Industrialization Part II: evils!

As promised in my last blog, this one will be dedicated to exploring the negative aspects of the Industrial Revolution. As I stated in the last blog, the Industrial Revolution was a time of economic prosperity, technological advancements, and a period which gave the people great optimism for the future. However, as previously stated, there were many negative consequences to the industrialization occurring in England. Many writers of the Victorian Era including Dickenson, Engels, and Carlyle were very much against the evils of industrialization. In this blog, I will be focusing on Friedrich Engels’ position on the Industrial Revolution as seen in his work The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844.
Friedrich Engels was a German social scientist and philosopher. He came to England to study the cotton trade and textile mills, but while there he discovered the overcrowding in the major cities of London and Manchester. He was appalled by the horrible working and insufficient living conditions of the English factory workers. This disgust prompted the writing of his first book, The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844. He would eventually become the father of the communist theory alongside of Karl Marx
Engels begins by admitting the fact that London has “multiplied a hundred- fold the economic strength of the two and half million inhabitants concentrated there… the commercial capital of the world (p. 500)”. He briefly describes England from an onlookers perspective as quite prosperous and great, but upon a closer inspection, one can see “the human suffering which has made all this possible (p. 500)”. Due to urbanization and the institution of the factory, many rural workers found themselves without a job and thus had to move into the cities. The major cities of London and Manchester found themselves overcrowded causing sanitation problems and probably discomfort to many families.
This overcrowding also led to an intense competition among the people of England for housing, jobs, and even food. I think Engels is pointing to that in the following statement, “Are they not all equally interested in the pursuit of happiness? And do they not all aim at happiness by following similar methods? The more Londoners are packed into a tiny space, the more repulsive and disgraceful becomes the brutal indifference with which they ignore their neighbors and selfishly concentrate upon their private affairs (p. 502)”. I think on one hand, this shows that the culture was changing in London during this era in that for the first time the middle class had the chance to rise up and make something for themselves. However, it also shows the brutal coldness that humans are capable of. I think our society today, as ugly as it seems, supports the competitive drive in people to be better than their neighbor because it promotes progress.
I think Engels would agree that generally this social struggle does promote progress, but “the strongest of all, a tiny group of capitalists, monopolise everything, while the weakest, who are in the vast majority, succumb to the most abject poverty (p. 502)”. It seems that what Engels detests most about this situation is the fact that those with wealth and power have no respect for those who are poor; they simply close their eyes to the way in which the poor are forced to live describing it as the “filth and dilapidation of a district which is quite unfit for human habitation (p. 507)” and that “It is only modern industry which permits these owners to take advantage of the poverty of the workers, to undermine the health of thousands to enrich themselves (p. 508)”.
The Industrial Age was such a bipolar time in that there were obvious positive enrichments that arose, but this progress came at the cost of suffering, hardship, and exploitation of an entire social class. Engels concludes his essay explaining the horrible cycle England found herself in in the middle of the 19th century, “Industry alone has been responsible for all this and yet this same industry could not flourish except by degrading and exploiting the workers (p. 508)”.