ILRLE 3440 Lecture Notes - Lecture 18: Business Cycle, The Communist Manifesto, Bourgeoisie
8 May 2018
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10 April 2018
ECON 3300 - Lecture 18!
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Frederick Engels (1820-1895)!
Sidekick of Karl Marx!•
Wrote The Condition of the Working Class in 1845!•
Was meant as a warning to the German working class !◦
Revealed to the world the dark underbelly of industrialism!◦
Manchester was the case study !◦
Marx learned about English industrialisation from Engels!•
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Looking at the condition of the working class will change your views about industrialism!
Pre industrial golden age!1.
Living condition in Manchester and other cities !2.
Working conditions in textile factories!3.
Attitudes of the working class towards the bourgeoisie !4.
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Pre Industrial Golden Age!
Workers work in their own home!•
Employ men, women and children (who are treated kindly)!•
Workers own the means of production!•
No competition because they are their own bosses!•
Basically the putting out system (cottage industry)!•
Uneducated but happy and healthy!•
This changes with the invention of machines and factories !•
Causes a mass migration to the cities he calls death traps !◦
Argues that industrialisation made pre industrial poverty worse!◦
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Living Conditions in Cities!
Engels says living conditions are terrible !•
No one in the working class was getting any clean water !•
Trash was dumped in the alleys !•
Death rates were extremely high (especially among children)!•
Infant/child mortality was 57% among the working class!◦
Infant/child mortality was 20% among the middle class!◦
Infant/child mortality was 32% in the rural areas!◦
But people were migrating from the rural areas to the cities, where they were getting higher •
wages but watched their children die younger!
People in the cities were dying from dierhhea diseases and tuberculosis !•
Children are being raised by older people or young children because mothers are forced to go •
back to work in the factories a few weeks after giving birth!
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Working Conditions in Factories !
Workers are displaced by machines!•
Adult male workers are replaced by women and adolescents because the jobs that were left were •
less demanding physically!
Men become part of the “industrial reserve army” and the family structure is turned upside down!•
By 1849 40% of factory workers were under the age of 18, meaning the mental and physical •
development is being sacrificed for the greed of the bourgeoisie !
Many of them have deformed legs and spines from standing for 12 to 14 hours a day!•
For women this leads to child birth problem!◦
