.’ In the cities ‘the consciousness of oppression awakens, and the workers attain social and political importance.’¹² The city, then, produces socialism, for a class-conscious worker is one who understands the antagonism between workers and bourgeoisie and from this goes on to form trade unions and political parties.

Thus we understand what England meant to Engels. It was where industrialisation was most developed, where the workers were most numerous, most oppressed and most distinct. Hence they were nearest to socialism. Engels outlines his developmental scale according to which the workers in the cities are more advanced than those in the countryside, and those in industry more than those in handicraft or agriculture. Within industry too, a gradation was evident: ‘the factory-hands are most enlightened as to their interests, the miners somewhat less so’. The former ‘have from the beginning to the present day formed the nucleus of the Labour Movement … the others have joined this movement just in proportion as their handicraft has been invaded by the industrial revolution’. The paradox of industrialisation is evident in Engels's very first paragraph on Manchester. He notes that ‘The degradation to which the application of steam-power, machinery and the division of labour reduce the working-man, and the attempts of the proletariat to rise above this abasement, must likewise be carried to the highest point and with the fullest consciousness.’ In England the cotton industry was the most mechanised and so its workers stood at the head of the labour movement and were the most hated by their employers. In this dialectic of development the most advanced workers confront the most aggressive bourgeoisie, for their manufacturers, ‘especially those of Lancashire, take the lead of the bourgeois agitation’. Where this logic would point was already evident. With supreme confidence in his diagnosis, Engels declared that ‘the course of the social disease from which England is suffering is the same as the course of a physical disease; it develops according to certain laws, has its own crises, the last and most violent of which determines the fate of the patient’. Thus we must ‘rejoice over everything which accelerates the course of the disease’. One contributory factor was the importation of the ‘passionate, mercurial Irish temperament’¹³ in combination with the more stable English, but a more fundamental development was the rise of Chartism and the labour movement.

III CHARTISM AND THE PROSPECTS FOR REVOLUTION

In November 1842 Engels's first publications on English politics appeared in the Rheinische Zeitung and from this point revolution and Chartism were clearly on his mind. The two, however, were not necessarily synonymous and at first Engels struggled to formulate a coherent account of their relationship. Though England's social and political edifice was said to rest on weak and anachronistic foundations, a Chartism confining itself to legal means and merely awaiting majority rule was no immediate threat. Its legalism didn't even have the advantage of winning middle-class support, for not even the bourgeois Radicals seemed to understand where Chartism came from. The middle class as a whole were bound to oppose it for universal suffrage would end the dominance of property in the House of Commons. Middle-class rejection was convenient in terms of class purity, for it left Chartism as a predominantly proletarian movement. Though in 1842 Engels thought Chartism backward in terms of tactics, the movement was at least growing steadily. Furthermore Engels assumed that material conditions would change consciousness and was confident that growing hunger would eventually compel the movement to overcome its very English respect for the law. A year later we find Engels closer to the Chartist frame of mind. Now democracy and revolution are no longer alternatives. They have been amalgamated for ‘before the assault of a democratic House of Commons, the whole rotten structure, Crown, Lords and so forth must collapse of its own accord’.¹⁴

The upranking of both workers' consciousness and the Chartist movement continued in The Condition of the Working Class. Engels here decided that ‘the working-men do not respect the law, but simply submit to its power when they cannot change it’. Chartism is elevated to a movement of ‘the whole working-class' (emphasis added) and one whose mood is near to the fever-pitch of revolution. Engels defended the Chartist concentration on winning the franchise, for the Six Points, ‘harmless as they seem’ are directed to where real power lies and so ‘are sufficient to overthrow the whole English Constitution, Queen and Lords included’. Furthermore, and in spite of its parliamentary focus, Chartism could not be seen as narrowly political, for the movement was combining with the campaigns against the 1834 Poor Law and for the Ten Hours Bill as part of the general radical agitation of its time. However this breadth of concern endangered its class integrity. One sign of this was its links with the Anti-Corn Law League. In February 1842 a meeting of Liberals and Chartists in Manchester had produced a joint petition against the Corn Laws and for the Charter. With the Tories now in government, the Liberals, according to Engels, had ‘half abandoned their law-abiding habits’ and ‘wished to bring about a revolution with the help of the workers’.¹⁵ However, when violence actually threatened, the liberal bourgeoisie feared the consequences. They realised that they had unleashed powers that would be hard to control. They consequently retreated to the old law-and-order stance and shamelessly blamed the Chartists for the agitation they had themselves instigated.

In the course of this cross-class activity a number of workers had been prosecuted and convicted but the affair still had its positive side. The workers had learnt that the bourgeoisie would not go the whole revolutionary way. Workers would also be wary of being drawn into campaigns that did not really concern them, which was Engels's view of the Anti-Corn Law Campaign. A cross-class alliance was tempting when a common enemy had to be tackled but even the liberal bourgeoisie were false friends. The proletariat, thought Engels, at last realised it had to go its own way. From early 1843, he concluded, this was achieved when Chartism became ‘purely a working-men's cause freed from all bourgeois elements’.¹⁶

With Chartism achieving its proper class basis and concern, Engels turned to the question of its doctrine. Here there were deficiencies. For a time O'Connor and other Chartist leaders had favoured returning workers to the land by providing them with small plots for a low rental. We may assume that Engels saw this as a clear rejection of modern developments. Otherwise Engels dismissed Chartism's ‘practical propositions (“protection for the worker, etc.”)’ on the vague and unspecified grounds that they were ‘apparently of a reactionary nature’. This was not crucially detrimental for, whatever the shortcomings of the working class, history came to the rescue. Its ineluctable forward march would dislodge those still sitting on the fence. For Engels there was no ‘third way’. The Chartists would have to succumb to competition or else abolish it. If this was as yet unclear to them, clarification would arrive with the imminent crisis which, with the brazen confidence of youth, Engels predicted ‘must follow the present active state of industry and commerce in 1847 at the latest, and probably in 1846’, that is in the following year. The Charter will be carried, ‘naturally’, but suddenly, in contrast to Engels's earlier analysis, this achievement appears somewhat eclipsed in the context of events ‘which will far exceed in extent and violence all former crises’.¹⁷

With the working class not yet as he wanted them, Engels next turned to English socialism. The one was the agency, the other the movement. They belonged together although they had not yet united. The movement of the working class was Chartism. Whatever socialism it contained was still incipient. Chartism was proletarian but insufficiently socialist, whereas socialism was identified with Owenite colonies of a few thousand people who ‘carry on both agriculture and manufacture and enjoy equal rights and equal education’. In October 1844, precisely while he was preparing his longer work, The Condition of the Working Class, Engels wrote his ‘Description of Recently Founded Communist Colonies Still in Existence’. Here he treated the terms socialism and communism as synonymous. He sought to refute charges of their being impractical with an account of Shaker and other communities in the United States of America and of the Owenite colony founded at Harmony, in Hampshire in 1839. The latter consisted of an estate of about twelve thousand acres with a hundred members ‘mainly engaged so far in arable farming’. In contrast to his direct contact with the Chartists and the industrial working class, Engels had not visited the Hampshire community. He relied upon sympathetic accounts provided in the Owenite New Moral World, the Chartist Northern Star and by the radical journalist Alexander Somerville. On this basis he concluded that cooperative communities were entirely plausible and successful. ‘We … see that the people who are living communally live better with less work, have more leisure for the development of their minds, and that they are better, more moral people than their neighbours who have retained private property.’ As such, and Engels was writing for a German audience, it was ‘the duty of the German workers also to take the question [of community of goods] seriously to their hearts’.¹⁸

The contrast between this article and his contemporary book is both striking and significant. As an indication of the shift of tone we may note that Robert Owen, favourably designated in the article as a ‘philanthropist’ has, in the book, been relegated to the category of ‘manufacturer’.¹⁹ Owen was still credited with the emergence of English socialism but even this was reduced to a partial advantage, for his contribution was tainted by his social origins and so resulted in the consequent deleterious decrease of class hostility. English socialism, then, was ‘thoroughly tame and peaceful’, avoiding any measures that might frighten the ruling class. Its tactics consisted of nothing more threatening than the attempt to persuade public opinion. Just as it was devoid of the audacity of French radical politics, so also English socialism lacked the historical breadth of German philosophy. Instead of grasping how the path of development necessarily leads to the ‘dissolution of the old social order’, it wished for the miracle by which the nation was ‘overnight’ to wake up to the utopia of communism. This socialism failed to see itself as the product of historically produced social circumstances and had replaced historical sociology with a theory of individual psychological development. For its English supporters, socialism was merely the product of individual minds developed to a higher state of awareness. For Engels this was ‘too abstract, too metaphysical’.²⁰ English socialists preached brotherly love whereas Engels favoured class conflict. They understood why the worker hated the employer but were too ashamed of this emotion to harness it for political purposes.

Brief though it is, the above analysis deserves a moment's reflection, for, as Gregory Claeys has noted,²¹ it contains the essence of the critique that was later to divide Marxists from those they derided as ‘Utopian Socialists’. A fuller development of this theory was provided by Marx in the Communist Manifesto three years later and considerably expanded by Engels over thirty years later into Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, a foundation text of popular Marxism. Engels here provides the embryonic articulation of a doctrine that, for nearly a hundred and fifty years, was fundamental in separating the communists from others on the left. As such it is an insufficiently recognised key moment in the development of Marxist doctrine.

Engels, then, was working for the amalgamation of class, movement and doctrine, in this context the proletariat, Chartism and socialism. Frustratingly, none were quite as he would have them. The Chartist movement had become properly proletarian, but the working class was insufficiently socialist and English socialism was less developed than that of the French. Engels wanted what he called ‘true proletarian socialism’ and he ended his chapter on ‘Labour Movements’ with the conviction that the education of the workers was moving precisely in that direction. He noted that trades unionists, Chartists and socialists were seeing to their own education, ‘free from all the influences of the bourgeoisie’. As an alternative to the Mechanics’ Institutes, where the employers had them instructed in the natural sciences, dutiful obedience and the wonders of Political Economy, the workers had established their own schools and reading rooms. In consequence it was working men alone who were reading the latest works on literature, philosophy and politics. Engels was particularly pleased to hear of translations of the French materialists, Helvetius, Holbach and Diderot, of the Young Hegelian David Friedrich Strauss's Life Of Jesus (by George Eliot) and of Proudhon's Property. Apart from Strauss these authors were all French but Engels doubtless welcomed any sign of the English accepting continental critical thought. Among their own writers, Engels welcomed the appreciation of Bentham and Godwin, the ‘two great practical philosophers’ and Shelley, ‘the genius, the prophet’, and Byron, with ‘his bitter satire upon our existing society’.²²

Whatever imperfections Engels found in the English, he never doubted that their social conditions placed them at the forefront of development. In the Preface to The Condition of the Working-Class we learn that, particularly in England, the gulf between owners and non-owners grows sharper every day so that ‘proletarian conditions exist in their classical form’. At the close of the Introduction Engels noted ‘the deep wrath of the whole working-class, from Glasgow to London, against the rich’ and so concluded that the ‘speedy collapse’ of society was ‘as certain as a mathematical or mechanical demonstration’. It was, however, considerably less orderly, for Engels felt able to predict ‘a revolution in comparison with which the French Revolution, and the year 1794, will prove to have been child's play’. The same message reappears in the last pages of the book where readers are told that unless the English bourgeoisie ‘pause to reflect … the vengeance of the people will come down with a wrath of which the rage of 1793 gives no true idea. The war of the poor against the rich will be the bloodiest ever waged. … The revolution must come; it is already too late to bring about a peaceful solution.’ Such confidence may seem surprising in view of Engels's lukewarm comments on the state of socialism in England. However, the country had an advantage that others lacked, for the society lay on a volcano. Beneath it seismic rumblings, the primal forces of industrial development and economic crisis, were pushing towards the inevitable explosion. The logic of economic advance, then, placed English socialism at the forefront of international developments. This, of course, is the presupposition behind the whole work.

Engels's investigation of conditions in England made him increasingly aware of Germany's relative backwardness. By 1847 Engels decided that ‘in every factory town [in England] the Chartists have shown more activity than all the German political, socialist and religious parties taken together’. His identification with the Chartist movement was probably now at its peak. Engels had been contributing to the Chartist Northern Star since the end of 1843 and one of their reports of November 1847 noted the speech of a ‘Citizen Engels (from Paris)’ who declared that he ‘had resided for some time in England, and was proud to boast himself a Chartist “name and all”. (Great cheering)’.²³

By far the best-known Marxist consideration of the leading countries' political placing in the 1840s is the Communist Manifesto, where Germany appears as an exception to the general scheme. In Germany—in spite of the fetters of state structures with feudal remnants—a bourgeois economic system had developed to the stage of producing a proletariat class that was not only beginning to organise itself, but was actually on the verge of assisting in a bourgeois revolution that would be ‘but the prelude to an immediately following proletarian revolution’.²⁴ It was for this reason that ‘the communists turn their attention chiefly to Germany’, a country thought to be on the eve of a bourgeois revolution, rather than to France and England, countries already well past that stage.

The reference to German pre-eminence is contained in a section of the Manifesto that places the communists in relation to other opposition parties. After Germany the countries considered are, in order of appearance, France, Switzerland and Poland. As for England and America, section IV begins by stating that ‘Section II has made clear the relations of the Communists to the existing working-class parties, such as the Chartists in England and the Agrarian Reformers in America.’ However, if one turns to Section II for elaboration one finds merely a general statement of the relationship of communists to ‘the proletarians as a whole’, with no explicit reference either to England or the United States of America. Thus, surprisingly, the Manifesto contains not so much as one precise sentence on the context of communist struggle in the most industrially advanced capitalist country at that time. Yet in the very month (November 1847) that the Communist League commissioned the preparation of their Manifesto, its authors had delivered speeches containing the following pronouncements:

Marx: Of all countries, England is the one where the contradiction between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie is most highly developed. The victory of the English proletarians over the English bourgeoisie is, therefore, decisive for the victory of all the oppressed over their oppressors.

Engels: I also believe that the first decisive blow which will lead to the victory of democracy, to the liberation of all European nations will be struck by the English Chartists.²⁵

One should, of course, point out that these speeches were made in London, whereas the Manifesto, although first published in London, was written primarily for the German Labour Movement. Engels had for some years been more pessimistic than Marx concerning developments in Germany. With his more direct experience of Manchester and the Chartist movement, Engels more consistently regarded England as forming the vanguard of political as much as of economic advance. As an example of the difference of emphasis let us compare the section on German predominance in the Manifesto, written by Marx, with its first draft, Principles of Communism, written by Engels in October 1847. In answer to the question ‘Will it be possible for this revolution to take place in one country alone?’ Engels replied that communist revolution will occur in all civilised countries at the same time, that is ‘at least in England, America, France and Germany’. But in each of these countries it would develop at a different pace, depending on the level of industry, wealth and productive strength. ‘It will therefore be slowest and most difficult to carry out in Germany, quickest and easiest in England.’ Earlier in the same month Engels had noted that ‘As a result of its industrial lethargy, Germany occupies such a wretched position in Europe that it can never seize an initiative, never be the first to proclaim a great revolution, never establish a republic on its own account without France and England.’²⁶ We must, then, assume that the formulation in the Manifesto represents Marx's deliberate revision of Engels's very different emphasis on the place of England on the road to revolution.

IV REVOLUTION AND COUNTER-REVOLUTION

It so happened that the Communist Manifesto was published in an appropriately revolutionary month, February 1848, but the uprisings commenced not in Germany, where Marx had directed his attention, nor in England, which Engels had placed at the forefront of development. In the year of revolution Italy, unmentioned in the Manifesto, was first off the mark with an insurrection in Palermo in January, followed by others in Turin, Tuscany and Lombardy in the following month. Of more significance for the continent was the Paris revolution which commenced on 22 February and forced the abdication of Louis Philippe. Later disturbances in France, Germany, Italy, Austria, Hungary, Spain, Poland, and Bohemia were not matched by comparable uprisings in Great Britain, which suffered the fear without the reality of revolution.

A few years earlier England had seemed the place to be. In 1848 if one was a revolutionary, it was the place not to be and Engels wasn't. He had the luck or good sense to start the year in Paris, from where he was expelled at the end of January and so left for Brussels. After the February revolution the new government invited him back to France but he was soon enticed away by disturbances throughout Germany. As one indication of where their hearts lay, Marx and Engels, while still in Paris, had joined other Communist League members in producing the ‘Demands of the Communist Party in Germany’ and after about two weeks in Paris, Engels left for Germany on about 6 April. In Cologne he worked as one of the editors of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung until the city authorities declared a state of siege, suspended the paper and issued a warrant for his arrest. After hiding in Barmen, Engels left for Belgium from where the police soon expelled him. He arrived in Paris on 5 October and could have returned to Germany as the Cologne siege was now over. However, for reasons that one can only conjecture, he set out on a leisurely walk to Switzerland, enjoying wine and women en route, and not returning to Germany until January 1849. Revolution, however, had not passed him by. He was able to put his military training to use in a democratic uprising in Elberfeld in May and against the Prussian troops in Baden and the Bavarian Palatinate in the following months. This did not provide the glory for which he hoped, for in the end it was just a matter of organising a withdrawal. W. O. Henderson has noted that ‘The Baden insurgents … were completely isolated and could no longer take the offensive. They could only retreat in face of the overwhelmingly superior forces of Prussia and the German Federation massed against them.’ Engels, with Willich and Liebknecht, did well ‘to escape capture for the Prussians took a terrible revenge upon the revolutionaries who fell into their hands’.²⁷ After the revolutionary movements had been crushed, Engels crossed Switzerland, got a boat from Genoa and arrived in London in November, his first visit to England since 1847.

So, during the main period of revolution Engels was not in Great Britain and its affairs were scarcely on his mind. As an indication of this, volume seven of the Marx-Engels Collected Works includes their articles for the Neue Rheinische Zeitung between June and November 1848. Of these 141 articles only one, of five pages, deals with England. It was written by Engels in response to a claim from the Kölnische Zeitung that in England, unlike France, there was no hatred against the bourgeoisie. This was not a statement that Engels could leave unchallenged. Between 1839 and 1842, he retorted, English workers sustained ‘the most advanced class struggle the world has seen’. He warned that the ‘class war of the Chartists, the organised party of the proletariat, against the organised political power of the bourgeoisie, has not yet led to those terrible bloody clashes which took place during the June uprising in Paris, but it is waged by a far larger number of people with much greater tenacity and on a much larger territory’. This is clearly a threat of cataclysms still to come, yet the earlier assumption of English pre-eminence is no longer evident and it was France that now merited the title of ‘classic country as regards hatred of the bourgeoisie’.²⁸ Other references to England in these articles are even less flattering. In June 1848 England was described as ‘the rock upon which the counter-revolution will build its church’. Three months later Engels added Russia and the Prussian government in a new triarchy, this time of the ‘most counter-revolutionary powers in Europe’.²⁹

What, then, of Engels's hopes for Chartism? In 1848, when people in Britain were occupied with the Chartist menace, Engels was not. He paid it very little attention, not even granting it his expressions of disappointment. One of Engels's Chartist friends was George Julian Harney, the editor of The Northern Star. In 1846 Harney had responded to Engels's optimistic hopes for revolution in England with some sober reflections. Harney rejected Engels's expectations of a speedy revolution in England with the Charter attained within a year and the abolition of private property within three years. ‘Indeed as regards the latter, although it may and I hope will come, it is my belief that neither you nor I will see it.’ Furthermore, ‘A long immunity from the presence of war in their own country and the long suspension of the militia has created a general distaste for arms, which year by year is becoming more extensive and more intense. The body of the English people … are becoming an eminently pacific people.’ Harney rejected the Chartist ‘physical-force’ agitation as likely to do more harm than good and concluded that ‘To organise, to conspire a revolution in this country would be a vain and foolish project and the men who with their eyes open could take part in so absurd an attempt would be worse than foolish, would be highly culpable.’³⁰

Engels had clearly been put in his place and certainly Harney's approach has better stood the test of time as a description of English political culture. However, as far as Engels was concerned, the long letter might never have been written, for it influenced neither his political proposals nor his confidence in Harney's political prospects. Writing to his brother-in-law Emil Blank just five days after the Chartist fiasco of 10 April 1848, Engels, high with delight at the fear the imagined his presence in Barmen produced, still expected the Chartists to attain a continental level of disturbance. ‘In a couple of months’, he imagined, ‘my friend’ Harney ‘will be in Palmerston's shoes. I'LL BET YOU TWOPENCE AND IN FACT ANY SUM.’³¹

After the defeat of the continental revolutionary movements, Engels's heady expectation of deeds gave way to sober faith in socio-economic processes. Deeds were the continental stock in trade. In them the French had imitated their predecessors and other countries had imitated the French. From all this England had stood relatively aloof. Where Harney and others attributed this to the political culture, Marx and Engels, in 1850, found the explanation in economic prosperity. Continental revolution had in fact aided British prosperity in that it brought ‘industry to an almost complete standstill’ among Britain's competitors, ‘helped the English to weather a year of crisis in a quite tolerable fashion, contributed substantially to clearing away the piled-up stocks of goods in the overseas markets, and made a new industrial upswing possible in the spring of 1849. … The factories are now overloaded with orders’ and ‘new factories are being built in great numbers in all parts of the industrial regions’. However, patterns of trade were cyclical and on this Marx and Engels based their hopes. The manufacturers' assurance that ‘they have never experienced such good times before’ is dismissed as ‘a claim always made on the eve of a crisis’. The ‘only question’ about England's prosperity is ‘how long this intoxication will last’. The markets were said to be almost ‘glutted’ and soon ‘panic will break out simultaneously in speculation and production. … This crisis will mark the beginning of the modern English revolution, a revolution in which Cobden will assume the role of a Neckar.’³²

In terms of tactics, Engels in 1850 ignored the Chartist ‘physical-force’ wing and also his own earlier premonitions of violence. Now the parliamentary path was seen as the only possible one. The working classes ‘must see now that under no circumstances have they any guarantee for bettering their social position unless by Universal Suffrage, which would enable them to seat a Majority of Working Men in the House of Commons’. Universal suffrage in France, where the majority of the population were peasants, had produced a reactionary outcome. In Britain, however, where two-thirds of the population were industrial proletarians, it would produce ‘the exclusive political rule of the working class with all the revolutionary changes in social conditions which are inseparable from it’.³³ Engels, then, looked forward once again to an inevitable revolution in England which would bring all industry under the control of the workers' state and so overcome the conditions of economic competition which now impeded both industrial progress and the welfare of the workforce.

V CONCLUSION

At the beginning of the 1840s Engels was doing military service in Berlin; by its end he was using that knowledge in pursuit of a staged retreat after a revolutionary uprising in south Germany. His politics had focused and clarified but at least he had remained on the same side. The same, he felt, could not be said of Carlyle, and Engels's enthusiasm of 1844 turned to scorn a few years later. Reviewing Latter-Day Pamphlets, Marx and Engels deplored ‘the decline of literary genius’ and its replacement by ‘highly indignant bluster’ which ‘turns out to be a thinly disguised acceptance of existing class rule’.³⁴

Not only had Engels stayed on the same side; he had also maintained the same illusions, for it is his incorrigible optimism that most strikes today's reader. In February 1851 he wrote to Marx that on ‘the next occasion’ they would keep clear of party entanglements and accept ‘no official government appointments’! Five months later he mentioned having given his father no commitment to remaining in Manchester ‘in case of a revolution’. Marx clearly inhabited the same dream-world for, in the same year of 1851, now so associated with the Great Exhibition and British self-confidence and complacency, he wrote: ‘If revolution breaks out in London tomorrow, Willich-Barthelemy will assuredly come to power.’³⁵

According to R. N. Hunt it ‘takes no great acumen to observe in hindsight that Engels was carried away here by his revolutionary desires and, like Marx in the same period, considerably overestimated the rapidity and ultimate extent of the social polarization caused by industrial development.’³⁶ This is clearly true, for hindsight is a marvellous blessing yet our task has been to convey not just the ideas of three great writers but to place them within the circumstances and the mood of their time. To them, and not just to Engels, the idea of revolution was not a fanciful exaggeration. Less than sixty years earlier it had exploded with then unparalleled ferocity in Europe's most cultivated, aristocratic and civilised country and then again in the apparently reformed and modernised society of France in 1830. Great Britain had weathered the storm of the revolutionary and Napoleonic periods and had forged ahead with an unprecedented and seemingly risky experiment. It had retained its old aristocracy and yet generated the wide social gulf that divided the old and new rich from the new industrial poor. Not many had the confidence to deny the danger of this combination. In partial confirmation of Engels's belief in the plausibility of revolution, it did, in 1848, break out almost everywhere that most mattered apart from where he most expected it. Here we might say that it was not Engels's belief in revolution that was misguided but his expectation of its location. In this, however, he was far from alone and it is only those employing, in E. P. Thompson's famous phrase, ‘the enormous condescension of posterity’³⁷ who can demean Engels's analysis.

In addition to his optimism, which is open and explicit, a modern social scientist is bound to note Engels's absence of critical reflection concerning his own social position. The Condition of the Working-Class in England contains very few biographical references. Most are direct observations of the public and public places, as when Engels recalled coming to Manchester in November 1842 and seeing ‘crowds of unemployed working-men at every street corner, and many mills … still standing idle’. Unique and of a different order is Engels's observation of the girls ‘In the throstle-room of the cotton mill at Manchester, in which I was employed’.³⁸ This also validates actual observation, but here we have participant-observation. It is the only time Engels tells us that he was employed in a factory. However, he does not mention what his actual role was, the context conveniently leaving open the possibility that he was genuinely one worker among others.

Engels writes of the bourgeoisie as if he was not one of them. He was a prolific writer but, as with Mill at the same time, his own employment remains almost invisible. The German-visitor pose, employed in the Preface and in the introduction ‘To the Working-Classes of Great-Britain’, helps give a sense of distance, yet Engels was writing in a highly partisan manner on issues relating crucially and directly to the way in which he was earning his living. We have previously noted R. N. Hunt's view that Engels's father insisted ‘that he move to England to help manage the family cotton factory in Manchester’.³⁹ Carver mentions Engels being ‘trained, on the job, for business management’⁴⁰ and so it would be interesting to know how much management he did and what sort of manager, supervisor, employer or capitalist he was. W. O. Henderson notes that there is ‘no contemporary evidence concerning Engels's work in the office of Ermen and Engels'.⁴¹ The elder Engels had wanted his son in Manchester to watch over the activities of his partners. Peter and Godfrey Ermen. He feared that they might be diverting some of his capital to the separate firm of Ermen Brothers. Engels then was, one might say, his father's spy, watching over not the workers but the managers. Well might the Ermen brothers, according to Henderson, have ‘regarded Engels's arrival with considerable misgivings since his presence in the office … threatened their freedom to run the Manchester business as they pleased’.⁴² In December 1850 Engels wrote to his brother-in-law Emil Blank on how he was using the isolation of dinner-hours, four days a week, to examine the accounts.

An oddity of Engels's position is that he was placed neither squarely with one side nor the other, not a wage labourer but neither primarily an employer. One might have expected this marginal situation to have produced some reflection on the anomalies of his own position, but he was better able to see in others a problem he failed to apply to himself. For example, in The Condition of the Working-Class Engels observed that ‘English Socialism arose with Owen, a manufacturer, and proceeds therefore with great consideration toward the bourgeoisie and great injustice toward the proletariat in its method.’⁴³ Here and elsewhere Engels complained of bourgeois influence on the working-class movement without any apparent inkling that a similar criticism could be levelled against him. How, one wonders, does Engels escape the strictures that he applied to Owen? On what basis could he assert that he had escaped from the mind-set of the bourgeoisie whereas Owen had not fully done so? The methodological problem of the sociology of knowledge is not attempted and it would probably be anachronistic to expect it to have been, yet we see above that Engels employs a rather mechanistic mode of reasoning in explaining Owen's limitations: he is a manufacturer, therefore he is considerate to the bourgeoisie.

Engels, then, is easy to criticise and on issues that are far from trivial, yet it would be wrong to leave him on a negative note, for his achievements are considerable. He was 30 in 1850 and by that time he had made a pioneering and durable contribution to social history and played a still under-acknowledged but crucial part in the genesis of Marxism. If there is any cause for regret it is that his first great work on social history was also his last.

In November 1850 Engels moved to Manchester where he worked for Ermen and Engels for almost twenty years. The 1850s and 1860s were also what David McLellan has called ‘the years of lowest ebb in Engels' political activities’.⁴⁴ His faith in revolution had not diminished but just his confidence in its immediacy. It was on this issue that Marx and Engels broke with other members of the Communist League in the early 1850s. The latter group looked to vigorous political leadership to fan the dying embers of 1840s optimism. Marx and Engels, in contrast, looked to the nature of the economic situation as the best index of an emerging revolutionary situation. Nothing serves better to illustrate the basic difference between liberal and Marxist radicalism than the fact that Marx and Engels at this time were fearful of attaining power prematurely and thus finding themselves in an inextricably false situation. This concern found its way into Engels's 1850 articles on The Peasant War in Germany: ‘The worst thing that can befall the leader of an extreme party is to be compelled to assume power at a time when the movement is not yet ripe for the domination of the class he represents. … He who is put into this awkward position is irrevocably lost.’⁴⁵ Engels's long haul of employment, then, coincided with a politics of the long haul. When, in 1869, Engels was able and delighted to retire from business and move closer to Marx in London, political events also moved in a more satisfactory direction; but that is another story.

Notes

1. MECW, 4, pp. 419-20.

2. P. Demetz, Marx, Engels and the Poets: Origins of Marxist Literary Criticism (Chicago, 1967), p. 145.

3. MECW, 4, pp. 415, 466.

4. Ibid., pp. 403, 534-5, 373.

5. MECW, 3, pp. 389, 390.

6. MECW, 4, pp. 361, 391, 390, 392, 419.

7. Ibid., p. 558.

8. Ibid., p. 559.

9. Ibid., pp. 309, 445.

10. Ibid., pp. 355, 473, 473-4.

11. Ibid., p. 421.

12. Ibid., p. 418.

13. Ibid., pp. 324, 345, 428, 419.

14. MECW, 3, p. 494.

15. MECW, 4, pp. 517-8, 519, 520.

16. Ibid., p. 523.

17. Ibid., p. 524.

18. Ibid., pp. 525, 224, 227.

19. Ibid., pp. 223, 525.

20. Ibid., pp. 525, 526. Also see G. Claeys, Citizens and Saints: Politics and Anti-Politics in Early British Socialism (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 146-7 on Engels's false presentation of Owenism.

21. G. Claeys, ‘The Political Ideas of the Young Engels, 1842-1845: Owenism, Chartism, and the Question of Violent Revolution in the Transition from “Utopian” to “Scientific ‘Socialism’”, History of Political Thought, VI (1985), 455-78, p. 470.

22. MECW, 4, pp. 526, 527, 528.

23. Ibid., p. 566 and MECW, 6, p. 621.

24. Italics added. MECW, 6, p. 519.

25. Ibid., pp. 518, 497, 389.

26. Ibid., pp. 351-2, 293.

27. W. O. Henderson, The Life of Friedrich Engels (London, 1976), vol. 1, pp. 162-3.

28. MECW, 7, pp. 297, 298.

29. MECW, 7, pp. 108, 424.

30. MECW, 38, p. 534.

31. Ibid., 171. Words in capitals were written in English in the original. Harney had stood against Palmerston at Tiverton, in Devon in 1847 and received no votes at all.

32. MECW, 10, pp. 264-5.

33. Ibid., pp. 275, 298.

34. Ibid., pp. 301, 307.

35. MECW, 38, pp. 290, 378, 298.

36. R. N. Hunt, Political Ideas of Marx and Engels, vol. 1, p. 111.

37. E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (Harmondsworth, 1968), p. 13.

38. MECW, 4, pp. 387, 454.

39. Hunt, Political Ideas of Marx and Engels, vol. 1, p. 105. Emphasis added.

40. Carver, Engels: His Life and Thought, p. 8.

41. W. O. Henderson, Marx and Engels and the English Workers and Other Essays (London, 1989), p. 36.

42. W. O. Henderson, The Life of Friedrich Engels (London, 1976), vol. 1, p. 196.

43. MECW, 4, p. 525. Emphasis added.

44. McLellan, Engels, p. 47.

45. MECW, 10, pp. 469-70.