Mark and Lincoln: And Unfinished Revolution

 
Preface to the American Edition of 
Th
  e Condition of the Working-
Class in England
Frederick Engels
1
Ten months have elapsed since, at the translator’s wish, I wrote the 
Appendix
2
 to this book, and during these ten months, a revolution 
has been accomplished in American society such as in any other 
country would have taken at least ten years. In February 1885, 
American public opinion was almost unanimous on this one point: 
that there was no working class, in the European sense of the word, 
in America; that consequently no class struggle between workmen 
and capitalists such as tore European society to pieces was possible 
in the American Republic; and that, therefore, Socialism was a thing 
of foreign importation which could never take root on American 
soil. And yet at that moment the coming class struggle was casting 
its gigantic shadow before it in the strikes of the Pennsylvania coal 
miners, and of many other trades, and especially in the prepara-
tions all over the country for the great Eight Hours’ movement, 
which was to come off , and did come off , in the May following. 
Th
  at I then duly appreciated these symptoms, that I anticipated a 
1  Published in the American edition of Th e Condition of the Working-Class in 
England, New York 1887. Printed according to the text of the book.
2 Th
  e Appendix to the American edition of Th e Condition of the Working-
Class in England was, except for the paragraph quoted in the next footnote, 
used by Engels as the basis of his preface to the English edition of 1892.

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working-class movement on a national scale, my Appendix shows,
3
 
but no one could then foresee that in such a short time the move-
ment would burst out with such irresistible force, would spread 
with the rapidity of a prairie fi re, would shake American society to 
its very foundations.
Th
  e fact is there, stubborn and indisputable. To what an extent 
it had struck with terror the American ruling classes was revealed 
to me, in an amusing way, by American journalists who did me the 
honor of calling on me last summer; the “new departure” had put 
them into a state of helpless fright and perplexity. But at that time 
the movement was only just on the start; there was but a series of 
confused and apparently disconnected upheavals of that class which, 
by the suppression of negro slavery and the rapid development of 
manufactures, had become the lowest stratum of American society. 
3  In this appendix Engels wrote: “Th
  ere were two circumstances which for 
a long time prevented the unavoidable consequences of the Capitalist system 
from showing themselves in the full glare of day in America. Th
 ese were the 
easy access to the ownership of cheap land, and the infl ux of immigration. 
Th
  ey allowed, for many years, the great mass of the native American popula-
tion to “retire” in early manhood from wage labor and to become farmers, 
dealers, or employers of labor, while the hard work for wages, the position of 
a proletarian for life, mostly fell to the lot of immigrants. But America has 
outgrown this early stage. Th
  e boundless backwoods have disappeared, and the 
still more boundless prairies are faster and faster passing from the hands of 
the Nation and the States into those of private owners. Th
  e great safety valve 
against the formation of a permanent proletarian class has practically ceased 
to act. A class of lifelong and even hereditary proletarians exists at this hour 
in America. A nation of sixty millions striving hard to become, and with every 
chance of success, too, the leading manufacturing nation of the world—such 
a nation cannot permanently import its own wage-working class, not even if 
immigrants pour in at the rate of half a million a year. Th
  e tendency of the 
Capitalist system towards the ultimate splitting-up of society into two classes, 
a few millionaires on the one hand, and a great mass of mere wageworkers on 
the other, this tendency, though constantly crossed and counteracted by other 
social agencies, works nowhere with greater force than in America; and the 
result has been the production of a class of native American wageworkers, 
who form, indeed, the aristocracy of the wage-working class as compared with 
the immigrants, but who become conscious more and more every day of their 
solidarity with the latter and who feel all the more acutely their present con-
demnation to lifelong wage toil, because they still remember the bygone days, 
when it was comparatively easy to rise to a higher social level.”—Ed.
240 frederick 
engels

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Before the year closed, these bewildering social convulsions began 
to take a defi nite  direction.  Th
 e spontaneous, instinctive move-
ments of these vast masses of working people, over a vast extent 
of country, the simultaneous outburst of their common discontent 
with a miserable social condition, the same everywhere and due to 
the same causes, made them conscious of the fact that they formed 
a new and distinct class of American society, a class of—practically 
speaking—more or less hereditary wageworkers, proletarians. And 
with true American instinct this consciousness led them at once 
to take the next step towards their deliverance: the formation of a 
political workingmen’s party, with a platform of its own, and with 
the conquest of the Capitol and the White House for its goal. In 
May, the struggle for the Eight Hours’ working day, the troubles 
in Chicago, Milwaukee, etc., the attempts of the ruling class to 
crush the nascent uprising of Labor by brute force and brutal class 
justice; in November, the new Labor Party organized in all great 
centers, and the New York, Chicago, and Milwaukee elections. May 
Frederick Engels, 1879
the working class in england  241

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