Essay Questions

What was Engels' primary concern about industrialization?

Generally speaking, industrialization is viewed as an important step forward for society, because it brought with it progress, an advancement in both knowledge and output, and created many more opportunities for employment than there had previously been. However, Engels was primarily concerned with what he saw as a giant step backwards for the workers.

Workers who had previously lived and worked in the countryside were drawn to the urban areas by the promise of jobs, but the living conditions they experienced once in the cities were deplorable. They were not treated well; conditions were overcrowded and unsanitary. There was a great deal of crime which they had not experienced in the country environment they had come from. Engels also addressed the differences in poverty between the countryside and urban environments; in the countryside, the air was clean. People lived off the land. Homes, whilst by no means luxurious, were clean and inhabited by the number of people for which they had been intended. Not so in the cities. The poor were crammed into tenements which were unsanitary and riddled with disease. Without proper nutrition and medical care, diseases spread and life expectancy actually became lower than it had been amongst their un-industrialized ancestors. Engels postulated that far from offering progress, industrialization was a retrograde step when it came to the wellbeing of the people.

This book is said to have been the seminal work that influenced the Communist movement. Why do you think it was so influential?

Even in his early work, it is clear that Engels is a "man of the people" in that he apparently despises those who are at the forefront of industry. To him, those who run industrial enterprises are exploiting the working class. The jobs that they are providing are benefitting the business owners, but not doing anything at all to improve the lives of the working class who work in them. He sees the business owning classes as tyrants and oligarchs who use the working class just to make as much money as possible.

This idea is central to the Communist movement; it purports to be "for the workers" and its key tenet is that all men should be equal. It also postulates that men cannot be trusted to do this for themselves which is why it is necessary for the government to step in. Unfortunately this only works in theory in and in reality a communist society becomes more of an Orwellian one where "all animals are equal but some are more equal than others". Still, Engels' work is used as a foundation stone for the principles of Communism and is instrumental in building the movement.

What is Engels' view of the urban life of the poor?

Engels states, "The manner in which the great multitude of the poor is treated by society today is revolting." Without Engels himself knowing it, this statement shows that he considers the poor to be outside of society. He does not say "the way that society treats its poor", which would suggest that he considered the poor to be a part of society; rather he says that the way the the poor is treated by society, implying that it is a group that is outside society as a whole.

He states too that the urban life of the poor is much worse than the life of their ancestors who lived before industrialization. The majority would live in a more countryside environment (there was no urbanization before industrialization) This meant that the air was generally more pure and less polluted; their jobs would also be done in a cleaner environment. Engels equates industrialization and urbanization with dirt and disease, and for this reason considers that the life of the poor has taken a dramatic downturn.