Frederick Engels

 

Engels recognized that "a good heart and a good soul" would prompt people of decency to condemn a world that creates such vast misery. Engels also pointed out (e.g. in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific) that moral condemnation in itself was inadequate to change society. Engels saw the origins of poverty in an economic system that permitted the individual accumulation of wealth. According to Engels, under capitalism a dynamic drives individual owners of the means of production to shape a world in which factory owners compete wildly with each other, driving smaller producers out of business and simultaneously generating an enormous class of poor, dependent wage earners. Further, the system ultimately canıt provide the proletariat with the means to survive. Ergo, the entire world of the capitalist collapses upon the capitalist and the proletariat as well. When capitalism is at its end, only then will the poverty that capitalism generates be at an end. If the insights of even the most perceptive individuals are inadequate to eliminate poverty (c.f. Engelsıs description of Robert Owen in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific), then a collective, broad-based campaign by the agents of historical change can succeed. According to Engels, the creation of trade unions and then a political party by the proletariat is made possible and necessary by capitalismıs failures. The class that is brought into being by industrial capitalism and the class that bears the brunt of wretched working and social conditions has the only real chance of overthrowing capitalism, transforming a societyıs objectives, and, finally, ending poverty.

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Dickens | Conclusion | Intro