Friedrich Engels and Modern Social and Political Theory

Paul Blackledge

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781438476889, 9781438476872
• eBook ISBN: 9781438476896
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Communism, Post-Communism & Socialism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Offers a powerful new interpretation of Engels's contributions to modern social and political theory.

In this comprehensive overview of Friedrich Engels's writings, Paul Blackledge critically explores Engels's contributions to modern social and political theory generally and Marxism specifically. Through a careful examination both of Engels's role in the forging of Marxism in the 1840s, and his contributions to the further deepening and expansion of this worldview over the next half century, Blackledge offers a closely argued and balanced assessment of his thought. This book challenges the long-standing attempt among academic Marxologists to denigrate Engels as Marx's greatest mistake, and concludes that Engels was a profound thinker whose ideas continue to resonate to this day.

1

Discovering the Working Class

Engels was born in Barmen, now Wuppertal, on November 28, 1820. His father was an affluent mill owner and an active member of the Pietist sect of Protestantism. Thanks to his mother, from whom, apparently, he “inherited his cheerful disposition” and his love of reading (Marx-Aveling n.d., 183), his was a comfortable but anti-intellectual childhood where his ability to constantly disappoint his father’s hopes that he would cast aside his idealistic inclinations to focus on pursuing a successful career was balanced by love from his mother.

He was educated at a local Pietist school until he was fourteen. Here he mastered the Bible. After primary education, he entered the still nominally Pietist but more liberal gymnasium for a further three years’ study. He left school with a good report card, but a year short of the necessary tenure to enable university entrance—his father was too pragmatically middle class to waste money on unnecessary classes. After school, he went to work in Bremen for his father’s export agent and consul for the king of Saxony. Carver points out that Bremen, a large seaport, was a much more liberal and cosmopolitan environment than Barmen had been, and he describes Engels’s period there as “intellectually and politically formative” (Carver 1989, 12). In Bremen Engels broadened his reading and began to write. Here too he came under the influence of the liberal Young Germany movement.

Prussia was an absolutist state with Lutheran coloring, and Young Germany’s literary challenge to royal power informed a deeper rationalist critique of Pietism. It was thus that in 1839 Engels came into contact with the Young Hegelian milieu when he read David Strauss’s pathbreaking The Life of Jesus. Strauss’s book had caused a stir on its publication four years earlier by decisively challenging the literal interpretation of the gospels. Reading Strauss placed Engels on a trajectory that quickly drew him into an increasingly close orbit around the radical Young Hegelian movement; indeed, shortly after reading Strauss, he moved on to Hegel’s Philosophy of History and embraced pantheism.

After two and a half years in Bremen, Engels moved to Berlin, then the center of Young Hegelian radicalism. Nominally he was there as a volunteer with the Prussian artillery, but actually he used military service as a back-door entry into university life. This was a particularly interesting time to be a radical young student as Friedrich von Schelling had just arrived at the University of Berlin with a mission from the Prussian king to root out the (Young) Hegelians. Schelling had been a contemporary and friend of Hegel’s (they had apparently shared a room at university) before relations between them became acrimonious as Hegel’s fame grew while Schelling was reduced to a mere footnote in the intellectual movement from Kant to Hegel. Schelling’s role in Berlin was simple: to defeat the Young Hegelians by demolishing their mentor. Alongside Engels the impressive list of attendees at Schelling’s lectures speaks to the importance of this event: Mikhail Bakunin, Jacob Burckhardt, Alexander von Humboldt, and Søren Kierkegaard were all disappointed with the old professor after expecting intellectual fireworks. For his part, Engels took it upon himself to pen a series of critical journalistic pamphlets in which he defended Hegel against Schelling’s philosophical defense of the Christian God. These pamphlets also contained an important admission: the Young Hegelians were, he wrote, atheists in all but name. Thus it was that, without fanfare, he announced the culmination of his own intellectual movement from liberal rationalist critique of Pietism through pantheism and on to atheism. This radical stance informed his embrace of “The Free,” a group of radical Berlin intellectuals including Bruno and Edgar Bauer whose critique of absolutism and religion was leaning toward an abstract but vociferously expressed conception of communism (Carver 1989, 1–94).

It was as a communist that Engels first met Marx in November 1842. However, this meeting was, as he reported to Franz Mehring half a century later, a “distinctly chilly” affair. In the months prior to this meeting, Marx had, in Engels’s words, “taken a stand against” Bruno and Edgar Bauer’s Young Hegelian “hot air brand of communism, which was based on a sheer love of ‘going to extremes.’ ” By contrast with their abstract and propagandistic politics, Marx wanted the newspaper he edited alongside Moses Hess, Rheinische Zeitung, to be a voice for much more concrete “political discussion and action.” Unfortunately, because Engels “corresponded with the Bauers,” Marx regarded him “as their ally” while the Bauers in turn caused Engels “to view Marx with suspicion” (CW 50, 503).

Despite this initial mutual mistrust, Engels’s healthy tendency to youthful political excess was mediated from the start by the kind of “serious” and “sober-minded” work Marx demanded of the contributors to his newspaper and against the “frivolous” style of “political romanticism” he believed was compromising “the cause of the party of freedom” (CW 1, 287; Carver 1983, 23). Indeed, Engels had already distinguished himself from his peers by the thoughtful pen-portrait he made of the effects of “factory work” in his home district.

Engels’s Letters from Wuppertal, published in a newspaper of the Young Germany movement, the Telegraph für Deutschland, when he was still only eighteen years old, in many ways prefigures the assessment of the negative consequences of industrialization he was to detail a few years later in The Condition of the Working Class in England (Marcus 1974, 77). He argued both that industrialization had led to the physical and moral “degradation” of workers and that religious Pietism played an important role in justifying this malign situation. He suggested that the Lutheran factory owners justified stern workplace discipline in exchange for a meager wage as a means of protecting workers from the evils of drink, while the workers did their best to cope with these dehumanizing conditions either by losing themselves in drink and licentiousness, or by internalizing religious fundamentalism as an emollient to salve the pain of their existence, or, more often, by hypocritically combining elements from both of these coping strategies (CW 2, 9–10). These letters were, as Carver observes, produced by a man with a sharp eye for detail and a “hunger for knowledge and hatred of dogmatism” (Carver 1983, 5). What is more, they were obviously produced by a serious student of German society who was aware both of his own strengths as a writer and of his weaknesses as a student of that about which he was writing. It was to remedy this failing that Engels announced, prior to his meeting with Marx, his intention to “devote more time to studying” (CW 2, 545; Carver 1989, 99).

The first substantial fruit of his renewed studies was his Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy (commonly known as the Umrisse)—written in October–November 1843 and published the following year. This “brilliant essay,” as Marx subsequently called it (CW 29, 264), not only marked an important moment in Engels’s evolution away from Young Hegelianism toward a more materialistic and realistic conception of revolutionary practice, it was also, as Samuel Hollander points out, “the founding document in the Marxian theoretical tradition” (Hollander 2011, 25; cf. Oakley 1984, 30–36). Indeed, the Umrisse was the first published critique of political economy by either man and the first to point toward a systematic critique of capitalism as a historical form—though it is probably true to say that Engels’s essay paralleled Marx’s independent realization, on the basis both of his critique of Hegel’s theory of the state, his notes on Adam Smith and James Mill, and his examination of the Rhineland Parliament’s proceedings on the theft of wood, that it was impossible to fully understand political questions independent of the underlying economic relations they express (Avineri 1968, 39; McLellan 2006, 47; Carver 1983, 32; CW 29, 261–262).

By the time of their next meeting in August 1844 Marx had read the Umrisse and exchanged (unfortunately lost) letters with Engels about the essay (Carver 1983, 37). From this moment onward the two men found themselves, as Engels put it some four decades later, in “complete agreement in all theoretical fields” (CW 3, 375–376; CW 26, 318). Their revolutionary perspective did not emerge, like Athena, fully formed at this moment. Rather, they began to articulate a common perspective through a process of both critical engagement with the works of the political economists and their socialist critics and practical work as active socialists.

This project was initially realized through the cowritten theoretical works The Holy Family and The German Ideology alongside a number of independently and cowritten shorter and more directly political interventions. Of these works, the closest to a common programmatic statement prior to the publication of The Communist Manifesto was Engels’s Principles of Communism (October 1847)—itself a reworked version of his earlier Draft of a Communist Confession of Faith (June 1847). The Communist Manifesto itself, which closely followed the arguments of Principles of Communism, declared the solution to capitalism’s ills to lie through the struggles of the new proletariat to overcome the inhumanity of bourgeois society. Engels’s contribution to this claim should not be underestimated. He came to this conclusion over a pivotal three-year period between 1842 and 1845. This moment marked the point when he moved beyond the burgeoning literature mapping the horrific consequences of industrial capitalism for the new working class to recognize, through his relationship to Chartism, that workers were not merely victims of the new capitalist system but could also act as progressive agents of its overthrow. Engels first gestured toward this conclusion in a series of articles published in the Rheinische Zeitung in late 1842.

In The English View of the Internal Crisis (1842) he suggested that England’s middle and upper classes viewed the Chartist call for universal suffrage as, in essence, a revolutionary demand because through it the “unpropertied … mass of proletarians” threatened their hold on power. In subsequent installments of the article published over the next two days he added that, though English industrial development had made the country rich, it had done so only at the cost of creating “a class of unpropertied, absolutely poor people.” However, whereas Hegel had seen in this class mere victims of industrialization (Hegel 1952, 150), Engels argued that that summer’s general strike was evidence not merely of this class’s independent agency but also of their growing awareness that “only a forcible abolition of the existing unnatural conditions, a radical overthrow of the nobility and industrial aristocracy, can improve the material position of the proletarians.” Interestingly, he also wrote that while “the Englishman’s inherent respect for the law” was holding back the revolutionary implications of this process, the existence of economic crises would put unbearable stress on this ideological barrier to radical change: “revolution is inevitable for England” because “fear of death from starvation will be stronger than fear of the law.” So, in stark contrast to Young Hegelian idealism, he concluded with the materialist claim that “it will be interests and not principles that will begin and carry through the revolution … the revolution will be social, not political” (CW 2, 368–374).

This germ of the idea of historical materialism was further deepened in his Letters from London, published the following May in the Zurich-based radical weekly Schweizerischer Repulikaner. Despite the defeat of the previous summer’s general strike, he claimed that “[t]he democratic party in England is making rapid progress … despised and derided socialism marches forward calmly and confidently and gradually compels the attention of public opinion … a new party of countless numbers has taken shape in a few years under the banner of the People’s Charter” (CW 3, 379). Subsequently, he reconstructed the moment when the English working class emerged as an independent political force at the 1843 Chartist Convention:

The fruit of the uprising was the decisive separation of the proletariat from the bourgeoisie. The Chartists had not hitherto concealed their determination to carry the Charter at all costs, even that of a revolution; the bourgeoisie, which now perceived, all at once, the danger with which any violent change threatened its position, refused to hear anything further of physical force, and proposed to attain its end by moral force, as though this were anything else than the direct or indirect threat of physical force. This was one point of dissension, though even this was removed later by the assertion of the Chartists (who are at least as worthy of being believed as the bourgeoisie) that they, too, refrained from appealing to physical force. The second point of dissension and the main one, which brought Chartism to light in its purity, was the repeal of the Corn Laws. In this the bourgeoisie was directly interested, the proletariat not. The Chartists therefore divided into two parties whose political programmes agreed literally, but which were nevertheless thoroughly different and incapable of union. At the Birmingham National Convention, in January, 1843, Sturge, the representative of the Radical bourgeoisie, proposed that the name of the Charter be omitted from the rules of the Chartist Association, nominally because this name had become connected with recollections of violence during the insurrection, a connection, by the way, which had existed for years, and against which Mr. Sturge had hitherto advanced no objection. The working-men refused to drop the name, and when Mr. Sturge was outvoted, that worthy Quaker suddenly became loyal, betook himself out of the hall, and founded a “Complete Suffrage Association” within the Radical bourgeoisie. So repugnant had these recollections become to the Jacobinical bourgeoisie, that he altered even the name Universal Suffrage into the ridiculous title, Complete Suffrage. The working-men laughed at him and quietly went their way. From this moment Chartism was purely a working-men’s cause freed from all bourgeois elements. (CW 4, 522–523)

These lines are taken from the young Engels’s masterpiece: The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845). Published when Engels was still only twenty-four years old, this book has consistently, according to Eric Hobsbawm, not only been “substantially accepted as standard,” but it is also “by far the best single book on the working class of the period” (Hobsbawm 1964, 106; 1969, 17). What made Engels’s book stand out from the crowd was not merely his eye for illuminating detail but, more importantly, his method for making sense of this detail (Rex 1969, 70). Though not explicitly stated in the book itself, Engels’s approach was signaled in two earlier essays: the Umrisse and a positive yet critical review of Thomas Carlyle’s Past and Present: The Condition of England (Hollander 2011, 25).

Writing some four decades later, Engels suggested the key lesson he learned in Manchester in the early 1840s was

that the economic facts which have so far played no role or only a contemptible one in historiography are, at least in the modern world, a decisive historical force; that they form the basis for the emergence of the present-day class antagonisms; that these class antagonisms, in the countries where they have become fully developed by dint of large-scale industry, hence especially in England, are in their turn the basis for the formation of political parties, party struggles, and thus of all political history. (CW 26, 317)

If his comments on the relationship between interests and principles quoted previously tend to confirm this general point, he first defended the analytical core of this claim in the Umrisse, in which he extended themes from Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s (anarchist) What Is Property? and (more significantly) John Watts’s (Owenite socialist) The Facts and Fictions of Political Economists to fashion a revolutionary critique both of political economy and more importantly of capitalism itself (Claeys 1984).

Marx pointed to the methodological importance of this contribution to political economy a few months later. Whereas the political economists had taken the existence of “private property for granted,” Proudhon’s “great scientific advance” was to subject this concept to critical scrutiny. However, Proudhon’s critique of political economy was fundamentally limited because he failed to analyze “wages, trade, value, price, money, etc., as forms of private property in themselves.” So, despite taking the first step in the critique of political economy, because Proudhon naturalized private property’s many specifically capitalist forms, he failed to go beyond this first step: “his criticism of political economy” was essentially hidebound because it failed to escape “the standpoint of political economy.” Engels’s Umrisse, by contrast, pointed beyond the historical limits of political economy because it deepened the critique of private property through a more general critique of its various forms (CW 4, 31–32).

Political economy, Engels argued, emerged in the eighteenth century alongside the growth of trade as the “science of enrichment” through which the previously dominant mercantilism was challenged in theory and practice. However,

just as all the revolutions of this century were one-sided and bogged down in antitheses—just as abstract materialism was set in opposition to abstract spiritualism, the republic to monarchy, the social contract to divine right—likewise the economic revolution did not get beyond antithesis. The premises remained everywhere in force: materialism did not attack the Christian contempt for and humiliation of Man, and merely posited Nature instead of the Christian God as the Absolute confronting Man. In politics no one dreamt of examining the premises of the state as such. It did not occur to economics to question the validity of private property. (CW 3, 419)

And in a brilliant dialectical inversion, Engels showed that though Adam Smith’s defense of free trade was a “necessary advance” beyond mercantilism’s defense of monopolies, this critique was fundamentally limited by its continued naturalization of private property. Indeed, Engels claimed, private property was itself the most important form of monopoly. So, while the Smithians had fought for the destruction of “the small monopolies,” they had created a world in which “the one great basic monopoly, property, may function the more freely and unrestrictedly” (CW 3, 421, 423). Consequently, political economy’s claim to be in the general interest was a sham, for “only that view which rises above the opposition of the two systems, which criticises the premises common to both and proceeds ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Marx, Engels, Marxism
• 1 Discovering the Working Class
• 2 Mapping the English Working Class
• 3 A New Theoretical Foundation: The German Ideology
• 4 The Communist Manifesto: A Strategy for the Left
• 5 1848: War, Revolution, and the National Question
• 6 1848: Intervening in the Revolution
• 7 Learning Lessons from Defeat
• 8 Military Critic: Confronting the Prospect of War
• 9 Revolutionary Continuity
• 10 Method and Value: (Mis)Understanding Capital
• 11 Philosophy and Revolution: Anti-Dühring
• 12 Toward a Unitary Theory of Women’s Oppression
• 13 Beyond 1848: Engels’s “Testament”
• 14 Legacy
• Bibliography
• Index
• Back Cover