Page:Zelda Kahan - The Life and Work of Friedrich Engels (1920).pdf/15

of Friedrich Engels good as it was, for this had to some extent also been done by others, but the marvellous acuteness with which the young author (Engels was then only twenty-four years old) grasped the true inwardness of capitalist production and the contradictions inherent in bourgeois society.

The central idea of the book was to show how capitalist industry produces the modern working class. How it breeds the miserable conditions under which they live. How it demoralises them, dehumanises them, and reduces them to a condition of slavery in all but name; indeed, to worse than slavery, for the worker under capitalism, whilst he has to sell his body, and at that time, before he had learned the true value of efficient organisation, also his soul, to the owner of the means of production—the capitalist—he is not even sure from day to day whether he will have the wherewithal to satisfy his most elementary bodily needs.

At the same time, and this is the most important point of all, the author saw in this very despairing condition of the workers, the germ of the new hope. He saw how the bringing together of great masses of workers into a collective form of industry (with, of course, individual ownership) would gradually develop a mass consciousness in the workers. How the mastery of man over nature (as illustrated in factory and town life) would breed confidence in the masses in their own power. How the workers would be forced by their very conditions of life to see that their only way out of their misery and degradation was by their combination as fellow workers against the exploiting class—the capitalists—and that in the horrible conditions of the present life of the workers there already existed, and was germinating, the hope of the future; the Communist working-class movement, which would finally deliver mankind from all forms of slavery, from all forms of domination of man by his fellow men. This work was thus the first to lay the foundation of scientific Socialism, and was but the earnest beginning of Engels' life-long work in the Socialist Labour movement.

The book shows how far he had emancipated himself from the intricacies, the useless parts, and the idealism (in a philosophic sense) of German philosophy, whilst yet holding fast and using with a sure hand all that was true and fruitful in the Hegelian philosophy.

In addition to his masterly analysis of capitalist industry and its economic and social results, Engels also investigates the various forms of the English labour movement of the time. He sees the significance, the importance of the Trade Union movement, and yet its inadequacy so long as it remains a purely professional organisation.

He therefore hails the Chartist movement as the compact political form of the proletarian opposition to the bourgeoisie. In Chartism, the workers, as a whole class, stand against the bourgeoisie in order to filch from it political power.

But whilst the Chartists rightly take an active part in all the social