Or something
See after the jump if interested.
From Places Journal, June 2020:
Manchester After Engels
The
city that was the global epicenter of the Industrial Revolution is now
being remade by globalized post-industrial capital. This is one of the
great spectacles of contemporary Britain.
Manchester is, to say the least, an enigma. Ever since the 2016 referendum on membership of the European Union, the United Kingdom has been languishing in Brexit limbo, investment confidence has been flagging, and everyone has been fretting about the future. The North of England, where a majority voted to Leave, has long been notoriously, pathologically depressed, its cities and towns, one after another, the victims of postwar post-industrial decline and post-millennial austerity. So how to explain the recent show of confidence in the self-styled capital of the North?
Manchester, whose collapse in the mid 20th century rivaled that of Detroit, is busily, loudly rebounding; the city is now constructing a cluster of skyscrapers on the edge of its downtown core, the scale of which dwarfs all existing buildings. 1 Not all that long ago, a big building here could perhaps boast 100,000 square feet; today “big” means half a million. The new South Tower of Deansgate Square, a collection of mostly residential towers, rises priapically to more than 600 feet, and it might soon be overtaken by the 700-foot-tall Trinity Islands. There were at the end of last year an unprecedented 80 construction sites in the city center, including 14,000 future apartments, many of which are underwritten by international investment. This is proving to be the most thoroughgoing transformation of an English city for some time; indeed, one of the great spectacles of contemporary Britain. “Manchester is visibly booming,” wrote Oliver Wainwright, the architectural critic of the Guardian. “Cranes cluster across the skyline and the concrete liftshafts of future towers dot every corner. The city is even beginning to look drunk on its own success.” 2
Inevitably this is a local story, one that underscores much about the unpredictability and uncertainty of Britain as it finally leaves the European Union, a departure that was expedited by the Conservative party’s victory in the recent general election. Yet it is also a global story; a story about how a city that was at the center of the industrial revolution, and that shaped global capitalism in the 19th century, is today being reshaped by post-industrial globalized capital. As the geographers Jamie Peck and Kevin Ward put it in 2002, in a prescient book on the beginning of the contemporary boom: “Being first proved to be a double-edged sword. The first industrial city was the first to experience large-scale deindustrialization. … Once a global player, the city is in many ways now just another potential investment site in the global economic system.” 3 And now, as I write, the future of the global economic system has been put on at least temporary hold by the spread of a global pandemic; the partly constructed new skyline of Manchester now constitutes an unwitting memorial to the moment the city went into lockdown.
It can feel remarkable to recall that Manchester, in 1900, was one of the ten largest cities on the planet, with a greater metropolitan population just shy of two million. From a market town of about 40,000 in the late 18th century, the city had grown, over the course of the 19th, into an industrial dynamo, the world center of textile manufacturing and trading, home to so many mills that it became known as “cottonopolis.” “It was the principal site of what was rapidly coming to be thought of as the Industrial Revolution,” wrote the cultural historian Steven Marcus, “and was widely regarded as the ur-scene, concentrated specimen, and paradigm of what such a revolution was portending both for good and bad.” 4 In this light it bears remembering that Manchester was at once deeply enmeshed in the Atlantic slave trade of the late 18th century and later one of the centers of the abolition movement in England. 5
*****
Cotton Exchange, Manchester, ca. 1835. [Wikimedia]
*****
Its rise was so phenomenal that by mid-century Manchester had become the focus of intense scrutiny, “the shock city of the age,” in the words of historian Asa Briggs. 6 Numerous illustrious visitors were both attracted and repelled. In 1826 Karl Friedrich Schinkel traveled to Britain as part of a Prussian delegation investigating new technologies; in Manchester he was fascinated by the scale of the warehouses, “seven to eight stories high and as big as the Royal Palace in Berlin.” 7 In 1838 Charles Dickens described his first visit in a letter to a friend. “I went some weeks ago to Manchester, and saw the worst cotton mill. And then saw the best,” Dickens wrote. “What I have seen has disgusted and astonished me beyond all measure.” 8 In one of his novels from the 1840s, Benjamin Disraeli, the future prime minister, insists that “rightly understood, Manchester is as great a human exploit as Athens.” 9 One of the most penetrating observers was Alexis de Tocqueville, whose travel diaries from 1835 capture the wondrous horrors of the industrializing metropolis.....MUCH MORE
A sort of black smoke covers the city. The sun seen through it is a disc without rays. Under this half daylight 300,000 human beings are ceaselessly at work. A thousand noises disturb this damp, dark labyrinth, but they are not at all the ordinary sounds one hears in great cities. …The city’s most influential chronicler was Friedrich Engels, who arrived in Manchester in 1842, just 22 years old, and set to work in one of the mills owned by his father, a wealthy textile manufacturer in the Rhineland. His family hoped he would learn the business, but within two years the politically precocious Engels had produced The Condition of the Working Class in England, one of the early classics of socialism. It was soon after its publication that Engels met Karl Marx in Chetham’s Library in Manchester; a few years later they would collaborate on The Communist Manifesto.
From this foul drain the greatest stream of human industry flows out to fertilize the whole world. From this filthy sewer pure gold flows. Here humanity attains its most complete development and its most brutish; here civilization works its miracles, and civilized man is turned back almost into a savage. 10
*****Engels’s early experience of Manchester structured his broader argument about social and economic class and the failures of industrial capitalism. He writes vividly about the peculiar form of the city. In a much-quoted section, he describes how the city has contrived in its “curious lay-out” and “hypocritical town planning” to shield its appalling poverty from the prosperous factory owners and merchants: “To such an extent has the convenience of the rich been considered in the planning of Manchester that these plutocrats can travel from their houses to their places of business in the center of town by the shortest routes, which run entirely through the working-class districts, without ever realizing how close they are to the misery and filth which lie on both sides of the road.” Engels does not spare the reader, though. A few pages later he describes the “most disgusting spot of all,” a slum called Little Ireland: “The cottages are very small, old and dirty, while the streets are uneven, partly unpaved, not properly drained and full of ruts. Heaps of refuse, offal and sickening filth are everywhere interspersed with pools of stagnant liquid. The atmosphere is polluted by the stench and darkened by the thick smoke from dozens of factory chimneys.” 11 Towards the end of the book, the author captures what he calls the “selfishness and moral depravity” of the city’s bourgeoisie.
One day I walked with [a] middle-class gentleman into Manchester. I spoke to him about the disgraceful unhealthy slums and drew his attention to the disgusting condition of that part of town in which the factory workers lived. I declared I had never seen so badly built a town in my life. He listened patiently and at the corner of the street at which we parted company he remarked: ‘And yet there is a great deal of money made here. Good morning, Sir.’ 12A city created by capital, an industrial powerhouse shaped, or misshaped, in its image: it is hard to overestimate the persistence of this trope, even today. Otherwise sensible visitors like to declare how little has changed since Engels’s time, no matter that they are navigating an urban environment in which few of the 19th-century buildings and artifacts, industries and institutions, would ultimately survive the creative destruction of the 20th century.....
Previously:
"The Cotton Bond Bubble" or How the Confederacy Might Have Won the Civil War
Hey, Hey, Ho, Ho, Marx and Engels Got To Go!
....Because that story reminded me that Friedrich Engels' fortune was built on the cheap cotton produced by American slaves via the family's business Ermen and Engels. In fact 'ol Freddie spent a lot of time in Manchester representing the fam at one of their cotton thread factories and seemed okey-dokey with the fruits of the slave biz even while decrying the condition of the Manchester laborers.
And Marx suckled on the teat of that cash flow to support himself..
When he wasn't speculating in British equities. See:
Karl Marx Dabbles in the Market (and rationalizes his success)The Karl Marx Credit Card – When You’re Short of Kapital
Friedrich Engels: Global Macro With an Emphasis on Commodities
Karl Marx on Market Manias
Marx and Engels Meet The Jetsons
On Marx and "The Law of the Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall"
Here's the amusingly numbered Ch. 13 of Volume III, Das Kapital via Marxists.org.
I've never gotten much farther than Volume I, the first chapter of which is 'Commodities'.
There are Some Things Money Can’t Buy. Especially If You Abolish All Private Property.
As the Civil War raged in North America the working people of Manchester sided with the enslaved Black people* but the capitalists like Engels and by extension Marx, wanted that cheap cotton to keep flowing.
That's a bit of history for this 157th anniversary of the beginning of the Battle of Gettysburg.
More tomorrow.
*If interested see The Guardian, February 4, 2013:
Lincoln's great debt to Manchester
In 1863, The US President wrote to the 'working men of Manchester' thanking them for their anti-slavery stance
