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# Capitalism-and-Its-Critics-A-History-From-the

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★ ★ ★

In progressive and literary circles, the reaction to Past and Present was generally positive. Ignoring or misinterpreting its reactionary political message, reviewers focused on its indictment of industrial capitalism and laissez-faire economics. George Owen, editor of the Owenite journal The New Moral World, recorded his gratification in finding “the true philosophy of Socialism  … arrayed in the gorgeous and striking drapery of Carlyleism.”39 J. S. Mill, in his 1845 article “The Claims of Labour,” credited Carlyle and his “indignant remonstrance with the higher classes on their sins of omission against the lower,” for having to brought to the center of debate the plight of the working classes.40

The influence of Past and Present would be a lasting one. John Ruskin, the Victorian art critic and polymath, for decades kept an annotated copy. Finally he gave it away, remarking that he no longer needed it “because it has become a part of myself.”41 When, in 1860, Ruskin published Unto This Last, his own searing examination of wealth, materialism, and political economy, Carlyle’s influence was readily evident. In another of Ruskin’s essays, on the nature of value and wealth, he cited Carlyle’s writings explicitly and remarked of them, “All has been said that needs to be said, and far better than I shall ever say it again.”42 Dickens, who addressed the condition of England in his own inimitable fashion, was also a fan of Carlyle. He dedicated to him his 1854 novel, Hard Times, which was set in a fictional mill town.43

In the United States, too, Past and Present was highly praised. “Since Burke, since Milton, we have had nothing to compare with it,” Emerson wrote in The Dial, the in-house journal of the Transcendentalists.44 He praised Carlyle as a writer who “in an age of Mammon and of criticism … never suffers the eye of his wonder to close … He cannot keep his eye off from that gracious Infinite which embosoms us.”45 Emerson did express some reservations about Carlyle’s overbearing writing style, noting “the habitual exaggeration of the tone wearies whilst it stimulates.” But he went on to remark that Carlyle, in his “strange half mad way,” had entered the realm of literary greatness and was “the indubitable champion of England.”46 Emerson’s close friend Henry David Thoreau agreed with this assessment. In an essay on Carlyle and his works, which appeared in 1847, Thoreau wrote: “For fluency and skill in the use of the English tongue, he is a master unrivaled.” Thoreau even forgave the Scot his exaggerations, saying: “He who cannot exaggerate is not qualified to utter truth.”47

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The Transcendentalists weren’t the only Americans to draw inspiration from Carlyle. In the South, some defenders of slavery hailed a writer who shared their argument that industrial capitalism, based on free wage labor and the profit motive, represented an unwarranted incursion on the natural order of society. In 1848 The Southern Quarterly Review, a journal based in Charleston, published a piece on Carlyle’s works that claimed, “The spirit of Thomas Carlyle is abroad in the land.”48 The following year, the Scot published an unsigned article in Fraser’s Magazine titled “Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question.” Ostensibly, this piece consisted of a public address lamenting the economic decline of the British West Indies since slavery had been abolished. The speaker wasn’t identified, but Carlyle’s anonymous narrator informed readers that his words were written down by a disreputable reporter, “Dr. Phelin M’Quirk,” and were left behind when M’Quirk skipped his digs without paying the rent. “As the colonial and negro question is still alive, and likely to grow livelier for some time,” the narrator went on, “we have accepted the article, at a cheap market rate; and give it publicity, without, in the least, committing ourselves to the strange doctrines and notions shadowed forth in it.”49

Perhaps Carlyle included this qualification as an insurance policy lest he be identified as the article’s author, which was virtually inevitable given his unique writing style. His anonymous speaker described the Black plantation workers who had been freed on the West Indian islands as “sitting yonder, with their beautiful muzzles up to the ears in pumpkins, imbibing sweet pulps and juices; the grinder and incisor teeth ready for every new work, and the pumpkins cheap as grass in those rich climates;

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while the sugar crops rot round them, uncut, because labor cannot be hired, so cheap are the pumpkins.”50 The speaker went on: “Quashee, if he will not help in bringing out the spices, will get himself made a slave again (which state will be a little less ugly than his present one), and with beneficient whip, since other methods avail not, will be compelled to work.”51

Although the article clearly reflected Carlyle’s racist views, its main purpose was to criticize the British abolitionists, whom he termed “Exeter Hall,” and free market economists, such as Smith, who had argued that wage labor would be more efficient and profitable than slave labor. Carlyle’s anonymous speaker claimed that in the Caribbean, but not just there, the ending of slavery had proved economically disastrous. “Alas, in many other provinces, beside the West Indian,” he said, “that unhappy wedlock of Philanthropic Liberalism and the Dismal Science, has engendered such all-enveloping delusions, of the moon-calf sort—and wrought huge woe for us, and for the poor, civilized world, in these days!”52

The description of economics as “the dismal science” is another of Carlyle’s famous aphorisms. He was correct that production on British sugar plantations did fall sharply after the abolition law was passed. But he conveniently ignored the fact that this was largely because the planters refused to pay the wages that the formerly enslaved workers demanded and opted to import indentured labor instead, largely from India. Faced with competition from plantations in Cuba and Brazil, which had maintained slavery, the British planters believed they had been unfairly treated. It seems likely that Carlyle picked up his account of the situation in the West Indies from some of them. His anonymous speechifier, at the end of his address, called for the establishment of new working arrangements on the plantations that would have been tantamount to a restoration of slavery. Addressing the freed Blacks, the speaker said:

You are not “slaves” now; nor do I wish, if it can be avoided, to see you slaves again: but decidedly you will have to be servants to those that are born wiser than you, that are born lords of you—servants to the whites, if they are (as what mortal can doubt they are?) born wiser than you … And if “slave” mean essentially “servant hired for life,” or by a contract of long continuance, and not easily dissoluble—I ask, Whether in all human things, the “contract of long continuance” is not precisely the contract to be desired, were the right terms once found for it?53

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It didn’t take long for Carlyle to be outed as the author of the article. Subsequently, Mill, a strong supporter of abolition, said in a letter to the editor of Fraser’s Magazine that the “doctrines and spirit” of the piece “ought not to pass without remonstrances.”54 In the American South, proslavery interests saw more to like in the article. In 1850, DeBow’s Review, a monthly business magazine based in New Orleans, reprinted it under the headline “Carlyle on West India Emancipation.” An editor’s note said “When British writers can so speak, it is time for Northern fanaticism to pause and reflect.”55 Whatever Carlyle’s intentions had been in writing “Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question,” he was hailed in the South as a fellow defender of slavery. If he had wanted to distance himself from the article, he could have done so. He didn’t. Instead, in 1853, he approved its republication in England with an even more incendiary title, which included a racial epithet.

★ ★ ★

In the twentieth century, Carlyle’s racist views and his love of autocrats would make him a favorite of right-wing extremists, including Nazi leaders. In the Führerbunker, according to some accounts, Goebbels read Hitler extracts from Carlyle’s biography of Frederick the Great.56 During Carlyle’s lifetime, however, it was his critiques of capitalism and materialism that attracted the most attention. In January 1844 Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, a Paris newspaper published by leftist German exiles, printed a review of Past and Present that began: “Of all the fat books and thin pamphlets which have appeared in England in the past year for the entertainment or edification of ‘educated society,’ the above work is the only one which is worth reading.” The article quoted long extracts from Carlyle’s book and noted: “If we discount a few expressions that have derived from Carlyle’s particular standpoint, we must allow the truth of all he says.” The shortcoming of Past and Present, the reviewer wrote, was not in analysis but in prescription: Carlyle was “vague and hazy about the future.” He spoke about creating a spiritual renewal and recognizing the true value of work, but he didn’t mention the English socialists at all, and his analysis was shot through with dubious religious arguments. “As I have said,” the review went on, “we too are concerned with combating the lack of principle, the inner emptiness, the spiritual deadness, the untruthfulness of the age; we are waging a war to the death against all these things, just as Carlyle is, and there is a much greater probability that we shall succeed than that he will, because we know what we want.”57

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The author of these words was Friedrich Engels, a young German socialist who had just returned home to Barmen after spending a couple of years in Manchester. At the time when he wrote the review of Past and Present, he was working on a book of his own.

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“The war of the poor against the rich will be the bloodiest ever waged”

Friedrich Engels and The Communist Manifesto

By the early 1840s, Manchester was Britain’s second largest city.1 Together with the adjoining town of Salford, it had a population of more than a quarter of a million. Its skyline was dominated by the tall chimneys of steam-powered cotton mills that belched black smoke into the Lancashire sky. Tens of thousands of men, women, and children worked in these factories, and the city had many other manufacturing facilities: tanneries, foundries, glassworks, and metalworking shops. As the center of the global cotton industry, it was also a thriving commercial center, with countless warehouses and a grand exchange building, where merchants and traders dealt in yarns of all kinds. In an age when the railroad was about to become king, Manchester already boasted lines to Liverpool (the world’s first intercity link) and Leeds. A line to London, via Birmingham, was under construction.2

In late 1842 Friedrich Engels, who was just twenty-two, arrived in Salford to work at a cotton thread factory that his father co-owned. He hailed from Barmen, an industrial town in the Rhineland, which was then part of Prussia. His family of pious Lutherans owned a successful linen bleaching business, but during the 1830s Engels’s father, Friedrich Sr., had quarreled with his siblings and entered a partnership with two Dutch brothers, Godfrey and Peter Ermen. By the early 1840s, the firm of Ermen and Engels had opened its factory in Salford, which, in honor of the new British monarch, it named Victoria Mill.3

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Engels was a reluctant capitalist. When he was seventeen, his father had forced him to start a business apprenticeship, first in Barmen, then in the port city of Bremen. To the horror of Friedrich Sr., his son had progressive views and wanted to become a writer. In an 1839 newspaper article that he wrote under the pseudonym Friedrich Oswald, he described the factories in his native Wuppertal Valley as “low rooms where people breathe in more coal fumes and dust than oxygen.”4 In 1841 young Friedrich went to Berlin to do his military service. Away from the parade ground, he attended philosophy lectures at the University of Berlin and socialized with a group of radicals known as the Young Hegelians, who criticized organized religion and the Hohenzollern monarchy that ruled Prussia. The idealism of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, who had died in 1831, provided the intellectual framework for the Young Hegelians’ intellectual sallies, but the battlegrounds they fought on were rationality, freedom, and modernity. Although they differed on some key philosophical issues, they were united in viewing themselves as enemies of religious superstition and old ways in general. Engels fit right in. He chose private lodgings over the military barracks, acquired a dog, and drank heavily with his associates. The philosopher Bruno Bauer, one of the more prominent Young Hegelians, referred to the group as the “beer literati.”5

Despairing at his son’s behavior, the elder Engels decided to send him to England to work alongside Peter Ermen, who managed the Victoria Mill. Friedrich obeyed his father’s order, but in November 1842, on his way to England, he stopped in Cologne to meet some editors from Rheinische Zeitung (Rhenish Newspaper), a left-leaning newspaper that had already published some anonymous freelance articles he had written. The top editor, recently appointed, was an intense young fellow from Trier, another city in the Rhineland, named Karl Marx. Evidently, the two didn’t hit it off. Decades later, Engels would describe this initial encounter as “distinctly chilly.”6

★ ★ ★

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Engels worked in the Victoria Mill’s office, handling orders and accounts. Despite his disdain for business, which he referred to as “a dog’s life,” he had a good head for figures.7 On evenings and weekends, he attended talks at the Manchester Hall of Science, an Owenite institution dedicated to adult education, self-improvement, and cooperative socialism. Among the lecturers at the Hall of Science was John Watts, a former weaver turned schoolmaster who had published a book entitled The Facts and Fictions of Political Economists, which railed against the regimentation of factory life and described how an economic system based purely on pecuniary values was responsible for “depravity.”8 According to Tristram Hunt, the author of a highly informative 2009 biography, Marx’s General, another workingclass writer who influenced Engels was James Leach, a Chartist activist and former handloom weaver, who had written an anonymous polemic about life in the mills.

A third critic of early industrial capitalism who made a big impression on Engels was Carlyle. Although Engels didn’t share Carlyle’s conservative views on religion and politics, he admired him for puncturing hypocrisies and addressing what he described as “the lack of principle, the inner emptiness, the spiritual deadness, the untruthfulness of the age.”9

Outside of work and the Hall of Science, Engels started a relationship with Mary Burns, a young Irish immigrant who may have been employed at Victoria Mill. (Some accounts say she was; others suggest she was in domestic service.)10 Engels and Burns would be involved for about twenty years. (After Mary died, in 1863, Engels went on to marry her sister Lizzy.) Having a knowledgeable local chaperone must have been a great help to Engels, especially when, for journalistic purposes, he started visiting some of the city’s poorest areas. Eventually he decided to write a book, The Condition of the Working Class in England, which was first published in Leipzig in 1845. Today, it is widely regarded as a classic account of early industrialization.

The book opens with the industrial revolution in England and the rise of the “industrial proletariat.” Then it describes various parts of Manchester, including the Old Town, a cramped neighborhood on the banks of the River Irk, where many Irish immigrants lived. The Irish were among the city’s most hard-up residents, and Engels wrote that the narrow courtyards that led down to the Irk “contain unqualifiedly the most horrible dwellings which I have yet beheld.”11 He described, at the end of one covered passage, “a privy without a door, so dirty that the inhabitants can pass into and out of the court only by passing through foul pools of stagnant urine and excrement.”12 The river itself was “a narrow, coal-black, foul-smelling stream, full of debris and refuse” from the local factories and residential buildings.13 In one spot that Engels happened across, the residences consisted of “small one-storeyed, one-roomed huts, in most of which there is no artificial floor; kitchen, living-and sleeping-room all in one.” The description goes on: “In such a hole, scarcely 5 feet long by 6 broad, I found two beds—and such bedsteads and beds!—which, with a staircase and chimney-place, exactly filled the room. In several others, I found absolutely nothing, while the door stood open, and the inhabitants leaned against it.”14

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Areas like the Old Town had no running water or proper sewage systems. Engels noted that cholera outbreaks were common. He also described some slightly more salubrious neighborhoods, including Ancoats, where “stand the largest mills of Manchester lining the canals, colossal sixand seven-storeyed buildings towering with their slender chimneys far above the low cottages of the workers.”15 This neighborhood had proper pavements and drains, and its residents were better off than the inhabitants of the Old Town, many of whom were casual workers rather than factory operatives. In a December 1842 article for Rheinische Zeitung, Engels acknowledged that full-time male factory workers in Manchester were paid higher wages than their counterparts in Germany. “The worker there earns just enough to allow him to live on bread and potatoes; he is lucky if he can buy meat once a week,” Engels wrote. “Here he eats beef every day and gets a more nourishing joint for his money than the richest man in Germany. He drinks twice a day and still has enough money left over to be able to drink a glass of porter at midday and brandy and water in the evening. This is how most of the Manchester workers live who work a twelve-hour day.”16

Engels didn’t include this passage in his book, which he described, while he was writing it, as an “indictment”17 of the British bourgeoisie rather than an even-handed treatment. But it was an indictment packed with vivid detail. One thing lacking in Ancoats and other working-class districts, Engels noted, was any middle-class or upper-class residents. Manchester’s property owners, himself included, lived in new housing developments on the city’s outskirts—“in free, wholesome country air, in fine, comfortable homes, passed once every half or quarter hour by omnibuses going into the center of the city.”18 Engels said the contrast in living conditions between the two Manchesters was reflected in the physical appearance of its residents. Echoing Flora Tristan and the anonymous Black Dwarf author, he wrote: “If one roams the streets a little in the early morning, when the multitudes are on their way to their work, one is amazed at the number of persons who look wholly or half-consumptive … These pale, lank, narrowchested, hollow-eyed ghosts, whom one passes at every step, these languid, flabby faces, incapable of the slightest energetic expression.”19

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For whatever reason, Engels didn’t describe the working conditions at the Victoria Mill, which he must have known well. (In Barmen, the Engels family was known as a benevolent employer.) But he did back up some of his assertions with materials drawn from official reports and parliamentary debates about industrialization, both of which proliferated during the 1830s and ’40s. Drawing on a speech by Lord Ashley, a campaigner for a shorter workday, he wrote: “Of 419,560 factory operatives of the British Empire in 1839, 192,887, or nearly half, were under 18 years of age, and 242,296 of the female sex, of whom 112,192 were less than 18 years old.”20 Citing parliamentary testimony from doctors, Engels highlighted a “pretty list of diseases engendered purely by the hateful money-greed of the manufacturers!” He cited children with curved spines; workers with chronic chest ailments; pregnant women forced to work virtually until childbirth.21 In another passage, he recalled traveling into the city with a local businessman and regaling him about the dilapidated condition of the workers’ quarters: “The man listened quietly to the end, and said at the corner where we parted: ‘And yet there is a great deal of money made here; good morning, sir.’”22

★ ★ ★

Best known for its vivid descriptions of Manchester and its inhabitants, The Condition of the Working Class in England also features a good deal of economic analysis. Indeed, it contains, at least in embryonic form, some of the key arguments that would subsequently be subsumed in “Marxist”

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