Notes to a Marxist Phenomenology: the Body and the Machine in Engels’ The Condition of the Working Class in England

Abstract

"In his The Condition of the Working Class in England, Friedrich Engels outlines systematically the miseries of the workers in England in the context of industrialization. A key to his argument concerns the interface between the human body and the machine. In this article I argue that Engels provides a kind of a phenomenology of the body in his analyses of the relation of the worker to the new machines. The limited secondary literature on Marxism and phenomenology has not been attentive to the detailed attention that is given to the body of the worker in this book. Keywords: handwork, machines, technology, Industrial Revolution, Friedrich Engels, factory work "