engels the condition of the working class in england

And in the march toward socialism, England - where the industrial revolution had left a deep chasm between rich and poor and where the proletariat was most advanced - would provide the social kindling of revolution. The solution, Hess suggested, was socialism: the abolition of private property and an end to the alienating effects of the money economy. All of which led him to abandon his Protestant faith for Feuerbach's religion of humanity, before then falling in with the 'communist rabbi' Moses Hess who taught him that modern capitalism was just as dehumanising a force as Christianity. Instead of dutifully performing his military service, he had succumbed to the beer rooms and lecture halls of Berlin University where the philosophies of Hegel, Ludwig Feuerbach and David Strauss were debated with boozy gusto. His father, a conservative textile manufacturer from the Rhineland, had been increasingly concerned about the circle of Young Hegelians Engels had been associating with in Berlin. The young Engels had in fact been sent to Manchester in 1842 precisely to rid him of radical sentiments. With Brazil, Russia, India and China experiencing just the kind of breakneck economic growth that transformed British society in the 1800s - villages turning into cities, peasants swapping fields for factories, and mass exploitation grinding out higher GDP - Engels's polemic resonates with terrifying force. And, 150 years on, it speaks to our age with painful prescience - not only in its critique of the instability of the free market and the structural inequalities of British society, but in its unrivalled depiction of the inhumanity of capitalism.

Engels the condition of the working class in england