The Condition Of The Working Class In England, By Friedrich Engels

In England, in the mid-nineteenth century, the industrial revolution gave rise to important transformations in the society. Friedrich Engels’ text extracted from The Condition of the Working Class in England, published in 1845, is the witness of this social revolution. Engels, who was one of the leading ideologists of scientific socialism, is describing the profound changes that British society has undergone since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution and already evokes the existence of a class that possesses only its working force to live: the proletariat. He will describe how the misdeeds of the Industrial Revolution, which reduced the worker to the role of the machine, resulted in the degradation of the working class. Through the case of Manchester, among other industrial cities, Engels shows how the …show more content…
The class struggle is the main concept used by Karl Marx (1818-1883) in the Manifesto of the Communist Party. It describes a situation in which the social classes, the bourgeoisie, and the proletariat, are strongly opposed, even violently, because of the exploitation of the latter by the former, which possesses capital. The growing impoverishment resulting from this exploitation fuels the struggle which is the only way for the oppressed class to emancipate itself and improve its situation. For Marx, the feeling of belonging to a class and the awareness of what separates it from other classes are the conditions that enable us to change society. The struggles that have been developed in the nineteenth century were merely the modern prolongation of the opposition between the free man and the slave or between the lord and the serf. This predominantly Marxist notion of class struggle is the starting point of the Revolution which will lead to the establishment of a classless society based on the pooling of the means of production and thus attaining his ultimate goal,