The purpose of this research is to examine Friedrich Engels' analysis of early industrial Britain. The plan of the research will be to set forth the historical context in which Engels studied England's emerging industrial base and then to discuss the foundation of his conclusion that it was exploitative as well as his proposed remedy for ending the exploitation.
By the middle of the 19th century, the Industrial Revolution that had begun toward the end of the 18th century was well under way in England. Wholesale social transformation accompanied the industrial transformation of production, and it became the subject of social and economic theory, which took the form of social criticism. In his introduction to The Condition of the Working Class in England, Engels locates what he takes to be an unjust social structure in the emergence of mechanized industry, which supplanted the longtime practice of production of goods for human use by craftsmen whose labor had value because of their direct participation in all phases of production and distribution. Referring to the weaving of cloth as a home-based enterprise as an example, Engels explains that the families of rural weavers who were the producers "could get on fairly well with their wages, because the home market was almost the only one and the crushing power of competition that came later, with the conquest of foreign markets and the extension of trade, did not yet press upon wages" (Engels). Mechanized production, which from an economic standpoint achieved economies of scale, disposed of the class of the independent yeomanry and obliged the formerly self-employed rural workers to provide for their material needs by seeking work at the urban industrial factories. Additionally, cottage industries repeatedly fell before the steam-engine-driven juggernaut, and small proprietors "were forced down into the proletariat" (Engels).
Wages were the prerogative of the employer/factory owner, a...