SOURCE: “Friedrich Engels: Workers and Revolution,” in his The Condition of England Question, Macmillan Press, 1998, pp. 137-56.

In the following essay, Levin analyzes Engels' study of the English proletariat and the effects of factory work on this class. Levin focuses on the factors that affected the development of Engels' thought on socialism and class conflict, maintaining that despite Engels' later emphasis on the proletariat's infiltration of parliament, Engels still saw revolution as necessary.

I the Proletariat

Engels regarded the segmentation of the city as merely the product of the segmentation of the social classes. ‘It is not surprising’, he thought,

that the working-class has gradually become a race wholly apart from the English bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie has more in common with every other nation of the earth than with the workers in whose midst it lives. The workers speak other dialects, have other thoughts and ideals, other customs...