"The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles...Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletariat have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win…Working Men of All Countries, Unite!" Marx and Engels: Communist Manifesto.
Friedrich Engels was born in Barmen, Wuppertal, Germany, on 28th November 1820, and on his 200th anniversary his home town has unveiled a new sculpture and has a day of celebrations and protests.
Here in Salford, where Engels spent years observing and writing about those at the bottom end of society, there's no official ceremonies. The Civic Centre isn't lit up red or anything, just a couple of online meetings from the Working Class Movement Library and the Socialist Workers Party this week.
Yet Engels' legacy is massive. He arrived in the city in 1842 to work at his father's Victoria Mill in Weaste – a potential world heritage site which now has the M602 running through the middle of it – and while here, met Mary Burns who took him around the working class areas of 'Little Ireland' and Gravel Lane showing him the poverty and squalor that suffused the people and properties.
After twenty months here, Engels went home and wrote The Conditions of the Working Class in England, which shocked people so much, it changed views all over the world. Published 1845, and "dedicated to the working classes of Great Britain", it wasn't available in English until 1892, so frightened were the authorities.
Once back in Germany, having taken part in an uprising against the Prussian army, Engels wrote The Communist Manifesto with Karl Marx – and the rest is a history of revolutions and Das Kapital and stuff...
He came back to Salford in 1850, exiled from his native land, and stayed here for 19 years causing trouble and all sorts with the secret police after him...
But, on his 200th anniversary, has Engels got anything to say about what is going on today? Plenty! But here is an example which explains what is going on with Salford's regeneration at the moment.
The Salford Star first brought this to light in a special Engels print edition of the magazine in 2007* but nothing has changed...
This is what Engels wrote in The Housing Question 1872 about Salford, Manchester, London, Liverpool, Paris (etc). He could have been writing it today…
"The growth of the big modern cities gives the land in certain areas, particularly in those which are centrally situated, an artificial and colossally increasing value; the buildings erected on these areas depress this value instead of increasing it, because they no longer correspond to the changed circumstances. They are pulled down and replaced by others. This takes place above all with the workers' houses which are situated centrally and whose rents…can never increase above a certain maximum.
"…The result is that workers are forced out of the centre of towns towards the outskirts; that workers' dwellings, and small dwellings in general, become rare and expensive and often altogether unobtainable. For under these circumstances the building industry, which is offered a much better field for speculation by more expensive houses, builds workers' dwellings only by way of exception…They will provide new dwellings for hardly more than a quarter of the workers actually evicted by the building operations…"
Engels goes on to write about this being in 'the spirit' of a bloke called Haussmann, a corrupt government official in 19th Century Paris, who built "long, straight and broad streets through the closely built workers' quarters, particularly those which are centrally situated…erecting big luxurious buildings on both sides of them…to turn the city into a pure luxury city."
Engels added that these "evils" were usually done in the name of "beautifying the town"…
Where have we heard this before – Chapel Street? The Crescent? Media City? Ordsall?...
Back in 2007, when the hopelessly failed Salford Urban Regeneration Company, or URC, was about, all the regeneration publicity followed this path...
"World's first industrial city to City beautiful!" (Central Salford URC slogan 2007)..."Beautiful, Vibrant, Prosperous Central Salford is rapidly becoming one of the most desirable locations for investors and developers in the North…" (Central Salford advert).
Has Fred still got loads to say? You bet! Viva!
* To read the full Salford Star special on Friedrich Engels – with a free virtual poster by Salford's own top artist Matt Carroll (Central Station, Happy Mondays, James etc) – click here and follow the links
WHAT FRED SAID...
"I once went into Manchester with a bourgeois and spoke to him of the bad, unwholesome method of building, the frightful conditions of the working people's quarters…The man listened quietly and said when we parted 'And yet there is a great deal of money to be made here; good morning sir'…All the conditions of life are measured by money, and what brings no money is nonsense, unpractical idealistic bosh !"
********
"Urban authorities…almost everywhere in England are recognised centres of corruption of all kinds, nepotism and jobbery – the exploitation of public office to the private advantage of the official or his family." The Housing Question 1887
********
"If we cross the Irwell to Salford, we find…one large working men's quarter, penetrated by a single wide avenue…All Salford is built in courts or narrow lanes, so narrow, that they remind me of the narrowest I have ever seen, the little lanes of Genoa….The working men's dwellings between Oldfield Road and Cross Lane…vie with the dwellings of the Old Town in filth and overcrowding.
In this district I found a man, apparently about 60 years old, living in a cow stable...which had neither windows, floor, nor ceiling…and lived there, though the rain dripped through his rotten roof. This man was too old and weak for regular work, and supported himself by removing manure with a hand-cart; the dung heaps lay next door to his palace.
The working people live, almost all of them, in wretched, damp, filthy cottages…the streets which surround them are usually in the most miserable and filthy condition, laid out without the slightest reference to ventilation, with reference soley to the profit secured by the contractor…"
The Condition of the Working Class in England 1844
**********
"A class which bears all the disadvantages of the social order without enjoying its advantages…Who can demand that such a class respect this social order?"
The Condition of the Working Class in England 1844
*************
"Exploitation is the basic evil which the social revolution strives to abolish, by abolishing the capitalist mode of production." Fred Engels 1887
*********
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
(3).jpeg)
.png)
(1).JPG)
