Markin comment:
Every Month Is Labor History MonthThis post is part of an on-going series under the following general title:
Labor’s Untold Story- Reclaiming Our Labor History In Order To Fight Another Day-And Win!
Other Septembers in this series I have concentrated on various sometimes now obscure leaders and rank and file militants in the international working class movement, especially those who made contributions here in America like "Big Bill" Haywood and Eugene V. Debs. This year, given the pressing need for clarity around the labor party question in America (algebraically expressed in our movement as the struggle for a workers party that fights for a workers government) I have gone back to the sources-Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels and their correspondence on working class organization with various associates and opponents. Strangely, or maybe not so strangely given the state of working class organization here these days, many of their comments, taken in due regard for changed times and circumstances, are germane today. This correspondence is only a start and should just whet the reader's appetite to research further.
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Condition of the Working Class in England by Frederick Engels (1845)-
Preface to the Second German Edition (1892)
Source: MECW Volume 27, p. 307;
Written: London, July 21, 1892;
First published: in F. Engels, Die Lage der arbeitenden Klasse in England, second edition, Stuttgart, 1892;
Transcribed: Andy Blunden.
The book herewith again made available to the German public first appeared in the summer of 1845. Both in its strengths and in its weaknesses it bears the stamp of the author’s youth. At the time, I was twenty-four; today, I am thrice as old, and as I re-read this early work I find I need not be ashamed of it on any count. So I have no intention of somehow obliterating this stamp of youthfulness. I am presenting my work to the reader again, unchanged. I have only worded more precisely a few not entirely clear passages and added, here and there, a brief footnote, marked with the present date (1892).
As for the fate of this book, I will only mention that an English translation of it (by Mrs. Florence Kelley-Wischnewetzky) came out in New York in 1887 and was also published by Swan Sonnenschein & Co. in London in 1892. The preface to the American edition underlies that to the English one, and the latter in its turn underlies the present German preface. Modern large-scale industry makes the economic conditions in all the countries affected uniform to such an enormous extent that I hardly need tell the German reader anything different from what I tell the American or English.
The state of things described in this book belongs today in many respects, to the past, as far as England is concerned. Though not expressly stated in our recognised treatises, it is still a law of modern political economy that the larger the scale on which capitalistic production is carried on, the less can it support the petty devices of swindling and pilfering which characterise its early stages. The pettifogging business tricks of the Polish Jew, the representative in Europe of commerce in its lowest stage, those tricks that serve him so well in his own country, and are generally practised there, fail him once he comes to Hamburg or Berlin; and, again, the commission agent who hails from Berlin or Hamburg, Jew or Christian, after frequenting the Manchester Exchange, finds out that in order to buy cotton yarn or cloth cheap, he, too, had better drop those slightly more refined but still miserable wiles and subterfuges which are considered the acme of cleverness in his native country. Of course, with the progress of large-scale industry a great deal has supposedly changed in Germany too, and a bad odour now attaches, particularly since the industrial Jena of Philadelphia, 283 even to the time-honoured German principle: People will be nothing but pleased if we first send them good samples and then bad goods. The fact is, those tricks do not pay any longer in a large market, where time is money, and where a certain standard of commercial morality is unavoidably developed not because of any considerations of virtue, but purely as a means of saving time and trouble. And exactly the same has taken place in England with the relation between the manufacturer and his “hands”.
The revival of trade, after the crisis of 1847, was the dawn of a new industrial epoch. The repeal of the Corn Laws 184 and the financial reforms subsequent thereon gave to English industry and commerce all the elbow-room they had asked for. The discovery of the Californian and Australian goldfields followed in rapid succession. The colonial markets developed at an increasing rate their capacity for absorbing English manufactured goods. In India millions of handweavers were finally crushed out by the Lancashire power-loom. China was more and more being opened up. But most important of all, America was developing at a rate unprecedented even for that country of tremendous progress; and America, it will be recalled, was then merely a colonial market, indeed the largest of all, i.e., a country supplying raw materials and importing industrial products, notably from England.
And, finally, the new means of communication introduced at the close of the preceding period-railways and ocean steamerswere now worked out on an international scale; they realised actually what had hitherto existed only potentially, a world-market. This world-market, at the time, was still composed of a number of chiefly or entirely agricultural countries grouped around one manufacturing centre – England – which consumed the greater part of their surplus raw produce, and supplied them in return
with the greater part of their requirements in manufactured articles. No wonder, therefore, that England’s industrial progress was colossal and unparallelled, and such that the status of 1844 now appears to us as comparatively insignificant, almost primitive.
And in proportion as this increase took place, in the same proportion did manufacturing industry become apparently moralised. The competition of manufacturer against manufacturer by means of petty thefts upon the workpeople did no longer pay. Trade had outgrown such low means of making money; the manufacturing millionaire had to know better than waste his time on petty tricks of this kind. Such practices were good enough, at best, for small fry in need of money, who had to snap up every penny in order not to succumb to competition. Thus the truck system was suppressed, the Ten-Hours’ Bill was enacted, and a number of other secondary reforms introduced-much against the spirit of Free Trade and unbridled competition, but quite as much in favour of the giant-capitalist in his competition with his less favoured brother.
Moreover, the larger the concern, and with it the number of workers, the greater the loss and inconvenience caused by every conflict with the workers and thus a new spirit came over the manufacturers, especially the largest ones, which taught them to avoid unnecessary squabbles, to acquiesce in the existence and power of trades unions, and finally even to discover in strikes-at opportune times – a powerful means to serve their own ends. The largest manufacturers, formerly the leaders of the war against the working class, were now the foremost to preach peace and harmony. And for a very good reason.
All these concessions to justice and philanthropy were nothing else but means to accelerate the concentration of capital in the hands of the few and crushing the smaller competitors, who could not survive without extra receipts of this sort. To these few, the petty accessory extortions of earlier years had not only lost all significance but had turned, as it were, into hindrances to large-scale business. Thus the development of production on the basis of the capitalistic system has of itself sufficed – at least in the leading industries, for in the more unimportant branches this is far from being the case – to do away with all those minor grievances which aggravated the workman’s fate during its earlier years. And thus it renders more and more evident the great central fact that the cause of the miserable condition of the working class is to be sought, not in these minor grievances, but in the capitalistic system itself. The worker sells to the capitalist his labour-force for a certain daily sum. After a few hours’ work he has reproduced the value of that sum; but the substance of his contract is, that he has to work another series of hours to complete his working-day; and the value he produces during these additional hours of surplus labour is surplus value, which costs the capitalist nothing, but yet goes into his pocket. That is the basis of the system which tends more and more to split up civilised society into a few Rothschilds and Vanderbilts, the owners of all the means of production and subsistence, on the one hand, and an immense number of wage-workers, the owners of nothing but their labour-force, on the other. And that this result is caused, not by this or that secondary grievance, but by the system itself – this fact has been brought out in bold relief by the development of capitalism in England.
Again, the repeated visitations of cholera, typhus, smallpox, and other epidemics have shown the British bourgeois the urgent necessity of sanitation in his towns and cities, if he wishes to save himself and family from falling victims to such diseases. Accordingly, the most crying abuses described in this book have either disappeared or have been made less conspicuous. Drainage has been introduced or improved, wide avenues have been opened out athwart many of the worst “slums”. “Little Ireland” had disappeared, and the “seven dials” 286 are next on the list for sweeping away. But what of that? Whole districts which in 1844 I could describe as almost idyllic have now, with the growth of the towns, fallen into the same state of dilapidation, discomfort, and misery. Only the pigs and the heaps of refuse are no longei. tolerated. The bourgeoisie have made further progress in the art of hiding the distress of the working class. But that, in regard to their dwellings, no substantial improvement has taken place is amply proved by the Report of the Royal Commission “On the Housing of the Poor”, 1885. And this is the case, tool in other. respects. Police regulations have been plentiful as blackberries; but they can only hedge in the distress of the workers, they cannot remove it.
But while England has thus outgrown the juvenile state of capitalist exploitation described by me, other countries have only just attained it. France, Germany, and especially America, are the formidable competitors who, at this moment – as foreseen by me [See Report of the Royal Commission on the Housing of the Working Classes. England and Wales, 1885.-Ed.] In 1844 - are more and more breaking up England’s industrial monopoly. Their manufactures are young as compared with those of England, but increasing at a far more rapid rate than the latter; and they have at this moment arrived at about the same phase of development as English manufacture in 1844. With regard to America, the parallel is indeed most striking. True, the external surroundings in which the working class is placed in America are very different, but the same economical laws are at work, and the results, if not identical in every respect, must still be of the same order. Hence we find in America the same struggles for a shorter working-day, for a legal limitation of the working-time, especially of women and children in factories; we find the truck system in full blossom, and the cottage system, in rural districts, made use of by the “BOSSES”, the capitalists and their agents, as a means of domination over the workers. When I received, in 1886, the American papers with accounts of the great strike of 12,000 Pennsylvanian coal-miners in the Connellsville district, I seemed but to read my own description of the North of England colliers' strike of 1844. The same cheating of the workpeople by false measure; the same truck system; the same attempt to break the miners’ resistance by the capitalists’ last, but crushing, resource – the eviction of the men out of their dwellings, the cottages owned by the companies.
Neither here nor in the English editions did I try to update the book, i.e. to list one by one the changes that have taken place since 1844. I did not do it for two reasons. Firstly, I would have had to double the volume of the book. And secondly, Volume One of Marx’s Capital gives a detailed description of the condition of the British working class for about 1865, i.e. the time when Britain’s industrial prosperity had reached its peak. I would therefore have had to repeat what Marx says.
It will be hardly necessary to point out that the general theoretical standpoint of this book — philosophical, economical, political — does not exactly coincide with my standpoint of to-day. Modern international socialism, since fully developed as a science, chiefly and almost exclusively through the efforts of Marx, did not as yet exist in 1844. My book represents one of the phases of its embryonic development; and as the human embryo, in its early stages, still reproduces the gill-arches of our fish-ancestors, so this book exhibits everywhere the traces of the descent of modern [See present edition, Vol. 4, pp. 540-47.-Ed.] socialism from one of its ancestors, German classical philosophy. Thus great stress is laid on the dictum that communism is not a mere party doctrine of the working class, but a theory compassing the emancipation of society at large, including the capitalist class, from its present narrow conditions. This is true enough in the abstract, but absolutely useless, and sometimes worse, in practice. So long as the wealthy classes not only do not feel the want of any emancipation, but strenuously oppose the self-emancipation of the working class, so long the social revolution will have to be prepared and fought out by the working class alone. The French bourgeois of 1789, too, declared the emancipation of the bourgeoisie to be the emancipation of the whole human race; but the nobility and clergy would not see it; the proposition – though for the time being, with respect to feudalism, an abstract historical truth – soon became a mere sentimentalism, and disappeared from view altogether in the fire of the revolutionary struggle. And to-day, the very people who, from the “impartiality” of their superior standpoint, preach to the workers a socialism soaring high above their class interests and class struggles-these people are either neophytes, who have still to learn a great deal, or they are the worst enemies of the workers-wolves in sheep’s clothing.
The recurring period of the great industrial crisis is stated in the text as five years. This was the period apparently indicated by the course of events from 1825 to 1842. But the industrial history from 1842 to 1868 has shown that the real period is one of ten years; that the intermediate revulsions were secondary, and had been increasingly disappearing from 1842 onwards. Since 1868 the state of things has changed again, of which more anon.
I have taken care not to strike out of the text the many prophecies, amongst others that of an imminent social revolution in England, which my youthful ardour induced me to venture upon. The wonder is, not that a good many of these prophecies proved wrong, but that so many of them have proved right, and that the critical state of English trade, to be brought on by Continental and especially American competition, which I then foresaw — though in too short a period — has now actually come to pass. In this respect I am bound to bring the book up to date, by placing here an article which appeared in the London Commonweal of March 1, 1885 in English and in Neue Zeit in June of the same year (Issue 6) in German.
“Forty years ago England stood face to face with a crisis, solvable to all appearances by force only. The immense and rapid development of manufactures had outstripped the extension of foreign markets and the increase of demand. Every ten years the march of industry was violently interrupted by a general commercial crash, followed, after a long period of’ chronic depression, by a few short years of prosperity, and always ending in feverish over-production and consequent renewed collapse. The capitalist class clamoured for Free Trade in corn, and threatened to enforce it by sending the starving population of the towns back to the country districts whence they came, to invade them, as John Bright said, not as paupers begging for bread, but as an army quartered upon the enemy. The working masses of the towns demanded their share of political power – the People’s Charter; they were supported by the majority of the small trading class, and the only difference between the two was whether the Charter should be carried by physical or by moral force. Then came the commercial crash of 1847 and the Irish famine, and with both the prospect of revolution.
“The French Revolution of 1848 saved the English middle class. The Socialistic pronunciamentos of the victorious French workmen frightened the small middle class of England and disorganised the narrower, but more matter-of-fact movement of the English working class. At the very moment when Chartism was bound to assert itself in its full strength, it collapsed internally before even it collapsed externally, on the 10th of April, 1848. The action of the working class was thrust into the background. The capitalist class triumphed along the whole line.
“The Reform Bill of 1831 had been the victory of the whole capitalist class over the landed aristocracy. The repeal of the Corn Laws was the victory of the manufacturing capitalist not only over the landed aristocracy, but over those sections of capitalists, too, whose interests were more or less bound up with the landed interest-bankers, stockjobbers, fundholders, etc. Free Trade meant the readjustment of the whole home and foreign, commercial and financial policy of England in accordance with the interests of the manufacturing capitalists — the class which now [These words belong apparently not to Bright but to his adherents. See The Quarterly Review, Vol. 71, No. 141, p. 273.-Ed.] represented the nation. And they set about this task with a will. Every obstacle to industrial production was mercilessly removed. The tariff and the whole system of taxation were revolutionised. Everything was made subordinate to one end, but that end of the utmost importance to the manufacturing capitalist: the cheapening of all raw produce, and especially of the means of living of the working class; the reduction of the cost of raw material, and the keeping down – if not as yet the bringing down - of wages. England was to become the ‘workshop of the world’; all other countries were to become for England what Ireland already was-markets for her manufactured goods, supplying her in return with raw materials and food. England, the great manufacturing centre of an agricultural world, with an ever-increasing number of corn and cotton-growing Irelands revolving around her, the industrial sun. What a glorious prospect!
“The manufacturing capitalists set about the realisation of this their great object with that strong common sense and that contempt for traditional principles which has ever distinguished them from their more narrow-minded compeers on the Continent. Chartism was dying out. The revival of commercial prosperity, natural after the revulsion of 1847 had spent itself, was put down altogether to the credit of Free Trade. Both these circumstances had turned the English working class, politically, into the tail of the ‘great Liberal Party’, the party led by the manufacturers. This advantage, once gained, had to be perpetuated. And the manufacturing capitalists, from the Chartist opposition, not to Free Trade, but to the transformation of Free Trade into the one vital national question, had learnt, and were learning more and more, that the middle class can never obtain full social and political power over the nation except by the help of the working class. Thus a gradual change came over the relations between both classes. The Factory Acts, once the bugbear of all manufacturers, were not only willingly submitted to, but their expansion into acts regulating almost all trades was tolerated. Trades Unions, hitherto considered inventions of the devil himself, were now petted and patronised as perfectly legitimate institutions, and as useful means of spreading sound economical doctrines amongst the workers. Even strikes, than which nothing had been more nefarious up to 1848, were now gradually found out to be occasionally very useful, especially when provoked by the masters themselves, at their own time. Of the legal enactments, placing the workman at a lower level or at a disadvantage with regard to the master, at least the most revolting were repealed. And, practically, that horrid People’s Charter actually became the political programme of the very manufacturers who had opposed it to the last. The Abolition of the Property Qualification and Vote by Ballot are now the law of the land. The Reform Acts of 1867 and 1884 make a near approach to universal suffrage, at least such as it now exists in Germany; the Redistribution Bill now before Parliament creates equal electoral districts-on the whole not more unequal than those of France or Germany; payment of members, and shorter, if not actually annual Parliaments, are visibly looming in the distanceand yet there are people who say that Chartism is dead.
“The Revolution of 1848, not less than many of its predecessors, has had strange bedfellows and successors. The very people who put it down have become, as Karl Marx used to say, its testamentary executors. Louis Napoleon had to create an independent and united Italy, Bismarck had to revolutionise Germany and to restore Hungarian independence, and the English manufacturers had to enact the People’s Charter.
“For England, the effects of this domination of the manufacturing capitalists were at first startling. Trade revived and extended to a degree unheard of even in this cradle of modern industry; the previous astounding creations of steam and machinery dwindled into nothing compared with the immense mass of productions of the twenty years from 1850 to 1870, with the overwhelming figures of exports and imports, of wealth accumulated in the hands of capitalists and of human working power concentrated in the large towns. The progress was indeed interrupted, as before, by a crisis every ten years, in 1857 as well as in 1866; but these revulsions were now considered as natural, inevitable events, which must be fatalistically submitted to, and which always set themselves right in the end.
“And the condition of the working-class during this period? There was temporary improvement even for the great mass. But this improvement always was reduced to the old level by the influx of the great body of the unemployed reserve, by the constant superseding of hands by new machinery, by the immigration of the agricultural population, now, too, more and more superseded by machines.
“A permanent improvement can be recognised for two ‘protected’ sections only of the working class. Firstly, the factory hands. The fixing by Act of Parliament of their working-day within relatively rational limits has restored their physical constitution and endowed them with a moral superiority, enhanced by their local concentration. They are undoubtedly better off than before 1848. The best proof is that, out of ten strikes they make, nine are provoked by the manufacturers in their own interests, as the only means of securing a reduced production. You can never get the masters to agree to work ‘short time’, let manufactured goods be ever so unsaleable; but get the workpeople to strike, and the masters shut their factories to a man.
“Secondly, the great Trades Unions. They are the organisations of those trades in which the labour of Grown-up men predominates, or is alone applicable. Here the competition neither of women and children nor of machinery has so far weakened their organised strength. The engineers, the carpenters and joiners, the bricklayers, are each of them a power, to that extent that, as in the case of the bricklayers and bricklayers’ labourers, they can even successfully resist the introduction of machinery. That their condition has remarkably improved since 1848 there can be no doubt, and the best proof of this is in the fact that for more than fifteen years not only have their employers been with them, but they with their employers, upon exceedingly good terms. They form an aristocracy among the working class; they have succeeded in enforcing for themselves a relatively comfortable position, and they accept it as final. They are the model working men of Messrs. Leone Levi & Giffen (and also the worthy Lujo Brentano), and they are very nice people indeed nowadays to deal with, for any sensible capitalist in particular and for the whole capitalist class in general.
“But as to the great mass of working people, the state of misery and insecurity in which they live now is as low as ever, if not lower. The East End of London is an everspreading pool of stagnant misery and desolation, of starvation when out of work, and degradation, physical and moral, when in work. And so in all other large towns-abstraction made of the privileged minority of the workers; and so in the smaller towns and in the agricultural districts. The law which reduces the value of labour-power to the value of the necessary means of subsistence, and the other law which reduces its average price, as a rule, to the minimum of those means of subsistence, these laws act upon them with the irresistible force of an automatic engine which crushes them between its wheels.
“This, then was the position created by the Free Trade policy of 1847, and by twenty years of the rule of the manufacturing capitalists. But then a change came. The crash of 1866 was, indeed, followed by a slight and short revival about 1873; but that did not last. We did not, indeed, pass through the full crisis at the time it was due, in 1877 or 1878; but we have had, ever since 1876, a chronic state of stagnation in all dominant branches of industry. Neither will the full crash come; nor will the period of longed-for prosperity to which we used to be entitled before and after it. A dull depression, a chronic glut of all markets for all trades, that is what we have been living in for nearly ten years. How is this?
“The Free Trade theory was based upon one assumption: that England was to be the one great manufacturing centre of an agricultural world. And the actual fact is that this assumption has turned out to be a pure delusion. The conditions of modern industry, steam-power and machinery, can be established wherever there is fuel, especially coals. And other countries besides England-France, Belgium, Germany, America, even Russiahave coals. And the people over there did not see the advantage of being turned into Irish pauper farmers merely for the greater wealth and glory of English capitalists. They set resolutely about manufacturing, not only for themselves, but for the rest of the world; and the consequence is that the manufacturing monopoly enjoyed by England for nearly a century is irretrievably broken up.
“But the manufacturing monopoly of England is the pivot of the present social system of England. Even while that monopoly lasted, the markets could not keep pace with the increasing productivity of English manufacturers; the decennial crises were the consequence. And new markets are getting scarcer every day, so much so that even the Negroes of the Congo are now to be forced into the civilisation attendant upon Manchester calicos, Staffordshire pottery, and Birmingham hardware. How will it be when Continental, and especially American, goods flow in in ever-increasing quantities – when the predominating share, still held by British manufacturers, will become reduced from year to year? Answer, Free Trade, thou universal panacea.
“I am not the first to point this out. Already in 1883, at the Southport meeting of the British Association, Mr. Inglis Palgrave, the President of the Economic section, stated plainly that
“‘the days of great trade profits in England were over, and there was a pause in the progress of several great branches of industrial labour. The country might almost be said to be entering the non-progressive state’.
“But what is to be the consequence? Capitalist production cannot stop. It must go on increasing and expanding, or it must die. Even a Report of the Fifty-Third Meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science; held at Southport in September 1883, now the mere reduction of England’s lion’s share in the supply of the world’s markets means stagnation, distress, excess of capital here, excess of unemployed workpeople there. What will it be when the increase of yearly production is brought to a complete stop?
“Here is the vulnerable place, the heel of Achilles, for capitalistic production. Its very basis is the necessity of constant expansion, and this constant expansion now becomes impossible. It ends in a deadlock. Every year England is brought nearer face to face with the question: either the country must go to pieces, or capitalist production must. Which is it to be?
“And the working class? If even under the unparalleled commercial and industrial expansion, from 1848 to 1868, they have had to undergo such misery; if even then the great bulk of them experienced at best but a temporary improvement of their condition, while only a small, privileged, ‘protected’ minority was permanently benefited, what will it be when this dazzling period is brought finally to a close; when the present dreary stagnation shall not only become intensified, but this, its intensified condition, shall become the permanent and normal state of English trade?
“The truth is this: during the period of England’s industrial monopoly the English working class have, to a certain extent, shared in the benefits of the monopoly. These benefits were very unequally parcelled out amongst them; the privileged minority pocketed most, but even the great mass had, at least, a temporary share now and then. And that is the reason why, since the dying-out of Owenism, there has been no Socialism in England. With the breakdown of that monopoly, the English working class will lose that privileged position; it will find itself generally – the privileged and leading minority not excepted-on a level with its fellow-workers abroad. And that is the reason why there will be Socialism again in England.”
So I wrote in 1885. In the Preface to the English edition written on January 11, 1892 I continued:
“To this statement of the case, as that case appeared to me in 1885, I have but little to add. Needless to say that to-day there is indeed ‘Socialism again in England’, and plenty of it-Socialism of all shades: Socialism conscious and unconscious, Socialism prosaic and poetic, Socialism of the working class and of the middle class, for, verily, that abomination of abominations, Socialism, has not only become respectable, but has actually donned evening dress and lounges lazily on drawing-room causeuses. That shows the incurable fickleness of that terrible despot of ‘society’, middle-class public opinion, and once more justifies the contempt in which we Socialists of a past generation always held that public opinion. At the same time we have no reason to grumble at the symptom itself.
“What I consider far more important than this momentary fashion among bourgeois circles of affecting a mild dilution of Socialism, and even more than the actual progress Socialism has made in England generally, that is the revival of the East End of London. That immense haunt of misery is no longer the stagnant pool it was six years ago. It has shaken off its torpid despair, has returned to life, and has become the home of what is called the ‘New Unionism’, that is to say, of the organisation of the great mass of ‘unskilled’ workers. This organisation may to a great extent adopt the form of the old Unions of ‘skilled’ workers but it is essentially different in character. The old Unions preserve the traditions of the time when they were founded, and look upon the wages system as a once-for-all established, final fact, which they at best can modify in the interest of their members. The new Unions were founded at a time when the faith in the eternity of the wages system was severely shaken; their founders and promoters were Socialists either consciously or by feeling; the masses, whose adhesion gave them strength, were rough, neglected, looked down upon by the working-class aristocracy; but they had this immense advantage, that their minds were virgin soil, entirely free from the inherited ‘respectable’ bourgeois prejudices which hampered the brains of the better situated ‘old’ Unionists. And thus we see now these new Unions taking the lead of the working-class movement generally, and more and more taking in tow the rich and proud, old Unions.
“Undoubtedly, the East Enders have committed colossal blunders; so have their predecessors, and so do the doctrinaire Socialists who pooh-pooh them. A large class, like a great nation, never learns better or quicker than by undergoing the consequences of its own mistakes. And for all the faults committed in past, present and future, the revival of the East End of London remains one of the greatest and most fruitful facts of this fin de siécle, and glad and proud I am to have lived to see it.”
Since I wrote the above, six months ago, the English working-class movement has again made a good step forward. The parliamentary elections which took place a few days ago gave both the official parties, Conservative as well as Liberal, notice in due form that from now on one and the other will have to reckon with a third party, the workers’ party. This workers’ party is now only in the process of formation; its elements are still engaged in shaking off traditional prejudices of all kinds-bourgeois, old trade-unionist, indeed, even doctrinaire-socialist-in order to be able to get together at last on ground common to all of them. And yet the instinct to unite which they followed was already so strong that it produced election results hitherto unheard-of in England. In London two workers’ have stood for election, and openly as Socialists at that; the Liberals did not dare to put up one of theirs against them, and the two Socialists have won by an overwhelming and unexpected majority [James Keir Hardie and John Burns. —Ed.]. In Middlesbrough a workers’ candidate [John Havelock Wilson.—Ed.] has stood against a Liberal and a Conservative and been elected in the teeth of both; on the other hand, the new workers’ candidates who allied themselves with the Liberals have been hopelessly defeated, with the exception of a single one. Among those who so far have been called workers’ representatives, that is, those who are forgiven their quality of workers because they themselves would willingly drown it in the ocean of their liberalism, the most significant representative of the old Unionism, Henry Broadhurst, has suffered a striking defeat because he declared himself against the eight-hour day. In two Glasgow, one Salford, and several other constituencies, independent workers’ candidates stood against candidates of the two old parties; they were beaten, but so were the Liberal candidates. Briefly, in a number of large-town and industrial constituencies the workers have resolutely severed all connections with the two old parties and thus achieved direct or indirect successes such as they had never scored in any election so far. And the joy on this account among the workers is boundless. For the first time they have seen and felt what they can do when they make use of their electoral rights in the interest of their class. The superstitious belief in the “great Liberal Party” which had kept a hold on the English workers for nearly forty years has been destroyed. They have seen by striking examples that they, the workers, are the decisive force in England if only they have the will and know their own will; and the 1892 elections have been the beginning of that knowledge and that will. The workers’ movement on the Continent will see to the rest: the Germans and the French, who are already so strongly represented in parliaments and local councils, will keep the spirit of emulation of the English sufficiently high by further successes. And if in the not very distant future it turns out that this new parliament can get nowhere with Mr. Gladstone, nor Mr. Gladstone with this parliament, the English workers’ party will surely be sufficiently constituted to put an early end to the seesaw game of the two old parties which have been succeeding each other in power and thereby perpetuating bourgeois rule.
F. Engels
London, July 21, 1892
