“MORE THAN ABSTRACT KNOWLEDGE”: FRIEDRICH ENGELS IN INDUSTRIAL MANCHESTER

Abstract

IN HIS BOOKMarxism and the City, Ira Katznelson, while lamenting the disappearance of spatial elements within Marxist thought, points to Friedrich Engels’s The Condition of the Working Class in England as an ur-text that is able to provide “positive specification of the mechanisms linking base and superstructure” (56). As a corrective to the narrowly “scientific” strain of Marxism that privileged “structure” over “agency,” Katznelson views Engels’s early text on the industrial city of Manchester as the bearer of a double message: “Writing at the precise branching moment of the emergence of the modern industrial city, [Engels] connected the development of this new urban form to the epochal changes of the industrial revolution; he showed how changes in organization of city space affected social relationships within and between classes; and he tied this social geography to the suffering and coming to consciousness of the new proletariat” (144). In this critical exchange between “base” and “superstructure,” where Marxism becomes a tool for reading the city, and the city a space for revising Marxist method, class consciousness gets redefined as “urban consciousness,”¹ thus supplanting the site of praxis from the arena of production to the psycho-social experience of space.