It was recently announced by Peter Lilley that poverty is relative. Talk of a widening gap between rich and poor is misleading, said Lilley, because the overall wealth of society is growing and so poverty keeps being redefined upwards. What is considered poverty today would have been regarded as something quite different by previous generations. People defined as poor have televisions, videos, sometimes even old cars. No one starves in Britain today. Children have shoes on their feet. Everyone receives a level of social security benefit. This is a world away from the 19th century, with its child labour, overcrowded slums and the workhouse for those who could not find employment.
Perhaps Lilley should take a look at one of the earliest writings of Frederick Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England, which describes the way in which workers in 1840s Manchester lived and worked. While there are many differences in the conditions workers faced then and what they face today, there are also more similarities than might at first be thought after 150 years of 'progress'.
Engels, the great friend and collaborator of Karl Marx, wrote the book after he was sent from his native Germany to the booming industrial city of Manchester in the early 1840s to work in the family firm. It was there that he came across the working class in large numbers. The book is a revelation about living conditions, work and attitudes among the working class at the timeso much so that it is still widely used and quoted from by those who are very far from Engels' own politics.
But most people would probably regard The Condition of the Working Class in England in one of two ways: either as a sociological document, to be included with other studies of mines and mills in the 19th century, or as pure historyan accurate description of the evils of early capitalism but having no relevance to the condition of the working class today.
Both interpretations miss out the heart of Engels' writing: that the misery of capitalism was caused by the system of exploitation and that the system was driven by competition between the capitalists to accumulate. This drive to accumulate led to constant attacks on the conditions of workers in repeated attempts to extract greater profits from them. Therefore it was not possible to simply approach the condition of the working class as an isolated problem: the awful way in which people were forced to live was a direct product of the way in which wealth was produced, and this situation would continue as long as capitalism. This core of the book explains why it is so relevant today: it explains the underlying causes of workers' conditions, not simply their surface appearance.
The workers lived often in the most miserable conditions. Engels described the terrible back to back slums, with no natural light or sanitation; the adulterated food which workers had to eat; the fact that wool and linen had disappeared from workers' wardrobes, to be replaced by cheaper cotton. But he pointed out that those on higher wages could afford substantially more than those at the bottom of the pile. He therefore made a distinction between different groups of workers, for example on the question of what food they ate:
'The better paid workers, especially those in whose families every member is able to earn something, have good food as long as this state of things lasts; meat daily and bacon and cheese for supper. Where wages are less, meat is used only two or three times a week, and the proportion of bread and potatoes increases. Descending gradually, we find the animal food reduced to a small piece of bacon cut up with the potatoes; lower still, even this disappears, and there remain only bread, cheese, porridge, and potatoes, until on the lowest round of the ladder, among the Irish, potatoes form the sole food... But all this presupposes that the workman has work. When he has none, he is wholly at the mercy of accident, and eats what is given him, what he can beg or steal. And, if he gets nothing, he simply starves.'
Workers could fend off the worst excesses of the capitalist system for a time, argued Engels, if they were able to work, and if at least some members of their families (including young children in the 1840s) were also able to sell their labour power. But even then, conditions were little more than bearable: 'The working class of the great cities offers a graduated scale of conditions in life, in the best cases a temporarily endurable existence for hard work and good wages...in the worst cases, bitter want, reaching even homelessness and death by starvation.'
However, Engels goes on, many workers will experience the whole range of conditions, from relative security to direst poverty and even starvation, in the course of one working lifetime. So 'almost every English working man can tell a tale of marked changes of fortune'. He was pointing to the insecurity facing everyone dependent on selling their labour power to live. When capitalism boomed there was full employment, wages tended to rise and employers were forced to make certain concessions in order to hold onto their workers. When crisis came and the system went into slump, many workers were thrown out of work and those who kept their jobs were forced to accept lower wages, longer hours or worse conditions.
The other major source of insecurity came when workers could no longer sell their labour power: when they were old, sick or disabled. In Engels' time this meant near destitutionmill hands displaced by machinery in Manchester now swept the streets or sold salt, matches, oranges and shoestrings, or beggedor confinement in the 'poor law bastilles' as the workhouses were known.
Thus one of the major areas of working class reform since the 1840s has been for various forms of a safety net to protect those inside the working class who could not protect themselves. Even in the 19th century, some of the worst excesses of life in the big cities were alleviated through better health and sanitation, the end of child labour, working class education, improved working class housing and shorter working hours. These reforms were welcomed by workers for obvious reasons, but were also backed by substantial sections of the capitalist class, who saw in them the means of gaining the healthier and more skilled working class which was essential to fit the changing needs of British capitalism.
Again, in the early part of this century the first state pensions and other forms of welfare were introduced. This was partly in response to growing disquiet among workers, partly to raise the competitiveness of British capitalism against its rivals in Germany and the US. The modern welfare statewith free education to 16, a full national health service, and social security benefits for the sick, old and unemployedwas ushered in by the postwar Labour government, swept to office by a radicalised working class after years of unemployment and war.
If we look at the condition of the working class today, compared with in Engels' time, there are two fundamental differences. The first is the existence of this welfare state, which means that those who cannot work do not face destitution. Instead they are ensured a bare minimum of subsistence covering basic costs of housing and food.
The second major difference is that workers have higher living standards, usually including, in particular, a fair number of what are called 'consumer durables': cars, electrical goods, fitted kitchens, which would obviously be unrecognisable to workers from the 1840s. However, we should remember when considering the higher living standards of workers today: that the existence of washing machines or vacuum cleaners are evidence of the way in which the market has spread to every area of life, as it had not by the 1840s, including the family itself. So the capitalists who make these appliances profit from selling them to workers who do not have the time to perform these tasks themselves in the home. Particularly with the vast influx of working women, the growth in areas such as convenience or fast foods is essential for women who no longer have time for home baking. Cars are not luxuries for most workers but an expensive essential paid for out of their wages in order to get them to and from work.
The condition of workers may be better in both these areas than in the 1840s, but there are many signs of conditions today deteriorating and becoming closer for at least some of the population to conditions which would be recognisable to Engels. The welfare state is now being cut into so substantially that the levels of care which existed 30 years ago are no longer there.
Homelessness has grown dramatically in the 1980s and 1990s, with the housing organisation Shelter estimating that 1.7 million people are unofficially homeless. Nearly another half million are accepted as homeless by local authorities. And one estimate by a housing charity says one in ten of those in homeless hostels are graduates.
Those on pensions and benefits are thrust into the worst poverty. Unemployment benefit today is only 14 percent of the average gross wage. Pensions are no longer linked to wages, so every pensioner now receives nearly £20 less a week than he or she would have done had pensions been calculated at the old rate.
While the old and sick are not consigned to workhouses any more, their long term care is now being pushed back into the home or prone to ever worsening cuts in spending. The attacks on welfare are necessary to a crisis ridden capitalism which is trying to claw back a number of the benefits which it allowed in times of boom. And poverty does not just affect those on benefits. Nearly four in ten of all adults working full time in 1994 were earning less than the Council of Europe's 'decency threshold' of £221.50 gross a week. Nearly 14 million people in Britain are classified as pooralmost a quarter of the entire population. Of these, 4.6 million have an income from employment.
This is a result of wages being held down and conditions worsened. The decline of British capitalism throughout this century and its relatively weak position with regard to its competitors today has led to the forcing down of large sections of workers into poverty.
The pressure on wages becomes greater in times of crisis, but the capitalists are constantly trying to find ways to increase their share of surplus value. As Engels puts it:
'When there are just as many workers at hand as can be employed in producing precisely the goods that are demanded, wages stand a little above the minimum. How far they rise above the minimum will depend upon the average needs and grade of civilisation of the workers. If the workers are accustomed to eat meat several times in the week, the capitalists must reconcile themselves to paying wages enough to make this food attainable... If the demand for workers increases, the price of workers rises; if it falls, their price falls.'
This attack on workers' wages, welfare and general living standards does not necessarily force their conditions back to those which Engels observed. Such conditions do however exist today. In, for example, a number of the growing Asian economies now held up as the future for British capitalism, child labour, 12 hour working days and non-existent health and safety provisions would all be completely familiar to any Manchester worker from the 1840s.
But in Britain, drives to increase the exploitation of workerslonger hours, speed up, lower wageshave not reproduced these conditions. It is not necessarily absolute levels of poverty which drive workers to fight. It is the disproportion between rich and poorso that workers see the rich getting richer, the dividends and bonuses paid to the fat cats, and resent it. Workers can also see their relative condition worsen. They cannot remember the workhouse or the industrial revolution but they can remember full employment, rising living conditions, job security and an expanding welfare stateand it is this that they judge present conditions against.
What we are seeing is the attempt to introduce some of the features of earlier stages of British capitalism while not abandoning the welfare state and higher living standards altogether. This is couched in terms of 'us' not being able to 'afford a welfare state'. But workers pay 10 percent of their earnings directly through national insurance, and another quarter in taxation, supposedly in the belief that much of this money goes to welfare, and on the basic assumption that you put in while you work and draw out when you are old or sick. What the capitalists are now saying is that they are no longer prepared to foot their side of the bill to provide better welfare.
Their mouthpieces and ideologues like Peter Lilley therefore tell us either that poverty does not exist or that it is our fault for living too long, not working hard enough or having too many children. Yet their arguments have so far had little success among most workers who still have a commitment to the welfare state, who want to see the gap between rich and poor closed, not widened, and who resent a society where the bottom half of the population owns only 7 percent of the wealth.
Engels noticed the differences in attitudes between workers and their bosses, 'The working class has gradually become a race wholly apart from the English bourgeoisie.' He goes on to say 'the workman is far more humane in ordinary life than the bourgeois...the beggars are accustomed to turn almost exclusively to the workers...more is done by the workers than by the bourgeoisie for the maintenance of the poor.'
There is a simple explanation for this basic humanity, 'They have experienced hard times themselves, and can therefore feel for those in trouble; to them every person is a human being, while the worker is less than human to the bourgeois; whence they are more approachable, friendlier, and less greedy for money, though they need it far more than the property holding class.'
The experience of the working class in the 1840s was that its life experience led it to solidarity and collective organisation against the class which exploited it. That wasn't automatic. By the 1880s Engels was very dismissive of these same English workers, who had become like their rulers in attitudes and beliefs. Expansion of the system coupled with lack of struggle had made most workers passive and conservative, more concerned with 'self-improvement' than with strikes. The workers 'share the feast' with the bourgeoisie, he wrote. That all changed again in the late 1880s when the 'grandchildren of the Chartists' burst out in class struggle.
We have seen similar features at work since the war. However the attacks on workers in recent years, the intensification of exploitation, are already leading some groups to fight back and to organise just as they did in Engels' time.