In Frederich Engels’s The Condition of the Working Class in England claims it as the first study anywhere to deal with the working class as a whole, not merely with particular sectors or industry its analysis of the social impact of capitalism is still in many respects unsurpassed.
The book does not depict all workers as starving or destitute, or living purely at subsistence level. Nor is the bourgeoisie presented as a bunch of black-hearted villains.
As so often, it takes one to know one: Engels himself was the son of a wealthy German manufacturer who ran a textile mill in Salford, and used his ill-gotten gains to help keep the down-at-heel Marx family afloat. He also enjoyed a spot of fox-hunting, and as a champion of both the proletariat and the colonial Irish maintained a unity of theory and practice by taking a working-class Irish woman as his mistress.
The book does not depict all workers as starving or destitute, or living purely at subsistence level. Nor is the bourgeoisie presented as a bunch of black-hearted villains.
As so often, it takes one to know one: Engels himself was the son of a wealthy German manufacturer who ran a textile mill in Salford, and used his ill-gotten gains to help keep the down-at-heel Marx family afloat. He also enjoyed a spot of fox-hunting, and as a champion of both the proletariat and the colonial Irish maintained a unity of theory and practice by taking a working-class Irish woman as his mistress.
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