Socialist social research – Friedrich Engels was a traitor in his class

Rarely have ideas for the ground. As well as you in the head, you indulge in your glass bead game, whether in universities, parliaments or on the German book market. But when ideas are put on the feet of the gravity of the street, they turn into a criticism in the handmade. They close together with the everyday class struggle from below. This is how large works are created. A prime example is “the situation of the working class in England” by Friedrich Engels, the then 25-year-old entrepreneur from Barmen. His first book in Leipzig was published by Otto Wigand published 180 years ago.

Sackgasse of German intelligence

When Engels was a young adult, the society was shaped by revolutionary fermentation. The 1840s formed the evening before bourgeois-liberal upheavals in Europe. You cancel the end of the restoration period from the Vienna Congress. Germany does not exist as a state, or only in thinking and density. Philosophy becomes a replacement for politics. Between small states, economic backwardness, existence as a political disposal in the middle of Europe and with Friedrich Wilhelm IV. In this situation, the young Engels also thinks and seals, especially in the dispute over Hegel’s philosophy of religion.

While the Althegelians defended Hegel’s concept of God as the ultimate affirmative of Christianity and the Prussian state, the Junghegelians in Hegel’s God saw the Achilles’ heel of the entire Hegel philosophy. With their criticism, the elimination of the prevailing conditions should collapse, according to the saying that the fish stinks from the head. But if you could catch the fish whether the critical critic with his “trombone of the latest court on Hegel” (Bruno Bauer), the only one with his property (Max Stirner), the folk educator with his yearbooks (Arnold Ruge) or the sky storm with the love of human genus (Ludwig Feuerbach) should be in a dispute.

The revolution in 1848 was formed in Germany, especially in the minds of a philosophical vanguard, in the middle of the Friedrich Engels, born in Barmen on November 20, 1820. Growing up in the shine and misery of the Prussian industrial metropolis Wuppertal was as simple as dialectical: only the hungry can catch the fish. It was not about who can free the oppressed, but about who the oppressed are who can only free themselves.

Neither heroes nor victims

The stay from November 1842 to August 1844 in England was a key experience for Engels. While he lived in Chorlton-on Medlock in Manchester to complete his father’s cotton mill in his father’s cotton mill, he studied the living conditions of the English proletariat. He realized that this class will be created in every society in which capitalism prevails, namely sooner or later in every country.

The apprenticeship years in the epicenter of the new economic system were reflected in his journalistic activity. By mid -1842 he wrote about Pietism, Schelling’s philosophy of revelation and about Volksbuch, from the end of 1842 he begins to write about grain laws, English history and communism in France. In 1844 the program font “Calculation of a criticism of the national economy” appeared, which emphasizes private property as a central category of bourgeois society. A year later, “the location of the working class in England”. Engels dedicates it to the English working class. Instead of becoming a capitalist, he became a communist and revolutionary, a traitor in his class.

In this book, he produces references between the history of England and the creation of the proletariat as an independent class. It links technical progress such as the spinning and steam engine with the living conditions of the workers, women and children in the “cottages”, the ghetto-like residential quarters.

Engels describes Manchester and other industrial cities in England as architecture of class society segregation. Moist cellar apartments, epidemics in the workers’ quarters, violence, prostitution and alcoholism in working -class families – he connects these phenomena to the economic competition of the workers, the economic crises and migration from Ireland. He does not represent this as an operating accident, but as the order of the bourgeois class, which makes her profit from the situation of the exploited.

He also goes into the different layers. He analyzes the similarities between seamstresses and land workers and turns out the differences between weavers and miners, in front of and behind the company gate. He also responds to the fine differences in clothing and nutrition. Finally, he confronts the labor movement and strikes with the views of the bourgeois and exposes the debates about the poor laws as hypocrisy. As a result, an overall picture of proletarian existence is created as an expectant class within the capitalist exploitation machine.

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Here an observer proves reality. Engels describes reality as a conflicting unit of material interests. He finds a radical starting point for a theoretical work that stops being meaningless and for a political practice that stops being blind. “The location of the working class is the actual soil and the starting point of all social movements of the present,” as he states in the foreword to the first edition. Location – this means to understand the workers and the poor from the real conditions of rule of their lives, not to describe them as a hero or as a victim, without moral prejudice how Engels did.

He self -critically draws the balance sheet: “We Germans, above all, are aware of the facts in this question.” He thinks of the Salto Mortale of German Intelligence. Decades later, with a now strong workers’ movement in Germany, he complemented self -criticism in the foreword in 1892 that this book has “everywhere the traces of the descent of modern socialism from one of his ancestors – the German classical philosophy”. This is precisely why it is Engels’ merit to have exposed the inner connection between economy, history, revolution, modernity and working class first. Without the philosophical conceptual arsenal, this connection would have been hidden, which in turn contributed to the materialistic transformation of dialectical philosophy.

The majority class

Engels’ first work is the milestone for empirical social research. It is also the land register of historical materialism. Karl Marx quotes in »the capital. Volume I «(1867) several times from the first work of his friend and companion. Because it shows how “deep Engels concept”. Not where the wealth prevails is reality. The reality can be found in those places outside of wealth where it is produced. In addition, the subtitle confirms that the partisan of the party is paradigmatic for the gain in knowledge of a social science that aims at the whole truth: “According to own view and authentic sources”. Finally, the book also documents Engels’ reasons for his political organizational activity. In 1843 he contacted the “Association of the Righte” in London. He and Marx will transform him into the “Association of Communists”.

After 180 years, Engels’ premature phone calls for running as an incidental observer by cities such as Hamburg, Frankfurt, Berlin or Duisburg. Even more than too Engels’ times, the working class is now the majority class, only made invisible by the wage labor, the distorted pictures from RTL to Springer press and the arrogant patronage of the nine times, in short, by the bourgeois class.