A Glimpse of Social War

"The flaneur still stands on the threshold — of the metropolis as of the middle-class. Neither has him in its power yet. In neither is he at home. He seeks refuge in the crowd." This is Walter Benjamin's praise for Charles Baudelaire's Paris. But it is also, albeit to a lesser degree, directed toward Friedrich Engels, whom Benjamin saw as a proto-flaneur. The text Benjamin has in mind, of course, is Engels's first book, The Conditions of the Working Class in England, whose city is not Paris but England's "great towns": London and Manchester. A mixture of sociology, travelogue, city guide, and polemic on the disastrous effects of industrial capitalism on the metropolis and its inhabitants, The Conditions is best known as a text about the industrial city. As Ira Katznelson puts it, Engels's book "introduced urban space ... into the core of Marx's macroscopic historical materialism and into Marx's account of the logic of capitalist accumulation by utilizing the organization and reorganization of the urban built-form to show how city space defines a dynamic, changing terrain: the city appears at once in his work as absolute space ... , as relative space ... , and as relational space." The reason The Conditions has been so influential for Marxist thought is because rather than mere descriptions of London and Manchester, it offers what Henri Lefebvre calls a "spatial architectonics" of the industrial city. Lefebvre explains that spaces "are products of an activity which involves the economic and technical realms but which extends well beyond them, for these are also political products, and strategic spaces." "Social space" is "polyvalent" because while it is "a product to be used, to be consumed, it is also a means of production; networks of exchange and flows of raw materials and energy fashion space and are determined by it." In a similar vein, Engels's text provides an analytic for studying how capitalist forms of production shape and organize everyday life in the industrial metropolis, but also how the city becomes a site for contesting that very order.

Engels's first impression of London is from the Thames. Staggered by the sheer number and velocity of trading vessels in the river, he calls London the "commercial capital of the world" whose "colossal centralization, this heaping together of two and a half millions of human beings at one point has multiplied the power of this two and a half millions a hundredfold." England's imperial might is unmistakable when viewed from the Thames, which is surrounded by "masses of buildings, the wharves on both sides ... the countless ships along both shores, crowding ever closer and closer together, until, at last, only a narrow passage remains in the middle of the river, a passage through which hundreds of steamers shoot by one another" (36). So imposing is this vista that Engels admits to being "lost in the marvel of England's greatness before he sets foot upon English soil" (ibid.). Once firmly planted on London's soil, however, Engels realizes that the zenith of capitalist modernity goes hand in hand with barbaric conflict. He describes his first moments in London as stepping into a Hobbesian "war of each against all," where "people regard each other only as useful objects; each exploits the other, and the end of it all is, that the stronger treads the weaker under foot, and that the powerful few, the capitalists, seize everything for themselves, while to the weak many, the poor, scarcely a bare existence remains" (37). Despite "the colossal centralization" and modernization of England's industrial cities, its populace is reduced to a primitive state of nature: "What is true of London, is true of Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds, is true of all great towns. Everywhere barbarous indifference, hard egotism on one hand, and nameless misery on the other, everywhere social warfare, every man's house in a state of siege, everywhere reciprocal plundering under the protection of the law and all so shameless, so openly avowed that one shrinks before the consequences of our social state as they manifest themselves here undisguised, and can only wonder that the whole crazy fabric still hangs together" (ibid.). A barbaric war, Engels suggests, lies beneath the surface of modern civilization.

The conjuncture of industrialism and barbarism was a common trope in writings on the transformations brought on by capitalism. In his travels through England some years earlier, Alexis de Tocqueville stated that in Manchester "humanity attains its most complete development and its most brutish; here civilisation works its miracles, and civilised man is turned back almost into a savage." And Henry Mayhew's famous ethnography of the working poor opens by describing the working classes as a "wandering tribe" that feeds off the rich. Basing his claim on ethnologic studies of Southern Africa, Mayhew explains that "we, like the Kafirs, Fellahs, and Finns, are surrounded by wandering hordes — the 'Sonquas' and the 'Fingoes' of this country — paupers, beggars, and outcasts, possessing nothing but what they acquire by depredation from the industries, provident, and civilized portion of the community." Engels differs in that he sees a nonviolent war to be at the heart of this slippage from modernity to barbarity. Such "peaceful" war involves no swords or cannons, entails no bloodshed, and is fought between civilians rather than armies. This conflict is conducted "under the protection of the law," meaning the state is not the agent of warfare but its sanction. And rather than typical instruments of warfare, capital "is the weapon with which this social warfare is carried on" (37–38). As peaceful as the industrial city might seem, as civil as it might appear, Engels sees war everywhere. Seemingly banal activities in the modern city like begging and police harassment take on a bellicose hue: "armies of workers" and "armies of beggars" crowd the streets, against whom "the police carry on perpetual war" (96, 98). Civil society, by his account, is the other means of war. Paradoxically, the "openness" of this war conceals its actual bellicosity, for the conflict manifests latently in the very gestures of the unemployed masses: "The starving workmen, whose mills were idle, whose employers could give them no work, stood in the streets in all directions, begged singly or in crowds, besieged the sidewalks in armies, and appealed to the passers-by for help; they begged, not cringing like ordinary beggars, but threatening by their numbers, their gestures, and their words" (100; emphasis added). The untrained eye might see beggary, but Engels perceives an "army" laying siege. Similarly, acts of petty resistance look like organized conquest: "And he among the 'surplus' who has courage and passion enough openly to resist society, to reply with...