Contrast this with the middle class slumming ideology of Orwell and many today who think that a pretence of living in the gutter gives them street cred socialism.

So many good bits. The Brickmakers revolt. Engels disgust with the almost fascist mentality of Malthusian ideology. The revolutionary Chartists. The full-on descriptive detail of the poverty of the working class. Hypocritical philanthropy disguising predatory acts of exploitation and cruelty. The courage of the English workers in their real fights and resistence.

And today when imperialism is using immigration and bulldog jingoism Engels was able to say: “…the abundance of hot Irish blood that flows in the veins of the English working-class. The English working-man is no Englishman nowadays; no calculating money-grubber like his wealthy neighbour. He possesses more fully developed feelings…. The cultivation of the understanding which so greatly strengthens the selfish tendency of the English bourgeois, which has made selfishness his predominant trait and concentrated all his emotional power upon the single point of money-greed, is wanting in the working-man, whose passions are therefore strong and mighty as those of the foreigner. English nationality is annihilated in the working-man….

And when one examines a year’s file of the Northern Star, the only sheet which reports all the movements of the proletariat, one finds that all the proletarians of the towns and of country manufacture have united in associations, and have protested from time to time, by means of a general strike, against the supremacy of the bourgeoisie. And as schools of war, the Unions are unexcelled. In them is developed the peculiar courage of the English. It is said on the Continent that the English, and especially the working-men, are cowardly, that they cannot carry out a revolution because, unlike the French, they do not riot at intervals, because they apparently accept the bourgeois regime so quietly. This is a complete mistake. The English working-men are second to none in courage; they are quite as restless as the French, but they fight differently. The French, who are by nature political, struggle against social evils with political weapons; the English, for whom politics exist only as a matter of interest, solely in the interest of bourgeois society, fight, not against the Government, but directly against the bourgeoisie…”

Continuing with revolutionary urgency he says:
“Because the English bourgeois finds himself reproduced in his law, as he does in his God, the policeman’s truncheon which, in a certain measure, is his own club, has for him a wonderfully soothing power. But for the working-man quite otherwise! The working-man knows too well, has learned from too oft-repeated experience, that the law is a rod which the bourgeois has prepared for him; and when he is not compelled to do so, he never appeals to the law. It is ridiculous to assert that the English working-man fears the police, when every week in Manchester policemen are beaten, and last year an attempt was made to storm a station-house secured by iron doors and shutters….”

And so much more…..

Contrast this with Marx’s dialectical and theoretical writings in the 1844 Economic ad Philisophical Manuscripts.

C of WC in E to be read again and again.

Do you know if there are plans to have a screening in Scotland? Looks fantastic.

Best,
Vikki