The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844: with a Preface written in 1892Engels, Friedrich
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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
It must be admitted, even if I had not proved it so often in detail, that
the English workers cannot feel happy in this condition; that theirs is
not a state in which a man or a whole class of men can think, feel, and
live as human beings. The workers must therefore strive to escape from
this brutalizing condition, to secure for themselves a better, more human
position; and this they cannot do without attacking the interest of the
bourgeoisie which consists in exploiting them. But the bourgeoisie
defends its interests with all the power placed at its disposal by wealth
and the might of the State. In proportion as the working-man determines
to alter the present state of things, the bourgeois becomes his avowed
enemy.
Moreover, the working-man is made to feel at every moment that the
bourgeoisie treats him as a chattel, as its property, and for this
reason, if for no other, he must come forward as its enemy. I have shown
in a hundred ways in the foregoing pages, and could have shown in a
hundred others, that, in our present society, he can save his manhood
only in hatred and rebellion against the bourgeoisie. And he can protest
with most violent passion against the tyranny of the propertied class,
thanks to his education, or rather want of education, and to the
abundance of hot Irish blood that flows in the veins of the English
working-class. The English working-man is no Englishman nowadays; no
calculating money-grabber like his wealthy neighbour. He possesses more
fully developed feelings, his native northern coldness is overborne by
the unrestrained development of his passions and their control over him.
The cultivation of the understanding which so greatly strengthens the
selfish tendency of the English bourgeois, which has made selfishness his
predominant trait and concentrated all his emotional power upon the
single point of money-greed, is wanting in the working-man, whose
passions are therefore strong and mighty as those of the foreigner.
English nationality is annihilated in the working-man.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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