The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844: with a Preface written in 1892Engels, Friedrich
History
The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844: with a Preface written in 1892
Engels, Friedrich
Great Britain -- Economic conditions; Working class -- Great Britain
Next to intemperance in the enjoyment of intoxicating liquors, one of the
principal faults of English working-men is sexual licence. But 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 labours and
hardships, and the consequence 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. When people are placed under conditions which appeal to the
brute only, what remains to them but to rebel or to succumb to utter
brutality? And when, moreover, the bourgeoisie does its full share in
maintaining prostitution--and how many of the 40,000 prostitutes who fill
the streets of London every evening live upon the virtuous bourgeoisie!
How many of them owe it to the seduction of a bourgeois, that they must
offer their bodies to the passers-by in order to live?--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 the general inability to sacrifice the pleasure
of the moment to a remoter advantage. But is that to be wondered at?
When 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
pleasures? A class about whose education no one troubles himself, which
is a playball 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 lives? 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 aspects--who can
demand that such a class respect this social order? Verily that is
asking much! But 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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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