43

ENGELS: THE CONDI TI ON OF THE WORKING CLASS IN ENGLAND IN 1844 AND

THE HOUSING QUESTION (1872) REVISITED; THEIR RELEVANCE FOR URBAN
ANTHROPOLOGY
Bernard Magubane
THE GHETTO
Is it well that while we range with Science, glorying in the time,
City children soak and blacken soul and sense in city slime?
There among the gloomy alleys Progress halts on palsied feet,
Crime and hunger cast our maidens by the thousand on the street;
There the master scrimps his haggard seamstress of her daily bread;
There a single sordid attic holds the living and the dead;
There the smouldering fire of fever creeps across the rotted floor,
And the crowded couch on incest, in the warrens of the poor.
Tennyson
The fundamental causes of this apparent paradox are in-
deed very difficult to decide. Basically, the poverty and
suffering which reached a critical level after 1815 were
the consequence of the establishment of a capitalist order
in farming: that long transformation which was already
decisively established by the mid-eighteenth century. We
have had enough experience, since, of the economics of
capitalism to know t hat it is no paradox, within its terms
and its order, to have rising production coexistent with
wide-spread unemployment and substantial pauperisation.
For in subjecting an economy to the disciplines of wage-
labour and the market, it exposes men to new kinds of
hazard, as its crises of credit and of prices work through.
Raymond Williams
The Conditions Of The Working Class In
England written in 1844" and The Housing
Question (HQ) written in 1872- 73 as a series
of articles, are generally argued to be "clas-
sics." This article re-examines the two works
Bernard Magubane is Professor of Anthropology at the Uni-
versity of Connecticut, Storrs, Ct.
*All quotes from Engels' book, hereafter CWC, are taken
from Marx and Engels', On Great Britain (Moscow: Progress
Publishers, 1962).
0304-4092/85/$03. 30 9 1985 Elseviers Sience Publishers B.V.
not only to demonstrate their historical im-
portance for urban anthropology, but also to
re-establish their historic importance for cur-
rent urban studies and the understanding of
the poor and working class in capitalist
society in the modem world.
Frederick Engels was the first and for a
long time the only person to provide a dialec-
tical and historical materialist analysis of the
evolution of the bourgeois city and its endem-
ic crisis. Engels' met hodol ogy and t heory re-
mains a shining example of the superiority of
the dialectical materialist analysis. In the mid
1840s, he already underst ood the role eco-
nomic factors play in the development of
society. He examined the capitalist mode of
production, showing how it spawned the
industrial urban forces with its contradictions.
He showed how the bourgeois affluence was
the dialectical opposite of the poverty of the
masses of the people who languished in the
urban slums.
44
A SOCIALIST CLASSIC
Marx and Lenin held bot h t he CWC and the
HQ in the highest esteem. In these books
Engels not only surveyed the origin and
history of the Industrial Revolution, but even
more he asked the crucial question in scien-
tific discourse: "How did this state of affairs
arise?" and "How will it end?" By studying
the character of English society prior to the
Industrial Revolution, Engels was able to
show how the situation that he was describing
and analyzing was the inevitable out come of
a mode of product i on whose dynamic de-
prived the immediate producers of their
means of livelihood and reduced t hem to a
situation where their only option was either
death through starvation or the sale of their
labor to the capitalist. The monopolization
of all means of subsistence by the capitalist
class was the source of the injustice and
distress of the working class in the atrocious
slums in English cities during the Industrial
Revolution.
In 1883, in an i nt roduct i on to a new edi-
tion of the Communist Manifesto of 1848,
Engels wrote that even before 1845 he had
been approaching the materialist conception
of history. "My book on The Conditions Of
The Working Class In England, shows how far
I had travelled along the road by myself. " In
1867 Marx declared that "t he fullness of
Engels's insight into the nature of the capital-
ist met hod of product i on has been shown by
the factory reports, the reports on mines, etc.,
that have appeared since the publication of
his book" [ 1 ]. Lenin expressed the view that:
"The book (The Conditions Of The Working
Class In England) was a terrible indictment of
capitalism and the middle classes ... It made a
profound impression upon the minds of all who
read it. Everywhere Engels's study came to be
regarded as the best available cont emporary
account of the condition of the proletariat.
And indeed neither before nor after 1845 had
the depressed conditions of the workers been
so sharply and accurately delineated" [2].
Frantz Mehring said that "The most ad-
mirable and at the same time the most note-
wort hy historical feature of the book is the
thoroughness with which the twenty-four
year old aut hor [Engels] understood the
spirit of the capitalist mode of product i on
and succeeded in explaining it from not only
the rise, but also the decline of the bour-
geoisie, not only the misery of the proletariat
but also its salvation. The aim of the book
was to show how large-scale industry created
the modem working class, as a dehumanized,
physically shattered race, degraded intellec-
tually and morally to the poi nt of bestial-
ity ..." [3].
Are these fullsome praises of Engels' works
deserved? What can urban anthropologists
learn from it? For Hobsbawm the CWC
deserves a number of accolades first as a
sociological investigation. Firstly, it was, as
Engels himself justly claimed, the first book
in Britain or any ot her country which dealt
with the working class as a whole and not
merely with particular sections and industries.
Secondly, and more important, it was not
merely a survey of working-class conditions,
but a general analysis of the evolution of
industrial capitalism, of the social impact of
industrialization and its political and social
consequences - including the rights of the
labor movement. "In fact it was the first
large-scale at t empt to apply the Marxist
met hod to the concrete study of society" [4].
With the cities everywhere facing crises, the
study of Engels' works is more than a fasci-
nating diversion. The possibilities and limita-
tions of urban anthropology and sociology are
revealed in Engels' work. Yet, with a few
notable exceptions, urbanologists have re-
mained indifferent to the questions Engels
raised. What Engels achieved almost a hun-
dred and fifty years ago was to suggest a way
to understand the urban crises and slum for-
mat i on in capitalist society based upon a
close study of empirical material i nformed by
the newly emerging materialist perspective.
In that sense the CWC provides the guidelines
for a future Marxist interpretation of the
process of urbanization.
"COUNTRY" AND "CI TY" IN HISTORY
"Count ry" and "City, " Raymond Williams
[5] tells us, are powerful words, and anthro-
pologists and sociologists often contrast them
in terms of their meaning and implication for
human existence. Among those social scien-
tists who have attempted to define urban
society and contrasted it with rural commun-
ity are T~Sennies, Weber, Durkheim, Cooley,
Redfield, etc. The "Count ry" and "City" are
often seen as ideal types or poles and societies
are ranged along the two poles according to
their complexity and development. TiSennies
distinguished Gemeinschaft from Gesellschaft
type societies, Weber called his two poles
Wesenwille and Kfirwille, Durkheim distin-
guished mechanical from organic solidarity;
Cooley distinguished between societies with
primary and those with secondary relations
and Redfield between folk and urban society.
Currently, for some, North America and
Europe represent "the City" and Africa, Asia
and Latin America "the Country. " These
formal distinctions are however ahistorical ab-
stractions and do not tell us how change itself
came about from one pole of existence to the
other. In point of fact, these dichotomies
tend to shift our attention away from real
historical processes and have become an
element of a very powerful myt h of urban
sociology and anthropology in which the
transition from a rural to an industrial society
is seen (depending on one's ideological pre-
disposition) either as a movement from back-
wardness to modernity or as a kind of fall,
the true cause and origin of social and moral
decay.
For Engels, scientific analysis of industrial
capitalism had to begin with what Therborn
calls the historico-material and concrete ex-
perience, i.e., the study of social reality as
45
motion and process [6]. There took place in
England a series of interlocking and mutually
enhancing changes and developments in the
seventeenth century that culminated in the
Industrial Revolution in the early nineteenth
century. The consequences of the technol-
ogies and innovations of the middle of the
eighteenth century were of an unprecedented
magnitude, for they ushered in a revolution
that "transformed the entire structure of civil
society."
Bourgeois social scientists never tire of accusing Marx and
Engels of arriving at these conclusions a priori, and of
ignoring empirical facts. The CWC shows that this charge
is untenable. Long before the appearance of "empirical
sociology and anthropology" Engels engaged in concrete
social research and based his theoretical concl usi ons on
the analysis and summing-up of facts which bourgeois
sociologists usually ignored [7 ].
In his historical survey of pre-industrial
Britain, Engels focused on the unique eco-
nomic transformations that occurred from the
fifteenth century and its social consequences
not only for rural England but for the entire
part of the world that was brought within the
orbit of British influence. He found that an
increasingly capitalist form of agriculture had
in effect become the pacesetter for the capi-
talist development of England and the world.
Since England was the classical ground of
the Industrial Revolution and where the
gigantic thrust of concentration and polariza-
tion took place, Engels used it as a case to
study in all its fullness the development of
its principal result, the proletariat. The indus-
trial revolution was thus more than a revolu-
tion in machinery, its most important result
was the creation of the revolutionary prole-
tariat. "It was this emergence, this produc-
tion, this creation of a new human being and
of the new class of social beings that was the
explicit object of the CWC" [8].
Although it was not Engels' aim to write
the history of the Industrial Revolution, he
believed it necessary to establish some con-
ception of the pre-historic state of English
46
rural society and of the general conditions be-
fore the great transformation. The kind of life
he describes is a familiar one to sociologists
and anthropologists; it was of small-scale
farming and domestic industry. The basic
form of property was land, and competition
of the peasant producers among themselves
did not exist because of rural dispersion of
their homes and the economy that supported
them. The peasant lives were comfortable,
peaceful and uneventful; they were pious and
honest men; and their material condition was
better by far than that of their successors.
Their hours of work were not excessive; they
had time for traditional recreation, and their
health and that of their children were good.
Socially their world was laid out for them:
it was prescriptive and patriarchal [9]. This
is how Engels described it:
They regarded their squire, the greatest landholder of the
region, as their natural superior; they asked for advice
from him, laid their small disputes before him for settle-
ment, and gave him all honor, as this patriarchal relation
involved. They were "respectable" people, good husbands
and fathers, led moral lives because they had no tempta-
tion to be immoral, there being no groggeries or low
houses in their vicinity and because the host, at whose
Inn they now and then quenched their thirst, was also a
respectable man, usually a large tenant farmer who took
pride in good order, good beer and early hours (p. 37).
The development of the capitalist urban-
industrial order disrupted this mode of exis-
tence: in many ways the destruction was
comparable in terms of its impact to the inva-
sion of the colonial world by capitalism. The
enclosure movement dislodged thousands of
families from the country and they had no
alternative but to flock to the towns. For
Engels the most important result of these
developments was the separation of the direct
producers from the land and their settlement
in urban centers as proletarians where they
were ranged against the capitalist owners of
the factories where they worked.
The rapid extension of manufacturing demanded hands,
wages rose, and troops of workmen migrated from the
agricultural districts to the towns. Population multiplied
enormously, nearly all the increase took place in the
proletariat. Thus arose the great manufacturing and com-
mercial cities of the British Empire, in which at least
three-fourths of the population belong to the working-
class, while the lower middle-class consists only of small
shop-keepers, and very few handicraftsmen (pp. 49- 50) .
Engels did not bemoan the passing away
of "traditional" society. He characterized the
mode of human existence in pre-industrial
Britain as follows:
They [the rural dwellers] were comfortable in their
silent vegetation, and but for the Industrial Revolution
they would never have emerged from this existence,
which, cosily romantic as it was, was nevertheless not
worthy of human beings. In truth, they were not human
beings; they were merely toiling machines in the service
of the few aristocrats who guided history down to that
time. The Industrial Revolution has simply carried this
out to its logical end by making the workers machines
pure and simple, taking from them the last trace of inde-
pendent activity, and so forcing them to think and
demand a position worthy of men (pp. 37- 38) .
Having characterized the social structure of
pre-industrial England, Engels then proceeded
to logically summarize the early history of the
Industrial Revolution. The aim of this resum6
was to show the impact of the new industrial
technology. The first group of technological
innovations set in motion a series of elaborate
differentiations. For example, the invention
of the spinning and the power-loom not only
altered the relations between weaving and
spinning, and weavers and spinners; it affected
the division of labor in the family as well, and
therefore had consequences in the structure
of the household, and its internal balance of
force. Other developments that followed were
the assembly of large numbers of power
driven machines in the factories. These
machines required large numbers of workers
to man them. As a result shifts took place,
population increased, conditions of employ-
ment altered and the nature of wealth chang-
ed as well [ 10].
Even though Engels focused on the growth
of the cotton industry - the prime mover of
industrial development - he did not neglect
parallel developments in other branches of
textile manufacture; in metal work, minerals
and mining, in agriculture, and in transport -
roads, canals, and railways - nor did he fail to
mention developments in commerce and the
expansion of overseas and colonial markets.
All these developments were connected in the
sense that they formed part of a large com-
plex and continually changing coherent whole
now called industrial society [ 11 ].
The history of the Industrial Revolution
was thus cumulative and was produced by
a process of conquest of the country by the
urban-based bourgeoisie. Williams [ 12] says
that before and during the Industrial Revolu-
tion rural England was characterized by an in-
creasing penetration by capitalist social rela-
tions and dominance of the market, because
these had been powerfully evolving within its
own structure for a long time. By the late eight-
eenth century there existed in England an
organized capitalist society, in which what
happened to the market, anywhere, whether
in industrial or agricultural production,
worked its way through to the town and
country alike, as parts of a single crisis.
Engels' investigation of the evolution of
capitalism in England brought into silent
relief the role of technology in the industrial
revolution and its implication for a basic
industry - cotton. With the increased mecha-
nization of the spinning process, the work
of spinning was further rationalized by the
machines driven by mechanical rather than
human power. Water power, a source of
mechanical energy, brought men together in
large numbers in cities like Manchester.
These immense cotton spinning factories or mills of the
late eighteenth century were something new in the world.
After 1815 weaving was increasingly brought into fac-
tories as well, and within a short time cotton became the
first industry in which production was wholly mechanized.
47
The next step was to adopt the men, women, and children
who worked at the machines to the unvarying require-
ments of those instruments, and this too was achieved,
although the adopters ran into some resistance on the part
of adoptees [ 13].
The historical experience of industrializa-
tion according to Engels was not to be sep-
arated from that of urbanization. The two in
the case of England happened together and
reinforced one another; the reciprocating
effects of each upon the other being further
intensified by the demographic escalation. To
form some idea of how the capitalist city
shaped human life, it is important to study
the dialectic of the commodity relationship
and the mode of urban existence it yields:
The industrial disciplines, the conditions of work, of
employment, continual insecurity and continual com-
petition, are not to be segregated, in their effects as
formative experience, from the conditions of living in the
new industrial towns, from the housing, sanitary provi-
sions - or lack of them - institutions of relief or welfare
or lack of them - from all the new densities and stresses
of existence in these unparalleled circumstances. The
working men and women who came out at the end of
their process were the first to go through what we now
understand as a world historical experience. As a group
they bear the marks of survivors. They bear those marks
to this very day [14].
The internal dynamic of economic trans-
formation in England became linked as well
to the colonialization movement. Within the
developing territorial division of labor, the
towns and cities of England had unlimited
elbow room to grow as "workshops of the
world." Elaborating on the historical impact
of the Industrial Revolution for England
Engels wrote:
Sixty, eighty years ago England was a country llke every
other, with small towns, few and simple industries, and a
thin but proportionally large agricultural population.
Today it is a country like no other, with a capital of
two and a half million inhabitants; with vast manufactur-
ing cities; with an industry that supplies the world, and
produces almost everything by means of the most com-
plex machinery; with an industrious, intelligent, dense
population, of which two-thirds axe employed in trade
48
and commerce, and composed of classes wholly different;
forming, in fact, with other customs and other needs, a
different nation from England of those days. The indus-
trial revolution is of the same importance for England as
the political revolution for France, and the philosophical
revolution for Germany; and the difference between Eng-
land in 1769 and in 1844 is at least as great as t hat be-
tween France, under the ancient regime and during the
revolution of July. But the mightiest result of this indus-
trial transformation is the English proletariat (p. 49).
Engels goes on to discuss the centralizing
t endency of manufacture; which brought to-
gether "those vast masses who now fill the
whole of the British Empire, whose condition
forces itself everyday more and more upon
the attention of the civilized world. The con-
dition of the working class is the condition of
the vast majority of English people" (p. 51).
The nexus of the city was large-scale mecha-
nized industry which required growing capital
investment, and its division of labor required
the accumulation of masses of proletarians.
Such large units of product i on, even when
built in the countryside attract communities
around them, which will produce a surplus
labor force [151. The industrial city became
the focus of mobilized abstract labor, of labor
power as a commodi t y placed in the service
of commerce as well as product i on [16]. As
Engels put it:
Population becomes centralized just as capital does; and,
very naturally, since the human being, the worker, is
regarded in manufacture simply as a piece of capital for
the use of which the manufacturer pays interest under
the name of wages. A manufacturing establishment re-
quires many workers employed together in a single build-
ing, living near each and forming a village of themselves
in the vicinity of a good-sized factory. They have needs
for satisfying which other people are necessary; handi-
craftsmen, showmakers, tailors, bakers, carpenters, stone-
makers, settle at hand. The inhabitants of the village,
especially the younger generation, accustom themselves
to factory work, grow skillful in it, and when the first
mill can no longer employ them all, wages fall and the
immigration of fresh manufacturers is the consequence.
So the village grows into a small town, and the small
town into a large one. The greater the town, the greater
its advantages. It offers roads, railroads, canals; the choice
of skilled labour increases constantly, new establishments
can be built more cheaply because of the competition
among builders and machinists who are at hand, than in
remote country districts, whether timber, machinery,
builders, and operatives must be brought; it offers a
market to which buyers crowd and direct communication
with the markets supplying raw material or demanding
finished goods. Hence the marvelously rapid growth of
the great manufacturing town (pp. 54- 55) .
The urbanization bound up with the
industrial revolution, and accompanying the
development of the capitalist mode of pro-
duction is thus a process of organizing space
based on two fundamental facts: the develop-
ment of capitalism in the countryside and the
consequent immigration of the population to
urban areas; the destruction of a domestic
economy of direct commodi t y producers,
which forced t hem at the same time to move
into cities where they were confined into the
ranks of the proletariat which in time be-
comes a definite class in the population,
whereas it had only been a transitional stage
toward entering the middle class [ 17]. What
the slums of Manchester actually indicated
was the true condition and devel opment of
the surplus labor force. If the slums are seen
as a monst rous or a diseased growth, this had
logically to be traced to the whole social
order that produced such cities - the capi-
talist mode of production.
As a study of industrialization and urbani-
zation, the CWC was primarily a study of the
devel opment of social patterns (Gemeinschaft
and Gesellschaft), of modes of product i on
and class relations characterized by conflict.
Engels examined the changes from Gemein-
schaft to GeselIschaft in its concrete historical
development rather than abstractly. To speak
of Gemeinschaft and/ or Gesellschaft, then, is
to speak of social arrangements determined
in the last instance by the specific combina-
tion of forces and relations of product i on
shaped by the capitalist mode of production.
METHODS OF INVESTIGATION
Participant Observation
To get an intimate acquaintance with
Manchester, Engels used various strategies
which have since become the common stock
of anthropologists. In a dedication to "The
Working Class Of Great Britain" which he
wrote in English and prefixed to the original
German edition of 1845, Engels wrote that
during his stay in England he purposefully
"forsook the company and dinner parties, the
portwine and champagne of the middle-classes,
and devoted my leisure hours almost exclu-
sively to the intercourse with plain working
men; I am bot h glad and proud of having
done so. " He wanted, he says, "t o see you in
your own homes, to observe you in your
every-day life, to chat with you on your con-
dition and grievances, to witness your strug-
gles against the social and political power of
your oppressor." That is, Engels' study was
based on the st udy of living people and their
living conditions. And because he had acted
consciously upon that desire, he "was induced
to spend many a happy hour in obtaining a
knowledge of the realities of life" (pp. 336-
337).
Engels also gained the intimacy of Man-
chester by taking to the streets; at all hours of
the day and night, on weekends and holidays.
He t ook to the net work of pathways along
which the city moves and that constitutes
the principal means for observing and under-
standing it. Engels did not venture into the
nooks and by-ways of Manchester alone. He
was accompanied on his expeditions into the
inner recesses of the city by Mary Burns
(cure informants) and it was she who induct-
ed Engels into certain working class circles
and into the domestic lives of the Manchester
proletariat. Thus Engels learned how t o read
a city in t he company or t hrough the media-
tion of an illiterate Irish factory woman. He
learned to read the life of the citY with his
49
eyes, ears, nose and feet. He learned to read
it with his senses, the chief inlets of mi nd in
the present age [18].
Library Research
In addition to his personal impressions
Engels drew on literary authorities (the works
of Peter Gaskell, Jon Wade, George Richard,
Richardson Porter, Edward Baines, Andrew
Ure, the brothers Archibald and William Pul-
teney Alison, Thomas Carlyle, and others
were consulted), and he also used official
records, parliamentary commissions, factory
inspectors' reports, and official statistics.
Engels also read many newspapers including
the Chartist North Star, which published
workers' letters and articles. "I am buried up
to my neck in English newspapers and books, "
he wrote to Marx on November 19, 1844,
"from which I am compiling my book on the
condition of the English proletariat." The
CWC thus abounds in facts, collected from
a variety of sources using a variety of research
strategies which have become the stock in
trade for modern scholars.
Engels' analytical procedure in writing the
CWC is that which Sweezy [19] has termed
the met hod of "successive approxi mat i on. "
This consists in moving from the abstract to
the more concrete in a step by step fashion.
Engels' met hod, was not however, simply
one of abstraction; the logical stages in this
successive approximation correspond to the
historical stages in the devel opment of capi-
talism - the CWC is based on a vast array of
facts gathered by a variety of met hods.
THE GREAT TOWNS
In his study of the devel opment of capi-
talism, Engels begins with the Great Towns
and especially London, the capital of Britain.
In a memorable message Engels recorded his
first impressions of London from Autumn of
1844. He speaks of the enormi t y of this
metropolis
50
where a man may wander for hours together without
reaching the beginning or the end, without meeting the
slightest hint which could lead to the inference that
there is open country within reach, is a strange thing.
This colossal centralization, this heaping together of two
and a half millions of human beings, at one point, has
multiplied the power of this two and a half millions a
hundred fold; has raised London to the commercial
capital of the world, created the giant docks and assem-
bled the thousand vessels that continually cover the
Thames ... all this is so vast, so impressive, that a man
cannot collect himself, but is lost in the marvel of Eng-
land's greatness before he sets forth upon the English
soil (p. 56).
It was not long before Engels understood
the price the Londoners had to pay for living
in such a dense metropolis. In one of the great
passages on the meaning of size, density, and
heterogeneity which for Wirth summed up
what he called "urbanism as a way of life,"
Engels drew important theoretical conclu-
sions. The passage is so significant that it
deserves quoting at some length.
After roaming the streets of the capital a day or two,
making headway with difficulty through the human tur-
moil and the endless lines of vehicles, after visiting the
slums of the metropolis, one realises for the first time that
these Londoners have been forced to sacrifice the best
qualities of their human nature, to bring to pass all the
marvels of civilisation which crowd their city; that a
hundred powers which slumbered within them have re-
mained inactive, have been suppressed so that a few might
be developed more fully and multiply through union with
those of others. The very turmoil of the streets has some-
thing repulsive, something against which human nature
rebels. The hundred of thousands of all classes and ranks
crowding past each other, are they not all human beings
with the same qualities and powers, and with the same
interest in being happy? and have they not, in the end, to
seek happiness in the same way, by the same means? And
still they crowd by one another as though they had
nothing in common, nothing to do with one another, and
their only agreement is the tacit one, that each keep to
his own side of the pavement, so as not to delay the
opposing streams of the crowd, while it occurs to no
man to honour another with so much as a glance. The
brutal indifference, the unfeeling isolation of each in his
private interest becomes the more repellent and offensive,
the more these individuals are crowded together, within
a limited space. And, however much one may be aware
that this isolation of the individual, this narrow self-seek-
ing is the fundamental principle of our society every-
where, it is nowhere so shamelessly bare-faced, so self-
conscious as just here in the crowding of the great city.
The dissolution of mankind into nomads, of which each
one has a separate principle and a separate purpose, the
world of atoms, is here carried out to its utmost extreme.
Hence, it comes, too, that the social war, the war of each
against all, is here openly declared ... [P] eople regard each
other only as useful objects; each exploits the other, and
the end of it all is, that the stronger treads the weaker
under foot, and that the powerful few, the capitalists,
seize everything for themselves, while to the weak many,
the poor, scarcely a bare existence remains.
What is true of London, is true of Manchester, Birming-
ham, Leeds, is true of all great towns. Everywhere barbar-
ous indifference, hard egotism on one hand, and nameless
misery on the other, everywhere social warfare, every
man' s house in a state of siege, everywhere reciprocal
plundering under the protection of the law, and all so
shameless, so openly avowed that one shrinks before the
concernings of our social state as they manifest them-
selves here undisguised, and can only wonder that the
whole crazy fabric still hangs together (pp. 57-58) [20].
This passage reveals Engels' great insight
into the impact of the capitalist industrial city
on the life of its occupants. His analytic de-
scriptive thrust locates urban alienation in the
historical evolution of the capitalist mode of
production - a society that is dominated by
the production of commodities and thus
stifles the fulfillment of human potentialities
for those from whom capitalists extract sur-
plus value. In such a society, respect for the
individual and human dignity cannot be
implemented, it only remains in the realm of
ideas and philosophic pronouncements about
human dignity and the sanctity of life.
This passage, I believe, was also the first
expression of what has since become a dom-
inant experience of the city. Blake saw a
common condition of "weakness and woe."
Wordsworth saw strangeness, a loss of connec-
tion, not at first social but in perceptual
ways, a failure of identity in the crowd of
others which worked back to a loss of iden-
tity in the self, and then, in these ways, a loss
of society itself, its overcrowding and replace-
ment by a procession of images: the "dance
of colours, lights and forms .... face after face"
and there are no other laws" [21].
George Simmel, in his essay "The Metro-
polis and Mental Life," undert ook to analyze
and explain the characteristic mental attitude
of modem city dwellers towards one another.
For Simmel the attitude of the met ropol i t an
toward others tends to be one of reserve and
formality. The inner aspect of this reserve is
not only indifference but a slight aversion or
at least mut ual strangeness and repulsiveness
[22].
The London Slums
What kind of living quarters does capital
provide for those it exploits? Having discussed
the mass anonymi t y of London, Engels pro-
ceeds to make a "more detailed examination
of t he conditions in which the social war creat-
ed by capitalism has placed the propertyless
class." The picture Engels paints is one of in-
difference and ut t er disregard of the welfare
of the proletariat by the bourgeoisie. He
regarded the plight of the proletariat as a law-
governed result of the domi nat i on of private
propert y and capital.
Since capital, the direct or indirect control of the means
of subsistence and production, is the weapon with which
the social warfare is carried on, it is clear that all the dis-
advantages of such a state must fall upon the poor. For
him no man has the slightest concern. Cast into the whirl-
pool, he must struggle through as well as he can. If he is
so happy as to find work, i.e., ff the bourgeoisie does him
the favor to enrich itself by means of him, wages await
him which scarcely suffice to keep body and soul to-
gether; if he can get no work he may steal, if he is not
afraid of the police, or starve, in which case the police will
take care that he does so in a quiet an inoffensive manner
(p. 58).
Engels then describes the English slums in a
general way, such as those of the most bitter
poverty that are to be found "nearby to the
splendid mansions of the weal t hy" and "with-
in the most respectable districts of t own. "
About the condition of human existence in
these slums he cites from his substantial col-
lection of reports, document s and newspaper
clippings which provided shockirrg statistics
51
about rent and densities including quotes
from coroners' inquests on persons who had
died of starvation and in circumstances of
ut t er destitution. He also has something to
say about the homeless. He had visited a
number of infamous cheap lodging houses,
and writes a heart rending paragraph about
what he saw. Then there were the literally
unhoused and unaccommodat ed, those who
slept in passages and arcades or who found
shelter in parks or on the embankment [23].
Urban slums were not simply an aberration,
they were the physical expression of the class
structure of the cities in the era of industrial
capitalism:
Every great city has one or more slums, where the work-
ing-class is crowded together. True, poverty often dwells
in hidden alleys close to the palaces of the rich; but, in
general, a separate territory has been assigned to it, where,
removed from the sight of the happier classes, it may
struggle along as it can. These slums are pretty equally
arranged in all the great towns of England, the worst
houses in the worst quarters of the towns; usually one or
two-stories cottages in long rows, perhaps with cellars
used as dwellings, almost always irregularly built. These
houses of three or four rooms and kitchen form, through-
out England some parts of London excepted, the general
dwellings of the working-class. The streets are generally
unpaved, rough, dirty, filled with vegetable and animal
refuse, without sewers or gutters, but supplied with foul,
stagnant pools instead. Moreover, ventilation is impeded
by the bad, confused met hod of building of the whole
quarter, and many human beings here live crowded into
small space, the atmosphere t hat prevails in these work-
ing-men' s quarters may readily be imagined. Further,
the streets serve as drying grounds in fine weather; lines
are stretched across from house to house, and hung with
wet clothing (p. 59) [24].
Manchester
All the above is preliminary to a discussion
in detail of Manchester, the "classic ground
on which English industry has wrought its
masterpiece." What sort of masterpiece was
Manchester? In the description and analyses
of t he workers' living conditions Engels makes
his seminal contribution t o the sociology of
the urban condi t i on - the impact of capitalist
industrialization and urbanization which in
many respects rings true today as it did when
it was written.
52
Everything which here aroused horror and indignation is
of recent origin, belongs to the industrial epoch. The
couple of hundred of houses, which belong to old Man-
chester, have long since been abandoned by their orig-
inal inhabitants; the industrial epoch alone has crammed
into them the swarms of workers which they now shelter;
the industrial epoch alone has built up every spot between
their old houses to win a new covering for the masses
whom it has conjured hither from the agriculture districts
and from Ireland; the industrial epoch alone enabled the
owners of these cattlesheds to rent them for high prices
to human beings, to plunder the poverty of the workers,
to undermine the health of thousands, in order t hat they
alone, the owners, may grow rich. In the industrial epoch
alone it has become possible that the worker scarcely
freed from feudal servitude could be used as mere mate-
rial, a mere chattle; that he must let himself be crowded
into a dwelling too bad for every other, which he for his
hard-earned wages buys the right to let go utterly to ruin
(p. 87).
Capitalism "pitchforked" the new proletar-
iat, often composed of immigrants from pre-
industrial backgrounds, into a social hell in
which they were ground down, despised,
underpaid (if they had a job) or starved, left
to rot in the slums [25]. The description of
this offers insight into the class structure of
the city that has endured and still character-
izes modem urban areas. Manchester con-
tained then about four hundred thousand
inhabitants. The town itself was peculiarly
built "so that a person may live in it for years,
and go in and out daily without coming into
contact with working-people's quarters or
even with workers," that is, so long as he
confines himself to his business or to pleasure
walks:
This arises chiefly from the fact, that by unconscious
tacit agreement, as well as with outspoken conscious
determination, the working-people' s quarters are sharply
separated from the sections of the city reserved for the
middie-class; or, if this does not succeed, they are con-
cealed with the cloak of charity (p. 78).
The description of the spatial structure of
Manchester by Engels anticipated by some
eighty years what has come to be known as
the concentric zone theory of the city, as
formulated by Park and Burgess.
Manchester contains, as its heart, a rather extended com-
mercial district, perhaps half a mile long and about as
broad, and consisting almost wholly of offices and ware-
houses. Nearly the whole district is abandoned by dwell-
ers, and is lonely and deserted at night; only watchmen
and policemen traverse its narrow lanes with their dark
lanterns. This district is cut through by certain main
thoroughfares upon which the vast traffic concentrates,
and in which the ground level is lined with brilliant shops.
In these streets the upper floors are occupied, here and
there, is a good deal of life upon them until late at night.
With the exception of this commercial district, all Man-
chester proper, all Salford and Hulme, a great part of
Pendleton and Chorlton, two-thkds of Ardwick, and
single stretches of Cheetham Hill and Broughton are all
unmixed working-people' s quarters, stretching like a
girdle, averaging a mile and a half in breadth, around
the commercial district. Outside, beyond this gkdle, the
upper and middle bourgeoisie live in regularly laid out
streets in the vicinity of the working quarters, especially
in Chorlton and lower lying portions of Cheetham Hill;
the upper bourgeoisie in remoter villas with gardens in
Chorlton and Ardwick, or on the breezy heights of Cheet-
ham Hill, Broughton, and Pendleton, in free, wholesome
country air, in fine, comfortable homes, passed once
every half or quarter hour by omnibus going into to city.
And the finest part of the arrangement is this, that the
members of this money aristocracy can take the shortest
road through the middle of all the labouring districts to
their places of business, without ever seeing that they are
in the midst of the grimy misery that lurks to the right
and the left. For the thoroughfares leading from the ex-
change in all directions out of the city are lined, on bot h
sides, with an almost unbroken series of shops, and are so
kept in the hands of the middle and lower bourgeoisie,
which, out of self-interest, cares for a decent and cleanly
external appearance and can care for it. True, these shops
boar some relation to the district which lie behind them,
and are more elegant in the commercial and residential
quarters than when they hide grimy working-men' s dwel-
lings; but they suffice to conceal from the eyes of the
wealthy men and women of strong stomaches and weak
nerves the misery and grime which form the complement
of their wealth (p. 79).
Engels then proceeds to a concrete demon-
stration and conducts the reader along a
number of the main streets, showing how the
changes in the character of the buildings that
front the streets indicates what is to be found
behind them. "He is in fact charting one series
of connected and stratified variables within
the social topography of the city" [26].
Engels concludes this spatial analysis of Man-
chester with the observation (p. 110) that:
[A] ny one who knows Manchester can infer t he adjoining
district, from t he appearance of t he thoroughfare, but
one is seldom in a posi t i on to catch from t he street a
glimpse of t he real labouring districts. I know very well
t hat this hypocritical plan is more or less common to all
great cities; I know, t oo, t hat t he retail dealers are forced
by t he nature of their business to take possession of t he
great highways; I know t hat t here are more good build-
ings t han bad ones upon such streets everywhere, and t hat
t he value of land is greater near t hem t han in remot e dis-
tricts; but at t he same t i me I have never seen so system-
atic a shutting out of t he working-class from t he t hor-
oughfares, so t ender a conceal ment of everything which
mi ght affront t he eyes and t he nerves of t he bourgeoisie,
as in Manchester.
Such are the physical arrangements of Man-
chester. The general laws that define the
history of urban devel opment and their links
to the dynamics of capitalist wealth accumu-
lation and distribution are basic to the science
of the city. David Harvey [27] points out
that this approach followed by Engels in 1844
was and still is far more consistent with the
hard economi c and social realities than is the
culturalist approach adopt ed by urbanologists
who write on the ghet t o and urban poverty.
"In fact with certain obvious modifications,
Engels' description could easily be made to
fit the cont emporary American city" [28].
In Manchester, like in modem bourgeois
cities, the slum, poverty and ot her urban dis-
orders were a permanent feature of this city,
embedded in its class relations. The separation
of the rich and the poor had been built into
the very spatial structure of the city, by insur-
ing that differential access to scarce resources
perpetuated the inequalities that formed
capitalism. The imperatives of capitalist logic
- land speculation, income concentration,
political power - combine to exclude the
poor and certain sections of the working class
from the benefits of capitalist economi c
growth. Worse still, t he working-class district
is always liable for demolition because of
built-in obsolescence of its housing. The
"contractors, usually carpenters anal builders,
53
or manufacturers, spend little or nothing in
repairs partly to avoid diminishing their rent
receipts, and partly in view of the approach-
ing surrender of the i mprovement to the land
owners; while in consequence of commercial
crises and loss of work that follows them,
whole streets oft en stand empt y, the cottages
falling rapidly into ruin and uninhabitable-
ness" (p. 92).
Since Engels wrote the CWC, the city has
enormously expanded as an organization of
product i on and a concentrated center of
power and wealth, it has also deteriorated as
a place in which to conduct ot her human and
civilized activities. "As the wealthier popula-
tion have fled the center, they have leap-
frogged over the vast working-class and left
t hem there massed, as it were, about that
alternatively dense and hollow core, in an
immense unbroken belt in which they work
and live" [29]. Other spatial aspects of urban
growth dealt with by Engels concern the
physical separation between the place of work
and the place of residence.
THE SOCIAL LIFE OF THE WORKING CLASS
What kind of existence does the working
class lead? That is, what are the conditions of
life and existence like for the working class
in general and for workers in particular?
Engels gives a shocking picture of the plight
of the English workers. Life in the urban
slums for the low paid and unempl oyed was
characterized by demoralization and aliena-
tion, by the most profound social and per-
sonal distress. It approxi mat ed the Hobbesian
"war of each against all."
Engels begins by tracing the results of com-
petition of single workers with one another.
"Compet i t i on is the completest expression of
the battle of all which rules modem civil
society. This battle, a battle for life, for exis-
tence, for everything, in case of need a battle
for life and death, is fought not between the
different classes of society only, but also be-
tween the individual members of these classes.
54
Each is in the way of the other, and each
seeks to crowd out all who are in his way, and
to put himself in their place" (p. 110).
The mode of conflict Engels is describing
is spawned in the interstices of the jungle
capitalist; its values and relations are reflected
in human behavior.
In t he struggle for existence; t he proletariat is helpless;
left to himself, he cannot live a single day. The bour-
geoisie has gained a monopol y of all means of existence. . . ;
what t he proletariat needs he can obtain only from this
bourgeoisie, which can decree his life or death. If offers
him t he means of living, but only for an "equi val ent " for
his work. It even lets him have t he appearance of acting
from a free choice, of making a cont ract with free, un-
const rai ned consent , as a responsible agent who has
at t ai ned his majority (p. 110).
Engels spends many pages setting down in
detail what can only be called conditions of
social hell under which the workers and the
poor lived. In the great towns disease of every
kind flourished. Lung disease and various
grades of fever were common. He also gives a
summary of diseases connected both directly
and in a secondary way with diet deficiency,
such as scrofula, rickets and a variety of ali-
mentary troubles [30].
Engels was the first to discuss what urban
anthropologists call the Culture of Poverty -
a group of circumstances and kinds of be-
havior patterns which when acting in concert
create a viscious circle for the poor, the unem-
ployed and the unemployable. First there was
unemployment which produced helplessness
and drunkeness; which as symptoms of this
state, are an effort on the part of the poor
to gain temporary release from their life, and
a further auxiliary cause in its worsening. The
cause of poverty, contrary to liberal assump-
tions, is created by capitalism and should not
be explained by the weakness and shiftless-
ness of individuals. Capitalism as a mode of
production creates a class structure of the
employed and the unemployable. The latter
class is put in a situation where it cannot help
but acquire and develop certain attitudes.
Then these acquired attitudes are taken to be
their nature and to determine their roles in
society. So dirty, temporary and seasonal jobs
are assigned to this class and when their serv-
ices are no longer needed, they are then
blamed for being shiftless and not deserving.
What is called culture of poverty, is thus a
"life-style" that is more the result of poverty
than its cause.
For instance, on top of everything else the
working class areas suffered from a complete
absence of almost all facilities for sociability
and recreation. As Engels puts it;
The failing of t he workers in general may be traced to an
unbridled thirst for pleasure, to want of providence, and
of flexibility in fitting into t he social order, to t he general
inability to sacrifice t he pleasure of t he moment to a
remot e advantage. But is t hat to be wondered at? When a
class can purchase few and only t he most sensual pleas-
ures by wearying toil, must it not give itself over blindly
and madly to t hose pleasures? A class about whose educa-
tion no one troubles himself, whi ch is a playball to a
t housand chances, knows no security in life - what in-
centives has such a class to providence, to "respectabil-
i t y, " to sacrifice t he pleasure of t he moment for a re-
mot er enj oyment , most uncertain precisely by reason of
t he perpetually varying, shifting conditions under whi ch
t he proletariat lives? A class which bears all t he disad-
vantages of t he social order wi t hout enjoying its ad-
vantages, one to which t he social system appears in purely
hostile aspects - who can demand t hat such a class
respect this social order? Verily that is asking much! But
t he working man cannot escape t he present arrangement
of society so long as it exists, and when t he individual
worker resists it, t he greatest injury falls upon hi msel f
(p. 162).
In the English cities there was thus a strik-
ing contrast between the extraordinary af-
fluence of the middle classes and the poverty
of the unemployed and unemployable; in the
dispossessed and vagrants, the old, the sick
and the disabled, who, because they were
unable to work in the towns created by the
capitalist, were seen merely as negative and
unwanted burdens. In analyzing the position
of the Irish, Engels made a point basic to the
understanding of the poor in cities under
capitalism - the need of the capitalist for a
reserve army of labor. "The rapid expansion
of English industry could not have taken
place if England had not possessed in the
numerous and impoverished population of
Ireland a reserve at command ... There are in
London 20,000; in Manchester 40,000; in
Liverpool 34,000 poor Irish people." (p. 124)
The surplus population serves definite func-
tions under capitalism: it can be drawn upon
during the periodic cycles of prosperity and
let go during the inevitable downturn. The
slums are the physical expression that the
reserve army is a permanently essential part
of capitalism. The reserve army was composed
partly of proletarians, partly of potential
proletarians - countrymen, Irish immigrants,
people from the economically dynamic areas
and less dynamic occupations [31 ].
The important institutional casuality of
urban capitalist development was to be none
other than tile working-class family. The
demand capitalism made on the various mem-
bers of the working-class family made family
life almost impossible for the workers. As
Engels (p. 162) put it
In a comfortless, filthy house, hardly good enough for
mere nightly shelter, ill-furnished, often neither rain-tight
nor warm, a foul atmosphere filling rooms overcrowded
with human beings, no domestic comfort is possible. The
husband works the whole day through, perhaps the wife
also and the elder children, all in different places; they
meet night and morning only, all under perpetual tempta-
tion to drink; what family life is possible under such
conditions? Yet the working-man cannot escape the
family, must live in the family, and the consequence is
a perpetual succession of family troubles, domestic quar-
rels, most demoralising for parents and children alike.
Neglect of all domestic duties, neglect of the children,
especially, is only too vigorously fostered by the existing
institutions of society. And children growing up in this
savage way, amidst these demoralising influences, are ex-
pected to turn out goody-goody and moral in the end!
Verily the requirements are naive, which the self-satisfied
bourgeois makes upon the working-man!
On top of all these problems, the working-
man, who was lucky enough to have a job was
no better off - the work he did was not of a
self-fulfilling kind. It was work imposed on
the working class as a necessity. Engels states
55
that the machine-tending work of a spinning
operative was guaranteed, if nothing else, to
break the spirit. It prevented the worker from
occupying his mind with anything else.
The supervision of machinery, the joining of broken
threads, is no activity which claims the operative' s think-
ing, yet it is of a sort which prevents him from occupying
his mind with other things ... this work affords the muscles
no opportunity for physical activity. Thus it is, properly
speaking, not work, but tedium, the most deadening,
wearing process conceivable. The operative is condemned
to let his physical and mental powers decay in this utter
monot ony, it is his mission to be bored every day and all
day long from his eighth year. Moreover, he must not take
a moment' s rest; the engine moves increasingly, the
wheels, the straps, the spindles hum and rattle in his ears
without a pause, and if he tries to snatch one instant,
there is the overlooker at his back with the book of fines.
This condemnation to be burned alive in the mill, to give
constant attention to the tireless machine is felt as the
keenest torture by the operatives, and its action upon
mind and body is in the long run stunting in the highest
degree (p. 211).
Since Engels wrote CWC, factory work has
become worse. It has been reduced to a series
of operations that are even more deadening to
the senses. The machine tending in the textile
mills, copy typist work, key-punch operators
and computer programmers, bank clerks -
the watchers and tenders of new electronic
technology - all confront a working life
whose quality is to say the least unappetizing
[32]. Bookchin makes the point that the aim
of capital is to reduce human labor into an
aggregate of muscular and mental energy and
to make it lose its identity as an expression of
human powers [33].
Though the development of capitalist
science and technology provides the material
prerequisites for the emancipation of labor,
by reducing necessary labor time and im-
mensely increasing productivity, the actual
consequences are not liberating but enslaving.
The individual worker is no longer identifiably
productive; established skills are eroded and
displaced; the worker is subordinated to the
machine; wages are depressed; both the in-
tensity and the length of the working day are
56
increased. Marx summed up the consequences
of factory work as follows:
Factory work exhausts the nervous system to the utter-
most; at the same time, it does away with the many-sided
play of the muscles, and confiscates every atom of free-
dom, both in bodily and in intellectual activity. Even the
lightening of the labour becomes an instrument of tor-
ture, since the machine does not free the worker from the
work, but rather deprives the work itself of all content.
. Every kind of capitalist production, in so far as it is not
only a labour process but also capital's process of valori-
zation, has this in common, but it is not the worker who
employs the conditions of his work, but rather the
reverse, the conditions of work employ the worker. How-
ever, it is only with the coming of machinery that this
inversion first acquires a technical and palpable reality.
Owing to its conversion into an automaton, the instrument
of labour confronts the worker during the labour process
in the shape of capital, dead labour, which dominates and
soaks up living labour-power. The separation of the intel-
lectual faculties of the production process from manual
labour, and the transformation of those faculties into
powers exercised by capital over labour, is, as we have
already shown, finally completed by large-scale industry
erected on the foundation of machinery. The special skill
of each individual machine-operator, who has now been
deprived of all significance, vanishes as an infinitesimal
quantity in the face of the science, the gigantic natural
forces, and the mass of social labour embodied in the sys-
tem of machinery, which, together with those three
forces, constitutes the power of the ' master' [34].
What does this tell us? That the process
that has produced vast "material wealth is
simultaneously reproduced as absolute aliena-
tion, that it has produced this wealth on the
backs of workers who had been reduced to
what C. Wright Mills called "cheerful robots."
In the language of the factory, workers are
"hands" and "operatives"; and individuality
in work is reduced to a numerical expression.
The fragmentation of the work process is to
ensure that capital through its hired managers
had the greatest possible degree of control
over the living labor it employs [35].
In the bourgeois city the very bases of
human association have been distorted and
reduced into harsh commodity relations;
everyone becomes an enemy of everyone else.
In this country, social war is under full headway, every
one stands for himself, and fights for himself against all
comers, and whether or not he shall injure all the others
who are his declared foes, depends upon a cynical calcula-
tion as to what is more advantageous for himself. It no
longer occurs to any one to come to a peaceful under-
standing with his fellow-man; all differences are settled by
threats, violence, or in a court of law. In short, everyone
sees in his neighbor an enemy to be got out of the way,
or, at best, a tool to be used for his own advantage. And
this war grows from year to year, as the criminal table
shows, more violent, passionate, irreconcilable. The ene-
mies are dividing gradually into two great camps - the
bourgeoisie on the one hand, the workers on the other.
This war of each against all, of the bourgeoisie against the
proletariat, need cause us no surprise, for it is only the
logical sequel of the principle involved in free competi-
tion (pp. 165-166).
Engels also discussed such currently perti-
nent problems of capitalism as depression and
trade cycles, the question of the "reserve
army of labor," the theoretical problems of
surplus labor, and the actual existence of sur-
plus laborers, largely in the form of an im-
mense pool of casual laborers in the cities and
beneath them of an almost as large group of
unemployed and unemployable members of
the proletariat [36].
THE CLASS STRUGGLE
Engels understood the progressive role of
cities in history as centers of economic-cul-
tural development and incubators of the
modern revolutionary working class. In the
industrial towns, the working men and
women were faced with many difficult prob-
lems. Millions of hitherto independent pro-
ducers had been "pitchforked" from the
"natural" economy and rendered destitute.
Those who found work consumed today what
they made yesterday. The men and women
who by their toil created the greatness of Eng-
land were living on the margins of poverty;
receiving less and less of the surplus value
they produced. The working class soon real-
ized that their situation was not temporary:
they came to understand that they were an
integral and permanent part of the property-
less urban population. It dawned on them
that their children would be born to toil,
would have no other prospect than remaining
toilers all their lives. To defend themselves
the workers formed themselves into trade
unions. The industrial urban milieu forced
them to learn the meaning of their situation
and by concentrating them in the urban
space, made them learn the power of collec-
tive action.
The great cities are the birthplaces of labour movements;
in them the workers first began to reflect upon their
own condition, and to struggle against it; in them the
opposition between proletariat and bourgeoisie first made
itself manifest; from t hem proceeded the Trade Unions,
Chartism, and Socialism. The great cities have trans-
formed the disease of the social body, which appears in
chronic form in the country, into an acute one, and so
made manifest its real nature and the means of curing it.
Without the great cities and their forcing influence upon
population intelligence, the working-class would be far
less advanced than it is. Moreover, they have destroyed
the last remnant of patriarchal relation between working-
men and employers, a result to which manufacture on a
large scale has contributed by multiplying the employees
dependent upon a single employer (p. 153).
A great part of the CWC is devoted to the
working-class movement, its forms and meth-
ods of struggle. It is thus no accident that
some of the most profound and enduring in-
sights about working consciousness derived
from the CWC. For Engels the working class
movement was a necessary expression of the
antagonistic contradictions of the main classes
of capitalist society.
Working-class consciousness and struggle
under capitalism has gone through many
phases. The earliest and crudest form of
struggle was that of crime and was induced by
want, distress or necessity. "The working-man
lived in poverty and want, and saw that others
were better off than he. It was not clear to
his mind why he, who did more for society
than the rich idler, should be the one to suffer
under these conditions. Want conquered his
inherited respect for the sacredness of proper-
ty, and he stole ... crime increased with the
extension of manufacture, ... the yearly num-
57
ber of arrests bore a constant relation to the
number of bales of cotton annually consum-
ed" (p. 248).
Soon the workers realized that crime did
not help their cause. That is to say, the struc-
ture of crime reproduces the structure of the
existing social injustice as much as it pro-
tested against them.
The criminal could protest against the existing order of
society only simply, as one individual; the whole might of
society was brought to bear upon each criminal, and
crushed him with its immense superiority. Besides, t heft
was the most primitive form of protest, and for this
reason, if for no other, it never became the universal
expression of the public opinion of the working-men,
however much they might approve of it in silence. As a
class, they first manifested opposition to the bourgeoisie
when they resisted the introduction of machinery at the
very beginning of the industrial period (p. 249).
The political significance of crime for
Engels showed a lack of political conscious-
ness on the part of the urban proletariat. The
next stage in the development of political
awareness among the newly proletarianized
workers was the revolt against the machinery
in the cause of which factories were demol-
ished. This form of opposition was too nar-
rowly focused and, like crime, self-defeating:
"When the monetary end was attained, the
whole might of social power fell upon the un-
protected evil doers and punished them to its
heart' s content, while the machinery was
introduced none the less" (p. 259).
The third stage reached by the working
class was the political form of struggle. The
reform bill of 1824 opened the way for this
phase in working-class political development.
The reform bill gave the working class a right
previously restricted to the aristocracy and
the bourgeoisie, the right of free association.
The hitherto secret organizations of the
workers could now be organized openly. "In
all branches of industry Trade Unions were
formed with the outspoken intention of
protecting the single working-men against the
tyranny and neglect of the bourgeoisie. The
58
objects were: to fix wages and to deal, en
masse, as a power, with the employers; to
regulate the rate of wages according to the
profit of its latter, to raise it when opportun-
ity offered, and to keep it uniform in each
trade through out the count ry" (p. 250).
Although the proletarianization of the
peasants had been a universal negation, with
the growth of the labor movement the work-
ers began to discover their power and their
humanity as well. In the trade union move-
ment the working-men discovered a new state
of consciousness and the beginnings of a new
kind of solidarity. The great urban centers,
the house of modern industry, by concentrat-
ing further both the increase of middle-class
wealth and power on the one hand and work-
ing-class poverty and helplessness on the other
was the main source of working-class move-
ment and class consciousness. That is, urban
development was a gigantic process of class
segregation, which put the new laboring poor
into great morasses of misery outside the
centers of government and business and the
newly specialized residential area of the bour-
geoisie. The almost universal European divi-
sion into a "good" west end and a "poor"
east end of large cities could not help but
produce this solidarity [ 37 ].
The labor movement of the first half of the
nineteenth century was not either in composi-
tion or in its ideology and program a strictly
"proletarian" movement, i.e., one of indus-
trial and factory workers or even one con-
fined to wage earners. It was rather a common
front of all forces and tendencies representing
the (mainly urban) laboring-poor [38]. Its
importance lay not in its effectiveness, but in
the lessons of solidarity and class conscious-
ness which it taught.
Engels examined in detail the life experi-
ences and struggles in specific production
processes and production relations to reveal
the forms of existence in these branches: the
spinners and weavers, workers in knitting and
embroidery, tailors and dressmakers, glass-
blowers, metal workers, miners, and farm
laborers. He shows the workers' tribulations
and struggles against impossible odds. The
misery had impelled the workers to grapple
with their condition. Engels found that the
workers in industry were more conscious of
their class interest than others. Under capi-
talism, the proletarians' human dignity is
expressed only in struggle against the existing
conditions. Hence the importance of trade
unions and economic strikes as instruments
for advancing the interests of the workers,
and as a means of uniting the workers and
generating militancy.
These strikes, at first skirmishes, sometimes resulted in
weighty struggles; they decide nothing, it is true, but
true they are the strongest proof that the decisive battle
between bourgeoisie and proletariat is approaching. They
are the military school of the working-men in which they
prepare themselves for the great struggle which cannot be
avoided; they are the pronounciamentos of single branches
of industry that these too have joined the labour move-
ment ... and as a school of war, the unions are unexcelled
(p. 260).
Engels illustrated the political conscious-
ness of the miners by describing the coal
miners' efforts to form a trade union and to
organize a strike which they launched in
March 1844. The miners had collected a strike
fund large enough to assure each miners'
family of strike pay of half a crown a week
for several months. The miners nineteen-week
experience was a great triumph; workers unity
struck fear in the hearts of the bourgeoisie.
The great five months' battle of the coal miners against
mine owners, a battle fought on the part of the oppressed
with an endurance, courage, intelligence, and coolness
demands the highest admiration. What a degree of true
human venture, of enthusiasm and strength of character,
such a battle implies on the part of men who ... were
described as late as 1840, as being thoroughly brutal
and wanting in moral sense (p. 204).
What gives these Unions and the strikes arising from them
their real importance is this, that they are the first at-
tempt of the workers to abolish competition. They imply
the recognition of the fact that the supremacy of the
bourgeoisie, is based wholly upon the competition of the
workers among themselves; i.e., upon their want of
cohesion. And precisely because the Unions direct them-
selves against the vital nerve of the present social order,
however one-sidedly, in however narrow a way, are they
so dangerous to this social order. The working-men can-
not attack the bourgeoisie, and with it the whole existing
order of society, at any sorer point than this. If the com-
petition of the workers among themselves is destroyed, if
all determine not to be further exploited by the bour-
geoisie, the rule of property is at an end (pp. 218-219).
The industrial capitalist city by its very
nature creates a new consciousness among
workers and a will to resist the injustices of
capitalism. It functions as an organizing con-
tainer; the source of Blake's "mind-forg' d
monacles." That is, it is a focus of all connec-
tions - social, political and economic. The
workers "saw plenty of wealth around them,
and the law protecting its gross inequities.
They wanted enough to live on, "and by fair
means or foul we will have it" [39].
For Engels the working-class movement
was an imperative and an expression of the
antagonism of capital. He saw the Chartist
movement as having the potential of becom-
ing a proletarian and a socialist movement.
Why? Because "Chartism is the compact form
of the opposition to the bourgeoisie" (p. 263).
Prior to that "opposition always remained
isolated. It was single working men or sections
who fought a single bourgeois. If the fight
became general, this was scarcely by intention
of the working men or when it did happen
intentionally, Chartism was at the bottom of
it. But in Chartism it is the whole working-
class which arises against the bourgeoisie, and
attacks, first of all the political power, the
legislative rampart with which the bourgeoisie
has surrounded itself."
But in England of the 1840s, socialism was
still unconnected to the working-class move-
ment and those who advocated socialism did
not advocate an implacable class struggle.
"English Socialism arose with Owen, a manu-
facturer, and proceeds therefore with great
consideration toward the bourgeoisie and
great injustices toward the proletariat in its
methods, although it culminates in demanding
59
the abolition of the class antagonism between
bourgeoisie and proletariat. The socialists are
thoroughly tame and peacable, accept our
existing order, bad as it is, so far as to reject
all other methods but that of winning public
opinion" (pp. 272-273).
How was Chartism to overcome its limita-
tions? It had to be purified of its bourgeois
elements and merge with the working class.
This process had already begun and many
Chartist leaders had embraced socialism.
Capitalist development was producing prole-
tarian socialism, whose historical necessity
was determined by the antagonistic character
of capitalism and the advance of philosophical
and sociological thought. Through the study
of the objective conditions Engels was able to
demonstrate how the progress of capitalist
production induced the proletarians to unite
in a single powerful army which was increas-
ingly conscious of the fact that its interests
were incompatible with those of the capitalist.
"The war of the poor against the rich now
carried on in detail and indirectly will become
direct and universal. It is too late for peaceful
solution. The classes are divided more and
more sharply, the spirit of resistance pene-
trates the workers, the bitterness intensifies,
the guerilla skirmishes become concentrated
in more important battles, and soon a slight
impulse will suffice to set the avalanche in
mot i on" (p. 335).
THE MIDDLE CLASSES
In analyzing the poverty of the working
class, Engels knew that he was dealing with a
society where poverty and affluence are in-
separably joined; where the production of
wealth takes place on condition of the social
or absolute impoverishment of the producers.
The poverty of the working class had thus
always to be compared with the affluence of
the middle classes. As Bentham put it:
In the highest stage of social prosperity, the great mass of
the citizens will most probably possess few other re-
60
sources than their daily labour, and consequently will
always be near to indigence [40].
Engels had nothing but cont empt and scorn
for the middle classes. The bourgeoisie as a
class neglected its workers and regarded t hem
as objects and not as human like itself.
"Among the middle classes the cultivation of
the reasoning power has most significantly
developed their self-seeking predisposition. It
has made selfishness the ruling passion. It has
concentrated all the power of feeling upon
the sole concern of greed for money" [41].
Engels was quite cognizant of the fact that
this distortion of energy was the requisite
accompani ment to the heroic phase of the
middle class's economic and social trans-
formation of the modern world; but for such
acquisitive instinct the bourgeois world
could never have been born. But he now
argues that the heroic phase of the age of this
class had passed. The struggle of the bour-
geoisie against the feudal order had by the
early nineteenth century been completely
distorted. Whatever claim the bourgeoisie made
to human progress, it seemed to Engels like a
survival of a dead age, the ghost that would
haunt the bourgeoisie in its at t empt to com-
pete with the new forces of development. He
summed up his attitude towards the English
bourgeoisie as follows:
I have never seen a class so deeply demoralised, so incur-
ably debased by selfishness, so corroded within, so in-
capable of progress, as the English bourgeoisie; and I
mean by this, especially the bourgeoisie proper, partic-
ularly the liberal, Corn Law repealing bourgeoisie. For
nothing exists in this world, except for the sake of money,
itself not excluded. It knows no bliss save that of rapid
gain, no pain save of the losing of gold. In the presence of
this avarice and lust of gain, it is not possible for a single
human sentiment or opinion to remain untainted. True,
these English bourgeoisie are good husbands and family
men, and have all sorts of private virtues, and appear,
in ordinary intercourse, as decent and respectable as all
other bourgeoisie; even in business they are better to deal
with than the Germans; they do not higgle and haggle so
much as our own pettifogging merchants, but how does
this help matters? Ultimately it is self-interest, and money
gain, which alone determines them. I once went into
Manchester with such a bourgeoisie, and spoke to him of
the bad, unwholesome method of building, the frightful
condition of the working-people's quarters and asserted
that I had never seen so ill-built a city. The man listened
quietly to the end, and said at the corner where we
parted: "And yet there is a great deal of money made
here; good morning, sir". It is utterly indifferent to the
English bourgeoisie whether his working-men starve or
not, if only he makes money (pp. 313-314).
To justify its inhuman t reat ment of the
urban poor and the unempl oyed, the bour-
geoisie evolved pseudo-social theories like the
Malthusian population theory and imposed
on the victims of the system of capitalist
development the Malthusian "New Poor Law"
of 1834.
For Engels bot h the proletariat and the
bourgeoisie are victimized by the same capi-
talist relations of product i on in which they
find themselves. The demoralization that
Engels ascribes to the middle classes is the
structural counterpart of that suffered by the
working classes. In Manchester the anat omy
of the city revealed to Engels that the isolated
and denied classes were in fact parts of a total
whole. The middle class too was enstranged;
they t oo had lost their real human existence
and could recognize it only in "objectified"
entities; the middle class had undertaken to
appropriate a world through means which
rendered it permanently alien to t hem as well
[421.
The bourgeoisie and the proletariat were
thus the bearers of the same exploitative
mode of production. The t wo classes of such
a mode of product i on presuppose and precon-
dition each ot her and their relationship is not
just logical, but material - between exploiter
and exploited, oppressor and oppressed. Their
relations are moderat ed only by the cash
nexus. For the bourgeoisie, as Engels put it:
All the conditions of life are measured by money, what
brings no money is nonsense, unpractical, idealistic bosh
... The relation of the manufacturer to his operatives has
nothing human in it, it is purely economic. The manu-
facturer is Capital, the operative Labour. And ff the
operative will not be forced into this abstraction, if he in-
sists that he is not Labour but a man, who possesses,
61
among other things, the attributes of labour-force, if he
takes it into his hands t hat he need not allow himself to
be sold and bought in the market, as the commodity
"Labour", the bourgeois reason comes to a standstill
(p. 34) [43].
In the bourgeois city the commodi t y, like
a mysterious external force, rises above
humani t y and alters its destiny according to
the commodi t y' s suprahuman and aut onom-
ous laws. That is, the imperative of class (i.e.,
uneven distribution of the social product)
translates itself into urban spatial relations.
The bourgeoisie realizes itself t hrough its
nei ghborhood enclaves t hat are defined by
property values. Int o these walled enclaves
the bourgeoisie and its assets retreat in order
to enjoy the fruits derived from exploiting the
working class, that is left to sink or swim in
the inner city core. But class antagonism,
despite the effort to "cage" the working class
in old run down neighborhoods has a way of
defying the bourgeois and reasserting itself
in the form of struggle for inner city real
estate. The characteristic urban conflict is due
to what Harvey calls the "compulsive power
of fixed capital," that remains in the down-
turn core when the bourgeoisie leap-frogs
poor neighborhoods to settle in suburbia. The
banks, the museums, the art galleries and
various accumulated treasures of human
achievement cannot be moved to the suburbs,
so the working-class districts in the inner city
must be bulldozed to make room for office
glass towers celebrating the power of cor-
porate wealth. The bourgeoisie, which sees
everything in terms of "how much, " will seek
to undermine and dismantle working-class
communal patterns which impede their eco-
nomi c ends, and will seek to create new inner
city forms more in keeping with the needs
for accumulation. The bourgeoisie, by reducing
land into a commodi t y, moves all aesthetic
restraints that held the growth of earlier cities
in check.
The concept of social responsibility, once intuitive to
precapitalist communities, is replaced by a single goal:
plunder. Every entity and human capacity is conceived
as a resource for the acquisition of profit: the land,
forests, seas, rivers, the labour of others, and ultimately
all the varieties of social life from ... the family to the
community itself. The new industrial and commercial
classes fall upon the social body like ravenous wolves on
a helpless prey, and what remains of a once vital social
organism are the torn fragments and indigestible sinews
that linger more in the memory of humanity than in the
realities of social intercourse. The American urban lot
with its rusted cans, broken glass, and debris strewn
chaotically among weeds and scrub reflects, in the minus-
cule, the ravaged remains of forests; waters, shorelines,
and communities [44].
Capitalism is thus an economic system
which feeds callousness. The unexampl ed in-
humanities suffered by the working class and
the urban poor were not the work of weak or
consciously malign men. "Their gigantic
horror is in considerable measure precisely
found in the circumstances that those who
can be held historically responsible for the
perpetuation of the unforgivable things are
generally virtuous, hardworking, law abiding
and upright men of character and strength of
purpose" [451.
Given its vested interest in the status quo,
it was unrealistic to expect the bourgeoisie to
abolish slums and poverty. Socialism was in-
compatible with the interests of the bour-
geoisie. The bourgeoisie, enslaved by social
conditions and the prejudices involved in
t hem, trembles, blesses and crosses himself
before everything which really paves the way
for progress; the proletariat has open eyes for
it, and studies it with pleasure and success
(p. 296). The bourgeois answer to working
class poverty is charity. But the bourgeoisie
required dependence, in social and political
quite as much as in directly economi c terms.
And Engels was scathing in his criticism of
such charities.
The English bourgeoisie is charitable out of self-interest;
it gives nothing outright, but regards gifts as a business
62
matter, makes a bargain with the poor, saying: "If I spend
much upon the benevolent institutions, I hereby pur-
chase the right not to be troubled any further, and you
are bound thereby to stay in your dusky holes and not to
irritate my tender nerves by exposing your misery. You
shall despair as before, but you shall despair unseen, this
1 require, this I purchase with my subscription of twenty
pounds for the infirmary! (p. 316) [46].
Such are the basic ideas of Engels' The
Condition of the Working Class in England.
It is not free of imprecise and incorrect prop-
ositions, which were mainly due to youthful
bravado and to the fact that Marxist econom-
ic and political theory was still embryonic.
Engels assumed that capitalism had already
worked out its potentialities as the cyclical
crises of overproduction seemed to indicate,
while the growing impoverishment of the
proletariat was a certain sign that the bour-
geoisie was losing its footing [471.
Whereas The Condition Of The Working
Class In England in 1844 gives a detailed
description of urban conditions in English
cities, The Housing Question 1872-73, con-
tains the essential proposition of a Marxist
approach to the housing and urban systems.
Written as a critical response to reform pro-
posals that appeared in the Volkestaat, the
organ of the German Social Democratic Party,
it criticized Mulberger, a Proudhonist who
had claimed that home ownership was the
solution to the housing question, and Dr.
Emil Sax, who saw legal reforms, philan-
throphy and moral appeals as the answer to
the housing shortage.
Mulberger, like modern urban reformers,
had bewailed the lot of the population caught
in the modern cities. He was deeply distressed
by the shortage of housing. To eliminate the
gross injustice of the people who lived "below
the savages" he wished to turn society into a
"totality of free and independent owners of
dwellings" (p. 31) through the gradual pay-
ment of the cost of his house by the tenant to
the original house-owner. The aim was to
make the worker an owner of property.
That the condition of the workers had in
general worsened materially since the intro-
duction of capitalist production on a large
scale was not in doubt for Engels. But he
asked if that necessitated looking back to the
past longingly and mourning the passing of
rural small-scale industry? The housing short-
age, though but one of the evils of capitalism,
had a silver lining. "Only the proletariat creat-
ed by modern large-scale industry, liberated
from all inherited fetters, including those
which chained it to the land, and driven its
herds into big towns, is in a position to ac-
complish the great social transformation
which will put an end to all class exploitation
and class rule. The old rural hand weaver with
hearth and home would never have been able
to do it; they would never have been able to
conceive such an idea, much less able to desire
to carry it out " (p. 24).
Engels used the concrete example of Dr.
Emil Sax, The Conditions Of The Working
Class And Their Reform, published in 1869,
because it had attempted to summarize as
far as possible the bourgeois literature on the
subject. And Sax claimed to have discovered
a new science - social economy - which
hoped to devise ways of preserving capitalism
by turning all wage workers into capitalists.
While Mulberger claimed that once workers
owned their dwellings, capitalism would
cease to exist, Sax held that by acquiring his
own little house the "so called propertyless
classes" were to be raised "to propertied
classes ... all wage workers can be turned into
capitalists without ceasing to be wage work-
ers" (p. 45).
This kind of reasoning, Engels argued, was
really the ideological prop of the status quo,
i.e., the bourgeois order of things. It wanted
to eliminate the evils of bourgeois society,
yet intended to preserve the economic basis
of their evils. He then asked rhetorically:
"Whence then comes the housing shortage?
How did it arise?" He reminded Dr. Sax that
the housing shortage was a necessary product
of the bourgeois social order; that it could not
fail to be present in a society in which the
great masses of the workers were exclusively
dependent upon wages;
63
[T] hat is to say, on the sum of foodstuffs necessary for
their existence and for the propagation of their kind; in
which improvements of the existing- machinery contin-
ually throw masses of workers out of employment; in
which violent and regularly recurring industrial vacilla-
tions determine on the one hand the existence of a large
reserve army of unemployed workers, and on the other
hand drive large masses in the big towns, at a quicker rate
than dwellings come into existence for them under exist-
ing conditions; in which, therefore there must always
be tenants even for the most infamous pigsties; and in
which finally the house owner in his capacity as a capi-
talist has not only the right, but in view of the competi-
tion, to a certain extent also the duty of ruthlessly
making as much out of his property in large rents as he
possibly can. In such a society the housing shortage is no
accident; it is a necessary institution and it can be abol-
ished together with all its effects on health, etc., only if
the whole social order from which it springs is fundamen-
tally refashioned (pp. 46-47).
Thus, for Engels, the housing question was
of a secondary nature - the essence of the
problem was the capitalist mode of produc-
tion itself. That is, the evils that arise around
the housing shortage and in the slums of the
major cities are a built-in feature of the capi-
talist mode of production. The argument that
by acquiring his own little house the wage
worker would "become a capitalist" and capi-
talism would change from an evil into an ideal
society revealed the limits of bourgeois
"socialism." To solve the problem that is
caused by capitalism, the workers must have
more of the disease!
The answer for Engels lay in an attack on
the capitalist system at its vital point; only in
that way could the evils that arose from it,
like the housing shortage and slums, be elim-
inated. However these were questions that the
bourgeois socialists a la Proudhoni st chose
not to counternance.
It does not explain the housing shortage from the existing
conditions ... who ever declares that the capitalist mode
of production, the "iron laws" of present-day bourgeois
society, axe inviolable, and yet at the same time would
like to abolish their unpleasant consequences, has no
other resource but to deliver moral sermon to the capital-
ist, moral sermons whose emotional effects immediately
evaporate under the influences of private interests and,
ff necessary of competition (pp. 46-47).
CONTEMPORARY RELEVANCE
Can the concepts developed by Engels in
any way help us understand the cont emporary
urban form and the conditions that exist in
the slums? Though similar in some striking
ways to the conditions described by Engels in
the 1840s, a case can be made that today' s
crisis is the result of the cyclical dynamics of
capitalism and the fact that the crisis of
recent years coincides with the movement
into the "inner-city" areas of black and other
Third World immigrants. Therefore the phe-
nomenon of decay, poverty, unempl oyment
and crime, although it has a precedent in the
past, is the result also of failure of the immi-
grants to adjust to the urban phenomenon.
A number of scholars, e.g., Harvey (1973),
Tabb and Sawyers (1978), Paris (1978),
Phizacklea and Miles (1980), among others,
have also poi nt ed to the importance of
acquaintance with Engels' writing [48].
Specifically, Marxist writers argue that the
logic of the current urban crisis, like that of
the 1840s, is derivative from the logic and the
workings of the wider capitalist social forma-
tion, which leads persistently to the recur-
rence of slums and the social problems which
the bourgeoisie can only solve in one way -
destruction of the working-class districts.
That is, industrial and urban devel opment is
structured by the demands of capital: in the
early phase of industrialization capital de-
manded a concentration of labor in the core
of expanding towns but refused to supply
housing for the workers. New capitalist devel-
opment has leap-frogged the working-class
district to the outskirts of the cities with
devastating results for the working class it had
previously assembled in the inner city.
One of the main contributions of Engels is
that the urban phenomenon is comprehen-
sible only in the cont ext of some prior anal-
ysis of the product i on and reproduct i on of
relations of capitalism. In short, urbanization
and its recurrent problems is comprehensible
only as a mediated out come of the social
64
dynamics and imperatives of the capitalist
mode of product i on in specific conjunctural
circumstances. This is not to deny that the
urban crisis of the 1970s is different in certain
respects from the decay in the 1840s, but
simply to suggest that bot h can only be ex-
plained by reference to the operation of the
capitalist mode of production.
The two books by Engels are therefore
i mport ant because they describe a state of
things which is reproduced at the present
moment in the major cities of all capitalist
countries and the underdeveloped countries
whose economies are capitalist in character.
Engels' analysis of urban decay and his in-
cisive criticism of liberal reforms are not only
applicable in light of todays' conditions, they
are still the most coherent st at ement of the
materialist approach to the urban problems.
Though the ethnic composition of the slums
has changed, the slums and the housing
shortage go back to the very origin of capital-
ism. On the English slums Engels has this to
say:
The worst quarters of all the large towns are inhabited by
Irishmen. Whenever a district is distinguished for especial
filth and especial ruinousness, the explorer may safely
count upon meeting those Celtic faces which one recog-
nizes at the first glance as different from the Saxon
physiognomy of the native, and the singing aspirate
brogue which the Irishman never loses (p. 123) [49].
That is, the slums of the 1840s were pop-
ulated not only by the indigenous and recent-
ly proletarianized groups, but also the worst
areas of these slums were assigned to Irish
immigrants who were distinguished from the
former both by physical and cultural charac-
teristics. Urbanologists and students of pover-
ty have written a great deal of descriptive
material about the changing ethnic composi-
tion of the ghet t o population. But these
students fail to see that the modern city is a
social and physical consequence of capitalism:
built and living in its modes.
Whereas the English cities in the nine-
t eent h century confined the undesirable Irish
in the urban slums, today the domi nant eco-
nomi c class, through the manipulation of race
and racism, has confined the undesirable
"Negro" and immigrants who are equally
necessary for the smoot h functioning of the
economy to the ghettos of remarkable pover-
ty and destitution. The living conditions in
these ghettos are no better than those de-
scribed by Engels in the ghettos of Manches-
ter and other cities. The houses have im-
perfect sewage and drainage, defective wiring,
and lack proper heating, which in the winter
causes suffering and death by hypothermia.
To make things worse, business buildings
drive the poor to ot her parts of the city,
saturating and degrading the city neighbor-
hood by neighborhood. The roots of the
urban crisis, Engels emphasized over and over
again, lie deep in the capitalist mode of pro-
duction [50].
There is no lack of "expl anat i on" from the
liberal poi nt of view of the current crisis faced
by the urban centers of the metropolitan and
underdeveloped areas of the world. Typically
ahistoric, pragmatic and descriptive, it is
concerned mainly with how cities adjust the
behavior of individuals and groups formed by
the rural areas with the urban mass. Liberal
urbanologists view conflict and slum condi-
tions a la Dr. Sax and Mulberger as unfortu-
nate evils which can be eliminated wi t hout
fundamental structural changes of capitalism.
There is very little light shed on why the
ghetto and urban poverty are such persistent
features of the capitalist city.
The next i mport ant contribution of Engels'
two books is that in t hem he laid the funda-
mental hypothesis for the historical material-
ist approach to the study of urbanization.
According to historical materialism, the
economic instant determines the social struc-
ture, while the political relations between
classes explain and organize each conjecture
for social practice as a whole.
65
One of the first tasks that Engels faced was
to demonstrate how the process of primitive
accumulation, or more correctly the initial
phase of capitalist accumulation in England,
involved a massive removal of bot h resources
and human labor power from the countryside
in order to centralize t hem in the cities. "In
industrial societies, t hroughout the nine-
t eent h century at least, the map of social
relationships of product i on clearly showed
the increasing imbalance between town and
countryside due to the fact that rapidly devel-
oping industrial product i on utilized the re-
sources of the countryside in ever-growing
quantities, removing labor and the agricultural
products needed to feed a continuously in-
creasing urban population, as well as the agri-
cultural raw materials needed for the growth
of i ndust ry" [ 51 ].
The analytic and empirical stance followed
by Engels, is holistic; he first established how
the various aspects of the capitalist mode of
product i on historically related to form a
totality. In his detailed study of Manchester,
Engels elucidated not only the determination
of the various parts of the urban system by
the whole, but also, and above all, the mut ual
determination of the different parts by the
whole. The affluence of the middle classes
and the poverty of the working class exposed,
according to Engels, the unity of opposites.
Therborn puts the nature of materialist anal-
ysis thus:
The pattern of social determination discovered by histor-
ical materialism is characterised precisely by a unity and
conflict of opposites. To speak of contradiction in society
is to acknowledge a basic unity between the parts of
fundamental structural incongruities. Contradiction in
this sense constitutes the relationship between social
classes ... [52].
The classes are the two necessary poles of a common
specific mode of exploitation and oppression. Their
interrelationship and their struggle are therefore deter-
mined by the development of their mode of production,
a development which occurs in and through the struggle
between classes ... An explorative mode of production,
then, is contradictory in the sense that it is at the same
time both a specific unity of opposing classes, of im-
mediate producers and appropriators of surplus labor
and conflict and struggle of these opposing classes [53].
The contradictions of a given social totality
cannot be eliminated wi t hout abolishing a
particular mode of production. Engels, in his
discussion of the housing question, points out
that the bourgeois met hod of dealing with the
housing shortage poi nt ed to the dilemma it
faced as well:
In reality the bourgeoisie has only one met hod of solving
the housing question after its fashion - that is to say, of
solving it in such a way that the solution continually
reproduces the question anew. This met hod is called
"aaussmann. "
By the term "Haussmann" I do not mean merely the
specifically Bonapartist manner of the Parisian Hauss-
mann - breaking long straight and broad streets through
the closely-built workers' quarter and erecting big lux-
urious buildings on bot h sides of them, the intention
thereby, apart from the strategic aim of making barricade
fighting more difficult, being also to develop a specifically
Bonapartist building trades' proletariat dependent on the
government and to turn the city into a pure luxury city.
By "Haussmann" I mean the practice which has now be-
come general of making breaches in the working class
quarters of our big towns, and particularly in those which
are centrally situated, quite apart from whether this is
done from considerations of public health and for beauti-
fying the town, or owning to demand for big centrally
situated business premises, or owning to traffic require-
ments, such as laying down of railways, streets, etc. No
matter how different the reason may be, the result is
everywhere the same: the scandalous alleys and lanes
disappear to the accomplishment of lavish self-praise
from the bourgeoisie on account of this tremendous
success, but they appear again immediately somewhere
else and often in the immediate neighborhood (pp. 74-
75).
The bourgeoisie and the working class, for
a materialist analysis, reflect two sides of the
same coin. Again Therborn:
Finally, the real value of Engels's books on
the city lies less in the descriptions it gives of
the misery of the working class and the poor
66
which developed in England as a result of the
capitalist mode of production, for in this
respect Engels had numerous predecessors.
And it is not even in the burning indignation
against a social system which subjected the
working masses to such terrible suffering, or
the moving and graphic description of those
suffering and the deep and heartfelt sympat hy
with the victims, which give Engels' work
its special character. The most not ewort hy
historical features of Engels's work are
summed up by Marcus as follows:
It is not a question of any easy fashionable radicalism,
of a moral superiority that is its own end or that it
justified by the distance it establishes between itself and
the objects of its contempt and indignation; it is a ques-
tion of bearing one' s witness in social and historical cir-
cumstances that are intolerable to almost everything one
has learned about the decent possibilities of human life.
And it is not a question of having a blueprint for the
future all worked out; it is quite enough to know that
means do exist for the amelioration of present injustices
and suffering, t hat one is not protesting against laws of
nature or dealing with a preindustrial economy with no
margins for sizable alternatives. If the history of all subse-
quent legislative encroachments and limitations on the
practices of industry proves nothing else, it proves this.
And even in 1845 the employment of children was a
flagrant human abuse. The best way of convincing oneself
of the soundness of this assertion is to read the defenses
and justifications offered at the time for the continuation
of such practices. They still make one blush for the spirit-
ual condition of the very souls of those who honestly
held such beliefs [54].
Above all Engels' met hod as a fieldworker
and as a revolutionary theoretician calls us
back to this work again and again, in a world
where locales and people have shifted, but the
processes remain the same.
NOTES
1. K. Marx, Capital, Vol. 1 (New York: International
Publishers, 1973), p. 240.
2. V.I. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 2 (Moscow: Progress
Publishers), p. 23.
3. F. Mehring, Karl Marx: The Story of His Life, Trans.
E. Fitzgerald (New York: Coviei, Friede, 1936) pp.
132-133.
4. E. Hobsbawm, "Int roduct i on, " in F. Engels, The Con-
dition of the Working Class in England (London:
Granada, 1979).
5. R. WiUiams, The Country and the City, (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1973), p. 3.
6. G. Therborn, Science, Class and Society (London: New
Left Books, 1976), p. 43.
7. T.I. Olzerman, The Making of Marxist Philosophy
(Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1977), p. 355.
8. S. Marcus, Engels' Manchester and the Working Class
(New York: Vintage, 1973), p. 134.
9. Ibid. , p. 135.
10. Ibid., p. 140.
11. Ibid.
12. Williams, op. tit., 1973; p. 98.
13. Marcus, op. cir., 1973; pp. 9- 10.
14. Ibid. , pp. 10- 11.
15. Hobsbawm, op. tit., 1979; p. 10.
16. M. Bookchin, The Limits of the City (New York:
Anchor, 1973), p. 51.
17. Hobsbawm, op. cit., 1979; p. 10.
18. Marcus, op. tit., 1973; p. 99.
19. P. Sweezy, The Theory of Capitalist Development
(New York: Monthly Review, 1956), p. 11.
20. Dickens in his novels also described the deprived, in-
complete, unrealized humanity of the masses of London
inhabitants. William (op. eit., 1973; p. 55) commenting
on Dickens' works makes the following observations on
the mass anonymity of the city:
As we stand and look back at a Dickens' novel the
general movement we remember - the characteristic
movement - is a hurrying seemingly random passing
of men and women, each heard in some fixed phrase,
seen in some fixed expression: a way of seeing men
and women that belong to the street. There is at
first an absence of ordinary connection and devel-
opment. These men and women do not so much
relate as pass each other and then sometimes collide.
Nor often in the ordinary way do they speak to each
other. They speak at or past each other, each i nt ent
above all on defining through his words his own
identity and reality; in fixed self-description, in
voices raised emphatically to be heard through and
past other similar voices. But then as the action
develops, unknown and unacknowledged relation-
ships, profound and decisive connections, definite
and committing recognitions and avowals are as it
were forced into consciousness. These are real and
inevitable relationships and connections, the neces-
sary recognitions and avowals of any human society.
But they are of a kind that are obscured, com-
plicated, mystified, by the sheer rush and noise and
miscellaneity of this new and complex social order.
21. Williams, op. cit., 1973; p. 150.
22. D. Martindale and Neuwirth, G., Trans., Introduction
to The C/ty (New York: Free Press, 1958), p. 34.
23. Marcus, op. cir., 1973; p. 163.
24. Hobsbawm (op. cir., 1979; p. 212) corroborates Engels'
description and writes: "Who says mid-nineteenth-
century city, therefore says ' overcrowding' and ' slums' ,
and the more rapidly the city grew, the worse its over-
67
crowding. In spite of sanitary reform and what little
planning there was, urban overcrowding probably in-
creased during this period and neither health nor mortal-
ity improved, where they did not actually deteriorate."
25. Ibi d. , p. 12.
26. Marcus, op. cit., 1973; p. 197.
27. D. Harvey, Social Justice and the Oty (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins, 1973), p. 133.
28. Ibid.
29. Marcus, op. cir., 1973; p. 173.
30. Ibid., p. 205.
31. Hobsbawm, op. cir., 1979; p. 12.
32. Marcus, op. cit., 1973; p. 214.
33. Bookchin, op. cit., 1973; p. 45.
34. K. Marx, Grundrisse (London: Penguin, 1974), pp.
422- 423.
35. G. Kay, The Economic Theory of the Working Class
(New York: St. Martins Press, 1979), p. 55.
36. Marcus, op. cir., 1973; p. 202.
37. Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution 1 789-1848 (New
York: Mentor Press, 1962), p. 203.
38. Ibid., pp. 212- 213.
39. Williams, op. cir., 1973; p. 184.
40. J. Bentham, "Principles of the Civil Code," in J. Brown-
ing (ed.), The Works ofJeremy Bentham, Vol. 1 (Edin-
burgh: William Tait, 1843), p. 314.
41. Marcus, op. cit., 1973; p. 230.
42. Ibid. , p. 233.
43. This is how Marx (quoted in Marcus, op. cit., 1973; p.
233) put the relation between labor and capital: "The
possessing class and the class of the proletariat represent
the same human self-estrangement. But the former is
comfortable in this self-estrangement and finds there in
its own comfirmation, knows, t hat this self-estrange-
ment is its own power, and possesses in it the semblance
of human existence. The latter feels itself annihilated
in this self-estrangement, sees in it its importance and
the reality of an i nhuman existence."
44. Bookchin, op. cir., 1973; p. 61.
45. Marcus, op. cit., 1973; p. 238.
46. Raymond Williams (op. cir., 1973; p. 83) also makes
this pertinent observation "To make many men poor
and dependent, and then to offer t hem charitable relief,
can perhaps be seen as human. But the landowning class
required dependence, in social and political quite as
much as in directly economic terms. "
47. Olzerman, op. cir., 1977; p. 344.
48. See for example Harvey, op. cit., 1973; W. Tabb,
Marxism and the Metropolis, New Perspectives in Urban
Political Economy (New York: Oxford University Press,
1978); A. Phizacklea and Miles, R., Labour and Racism
(London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980).
49. Engels' description of the Irish slum has a contemporary
ring: "The houses are occupied from cellar to garret,
f'flthy within and without, and their appearance is such
that no human being could possibly wish to live within
t hem ... Scarcely a whole window-pane can be found,
the walls are crumbling, door-post and window frames
loose and broken, doors of old boards nailed together,
50.
51.
or altogether waiting in this thieves' quarter, where no
doors are needed, there being nothing to steal" (p. 60).
E. Mingione, "Theoretical Elements for a Marxist
Analysis of Urban Development," in Michael Harloe
(ed.), Captive Cities: Studies in the Political Economy
of Cities and Regions, (New York: Wiley, 1977), p. 94.
The solution of the poor in such cities as Newark and
the South Bronx are well known. The old conflict be-
tween gain for the few and jobs, livability and commun-
ity for the many continues in America' s towns and
cities. The Nation Dec. 29, 1979, has three articles;
Phoenix is described as a "developer' s city, " its runaway
suburban spill soaking up the Arizona landscape. Writes
Bob Gottlieb: "Despite the Sunbelt protestations to the
contrary, class divisions in Phoenix are real - and ex-
treme. Unemployment figures during recessionary
periods are higher than national averages, without taking
into account the thousands of Mexican migrant workers
who work and live in their cardboard shacks provided
by the big agribusiness interests in the northwest section
of the valley. Yet, amid some of the worst poverty in
the region, the Del Webb Company, in conjunction with
cot t on grower J.G. Boswell, built a model retirement
community called Sun City and plunked it down in
the middle of this farming region. Within twenty years,
the Webb corporation created a mini-city of 50,000
upper- and middle-size single-family dwellings with their
eleven golf courses, three country clubs, several recrea-
tion centers, shipping centers, restaurants and a 200-bed
hospital called the Boswell Memorial Hospital. There are
no blacks or Hispanics in Sun City and even visiting
grandchildren under the age of 18 can' t use the recrea-
tion facilities. It is a closed, walled-in slice of what Webb
likes to think of as the end point of the American
dream. "
The situation in Boston is described by Edward D.
McClive and Kirk Scharfenberg as follows: "To an out-
sider it may all seem a paradox. A city so vibrant and
yet so troubled. An urban success story; an urban
tragedy. But for those viewing the situation up close it
seems all of a piece. The winners in Boston are the inves-
tors, the tourists attracted to its growing vanity eco-
nomy, the professionals who commute daily, abandon-
ing the city at nightfall. The many who reside in Bos-
t on' s working-class neighborhoods, bot h black and
white, however, find their fortunes are not rising with
the tide. Unemployment in white South Boston exceeds
12 percent, more than twice the official city-wide
figure; in black Roxbury it' s above 20 percent; for the
youths of bot h those communities an unemployment
rate of 40 percent is now chronic. Burdened with the
highest property taxes in the nation, squeezed by an
influx of middle- and upper-middle-income families
back into Boston, pressed by skyrocketing rents (and a
3 percent vacancy rate in apartments), impoverished by
rising fuel costs, they are not sure that the "revitalized"
Boston has a place for them. Rightly insecure about
their futures, they turn on those below them on the
economic ladder who, they fear, are trying to take
68
their place. Whites turn on blacks; blacks strike back at
whites" (The Nation, Dec. 29, 1979: 687).
52. Therborn, op. tit., 1976, p. 393.
53. Ibid. , p. 394.
54. Marcus, op. tit., p. 218.
Dialectical Anthropology, 10 (1985) 43 - 68
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