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Engels, Manchester, and the Working Class
... During this time, Engels came into his own, as he forged ahead in learning political economy, deepening his commitment to socialism, studying utopian writers such as Charles Fourier and Robert Owen, writing articles for continental newspapers, and inves- tigating the polarization of wealth within society. His time in Manchester was one of intense activity ( Ilyichov et al., 1974;Marcus, 1985;Mayer, 1936;McLellan, 1978). After work at the firm, Engels devoted his remaining hours and energy to documenting and studying the class divisions within the industrial capital of the world, which later culminated in the book, The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844 (more will be said later about this particular work). ...
... Manchester was the center of the industrial revolution and industrial capitalism. Manchester and the surrounding urban area had a population of more than 400,000 people and was located northwest of London (Marcus, 1985). Great Britain had an extensive network of colonies around the world that provided the needed raw materials for the textile industry. ...
... Many of the early technological innovations involved the spinning process. Once spinning and weaving became centralized in factories, cotton was one of the first industries mechanized (Marcus, 1985). In Manchester, cotton was the dominant industry. ...
Both urban sociology in general and urban environmental justice studies began with Frederick Engels's seminal work The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844. Engels provided a walking tour of the environmental conditions in the manufacturing establishments and slums of the factory towns of England, together with a similar view of London. He addressed conditions of widespread pollution and helped lay the grounds for the development of social epidemiology. He connected this to his "Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy" that influenced his even more famous collaborator Karl Marx. For Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844 was to be the first of a series of connected analyses of ecology that stretched through more than half a century and included The Housing Question and Dialectics of Nature, making him one of the most important but underappreciated contributors to the development of environmental thought.
... For discussion of the case, see Walkley (1981), and for a Marxist analysis, see Bieler and Morton (2021). 8 For Marx and Engels apropos Carlyle, see, e.g., Johnson (1947), Marcus (1974), Prawer (1976 and Althofer (2022aAlthofer ( , 2022b; and for Dickens, see, e.g., Marcus (1974), Prawer (1976, Houston (2005), Murray and Schuler (2020) and Riley (2021). 9 Krishnamurty (2000) and Kouvelakis (2003) discuss Engels's own bourgeois prejudice and his anti-Irish racism. ...
... For discussion of the case, see Walkley (1981), and for a Marxist analysis, see Bieler and Morton (2021). 8 For Marx and Engels apropos Carlyle, see, e.g., Johnson (1947), Marcus (1974), Prawer (1976 and Althofer (2022aAlthofer ( , 2022b; and for Dickens, see, e.g., Marcus (1974), Prawer (1976, Houston (2005), Murray and Schuler (2020) and Riley (2021). 9 Krishnamurty (2000) and Kouvelakis (2003) discuss Engels's own bourgeois prejudice and his anti-Irish racism. ...
This article reads Karl Marx’s Capital (volume 1, 1867) as the Bildungsroman of a congenital criminal: its eponymous character, Capital. Following Friedrich Engels’s The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845), Marx detects and dissects capitalism’s crimes. Capital has been called Marx’s ‘Victorian novel’ and compared to English realism’s triple-deckers. Yet his indispensable informants include factory inspectors whose reports, according to Fredric Jameson, provide testimony beyond anything realism can represent. How, then, does Marx’s apparently realist aesthetic convey Capital’s criminal deeds and criminogenic drive? To address this matter, the article examines the Gothicism of Marx’s realism. It highlights his development of Engels’s Gothic realism, demonstrates how Capital begins in media res—its first sentence presenting an immense, monstrous collection of evidence of Capital’s cannibalism—and links this opening crime scene to Marx’s portrayal of the 1863 case of Mary Anne Walkley. Murdered in her workplace, Walkley inhabits an underworld overpopulated by fellow workers killed by wage-labour. The article argues that, because actuality under the rule of Capital is structurally and monstrously criminal, Marx’s Gothic constitutes a realistic medium to represent criminal monsters and structures.
... Though in equation (1) all infectives were mistaken for the people who were reversible and (-by) was taken as (-bx) after all, equation (1) reflected the property of the two stages of epidemic processes and the solving process of the equation was similar to that of a two-stage catalytic model. So the solution of equation (1) is also a double-exponential function (10) If we write it is not difficult to test and verify that there are relationships between D,α,β and a,b,c which have been shown in the first and last formulas of equations (7). When b and c are very small compared with a, the second formula of equation (7) reversible and two-stage types so that we will have something to go by when solving a new problem. ...
... We could study the range of certain experiences that occur within any one family, or we could study the range of certain ideologies or beliefs that emerge within any one family member's experiences over many years-each experience or belief as a unit of observation nested within a family or family member as a unit of analysis, or an episode of parent-child interaction might be a unit of observation. For example, in an archival study of more than 200 advice-seeking letters from fathers and mothers to parent educator Angelo Patri, LaRossa and Reitzes (1993) analyzed 1,000 mentions of parent-child interaction, and, in a classic example of family ethnography, Engels (1845, cited in Marcus, 1974) presented a case study of industrial conditions in a single city-Manchester, England-while drawing on data from multiple families (units of observation) living in poverty. Stated simply, a single sampling decision can lead to another related, undiscovered, yet clarifying sample of the same family. ...
Sampling is one of the most difficult and contentious aspects of qualitative research design. There are few guidelines for sampling decisions or for understanding saturation in qualitative family research. The authors frame the problematic of data quality in the selection of units of analysis and observation and consider how to enhance sample richness. They outline considerations for data quantity and sample size as well as case- and variable-based approaches. With multiple examples from recent and classic studies to illustrate the consequences of sampling decisions, they explore links between saturation and validity. Finally, they encourage researchers to craft a coherent statement on qualitative integrity to demonstrate how their sampling decisions are rooted in epistemology, theory, and richness and quality of data.
... Marx's own well-documented engagements with literature and with literary treatments of the capitalist city ought to alert us immediately to the fact that the scientific status of Marxist theory is inseparable from aesthetic considerations (Prawer, 1976). Marx's dismissal of Eugéne Sue's reformist socialism through a critique of Sue's great serial melodrama Mysteries of Paris has tended rightly to reinforce the idea that Marx saw it as his duty to transcend the problems associated with literary treatments of urban problems and their causes, but his success in this is quite compromised—not least for instance by his reliance on Engels' accomplished urban reportage (Blanchard, 1985; Marcus, 1974). ...
Radical urban geography has recently begun a critique of crime fiction, seeing its ideological shortcomings as politically instructive. This paper argues that this critique is theoretically naive and suggests that a concentration on the epistemological claims of both fiction and urban geography is more fruitful. The paper turns the critique back on radical geography and celebrates the critical possibilities of some forms of crime fiction. Specifically, the police procedurals of British author John Harvey are used to illustrate the genre's ability to articulate alternative epistemologies, ways of knowing the city that track the structure of everyday life and thus offer a critical, realistic, and reflexive approach to the city and itsproblems.
The history of nations is the result of natural and anthropogenic stratifications that have induced changes to the territories and the organization of societies often with dramatic consequences that have questioned local cultural instances. Meanwhile, these local cultural values represent a fundamental “humus” for the life of the communities and the knowledge and transmission of these values to future generations are important actions for the continuity and development of the territories in respect of local needs. Meanwhile, these values are the main targets to be erased when external expansionist interference intervenes on the territories. Once these expansions took place through conquests and wars; today these wars are also fought electronically with often much more devastating consequences. The city, together with “cives”, is the mirror of these transformations and its existence not only depends on the citizens but on the ways in which they themselves are able to transmit their cultural heritage to the future. This chapter intends to analyze some experiences that have strongly characterized the history of Lithuania immediately after the Second World War and how cities have been sacrificed in their essential and fundamental values. Although the forms of colonization have often been devastating, the death of the cities was followed by a period of cultural regeneration that is interesting to analyze to understand the meaning of local values for the development of territories.KeywordsLithuaniaVilniusPoliticsColonizationCultureParadigmsCommunityEducation
Friedrich Engels’ The Condition of the Working-Class in England (1845) features a pioneering multisensory ethnography of the factory system. His critique of the industrial revolutionization of light for 24/7 production adapted a contemporaneous Gothic imaginary of the night. In The Philosophy of Manufactures (1835), Andrew Ure repudiated a physician who condemned night-work’s effects on factory children – “if light is excluded from tadpoles, they never become frogs” – by counter-claiming: “the number and brilliancy of the gas-lights in a cotton-mill” militated against child-labourers lingering “in the tadpole state.” Dispelling Ure’s thinking as blinding fantasy, Engels revealed “the vampire property-holding class” penetrating night-workers with “very powerful light … most injurious to the sight.” He brilliantly anticipated Karl Marx’s demonstration in Capital (1867) that industrial revolutionism, involving capital’s rapid take-up of new lighting technologies, occurred “at the expense of the workpeople. Experimenta in corpore vili , like those of anatomists on frogs, were formally made.”
In 2020 the scientific community celebrated the 200th anniversary of the birth of Friedrich Engels with numerous publications, conferences, and meetings. But as if by tradition representatives of various social and humanitarian disciplines, including sociologists, were and remain to this day, surprisingly inattentive (or indifferent) to the concepts of classes and class analysis presented by the founder of Marxism in his first book «The Condition of the Working Class in England», published in 1845. Modern life writers of F. Engels usually rank the work as a genre of high-quality journalistic investigations, as an engaged political journalism, as the first publications on the problem of urbanization, and as one of the best examples of a fiction book about the life and customs of the Victorian era. The article substantiates its belonging to the social and humanitarian science in accordance with today’s ideas about the relevance of scientific research. A sociological explication and interpretation of the views on the formation, evolution and prospects for the participation of large groups of people in the process of transforming social orders are proposed. The first part presents the biographical context of Engels’ writing of his first major work, as well as some post-biographical facts about the memory of his stay in Manchester in connection with the living conditions of English workers. The second part lists those conceptual constructs that can be taken for the concept of classes.
Through Friedrich Engels’ The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845), this article examines two prominent themes in environmental humanities – vital ecological materialism and ‘big data’. Engels’ vivid descriptions of factories, houses, and environment shared the central tenets of ‘material ecology’ – ‘thing power’ (Jane Bennett); ‘intra-actions’ of social and material agency (Karen Barad); ‘trans-corporeality’ (Stacy Alaimo) – and met Bennett’s call to align vital and historical materialism. The main body of the paper connects his analysis both to current debates about integrating ‘big data’ into social science and the humanities and to comparable nineteenth-century developments in statistics and data visualisation. Engels articulated the working-class condition by blending four distinct modes of investigation: big data; qualitative survey research; literary thick description; and theory (the nascent critique of capitalist political economy). Such a mix remains rich with possibilities for sociology and humanities not only in communicating but in generating knowledge about complex ecologies.
In the light of climate change, the steam engine appears as one of the most momentous productive forces in history. This essay traces Karl Marx's shifting thoughts on that particular technology, arguing that his oeuvre exhibits a break: the young Marx espoused productive-force determinism and considered the steam engine a force of progress while the mature Marx tended to regard the relations of production as determinant. Steam power then arose as a result of contradictions in the relations between capital and labor—not as the origin of those relations. Ecological Marxism needs to reckon with these tensions and ruptures in Marx's works. By elaborating on his constructivism, we may approach a theory of fossil-fuel technologies as material manifestations of capitalist power—the general obstacle, so far, to any meaningful politics for mitigating climate change.
This article explores cultural cityism at a time when a more expansive, ‘planetary’ urbanization is argued to have superseded ‘the city’ as the dominant urban form. It takes an essentially Lefebvrian problematic and works this through an examination of one aspect of contemporary metropolitan culture, the L.S. Lowry exhibition at Tate Britain, held in the summer of 2013. The article scrutinizes the juxtaposition of Lowry's images of the industrial city with the image of ‘global’, corporate London provided by Tate Britain itself. The exhibition is presented as evidence of Lefebvre's argument that although the urban core has imploded and exploded, through images the city ‘can perpetuate itself, survive its conditions’. Taking stock also of the preponderance of city images in culture more widely, it is argued such images make a fetish of the city, producing also an ‘urban pastoral’ that obscures the defining characteristics of urban life today. Finally, Benjamin's concept of the ‘dialectical image’ and Rancière's notion of the ‘sentence image’ are invoked to capture the flashing together of past and present city images and the opportunities for critical reflection this constellation presents.
By applying a basic fixed- and random-effects paradigm of meta-analysis, this chapter summarizes findings from numerous evaluations of managed care programs in which nurses preauthorized and monitored inpatient care. Although the backlash against managed care circa 2000 reduced the use of such programs, the rising costs of medical care have led health plans to reconsider their use (Mays et al. 2004, W4: 429–431). So that Medicare can meet the future needs of the retiring baby boom generation, the National Academy of Social Insurance formed panels of experts to develop recommendations about reforming Medicare (Aaron and Reischauer 1995, 1998; Marmor and Oberlander 1998; Wilensky and Newhouse 1999). The panel on fee-for-service Medicare (January 1998) requested the identification of promising private-sector innovations for managing health care costs and quality that Medicare could apply (Fox 1997, 50; Miller and Luft 1997).
The Life and Times of a Revolutionary HegelianDialectics, Philosophy, and ScienceHistorical Materialism and Modern SocietiesCapital and CounterrevolutionSocialism and RevolutionMarx, “the Battle for Democracy,” and the Realm of FreedomCrisis, Revolutionary Historicism, and the Transition to SocialismThe Limitations of Classical MarxismMarx in the Present Age
This article examines the motivation, scope, findings and reception of the survey of London, Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds and Birmingham which the French journalist Léon Faucher published in Etudes sur l'Angleterre (1843–5). Sources include Faucher's letters, the original and revised text, the English translator's notes, and reviews in the British, French and German press. Faucher's fieldwork led him to question liberal orthodoxy and propose remedies to alleviate working-class distress. Exceptionally in eighteen-forties Britain, the continental socio-economic treatise was widely discussed and acclaimed. Elucidating Faucher's thought and setting it in context illuminates the contrast between him and other writers, particularly Friedrich Engels.
This article is concerned with the place of psychotherapy under capitalism. This is addressed using elements of the critique of political economy undertaken by Marx. I also argue that a Marxist critique of capitalist political economy is also necessarily feminist. I include analyses of the “feminisation” of work in order to grasp how value is produced, circulated and managed by psychotherapy, how subjectivity is targeted. Three aspects of psychotherapy are discussed to illustrate the value of a Marxist feminist approach to this particular practice of the self: the question of payment for the labour of a psychotherapist (and the labour of the client); the question of public health provision, focusing here on the UK's National Health Service; and the continuing debates about the role of the State and the regulation of public and private provision of psychotherapy. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
The paper argues for the possibility of reworking the concept of ideology in such a way as to depend neither on a problematic of truth and error, nor on a division of the world into two parts one of which is more real than the other, nor on an expressive relation of subjects to meaning. The political force of the concept can be retained if ideology is thought as a provisional state of discourse (a function of its appropriation and use) rather than as a content or an inherent structure. Any discursive system produces a particular configuration of subject-positions which are the conditions of entry of individuals into discourse; but these acquire political significance only through the (historically variable) codification of discourse in terms of a play of relations of power, and the positions available can be refused or undermined. Some implications of this argument for models of the social and for discourse theory are discussed
How is space political? This article first highlights Marx and Engels’s contributions to this question, then examines how a later generation of Marxists exemplified by Manuel Castells and his theory of “ collective consumption” returned to it with decidedly structuralist and reductive readings of Marxism. In conclusion, the article outlines how Fredric Jameson’s work on postmodernism and “cognitive mapping” provides a more holistic Marxist approach to urban experience by linking political economy to cultural theory.
As One of the primary works of American literature to be recovered by feminist archaeology, Life in the Iron Mills (1861) can also stand as the test of a theoretical blind spot of early feminist criticism – its inability to see “bad writing” – for Davis's novella is notably awkward in its conception and construction. An obvious reason for the lack is that this kind of judgment fulfills an assumption of patriarchy in regard to women's writing: “that the reason for the absence of women [in the literary canon] is that women have not written in the past – or that what they have written is not very good” (Spender, 1). In the older formalist critical dispensation, aesthetic defects had to be publicly identified and labeled, like Hester Prynne's badge of shame. I certainly do not mean to suggest that feminism (however constituted) has any obligation to reproduce this order of judgment, but not owning such effects has consequences. Davis's novella can temporarily resolve this dilemma by using feminism to expose the traditional aesthetics of judgment.
In recent years there has been a marked revival of Marxism in the intellectual life of western societies. This has resulted not only in some impressive synoptic studies dealing with the structure of contemporary capitalist societies, but in a renewed concern with social change in these societies, and specifically with the role of the working class in the future transformation of capitalist society. This paper questions the importance attached to the proletariat as an actual or potential agent of revolutionary change. It asks: why did Marx and Engels see the proletariat in this role? What historical and theoretical considerations led them to this view? How plausible is it? The paper concludes that on the historical and sociological evidence Marx and Engels drew unwarranted inferences concerning the future role of the working class as an agency of the revolutionary transformation of capitalist society.
Fictional treatment of the poor has varied with changing perceptions of their position and role in English society. In part these perceptions have been affected by the social locations of the writers. But this essay argues that a major determinant of the treatment of the poor has been the inheritance of a pastoral tradition of viewing them. Writers have largely worked within this tradition. Only in the 1930s was a determined attempt made to break out of it. This failed, and after the war fiction gradually abandoned its efforts to deal with the poor, preferring to leave that to the newer media of film and television.
The tradition of American cultural geography was defined by studies of the rural, and in its more prosaic form focused on cataloguing and mapping artifacts such as fence posts, barn types, and gravestones in order to delimit culture areas. In contrast, the city was all but ignored, treated as a cultural vacuum, and conceived only as a site of work, production, and economic relations. Hence, the importance ofurban spatial science that fromthe late 1950s formalized that economism as central place theory, or Alonso’s map of bid-rent curves, or models of retail location. Even when urban geography began eschewing formal models and theory, turning towards some kind of Marxist approach during the 1970s, the focus on things economic remained, but couched now in a different vocabulary such as rent gap, urban gatekeepers, and uneven development. The economism of spatial science and Marxism could not be sustained, however. Culture had to be let in. From 1990 pressured by outside theoretical developments such as cultural studies, and post-modernism, and changes from inside the discipline such as the rise of the new cultural geography, urban geography finally cracked, explicitly allowing culture in first as a trickle, but by the end of that decade as a flood. Culture had finally left the farm and hit the streets.
This paper focuses on the passage and enforcement of laws regulating the corporate sector, specifying patterns which seem to emerge from this literature in the major English speaking democracies.
The creation of regulatory laws, the typical resistance by the industry and the state, and the crucial role of crises in the successful passage of laws are examined first. The patterns which law enforcement follows, and the key role of the regulatory agency in shaping these, are delineated next. The theoretical implications of these empirically based generalizations are then set out.
The author argues that neither the pluralist nor the mainstream Marxist analyses adequately explain the very real progress that has occurred over the past 400 years in containing corporate crime, because it has happened largely in spite of rather than because of laws and regulatory activity. Real reform resulted because ongoing struggles forged a change at the ideological level, and this in turn led to improvements at the level of production. By raising the price of legitimacy for corporations in a particular nation‐state, prolaterian groups and their allies can create the conditions for change. Law and regulatory agencies have been of secondary importance, it is argued, in the struggle to restrain the predatory behavior of the corporate sector.
There are multiple factors which contribute to the development of the individual's personality. Many of these factors have been amply discussed in traditional theories of personality formation. An area that has been neglected in these discussions has been the role that poverty and ethnic and cultural factors may have in this regard. This paper offers a discussion of these issues with special emphasis on cultural, ethnic, and socioeconomic factors which tend to characterize the lives of Latino and Black individuals. Recommendations are made for a re-evaluation of the traditional theories of personality when applied to poor and minority individuals.
Thomas Carlyle’s criticism of economics goes far beyond his epithet, “Dismal Science.” One aspect of economics that attracted
his attention was its use of numbers in both theories and empiricisms. Here is explored his attacks on economist’s use of
arithmetic in explaining human behavior, and statistics in addressing the condition of the working class.
This paper examines the future of Schools of Public Health in the United States. The history of Schools of Public Health is developed by tracing the history of the philanthropies which supported scientific medicine and public health in the early decades of the twentieth century. The role of the theory of disease in shifting the focus of public health from the community to the laboratory is explored. This paper argues that Schools of Public Health have lost their legitimacy and no longer have any content area or discipline for which they alone are responsible. The declining public image of public health is explored in light of the recent swine flu and legionnaire disease episodes. The current tendencies of Schools of Public Health as miniature business schools or as departments of medical schools are explored and criticized and a revitalized curriculum for Schools of Public Health is posited.
This paper examines a prevailing cultural interpretation of high infant mortality rates among the 19th-century English working class. It argues that most deaths attributed to overlaying or smothering were probably not the results of infanticide but rather due to Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS). Recent research on SIDS is discussed in support of this hypothesis, followed by a description of the demographic and nutritional conditions of 19th-century British working-class populations. Finally, the class-cultural biases of the infanticide hypothesis are suggested.
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