The book which is herewith submitted to the English-speaking public in its own language,
was written rather more than forty years ago. The author, at the time, was young,
twenty-four years of age, and his production bears the stamp of his youth with its good
and its faulty features, of neither of which he feels ashamed. That it is now translated
into English, is not in any way due to his initiative. Still he may be allowed to say a
few words, “to show cause” why this translation should not be prevented from seeing the
light of day.

The state of things described in this book belongs to-day in many respects to the past,
as far as England is concerned. Though not expressly stated in our recognized 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 characterize 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 practiced
there, he finds to be out of date and out of place when he comes to Hamburg or Berlin;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 for a few months, 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. 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, purely as a means of saving time and trouble. And it is the same with the
relation between the manufacturer and his “hands.” The repeal of the Corn-laws, the
discovery of the Californian and Australian gold-fields, the almost complete crushing-
out of domestic handweaving in India, the increasing access to the Chinese market, the
rapid multiplication of railways and steam-ships all over the world, and other minor
causes have given to English manufacturing industry such a colossal development, that
the status of 1844 now appears to us as comparatively primitive and insignificant. And
in proportion as this increase took place, in the same proportion did manufacturing
industry become apparently moralized. 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; they were not worth while practicing for the
manufacturing millionaire, and served merely to keep alive the competition of smaller
traders, thankful to pick up a penny wherever they could. 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 favor of the giant-capitalist in his competition with his less favored
brother. Moreover, the larger the concern, and with it the number of hands, the greater
the loss and inconvenience caused by every conflict between master and men; and thus a
new spirit came over the masters, especially the large 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, The fact is, that all these concessions to justice and philanthropy were nothing
else but means to accelerate the concentration of capital in the hands of the few, for
whom the niggardly extra extortions of former years had lost all importance and had
become actual nuisances; and to crush all the quicker and all the safer their smaller
competitors who could not make both ends meet without such perquisites. 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 stages. 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
wage-worker sells to the capitalist his labor-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 labor 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 civilized society into a few 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 labor-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 since 1847.

Again, the repeated visitations of cholera, typhus, small-pox 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” I had to describe. “Little
Ireland” has disappeared and the “Seven Dials,” 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 longer 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, too, 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 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; but curious enough, 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” as a means of domination over the workers. At this very moment I
am receiving the American papers with accounts of the great strike of 12,000
Pennsylvanian coal-miners in the Connellsville district, and I seem but to read my own
description of the North of England colliers’ strike of 1844. The same cheating of the
work-people 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.

There were two circumstances which for a long time prevented the unavoidable
consequences of the Capitalist system from showing themselves in the full glare of day
in America. These were the easy access to the ownership of cheap land, and the influx of
immigration. They allowed, for many years, the great mass of the native American
population to “retire” in early manhood from wage-labor and to become farmers, dealers,
or employers of labor, while the hard work for wages, the position of a proletarian for
life, mostly fell to the lot of immigrants. But America has outgrown this early stage.
The boundless backwoods have disappeared, and the still more boundless prairies are fast
and faster passing from the hands of the Nation and the States into those of private
owners. The great safety-valve against the formation of a permanent proletarian class
has practically ceased to act. A class of life-long and even hereditary proletarians
exists at this hour in America. A nation of sixty millions striving hard to become — and
with every chance of success, too — the leading manufacturing nation of the world — such
a nation cannot permanently import its own wage-working class; not even if immigrants
pour in at the rate of half a million a year. The tendency of the Capitalist system
towards the ultimate splitting-up of society into two classes, a few millionaires on the
one hand, and a great mass of mere wage-workers on the other, this tendency, though
constantly crossed and counteracted by other social agencies, works nowhere with greater
force than in America; and the result has been the production of a class of native
American wage-workers, who form, indeed, the aristocracy of the wage-working class as
compared with the immigrants, but who become conscious more and more every day of their
solidarity with the latter and who feel all the more acutely their present condemnation
to life-long wage-toil, because they still remember the bygone days, when it was
comparatively easy to rise to a higher social level. Accordingly the working class
movement, in America, has started with truly American vigor, and as on that side of the
Atlantic things march with at least double the European speed, we may yet live to see
America take the lead in this respect too.

I have not attempted, in this translation, to bring the book up to date, to point out in
detail all the changes that have taken place since 1844. And for two reasons: Firstly,
to do this properly, the size of the book must be about doubled, and the translation
came upon me too suddenly to admit of my undertaking such a work. And secondly, the
first volume of “Das Kapital,” by Karl Marx, an English translation of which is about to
appear, contains a very ample description of the state of the British working class, as
it was about 1865, that is to say, at the time when British industrial prosperity
reached its culminating point. I should, then, have been obliged again to go over the
ground already covered by Marx’s celebrated work.

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
Socialism from one of its ancestors, German 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 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 stand-point” preach to the
workers a Socialism soaring high above their class interests and class struggles, and
tending to reconcile in a higher humanity the interests of both the contending classes —
these people are either neophytes, who have still to learn a great deal, or they are the
worst enemies of the workers — wolves in sheeps’ clothing.

The recurring period of the great industrial crises 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 revolutions were secondary and tended more and more to
disappear. 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 ardor induced me to
venture upon. The wonder is, not that a good many of them proved wrong, but that so many
of them have proved right, and that the critical state of English trade, to be brought
on by German and especially American competition, which I then foresaw — though in too
short a period — has now actually come to pass. In this respect I can, and am bound to,
bring the book up to date, by placing here an article which I published in the London
“Commonweal” of March 1, 1885, under the heading: “England in 1845 and in 1885.” It
gives at the same time a short outline of the history of the English working class
during these forty years.

London, February 25, 1886

Frederick Engels