Manchester, a city of contrast today as ever. I once went into Manchester with a real bourgeois and spoke to him of the awful unhealthy building style, the terrible conditions of the working class districts. and declassed that I had never seen such a poorly constructed city.
The man listened calmly to everything I said and then, at the corner where he left me, said, And yet, there is a great deal of money made here. Good morning, sir. For more than 20 years, Friedrich Engels lives and works in Manchester. He experiences both its glitter and its darker side. The city is to change him.
Manchester, Cottonopolis. Visible from afar, a gold-plated cotton ball atop the spire of the town hall, the city's landmark. A cathedral of faith in technical progress.
Its floor a mosaic of busy bees, symbol of industry and prosperity. In the Dome, the city's coat of arms. The worldwide trade with cotton and its processing brings wealth to the city.
Along the canals, entire urban districts live from the textile industry. The number of factories is growing rapidly. In 1782, there were only two cotton mills in and around Manchester. Ten years later, more than 50, with ever more to come. There are many reasons for the boom.
People had come into Manchester to trade. It was always here. We're lower here, it's flatter here, yet the hills have got rivers with soft water. The soft... Water was ideal for treating cotton, for washing the cloth.
This is long before modern-day technology. A number of other factors, the wet, damp climate. It doesn't get too hot here, it never gets too cold. Ideal for actually treating cotton. To this, Manchester still has an ingenious canal system, the city's major lifeline.
Already in 18th century England, the industrial revolution is gaining momentum. Engineers are building new bridges and aqueducts, and thus radically improving the infrastructure. Raw materials such as cotton and coal, which is vital for running the steam engines, can now be shipped to the factories more quickly and economically. The first canal in Britain, Bridgewater Canal, that came into Manchester in 1765. The price of coal dropped. It was easier transporting coal.
People wanted to open up new factories. The railway is soon to follow. In 1830, railway pioneer George Stevenson builds the first railway line between Manchester and the seaport of Liverpool, the European hub for the overseas cotton trade. Young Friedrich Engels too uses the new mode of transport in 1842 and is fascinated by the groundbreaking technology. The railway makes people mobile on an unprecedented scale.
Transportation of bulk goods is now viable. With the railway, economic growth really gets going. Especially in Manchester.
Here, since 1837, Friedrich Engels'father has been a joint partner in the Ehrman and Engels spinning mill. He needs a loyal family representative in distant England. And so his son Friedrich is sent to the booming metropolis.
Engels did not go to Manchester voluntarily. He was ordered to go by his father. For as a budding merchant, he had to complete his apprenticeship in a firm co-owned by the German government.
by his father. The Ehrmann and Engels cotton mill is located in Wiest, just outside and to the west of Manchester on the old Salford-Liverpool road. Today, the factory building is only to be seen on an old photograph.
As in other factories of the age, production takes place simultaneously on several floors. The Erman and Engels cotton yarn is famed for its high quality. The 22-year-old Engels is now one of the 400 strong workforce. He is here to gain practical experience as a draper. The spinning mill is equipped with the most modern machinery.
Spinning mules with more than 600 spindles running concurrently. The finer the yarn, the greater the gain. Engels sees the profit that his father makes, but in contrast to him and other industrialists, he also sees the hard lot of the workers who generate this profit. He was very socially oriented, had great understanding for the concerns of the common people and was very curious. He hung around, as one would put it today, and experienced the life of the workers and the working class.
Engels meets the Irish worker Mary Burns. Through her, he gains true insight into the lives and living conditions of the workers. We know from reports that Engels visited the working class districts in his free time. Instead of just blustering about how it could have been in theory, he went and saw it for himself. In such working class districts as Little Ireland, the factory owner's son sees the other side of industrialization.
Wage dumping. house shortages, hunger and unemployment. Engels recognizes the devastating side effects of the Industrial Revolution. People dwelling with their families in cramped, run-down shacks. In desperate circumstances, in search of work and wages, ever more people move into the city.
The city was ringed by a core of slums, Little Island, Chortland-Medlock. Ardwick, these places became some of the... Harpahay became some of the worst districts in Manchester. But it was very, very close together. When Engles first arrived here, you'd have smart street like Deansgate with quality buildings on it, and then behind Deansgate going towards the river, terrible slums, people congested, people crowded into housing, really bad housing, very, very closely packed together.
There was no need really to build anything of any quality. So just get the housing up to put those workers in. They're working all day.
They're not going to be at home. They're working in the factories for over 10 hours a day, children as well. Children compose more than a third of the workforce.
They have to do the cleaning amongst running machinery and reattach broken threads. There are countless accidents. For the industrialists, they are nothing more than cheap labour.
Erman and Engels included. We know that in the family business, child labour was customary, in Engelskirchen just as well as in Manchester. We know from the reports of factory inspectors in Manchester that the daily working hours were exceeded. Fines were imposed, but they were easily paid and taken into account, for the profit was much greater.
Not just in his father's factory, but everywhere in Manchester. Engels is outraged by the social conditions and is not prepared to accept them. Events turn him into an advocate of the workers. He sees the grueling working hours, the hard working conditions and the lack of any social welfare.
All of this is a sign of the fact that sudden break from what had, up until then, been a more or less agrarian society. New dimensions are added. Child labour certainly is the ugliest negative offshoot, but also female labour to an ever-growing degree, for women were by no means spared. To summarize this in a book and send it out as a warning was certainly his driving force. In order to give his experiences scientific support, he visits the Cheethams Library, Manchester's oldest and largest library.
Engels reads accounts of the poor, medical records and studies statistics. He writes to Karl Marx, I will assemble an impressive list of English sins. For the whole world I accuse the English bourgeois of murder, robbery and all kinds of other crimes, perpetrated on the masses.
In 1845 his work, The Condition of the Working Class in England, is published. For the industrialist's son, the only possible form of protest. But the more young Engels immerses himself into capitalist behavior, and recognizes its mechanisms, the more horrified he becomes.
And when he turns 24 and is no longer underage, it all bursts out of him and he says, I won't be a part of it any longer. But that's all he can do, which is why, after the failure of the Civil Revolution of 1848, he then, with respect, goes back to work for his father, with his tail between his legs. That, too, is surely a bit of a double standard. An inner conflict. After the failed revolution he flees to London like Karl Marx with his family.
Their association begins. Marx investigates the structures of capitalism, which Engels co-finances through his work in the paternal factory in Manchester. A constant balancing act.
If you watched him, if you walked down the street in 1850 in Manchester, you wouldn't be able to tell any difference between Engles and any of the other capitalists. And yet, in the evening, he's this figure, campaigning political figure. No one in Manchester, or very few people in Manchester, knew that at the time, of course. That makes him an extremely interesting figure from our point of view. The fact that he was somebody who wasn't working class, but wanted to improve the lot of the working class.
For the working class has hardly any political rights. On the other side, Engels observes how the merchants and businessmen demonstrate their power with the new free trade hall. Industrial looking out on a city where unbridled capitalism holds sway. In 1846 free trade was unrestrained. There was huge riches to be made in Manchester.
So Manchester had the wealthiest capitalists, entrepreneurs. And Friedrich Engels is now among them. Back in the city since 1846. 1950 this time he will remain for 18 years As a cotton Lord he represents his father's interest in the company as a socialist He fights for the rights of the working class a double life That's is not really from a trillion here Go see him and see me obviously from the human perspective He managed to perform a real balancing act in the balance in act in his personal lifestyle But also in his contentual orientation you For he was, after all, an entrepreneur, an industrialist, bound up in the capitalistic mechanism of his mercantile concern, his yarn production, and at the same time a political activist who, together with Marx, sought to advance the cause of the labor movement.
A socialist by night, an entrepreneur by day. Friedrich Engels'office is in the city center. close to the main street of Deansgate.
Only a few steps away, the Royal Exchange, Manchester's stock market. Nowhere else in the world is so much profit made, and Engels successfully joins in. In retrospect, he writes to a party colleague.
One can, at the same time, be a very good investor and a socialist, and still loathe and despise the investor class. Would it ever occur to me to apologize for once being an associate in a factory? Let my accuser step forward.
And if I was certain that I could make a million on the stock exchange tomorrow and put the means at the party's disposal in Europe and America, I would invest immediately. From practice to science. The Cheatham's Library in Manchester. The medieval monastery houses one of England's most important libraries. For Engels and Marx, a gold mine.
They study the classics of economic history and political economy. Apart from the current problems, they are always concerned with the historic dimension. They want to fathom the reasons why, despite all the industrial progress, the situation of the working class continues to deteriorate. The bay of the monastery becomes the starting point for some major ideas. Marx, who never saw a factory from within, is strongly influenced by Engels'earlier works.
Marx suddenly experienced a eureka effect and says, man, that is it, that's the thing I will develop. And Engels, who was an incredibly fast and disciplined worker, wrote three months later, where is the thing? The thing then took 20 years.
It's the famous Capital. The first volume appears in 1867. After the death of Marx, Marx was the first to write a new book, Engels completes and publishes Volumes 2 and 3. Engels is to leave Manchester in 1870. He's overjoyed to say goodbye to the haggling of the Cotton Lords as he writes to his mother. My new freedom is tremendously appealing.
I am a completely different fellow and feel ten years younger. He is to join Karl Marx in London and be politically active for another 25 years.