income

The point is so elementary it ought not to require a quotation from Engels or anyone else to establish it. But, since the argument here points in a direction that many on the Left do not want to go, let us go with Engels. ‘The condition of the working class is the real basis and point of departure of all social movements at present … A knowledge of proletarian conditions is absolutely necessary to be able to provide solid ground for socialist theories …’. This is what he wrote in 1845 in his preface to his The Condition of the Working Class in England.[1]