The good social scientist, as Engels showed, could only be a person free from the illusions of bourgeois society.

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It must not be forgotten that Engels was (unlike most other foreign visitors) no mere tourist, but a Manchester businessman who knew the businessmen among whom he lived, a communist who knew and worked with the Chartists and early socialists, and not least through his relations with the Irish factory girl Mary Burns and her relatives and friends — a man with considerable firsthand knowledge of working-class life. His book is thus an important primary source for our knowledge of industrial England at this time.

—Eric Hobsbawm, How to Change the World, (London: Little, Brown, 2011), 97-98.

I read this last line again and again. It makes perfect sense of course, but what strikes me is how foreign several of the concepts are to the societies I know. „Primary source“? My acquaintances, family, coworkers don’t have a ready understanding of this term. „Our knowledge of industrial England at this time“? What knowledge do acquaintances and coworkers have of their own industrial countries at the current time? Are their countries industrial, or post-industrial? How would they know? What do these phrases even mean?

Contemporary topics of discussion are nearly solely related to consumer goods, especially intangible consumables.

Hobsbawm is evaluating Engels‘ work from the standpoint of a historian looking back from the 1960s, and needs to be read this way, but it occurs to me few of the people I know could correctly place the time Marx and Engels were writing in within half a century. What Engels meant by the bourgeois society of mid-19th Century England is inaccessible, but then so is an understanding, really, of present US society, classes, wealth.

The work begins with a brief sketch of that Industrial Revolution which transformed British society and created, as its chief product, the proletariat (chapters I—II). This is the first of Engels‘ pioneering achievements, for the Condition is probably the earliest large work whose analysis is systematically based on the concept of the Industrial Revolution, which was then novel and tentative, having only been invented in British and French socialist discussions during the 1820s. Engels‘ historical account of this transformation lays no claim to historical originality. Though still useful, it has been superseded by later and fuller works.

Socially Engels sees the transformations brought about by the Industrial Revolution as a gigantic process of concentration and polarisation, whose tendency is to create a growing proletariat, an increasingly small bourgeoisie of increasingly large capitalists, both in an increasingly urbanised society. The rise of capitalist industrialism destroys the petty commodity producers, peasantry, and petty-bourgeoisie, and the decline of these intermediate strata, depriving the worker of the possibility of becoming a small master, confines him to the ranks of the proletariat which thus becomes ‚a definite class in the population, whereas it had only been a transitional stage towards entering into the middle classes‘.

—Eric Hobsbawm, How to Change the World, (London: Little, Brown, 2011), 91-92.

As Marx and Engels championed materialism against idealism in philosophy, so also they consistently criticised the view that the state stood above classes, represented the common interest of all society (except negatively, as a safeguard against its collapse), or was neutral between classes. The state was a historical phenomenon of class society, but while it existed as a state it represented class rule — though not necessarily in the agitationally simplified form of an ‚executive committee of the ruling class‘. This imposed limits both on the involvement of proletarian parties in the political life of the bourgeois state and on what it could be expected to concede to them. The proletarian movement thus operated both within the confines of bourgeois politics and outside them. Since power was defined as the main content of the state, it would be easy to assume (though Marx and Engels did not do so) that power was the only significant issue in politics and in the discussion of the state at all times.

—Eric Hobsbawm, How to Change the World, (London: Little, Brown, 2011), 84.