The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 | Page 2

and such 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 moralised. 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 practising 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 favour of the
giant-capitalist in his competition with his less favoured 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
labour-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
labour is surplus value, which cost the capitalist nothing, but yet goes
into his pocket. That is the basis of the system which tends more and
more to split up civilised society into a few Rothschilds and
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 labour-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, smallpox, 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,