Socialist Social Research | Friedrich Engels was a traitor to his class

Ideas rarely have a solid foundation. As soon as they float around in our heads, they indulge in their glass bead game, whether in universities, parliaments, or on the German book market. But when ideas are finally brought to life by the force of gravity on the street, they transform into a critique in hand-to-hand combat. They merge with the everyday class struggle from below. This is how great works are born. A prime example is "The Condition of the Working Class in England" by Friedrich Engels, the then 25-year-old son of a businessman from Barmen. His first book was published 180 years ago in Leipzig by Otto Wigand.

Dead end of the German intelligentsia

When Engels was a young adult, society was characterized by revolutionary ferment. The 1840s marked the eve of bourgeois-liberal upheavals in Europe. They heralded the end of the restoration period established by the Congress of Vienna. Yet Germany did not exist as a state, or rather, only in thought and poetry. Philosophy became a substitute for politics. Amidst the fragmentation of small states, economic backwardness, an existence as a politically disposable mass in the heart of Europe, and with Frederick William IV, a "Romantic on the throne" in Prussia, the direct impact of classical German philosophy entered its final phase. It was in this context that the young Engels also thought and wrote, especially in the controversy over Hegel's philosophy of religion.

While the Old Hegelians defended Hegel's concept of God as the ultimate affirmation of Christianity and the Prussian state, the Young Hegelians saw Hegel's God as the Achilles' heel of Hegel's entire philosophy. The critique of Hegel's philosophy was supposed to coincide with the elimination of the prevailing conditions, in keeping with the saying that the fish stinks from the head. But who could catch the fish—whether it would be the critical critic with his "trumpet of the Last Judgment on Hegel" (Bruno Bauer), the individual with his property (Max Stirner), the popular educator with his yearbooks (Arnold Ruge), or the heaven-stormer with his love of the human race (Ludwig Feuerbach)—the German intelligentsia reached a dead end in the debate over this.

The 1848 revolution in Germany took shape primarily in the minds of a philosophical vanguard, at the center of which was Friedrich Engels, born in Barmen on November 20, 1820. Raised in the splendor and squalor of the Prussian industrial metropolis of Wuppertal, his proposal was as simple as it was dialectical: Only the hungry can catch the fish. It wasn't about who could liberate the oppressed, but rather about who the oppressed were, who could only liberate themselves.

Neither heroes nor victims

Engels's stay in England from November 1842 to August 1844 was a pivotal experience. While living in Chorlton-on-Medlock in Manchester to complete his commercial apprenticeship at his father's cotton mill, Ermen & Engels, he studied the living conditions of the English proletariat. He recognized that this class would emerge in every society dominated by capitalism—that is, sooner or later, in every country.

His years of learning at the epicenter of the new economic system were reflected in his journalistic work. Until mid-1842, he wrote about Pietism, Schelling's philosophy of revelation, and popular books; from the end of 1842, he began writing about the Corn Laws, English history, and communism in France. In 1844, his manifesto "Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy" was published, which emphasized private property as a central category of bourgeois society. A year later, "The Condition of the Working Class in England" followed. Engels dedicated it to the English working class. Instead of becoming a capitalist, he became a communist and revolutionary, a traitor to his class.

In this book, he draws connections between the history of England and the emergence of the proletariat as an independent class. He links technological advances such as the spinning and steam engines with the living conditions of workers, women, and children in the "cottages," the ghetto-like residential quarters.

Engels describes Manchester and other industrial cities in England as architectures of class-based segregation. Damp basement apartments, epidemics in working-class neighborhoods, violence, prostitution, and alcoholism in working-class families – he links these phenomena to the economic competition among workers, the economic crises, and migration from Ireland. He presents this not as an industrial accident, but as the order of the bourgeois class, which profits from the situation of the exploited.

He also delves into the various social classes. He analyzes the similarities between seamstresses and farmworkers and highlights the differences between weavers and miners, both in front of and behind the factory gate. He also addresses the subtle differences in clothing and diet. Finally, he confronts the labor movement and the strikes with the views of the bourgeoisie and exposes the debates about the Poor Laws as hypocrisy. The result is a comprehensive picture of proletarian existence as a class in the making within the capitalist machine of exploitation.

Here, an observer demonstrates a sense of reality. Engels depicts reality as a conflicting unity of material interests. In doing so, he finds a radical starting point for theoretical work that ceases to be meaningless and for political practice that ceases to be blind. "The situation of the working class is the actual basis and starting point of all contemporary social movements," as he states in the preface to the first edition. "Situation" means understanding workers and the poor from the real conditions of domination in their lives, describing them neither as heroes nor as victims, without moral prejudgment, as Engels did.

He draws a self-critical conclusion: "We Germans, above all, need a knowledge of the facts on this question." In doing so, he thinks of the somersault mortale of the German intelligentsia. Decades later, with a labor movement now strong in Germany, he supplements the self-criticism in the 1892 preface by stating that this book "exists everywhere the traces of the descent of modern socialism from one of its ancestors—German classical philosophy." Precisely for this reason, however, it is Engels's merit to have been the first to uncover the inner connection between economics, history, revolution, modernity, and the working class. Without the philosophical arsenal of concepts, this connection would have remained hidden from him, which in turn contributed to the materialist transformation of dialectical philosophy.

The majority class

Engels's first work is considered a milestone for empirical social research. It is also the foundational text of historical materialism. In "Capital: Volume I" (1867), Karl Marx quotes several times from the first work of his friend and comrade-in-arms. He argues that it demonstrates how "deeply Engels grasped the spirit of the capitalist mode of production." Reality is not where wealth reigns. Reality is to be found in those places outside of wealth, where it is produced. Furthermore, the subtitle affirms that taking the side of the propertyless class is paradigmatic in gaining knowledge in a social science that aims at the whole truth: "according to one's own observations and authentic sources." Finally, the book also documents Engels's reasons for his political organizing activities. In 1843, he made contact with the "League of the Just" in London. He and Marx would transform it into the "League of Communists."

180 years later, Engels's early work calls us to walk through cities like Hamburg, Frankfurt, Berlin, or Duisburg as intervening observers. Even more than in Engels's time, the working class is now the majority class, only rendered invisible by wage labor, the distorted images from RTL to the Springer press, and the arrogant paternalism of the know-it-alls—in short, by the bourgeois class.