Known chiefly as Karl Marx’ sidekick, Friedrich Engels was the other pioneer of post-Enlightenment communist philosophy. Engels and Marx worked together on nearly everything either of them produced – history had room to give only one of them the luxury of an ideological ‘-ism’, however.
A work Engels did research and publish entirely on his own is The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844. The Condition is a truly extraordinary text in its historical scope, detail and theoretical grounding. For Engels trawled and traversed through the city of Manchester, trying to understanding and grasp a sense of how the industrial revolution had crystalised capitalism into a specific type of modern society.
He analysed factories, districts and living conditions in which factory workers lived, the wages paid out by the factory-owners or as Engels called them, the bourgeoisie, and fundamentally, the relationship between these owners and the workers employed by them.
One chapter, ‘Competition’, from the book deserves particular attention in light of the previous blogpost on Malthus’ conception of excess population.
Engels (p. 87) firstly describes how competition created industrial capitalism. The productive powers of industrial factories rendered the economies of agriculture obsolete, centralising capital in the hands of factory-owners and fostering innumerable ranks of inner-city factory workers, the proletariat, vying alongside each other for jobs inside the factories. Higher wages and higher profits ushered both worker and owner away from the farms in unison, towards the inner-city.
We get a sense of capitalism’s revolutionary mobility here: the capacity to dissolve entire worlds into sands, forging new ones apace and without hesitation. Under capitalism, as Marshall Berman once described: all that is solid melts into air.
And Engels follows on to detail the structure of production within industrial capitalism. The factory-owners hold a ‘monopoly’ upon the means of production, choosing employment between members of the proletariat: workers either accept the wage given out, or live unable to feed themselves (p. 88). This was the cold brutality of early industrial capitalism, lacking in any semblance of a welfare state. And this necessity to work as a means of subsistence, Engels notes, is coated by an illusion of free choice: the idea that as a responsible agent, the worker is free to work for whomever he or she pleases.
In this sense, for Engels, the old systems of slavery have not been truly abolished, only dehumanised. For the labourer is no longer a slave to a slave-owner, yet a slave to wage-labour, to be sold off ‘piecemeal’, day by day, wage by wage to any given owner of capital who decides to employ her (p. 91).
The factory owners employ workers according to demand, in pursuit of profit. If more workers are required, wages may rise to attract workers and employment increases. If too many workers are employed, wages fall and unemployment arises, with all its’ ugly offspring: starvation, death, homelessness etc. And in the latter case, a ‘surplus population’ is created by capitalism, a portion of the population who are not required as a function of society’s productive mechanisms (p. 92).
This surplus population for Engels, chimes with Malthus’ ideas of excessive population. For Malthus is ‘wrong’ only in blaming a shortage of resources for the cause of surplus population.
Rather, the disparity between population and the means to survive, is ‘engendered’ by ‘competition of workers themselves’, by a process of production that is able to ruthlessly sever giant numbers of people from its activity, without any compensation at all.
Malthus’ observed a society in which an excess of population appeared to indicate that humanity may struggle to sustain itself in certain instances. In The Condition, Engels reworks this idea to show that rather than population growth, it is the relations of production embodied within the market, left unrestrained and in tandem with a large population, which may result in these humanitarian tragedies.
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1. Engels, F (1993), The Condition of the Working Class in England, Oxford World Classics.