(6) Engels, "Wuppertal Dayori" - 18-year-old journalist Engels denounces the poor conditions at the factory.

Engels, "Wuppertal Dayori" - 18-year-old journalist Engels denounces poor factory conditions "Learning from the Life and Thought Background of Marx Engels" (6)

In the article above, we looked at the lives of Marx and Engels in a rough chronology, but in this series, "Learning from the Life and Thought Background of Marx and Engels," we will look at the lives and thought of the two men in more detail.

I will now refer to the book by Tristram Hunt.'TheEngels, The Man Marx Called General."This is a biography of Engels called.

What makes this book excellent is that it explains in an easy-to-understand manner which ideas influenced Engels and how his writings were produced from them.

It is very easy to understand the flow of history because you can learn along with the historical background of the time and the ideas that were popular at the time. It is easy to understand how the ideas of Engels and Marx were developed. The book also gives me a road map of what to read next to learn more about Marx and Engels. I appreciated this.

And this book made me realize how much Engels had influenced Marx's writings. It is quite amazing.

Although this book is a biography of Engels, it also goes into great detail about Marx. It was such a great biography that I thought I could learn more about Marx by reading this book than by reading a biography or commentary on Marx.

We may use other Marx biographies to supplement some of Marx's life and interesting episodes, but basically we will focus on this book and take a closer look at the lives of Marx and Engels.

For other reference books, see the following articles"List of 12 recommended Marx biographies--to learn more about the life and thought of Marx Engels."Please refer to this page for a summary.

So let's get started.

The beginning of Engels' writing career - Engels the poet

In his spare time between socializing, participating in the Trevinals' games and games, and working as an accounting clerk, Engels began to pursue his freedom in writing.

Historically, Engels's style has been regarded as inferior to Marx's. Critics have tended to contrast Engels' grim, objective prose with Marx's witty, flamboyant style of crossed syllogisms. This is unfair. Engels was in fact an elegant writer, both in his private correspondence and in his writings for the public at large, before he turned to thoroughly scientific writing in the 180s. That said, his defense does not begin smoothly. (Among others.)

The Bedouin" - Engels' first published work - is an oriental poem that laments the loss of the noble savagery of the Bedouin people as they come into contact with Western civilization. Once walking "proud and free," they now act like slaves in Parisian theaters for a pittance. Even for the work of an eighteen-year-old, this is awkward. Still, we can see that Engels continued to harbor romantic ambitions like Shelley's in their daily, tedious commercial correspondence. (omitted).

Still, Engels could not abandon his youthful literary passion for Germany's mythical past, and in April 1839 he wrote an unfinished epic play on the life of the national hero Siegfried. It is a reiteration of the demand to stop dwelling and take action, the story of a battle that begins and a dragon that is slain.
Some line breaks have been made.

Chikuma Shobo, Tristram Hunt, translated by Erika Togo, Engels: The Man Called General by Marx, P49-50

Engels originally loved poetry and romantic stories. He went to college to study them and even wanted to enter public office or become a poet.

However, Engels' father, who wanted him to take over the family business, forced him to leave the Gymnasium and give up his university education.

Having thus lost his way, Engels published his works as a poet while training as a merchant.

Engels' Unexpected Talent as a Journalist - The Birth of Journalist Oswald

It was Engels' prose in journalism that showed more talent than his rhymed poetry. Bedouin" was published in the Bremen newspaper Bremisches Konversatzionsblatt, and Engels - as any decent writer would have done - immediately complained that his manuscript had been rewritten and spoiled ("The last line was changed without permission, and there was an untenable mess. ("The last line has been changed without permission, which has created an untenable mess").

He therefore switched to Karl Gutzko's newspaper, Telegraph für Deutschland, where he began to make a name for himself as a precocious cultural critic from the "Young Germany" crowd. Rather, he took the appropriate medieval pseudonym of his own choosing, "Friedrich Oswald.

Signs of the tension that characterized Engels' career were already evident at this time. He wanted his opinions and criticisms to be widely heard, but at the same time he wanted to somehow avoid stress and pain. If he openly turned his back on his family, he would inevitably suffer it. In order to ensure his own financial security and to avoid public humiliation of his parents, Engels began a double life as "Oswald".
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Chikuma Shobo, Tristram Hunt, translated by Erika Togo, Engels: The Man Called General by Marx, p. 51

Engels thus created a second self as the journalist "Oswald" who wrote scathing articles.

Economic conditions in and around Wuppertal in the 1830s - Working conditions deteriorating with the wave of modernization

By the 1830s, the Rhineland textile industry was finding it increasingly difficult to compete with the more industrialized English. The old-fashioned subcontracting practices of the Balmain artisans - in which textile products were produced by cottage industry - were no match for the mechanized and efficient factories of Lancashire.

Even in Germany, where free trade through Zollverein (the Prussian-led customs union) was taking place, the situation became more difficult as the Rhine region lost its strength in textiles due to competition from Saxony and Silesia.

French demand for silk fabrics and ribbons helped to alleviate some of the slump, but this was a volatile market, subject to fashions and prone to sudden drops in demand.

These economic changes have steadily worsened the situation of Barmen's workers, and the Engels family is not as proud as it once was.full of patriarchal warmth.patternalistThe corporate structure gradually collapsed. As guilds disbanded, incomes were squeezed, and working conditions deteriorated, the social economy of the old apprenticeship system and the wage differentials based on skill level were shaken to their foundations, even for decently paid male workers. In their place, a new and obvious divide emerged between the workers and the factory owners. This meant a rapid loss of income and position for those on the margins of the textile economy, such as hand spinners, sock makers, and weavers.

This new economic reality was reflected in the increased use of the term "poor" or "proletariat" by journalists and social commentators to refer to the rootless, meansless, temporary urban workers without regular employment or security.

They are the thousands of unemployed or underemployed knife sharpeners, shoemakers, tailors, skilled craftsmen and textile industry workers who are on their apprenticeship journey at the end of the year and who have flooded into the towns and cities of the Rhineland.

In a city like Cologne, between nineteen to thirty-one TP3T of the population received poor relief. German social theorist Robert von Mohr described modern factory workers - people who were unlikely to receive apprenticeship training, become masters, inherit property, or acquire skills in the future - as resembling "serfs chained to cars, chained like Ixion [the king in Greek mythology]. He described them as resembling "serfs chained to their cars, chained like Ixion [the king in Greek mythology]. The political reformer Theodor von Schön used the term proletariat as a synonym for "people without houses or property.
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Chikuma Shobo, Tristram Hunt, translated by Erika Togo, Engels: The Man Called General by Marx, p. 52-53

Even the Engels family, which once provided conscientious employment to its workers, was no longer able to maintain it as the times changed. Even the Engels family, once known as the town's prominent figures because of their good management practices, should be expected to make a guess at other factories.

Under these circumstances, Engels wrote articles as a journalist, which became known as "Wuppertal Dayori.

Wuppertal Dayori" and Engels' novel article of accusation

Friedrich Oswald, however, attempted something somewhat different. In a style that he would later come to regard as his own, Engels went among the people and wrote remarkably well-considered social and cultural reports.

No over the top social theories about the nature of poverty or the meaning of the proletariat were to be found in this son of a factory owner. Instead, his "Wuppertal Daler" - published in the Telegraph in 1839 - was unparalleled in authenticity, recounting his own experiences of seeing with his own eyes a depressing, booze-soaked, and demoralized region.

The disappointment was palpable when the reality of life in Barmen was compared to Engels' romantic idealization of what a homeland should be - a country imagined by Herder, Fichte, and the Brothers Grimm, populated by a strong, patriotic people. The disappointment was palpable.

There is no trace of the vibrant, healthy human life that exists almost everywhere in Germany. Indeed, at first glance, it appears that way. It certainly seems so at first glance, for every night one can hear the cheerful voices of people walking down the street, singing songs. However, it is the most vulgar and obscene song that has ever been sung by drunken loiterers. Not a single one of the folk songs that have been popular throughout Germany, of which we should be proud, can be heard.

Written by the nineteen-year-old heir of a factory owner, "Wuppertal Dayori" became a brilliant and merciless critique of the human losses imposed on man by capitalism. Engels draws attention to the reddened Wuppertal River and to "smoking buildings and bleaching grounds strewn with thread. He follows the plight of weavers hunched over their looms and factory workers who work "in low-ceilinged rooms where people inhale more coal smoke and dust than oxygen.

He laments child labor and the abject poverty of what he would later name the lumpenproletariat ("people who are completely discouraged, who have no fixed address or no regular job, who crawl out at dawn from shelters, haystacks, or horse stables unless they spent the night before in a compost heap or on the stairs"). .

He also notes that alcoholism is widespread among tanners, with three out of five deaths due to excessive drinking of schnapps (strong drink).

Decades later, this memory of industrializing Barmen was still fresh in his mind. I still remember well how, at the end of the 1820s, cheap schnapps suddenly conquered the industrial areas of the Lower Rhine and the Marks," Engels wrote in 1876 in an essay on the social impact of cheap alcoholic beverages.

Especially in the Duchy of Berg, especially in Elberfeld-Barmen, a large part of the working population fell victim to drunkenness. From nine o'clock in the evening, swarming, arm-in-arm, and occupying the streets from one end to the other, the 'salted men' [meaning drunkards] staggered along, drinking from inn to inn, ranting and raving, before finally making their way home."
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Chikuma Shobo, Tristram Hunt, translated by Erika Togo, Engels: The Man Called General by Marx, p. 53-55

One can only marvel at Engels for writing such an accurate and influential article at the age of 18. Although Engels dropped out of Gymnasium and was unable to go to university, there is something different about a genius who changes history. Although he is often overshadowed by Marx, glimpses of his genius have already appeared here.

As we will discuss later, this style of "Wuppertal Dayori" was carried over into the later "The State of the Working Class in England," which in turn was directly connected to Marx's "Capitalism.

At the age of 18, Engels was working here on what would become a major project.

Why did Engels write "Wuppertal Dayori" in the first place?

The writing of the "Wuppertal Day by Day" was scathing, but did Engels, a hardworking intellectual with a moustache, a sword-wielder, a writer of literary columns, and an unencumbered life, feel any personal sympathy for these unfortunates in Wuppertal?

The official biography by a communist writer states that Engels' policies were "based on a pure and deep sense of responsibility before the workers. Their hardships grieved Engels, who was neither immortal, clerical, nor cold-hearted," he declares.

Certainly, anyone who has read Engels' work senses a clear picture of injustice and its causes, but it is not clear whether the author was emotionally driven or ideologically inspired by such misery. What can be said at this stage is that the intensity of his feelings toward the downtrodden of Barmen was probably as much a product of his defiant hostility toward his father's generation as it was of his concern for the plight of the workers.

Whatever the motive, the columns of the Telegraph were a flurry of critical commentary, as if they had been meticulously written and steadily accumulated since childhood. The petty snobbery of Wuppertal's employers was reflected in the town's design. Wuppertal's employers' petty snobbery was reflected in the town's design, with "featureless, lifeless streets," poorly constructed churches, and public monuments that remained unfinished.

To Engels, who had grown discerning after living in Bremen, the city's so-called educated elite were nothing more than snobs. Along the Wuppertal, there was very little talk about the "young Germans," just endless gossip about horses, dogs, and servants.

These people live a lousy life, but they are perfectly content with it. During the day they devote themselves to bookkeeping with incredible enthusiasm and interest. In the evening, they show up at their regularly scheduled social gatherings, where they play cards, talk politics, smoke, and go home as soon as nine o'clock rolls around.

What's the worst of it?

Fathers raise their sons diligently according to these policies. It is the sons who show every indication that they are likely to follow the same path as their fathers". It was already clear to Engels that this was not a fate he was willing to bet his life on.

Even though he criticized the working conditions and the social costs of industrialization, Engels' original goal in "Wuppertal Daya" was not capitalism itself. He did not yet truly understand the workings of private ownership, the division of labor, or the nature of surplus labor value.

The real object of his indignation was the piety of his childhood. It was a conscious study and rejection of the ethics that had guided his family, as a young man fed up with the social cost of religious dogma.

Academics, reason, and progress have all been held in the hands of the saintly-looking Krumacher and his followers, and all have been thwarted. And the factory workers have embraced the passion of piety as a mystical way out of their impenetrable predicament, as if they were drinking schnapps.

On the other hand, the factory owners, who had made such a big deal about their piety, were better known as the employers who exploited their workers the most, as if they did not have to behave as human beings should because they believed themselves to be the chosen ones. From Engels' perspective, Wuppertal was about to sink under the current of hypocritical morality and religion. The whole region is sinking into a sea of piety and snobbery from which no beautiful, flowery island will ever emerge."
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Chikuma Shobo, Tristram Hunt, translated by Erika Togo, Engels: The Man Called General by Marx, p. 55-56

As I mentioned earlier, Engels was 18 years old at this time. At his age, he had already thought this far...

Of course, 18 year olds back then and 18 year olds in modern Japan are different. There is no comparison.

However, we can sense from the above text that Engels has felt the same feelings since he was a child.

And from here, the commitment to atheism is only one step away.

In the next article, we will look at Engels' turn to atheism.

Next Article.

Click here to read the previous article.

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