Question

Every great city has one or more slums, where the working-class is crowded together. . . . The streets are generally unpaved, rough, dirty, filled with vegetable and animal refuse [trash], without sewers or gutters, but supplied with foul, stagnant pools instead. . . .The modern art of manufacture has reached its perfection [highest level] in Manchester [in England]. . . . The degradation [disrespect] to which the application of steam-power, machinery and the division of labor reduce the working-man, and the attempts of the proletariat to rise above this abasement [low condition], must likewise be carried to the highest point and with the fullest consciousness.

Background information: Friedrich Engels was a German socialist whose family was wealthy cotton manufacturers. When he was twenty-two, he was sent to work at the family factory in Manchester, England. This excerpt is from his book, The Condition of the Working Class in England, which was published in 1844.

Which of these lines from the text provides a clue that Engels is a socialist and therefore opposed to capitalism?

A.) “Every great city has one or more slums”
B.) “The streets are generally unpaved”
C.) “The modern art of manufacture has reached its perfection”
D.) “The attempts of the proletariat to rise above this abasement”

Answer 1

The answer is D: “The attempts of the proletariat to rise above this abasement”.

Engels was a German writer and philosopher very well-known for having co-written the Communist Manifesto alongside Karl Marx.

The foundation of his political and economic thinking was that the working conditions of the labor power were unacceptable under the rise of early capitalism and needed to be changed so that the laborers could benefit from the fruits of their own labor. His claims was that society as a whole needed to improve these conditions so that the proletariat, rightfully, could “rise above this abasement”, meaning, their unjust working and living conditions.

Answer 2

The answer is D. The word proletariat is used to talk about the working class by believers in Marxism.