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practiced there, he finds to be out of date and out of place when 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 manufactur- 
ing 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 moral- 
ized. 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 manufactur- 
ers, 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-power 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. Accord- 
ingly, 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 condemna- 
tion 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