From The Condition of the Working Class in England By Friedrich Engels, 1845

Preface (1845)
The condition of the working-class is the real basis and point of departure of all social movements of the present because it is the highest and most unconcealed pinnacle of the social misery existing in our day. A knowledge of proletarian conditions is absolutely necessary to be able to provide solid ground for socialist theories, on the one hand, and for judgments about their right to exist, on the other; and to put an end to all sentimental dreams and fancies pro and con. ut proletarian conditions exist in their classical form, in their perfection, only in the ritish !mpire, particularly in !ngland proper. esides, only in !ngland has the necessary material been so completely collected and put on record by official en"uiries as is essential for any in the least exhaustive presentation of the subject. Twenty-one months # had the opportunity to become ac"uainted with the !nglish proletariat, its strivings, its sorrows and its joys, to see them from near, from personal observation and personal intercourse, and at the same time to supplement my observations by recourse to the re"uisite authentic sources. $hat % have seen, heard and read has been worked up in the present book...

Introduction
The history of the proletariat in !ngland begins with the second half of the last century, with the invention of the steam-engine and of machinery for working cotton. These inventions gave rise, as is well known, to an industrial revolution, a revolution which altered the whole civil society; one, the historical importance of which is only now beginning to be recogni&ed. !ngland is the classic soil of this transformation, which was all the mightier, the more silently it proceeded; and !ngland is, therefore, the classic land of its chief product also, the proletariat. 'nly in !ngland can the proletariat be studied in all its relations and from all sides. efore the introduction of machinery, the spinning and weaving of raw materials was carried on in the workingman(s home. $ife and daughter spun the yarn that the father wove or that they sold, if he did not work it up himself. These weaver families lived in the country in the neighborhood of the towns, and could get on fairly well with their wages, because the home market was almost the only one and the crushing power of competition that came later, with the con"uest of foreign markets and the extension of trade, did not yet press upon wages. There was, further, a constant increase in the demand for the home market, keeping pace with the slow increase in population and employing all the workers; and there was also the impossibility of vigorous competition of the workers among themselves, conse"uent upon the rural dispersion of their homes. )o it was that the weaver was usually in a position to lay by something, and rent a little piece of land, that he cultivated in his leisure hours, of which he had as many as he chose to take, since he could weave whenever and as long as he pleased. True, he was a bad farmer and managed his land inefficiently, often obtaining but poor crops; nevertheless,

he was no proletarian, he had a stake in the country, he was permanently settled, and stood one step higher in society than the !nglish workman of today. )o the workers vegetated throughout a passably comfortable existence, leading a righteous and peaceful life in all piety and probity; and their material position was far better than that of their successors. They did not need to overwork; they did no more than they chose to do, and yet earned what they needed. They had leisure for healthful work in garden or field, work which, in itself, was recreation for them, and they could take part besides in the recreations and games of their neighbors, and all these games - bowling, cricket, football, etc., contributed to their physical health and vigor. They were, for the most part, strong, well-built people, in whose physi"ue little or no difference from that of their peasant neighbors was discoverable. Their children grew up in the fresh country air, and, if they could help their parents at work, it was only occasionally; while of eight or twelve hours work for them there was no "uestion. $hat the moral and intellectual character of this class was may be guessed. )hut off from the towns, which they never entered, their yarn and woven stuff being delivered to traveling agents for payment of wages - so shut off that old people who lived "uite in the neighborhood of the town never went thither until they were robbed of their trade by the introduction of machinery and obliged to look about them in the towns for work - the weavers stood upon the moral and intellectual plane of the yeomen with whom they were usually immediately connected through their little holdings. They regarded their s"uire, the greatest landholder of the region, as their natural superior; they asked advice of him, laid their small disputes before him for settlement, 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 temptation to be immoral, there being no groggeries or low houses in their vicinity, and because the host, at whose inn they now and then "uenched their thirst, was also a respectable man, usually a large tenant-farmer who took pride in his good order, good beer, and early hours. They had their children the whole day at home, and brought them up in obedience and the fear of +od; the patriarchal relationship remained undisturbed so long as the children were unmarried. The young people grew up in idyllic simplicity and intimacy with their playmates until they married; and even though sexual intercourse before marriage almost unfailingly took place, this happened only when the moral obligation of marriage was recogni&ed on both sides, and a subse"uent wedding made everything good. #n short, the !nglish industrial workers of those days lived and thought after the fashion still to be found here and there in +ermany, in retirement and seclusion, without mental activity and without violent fluctuations in their position in life. They could rarely read and far more rarely write; went regularly to church, never talked politics, never conspired, never thought, delighted in physical exercises, listened with inherited reverence when the ible was read, and were, in their un"uestioning humility, exceedingly well-disposed towards the *superior* classes. ut intellectually, they were dead; lived only for their petty, private interest, for their looms and gardens, and knew

nothing of the mighty movement which, beyond their hori&on, was sweeping through mankind. They were comfortable in their silent vegetation, and but for the industrial revolution they would never have emerged from this existence, which, co&ily romantic as it was, was nevertheless not worthy of human beings. #n truth, they were not human beings; they were merely toiling machines in the service of the few aristocrats who had 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 independent activity, and so forcing them to think and demand a position worthy of men. As in ,rance politics, so in !ngland manufacture and the movement of civil society in general drew into the whirl of history the last classes which had remained sunk in apathetic indifference to the universal interests of mankind.

The

reat To!ns

The whole assemblage of buildings is commonly called -anchester, and contains about four hundred thousand inhabitants, rather more than less. The town itself is peculiarly built, so that a person may live in it for years, and go in and out daily without coming into contact with a working-people(s "uarter or even with workers, that is, so long as he confides himself to his business or to pleasure walks. This arises chiefly from the fact, that by unconscious tacit agreement, as well as with out-spoken conscious determination, the working-people(s "uarters are sharply separated from the sections of the city reserved for the middle-class; or, if this does not succeed, they are concealed with the cloak of charity.

"esults
.aving now investigated, somewhat in detail, the conditions under which the !nglish working-class lives, it is time to draw some further inferences from the facts presented, and then to compare our inferences with the actual state of things. /et us see what the workers themselves have become under the given circumstances, what sort of people they are, what their physical, mental, and moral status. Typhus, that universally diffused affliction, is attributed by the official report on the sanitary condition of the working- class , directly to the bad state of the dwellings in the matters of ventilation, drainage, and cleanliness. This report compiled, it must not be forgotten, by the leading physicians of !ngland from the testimony of other physicians, asserts that a single ill-ventilated court, a single blind alley without drainage, is enough to engender fever, and usually does engender it especially if the inhabitants are greatly crowded. This fever has the same character almost everywhere, and develops in nearly every case into specific typhus. #t is to be found in the working-people(s "uarters of all great towns and cities, and in single ill-built, ill-kept streets of smaller places, though it naturally seeks out single victims in better districts also. That the dwellings of the workers in the worst portions of the cities, together with the other conditions of life of this class, engender numerous diseases, is attested on all sides. 0ext to intemperance in the enjoyment of intoxicating li"uors, one of the principal faults

of !nglish working-men is sexual license. ut this, too, follows with relentless logic, with inevitable necessity out of the position of a class left to itself, with no means of making fitting use of its freedom. The bourgeoisie has left the working-class only these two pleasures, while imposing upon it a multitude of labors and hardships, and the conse"uence is that the working-men, in order to get something from life, concentrate their whole energy upon these two enjoyments, carry them to excess, surrender to them in the most unbridled manner. $hen people are placed under conditions which appeal to the brute only, what remains to them but to rebel or to succumb to utter brutality1 And when, moreover, the bourgeoisie does its full share in maintaining prostitution - and how many of the 23,333 prostitutes who fill the streets of /ondon every evening live upon the virtuous bourgeoisie4 .ow many of them owe it to the seduction of a bourgeois, that they must offer their bodies to the passers-by in order to live1 - surely it has least of all a right to reproach the workers with their sexual brutality. The failings of the workers in general may be traced to an unbridled thirst for pleasure, to want of providence, and of flexibility in fitting into the social order, to tile general inability to sacrifice the pleasure of the moment to a remoter advantage. ut is that to be wondered at1 $hen a class can purchase few and only the most sensual pleasures by its wearying toil, must it not give itself over blindly and madly to those pleasures1 A class about whose education no one troubles himself, which is a play-ball to a thousand chances, knows no security in life - what incentives has such a class to providence, to *respectability*, to sacrifice the pleasure of the moment for a remoter enjoyment, most uncertain precisely by reason of the perpetually varying, shifting conditions under which the proletariat lives1 A class which bears all the disadvantages of the social order without enjoying its advantages, one to which the social system appears in purely hostile aspectswho can demand that such a class respect this social order1 5erily that is asking much4 ut the working-man cannot escape the present arrangement of society so long as it exists, and when the individual worker resists it, the greatest injury falls upon himself. Thus the social order makes family life almost impossible for the worker. #n 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 hum an 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 temptation to drink; what family life is possible under such conditions1 6et the working-man cannot escape from the family, must live in the family, and the conse"uence is a perpetual succession of family troubles; domestic "uarrels, most demorali&ing for parents and children alike. 0eglect of all domestic duties, neglect of the children, especially, is only too common among the !nglish workingpeople, and only too vigorously fostered by the existing institutions of society. And children growing up in this savage way, amidst these demorali&ing influences, are expected to turn out goody-goody and moral in the end4 5erily the re"uirements are naive, which the self-satisfied bourgeois makes upon the working-man4