Friedrich Engels for the 21st Century: Reflections and Revaluations (Marx, Engels, and Marxisms) 3030971376, 9783030971373

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MARX, ENGELS, AND MARXISMS

Friedrich Engels for the 21st Century Reflections and Revaluations

Edited by Terrell Carver · Smail Rapic

Marx, Engels, and Marxisms

Series Editors Marcello Musto, York University, Toronto, ON, Canada Terrell Carver, University of Bristol, Bristol, UK

The Marx renaissance is underway on a global scale. Wherever the critique of capitalism re-emerges, there is an intellectual and political demand for new, critical engagements with Marxism. The peer-reviewed series Marx, Engels and Marxisms (edited by Marcello Musto & Terrell Carver, with Babak Amini, Francesca Antonini, Paula Rauhala & Kohei Saito as Assistant Editors) publishes monographs, edited volumes, critical editions, reprints of old texts, as well as translations of books already published in other languages. Our volumes come from a wide range of political perspectives, subject matters, academic disciplines and geographical areas, producing an eclectic and informative collection that appeals to a diverse and international audience. Our main areas of focus include: the oeuvre of Marx and Engels, Marxist authors and traditions of the 19th and 20th centuries, labour and social movements, Marxist analyses of contemporary issues, and reception of Marxism in the world.

More information about this series at https://link.springer.com/bookseries/14812

Terrell Carver · Smail Rapic Editors

Friedrich Engels for the 21st Century Reflections and Revaluations

Editors Terrell Carver University of Bristol Bristol, UK

Smail Rapic Bergische Universität Wuppertal Wuppertal, Germany

ISSN 2524-7123 ISSN 2524-7131 (electronic) Marx, Engels, and Marxisms ISBN 978-3-030-97137-3 ISBN 978-3-030-97138-0 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-97138-0 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Chronicle/Alamy Stock Photo This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Series Editors’ Preface

Titles Published 1. Terrell Carver & Daniel Blank, A Political History of the Editions of Marx and Engels’s “German Ideology” Manuscripts, 2014. 2. Terrell Carver & Daniel Blank, Marx and Engels’s “German Ideology” Manuscripts: Presentation and Analysis of the “Feuerbach Chapter”, 2014. 3. Alfonso Maurizio Iacono, The History and Theory of Fetishism, 2015. 4. Paresh Chattopadhyay, Marx’s Associated Mode of Production: A Critique of Marxism, 2016. 5. Domenico Losurdo, Class Struggle: A Political and Philosophical History, 2016. 6. Frederick Harry Pitts, Critiquing Capitalism Today: New Ways to Read Marx, 2017. 7. Ranabir Samaddar, Karl Marx and the Postcolonial Age, 2017. 8. George Comninel, Alienation and Emancipation in the Work of Karl Marx, 2018. 9. Jean-Numa Ducange & Razmig Keucheyan (Eds.), The End of the Democratic State: Nicos Poulantzas, a Marxism for the 21st Century, 2018. 10. Robert X. Ware, Marx on Emancipation and Socialist Goals: Retrieving Marx for the Future, 2018.

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SERIES EDITORS’ PREFACE

11. Xavier LaFrance & Charles Post (Eds.), Case Studies in the Origins of Capitalism, 2018. 12. John Gregson, Marxism, Ethics, and Politics: The Work of Alasdair MacIntyre, 2018. 13. Vladimir Puzone & Luis Felipe Miguel (Eds.), The Brazilian Left in the 21st Century: Conflict and Conciliation in Peripheral Capitalism, 2019. 14. James Muldoon & Gaard Kets (Eds.), The German Revolution and Political Theory, 2019. 15. Michael Brie, Rediscovering Lenin: Dialectics of Revolution and Metaphysics of Domination, 2019. 16. August H. Nimtz, Marxism Versus Liberalism: Comparative RealTime Political Analysis, 2019. 17. Gustavo Moura de Cavalcanti Mello and Mauricio de Souza Sabadini (Eds.), Financial Speculation and Fictitious Profits: A Marxist Analysis, 2019. 18. Shaibal Gupta, Marcello Musto & Babak Amini (Eds.), Karl Marx’s Life, Ideas, and Influences: A Critical Examination on the Bicentenary, 2019. 19. Igor Shoikhedbrod, Revisiting Marx’s Critique of Liberalism: Rethinking Justice, Legality, and Rights, 2019. 20. Juan Pablo Rodríguez, Resisting Neoliberal Capitalism in Chile: The Possibility of Social Critique, 2019. 21. Kaan Kangal, Friedrich Engels and the Dialectics of Nature, 2020. 22. Victor Wallis, Socialist Practice: Histories and Theories, 2020. 23. Alfonso Maurizio Iacono, The Bourgeois and the Savage: A Marxian Critique of the Image of the Isolated Individual in Defoe, Turgot and Smith, 2020. 24. Terrell Carver, Engels Before Marx, 2020. 25. Jean-Numa Ducange, Jules Guesde: The Birth of Socialism and Marxism in France, 2020. 26. Antonio Oliva, Ivan Novara & Angel Oliva (Eds.), Marx and Contemporary Critical Theory: The Philosophy of Real Abstraction, 2020. 27. Francesco Biagi, Henri Lefebvre’s Critical Theory of Space, 2020. 28. Stefano Petrucciani, The Ideas of Karl Marx: A Critical Introduction, 2020. 29. Terrell Carver, The Life and Thought of Friedrich Engels, 30th Anniversary Edition, 2020.

SERIES EDITORS’ PREFACE

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30. Giuseppe Vacca, Alternative Modernities: Antonio Gramsci’s Twentieth Century, 2020. 31. Kevin B. Anderson, Kieran Durkin & Heather Brown (Eds.), Raya Dunayevskaya’s Intersectional Marxism: Race, Gender, and the Dialectics of Liberation, 2020. 32. Marco Di Maggio, The Rise and Fall of Communist Parties in France and Italy, 2020. 33. Farhang Rajaee, Presence and the Political, 2021. 34. Ryuji Sasaki, A New Introduction to Karl Marx: New Materialism, Critique of Political Economy, and the Concept of Metabolism, 2021. 35. Kohei Saito (Ed.), Reexamining Engels’s Legacy in the 21st Century, 2021. 36. Paresh Chattopadhyay, Socialism in Marx’s Capital: Towards a Dealienated World, 2021. 37. Marcello Musto, Karl Marx’s Writings on Alienation, 2021. 38. Michael Brie & Jörn Schütrumpf, Rosa Luxemburg: A Revolutionary Marxist at the Limits of Marxism, 2021. 39. Stefano Petrucciani, Theodor W. Adorno’s Philosophy, Society, and Aesthetics, 2021. 40. Miguel Vedda, Siegfried Kracauer, or, The Allegories of Improvisation: Critical Studies, 2021. 41. Ronaldo Munck, Rethinking Development: Marxist Perspectives, 2021. 42. Jean-Numa Ducange & Elisa Marcobelli (Eds.), Selected Writings of Jean Jaurès: On Socialism, Pacifism and Marxism, 2021. 43. Elisa Marcobelli, Internationalism Toward Diplomatic Crisis: The Second International and French, German and Italian Socialists, 2021. 44. James Steinhoff, Automation and Autonomy: Labour, Capital and Machines in the Artificial Intelligence Industry, 2021. 45. Juan Dal Maso, Hegemony and Class Struggle: Trotsky, Gramsci and Marxism, 2021. 46. Gianfranco Ragona & Monica Quirico, Frontier Socialism: Selforganisation and Anti-capitalism, 2021. 47. Tsuyoshi Yuki, Socialism, Markets and the Critique of Money: The Theory of “Labour Notes”, 2021. 48. Gustavo Moura de Cavalcanti Mello & Henrique Pereira Braga (Eds.), Wealth and Poverty in Contemporary Brazilian Capitalism, 2021.

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SERIES EDITORS’ PREFACE

49. Paolo Favilli, Historiography and Marxism: Innovations in Midcentury Italy, 2021. 50. Levy del Aguila Marchena, Communism, Political Power and Personal Freedom in Marx, 2021. 51. V. Geetha, Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar and the Question of Socialism in India, 2021. 52. Satoshi Matsui, Normative Theories of Liberalism and Socialism: Marxist Analysis of Values, 2022. 53. Kei Ehara (Ed.), Japanese Discourse on the Marxian Theory of Finance, 2022. 54. Achim Szepanski, Financial Capital in the 21st Century, 2022.

Titles Forthcoming Vesa Oittinen, Marx’s Russian Moment Kolja Lindner, Marx, Marxism and the Question of Eurocentrism Adriana Petra, Intellectuals and Communist Culture: Itineraries, Problems and Debates in Post-war Argentina George C. Comninel, The Feudal Foundations of Modern Europe Spencer A. Leonard, Marx, the India Question, and the Crisis of Cosmopolitanism Joe Collins, Applying Marx’s Capital to the 21st century Jeong Seongjin, Korean Capitalism in the 21st Century: Marxist Analysis and Alternatives Marcello Mustè, Marxism and Philosophy of Praxis: An Italian Perspective from Labriola to Gramsci Shannon Brincat, Dialectical Dialogues in Contemporary World Politics: A Meeting of Traditions in Global Comparative Philosophy Francesca Antonini, Reassessing Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire: Dictatorship, State, and Revolution Thomas Kemple, Capital After Classical Sociology: The Faustian Lives of Social Theory Xavier Vigna, A Political History of Factories in France: The Workers’ Insubordination of 1968 Attila Melegh, Anti-migrant Populism in Eastern Europe and Hungary: A Marxist Analysis Marie-Cecile Bouju, A Political History of the Publishing Houses of the French Communist Party

SERIES EDITORS’ PREFACE

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Peter McMylor, Graeme Kirkpatrick & Simin Fadaee (Eds.), Marxism, Religion, and Emancipatory Politics Mauro Buccheri, Radical Humanism for the Left: The Quest for Meaning in Late Capitalism Rémy Herrera, Confronting Mainstream Economics to Overcome Capitalism Tamás Krausz, Eszter Bartha (Eds.), Socialist Experiences in Eastern Europe: A Hungarian Perspective Martin Cortés, Marxism, Time and Politics: On the Autonomy of the Political João Antonio de Paula, Huga da Gama Cerqueira, Eduardo da Motta e Albuquer & Leonardo de Deus, Marxian Economics for the 21st Century: Revaluating Marx’s Critique of Political Economy Zhi Li, The Concept of the Individual in the Thought of Karl Marx Lelio Demichelis, Marx, Alienation and Techno-capitalism Dong-Min Rieu, A Mathematical Approach to Marxian Value Theory: Time, Money, and Labor Productivity Salvatore Prinzi, Representation, Expression, and Institution: The Philosophy of Merleau-Ponty and Castoriadis Agon Hamza, Slavoj Žižek and the Reconstruction of Marxism Éric Aunoble, French Views on the Russian Revolution Patrizia Dogliani, A Political History of the International Union of Socialist Youth Alexandros Chrysis, The Marx of Communism: Setting Limits in the Realm of Communism Stephen Maher, Corporate Capitalism and the Integral State: General Electric and a Century of American Power Paul Raekstad, Karl Marx’s Realist Critique of Capitalism: Freedom, Alienation, and Socialism Alexis Cukier, Democratic Work: Radical Democracy and the Future of Labour Christoph Henning, Theories of Alienation: From Rousseau to the Present Daniel Egan, Capitalism, War, and Revolution: A Marxist Analysis Genevieve Ritchie, Sara Carpenter & Shahrzad Mojab (Eds.), Marxism and Migration Emanuela Conversano, Capital from Afar: Anthropology and Critique of Political Economy in the Late Marx Marcello Musto, Rethinking Alternatives with Marx

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SERIES EDITORS’ PREFACE

Vincenzo Mele, City and Modernity in George Simmel and Walter Benjamin: Fragments of Metropolis David Norman Smith, Self-emancipation: Marx’s Unfinished Theory of the Working Class José Ricardo Villanueva Lira, Marxism and the Origins of International Relations Bertel Nygaard, Marxism, Labor Movements, and Historiography Fabio Perocco (Ed.), Racism in and for the Welfare State Marcos Del Roio, Gramsci and the Emancipation of the Subaltern Classes Marcelo Badaró, The Working Class from Marx to Our Times Tomonaga Tairako, A New Perspective on Marx’s Philosophy and Political Economy Matthias Bohlender, Anna-Sophie Schönfelder, & Matthias Spekker, Truth and Revolution in Marx’s Critique of Society Mauricio Vieira Martins, Marx, Spinoza and Darwin on Philosophy: Against Religious Perspectives of Transcendence Jean Vigreux, Roger Martelli, & Serge Wolikow, One Hundred Years of History of the French Communist Party Aditya Nigam, Border-Marxisms and Historical Materialism Fred Moseley, Marx’s Theory of Value in Chapter 1 of Capital: A Critique of Heinrich’s Value-Form Interpretation Armando Boito, The State, Politics, and Social Classes: Theory and History Anjan Chakrabarti & Anup Dhar, World of the Third and Hegemonic Capital: Between Marx and Freud Hira Singh, Annihilation of Caste in India: Ambedkar, Ghandi, and Marx Salvatore Engel-Di Mauro, An Introduction to Ecosocialism

Acknowledgements

Terrell Carver is very grateful to colleagues for organizing the international conference “Die Aktualität eines Klassikers —The Timeliness of a Historic Figure” at the Bergische Universität-Wuppertal, 19–21 February 2020, in celebration of the bicentenary of the birth of Friedrich Engels. The present volume derives from contributions to, and discussions at, that very exciting and historic forum for scholarly interchange and collaboration. Smail Rapic would like to thank colleagues from European countries, South and East Asia and the Americas who made the trip to the Engels conference in Wuppertal, Germany, to celebrate the bicentenary. The papers they presented there show that Engels was indeed a talented writer and is still an important political figure, remarkable in any century, and particularly for the twenty-first.

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Praise for Friedrich Engels for the 21st Century

“This impressively internationalist collection is an essential read for those interested in Engels in his own right rather than as just a “second fiddle” to Marx. All contributions present fresh perspectives based on the latest research. They do full justice to the many areas in which Engels displayed his prodigious talents.” —David McLellan, Professor Emeritus of Political Theory, University of Kent, UK “Based on the results of archival research, this book contributes to the liberation of Engels from the entrenched image that he is the man who distorted and dogmatized Marx’s theory. This will allow us to appreciate Engels as an independent theorist and to understand his great achievements as they really are.” —Ryuji Sasaki, Associate Professor of Economics, Rikkyo University, Japan “This fascinating collection of nineteen essays by an international cast of distinguished authors—expertly edited by Terrell Carver and Smail Rapic—reconsiders Engels’s many projects, problems, and prospects. Engels here gets the attention he sorely deserves as a solo act. Highly recommended.” —James Farr, Professor of Political Science, Northwestern University, USA

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PRAISE FOR FRIEDRICH ENGELS FOR THE 21ST CENTURY

“This impressive collection demolishes the notion that Engels paved the way for a dogmatic interpretation of Marxism or that he was merely a populariser of Marx’s ideas. Instead, it establishes Engels as an independent and creative Marxist thinker whose ideas continue to enlighten us in the 21st century.” —Camilla Royle, Fellow in Geography and Environment, London School of Economics, UK “This timely volume on Engels corrects a number of misconceptions about this fundamentally important yet underrated thinker. Its richness in historical detail offers new insights into Engels’s work and presents a genuinely interdisciplinary and global reading. It will be of great interest for scholars and students of politics, history, ecology and philosophy the world over.” —Shannon Brincat, Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Relations, University of the Sunshine Coast, Australia “Why should we continue to read Engels in the 21st century? Because—as leading experts in the world establish here—the breadth and depth of his contribution to the critical social sciences is remarkable, and its resonance palpable. If you want to learn more about Marx’s too often underestimated and misunderstood intellectual partner—and you should—then you must read this book.” —David Bates, Professor of Contemporary Political Thought & School Director of Research and Enterprise, Canterbury Christ Church University, UK

Contents

1

Introduction Smail Rapic

1

Part I Epistemology and Philosophy of Nature 2

Engels and the Dialectic of Nature Sean Sayers

33

3

Engels and the “Dialectics of Nature” Kaan Kangal

53

4

Was Engels a Dialectical Materialist? Smail Rapic

71

5

Engels and the End of Philosophy Changfu Xu

89

Part II 6

7

Political Economy

Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy: The is/Ought Question Hans Frambach

109

The Young Engels and the Critique of Capitalism: His Influence on the Young Marx Marco Solinas

127

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CONTENTS

8

Engels on the “External Market” and “Deindustrialization” Prabhat Patnaik

Part III 9

10

145

The Condition of the Working Class

The Constitution of the Proletariat: Bringing Together Friedrich Engels, Edward P. Thompson and Michael Vester Heinz Sünker The Question of Housing Revisited Regina Kreide

163 187

Part IV Theorizing Power 11

Engels Theorizes Gender Hierarchy in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State Terrell Carver

12

The Concept of Power in Engels’s Theory of the State Ana María Miranda Mora

13

Re-Reading Engels in the Twenty-First Century: State, Nationalism, and Internationalism Michael Forman

211 229

247

Part V Engels and Literature 14

15

16

The Proletariat and the “People”: Engels and the “Social Prose” of the 1840s Wolfgang Lukas

271

Engels’s Philosophical Mock-Epic: The Triumph of Faith Mattia Luigi Pozzi

289

Engels and German Literature: A Political History to the Present Anne-Rose Meyer

311

CONTENTS

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Part VI Emancipation—Revolution—Communism 17

18

19

Engels on Post-capitalist Society: Continuity or Discontinuity with Marx’s Concept of the Alternative to Capitalism? Peter Hudis Engels and the Remaking of Communism in the Twenty-First Century Regletto Aldrich Imbong Afterword: Whither Engels? Terrell Carver

Index

335

355 373

385

Notes on Contributors

Terrell Carver is Professor of political theory at the University of Bristol, UK. He graduated from Columbia University, B.A. summa cum laude, in 1968, and took further degrees at Balliol College, Oxford: B.Phil. in 1970, and D.Phil. in 1975. He is affiliated Professor at Peking University, Nanjing University, and the University of the Witwatersrand. In 2018 he was program co-chair for the World Congress of the International Political Science Association in Brisbane, and he is Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences. His most recent books include Engels Before Marx, and The Life and Thought of Friedrich Engels, 30th anniversary edition, both published by Palgrave Macmillan, New York in 2020. Changfu Xu is Professor of Philosophy at the Department of Philosophy, and at the Institute of Marxist Philosophy and China Modernization, and also Director of the Centre for Practical Philosophy, Sun Yat-Sen University, Guangzhou. His research interests include metaphysics, practical philosophy and Marxist philosophy. He has published around one hundred articles in Chinese and foreign journals, such as Marx-Engels Jahrbuch in Germany, Studies in Marxism in the UK, and Socialism and Democracy in the USA. He is also author of five books, including Theory-Thinking and Engineering-Thinking: Overstepping and Demarcation Between Two Thinking-Modes (Shanghai, 2002), and Marxism, China and Globalization (2nd edition, Berlin, 2019).

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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Michael Forman is Associate Professor of social and political theory at the University of Washington-Tacoma, USA. He is author of Nationalism and the International Labor Movement: The Idea of the Nation in Anarchist and Socialist Thought (Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999). His recent work includes “Marcuse in the Crisis of Neoliberal Capitalism: Revisiting the Occupation”, in The Great Refusal (ed. Funke, Lamas, and Wolfson, Temple University Press, 2016). Hans Frambach is Professor at the Faculty of Economics—Schumpeter School of Business and Economy for Microeconomics and History of Economic Thought at the Bergische Universität-Wuppertal, Germany. His research focuses on history of economic thought, Catholic social encyclicals and behavioural economics. He earned his Ph.D. in economics at Dortmund University in 1992, and his habilitation thesis of 1999, Arbeit im ökonomischen Denken (Work in Economic Thought), quickly became the standard reference in the field. His latest works include Basiswissen Mikroökonomie (Microeconomics Principles,5th edn, Stuttgart, 2019), and Die Wirtschaftsideen des Vatikans. Impulse für Politik und Gesellschaft (Economic Concepts of the Vatican. Impulses for the Economy, Munich, 2020, with D. Eissrich). Peter Hudis is Professor of humanities and philosophy at Oakton Community College in Illinois, USA. He is author of Marx’s Concept of the Alternative to Capitalism (Brill, 2012) and Frantz Fanon: Philosopher of the Barricades (Pluto Press, 2015). He has published on Hegelian philosophy, Marxist theory, Latin American social movements and critical race theory. He co-edited The Power of Negativity: Selected Writings on the Dialectic in Hegel and Marx, by Raya Dunayevskaya (with Kevin B. Anderson), and The Rosa Luxemburg Reader and The Letters of Rosa Luxemburg (with Annelies Laschitza and George Adler). Currently, he is general editor of The Complete Works of Luxemburg, forthcoming in seventeen volumes. Regletto Aldrich Imbong is Assistant Professor of Philosophy of the University of the Philippines-Cebu. His research interests include the emancipatory politics of Alain Badiou, Marxism, neoliberalism, philosophy of technology and peace studies. He is an activist and current president of the All UP Academic Employees Union-Cebu Chapter, the union for academic workers of the University of the Philippines. He is also

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the current vice-president for the Visayas in the Philosophical Association of the Visayas and Mindanao (PHAVISMINDA). Kaan Kangal is Associate Professor at the Research Center for Studies of Marxist Social Theory at the Philosophy Department of Nanjing University, PR China. His research interests include the history of modern German philosophy and aesthetics between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries, Soviet Marxism and Marx–Engels (MEGA) studies. He is the winner of the 2019 David Riazanov Prize. Most recently he has published Friedrich Engels and the Dialectics of Nature (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020). He is currently working on politics, ideology, aesthetics, philosophy and theology in the young Marx and on Young Hegelianism. Regina Kreide is Professor of political and social theory and the history of ideas at the Justus Liebig University in Giessen, Germany. Her research is in political and social theory and on topics such as justice/injustice, democracy, resistance, security/insecurity, border politics and housing. The Securitization of the Roma in Europe, (edited with Huub van Baar and Ana Ivasiuc) appeared 2018, and her book Global (In-)Justice? (in German) will be published in 2021 Wolfgang Lukas is Professor of the history of modern literature and textual scholarship at Bergische Universität-Wuppertal, Germany. His research in literature and history concentrates on semiotics, literary anthropology, literary constructions of identity and otherness, relations between literature and theoretical discourses, and media science questions. In textual scholarship he focuses on editions of letters, variorum text editions, and aesthetics and logic in digital and multimedia editions. His books include Das Selbst und das Fremde. Epochale Lebenskrisen und ihre Lösung im Werk Arthur Schnitzler (München, 1996) and Anthropologie und Theodizee. Studien zum Moraldiskurs im deutschsprachigen Drama der Aufklärung ca. 1730-177) (Göttingen, 2005). Anne-Rose Meyer is Professor for modern German literature at the Bergische Universität-Wuppertal. Her research interests include literature from the Vormärz and Nachmärz periods pre- and post-1848, twentieth-century and contemporary literature, aspects of intercultural literary studies as well as aesthetics and literary history. Her publications include Jenseits der Norm. Aspekte der Bohèmedarstellung in der französischen und deutschen Literatur. 1830–1910 (Dissertation, 2001); Homo dolorosus. Körper—Schmerz—Ästhetik (Habilitation, 2011); Die

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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

deutschsprachige Kurzgeschichte. Eine Einführung (2014). Her most recent book is Internet—Literatur—Twitteratur. Erzählen und Lesen im Medienzeitalter. Perspektiven für Forschung und Unterricht (2019). Ana María Miranda Mora holds a doctorate in political philosophy from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) in Mexico City. She has studied political philosophy and feminism in Mexico City, Madrid, Bochum and Berlin. Her research and teaching focuses on political and social philosophy, classical German philosophy especially Hegel, decolonizing and postcolonial feminism, and ethics. Currently, she is teaching “Gender and Queer Studies” at Alice Salomon Hochschule in Berlin. Prabhat Patnaik has been a member of the economics faculty at the University of Cambridge, U. and at Jawaharlal Nehru University, India, where he is currently Professor Emeritus. He has written a number of books and articles in macroeconomics, development economics and political economy. His books include Accumulation and Stability Under Capitalism, The Value of Money, Re-Envisioning Socialism, and (coauthored with Utsa Patnaik) A Theory of Imperialism. His latest book (co-authored with Utsa Patnaik) is Capital and Imperialism: Theory, History and the Present, published in 2021. Mattia Luigi Pozzi holds a Ph.D. in philosophy from the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan, Italy, where he currently collaborates with the Institute of Philosophy. His fields of research are philosophy of history, and German philosophy of the nineteenth century, e.g. Schelling, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, with a focus on Young Hegelianism (e.g. Bruno and Edgar Bauer, Max Stirner. He has a particular interest in the category of “the comic” for its aesthetic, metaphysical and political value. He is author of several articles and of the book L’erede che ride. Parodia ed etica della consumazione in Max Stirner (Milan, 2014). Smail Rapic is Professor of philosophy at the Bergische UniversitätWuppertal, Germany. He has written on Marx and Engels in Subjektive Freiheit und Soziales System. Positionen der kritischen Gesellschaftstheorie von Rousseau bis zur Habermas/Luhmann-Kontroverse (2008), in the anthologies he has edited: Habermas und der Historische Materialismus (2014), and Jenseits des Kapitalismus (2020). Since 2016, he has been organizing a series of workshops on “Ways out of Capitalism?”

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Sean Sayers is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Kent and Visiting Professor of Philosophy at Peking University. He has written extensively on many areas of philosophy from a Hegelian-Marxist perspective. His books include Marx and Alienation (2011), Plato’s Republic: An Introduction (1999), Marxism and Human Nature (1998), Reality and Reason (1985), and Hegel, Marx and Dialectic (with Richard Norman, 1980). His work has been translated into many languages, and he has held visiting appointments in USA, Australia, Turkey and China. He was one of the founders of Radical Philosophy (1972), and he founded the online Marx and Philosophy Review of Books (2010). Marco Solinas holds the National Scientific Qualification as Associate Professor of Political Philosophy from 2013 and is currently research fellow in political philosophy at University of Milan, focusing on critical theory and social philosophy. He studied philosophy at the University of Florence, Nottingham University and Humboldt Universität zu Berlin, and received his Ph.D. at the University of Florence in 2004. He has published articles in international journals and has edited and co-edited l special issues and books. He is author Via Platonica zum Unbewussten (Wien-Berlin: Turia und Kant, 2012) and From Aristotle’s Teleology to Darwin’s Genealogy (London-New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). Heinz Sünker is Rudolf-Carnap-Senior-Professor at the Bergische Universität-Wuppertal. He studied German philology, philosophy, Protestant theology and pedagogy at the Universities of Münster and Heidelberg. His research interests include western Marxism/critical theory, theory and history of social work and social policy, sociology of education, childhood studies, Fascism and resistance. His recent publications include Theodor W. Adorno. Aktualität und Perspektiven seiner Kritischen Theorie (Westfälisches Dampfboot, Münster, 2020) and Kinder, Technik und das Digitale (ed. with R. Baches-Chyrek, J. Moran-Ellis, Ch. Röhner, Budrich: Opladen/Toronto, 2021).

Abbreviations

MECW MEGA MEW

Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. Collected Works in 50 volumes. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1975–2010 (series complete). Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Gesamtausgabe. Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1972– (series in progress). Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Werke. Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1956–68 (series complete).

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction Smail Rapic

After the end of so-called actually existing socialism in eastern Europe, Friedrich Engels was largely forgotten in German-speaking academic and public life. The interest in Marx, re-ignited in the wake of the 2008 world financial crisis, did not spread to his contributions to the Marxist tradition. Only on the occasion of his 200th birthday did a series of innovative research contributions appear. The decades-long lack of interest in Engels in the German-speaking world was due in no small measure to the notion, which became entrenched under the influence of some well-known authors, that Engels—unlike Marx himself—had provided the impetus for the dogmatization of Marxism in “actually existing socialist” states. According to this widespread view, Marxism was really an “Engels-ism”.1 The first part of the following chapter outlines the origin of this view of Engels. I then critically discuss how it was updated by Ingo Elbe and Samuel Salzborn, before turning to recent research exploring the connection of science and

S. Rapic (B) Bergische Universität Wuppertal, Wuppertal, Germany e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 T. Carver and S. Rapic (eds.), Friedrich Engels for the 21st Century, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-97138-0_1

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politics in Engels’s publications. This research contradicts the thesis that his thinking has a fundamentally dogmatic character. Furthermore, works published on the occasion of the Engels bicentenary, which consider his role in the socialist movement, fundamentally challenge the prevailing view that there is a direct link between Engels’s journalistic-political activities and “actually existing socialism”. Finally, I provide a brief overview of an innovative anthology that treats the intersections between Engels’s writings and the literature of his time, assessing his literary impact.

Controversies in Recent German-Language Interpretations of Engels Is “Marxism” an “Engels-Ism”? The term “Marxism” emerged in the 1870s as a hostile designation within the socialist movement.2 Marx and Engels themselves initially used it with critical undertones. Its widespread use as an affirmative self-designation since the 1880s can be traced back to Karl Kautsky and Eduard Bernstein. Engels made this sense of the term his own, although not without reservations. In 1887 Engels described his role in his collaboration with Marx as follows: As a consequence of the division of labour that existed between Marx and myself, it fell to me to present our views in the periodical press, and, therefore, particularly in the fight against opposing views, in order that Marx should have time for the elaboration of his great main work. This made it necessary for me to present our views for the most part in a polemical form, in opposition to other views.3

Engels’s journalistic activities helped the “Marxian school of history”4 to have a formative influence on the socialist movement. His greatest success was the pamphlet Anti-Dührung, which first appeared in a series of articles in Vorwärts [Forward], the newspaper of the Sozialdemokratischen Arbeiterpartei Deutschlands [Social-Democratic Workers Party of Germany] (1877–1878). Three chapters of this work were subsequently published in a separate edition under the title of Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (French in 1880, German in 1882). V.I. Lenin counted AntiDührung among the “handbooks for every class-conscious worker”.5 That view became canonical in the “actually existing socialist” countries

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of eastern Europe. The editor’s introduction to the Anti-Dühring in Vol. I/27 of the Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe, published in East Berlin in 1988, described it as an authoritative compendium of Marxism: “In the unity of philosophical, economic, and socialist theories”, it reflects “the general structure and internal logic of the scientific worldview of the working class”.6 However, in History and Class Consciousness (1923), Georg Lukács took a decidedly opposed position to Lenin’s claims that the common “views” of Marx and Engels were “most clearly and fully expounded”7 in the latter’s Anti-Dühring and in Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy (1888). Lukács argues there that Engels fell short of Marx’s understanding of social practice in the “Theses on Feuerbach”8 : Marx had stated that the “chief defect of all previous existing materialism” was its conceiving “reality … only in the form of the object” and not as “human sensuous activity, practice” (MECW 5, 4). In his own Feuerbach text, Engels cited the fact that “we are able to prove the correctness of our conception of a natural phenomenon by bringing it about ourselves, producing it out of its conditions”, as a decisive argument against sceptical doubt concerning an “exhaustive cognition” of the world (MECW 26, 367). Lukács infers from the key role that Engels attributes to modern experimental natural science, and to its technical applications in our cognition of the world, that Engels conceives society as a domain of reality pervaded by causal laws that social technologists can harness and control. In History and Class Consciousness, Lukács regards this as a naturalistic reduction of the concept of social practice, and thus as a relapse into the older materialism criticized by Marx in his “Theses on Feuerbach”, that is, a materialism that conceives of reality under the form of the object.9 This interpretation of Engels, which Lukács revised in the 1967 preface to the new edition of History and Class Consciousness,10 is at first glance supported by the publication of Engels’s Nachlaß manuscript on the Dialectics of Nature (1925). Lukács’s view was also subsequently propagated by well-known western authors after the Second World War. According to Jean-Paul Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960), the later Engels advocates a monism that levels the categorical difference between nature and society, and, by recourse to natural laws, wants to “steer” “human history from the outside”.11 And in his much-respected book Der Begriff der Natur in der Lehre von Marx [The Concept of Nature in Marx] (1962), Alfred Schmidt

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agrees with the view that Engels failed to attain the intellectual level of Marx’s “Theses on Feuerbach”. The philosophy of Engels’s later years, Schmidt claims, falls foul of the “verdict” by which he had declared the materialism of the eighteenth century to be obsolete in his “Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy” (1844): it “merely posited Nature instead of the Christian God as the Absolute confronting Man” (MECW 3, 419).12 Ludwig Landgrebe speaks of a “degeneration” of Marxist theories or theoretical approaches in Engels: the latter conceives of human history as a “mechanical development” that paved the way for the “dogmatic consolidation of the Marxist position” in Lenin and his followers.13 Albrecht Wellmer makes the same allegation of a “naturalization of history”.14 On this line of reception, Engels’s self-declared task of “present[ing] our opinions in the periodical press” (MECW 26, 427), and of drawing in non-academic readers, is taken as a sign that he had little sense of the subtleties of Marx’ theoretical achievements. Engels’s popularization of these in his later publications supposedly exalted the natural sciences because of his naïve conformity to the Zeitgeist and thus abetted the ideological function of “Marxism” in “actually existing socialist” states. Elbe’s and Salzborn’s Critique of Engels Ingo Elbe claims there are three points of connection for an “ideologized and restricted reception of Marx” in Engels’s work: (1) the reduction of the concept of social practice to the “experimental activity in the natural sciences”—this accords with Lukács’s influential, but later revised, critique of Engels in History and Class-Consciousness; (2) the “historicist interpretation” of Marx’s Capital; which Elbe, drawing upon the interpretation in the “new Marx-reading” (including Helmut Reichelt, Hans Georg Backhaus, Michael Heinrich, among others), but giving it a polemical and pointed expression, reckons to be a serious misunderstanding; (3) an inadequate theory of the state which applies a “personal definition of class rule acquired from pre-capitalist forms of society” to the bourgeois state and thus fails to sufficiently account for anonymous forms of power.15 This theory, however, was fertile ground for Lenin’s concept of the state, which he used to justify the Bolsheviks’ repressive rule after the October revolution.16 On point (1) Elbe vacillates between two different positions in justifying the allegation of a naturalistic reduction of the concept of practice

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in Engels. He puts forward a radical critique with the claim that Engels was closely attached to the scientism of his times and therefore shifted “the emphasis from a theory of social practice to a contemplativereflective theory of development that paved the way for a mechanistic and fatalistic conception of historical materialism”.17 Elbe thus reiterates—but without mentioning his name—Lukács’s position in History and Class Consciousness which had claimed that the prominence that Engels ascribes to natural-scientific experiments, for our cognition of the world, reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of the Marxist concept of social practice, because experimentation is “the most purely contemplative comportment”.18 Lukács corrects this interpretation of Engels in the 1967 forward to History and Class Consciousness when he notes that modern experimental natural science in no way merely observes the phenomena of nature but systematically produces experimental conditions, with the goal of investigating technically applicable causal relations. The knowledge and control yielded by this can lead human beings out of their powerlessness in the face of nature, and this itself—according to Lukács in 1967—is a form of social practice.19 Elbe implicitly draws close to Lukács’s self-correction in the 1967 foreword by relativizing his claim that Engels provided the impetus for a “mechanistic and fatalistic conception of historical materialism” by indicating “ambivalences and practical-philosophical motives” in the latter’s Feuerbach text, in Anti-Dühring, and in his later letters.20 In the passage in Anti-Dühring which Elbe refers to, Engels describes the projected socialist society as follows: The whole sphere of the conditions of life which environ man, and which have hitherto ruled man, now comes under the dominion and control of man, who for the first time becomes the real, conscious lord of nature, because he has now become master of his own social organisation … The extraneous objective forces that have hitherto governed history pass under the control of man himself. Only from that time will man himself, with full consciousness, make his own history. (MECW 25, 270)

What Elbe sees as the “ambivalences” in Engels’s late work emerges from his approving rendition of Charles Taylor’s thesis that “MarxistLeninism” had united “incompatibles”, “an extreme voluntarism … with the most thoroughgoing determinism”. Taylor considers the leading socialists’ project of planning and directing future society as extreme

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voluntarism, and he sees the conviction that this can only happen, through insight into the causal laws that permeate social reality, as an extreme determinism. Elbe traces the “paradox of connecting voluntarism and determinism” in “Marxist-Leninism” back to a half-baked amalgamation of the inclination towards a naturalistic reduction of the concept of practice with genuinely practical-philosophical motives in Engels’s late work. While Elbe wants to corroborate his thesis that “Marxism” is really an “Engels-ism”,21 Taylor locates the “error”, as he deems the entanglement of voluntarism and determinism, already in Marx.22 The above-cited passage from Anti-Dühring picks up Marx’s central statement about the course of history in general in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852): “Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past” (MECW 11, 103). Engels gives this phrase a fresh twist by distinguishing future socialist society from all previous ones: there human beings will first be able to “make” their “own history” “with full consciousness” on the basis of the knowledge and control of the “laws of [their] own social action” (MECW 25, 270). The parallel that Engels draws between these laws and natural laws is prefigured in Marx. In the afterwards to the second edition of Capital (1873), Marx cites approvingly the claim of a Russian reviewer that he viewed “the social movement as a process of natural history, governed by laws not only independent of human will, consciousness and intelligence, but rather, on the contrary, determining that will, consciousness and intelligence” (MECW 35, 18). Jürgen Habermas takes this as evidence that Marx “does not distinguish between the logical status of the natural sciences and critique”, that is, critical social theory.23 This is akin to Taylor’s view that the amalgamation of voluntarism and determinism in “Marxist-Leninism” has its origin in Marx himself. Elbe characterizes the statement that Engels is the sole author of the “ideological and restricted reception of Marx” in Marxist-Leninism as erroneous. This reception should “rather be conceived as the elaboration, systematization, and foregrounding of the ideological content in Marx’s work—within the framework of [its] reception by Engels and the epigones”.24 Yet if the root of the ideological content of “MarxistLeninism” is already to be sought in Marx, then we can no longer call this “Engels-ism”—which Elbe nonetheless does. Thus an inconsistency

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in his argument comes to the fore in his vacillation between a catchy and a nuanced critique of Engels. In what follows, I will show that there are also incoherencies in his assessment of Engels’s reading of Marx’s Capital and in his understanding of the state. Regarding (2), the “new Marx reading” that emerged in the 1960s in and around Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer corrected the previously prevailing conviction about the pathbreaking significance of Engels’s commentaries on Marx’s critique of political economy. In his review of Marx’s A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859), Engels pointed out its methodological proximity to Hegel’s Logic, and he ties this to the thesis that Marx’s “logical” reconstruction of economic categories is a “reflection” of the historical genesis of these categories, but purged of “interfering contingencies” (MECW 16, 475). On this reading, a real historical process corresponds to the thinking in Marx’s critique that runs from the category of the exchange value of goods through the concept of money and on to capital. Engels adheres to this interpretation in his “Supplement” to Volume III of Marx’s Capital (1894), which he compiled from the Nachlaß manuscripts and also partly edited independently. According to Marx’s Critique of Political Economy, the exchange value of a commodity is determined by the labour-power that must be expended as labour-time in order to offer the commodity to interested parties (MECW 29, 277, 308, 320).25 We read in Engels’s “Supplement” to Capital, Volume III, that during the “whole period of peasant natural economy”, goods were exchanged for equivalents whose production required the same expenditure of time and energy (MECW 37, 885). Engels presents a logical reconstruction of the historical transition, from a natural economy to price-determined commodity-exchange, (MECW 37, 884) in the foundational function of exchange-value for the concept of money as the general equivalent within useful goods in Marx’s critique of political economy (MECW 35, 80–81). Helmut Reichelt points out that Engels’s historicist interpretation of Marx’s logical method is irreconcilable with the programmatic statement, in the posthumously published draft “Introduction” to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1857), that it would be “inexpedient and wrong to present the economic categories successively in the order in which they played the determining role in history” (MECW 28, 44).26 Marx counts the concept of exchange value, which he adopted from classical political economy, among the “objective forms of thought”

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of bourgeois-capitalist society (MECW 35, 87, translation modified), because it contains the assumption that human labour has a monetary value in itself that must be renumerated (MECW 35, 48–9, 51, 70). This view was alien to the slave traders of antiquity; rather, it is bound to bourgeois forms of thought, formulated in a paradigmatic fashion by John Locke. His conception was of every human being as a person with a right to bodily integrity and a basic freedom of movement, who is accordingly the owner of their labour-power (MECW 35, 87 f., 95, 329, Theorien über den Mehrwert, MEW 26/1, 331). Engels’s claim that the category of exchange value already guided natural exchange thus contradicts Marx’s explicit location of this category in bourgeois capitalism. Reichelt does not, however, regard Engels’s historicist interpretation of Marx’s Critique of Political Economy as a flat-out misunderstanding. He cites Marx’s statement that his logical method must be supplemented by a “historical analysis” (MECW 28, 388).27 Marx had no objection to Engels’s review of his A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy—it was published in the journal he edited, Das Volk.28 According to Hans-Georg Backhaus, there is “no getting around the conclusion that Marx had at least ‘flirted’ with logical-historical constructions”.29 The perspective of the “new Marx reading” [Neue Marx-Lektüre] has also been accepted in anglophone scholarship. Christopher Arthur explains the fact that Marx withheld the 1857 “Introduction” to the Critique of Political Economy, which emphasizes the difference between the logical reconstruction of its categories and world-historical developments (see above), by saying that he remained undecided “about the relevance of his logical arrangement of the categories for historical research”.30 As the “Introduction” was first published in a definitive German edition in 1939, the reception of Marx’s Capital was thoroughly influenced by Engels’s historicist reading until well into the twentieth century. While the “new Marx reading” provides a nuanced view of the tensions between Engels’s historicist interpretation and Marx’s authorial intentions, Elbe accuses Engels of a “vulgar empiricism” that gave the impetus to a “socio-technological concept of emancipation” in Marxist-Leninism. On this reading, Engels played an essential role in distorting “Marxist communism” into “actually existing socialism”.31 In his “Critique of

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the Gotha Programme”, a document of the Socialist Workers Party of Germany (1875), Marx distinguishes between two phases of “communist society” (MECW 24, 84f.). In the first, through labour one acquires a claim to goods whose production required an equivalent expenditure of labour. The distribution of goods in that phase follows the principle of the exchange of equivalents which, according to Engels’s “Supplement” to Capital, Volume IIII, had already governed the natural economy. Marx considered this principle imperfect from a normative point of view, because it does not take into account the unequal physical and intellectual endowments of individuals. Following the principle of the exchange of equivalents, when someone can achieve more than others due to their robust physical constitution or above-average intellectual capacities, they thereby acquire a claim to greater wealth (MECW 24, 84f.). Marx saw this as an unwarranted privilege, because a superior physical or intellectual endowment is not a merit in itself. In the second phase of communist society envisaged by Marx, such privileging is to be abolished by the principle, “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs!” (MECW 24, 87) This principle not only includes compensation for disadvantages arising from below-average performance through no fault of one’s own, but it can also be used to justify allowances to families with several children as the only way to create equality of opportunity for children and youth raised in familial care. The second phase of communist society presupposes that the hitherto prevailing scarcity of essential goods has finally been overcome through an increase in economic productivity (MECW 24, 84f.). Elbe bases his accusation that Engels had paved the way for a “sociotechnological concept of emancipation” on the fact that the “Socialism” section of Anti-Dühring only discusses the first phase of communism as described by Marx where economic planning is directed by the principle of the exchange of equivalents (MECW 25, 294 f., cf. MECW 24, 87). According to Marx’s “Critique of the Gotha Programme”, such economic planning has not yet abandoned the “horizon of bourgeois right” which historically precedes communist society (MECW 24, 87). It is no accident, then, that Anti-Dühring does not consider Marx’s critical reservations concerning this economic planning in which bourgeois rights remain in effect. By locating the principle of the exchange of equivalents in the natural economy Engels implicitly contradicts Marx’s view that this is rooted in the bourgeois understanding of every individual

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as a person and thus as the owner of their labour-power. Elbe infers from this that Engels views the exchange of equivalents as a supra-temporal standard of justice. This, he claims, reveals a “significant disproportion between the constant emphasis on the ‘historical’ [by Engels] on the one hand and the absence of a historically specified and socio-theoretically reflected concept of objectivity on the other”32 ; Engels ignores Marx’s insight that the principle of the exchange of equivalents only became established in bourgeois capitalism. By accusing Engels of having marginalized “Marxist communism” through his “socio-technological concept of emancipation” by means economic planning guided by the exchange of equivalents, Elbe takes the absence of the second phase of communism, as conceived by Marx, in Anti-Dühring as expressing a difference in principle between the two authors’ views on future communism. An objection, however, to this interpretation is that Marx’s “Critique of the Gotha Programme” was first published after his death by Engels (1891). Since Engels publicized Marx’s conception of the two phases of communist society, it cannot be inferred from the restricted account that he gives to the first phase, in the “Socialism” section of AntiDühring, that Engels rejects the principle of “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs”. The political intent of AntiDühring explains the lack of consideration given to this principle. Socialist economic planning, directed by the principle of the exchange of equivalents, could appear to be a plausible goal to then-contemporary readers, and thus one capable of being realized in the near future. But the project of a communist society that satisfies the needs of all its members and knows no privileges could therefore seem utopian. If in Anti-Dühring Engels had included the second phase envisaged by Marx, it would have been difficult for him to reprint the socialism section under the title Socialism: Utopian and Scientific. If Elbe’s claim that Engels neglects the historically specific economic relations is correct, then Engels would also be violating his own guiding methodological thesis that the “historical” sciences which investigate the social “conditions of human life” cannot bring to light any transtemporally valid truths (MECW 25, 82). By including Engels’s reading of Marx’s critique of political economy in his accusation of promoting an “ideological and restricted reception of Marx”,33 Elbe presupposes that Capital has a coherent theoretical architectonic structure.

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However, Georg Lohmann has worked out an unresolved tension between the logical development of the categories and the historical aspects of Capital.34 Engels’s reading of Capital can be understood as a reaction to this. In the chapter on “so-called primitive accumulation” in the first volume of Capital, Marx describes the appropriation of the village commons by local feudal lords in England since the last third of the fifteenth century (MECW 35, 708–723). The arable land that had previously been cultivated communally was converted into sheep pastures for the flourishing Flemish textile manufacturers, thus advancing the emergent capitalist mode of production (MECW 35, 708). Marx characterizes the feudal lords’ appropriation of the village commons as a “usurpation” (MECW 35, 708). But this appropriation usually did not involve any explicit breach of the law, as the peasants were the subjects of their respective feudal lords. When Marx makes the accusation of usurpation, he applies a normative standard that he places over and beyond positive law. Such a measure can be gleaned from Locke’s Second Treatise of Government (1689): the definition given there of the human being as the owner of their own self, and thereby of their labourpower, also includes each person’s right to the fruits of their labour. Locke infers from this that by cultivating a piece of land one acquires a claim to possession that should be respected by others—unless one produces a surplus that is allowed to spoil (Second Treatise, §§ 27, 38). In the normative perspective of the Second Treatise, the feudal lords’ seizure of the commonly cultivated acreage is thereby illegitimate. But Marx cannot justify his charge of usurpation by simply referring to Locke since he counts Locke’s definition of each human being as the owner of their own self among the objective forms of thought that characterize bourgeois capitalism (cf. MEW 26/1, 331). As Lohmann points out, the logical development of the categories in Marx’s Capital thus does not provide an argumentative basis for countering the objection that the charge of usurpation is anachronistic: Marx applies a normative standard of subsequent bourgeois capitalism to relations between feudal actors.35 Lohmann sees this argumentative break in Capital as proving the validity of Marx’s programmatic statement that his “method shows the points where historical observation must come in”, Marx concretizes this by saying that “bourgeois economy as a mere historical form of the production process points beyond itself towards earlier historical modes of production” (MECW 28, 388–389).36 In the historical parts of the

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Marxist critique of political economy, bourgeois capitalism is thus to be embedded in a developmental history of the forms of production and their institutional and normative framework. Marx reproduces the “complaints” of those peasants affected with the accusation of the usurpation of the communal land by the feudal lords in the chapter on “primitive accumulation” (MECW 35, 708 f.), and he makes their “normative claims and self-interpretations” into his own.37 He thus confers a normative dignity on their factual protest. In doing so, he must implicitly take recourse to Locke’s definition of the human being as the owner of their own self. The objection that Marx’s normative critique of the feudal lords is anachronistic can only be countered if it can be shown that Locke’s concept of the person is already contained in nuce within the normative framework of the feudal economy. Lohman rightly asserts that it is a desideratum of Marx’s Capital that the historical genesis of the normative standards used in the chapter on “original accumulation” is not discussed anywhere there.38 Engels’s historicist reading takes this desideratum into account. It includes the programme of exhibiting progress in the developmental history of social norms; this moves towards a “really human morality” in future communism (MECW 25, 88). Engels illustrates his claim that the principle of the exchange of equivalents already guided the natural economy using the example of the medieval peasantry who had traded their surplus for handicraft products, and, he claims, agreed that a trade is fair when the goods exchanged required the same amount of labour (MECW 37, 885). This standard of justice, explicitly formulated by Locke in the Second Treatise (§ 50), includes the conviction that one acquires a right to property through one’s labour, from which it follows that the seizure of the village commons by the feudal lords is to be regarded as usurpation. Engels’s description of exchange without money in the Middle Ages can thus be read as a contribution to the genesis of the bourgeois definition of every human being as the owner of their own self. Here it is of secondary importance whether or not the principle of the exchange of equivalents guided the natural economy from the outset, as Engels maintained. Elbe’s accusation that Engels’ historicist reading of Marx’s Critique of Political Economy reveals a “vulgar empiricism” ignores the fact that the reconstruction of the historical evolution of normative standards that Engels envisages is indispensable for a social history with a critical impulse. Such a reconstruction cannot stop at the description and explanation of social facts but must supply standards for their normative appraisal.

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Engels’s thesis that a “really human morality” will only be able to take shape under communism can be seen as a further index that he by no means rejected the principle “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs”, as Elbe assumes, but rather that he considered it inopportune to discuss this in Anti-Dühring. Since Engels was convinced that a “really human morality” would only be “possible” under communism (MECW 25, 88), he must have feared that many readers would have seen the radical demand for equality in this principle not as a normative ideal but as overblown. Regarding (3), according to Elbe, the deficiencies in Engels’s reading of Marx’s critique of political economy result in a distorted picture of the bourgeois-capitalist state that could have been used to justify repression in “actually existing socialism”. He claims that Engels did not have a clear view of the dividing lines between bourgeois capitalism and pre-capitalist forms of society on the one hand and communism on the other.39 He sees Engels’s key mistake as locating the principle of the exchange of equivalents in the natural economy and thereby ascribing to it a transtemporal status, as is reflected in his socio-technological understanding of communism. That mistake, according to Elbe, was reproduced in Engels’s understanding of the state: he puts the power structures of bourgeois capitalism on a par with personal class rule in pre-capitalist forms of society. This meant Lenin could declare that, among the main tasks of socialism, was the replacement of the bourgeois-capitalist governing elites with central planning authorities, which would organize the socialist exchange of equivalents.40 However, when Elbe claims that Lenin’s centralism is a “consistent continuation” of Engels’s understanding of the state, he overlooks the fact that Engels declares the “democratic republic” to be an “inevitable necessity” in “our modern conditions” (MECW 26, 271). And Elbe overlooks the fact that Engels’s long-time follower Kautsky had rejected Lenin’s centralism, too, by invoking Engels’s own position. And Elbe overlooks Lenin’s claim to have established a “dictatorship of the proletariat” after the October revolution.41 Samuel Salzborn takes a contrary perspective to Elbe in justifying the claim that Engels’ understanding of the state could have served as the legitimation for “real existing socialist regimes of coercion”: while Elbe ascribes a socio-technologically restricted concept of emancipation to Engels, Salzborn accuses him of a “utopianism” guided by “wishful

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fantasies”.42 This is revealed, according to Salzborn, in Engel’s prognosis that under socialism “the government of persons is replaced by the administration of things, and by the conduct of processes of production”. Engels claims: “The state is not ‘abolished.’ It dies out ” (MECW 25, 268; the same formulation is used at MECW 24, 321). According to Salzborn, Engels thereby paints a picture of a socialist society “without coercive state apparatus”, which betrays a “naïve belief” in natural human goodness.43 Because of the remoteness to reality of his “misty-eyed anthropology”, Engels’ “utopia of a state that ‘dies out’” unleashed a “raw, unbridled, and uncontrolled violence” that was supposed to first create the precondition, through re-education, for a “peaceful communism” but which, on account of the futility of this undertaking, vanished into an unforeseeably distant future.44 In his critique Salzborn ignores the specific sense in which Engels uses the concept of the state in the political prognosis discussed above. Engels distinguishes between “political rule” and “social administration”, that is, the administrative tasks of public institutions (MECW 25, 167, translation modified). Like Max Weber, Engels notes the increasing influence of bourgeois lawyers who perform administrative tasks in the newly centralized states (“On the decline of feudalism and the emergence of national states”, MECW 26, 561). His prognosis that the state will die out under socialism means, speaking concretely, that political rule will give way to social administration. Engels thereby prolongs the strengthening of the public administration, already visible in the bourgeois state, into the future. However, socialist administration should no longer receive its directives from the governing political elites, but should promote general social interests. Engels’ distinction between political rule and social administration is prefigured in Hegel’s Elements of the Philosophy of Right, which influenced him since his youth. Hegel assigns public administration (under the heading of “police”), as well as the “administration of justice”, not to the state but to “civil society”.45 Salzborn’s claim that Engels naively believes that a socialist society without coercive apparatus could emerge is based on a simple misunderstanding. Engels emphasizes the opposite in his article “On Authority” that “on the one hand, a certain authority, no matter how delegated, and, on the other hand, a certain subordination, are things which, independently of all social organisation, are imposed upon us” (MECW 23, 424).

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The Scientific and Political Function of Engels’s Publications In his introduction essay to his edited collection of Engels’s texts entitled Friedrich Engels oder: Wie ein “Cotton-Lord” den Marxismus erfand [Friedrich Engels or: How a ‘Cotton Lord’ invented Marxism], Michael Krätke sets out to refute the claim that “Marxism” was really an “Engelsism”.46 His choice of title reveals that Krätke agrees with the thesis that the use of the term “Marxism” as a positive self-characterization owes its historical effectivity to Engels. He disputes, however, that the “actually existing” socialist party dogmas should be conceived as the consistent continuation of Engels’s popularization of Marxist theories. Like John O’Neill47 before him, Krätke emphasizes the undogmatic character of Engels’s thinking. Lenin’s canonization of Anti-Dühring as one of the “handbooks for every class-conscious worker” is divergent, as Krätke stresses, from the self-understanding of its author.48 Engels rejects Dühring’s claim to have discovered irrefutable truths, and he makes it clear that he himself does not aim at “presenting another system as an alternative to Herr Dühring’s ‘system’” (MECW 25, 6f., 28 f.). He concedes that he can only take a position on some of the natural-scientific and legal themes, introduced by Dühring, in the role of a “dilettante”, and he cites approvingly Rudolf Virchow’s admission that even a professional natural scientist is only a “semi-initiate” in areas outside his specialization (MECW 25, 7). And in Engels’s introductions to the new editions and translations of his and Marx’s writings, Engels repeatedly emphasizes their relation to their times and corrects earlier misapprehensions about contemporary developmental tendencies.49 Krätke outlines his guiding thesis that Engels invented Marxism but by no means launched an “Engels-ism”, by starting from Engels’s letter to Marx’s daughter Laura Lafargue of 11 June 1889, where he claims that their enemies “will be mad they gave us that name” [= ‘Marxists’] (MECW 48, 338).50 Engels saw in the spread of the polemical term “Marxism” the chance to re-appropriate it and to make it appealing by using the title “scientific socialism”. The “Marxists” should henceforth step forth with the claim that they are drawing political conclusions from the “most advanced form of social science”.51 According to Krätke, Engels “invented” Marxism by making it synonymous with “scientific socialism”, thus giving it a broad appeal to the scientifically inclined nineteenth century.

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The point of Krätke’s argument is that in Engels this publicly effective re-appropriation of the polemical term “Marxism” was also accompanied by a critical application. If insight into the irrevocable provisional nature of scientific statements gets swallowed up by the endeavour to rally likeminded people in a political struggle, then the “materialist conception of history,” Engels claims, degenerates into a “loud-mouthed phrase”.52 Engels complained to August Bebel, president of the SPD (SocialDemocratic Party of Germany) about the “younger party members” who were dogmatizing his and Marx’s theories, instead of using them as a “guide” for their own independent “study of history.53 In a letter to Florence Kelley-Wischnewetzky of 28 December 1886, he writes: “Our theory is not a dogma but the exposition of a process of evolution” (MECW 47, 541). Engels’s letter to Conrad Schmidt of 27 October 1890, which Krätke includes in his collection, shows, however, that in his publications Engels sometimes propounds aspects of the theories in a strikingly one-sided way so as to create a political impact. Following Hegel, he defines the relationship between cause and effect in his letter to Schmidt as dialectical and thus always embedded in forms of interaction.54 However, in his foreword to the German edition of Marx’s The Poverty of Philosophy (1884), he traces the advent of communism mono-causally back to the imminent “inevitable collapse of the capitalist mode of production” (MECW 26, 282). In the letter to Schmidt mentioned above, he accuses his contemporary critics, who charge him and Marx with economic determinism, with a superficial understanding of their writings (MECW 49, 63). It should have been clear to these critics that his and Marx’s evocation of the unavoidable downfall of capitalism should be taken as political rhetoric: if they were really convinced of the inevitability of capitalism’s downfall, their political engagement, which forced them into exile, would be superfluous (MECW 49, 63). Engels thus lets Schmidt know that his publications have a double set of addressees. He expects that intellectually aware readers will perceive the political function of the full-throated claim, directed at the broader public, that capitalism inevitably gives way to socialism: It is meant to spur on the victims of capitalist power structures, and the followers of socialist ideas, to persevere in the struggle against capitalism. And while Engels wants to convey assurances to the non-scientific public, who are receptive to his writings, that the victory of socialism is only a matter of time, this prognosis also contains a hidden message for his intellectual

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readers: there is a realistic chance of overcoming capitalism if the struggle against it is carried through consistently. Jürgen Herres’s contribution to the anthology Friedrich Engels. Das rot-schwarze Chamäleon [Friedrich Engels. The Red–Black Chameleon] corroborates the findings of Krätze’s argument, namely that the popularizing tendency in Engels does not go hand-in-hand with a dogmatization of “Marxism”. In the title of his article, Herres cites the heading of a list of publications that Engels made in 1891: “My Immortal Works”.55 Engels clearly speaks of his “immortal works” with a “fine irony” as two important, although then-unpublished, texts are not on this list: the posthumously edited and book-titled The German Ideology, a miscellany of manuscripts written together with Marx, and his much later manuscripts collected as the Dialectics of Nature.56 The heading of the list reveals a critical distance from his own productions57 : Engels himself admits that he can hardly hope that his “works” achieve “immortality” when such key texts as the German Ideology and the Dialectics of Nature are not yet ripe for publication. The dogmatization of Marxism in “actually existing socialism” ignores Engels’s critical self-appraisal: only in the twentieth century did the transformation of his writings and manuscripts into “coherent ‘works’” by forceful “dis-ambiguation” take place.58 While Engels saw his own productions as an unfinished work in progress, in his editorial work on Marx’s Nachlaß Capital-manuscripts he sought to make these into a well-rounded “work”. He notes in his foreword to Volume III that at the time of Marx’s death only a “first extremely incomplete draft” had been written (MECW 37, 6). And Engels by no means acted simply as an executor of Marx’s Nachlaß manuscripts. He became, as Regina Roth and Carl-Erich Vollgraf point out, co-author of the third volume.59 “Within certain limits, he brought about a degree of explicitness that was not present in Marx’s original drafts”.60 This holds especially true for the most discussed theorem in volume III, “the law of the tendency of the profit rate to fall” (MECW 37, 209). Engels raised this theorem, of whose scope Marx himself remained undecided, to the rank of a law by playing down the factors that Marx discussed which counteract the tendency of the profit rate to fall. It is from Engels that the “oft-quoted passage on a possible disintegration of the capitalist production” stems.61 However, Vollgraf surmises that already in the years before the publication of Volume III, Engels was no longer convinced that capitalism would

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collapse because of the decline in the rate of profit.62 In support of this claim Vollgraf refers to Engels’s letter to Nikolai Danielson of 4 July 1889 where he declares that overproduction, and a general social stagnation due to flagging economic growth, would be the main threat to capitalism (MECW 48, 347).63 Through his “dis-ambiguation” of Marx’s tentative considerations on the tendency of the profit rate to fall, Engels left his readership in the dark, not only concerning Marx’s but also concerning his own doubts about whether or not this would lead to the downfall of capitalism.64 And he apparently did so in order to produce precisely the effect that Volume III of Capital did in fact have: its character as a crafted and complete work with forceful theses, brought about by Engels’s editorial revisions, ignited an intensive academic debate and thus also fired the hopes of the Second International for the imminent disintegration of capitalism.65 Krätke’s, Herres’s, Roth’s and Vollgraf’s innovative contributions to Engels-scholarship, published on the occasion of his bicentenary, thus consist in revealing the politics of the scientific thinking in his publications. The widespread assumption that Engels was the first Marxist dogmatist does not recognize the fact that his publications have political aims bound to their times and circumstances: he viewed them as scientific, historical contributions, themselves open for future revisions, to the cause of social emancipation. Engels’s Role in the Socialist Movement Like Krätke, Christina Morina sees Engels’s journalistic and political assertiveness in the “semantic struggle” for an adequate programme for the contemporary anti-capitalist movement as his decisive contribution to the emergence of Marxism.66 Morina also stresses, however, that this success was only possible because he forged a “network of political alliances” with the younger socialists who “went on to become the founding generation of Marxism” in the 1870s.67 Engels acted as advisor, sometimes also as financier, and thus established personal friendships with several comrades in the movement. His “humane, intellectual, communicative and strategic dexterity” was shown by his capacity to “remain flexible with respect to the premises of Marxism when interacting with local activists and to take into consideration the political practice and the real-world experience of the movement on the ground”.68 Engels’s pragmatism was borne out by the rise of the socialist movement in numerous

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European countries. And it was this pragmatism that led him to warn against those “younger party members” who jeopardized what had been attained by their dogmatization of the premises of Marxism, thus showing they were intent on rounding up disciples instead of being open to new alliances. The pragmatic flexibility that Engels displayed in his journalistic and political interventions meant that after his death he was claimed as the figurehead for heterogeneous and to some degree opposed positions. Engels’s last published text, his introduction to the new edition of Marx’s The Civil War in France (1895), played a prominent role in this. Engels warned there against an armed uprising directed at the dominant system, something that he and Marx had seen as having prospects for success in the Communist Manifesto almost fifty years earlier. Because of advances in military technology, “rebellion in the old style, street fighting with barricades” would have no real chance against regular troops (MECW 27, 517). Under the contemporary conditions of advanced capitalist states, socialist movements were “thriving far better on legal methods than on illegal methods and overthrow” (MECW 27, 522), and “Parliamentary activity” is therefore the central task of socialist and social democratic parties (MECW 27, 521). At the same time, Engels makes it clear that the proletariat and the socialist vanguard retain the “right to revolution” (MECW 27, 521). Following the request of the SPD leadership, Engels refrained from detailing the conditions under which he would advocate a violent, revolutionary uprising.69 He had, however, made this clear in his 1891–1892 article “Socialism in Germany”: if the ruling class proceed with military violence against the socialist movement, this would call for violent resistance, which would have prospects of success as the socialists among the regular troops would take the side of the rebels (MECW 27, 240 f.). At the time Engels was writing his introduction to Marx’s The Civil War in France, the Reichstag was debating a bill initiated by Kaiser Wilhelm II on tightening criminal and press laws. Its advocates claimed that this was the only way to prevent subversive socialist and anarchist activities.70 The SPD leadership feared that were Engels to re-affirm his earlier position on the necessity for revolutionary resistance against violent governmental measures, this would play right into the hands of the proponents of the bill. Engels took these concerns into account and deleted several passages in his manuscript. In correspondence, however,

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he complained that the truncated text could now give the impression that he agreed with those preaching “complete abstention from force”.71 Eduard Bernstein, who managed Engel’s literary Nachlaß, together with August Bebel, argued for a change of course for the SPD in 1898– 1899 by citing Engels’s introduction to Marx’s The Civil War in France, which he called Engels’s “political testament”: The SPD should admit that there is no realistic chance for a revolutionary overthrow of the dominant system and that they should therefore strive for its evolutionary transformation.72 Bernstein took Engels’s admission in the 1895 introduction that the hopes of the Communist Manifesto for an imminent revolutionary uprising turned out to be illusory, thus expressing a basic willingness to adapt to changed historical circumstances. According to Bernstein, the socialist movement should continue this “revisionary line of Marxism”.73 Kautsky objected that Engels had retained the right to revolution in the 1895 introduction, yet he was aware that this text, taken in and of itself, could be read as rejecting an armed uprising.74 The dispute over Engels’s “political testament” took a fresh turn in 1924. David Rjazanov, the director of the Moscow Marx-Engels Institute, was able to see Engels’s original manuscript, and he then publicized the deletions made at the behest of the SPD leadership.75 Rjazanov accused Bernstein of covering up the cuts to the text so as to create the misleading impression that the later Engels had adhered to a “reformism”.76 This “fraud”, Rjazanov claimed, “ruined the life’s work of Marx and Engels. It had to be reconstructed first by Lenin”.77 Engels’s introduction was thereby elevated to the status of an authoritative text whose right or wrong interpretation would decide the future fate of socialism. The Austrian Social Democrats took a middle way between Bernstein’s reformist take on Engels’s introduction and the Bolsheviks’ laying claim to the original manuscript, which they saw as betrayed by the SPD’s reformism, instigated by Bernstein. In their 1926 “Linzer Programme” they advocated a parliamentary path to socialism but retained the right to use violence if the bourgeoisie were to attempt to establish a monarchist or fascist dictatorship.78 Since Engels regarded consideration of concrete circumstances as indispensable to political struggle, irreconcilable political tendencies in the twentieth century—for example, the Bolsheviks and the German Social Democrats after 1918—could lay claim to furthering his and Marx’s intentions. Engels’s characteristically experimental style in his journalistic

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and political activities rules out attempts to declare one particular line of reception to be the only adequate one.

Engels and Literature Engels’s literary activities have hitherto received little scholarly attention. And wrongly, since consideration of these shows not only that they merit scholarly treatment, but also how his lyric and epic poetry, drafts of plays, narrative texts and literary criticism, as well as his engagement with the works of others in his correspondence, served his political and philosophical position-taking. The anthology Friedrich Engels—Produzent, Rezipient und Kritiker von Literatur, edited by Anne-Rose Meyer and Wolfgang Lukas (Bielefeld 2022)—identifies the intersections between Engels’s economic, political and philosophical thought in his literary work. It deals with Engels as a protagonist in the literary life of his time, and also with the reception of Engels as a historic figure in the literature of the German Democratic Republic and the Federal Republic of Germany. These interdisciplinary perspectives, which also take into consideration aesthetic aspects of his work, open up new paths for analysis and interpretation. Future research will have to take this seriously in re-evaluating his literary activity. One object of systematic study is the drama fragment entitled Cola di Rienzi, which Olaf Briese reads in the context of Vormärz (pre1848) oppositional literature as a disguised confrontation with Napoleon. Michael Ansel and Matteo Pozzi’s explorations of Engels’s ironic and verbally aggressive epic verse Der Triumpf des Glaubens [The Triumph of Belief ] reveal its philosophical-diagnostic potential in an exemplary fashion. In Engels’s works of literary criticism—as the contributions of Bernd Füllner and Paul Keckeis make clear—we can make out not only the genesis of a pre-Marxist aesthetics of heteronomy but we can also see how already early on Engels used literature as a social practice in order to stake out independent political positions. As the contributions by Florian Vaßen, Birgit Bublies-Godau and Johanna-Charlotte Horst on The Condition of the Working Class in England show, Engels used literary modes of representation in his scientific and social-critical writings, for example, in the vivid descriptions of living conditions in industrial cities. In terms of their literary and discursive historical context, Engels’s writings can now be situated in the pre- and post-1848 literary periods. In addition to a writing style that synthesizes philosophy and literature, another

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striking feature of these works is their combination of literary and quasisociological modes of depiction, as Wolfgang Lukas Torsten Voß and Martin Bartelmus reveal. Finally, Anne-Rose Meyer gives insights into the reception of Engels in the twentieth century, and thus into the relevance of this historic figure for social critique and political self-positioning in the literatures of the German Federal Republic and the German Democratic Republic.

Overview of the Present Volume The contributions to section 1 “Epistemology and the Philosophy of Nature” defend Engels against the charge that he falls back into a dogmatic metaphysics in assuming that dialectical laws govern the world as a whole. Sean Sayers shows that underlying this charge is a mechanistic worldview incapable of adequately capturing the continuity between natural and human history. Kaan Kangal works out the differences between Engels’s subtle, careful considerations in his Nachlaß manuscript on the Dialectics of Nature and his popularized presentation of this theme in Anti-Dühring; he shows that the reflections in Nachlaß manuscript centre on the phenomenon of emergence. The main thesis of Smail Rapic’s chapter is that the philosophical core of Engels’s “materialist dialectic” was lost in the “dialectical materialism” of “actually existing socialist” party orthodoxy. And Xu Changfu highlights the key role of empiricism in Engels’s understanding of science; philosophy is thereby reduced to the meta-level of reflection on the structures of thought implicitly presupposed in scientific research. Section 2 on “Political Economy” discusses Engels’s independent contributions to this discipline. Hans Frambach stakes out the pioneering features of Engels’s Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy (1844), described by Marx as an “ingenious sketch” (MECW 29, 264), delimiting them from the argumentation concerning the constraints and prejudices of its time. Marco Solinas retraces the development of the theoretical framework of Engels’s critique of capitalism to the beginning of his collaboration with Marx in the mid-1840s. Prabhat Patnaik emphasizes the far-ranging significance of Engels’s thesis, formulated in scattered reflections in his later works, that capitalism can only maintain the dynamics of growth by invading pre-capitalist forms of life, thus leading capitalism in the long run into a systematic crisis.

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In the eponymous section 3, Heinz Sünker and Regina Kreide thematize aspects of Engels’s publications on the “Condition of the Working Class” that are still of striking relevance today. Sünker shows that Engels’s book The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845), hitherto regarded mainly as a milestone in empirical social research, aims to contribute to constituting the proletariat as a self-conscious class. Kreide points out the astonishing relevance of Engels’s “On the Housing Question” (1872) in the face of problematic developments, since the turn of the millennium, in the real estate industry of capitalist countries. Section 4 “Theorizing Power” focuses on the timeliness of Engels’s most striking texts on this topic. Terrell Carver argues that in theorizing women, Engels theorizes men, albeit in an unknowing and exculpatory way. Ana Maria Miranda Mora challenges a reductionist reading of the Marxist base/ superstructure theory, according to which the state is a mere epiphenomenon of economic relations; she establishes links between Engels’s and Marx’s analyses of class domination in the bourgeois state and Michel Foucault’s theory of power. Michael Forman explores the question of which aspects of Engels’s analyses can be carried over to the present, beginning with the fact that the conflict between capitalist internationalism and nationalism, thematized by the later Engels, has flared up again today under changed circumstances. “Engels and Literature”, section 5, concerns Engels’s role as a producer of literature and as an object of literary writing. Based on The Condition of the Working Class in England and the verse epic Triumph of Faith, Wolfgang Lukas and Matteo Pozzi show how deeply socio-economic, socio-critical and philosophical thinking are connected in Engels. By way of example, they also show that Engels uses literary design elements in his theoretical works. Engels’s life and thought, in turn, also became objects of literary design: this is the theme of Anne-Rose Meyer’s chapter. Novels, poems and plays about Engels provide information about how he was received differently in the German Democratic Republic and in the Federal Republic of Germany, and why German-speaking writers have been engaged with Engels for more than a hundred years.

The concluding section 6 “Emancipation – Revolution – Communism” treats the reception of Engels’s thoughts on future socialism in the twentieth century. Peter Hudis considers the extent to which Engels made an independent contribution to the idea of socialism. And Regletto Aldrich

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Imbong discusses echoes of Engelsian positions in French Marxism post-1968 with a particular focus on Alain Badiou. In a brief “Afterword: Whither Engels?” Terrell Carver considers this protean figure with a hugely varied past and then looks forward to his exciting future.

Notes 1. See Sven-Erik Liedman, “Engelsismus,” in Historisch-kritisches Wörterbuch des Marxismus, vol. 3, ed. Wolfgang Fritz Haug (Hamburg, 1997), column 384–392. 2. On the history of the word “Marxism,” see the article “Marxismus” in Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, vol. 5, ed. Joachim Ritter and Karlfried Gründer (Basel and Stuttgart, 1980), pp. 758– 772. 3. “Preface” to the second edition of The Housing Question, MECW 26, 427. 4. Engels to Kautsky, 20. 9. 1884, MECW 47, 194. 5. Lenin, “Drei Quellen und drei Bestandteile des Marxismus” (1913), in Werke, vol. 19, ed. Lenin (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1965), pp. 3–9, here: 4. English translation from https://www.marxists. org/archive/lenin/works/1913/mar/x01.htm. 6. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Gesamtausgabe. 1. Division: Werke Artikel Entwürfe, vol. 27: Herrn Eugen Dührings Umwälzung der Wissenschaft (Anti-Dühring) (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1988), p. 25. 7. Lenin, “Drei Quellen und drei Bestandteile des Marxismus,” p. 4. English translation from: https://www.marxists.org/archive/ lenin/works/1913/mar/x01.htm. 8. Georg Lukács, Geschichte und Klassenbewusstsein. Studien über marxistische Dialektik, New edition (Neuwied and Berlin, 1968), p. 61 f., 241, cf. 86. 9. Op cit., p. 62. 10. Op cit., p. 19 f. See below. 11. Jean-Paul Sartre, Kritik der dialektischen Vernunft. I. Vol: Theorie der gesellschaftlichen Praxis (Hamburg, 1967), p. 34 f. [= Part A, Section 9]. 12. Alfred Schmidt, Der Begriff der Natur in der Lehre von Marx. Überarb. Neuausgabe (Frankfurt a. M.: 1971), p. 51.

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13. Ludwig Landgrebe, “Das Problem der Dialektik,” in Phänomenologie und Geschichte (Gütersloh, 1968), pp. 82–134, here: 127, 129. 14. Albrecht Wellmer, “Kommunikation und Emanzipation. Überlegungen zur ‘sprachanalytischen’ Wende der kritischen Theorie,” in Theorien des Historischen Materialismus, ed. Urs Jaeggi and Axel Honneth (Frankfurt a. M.: 1977), pp. 465–500, here: 470. 15. Ingo Elbe, Marx im Westen, Die neue Marx-Lektüre in der Bundesrepublik seit 1965 (Berlin, 2010), pp. 14–18, 22 f. 16. Elbe, “Staat der Kapitalisten oder Staat des Kapitals? Rezeptionslinien von Engels’ Staatsbegriff im 20. Jahrhundert,” in “… ins Museum der Altertümer.” Staatstheorie und Staatskritik bei Friedrich Engels, ed. Samuel Salzborn (Baden-Baden, 2012), pp. 155–181, here: 155–162. 17. Op cit., p. 19 f. 18. Lukács, Geschichte und Klassenbewusstsein, p. 242. 19. Op cit., p. 20. 20. Elbe, Marx im Westen, p. 16. 21. Elbe, Marx im Westen, p. 16–18, note 44. 22. Op cit., p. 14; Taylor: Hegel, p. 728. 23. Jürgen Habermas, Erkenntnis und Interesse, with a new afterword (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1973), p. 61. 24. Elbe, Marx im Westen, p. 24. 25. This is congruent with David Ricardo’s understanding of exchange value. See Ricardo, Grundsätze der politischen Ökonomie und der Besteuerung, ed. F. Neumark (Frankfurt a. M., 1972), p. 35. 26. Helmut Reichelt, Zur logischen Struktur des Kapitalbegriffs bei Karl Marx (Frankfurt a. M.: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1970), p. 133. 27. Reichelt, ibid. 28. Christopher J. Arthur, “Engels as Interpreter of Marx’s Economics” in Engels Today. A Centenary Appreciation (Basingstoke and New York, 1996), pp. 173–209, here: 180. 29. Hans-Georg Backhaus, Dialektik der Wertform. Untersuchungen zur Marx’schen Ökonomiekritik (Freiburg, 2011), p. 157. 30. Arthur, “Engels as Interpreter of Marx’s Economics,” p. 186. 31. Elbe, Marx im Westen, p. 19, 21. 32. Op. cit., p. 21. 33. Elbe, Marx im Westen, p. 21.

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34. Georg Lohmann, “Gesellschaftskritik und normativer Maßstab. Überlegungen zu Marx,” in Arbeit, Handlung, Normativität. Theorien des Historischen Materialismus 2, ed. Axel Honneth and Urs Jaeggi (Frankfurt a. M.: 1980), pp. 234–299. 35. Lohmann, “Gesellschaftskritik und normativer Maßstab,” pp. 261, 281 f. 36. Op. cit., p. 280 f. 37. Lohmann, op. cit., p. 260. 38. Op. cit., p. 260 f., 286. 39. Elbe, Marx im Westen, pp. 22–24. 40. Op. cit., p. 22: Elbe, “Staat der Kapitalisten oder Staat des Kapitals?” (note 16), p. 162. 41. Karl Kautsky, The Dictatorship of the Proletariat [1918], trans. H. J. Stenning (Ann Arbor, 1964), p. 44. 42. Samuel Salzborn, “Von der Utopie zur Wissenschaft? Zur Regression des materialistischen Anspruchs in der Staatstheorie von Friedrich Engels,” in “… ins Museum der Altertümer.” Staatstheorie und Staatskritik bei Friedrich Engels (note 16), pp. 13–30, here: 14 f., 24. 43. Op. cit., p. 23. 44. Ibid. 45. Hegel, Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts, §§ 209–249, English translation, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, ed. A. W. Wood and trans. A. B. Nisbet (Cambridge, 2003). On the wide significance with which the word “police” was used from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, see Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, ed. Michel Senellart and trans. Graham Burchell (New York, 2004), pp. 311–332. 46. Michael Krätke, “Friedrich Engels, der erste Marxist” in Friedrich Engels oder: Wie ein “Cotton-Lord” den Marxismus erfand (Berlin, 2020), pp. 9–68, here: 55. 47. “Engels without Dogmatism” in Engels Today, ed. Arthur (note 29), pp. 47–66. 48. Krätke, Friedrich Engels, p. 66, note 94. 49. Op. cit., p. 60. 50. Op. cit., p. 56. 51. Ibid. 52. Engels to August Bebel, 16 March 1892 (cf. Krätke, “Friedrich Engels,” p. 54).

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53. Ibid. 54. MEW 37, 494; MECW 49, 63–4 (cf. Krätke, Friedrich Engels oder: Wie ein “Cotton-Lord” den Marxismus erfand, p. 174). 55. Jürgen Herres, “‘Meine unsterblichen Werke.’ Friedrich Engels als Journalist und Publizist. Ein Überblick,” in Friedrich Engels. Das rot-schwarze Chamäleon, ed. Eberhard Illner, Hans Frambach, and Norbert Koubeck (Darmstadt, 2020), pp. 224–227. 56. Op. cit., p. 24. 57. Op. cit., p. 23. 58. Op. cit., p. 24. 59. Regina Roth, “Reparaturfall Kapital ? Friedrich Engels und die Herausgabe der Bände 2 und 3 des Kapital von Karl Marx,” in Friedrich Engels, ed. Eberhard Illner, Hans A. Frambach, and Norbert Koubeck, pp. 352–371; Carl-Erich Vollgraf, “Mehr als 60 Seiten: Engels’ Zusätze zum 3. Band des ‘Kapital’,” in Engels “Anti-Dühring.” Kontext, Interpretationen, Wirkung, ed. Rolf Hecker and Ingo Stütze (Berlin, 2020), pp. 54–75. 60. Roth, “Reparaturfall Kapital ?,” p. 361. 61. Ibid. Cf. Vollgraf, “Mehr als 60 Seiten,” p. 62 f. 62. Vollgraf, “Mehr als 60 Seiten,” p. 73. 63. Ibid. 64. Roth, “Reparaturfall Kapital ?,” pp. 354, 361. 65. Wilfried Nippel, “Engels über Marx. Biographie als Geschichtspolitik” in Friedrich Engels, ed. Eberhard Illner, Hans A. Frambach, and Norbert Koubeck, pp. 49–67, here: 49, 402, note 7; Vollgraf, “Mehr als 60 Seiten,” p. 63. 66. Morina, “Zweite Geige? Friedrich Engels und der Aufstieg der europäischen Sozialdemokratie (1875–1890),” in Friedrich Engels und die Sozialdemokratie. Werke und Wirkungen eines Europäers, ed. Detlef Lehnert and Christina Morina (Berlin, 2020), pp. 149– 162, here: 150. 67. Op. cit., p. 149, 151. 68. Op. cit., p. 161. 69. Cf. Engels letter to Richard Fischer, 8 March 1895, MEW 39, 424 ff; MECW 50, 457. 70. Cf. Wilfried Nippel, “Der Dauerstreit um das ‘politische Testament’ von Engels” in Friedrich Engels und die Sozialdemokratie, ed. Detlef Lehnert and Christina Morina, pp. 195–218, here: 196.

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71. To Richard Fischer, 8 March 1895, MEW 39, 424, MECW 50, 457. 72. Bernstein, Die Voraussetzungen des Sozialismus und die Aufgaben der Sozialdemokratie (1899), New Edition (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1991), p. 41. 73. Bernstein, “Der Marx-Cultus und das Recht der Revision” (1903). Cited from: Nippel, “Der Dauerstreit um das ‘politische Testament’ von Engels,” p. 204. 74. Nippel, op. cit., p. 205. 75. Op. cit., p. 210. 76. Ibid. 77. Cited from Nippel, ibid. 78. Uli Schöler, “Friedrich Engels und der Austromarxismus,” in Friedrich Engels und die Sozialdemokratie, ed. Detlef Lehnert and Christina Morina, pp. 265–288, here: 283 f.

Bibliography “Marxismus.” In Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie. Vol. 5, edited by Joachim Ritter and Karlfried Gründer (Basel and Stuttgart: Schwabe, 1980), pp. 758–772. Arthur, Christopher J. “Engels as Interpreter of Marx’s Economics.” In Engels Today. A Centenary Appreciation, edited by Christopher J. Arthur. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1996), pp. 173–209. Backhaus, Hans-Georg. Dialektik der Wertform. Untersuchungen zur Marx’schen Ökonomiekritik (Freiburg: Ça Ira Verlag, 2011). Bernstein, Eduard. “Der Marx-Cultus und das Recht der Revision,” Sozialistische Monatshefte 4 (1903), pp. 255–265. Bernstein, Eduard. Die Voraussetzungen des Sozialismus und die Aufgaben der Sozialdemokratie (1899). New Edition (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1991). Elbe, Ingo. “Staat der Kapitalisten oder Staat des Kapitals? Rezeptionslinien von Engels‘ Staatsbegriff im 20. Jahrhundert.” In “… ins Museum der Altertümer”. Staatstheorie und Staatskritik bei Friedrich Engels, edited by Samuel Salzborn (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2012), pp. 155–181. Elbe, Ingo. Marx im Westen. Die neue Marx-Lektüre in der Bundesrepublik seit 1965 (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2010). Engels, Friedrich. “Preface” to the Second Edition of The Housing Question, MECW 26, pp. 424–433.

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Foucault, Michel. Security, Territory, Population, edited by Michel Senellart and translated by Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). Habermas, Jürgen. Erkenntnis und Interesse. With a new afterword (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1973). Hegel, G. W. F. Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts. English translation, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, edited by A. W. Wood and translated by A. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Herres, Jürgen. “‘Meine unsterblichen Werke.’ Friedrich Engels als Journalist und Publizist. Ein Überblick.” In Friedrich Engels. Das rot-schwarze Chamäleon, edited by Eberhard Illner, Hans Frambach, and Norbert Koubeck (Darmstadt: WBG Academic, 2020), pp. 22–47. Kautsky, Karl. The Dictatorship of the Proletariat [1918], translated by H. J. Stenning (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1964). Krätke, Michael. “Friedrich Engels, der erste Marxist.” In Michael Krätke. Friedrich Engels oder: Wie ein “Cotton-Lord” den Marxismus erfand (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 2020), pp. 9–68. Landgrebe, Ludwig. “Das Problem der Dialektik.” In Ludwig Landgrebe. Phänomenologie und Geschichte (Gütersloh: G. Mohn, 1968), pp. 82–134. Lenin, Vladimir. “Drei Quellen und drei Bestandteile des Marxismus” (1913). In Werke. Vol. 19 (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1965), pp. 3–9. English translation from: https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1913/mar/x01.htm Liedman, Sven-Erik. “Engelsismus.” In Historisch-kritisches Wörterbuch des Marxismus. Vol. 3, edited by Wolfgang Fritz Haug (Hamburg: Argument Verlag, 1997), column 384–392. Lohmann, Georg. “Gesellschaftskritik und normativer Maßstab. Überlegungen zu Marx.” In Arbeit, Handlung, Normativität. Theorien des Historischen Materialismus 2, edited by Axel Honneth and Urs Jaeggi (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1980), pp. 234–299. Lukács, Georg. Geschichte und Klassenbewusstsein. Studien über marxistische Dialektik. New edition (Neuwied und Berlin: Luchterhand, 1968). Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. Gesamtausgabe. 1. Division: Werke Artikel Entwürfe. Vol. 27: Herrn Eugen Dührings Umwälzung der Wissenschaft (Anti-Dühring) (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1988). Morina, Christina. “Zweite Geige? Friedrich Engels und der Aufstieg der europäischen Sozialdemokratie (1875–1890).” In Friedrich Engels und die Sozialdemokratie. Werke und Wirkungen eines Europäers, edited by Detlef Lehnert and Christina Morina (Berlin, 2020), pp. 149–162. Nippel, Wilfried. “Engels über Marx. Biographie als Geschichtspolitik.” In Friedrich Engels: Das rot-schwarze Chamäleon, edited by Eberhard Illner, Hans A. Frambach, and Norbert Koubeck (Darmstadt: WBG Academic, 2020), pp. 49–67.

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O’Neill, John. “Engels without Dogmatism” In Engels Today. A Centenary Appreciation, edited by Christopher J. Arthur (Basingstoke and New York: .Palgrave Macmillan, 1996), pp. 47–66. Reichelt, Helmut. Zur logischen Struktur des Kapitalbegriffs bei Karl Marx (Frankfurt a. M.: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1970). Ricardo, David. Grundsätze der politischen Ökonomie und der Besteuerung [Principles of Political Economy and Taxation], edited by F. Neumark (Frankfurt a. M., 1972). Roth, Regina. “Reparaturfall Kapital ? Friedrich Engels und die Herausgabe der Bände 2 und 3 des Kapital von Karl Marx.” In Friedrich Engels: Das rot-schwarze Chamäleon, edited by Eberhard Illner, Hans A. Frambach, and Norbert Koubeck (Darmstadt: WBG Academic, 2020), pp. 352–371. Salzborn, Samuel. “Von der Utopie zur Wissenschaft? Zur Regression des materialistischen Anspruchs in der Staatstheorie von Friedrich Engels.” In “… ins Museum der Altertümer”. Staatstheorie und Staatskritik bei Friedrich Engels, edited by Samuel Salzborn (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2012), pp. 13–30. Sartre, Jean-Paul. Kritik der dialektischen Vernunft. Vol. 1: Theorie der gesellschaftlichen Praxis (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1967). Schmidt, Alfred. Der Begriff der Natur in der Lehre von Marx. Überarb. Neuausgabe (Frankfurt a.M.: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1971). Schöler, Uli. “Friedrich Engels und der Austromarxismus.” In Friedrich Engels und die Sozialdemokratie. Werke und Wirkungen eines Europäers, edited by Detlef Lehnert and Christina Morina (Berlin, 2020), pp. 265–288. Vollgraf, Carl-Erich. “Mehr als 60 Seiten: Engels’ Zusätze zum 3. Band des ‘Kapital.’” In Engels: “Anti-Dühring”. Kontext, Interpretationen, Wirkung, edited by Rolf Hecker and Ingo Stütze (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 2020), pp. 54–75. Wellmer, Albrecht, “Kommunikation und Emanzipation. Überlegungen zur ‘sprachanalytischen’ Wende der kritischen Theorie.” In Theorien des Historischen Materialismus, edited by Urs Jaeggi and Axel Honneth (Frankfurt a. M.: Surhkamp, 1977), pp. 465–500.

PART I

Epistemology and Philosophy of Nature

CHAPTER 2

Engels and the Dialectic of Nature Sean Sayers

Engels is usually looked upon as a follower and interpreter of Marx. But on this, the 200th anniversary of his birth, it is fitting to consider him as a philosopher in his own right, on a topic on which he took the lead in his partnership with Marx: his philosophy of nature. Few philosophers have been more unjustly abused and defamed than Engels, and particularly for his ideas in this area. He is accused of being uneducated and ignorant, of knowing little of Hegel’s ideas and understanding less, of peddling a crudely positivistic and mechanistic form of materialism and of putting forward the absurd and nonsensical idea that nature is dialectical.1 It would be pointless and tedious to respond to these charges in detail, they are all completely false. Engels was a hugely wide ranging and knowledgeable thinker. He grew up at a time when German thought was dominated by Hegel’s philosophy—he was steeped in it; and he continued to draw on Hegel’s ideas throughout his life, as his continual references to Hegel in his philosophical works makes evident.

S. Sayers (B) University of Kent at Canterbury, Canterbury, UK e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 T. Carver and S. Rapic (eds.), Friedrich Engels for the 21st Century, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-97138-0_2

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The underlying ideas of Engels’ philosophy are drawn from a deep understanding of Hegel’s philosophy in an original and fruitful way, as I will go out of my way to illustrate in what follows. The non-reductive, dialectical form of materialism that he develops is entirely different from positivistic and mechanistic forms of it that he is accused of holding. I shall focus particularly on the idea that nature is dialectical. This seems at first to be a very abstract and purely logical topic, but it has large and important implications, and it has given rise to controversies about fundamental philosophical issues over the years. It has been much criticized, and Engels has been a particular target for attack—but it is not clear why. The idea was not invented by Engels and it is not peculiar to him. The idea of a dialectic of nature is part of a larger philosophy of dialectic, the modern source of which is Hegel. According to this, everything concrete undergoes changes, and at the basis of these changes are contradictions that are inherent within them. For Hegel, these are metaphysical, logical truths that apply to all concrete things, whether in the realm of nature, society or thought. The idea that nature is dialectical is an intrinsic part of this philosophy, there is nothing special about it. This philosophy was taken up and adapted by Marx and Engels. In the division of labour between them, the job of elaborating and explaining it fell to Engels. He did this at length in Anti-Dühring 2 and in Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy.3 His notes for a work he planned on the natural sciences were published posthumously under the title of Dialectics of Nature.4 The idea that nature is dialectical is explained and defended in all these works as an integral part of the dialectical and materialist outlook as a whole. Nevertheless, the idea that there are dialectical processes in nature has been singled out, and Engels has been castigated for holding it as though he is primarily responsible for it. This idea, it is said, commits the elementary logical error of attributing logical contradictions to mere things, whereas logical contradictions properly so-called can exist only in the realm of human thought and activity: between natural objects there can only be non-contradictory forms of opposition or conflict. Engels quotes Eugen von Dühring as asserting that “Contradiction is a category which can only appertain to a combination of thoughts but not to reality. there are no contradictions in things”.5 Engels’s claim that there are contradictions in nature, according to Dühring, commits an elementary logical fallacy by failing to make this simple logical distinction. This

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argument has been repeated ever since. As Richard Norman, for example, puts it: We need to distinguish between conflicts in the natural world and conflicts in human thought and activity. One and the same force cannot be in conflict with itself. The conflict is between one force and another, not a conflict within one force. But one and the same person can hold conflicting beliefs, and it is in such a case that we can talk of self-contradiction.6

Lucio Colletti spells out this point at length. A logical contradiction holds between a term and its negation, he asserts: it is expressed by the formula A and not-A. “Each opposite cannot stand without the other and viceversa […] In and for itself it is nothing; it is the negation of the other and nothing else”.7 In a contradiction, each opposite is not only opposed to, it is also united with the other. A contradiction is a unity of opposites: “Each pole of the contradiction is itself negative, being simply the Negation of the other, and its essence lies outside itself, in its opposite […] it follows that if each pole is to be itself, it must imply the relation to the other, i.e. the unity of opposites”.8 A dialectical relation involves a contradiction of this form. In nature, by contrast, there are only “real opposites” that have nothing in common with each other. Things in nature are entirely distinct and separate from each other. They are not united, they are merely different; they are external to each other. Conflicts between them are expressed by the formula A and B. In nature, in other words, “Each of the opposites is real and positive. Each subsists for itself […] This is an exclusive opposition, instead of an inclusive opposition […] Hence real extremes do not mediate each other”.9 Similar views are expressed by many other writers. According to JeanPaul Sartre, for example: The mainspring of all dialectics is the idea of totality. In it, phenomena are never isolated appearances. When they occur together, it is always within the higher unity of a whole, and they are bound together by inner relationships, that is, the presence of one modifies the other in its inner nature.10

Like Colletti, Sartre thus maintains that a dialectical relation involves a contradiction and has the form of a unity of opposites. Such inner conflict,

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and hence inner movement and life, exists only in the realm of human thought and activity. According to Gy¯orgy Lukács: The misunderstandings that arise from Engels’ account of dialectics can in the main be put down to the fact that Engels—following Hegel’s mistaken lead—extended the method to apply also to nature. However, the crucial determinants of dialectics—the interaction of subject and object, the unity of theory and practice, the historical changes in the reality underlying the categories as the root cause of changes in thought, etc.—are absent from our knowledge of nature.11

Similarly, Alfred Schmidt maintains that “negativity emerges only with the working subject”.12 In nature, by contrast, there are no contradictions. Natural objects are without their own movement and life—change comes to them only from without. According to Sartre, “Matter is characterized by its inertia. This means it is incapable of producing anything by itself. It is a vehicle of movements and of energy; and it always receives these movements and this energy from without”.13 Thus “a material object is animated from without […] is subject to forces which always come from elsewhere, is composed of elements that unite, though without interpenetrating, and that remain foreign to it. It is exterior to itself”.14 In short, according to these writers, dialectic occurs only in the realm of human thought and activity, there is no “dialectic of things”. And similar assertions could be quoted from many other authors who argue in similar terms.15 These views, it is claimed, are simply the expression of the elementary logical principle that there can be no contradictions in things, but it is clear that more than mere formal logical ideas are being put forward. Substantial philosophical views are being asserted—views about the character of the natural world, about the realm of human thought, and the differences between them. As regards the natural world, what is being asserted is a purely mechanistic picture of it. According to this, natural entities are distinct and separate from each other, and only externally related. For, as Hegel says, the mechanistic view sees things as complete and self-subsistent objects that, consequently, even in connection relate to one another as each standing on its own, each maintaining itself

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in every combination as external.—This is what constitutes the character of mechanism, namely, that whatever the connection that obtains between the things combined, the connection remains one that is alien to them, that does not affect their nature […] the connection remains nothing more than composition, mixture, aggregate, etc.16

Moreover, the mechanical view regards entities as inert and passive. They are solely positive. Negation and hence change can come to them only from outside. This principle is fundamental to the mechanical view. It is embodied in Isaac Newton’s First Law of Motion (“an object either remains at rest or continues to move at a constant velocity, unless acted upon by a force”), and it is expressed in the classical empiricist view that a material object, in John Locke’s words, is “inactive” and has “not the power to produce motion in itself”.17 These are not mere formal logical claims; they are large metaphysical theses about the character of the material world—and questionable ones, as we shall shortly see. The criticisms of the idea of the dialectic of nature that I have been describing also imply philosophical ideas about the realm of human thought and activity. This is portrayed as completely distinct and different from the natural world—as a realm of internality that is capable of sustaining internal contradictions, the realm of logic and thought, governed by rational principles. Again, these are not merely formal logical views; they are major metaphysical theses. And they too are questionable. One of Engels’s philosophical achievements is to criticize both these views and to develop a dialectical and materialist account of both nature and thought, and of the relation between them. The mechanistic view of nature was created by scientists and philosophers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The development of mechanics and physics in this period constituted an enormous advance in the human understanding of the natural world. The great success of scientists in explaining the behaviour of physical phenomena suggested to many that it could be extended to understand all reality in purely material and mechanical terms. And so in this period these ideas were generalized by philosophers such as Thomas Hobbes, Pierre Gassendi, Julien Offray de La Mettrie and Baron D’Holbach into a metaphysical theory which claimed to be able to provide a complete account of all natural phenomena.

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According to this philosophy, all reality is purely material or physical in character and can be understood and explained in mechanical and physical terms alone. Even the most complex natural phenomena can be accounted for in this way. All living things, including human beings, are merely complex material bodies acting in accordance with the laws of mechanics and physics. Human thought and feeling are nothing but the material activity of the brain and the nervous system. It can in principle be reduced to and explained by the laws of mechanics and physics. Engels calls this philosophy “mechanistic materialism”. A descendent of these views, updated to take account of subsequent developments in physical sciences, currently goes under name of “physicalism”. It is still widespread and influential today. Many philosophers, however, who accept the mechanistic account of purely material phenomena, argue that it cannot be extended to the realm of human thought and activity. Human beings are distinct from rest of natural creation, it is claimed; they are governed by different principles. A mechanistic, materialistic and reductionist theory is incapable of grasping the character of human subjectivity, rationality and freedom. This way of thinking leads to various forms of dualism. This outlook, too, has many contemporary adherents.18 The criticisms of the idea of the dialectic of nature put forward by Dühring, Colletti, Sartre, Norman and others presuppose a dualist position of this kind. They combine a mechanistic account of the natural world with the idea that the human realm is governed by different principles: dialectic applies only to realm of human thought and activity.

Beyond the Mechanistic Philosophy of Nature Engels rejects such dualism; he is a materialist. He rejects idea that human thought is something separate that transcends nature. But his materialism is not of the eighteenth-century mechanistic kind. He also questions the account of nature that is put forward by mechanistic materialists and physicalists and that is a part of the dualist position I have been describing. He puts forward a non-mechanistic, non-reductive, dialectical form of materialism. Mechanics and physics were first developed in a rigorous fashion by natural scientists in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and the mechanical conception of nature grew up in their wake. Subsequently, significant progress began to be made in the scientific understanding of

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other and more complex aspects of nature, including chemical, geological, biological and social processes. In these areas different principles come into operation and require new and different modes of understanding. New branches of knowledge were created: chemistry, geology, biology, psychology and economic and social theory. Engels followed these developments with close attention, and they provide the basis upon which he develops a non-mechanistic, non-reductive dialectical form of materialism. This does not deny the validity of mechanics or physics as branches of knowledge. All things are mechanical and physical; all things have a mechanical and physical aspect. This is described and explained by the sciences of mechanics and physics. These are and continue to be the most rigorous and fully developed areas of nature science. However, the mechanical and physical aspect of natural phenomena is only one of their aspects. Concrete things are never solely mechanical or physical; they are always parts of other processes and have other aspects as well. The purely mechanical view of nature abstracts from these other aspects. It is blind to them and ignores them. Hegel has a clear understanding of this. As he says: In Nature it is only the veriest abstract relations of matter in its inert masses which obey the law of mechanism. On the contrary the phenomena and operations of the province to which the term ‘physical’ in its narrower sense is applied, such as the phenomena of light, heat, magnetism, and electricity, cannot be explained by any mere mechanical processes, such as pressure, impact, displacement of parts, and the like.19

In chemical and biological phenomena, new, higher principles come into force. A living organism, for example, is made up of atoms and molecules that are governed by mechanical and physical laws; but an organism is not only a mechanical or physical system, and it has proved impossible to understand the structure and growth of living organisms in purely mechanical, physical or chemical terms, never mind the formation and evolution of living species, their distribution on the earth, etc. Living organisms are governed by principles that cannot be reduced to purely physical or chemical terms alone. This is not just because biological organisms are too complex to be comprehended in current mechanical, physical or chemical terms. It is also and primarily because biological organisms have their own specific forms and properties:

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Life is the mode of existence […] the essential element of which consists in continual metabolic interchange with the natural environment outside them, and which ceases with the cessation of this metabolism […] Such metabolism can also occur in the case of inorganic bodies and in the long run it occurs everywhere, since chemical reactions take place, even if extremely slowly, everywhere. The difference, however, is that inorganic bodies are destroyed by this metabolism, while in organic bodies it is the necessary condition for their existence.20

A living organism has its own life and its own “interests”. Its activity and development can be understood only in terms of laws that govern the organism as a whole, principles that concern its life and its interests, its self-preservation and the preservation of its species. As Dennett says: When an entity arrives on the scene capable of behaviour that staves off, however primitively, its own dissolution and decomposition, it brings into the world its “good.” That is to say, it creates a point of view from which the world’s events can be roughly partitioned into the favourable, the unfavourable and the neutral. As the creature thus comes to have interests, the world and its events begin creating reasons for it, whether or not the creature can fully recognise them. The first reasons pre-existed their own recognition.21

There is nothing mystical about this; it is not a matter of positing a mysterious form of “organic unity” or an immaterial “life force” or anything like that. Living organisms are natural, material things, made up of physical and chemical constituents and nothing more, and these obey the laws of physics and chemistry. But a biological organism is a higher and more complex form of organization of matter, governed also by higher and more complex—biological—principles, and mechanical and physical principles, although they continue to operate, and in Hegel’s words they “cease to be final and decisive and sink, as it were, to a subservient position”.22 Engels echoes this line of thought when he criticizes mechanical materialism for its, “exclusive application of the standards of mechanics to processes of a chemical and organic nature—in which processes the laws of mechanics are, indeed, also valid, but are pushed into the background by other, higher laws”.23 These new, higher laws do not operate independently of physical laws, nor do they replace them. Rather they act in and through them, by giving a new and higher form of organization to

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the physical and chemical phenomena. The biological level arises in and through the physical and chemical levels, not outside or apart from them. In this way, chemical and biological forms and principles are not reducible to mechanical and physical ones, nor do they completely transcend them. The different levels are relatively autonomous, to borrow a useful concept from elsewhere in Engels’ work.24 They are distinct but also united; different, but also continuous with each other. According to the non-reductive, non-mechanistic, dialectical, form of materialism that Engels puts forward, biological forms and laws do not supplant those of physics and chemistry. On the contrary, in a living thing the laws of the lower—physical and chemical—levels continue to operate. However, with the development of living organisms, new forms emerge and develop. New—biological—principles come into effect, and physical and chemical processes are subsumed within a higher form.25 Moreover, Engels argues, these different levels can change into each other. This is a further important insight of his dialectical form of materialism. The mechanical materialism of the eighteenth century did not comprehend such processes of development and change. The other specific limitation of this materialism lay in its inability to comprehend the universe as a process, as matter undergoing uninterrupted historical development. This accorded with the state of the natural science of that time, and with the […] anti-dialectical manner of philosophising connected with it.26

Of course, as Engels says, such materialism acknowledged that material entities are in motion. However, it was generally believed that natural processes move in repeated cycles. At this time, as Engels describes: The Kantian theory of the origin of the Solar System [that the Sun and planets originated from incandescent rotating nebulous masses] had been put forward but recently and was still regarded merely as an oddity. The history of the development of the Earth, geology, was still totally unknown, and the conception that the animate natural beings of today are the result of a long sequence of evolution from the simple to the complex could not at that time scientifically be put forward at all.27

An unhistorical view of nature prevailed. Even for Hegel, despite the thoroughly historical way he sees the world of “spirit” (i.e. the human world), natural kinds are fixed and movement in nature takes the form

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of unchanging cycles. Only gradually, from the end of the eighteenth century onwards, did it begin to be understood that nature must be conceived in a historical fashion as evolving and developing. Higher natural forms emerge and develop out of lower ones, and can revert back to them. This occurs at all levels. Galaxies, stars and planetary systems emerge, develop and die. The surfaces of planets are undergoing a constant process of geological transformation. Biological organisms emerge out of inorganic matter. Living species emerge, evolve and become extinct. Physical and chemical mechanisms are at the basis of all these developments; all of them involve physical and chemical processes. However, they cannot be comprehended in purely mechanical, physical or chemical terms. The historical and developmental processes involved are not recognized by the sciences of mechanics, physics or chemistry, nor are they visible to them. New and different geological, biological and evolutionary processes are in operation which are not reducible to the principles of mechanics, physics or chemistry alone. To comprehend such processes it is necessary to go beyond purely mechanical, physical or chemical ways of thinking and see the natural world as inherently changeable and evolving. The dialectical account of nature recognizes this. It rejects the assumptions about nature that are implicit in the criticisms of it that I have been considering. It rejects the mechanistic picture which sees natural entities as inert and passive. Change and development do not come to them only from outside. As Hegel says: To materialized conception existence stands in the character of something solely positive, and quietly abiding within its own limits: though we also know, it is true, that everything finite (such as existence) is subject to change. Such changeableness in existence is to the superficial eye a mere possibility, the realisation of which is not a consequence of its own nature. But the fact is, mutability lies in the notion of existence, and change is only the manifestation of what it implicitly is.28

And this implies that things are not purely positive. “The foundation of all determinateness is negation. The unreflecting observer supposes that determinate things are merely positive, and pins them down under the form of being. Mere being however is not the end of the matter: it is […] utter emptiness and instability besides”.29

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Such views will no doubt provoke the objection that they presuppose Hegel’s idealism and mysticism by attributing living features to purely inert and lifeless nature. According to Colletti, for example, Hegel’s insistence that there are contradictions in nature amounts to the belief that, “The finite is limited, the perishable, the ephemeral. The finite ‘seems’ to be, and is not. The finite is that which is fated to come to an end: that which is evanescent and devoid of value”.30 According to Colletti this leads to the idealist conclusion that only the “Absolute” truly has being,31 a Christian viewpoint that Colletti accuses Engels, Lenin and others of reproducing. This charge is without foundation. Engels does indeed believe that the finite is contradictory, and he does inherit this view from Hegel, as Colletti says. It is also true that Hegel’s account of nature ultimately takes an idealist form. However, Engels does not follow Hegel in believing that only the Absolute exists, nor need one do so. Engels uses some of Hegel’s ideas to develop a materialist philosophy of nature. He holds that nature is indeed contradictory, that it has a history, that natural forms change and new forms emerge and grow. There is nothing idealist about these views. Emergence, it should be added, is not an explanatory concept as I am using it here. It does not attempt to explain the development of higher natural forms from lower ones. It is not intended as an explanatory theory, as Andy Blunden appears to think.32 It does not propose an explanatory mechanism like Charles Darwin’s theory of genetic variation and natural selection. Rather, it describes the logical relation between different forms of organization of nature and of the different forms of explanation and branches of science needed to comprehend them.

Human Thought and Activity These ideas and principles can also be extended to the realm of human thought and activity. From the materialist point of view, there is no reason to stop short of this. Human beings are biological organisms made up entirely of physical and chemical constituents. Human activity and thought are therefore physical, chemical, biological and natural phenomena. Nevertheless, one cannot describe or understand human activity or thought in purely mechanical, physical, chemical or biological terms. They involve new and different forms and principles. Thought is, indeed, an

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activity of the brain and nervous system, but it cannot be described or understood in the terms of physics, chemistry, biology or neuroscience alone. It is governed also by psychological, social and historical principles to which these other sciences are blind. It is often argued that there is a fundamental difference between human and animal or other merely natural phenomena in that unlike purely natural entities, humans have the ability to act consciously, intentionally and freely, and they can act for reasons. As Immanuel Kant puts it, natural events occur according to laws and principles, but human beings also have the ability to act from principles.33 These ideas imply that Marxism, as the study of human activity, must use methods which are completely different from those used in natural sciences to study mere things. Engels is, of course, familiar with this line of argument. Although he insists that we should not underestimate the abilities of other animals, he agrees that there are fundamental differences between human, and other animals and forms of life. Drawing on his own abundant experience,34 he writes: In animals the capacity for conscious, planned action […] attains a fairly high level. While fox-hunting in England one can daily observe how unerringly the fox makes use of its excellent knowledge of the locality in order to elude its pursuers, and how well it knows and turns to account all favourable features of the ground that cause the scent to be lost.35

Nevertheless, Engels argues, there still exist fundamental differences between human abilities and those of other animals: “All the planned action of all animals has never succeeded in impressing the stamp of their will upon the earth […]. The animal merely uses its environment, and brings about changes in it simply by its presence; man by his changes makes it serve his ends, masters it”.36 Even this difference may be less sharp than Engels here suggests. Beavers, for example, build dams in rivers “to serve their ends” and can change the environment considerably in the process. It might be argued that they are driven solely by natural impulses rather than exercising their “will”, that they are acting according to principles rather than from principles; but these are not all-or-nothing matters, and we should beware of drawing too sharp a distinction here.

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In any case, Engels agrees with the Kantian view that there are fundamental differences between humans and other animals in these respects. Humans have the capacity to act for reasons, not only from natural impulse. They can separate themselves from their situation and reflect upon it, and this separation enables them to reflect and to choose among alternatives, to exercise will and choice. It enables human beings to act autonomously and freely. Many will be distressed by Engels’s claim that humans “master” nature. He himself is aware of the problems that this language raises. Any idea that these uniquely human powers lift us above the natural world is illusory: “Let us not […] flatter ourselves overmuch on account of our human victories over nature. For each such victory nature takes its revenge on us”37 and brings with it unforeseen and sometimes disastrous consequences: At every step we are reminded that we by no means rule over nature like a conqueror over a foreign people, like someone standing outside nature —but that we […] belong to nature, and exist in its midst, and that all our mastery of it consists in the fact that we have the advantage over all other creatures of being able to learn its laws and apply them correctly. […] But the more this progresses the more will men not only feel but also know their oneness with nature, and the more impossible will become the senseless and unnatural idea of a contrast between mind and matter, man and nature, soul and body.38

Moreover, Engels adds: With man we enter history. Animals also have a history, that of their descent and gradual evolution to their present position. This history, however, is made for them, and in so far as they themselves take part in it, this occurs without their knowledge and desire. On the other hand, the more that human beings become removed from animals in the narrower sense of that word, the more they make their history themselves, consciously, the less becomes the influence of unforeseen effects and uncontrolled forces on this history.39

We are social beings, and our distinctively human abilities develop historically, in and through social relations: “It required the labour of thousands of years for us to learn a little of how to calculate the more remote natural

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effects of our actions in the field of production, but it has been still more difficult in regard to the more remote social effects of these actions”.40 Such knowledge is at the basis of our freedom. Again, Engels is following Hegel in seeing our freedom in these terms: Hegel was the first to state correctly the relation between freedom and necessity. To him, freedom is the insight into necessity [die Einsicht in die Notwendigkeit ]. ‘Necessity is blind only in so far as it is not understood [begriffen].’41 Freedom does not consist in any dreamt-of independence from natural laws, but in the knowledge of these laws, and in the possibility this gives of systematically making them work towards definite ends. This holds good in relation both to the laws of external nature and to those which govern the bodily and mental existence of men themselves—two classes of laws which we can separate from each other at most only in thought but not in reality.42

In short, our freedom and autonomy from natural forces are not transcendent powers that separate us absolutely from the natural world, as Kant implies. They are based upon and emerge out of naturally developed and socially acquired abilities and skills. They do not operate independently of natural processes, but in and through them, by giving them a higher form of organization. They are only relatively autonomous and different from the natural conditions and social practices on which they are based. They emerge and develop, gradually and by degrees, in the course of biological and historical evolution. Engels thus rejects the dualistic separation of the world of human thought and activity from the rest of nature that is implicit in the criticisms of the idea of the dialectic of nature that I have been discussing. He does not privilege human abilities as transcendent, and separate and apart from nature. The idea that dialectic operates in nature as well as in the human realm is a logical expression of these views. We are both material and social beings. All our activities are material, and they always occur in and through our social relations. In insisting that dialectic applies both to the natural and the social realms, Engels is affirming their unity and rejecting any attempt to drive a dualistic wedge between them.43 As he and Marx wrote: We know only a single science, the science of history. One can look at history from two sides and divide it into the history of nature and the history of men. The two sides are, however, inseparable; the history of

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nature and the history of men are dependent on each other so long as men exist.44

Dialectical principles are at work in both the natural and the human realms: “The motion of matter is not merely crude mechanical motion, mere change of place, it is heat and light, electric and magnetic stress, chemical combination and dissociation, life and, finally, consciousness”.45 Nature develops, it has a history, it is dialectical. It becomes organized—it organizes itself—in increasingly complex forms, until it develops consciousness of itself. Human capacities, including consciousness and rational thought, are natural capacities that have emerged through the development of natural processes. These are the ideas that are involved in Engels’ dialectical and materialist view of nature.

Notes 1. Terrell Carver, “Marx, Engels and Dialectics,” in Political Studies 3 (1980), pp. 353–363; Leszek Kolakowski, Main Currents in Marxism, 3 vols (Oxford, 1978); Norman Levine, The Tragic Deception: Marx Contra Engels (Oxford, 1975); George Lichtheim, Marxism. An Historical and Critical Study (London, 1961); Tom Rockmore, Marx’s Dream: From Capitalism to Communism (Chicago and London, 2018), etc. For surveys of these criticisms see Kaan Kangal, Friedrich Engels and the Dialectics of Nature (London, 2020); and Paul Blackledge, Friedrich Engels and Modern Social and Political Theory (Albany, 2019). 2. Frederick [Friedrich] Engels, Anti-Dühring (1878), in MECW , vol. 25. 3. Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy (1886), in MECW , vol. 26. 4. Engels, Dialectics of Nature (1925), in MECW , vol. 25. 5. Engels, Anti-Dühring, p. 110. 6. Richard Norman and Sean Sayers, Hegel, Marx and Dialectic: A Debate (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1980), pp. 59–60. 7. Lucio Colletti, “Marxism and the Dialectic,” in New Left Review 93 (1975), p. 4. 8. Ibid., p. 5. 9. Ibid., p. 6.

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10. Jean-Paul Sartre, “Materialism and Revolution,” in Literary and Philosophical Essays (London, 1968), p. 191. 11. Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics (London, 1971). This was written in 1923. Lukács later rescinded these views (Kangal, Friedrich Engels and the Dialectics of Nature). 12. Alfred Schmidt, The Concept of Nature in Marx (London, 1971), p. 195. 13. Sartre, “Materialism and Revolution,” p. 191. 14. Ibid., p. 196. 15. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Marxism and Philosophy,” in Sense and Nonsense (Evanston, 1964); Lichtheim, Marxism. An Historical and Critical Study; Kolakowski, Main Currents in Marxism, vol. 1, ch. XV; Norman in Norman and Sayers, Hegel, Marx and Dialectic: A Debate, chapters 2, 3, 5; Gareth Stedman Jones, Karl Marx, Greatness and Illusion (London, 2017); etc. There is a good brief review of this literature in Helena Sheehan, Marxism and the Philosophy of Science: A Critical History: The First Hundred Years (London, 2017), Chapter 1. 16. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Science of Logic, trans. George Di Giovanni (Cambridge, 2015), p. 631. 17. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (Oxford, 1924), IV.x.10, II.xxi.4.; cf. George Berkeley, A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, in A New Theory of Vision and Other Writings (London, 1910), §25. 18. Richard Warner and Tadeusz Szubka (eds.), The Mind–Body Problem: A Guide to the Current Debate (Oxford, 1994). 19. Hegel, Logic: Being Part One of the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences (1830). Trans. William Wallace, Third ed (Oxford, 1975), §195 Addition. 20. Engels, Dialectics of Nature, p. 576 and note. 21. Daniel C. Dennett, Consciousness Explained (Harmondsworth, 1993), pp. 173–174. 22. Hegel, Logic: Being Part One of the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences (1830), §195 Addition. 23. Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy, p. 370. 24. Engels, “To Conrad Schmidt, London, 27 October, 1890,” in MECW, vol. 49. Engels uses this term to describe the relation of

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base and superstructure in Marx’s social theory. See also Norman and Sayers, Hegel, Marx and Dialectic: A Debate, pp. 90–94. 25. The term “emergence” is not used explicitly by Engels as far as I am aware, but it has come to be used in connection with the sort of materialism he puts forward. It was introduced by philosophers and biologists, including G. H. Lewes and Samuel Alexander at the end of nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century. 26. Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy, p. 370. 27. Ibid. 28. Hegel, Logic: Being Part One of the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences (1830), §92 Addition. 29. Ibid., §91 Addition. 30. Lucio Colletti, Marxism and Hegel (London, 1973), pp. 78. 31. Ibid., p. 25. 32. Andy Blunden, “Marx, Hegel and Teleology,” https://www.aca demia.edu/39280002/Marx_Hegel_andTeleology (2019). 33. Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Mary Gregor (Cambridge, 1998), section 1. 34. He was a keen fox-hunter (Tristram Hunt, The Frock-Coated Communist: The Life and Times of the Original Champagne Socialist (London, 2010)). 35. Engels, Dialectics of Nature, p. 460. 36. Ibid. 37. Ibid., pp. 460–461. 38. Ibid., p. 461. 39. Ibid., pp. 330–331. 40. Ibid., pp. 461–462. 41. Hegel, Logic: Being Part One of the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences (1830), §147 Addition. 42. Engels, Anti-Dühring, p. 105. See Christopher Caudwell, “Liberty,” in Studies in a Dying Culture (London, 1938). For an elaboration of this account of freedom. 43. John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark, and Richard York, The Ecological Rift: Capitalism’s War on the Earth (New York, 2010), Chapter 11. 44. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The German Ideology (1845), in MECW , vol. 5, p. 28 (passage crossed out in the original). 45. Engels, Dialectics of Nature, p. 332.

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Bibliography Berkeley, George. “A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge.” In A New Theory of Vision and Other Writings (London: E.P. Dutton, 1910). Blackledge, Paul. Friedrich Engels and Modern Social and Political Theory (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2019). Blunden, Andy. “Marx, Hegel and Teleology.” https://www.academia.edu/392 80002/Marx_Hegel_and_Teleology, 2019. Carver, Terrell. “Marx, Engels and Dialectics.” In Political Studies 3 (1980), pp. 353–363. Caudwell, Christopher. Studies in a Dying Culture (London: Bodley Head, 1938), accessible at https://www.marxists.org/archive/caudwell/1938/stu dies/ch08.htm. Colletti, Lucio. “Marxism and the Dialectic.” New Left Review 93 (1975), p. 4. Colletti, Lucio. Marxism and Hegel (London: New Left Books, 1973). Dennett, Daniel. Consciousness Explained (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1993). Engels, Frederick. Anti-Dühring (1878). In MECW , vol. 25, pp. 5–311. Engels. Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy (1886). In MECW , vol. 26, pp. 353–423. Engels: Dialectics of Nature (1925). In MECW , vol. 25, pp. 313–590. Foster, John Bellamy, Brett Clark, and Richard York. The Ecological Rift: Capitalism’s War on the Earth (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2010). Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Logic: Being Part One of the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences (1830). Translated by William Wallace. Third edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975). Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. The Science of Logic. Translated by George Di Giovanni (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). Hunt, Tristram. The Frock-Coated Communist: The Life and Times of the Original Champagne Socialist (London: Penguin, 2010). Jones, Gareth Stedman. Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion (Princeton and London: Princeton University Press, 2017). Kangal, Kaan. Friedrich Engels and the Dialectics of Nature (London: Palgrave, 2020). Kant, Immanuel. Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. Translated by Mary Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Kolakowski, Leszek. Main Currents in Marxism, 3 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978). Levine, Norman. The Tragic Deception: Marx Contra Engels (Oxford: ABC-Clio, 1975). Lichtheim, George. Marxism. An Historical and Critical Study (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1961). Locke, John. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1924).

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Lukács, Georg. History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics (London: Merlin Press, 1971). Marx, Karl, and Frederick Engels. The German Ideology (1845). In: MECW , vol. 5. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. “Marxism and Philosophy.” In Sense and Nonsense (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964). Norman, Richard and Sean Sayers. Hegel, Marx and Dialectic: A Debate (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1980). Rockmore, Tom. Marx’s Dream: From Capitalism to Communism (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2018). Sartre, Jean-Paul. “Materialism and Revolution.” In Literary and Philosophical Essays. Translated by Annette Michelson (London: Hutchinson, 1968). Schmidt, Alfred. The Concept of Nature in Marx (London: New Left Books, 1971). Sheehan, Helena. Marxism and the Philosophy of Science: A Critical History: The First Hundred Years (London: Verso, 2017). Warner, Warner and Tadeusz Szubka. Eds. The Mind-Body Problem: A Guide to the Current Debate (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 1994).

CHAPTER 3

Engels and the “Dialectics of Nature” Kaan Kangal

Much has been said and written of Engels’s infamous “book” Dialectics of Nature. Typically there are those who charge Engels’s work with distorting Marx’s social theory by introducing a natural dialectics behind the “great master’s back”. And there are those who blame Engels’ critics for erecting a strawman based upon which one life-long friend and comrade is played off against the other. Given various political commitments displayed in the backdrop of Engels scholarship, it is not very astonishing to see that the Engels debate stands and falls largely with a political battle rather than a philosophical or scientific debate. For those who are keen to know more about Engels’s own problems, tasks and issues that occupied his mind for a couple of decades, these debates do not offer much. For instance, it is still curious as to what the title of Engels’ “book” is supposed to mean and where it originated from. Relatedly, one can ask whether the title is expressive of the philosophical heritage which Engels

K. Kangal (B) Nanjing University, Nanjing, People’s Republic of China e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 T. Carver and S. Rapic (eds.), Friedrich Engels for the 21st Century, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-97138-0_3

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claimed to endorse. Both Aristotle and Hegel figure as two sources of inspiration in Engels’s dialectics, but this does not say much about what both philosophical giants could have said of a “dialectics of nature” and whether that phrase would have made sense to them at all. In this short chapter, I will first trace the origins of the title of the “book” and explain why I mention Engels’s work in scare quotes. Then I will highlight the historical context into which the “book” was born. This will illuminate how it arose from, and intermediated, the ongoing debates on Engels’ dialectics. I will finally ask, and try to answer, what constitutes Engels’s dialectics in Dialectics of Nature.

The Backstory of a “Book” Title The title of Engels’s work has a story before and after it became a “book”. It was referred to in various ways by Marx and Engels, and it went through a mini-evolution in the hands of its editors until it was finally called “Dialectics of Nature”. Sometime ago, a Chinese scholar1 speculated that what is known as “Nature-Dialectics” (Naturdialektik) or “Dialectics of Nature” (Dialektik der Natur) probably goes back to Eugen von Dühring’s 1865 book Natural Dialectics. New Logical Foundations of Science and Philosophy (Natürliche Dialektik. Neue logische Grundlegungen der Wissenschaft und Philosophie). Though the formulations “natural dialectics”, on the one side, and “nature-dialectics” and “dialectics of nature”, on the other, are obviously similar, it is not all too clear whether Engels intended to write a comprehensive response particularly to that book by Dühring. Equating “natural dialectics” with “nature-dialectics”, Zhou collapses the distinction between adjective “natural” and noun “nature”, both coupled with “dialectics”.2 Yet it remains to be asked whether Engels meant to speak to a Dühringian or a wider audience, and thus wrote his Dialectics of Nature against Dühring’s Natural Dialectics to that end. Therefore, it makes sense to briefly review what occasioned Engels’s critique of Dühring, how Engels and Marx referred to Dialectics of Nature, and what editorial titles the latter work received after Engels’s death. Initially, Dühring caught Engels’s attention with his review of the first edition of Marx’s Capital (1867). Engels mentions Dühring’s review in a letter to Marx in January 1868.3 Marx replies that Dühring fails to follow Marx’s concerns, including Marx’s ambition to distinguish his own dialectics from that of Hegel.4 With a sense of irony, Marx speaks of this

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“great philosopher” who “wrote a ‘Natural Dialectics’ against Hegel’s ‘unnatural’ one”.5 Marx also told Ludwig Kugelmann that Dühring: is ordinarily a most bumptious cheeky boy, who sets himself up as a revolutionary in political economy. He has done two things. He has published, first (proceeding from Carey) a Kritische Grundlegung der Volkswirtschaftslehre (about 500 pages), and secondly, a new Natürliche Dialektik (against the Hegelian dialectic). My book [Capital ] has buried him from both sides.”6 [translation modified]

However, Dühring found more supporters than Marx and Engels expected, as Wilhelm Liebknecht tried to convince Engels to write a comprehensive counter-attack against Dühring. Although Engels’s take was “by no means the fruit of any ‘inner urge’”, he used it as an “opportunity of setting forth in a positive form my views on controversial issues which are today of quite general scientific or practical interest”.7 Contrary to what one might expect, Dühring’s Natural Dialectics is not so much concerned with the application of dialectics to nature as by the “natural” usage of dialectics in philosophical theory of social knowledge. By “natural”, Dühring means something that is the opposite of counterfeit, artificial or fake. He gives emphasis to the “natural division of philosophy into dialectics, physics and ethics”.8 In his 1875 book Cursus, of which Marx speaks, Dühring develops his previous views on dialectics and weaves them into an angle of attack against Marx. Dühring’s target is Marx’s Hegelian concept of contradiction. On Dühring’s account,9 Marx’s problem is that he follows Hegel’s mistaken lead in projecting the notion of “real contradiction” into the real world. Contra Marx’s Hegelian “arabesque” “unlogic”, Dühring suggests dropping the talk of contradiction and adopting the notion of “antagonism”, “conflict” and “real opposites” instead.10 It is precisely this line of reasoning that constitutes the setting of Engels’s philosophical response. Engels not only argues that there are real contradictions in nature and society, but he also claims that contradiction is everywhere, as it is nested in each single act of physical motion: “motion itself is contradiction”.11 Engels extrapolates his concept of contradiction to the extent that it becomes one of the cornerstones of his dialectics. Accordingly, dialectics is understood as a world view within which the texture of natural and social reality is presumed to be structured by a multiplicity of interacting contradictions. Since a particular focus on

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natural and social structures of contradictions requires a specific perception and comprehension of its own, Engels, following Marx, extends this approach to a methodological account. Thus, he justifies his elaboration of a dialectical method. Last but not least, Engels’s undertaking is not constrained to an arbitrary number of examples of application of dialectics. On the contrary, it is safe to say that Engels aims to develop a general or universal view of dialectics that informs and is displayed in the backdrop of, his and Marx’s philosophical theory and political practice. This gives a certain sense of what dialectics may have to do with nature from Engels’s point of view. Nevertheless, we are still far from appreciating what exactly is meant by the phrase “dialectics of nature”. Therefore, I will now turn to the birth hour of Engels’s text and to its editorial afterlives.

Text and Edition The birth hour of Engels’s Dialectics of Nature is usually associated with an 1873 letter to Marx which opens with the following sentence: “[t]his morning in bed the following dialectical points about the natural sciences came into my head”.12 And the following statement is taken to refer to its end: “Now […] I must really go ahead and finish my Naturdialektik”.13 Aside from this late letter where Naturdialektik is explicitly mentioned, there is a large bunch of manuscripts that received the same title. Out of 197 fragments in total, the first 94 manuscripts (written between 1873 and 1875 or later) bear the headings Naturdialektik 1–11 and Naturdialektik references. It is not evident whether Engels was referring to these first 94 manuscripts or to all 197 notes when he wrote to Marx in 1882 that he was planning to finish his Naturdialektik. Elsewhere, “Dialectics of Nature” (Dialektik der Natur) is also employed. Presumably in 1886, Engels ordered the manuscripts by putting them into four folders. The third folder containing six manuscripts is called “Dialectics of Nature” (Ms. 98, 162, 170, 171, 177, 192). Disappointingly, the content of those manuscripts does not have much to do with philosophical dialectics. The manuscripts relevant to dialectics, such as the Plan 1878, Plan 1880 and Dialectics, ended up somehow in the fourth folder (Math[ematics] and Natural S[ciences] Diversa). The Naturdialektik manuscripts were curiously placed in the first folder (Dialectics and Natural Science). It is unknown whether this distribution suggests different connotations of Naturdialektik and Dialectics of Nature, or whether it signals a trivial result of mere manuscript

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re-arrangement. Whatever the reason, Engels neither provided a precise definition of these phrases nor gave a final title to his work. It took a while until the editors came up with a definite name for the “book” to which I now turn. After Engels’ death, Eduard Bernstein was acting as an executor for the literary estates of Marx and Engels. Boris I. Nikolaevskii, an associate of the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow, reported to David B. Riazanov, the director of the Institute, that Bernstein had a large number of manuscripts by Engels, including some works on “natural science”.14 Elsewhere, Nikolaevskii refers to them as “Dialectics and Natural Sciences”.15 Nikolaevskii’s discovery was important insofar as the Institute had launched a project to publish a historical–critical edition of Marx’s and Engels’s collected works. As Riazanov announced, “the most important unpublished manuscripts (German Ideology, Nature-dialectics [Naturdialektik]) will be released […]”.16 The “Nature-dialectics” was indeed published by the Institute in 1925 in the German original and in Russian translation under the titles “Naturdialektik” and “Dialektika Prirody”.17 In a 1927 edition, the title was changed to “Dialectics and Nature”.18 A newer Russian edition in 1939–1941 switched the title back to “Dialectics of Nature”. Then we have the German/Russian editions by B. M. Kedrov: Friedrich Engels on Dialectics of Natural Science (1973/1979). Also note that in the early 1920s, in the editorial circles, Engels’s manuscripts were referred to interchangeably as “nature and dialectics”,19 “dialectics of nature”,20 “nature-dialectics-work”,21 “dialectics in nature”22 and “nature-dialectics”.23 Nevertheless, the final edition (1985) was called “Dialectics of Nature”.24 Significantly, the last edition (1985) offered two versions published in the same volume: chronological and systematic. While the chronological version is fully in line with the editorial criteria of the historical–critical edition of Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe, it was thought that a systematic edition would make Engels’s work look more compact and coherent, as the controversy over Engels’s dialectics was still a matter of heated dispute at that time. In other words, editors may have drawn some lessons from how the editorial presentation of a work can crucially impact how that work is read and what debates it is able to stimulate. For instance, it is safe to assume that, from the angle of 1985, the first edition (1925) proved to be unarmed against potential extrapolations of Engels’s text to the disadvantage of the pioneers of a canonized form of dialectics, as some

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prominent readers of the first edition believed that they had discovered various ambiguous shifts from early to late periods in Engels’s work. I.I. Stepanov, a well-known Bolshevik party theoretician, claimed that while Engels had embraced a vitalist-idealist view of nature in the initial phases of Dialectics of Nature, he came close to a mechanical world view in 1880s. Stepanov was largely concerned with Engels’s hierarchical categorization of different types of natural motion. It hardly made sense to speak of general motion, on the one side, and special chemical or physical kinds of motion subordinated to general form of motion, on the other.25 Stepanov was also quite hostile to how the arm-chair philosophers were arrogantly lecturing natural scientists. He had the former Menshevik philosopher Abram Deborin and his pupils in mind when he wrote that philosophical generalizations and methodologies need to be derived from, and informed by, the results of positive-scientific research, not the other way around. Deborin, by contrast, argued that “philosophy provides us with a holistic worldview by synthesizing the results of particular sciences”.26 Like it or not, philosophy functions as the categorial system displayed in the backdrop of any natural-scientific discipline. The point is to make the natural-scientific practice more aware of the internal coherence of the philosophical theory that it employs, consciously or unconsciously. Accuracy of description, explanation and prediction in natural sciences heavily depends on the consistency of the philosophical system that informs the ways in which theoretical natural sciences is embodied in applied practice. Just two years before the first edition of Dialectics of Nature (1925) was published, Georg Lukács’s 1923 book History and Class Consciousness came out. There Lukács had famously claimed that “Engels – following Hegel’s mistaken lead – extended the [dialectical] method also to the knowledge of nature”.27 The dialectical method was limited to “historical- social reality”. “Natural knowledge” lacks the kind of “crucial determinations of dialectics”, such as “reciprocity of subject and object, unity of theory and praxis, historical change of substrates of categories as the foundation of their change in thought etc..”. Although later he said that “my struggle against […] the concept of dialectics in nature [Dialektik in der Natur]” was one of the “central mistakes of my book”,28 he made a huge impact on the Engels scholarship that he could no longer take back. Seen from the angle of the polemical context, it is evident what pushed the editors to give a special emphasis on dialectics that is much stronger

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than it already was in Engels’s text, and what motivated them to polish the text in a way that does not appear so vulnerable to those who were ready to deny its potential merits from the outset. Certainly Engels’s work could have been called “Philosophical-Natural Scientific Manuscripts”, “Natural Philosophical Work” (Marx) or “Dialectics of Natural Science” (Kedrov). However, I am tempted to think that none of them makes the Engelsian ontological overtones as clear as “Dialectics of Nature”. The systematical order of Engels’s manuscripts goes back to the 1939–1941 edition, as it was this version that put both Plan 1878 and Dialectics at the very beginning of the volume that was then followed by Articles and Chapters, signifying that Engels’s various takes on natural-scientific debates invariably clustered around, and derived from, the axioms listed in those manuscripts. Since the bulk of manuscripts hardly speak for themselves, editorial interventions served the purpose of making them more accessible to general readership and make them look less suspect in the eyes of the opponents of Engels’s dialectics. This editorial strategy may have helped solve some earlier issues, but it also prompted other debates. Perhaps unsurprisingly, readers’ attention shifted from Engels’s different takes on Kantianism, vitalism, biological evolution or thermodynamics to what was put at the beginning of the volume: Engels’ Plan 1878, Plan 1880 and Dialectics. It comes as no surprise that, for instance, Jean-Paul Sartre challenged the accuracy of the number of Engels’s dialectical laws. Roger Garaudy, in turn, responded that it is naïve to assume that “there exists a list of complete and immutable laws of dialectics”.29 Since then, there is a prejudice suggesting that it hardly makes sense to list a finite number of laws of nature as Engels did. Editorial responses to ongoing theoretical polemics enabled Engels’s work to turn into a compact “book”, and when it was read as a “book”, it gave rise to other disputes. The longer the historical distance between Engels’s writing and its reception, the harder it is to hear the author’s voice. Therefore, it is not all too trivial or naïve to ask what the posthumous title of Engels’s work is supposed to mean, and whether the connotations attached to the title necessarily coincide with Engels’s own intentions. Within the formal constraints of the present chapter, I cannot offer a comprehensive take on the contrast between Engels’s philosophical intentions and terminological evolution, on the one side, and its editorial and political reception, on the other. But I will explore at least one crucial

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aspect of the issue at stake: Engels’s own conception of dialectics in Naturdialektik manuscripts and the third folder Dialectics of Nature. A surprise awaits the readers, as the way Engels coins the term approaches an interplay of opposites rather than a systematic logic of real contradictions. There is no evidence that the concept of contradiction is somewhat downplayed. But opposites certainly figure as the logical gist of Engels’s account of dialectics of nature and natural sciences much more visibly than the notion of contradiction does. In the next sections, I will focus on Engels’s usage of dialectics in Naturdialektik (Ms. 1–94) and will look for potential links to the third folder (Dialectics of Nature), and to his 1882 letter to Marx without any recourse to the manuscripts Plan 1878, Dialectics and Plan 1880 (Ms. 164–166).

Dialectics in Naturdialektik In Naturdialektik, Engels deploys the terms “dialectics” and “dialectical” twenty times in total.30 In the Büchner manuscript (Ms. 1), we are told that the philosophical tradition is largely shaped by “2 philosophical directions, the metaphysical with fixed categories, the dialectical (Arist[otle] and Hegel especially) with fluid [categories]”.31 Flux of categories is equated with a bidirectional transition between “opposites of ground and consequence[,] cause and affect[,] identity and difference[,] shine [illusion] and essence”. “[O]ne pole is already in embryo present [vorhanden] in the other, that at a certain point the one pole reverts [umschlägt ] into the other and that the entire logic develops only from these progressing opposites [fortschreitenden Gegensätzen]”.32 Engels reminds us not to confuse dialectics of categories with that of “the real world”. Hegel has wrongly presumed that motion of categories precedes the motion of real entities. For what holds things together in the real world, Hegel argued, was a mirror reflection of the logical evolution of categories subject to Greater Logic. In that the categories of Logic were ascribed to the task to describe and explain what they refer to, how they evolve and what relations they embody within the constraints of Logic, categories were taken to explore what comes out of the very sequence of logical thinking. On Engels’s account, Hegel was naïve to assume that the ultimate result of Logic reproduces formal structures of the fabric of (natural or social) reality. Rather, one should go out from what Logic was initially taken to apply to, i.e. nature and society. Indeed, the etymological origin

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of logic (legein: to speak of smt.) testifies that the linguistic material of which one speaks inevitably precedes what is said of it. Accordingly, it is completely irrelevant to nature (or society) itself how or whether it is grasped by any logical mode of thinking. Rather, it is the logically reproduced and explicated formal structures of reality that need to be taken as criteria against which the internal accuracy of system of categories is measured. Engels’s target is quite specific in this regard: the chief concern of dialectics is understanding and explaining real motion, and it is this task that gives a particular shape to the conceptual apparatus in use. In other words, it is the object of investigation that demands a certain approach without which real motion would remain unintelligible—hence the intimate tie between real motion and categorial motion. A few other lines from the same manuscript provide further insights into what Engels might have meant by Naturdialektik. The cell physiology, that is, “the organic process of development, both of the individual and of species, by differentiation” is “the most striking test of rational dialectics”.33 Engels believes that “modern [nature-scientific] facts […] prove the dialectics in nature [Dialektik […] in der Natur nachweisen]” if they are “rationally explained and brought into relation with one another”.34 This is to say that what initially appears to be a logical concept is confirmed by recent research results in natural sciences. In the same passage, Engels unmistakably underscores the principle of relationality, designating it as the natural-scientific measure of “dialectics in nature”. If relationality functions as the organizing principle of “dialectics in nature”, then he may have thought of the reciprocal interaction and bidirectional transition of opposites as a specific characterization of dialectics subordinated to the principle of relationality. What remains is the task to make natural scientists aware of the fact that “dialectics becomes an absolute necessity for natural sciences”,35 as it is relationality in general, and the dynamic interconnection of opposites in particular, due to which natural entities interact and natural phenomena take place. Engels goes so far as to reformulate this idea in terms of “dialectics of natural scienc[es]: [research] objective [is] the stuff that moves itself [der sich bewegende Stoff ]”.36 He defines motion as the structural form within which “various forms and types of stuff” come into being. Natural scientists may lack “logical and dialectical pre-education”,37 but they cannot be excused by denying the commonsensical fact that a bottom-line

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phenomenon such as motion takes place within a setting that is structured by opposites. Engels argues that motion is a predicate of a body that is in motion. It has a certain point of departure and a destination bridged by intermediated steps, just like a colour-scale of black and white intermediated by shades of grey. But he also says that one opposite is nothing without its relational correlate. For instance, take “life and death”. Death as “the negation of life is essentially contained within life itself”. What life is opposed to appears to be an “essential moment of life”.38 The same logic applies to other opposite pairings such as “the dialectical relationship” between “identity and difference”.39 Suppose we have a complete list of all the features of an object based upon which we are able to identify that very object. Since motion suggests that the aforementioned list is constantly subject to change, and change means alteration of the features that make up the very identity of the object, we must account for change as a moment of the identity of that object. To put it into Germanic philosophical terms, an object is what it is, in that it is also something other than what it is. The latter formulation is not entirely trivial, as Engels keeps referring to Hegel’s contribution to “dialectical thinking”.40 It does not suffice to figure out the dialectical mechanisms that underlie the structures of natural motion. In so doing, one also needs to develop a self-awareness of the conceptual apparatus in use, according to which the issue at stake is described and explained in terms of a dynamic interaction of opposites. In this respect, Engels brings to the fore the fact that our mental faculties need to be, and in fact are, structured by various pairs of opposites, such as “induction, deduction […] abstraction [concretion] […] analyzing […] synthesizing”, etc.41 Accordingly, he distinguishes “objective” from “subjective dialectics”. While objective dialectics “prevails in the entire nature”, subjective dialectics, that is, “the dialectical thought”, figures as a “reflex of the motion in opposites [Bewegung in Gegensätzen] which asserts itself everywhere in nature”. These opposites “condition [bedingen] the life of nature by their continual conflict [fortwährender Widerstreit ] and their final passage [schließliches Aufgehen] into one another, or into higher forms”. Based upon the exposition above, one can conveniently assert that what makes up dialectics in Engels’s Naturdialektik stands and falls with a general principle of relationality to which the interconnection of opposites is subordinated. It is this structural form within which motion takes place and bodies in motion interact. That particular entities evolve and

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give rise to newer combinations of the interplay of opposites constitutes the open-endedness of Engels’s objective dialectics. Subjective dialectics, on the other hand, demands its own treatment, as it is supposed to take into account what the natural-scientific findings provide and to work out the categorial tools that describe and explain the ontological structural forms according to which scientific findings are framed and narrated.

Dialectics in Dialectics of Nature (Third Folder) and 1882 Letter One comes across the term “dialectics” and “dialectical” ten times in the third folder.42 Curiously enough, the term is not mentioned in the famous Introduction manuscript even once.43 The article The Natural Research in the Spirit-World (Ms. 162) opens with the following remark, though Engels avoids a systematic elaboration: “The dialectics that has found its way into popular consciousness [Volksbewußtsein] is expressed in the old saying that extremes meet”.44 This opening phrase is used parodically to illustrate the relationship between two extreme opposites dominant in the theoretical natural sciences: British empiricism and German idealist philosophies of nature. Engels ridicules the empiricist attempt to downplay the relevance of abstract theory to applied sciences as well as the lack of hard evidence in the speculative propositions representative of German philosophies of nature. The term makes a comeback at the end of the article where Engels condemns anti-theoreticism to fail. He equates hostility to the merits of a self-awareness of a theoretical system with a denial of viability of dialectics: dialectics cannot be despised with impunity. However great one’s contempt for all theoretical thought, nevertheless one cannot bring two natural facts into relation with each other, or understand the connection existing between them, without theoretical thought.45

In the manuscript Basic Forms of Motion (Ms. 170), Engels defines motion in general as the “interplay” (Wechselspiel ) of two opposites (attraction and repulsion). Motion, we are told, is possible “when each individual attraction is compensated by a corresponding repulsion somewhere else”.46 It is this premise based upon which Engels provides us with a straightforward definition of “nature”:

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The whole of nature accessible to us forms a system, an interconnected totality [Gesammtzusammenhang ] of bodies, and by bodies we understand here all material existences extending from stars to atoms, indeed right to ether particles … In the fact that these bodies are interconnected is already included that they react on one another, and it is precisely this mutual reaction that constitutes motion.47

Recall that opposition was subordinated to the principle of relationality in Naturdialektik. Accordingly, motion was set to constitute the interconnection of opposites. In the passage quoted above, Engels seems to extend this principle to a system of interconnection that finds its philosophical correlate in a theory of totality with motion understood as its structural core. It would not be perhaps wrong to say that Engels ascribes primacy to the whole over the parts encompassed by the whole. Mutual reaction of interacting bodies is said to be embodied by the motion of, and between, the opposites. This indicates not only that the very interaction of opposites reproduces the specific kind of motion in which some particular opposites are involved. Interaction of particular opposites also reproduces a certain mode of how universal interconnection (Gesamtzusammenhang ) is sustained. This proposition receives the name of “dialectical nature of polar opposites”.48 We are repeatedly advised to keep in mind that what dialectical thinking dictates should not be projected into the object of investigation. On the contrary, what subjective dialectics suggests holds insofar as it results from “our previous nature-experience”.49 When writing to Marx in 1882 about his intention to finalize his Naturdialektik, Engels had in mind a new mathematical formulation of electrical energy. This was, Engels believed, “a general natural law of motion”, which “I have formulated for the first time”. When mechanical motion transitions into heat or electricity, this transmission is accompanied by a “change of form”.50 Interpreting this as some sort of uniformity in nature, Engels perhaps assumed that the behaviour of transmission/formal change confirmed his assumption that qualitatively different forms of motion between interacting bodies necessarily bring about quantitative equivalence.51 When one form of motion gives rise to another, the latter motion embodies quantitatively something equal to, but qualitatively different from, the former.

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Conclusion Perhaps, it would be no exaggeration to say that the central emphasis given to the notion of real contradiction is what distinguishes Engels’s dialectics in Anti-Dühring from his dialectics in Dialectics of Nature (the “book”). Though various types of contradiction are employed throughout the manuscripts of Dialectics of Nature, Engels speaks of real contradictions very rarely. The only occasion in Naturdialektik manuscripts where Engels provides an example of real contradiction is when he briefly discusses planetary motion. Engels asserts there that the “rotational motion” of “annular bodies ” revolving around the sun “runs into [a] contradiction with itself appearing as attraction, on one side, and tangential force, on the other”.52 Elsewhere he slightly revises his vocabulary in that tangential force is replaced with tangential tendency. He may have, of course, thought that the derivation of the notion of real contradiction is just one step away from that of real opposites. But from the angle of neo-Kantians, including that of Dühring, it makes all the difference in the world whether real opposites are intimately tied to real contradictions.53 I doubt Engels ever intended to comprehensively respond to this issue in Dialectics of Nature (the “book”), but it was clearly one of his chief concerns in Anti-Dühring . Aside from the issue of real contradiction, connotations of dialectics in Naturdialektik (manuscripts) and dialectics in Dialectics of Nature (third folder) slightly differ. While in the dialectics of Naturdialektik, the principle of relationality comes to the fore, dialectics in Dialectics of Nature underlies a theory of totality. It is possible to read both propositions as two pieces of the same puzzle: the condition of possibility of the interaction between opposites is equated with the principle of relationality. Opposites, in turn, figure as the structural components that embody how one opposite contains the embryo of the other opposite at which it directs itself. One opposite gives rise to its other in that the posterior manifests what precedes it. Putting dialectics into these terms suggests that dialectics can be structurally equated with the phenomenon of emergence. The point of departure of a body in motion signals its potential points of destination. With recourse to Engels’s conception of dialectics in Dialectics of Nature, dialectical opposites can be said to constitute the ways of how they hold together. Engels takes motion as such to be the core mechanism of what makes up what he calls “nature”. Dialectics applies to nature insofar as bodies in motion trigger motion of bodies. As the

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context of the 1882 letter indicates, one type of motion emerges out of another (qualitatively different) motion. As far as Engels’s latest intention is concerned, probably it is accurate to think that the coincidence of qualitatively different types of motion with quantitatively equal numerical values of motion is what Engels’s dialectics in Dialectics of Nature is about.

Notes 1. L. Zhou, Renhua Ziran Bianzhengfa. Dui Makesi de ziranguan de jiedu (Beijing, 2008), pp. 2–4. 2. Cf. Kaan Kangal, Friedrich Engels and the Dialectics of Nature (London, 2020), p. 74. 3. Frederick Engels, “Engels an Marx, 7 Januar 1868,” in MEW, vol. 32 (Berlin, 1974), p. 8. 4. Karl Marx, “Marx an Engels, 8 Januar 1868,” in MEW , vol. 32, p. 9. 5. Marx, “Marx an Engels, 11 Januar 1868,” in MEW , vol. 32, p. 18. 6. Marx, “Marx an Ludwig Kugelmann, 6. März 1868,” in MEW , vol. 32, p. 538; Marx (1987), “Marx to Ludwig Kugelmann, 6 March 1868,” in Marx and Engels, Collected Works (MECW ), vol. 42, pp. 543–544. 7. Engels, Anti-Dühring, in MECW , vol. 25, pp. 5–6. 8. Eugen Dühring, Natürliche Dialektik. Neue logische Grundlegungen der Wissenschaft und Philosophie (Berlin, 1865), p. 1. 9. Dühring, Cursus der Philosophie als Streng-wissenschaftlicher Weltanschauung und Lebensgestaltung (Leipzig, 1875), p. 30. 10. Dühring, Natürliche Dialektik, p. 113; Dühring, Cursus der Philosophie als Streng-wissenschaftlicher Weltanschauung und Lebensgestaltung, p. 31; Dühring, Kritische Geschichte der Philosophie von ihren Anfängen bis zur Gegenwart (Berlin, 1873), pp. 446, 453. 11. Engels, Herrn Eugen Dührings Umwälzung der Wissenschaft (Anti-Dühring ), in Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe (MECW ), vol. I/27.1 (Berlin, 1988), p. 318. 12. Engels, “Engels to Marx, 30 May 1873,” in MECW , vol. 44, p. 500.

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13. Engels, “Engels an Marx, 23. November 1882,” in MEW , vol. 35, p. 119; Engels, “Engels to Marx, 23 November 1882,” in MECW , vol. 46, p. 384. Translation modified. 14. Boris I. Nikolaevskij, “Nikolaevskij an Rjazanov, 2. November 1924,” in Beiträge zur Marx-Engels-Forschung Neue Folge. Sonderband 1 (1997), p. 62. 15. Nikolaevskij, “Nikolaevskij an Felix Weil, 24. November 1924,” in Beiträge zur Marx-Engels-Forschung Neue Folge. Sonderband 1 (1997), p. 63. 16. David B. Rjazanov, “MEI (Rjazanov) an GfS, 5. November 1924,” in Beiträge zur Marx-Engels-Forschung Neue Folge. Sonderband 2 (2000), p. 152. 17. Notice here that the Russian title (Dialektika Prirody) remained the same in different editions even when the German title was switched from Naturdialektik to Dialektik der Natur. For Russian does not follow the German grammatical distinction between the composition of multiple words (Natur-dialektik) and the genitive construction (Dialektik der Natur). 18. Cf. Kangal, “Engels’ Intentions in Dialectics of Nature,” in Science & Society 2 (2019), pp. 215–243, here: 220–221. 19. Rjazanov, “MEI an GfS. 11, Dezember 1924,” in Beiträge zur Marx-Engels-Forschung Neue Folge. Sonderband 2 (2000), p. 183. 20. Felix Weil, “Felix Weil an Eduard Bernstein, 3. Dezember 1924,” in Beiträge zur Marx- Engels-Forschung Neue Folge. Sonderband 2 (2000), p. 179; Eduard Bernstein, “Eduard Bernstein an Felix Weil, 19. Dezember 1924,” in Beiträge zur Marx-Engels-Forschung Neue Folge. Sonderband 2 (2000), pp. 404–405. 21. Bernstein, “Eduard Bernstein an Felix Weil, 19. Dezember 1924,” p. 405. 22. Weil, “Felix Weil an Eduard Bernstein, 9. Dezember 1924,” in Beiträge zur Marx-Engels-Forschung Neue Folge. Sonderband 2 (2000), p. 194. 23. Rjazanov, “David Rjazanov an Carl Grünberg, 23. Juni 1925,” in Beiträge zur Marx-Engels-Forschung Neue Folge. Sonderband 2 (2000), p. 221; Ernst Czóbel, “Ernst Czóbel an David Rjazanov, 13. August 1925,” in Beiträge zur Marx-Engels-Forschung Neue Folge. Sonderband 2 (2000), p. 226. 24. The complete version was published in 1985 in Berlin (East). The first edition came out in 1925, but it was far from complete (cf.

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Kangal, Friedrich Engels and the Dialectics of Nature) pp. 56–60, 76. 25. I. Stepanov, “Engel’s i mekhanisticheskoe ponimanie prirody,” in Pod Znamenem Marksizma 8–9 (1925), pp. 44–72, here: 51; Stepanov, Dialekticheskii materializm i deborinskaia shkola (Moscow, 1928), p. 130; Engels, Dialektik der Natur, in MECW I/26, pp. 23–24; Engels, Dialectics of Nature, in MECW , vol. 25, p. 527. 26. Abram Deborin, “Lenin i krizis noveishei fiziki,” in Filosofia i Politika, ed. Deborin (Moscow, 1961), pp. 415–440, here: 417. 27. Georg Lukács, Geschichte und Klassenbewußtsein, in Georg Lukács Werke, vol. 2 (Neuwied, 1977), p. 175, n. 1. 28. Lukács, “Die Bedeutung von ‘Materialismus und Empiriokritizismus’ für die Bolschewisierung der kommunistischen Parteien. Kritik und Selbstkritik zu ‘Geschichte und Klassenbewußtsein’,” in Geschichte und Klassenbewußtsein Heute. Diskussion und Dokumentation, ed. F. Cerutti et al. (Amsterdam, 1971), pp. 253–262, here: 260. 29. Jean-Paul Sartre et al., Marxisme et Existentialisme. Controverse sur la dialectique (Paris, 1962), pp. 27–28. 30. Engels, Dialektik der Natur, in MECW I/26, pp. 5–6, 9, 12, 16, 28, 41, 45–46, 48. 31. Ibid., p. 5. 32. Ibid. 33. Engels, Dialectics of Nature, in MECW , vol. 25, p. 485; Engels, Dialektik der Natur, in MECW I/26, p. 6. 34. Engels, Dialectics of Nature, in MECW , vol. 25, p. 486; Engels, Dialektik der Natur, in MECW I/26, p. 6. 35. Ibid., p. 6. 36. Ibid., p. 9. 37. Ibid., p. 12. 38. Ibid., p. 16. 39. Ibid., p. 41. 40. Ibid., pp. 45–46. 41. Ibid., p. 45. 42. Ibid., pp. 155, 163, 188, 189, 202, 212, 267. 43. Ibid., pp. 67–87. 44. Ibid., p. 155; Engels, Dialectics of Nature, in MECW , vol. 25, p. 345.

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45. Engels, Dialectics of Nature, in MECW , vol. 25, p. 454; Engels, Dialektik der Natur, in MECW I/26, p. 163. 46. Engels, Dialectics of Nature, in MECW , vol. 25, p. 364; Engels, Dialektik der Natur, in MECW I/26, p. 189. 47. Engels, Dialectics of Nature, in MECW , vol. 25, p. 363; Engels, Dialektik der Natur, in MECW I/26, p. 188. 48. Engels, Dialektik der Natur, in MECW I/26, p. 189. 49. Ibid. 50. Engels, “Engels an Marx, 23. November 1882,” p. 119. 51. Cf. Engels, Dialektik der Natur, in MECW I/26, pp. 275, 244– 245. 52. Engels, Dialectics of Nature, in MECW , vol. 25, p. 552; Engels, Dialektik der Natur, in MECW I/26, p. 45. 53. For Kant’s distinction of three types of opposites, see Kangal, Friedrich Engels and the Dialectics of Nature, pp. 146–148.

Bibliography Bernstein, Eduard. “Eduard Bernstein an Felix Weil, 19. Dezember 1924.” In Beiträge zur Marx-Engels-Forschung Neue Folge. Sonderband 2 (Hamburg: Argument Verlag, 2000), pp. 404–405. Deborin, Abram. “Lenin i krizis noveishei fiziki.” In Filosofia i Politika, edited by Abram Deborin (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Akademii Nauk SSSR, 1961), pp. 415– 440. Dühring, Eugen. Cursus der Philosophie als Streng-wissenschaftlicher Weltanschauung und Lebensgestaltung (Leipzig: Koschny Verlag, 1875). Dühring, Eugen. Kritische Geschichte der Philosophie von ihren Anfängen bis zur Gegenwart (Berlin: L. Heimann, 1873). Dühring, Eugen. Natürliche Dialektik. Neue logische Grundlegungen der Wissenschaft und Philosophie (Berlin: Mittler Verlag, 1865). Engels, Frederick. Anti-Dühring. In MECW , vol. 25, pp. 5–309. Engels, Frederick. Dialektik der Natur. In MEGA I, vol. 26. Engels, Frederick. Herrn Eugen Dührings Umwälzung der Wissenschaft (AntiDühring). In MEGA I, vol. 27. Hecker, Rolf, Richard Sperl, and Carl-Erich Vollgraf. Eds. Beiträge zur Marx-Engels-Forschung Neue Folge. Sonderband 2: Marx-Engels-Edition und biographische Forschung (Hamburg: Argument Verlag, 2000). Kangal, Kaan. Friedrich Engels and the Dialectics of Nature (London: Palgrave, 2020).

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Lukács, Georg. “Die Bedeutung von ‘Materialismus und Empiriokritizismus’ für die Bolschewisierung der kommunistischen Parteien. Kritik und Selbstkritik zu ‘Geschichte und Klassenbewußtsein.’” In Geschichte und Klassenbewußtsein Heute. Diskussion und Dokumentation, edited by F. Cerutti et al. (Amsterdam: Verlag de Munter, 1971), pp. 253–262. Lukács, Georg. Geschichte und Klassenbewußtsein. In Werke, vol. 2 (Neuwied, 1977). Sartre, Jean-Paul et al. Marxisme et Existentialisme. Controverse sur la dialectique (Paris: Plon, 1962). Stepanov, Ivan Ivanovich Skvortsov. Dialekticheskii materializm i deborinskaia shkola (Moscow, 1928). Weil, Felix. “Felix Weil an Eduard Bernstein, 3. Dezember 1924.” In Beiträge zur Marx- Engels-Forschung Neue Folge. Sonderband 2 (2000), p. 179. Zhou, L. Renhua Ziran Bianzhengfa. Dui Makesi de ziranguan de jiedu (Beijing: People’s Publishing House, 2008), pp. 2–4.

CHAPTER 4

Was Engels a Dialectical Materialist? Smail Rapic

Engels did not call his philosophical position “dialectical materialism”. Joseph Dietzgen and Georgi Plekhanov were the first ones who used this term to characterize Marx’s and Engels’s philosophy.1 This designation was adopted by Karl Kautsky and V.I. Lenin, and thus entered into the history of Marxist theory. Engels himself preferred the expression “materialist dialectic”.2 In that way he illustrates the counter-position to Hegel’s idealism by using the famous metaphor, taken from Marx’s Capital, that he and Marx had overturned “the dialectic of Hegel …; or rather, turned it off its head, on which it was standing, and placed it upon its feet” (MEW 21, p. 293). Marx concretizes this inversion as follows: To Hegel, the process of thinking, which, under the name of “idea” he even transforms into an independent subject, is the demiurgos of the actual [Wirklichen] … With me, on the contrary, the ideal is nothing else than the material world transposed and translated in the human head.3

S. Rapic (B) Bergische Universität Wuppertal, Wuppertal, Germany e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 T. Carver and S. Rapic (eds.), Friedrich Engels for the 21st Century, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-97138-0_4

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In these Marxian formulations Engels sees the quintessence of the opposition between idealism and materialism: Those who asserted the primacy of spirit to nature … comprised the camp of idealism. The others, who regarded nature as primary, belong to the various schools of materialism. (MEW 21, p. 275)

If these are the underlying definitions of idealism and materialism, then it seems inevitable that the Hegelian system is situated decidedly in the idealist camp. Hegel claims that the development of the categories of his logic also pre-designates the basic structure of all areas of reality. His metaphorical thesis, that the “pure idea”, that is, the generative context of the categories of his logic, “discharges [entlässt ]”4 itself into nature, implies that empirical contingencies, which he in no way denies, do not affect the constitutive logical principles of actuality [Wirklichkeit ]. In Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, Lenin cites Engels as the guarantor for his claim that idealism and materialism are “irreconcilable” philosophical standpoints in the sense that materialism advocates a realistic “copy theory” of knowledge whereas idealism ascribes to subjectivity a constitutive role for any objectivity.5 While Plekhanov’s and Lenin’s view that Marx and Engels held the same philosophical position had achieved a canonical status in Bolshevik party doctrine, Georg Lukács takes a contrary view in History and Class Consciousness. He claims that Marx, in contrast to Engels, strove for a synthesis of materialism and idealism. This thesis has exerted a large influence on western authors who were Marxists or at least had an affinity to Marxism. Lukács refers to Marx’s first thesis on Feuerbach: The chief defect of all hitherto existing materialism … is that the thing, reality, sensuousness, is conceived only in the form of the object or of intuition [Anschauung ], but not human sensuous activity, practice; not subjectively.6

According to Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness, Engels ignores the idealist aspect of Marx’s concept of practice, that is, its object-constituting function, and then aligns the materialist dialectic with natural-scientific causal explanation.7 What seems to speak for this interpretation of Engels is that J.V. Stalin, in his influential On Dialectical and Historical

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Materialism, appeals to Engels and Lenin in depicting dialectical materialism as a determinism, thus integrating Engels’s reference to Marx’s Feuerbach-thesis into this perspective, as we will see later. Lukács’s interpretation of Engels in History and Class Consciousness was subsequently adopted in the west by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, JeanPaul Sartre, Ludwig Landgrebe, Alfred Schmidt and Albrecht Wellmer, to name only a few well-known figures. However, Lukács revised his standpoint in the 1967 preface to History and Class Consciousness.8 Following Lukács’s self-correction, I want to argue that Engels’s materialist dialectic was received from a one-sided and limited point of view by Lenin and Stalin as well as by authors who took over Lukács’s interpretation of Engels in History and Class Consciousness. I want to show that Engels in no way constitutes a regression with respect to the Marxian concept of practice; rather, he expanded it into a philosophical position which, despite its shortcomings, is still of interest. It is Engels’s relationship to Hegel that is the focus of the remarks that follow, which are divided into three parts. I will first explain Engels’s thesis that Hegel’s system contains materialist features. Then I will briefly discuss Lenin’s and Stalin’s conceptions of dialectical materialism. Those conceptions were equated with Engels’s “materialist dialectic” not only in the former Soviet bloc but also by prominent western authors. Thereafter, I want to outline Engels’s innovative continuation, inspired by Hegel’s system, of the Marxian concept of practice as well as its systematic relevance for the present.

Engels’s View of the Materialist Features of the Hegelian System According to Engels’s writings on Feuerbach, the idealist systems of modernity “fill themselves more and more with a materialist content … Thus, ultimately, the Hegelian system represents merely a materialism idealistically turned upside down in method and content” (MEW 21, p. 277). The point of departure for this prima facie surprising statement is the fact that Hegel’s claim to be able, through the generative context of his logical categories, to grasp the basic structure of all areas of reality should be redeemed in the real-philosophical parts of his system— the philosophy of nature and of spirit. As Engels puts it: “in hundreds

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of passages” in his Logic, Hegel gives “the most striking individual illustrations of the dialectical laws from nature and history” (MEW 20, p. 349).9 With that statement, Engels relativizes or revises his strikingly coarse reproach that Hegel “foisted” the logical laws of thought “on nature and history” (MEW 20, p. 348; CW 25, p. 356). The point of this thesis, namely, that the Hegelian system represents “a materialism idealistically turned upside down in method and content”, is that Hegel obscured the future-oriented features of his system through an inappropriate self-understanding. According to Engels, the “natural and historical science” only reaches the level of reflection [Reflexion] in the realphilosophical parts of the Hegelian system where they have been “imbued with dialectics” (MEW 20, p. 480; CW 25, p. 491). The materialist dialectic in Engels’s sense takes over the tripartite division of Hegel’s system whereby natural science steps into the place of the Hegelian philosophy of nature, historical science into that of his philosophy of spirit, and the dialectical “principles” of natural and historical science are formulated in the “pure theory of thought” as the genuine philosophical counterpart to Hegel’s logic (MEW 20, p. 480; CW 25, p. 491). The pure theory of thinking—following the programmatic maxim of inverting the Hegelian system from its head so that it stands upon its feet—should thus be empirically founded. It is therefore not to be conceived in terms of principles preceding experience (cf. MEW 20, p. 33, p. 574). Engels sees the inversion, intended by him and Marx, of the architecture of Hegel’s system to be the result of an immanent critique of Hegel. Hegel claims that the categorical framework of his logic proves itself in the empirical material that he works through in the real-philosophical parts of his system by stringently organizing it. With the striking assertion that the pure idea, “absolutely certain of itself and internally at rest” “discharges”10 itself into nature, however, Hegel disregards the fact that he must have recourse to fundamentally falsifiable results of empirical research in the philosophy of nature and history, so that his thesis, which is constitutive to his system, that his logic contains the principles of all areas of reality, is also subject to falsification. If the contingency of the research results, which are indispensable for Hegel’s real philosophy [Realphilosophie], are then taken into account, the claim that his system arrives at “absolute truth” must be rejected, as Engels does (MEW 21, p. 268 f.). That leads back to the Enlightenment

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understanding of cognition of the world, according to which we must always remain aware of its “necessary limitation”, but at the same time, however, we will have reason to assume that “in spite of all temporary retrogression, a progressive development asserts itself in the end” (MEW 21, p. 293). Marx’s and Engels’s aim of inverting Hegel’s system from its “from its head to its feet” must not be understood as saying that the dialectical forms of thought in Hegelian logic, whose “rational kernel” Marx and Engels want to uncover (MEW 23, p. 27), can be gained through a descriptive summary of empirical research results—although Engels, with his partiality for one-sided, pointed formulations, sometimes gives that impression (MEW 34, p. 593). If the dialectical forms of thought had a purely empirical content, Engels’s programmatic statement, that the genuinely philosophical part of his materialist dialectic consists in the “pure theory of thought”, would be amiss (MEW 20, p. 480; CW 25, p. 491). It is Engels’s conviction that the positivist features of the thencontemporary sciences reveal a severe reflexive deficit: “Natural scientists believe that they free themselves from philosophy by ignoring it or abusing” (MEW 20, p. 480; CW 25, 490). Positivism erases the fact that the empirical sciences apply methodological premises which reflect the influence of “obsolete philosophies” on the “consciousness of so-called educated persons” (MEW 20, p. 480; CW 25, p. 491). Engels’s programme of applying dialectical forms of thought to natural and historical sciences includes a resolute turn against positivism. On Engels’s conception of a materialist dialectic, philosophy and the empirical sciences thus stand in a reciprocally founding relationship: according to Engels, the pure doctrine of thought requires, on the one hand, an empirical connection, and on the other hand, it functions as a corrective to an unreflective handing down of philosophically obsolete premises for the natural sciences. However, it remains unclear in Engels what the genuine philosophical point of departure for the pure theory of thought really is. This is the central methodological shortcoming of his materialist dialectic.

Lenin’s and Stalin’s Understanding of Dialectical Materialism Lenin’s view that there is an irreconcilable antagonism between idealism and materialism is based on his combining and simplifying two different

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readings of this conceptual pair. He takes the first reading from Engels. According to this reading, it belongs to the definition of the two positions that idealism takes spirit, and materialism takes nature, “as primary”.11 Lenin brings the second reading of the conceptual pair “idealism/materialism” into play with his thesis that idealism “only begins when the philosopher says that objects are my sensations”.12 According to Lenin, the materialist counter-position to such an idealism regards our “perceptions and representations” as “copies” of things that “exist independently of our consciousness”.13 By linking these two readings of the conceptual pair “idealism/materialism” with each other, Lenin argues that those who see Hegel’s “spirit” [Geist ] as primary must identify things with representations. Lenin traces this understanding of idealism back to Bishop George Berkeley.14 However, he thereby distorts both Berkeley’s position and Kant’s and Hegel’s idealist standpoints. None of those authors equates the existence of external objects with their presence in consciousness without further ado. Berkeley’s core thesis is that there are no objects that are absolutely independent of us, but he does not deny that things can also exist within the horizon of our experience, even when they are not actually being perceived by anyone: in those cases, their existence, according to Berkeley, consists in their ability to be perceived.15 Kant’s transcendental idealism, according to which we have no knowledge of “things in themselves” which are absolutely independent of experience, goes together with an empirical realism. For Hegel, the synthesis of the opposed theses, that spirit “posits” nature and at the same time presupposes nature, is of central significance. Lenin justifies his materialism by saying that this “conviction” “that things, reality and environment exist independently of us” is indispensable for our natural relation to the world.16 None of the modern idealists dispute the view that this conviction is ineluctable. Lenin neglects the distinction, fundamental to their position, that lies within the concept of being-in-itself, which relates to spatio-temporal objects. According to that distinction, we must ascribe to those objects an existence outside their presence in consciousness, an existence that lies within the horizon of our experience. But this is an existence which we cannot infer directly from the fact that these objects exist absolutely independent of our experience. In the last section of my chapter, I want to show that Engels’s materialist dialectic incorporates this idealist distinction.

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The widespread conception among western Marxist authors, or authors with an affinity for Marxism, that Engels ignores the objectconstituting function of human practice, as discussed in Marx’s “Theses on Feuerbach”, can be supported prima facie by Stalin’s interpretation of Engels in his On Dialectical and Historical Materialism. Stalin’s materialist determinism emerges clearly in his interpretation of Marxist base/superstructure theory. Stalin rejects a simplistic reading of this theory, according to which the historical development of the economic basis of social formations exclusively follows immanent laws. He does this by deploying the argument that “social ideas, social theories, political views, political institutions” that belong to the superstructure in the Marxist sense retroact upon the “conditions of the material life of society”.17 According to Stalin, the formation of ideas that drive social progress are, however, determined in the sense that they are indispensable to the solution of problems in the material basis: New social ideas and theories arise precisely because they are necessary to society, because it is impossible to carry out the urgent tasks of development of the material life of society without their organizing, mobilizing and transforming action.18

According to Stalin, the communist party, as the avant-garde of the proletariat, thus faces the task of filtering out those contemporary ideas and theories from which such a reconfiguration of the material basis is to be expected.19 The recognition of these ideas is the prerequisite of successful political action. Stalin introduces Engels and Lenin as key witnesses for his determinist understanding of practice.20 He cites a passage from Engels’s writings on Feuerbach in which Engels takes up Francis Bacon’s maxim that human knowledge and ability amount to the same thing, to the extent that “that which in contemplation is as the cause is in operation as the rule”.21 According to Engels’s writings on Feuerbach, the “most telling refutation” of sceptical doubt about “an exhaustive cognition” of the world is “practice – namely, experiment and industry. If we are able to prove the correctness of our conception of a natural process by making it ourselves, bringing it into being out of its conditions and making it serve our own purposes into the bargain, then there is an end to the Kantian ungraspable ‘thing-in-itself’” (MEW 21, p. 276).

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This passage is of central importance for clarifying the question of whether Engels falls in behind the Marxian concept of practice, because Marx himself alludes to Bacon in the “Theses on Feuerbach”: “Man must prove the truth, that is, the reality and power … of his thinking in practice” (MEW 3, p. 5). However, in the “Theses on Feuerbach” Marx focused on political practice and not, as Engel later did, on natural science and its technical application in industry. In History and Class Consciousness, Lukács views the aforementioned section from Engels’s writings on Feuerbach as proof that Engels’s approach to practice is that of an experimenter who seeks causal explanations and wants to make use of them.22 Engels thereby misses, according to Lukács, the critical-emancipatory moment of Marx’s concept of practice. Like Lukács in History and Class Consciousness, Sartre, Landgrebe, Schmidt and Wellmer also hold the view that Engels established the priority of natural science and technology over his concept of practice in his programmatic draft of a dialectic of nature.23 Engels’s dialectic of nature, according to this line in the western tradition, is a pseudoscientific, dogmatic metaphysics, so his materialist dialectic is entirely null and void.

Engels’s Materialist Dialectic as the Unity of Theory and Practice In his 1967 preface to History and Class Consciousness Lukács retracts the accusation made in the book that Engels, by focusing his concept of practice on modern natural science and its technical application, ignores the “dialectic mediation between subject and object in the historical process” which is central to Marx’s “Theses on Feuerbach”.24 According to Lukács’s self-correction, this accusation focuses exclusively on the object-relatedness of natural science and technology and fades out the fact that experiments are the decisively testing instance of natural-scientific theory formation as a historically situated cooperative undertaking. As Bacon correctly predicted, through its success in experiment, modern natural science has not only superseded traditional, metaphysical natural philosophy, and thereby brought about a turning point in the history of science, but has also prepared the way for a global technological civilization that has drawn human beings out from powerlessness in the face of natural forces. According to Lukács’s 1967 preface, scientifictechnical practice so understood must be extended to a “comprehensive

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practice” in order to be able to exercise its “function that was rightly demanded by Engels” as a way of verifying theories that should contribute to human progress.25 Such a “comprehensive practice” is then realized when the cooperation of natural scientists acquires a paradigmatic significance for the common formation of social relations and accordingly becomes transparent to the public. If natural-scientific research remains a matter for experts sealed off from the public, it can be instrumentalized for claims to dominance. Lukács’s statement in his 1967 preface that Engels had innovatively expanded the Marxist conception of a “dialectical mediation of subject and object in the historical process” can be concretized and corroborated, starting from Engels’s genus-historical classification of modern natural science. With its experimental methods and technical applications, the labour that forms the genus-historical origin of the specifically human form of life reaches a new historical stage. Labour, according to Engels, is “the primary basic condition for all human existence, and this to such an extent that, in a sense, we have to say that labour created man himself” (MEW 20, 444). The definition of human labour here is the capacity to produce tools, acquired in the history of the genus and then passed on (MEW 20, 449). According to Engels, the practice of using tools is the root of thinking, the fundamental category of which is therefore causality: its genus-historical origin is the experience that our activities can bring forth predictable effects: [T]he alteration of nature by men, not solely nature as such … is the most essential and immediate basis of human thought, and it is in the measure that man has learned to change nature that his intelligence has increased. (MEW 20, 498, CW 25, p. 511)

The genesis of thinking is a recursive process: the use of equipment, initially applied in a mechanical way, provides the impetus for the cognition of the connection between cause and effect. This in turn creates the capacity to act methodically and thus to shape our life circumstances consciously. The foundation of the cognition of nature in labour, upon which the evolutionary step from the animal to the human rests, is continued at a higher level in the experimental methods of modern natural science.

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With his outline of a materialist dialectic, Engels conceives the history of society as analogous to the genus-historical path from the archaic use of tools to modern natural science and technology: Animals also have a history, that of their descent and gradual evolution to their present position. This history, however, is made for them, and insofar as they themselves take part in it, this occurs without their knowledge and desire. On the other hand, the more the human beings become removed from animals in the narrower sense of the word, the more they make their history themselves, consciously, the less becomes the influence of unforeseen effects and uncontrolled forces on this history, and the more accurately does the historical result correspond to the aim laid down in advance. (MEW 20, 323, CW 25, pp. 330–331)

The point of this passage is that we ourselves can only “make”, that is, consciously shape history, when we know how it is “made”, thus when we know its structural principles. In this way, Engels transposes Bacon’s maxim that humans can only dominate nature when they obey it to the social history that they make.26 However, Engels goes beyond Bacon’s mechanistic concept of causality. Only in this way can he extend his core thesis that we have only grasped the “in itself” of a natural process when we can generate it in society. According to Engels nature is the “test” of the dialectic, whereby he describes Hegel’s work as “a comprehensive compendium of dialectics, developed though it be from an utterly erroneous point of departure” (MEW 20, 22, 334, CW 25, p. 23, p. 342). Engels sees the core of Hegel’s dialectical logic in the concept of “Essence [Wesens ]”, that is, “reflection” (MEW 20, 43, CW 25, p. 43). The key role of this concept in Engels’s materialist dialectic is ignored by both Lenin and Stalin as well as by the line of thought in the west that goes back to Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness. That means that the conventional understanding of dialectical materialism misses the central point of Engels’s materialist dialectic. I first want to briefly outline the Hegelian concept of essence, and following on from this, I will go into its materialist re-interpretation by Engels. In Hegel’s Logic the step from the sphere of being to essence is a regression into the ground of being. At the beginning of the logic of being the category of becoming passes over into that of existence [Dasein]; for Hegel “existence” means a manifold of firmly determined

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mutually external entities. The step in the logic of being from becoming to existence comes about by the insight that becoming—as Plato had already emphasized in the Theaetetus—can only be identified as such if it bears some determinations. In Hegel’s logic of essence, the transition in the logic of being from becoming to existence is repeated in the foundational dimension of being. Hegel’s seemingly enigmatic formula that becoming is in essence “the movement from nothing to nothing and thereby back to itself”27 means that every determinacy is generated in a self-referential process that itself has no underlying objectivity: in Hegel’s logic “nothing” means “indeterminacy”. The Hegelian term for the self-referentiality of essence is “reflection”. Reflection is “positing” in that it brings forth determinations—and simultaneously reflection is “presupposing”, because it does not create the sphere of being but only generates its determinations. Hegel grasps selfconscious subjectivity as the being-for-itself of the self-referentiality of essence. According to Hegel, spirit “posits” nature in that it constitutes its conceptual determinations and at the same time spirit presupposes nature in that it refers to nature as something pre-given. What must be kept in mind here is that a nature stripped of all conceptual determinations would be fully indeterminate and a “nothing” in this sense. Engels sees in Hegelian logic the key to the categorical reconstruction of the history of nature and society. While Hegel grasps the category “becoming” in the logic of being purely conceptually, Engels refers it from the outset to nature, that is, to the material. He agrees with Heraclitus’s view that “nature is not, but becomes and passes away” (MEW 20, 317, translation adapted from CW 25, p. 324). A fundamental tendency towards increasing complexity can be recognized in the history of the cosmos hitherto. However, Engels rightly predicts that the highest level of complexity known to us in matter—life on earth—is preordained to extinction, for the sun cannot forever supply the energy required for life. Like J.G. Herder before him, Engels considers Kant’s hypothesis in his Allgemeine Naturgeschichte und Theorie des Himmels as an adequate reconstruction of the early phase of the universe. According to this hypothesis, the solar and planetary systems have evolved through the condensation of an amorphous nebula of matter on the basis of the interplay between the Newtonian forces of attraction and repulsion (MEW 20, 316 f.). Kant’s tentative explanation is also accepted in its essentials in contemporary cosmology. Herder generalizes it in his Ideen zu einer

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Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit to make it a paradigm of the self-organization of matter in natural history, transposing this paradigm to social history. Herder’s leading thesis is that in both spheres there are complex structures that rest “on the equilibrium of mutually resisting forces by an internal power that steers them to order”,28 anticipating modern general system theory. The “inner power” of which Herder speaks is nothing other than the principle of self-organization. The connecting link between Engels’s materialist dialectic and Herder’s Ideen, which Engels does not explicitly mention, is their common reference to Baruch Spinoza, who defines the one substance—deus sive natura—as causa sui.29 Engels agrees with Hegel that the principle of self-organization that Spinoza’s formula causa sui stands for must be grasped in terms of a logic of essence. In his “pure theory of thought” Engels takes up the Hegelian concept of essence under the heading of the “law of the interpenetration of opposites” (MEW 20, 348, CW 25, p. 491, 356). He takes over Hegel’s interpretation, in his doctrine of essence, of the category of mutual interaction, with which Hegel integrates Spinoza’s determination of substance as causa sui into his logic. According to Engels, in “universal interaction” “causes and effects are eternally changing places, so that what is effect here and now will be cause there and then, and vice versa” (MEW 20, 22, CW 25, p. 23, first citation modified). This corresponds to the concept of causality in general system theory: it is characterized by the feedback effects that generate complex structures.30 In Engels’ materialist dialectic Darwin’s evolutionary theory forms the connecting link between the history of the universe and the history of society. Engels’s metaphorical statement that the evolutionary history of animals is “made for them” (MEW 20, 323, ff., CW 25, pp. 330–331) implies that this history proceeds as if it strives for the goal of enabling the survival of those animals who are best adapted to their environment. Since human beings are also a product of evolution, Engels explains the emergence of thought by its function of serving life. On the basis of the feedback effect between thinking and labour, the concept of mutual interaction from the logic of being that Engels takes over from Hegel is applied to the genesis of the human form of life. With his thesis that we can cognize the “in-itself” of a natural process insofar as we can “bringing it into being out of its conditions” (MEW 21, 276, ff.), Engels explains causally regulated processes that we can make use of as the original object of cognition. That our knowledge initially refers to

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processes ties in with Engels’s fundamental thesis that “nature is not, but becomes and passes away” (MEW 20, 317, ff.). In the course of the progress of thinking, natural processes are made the object of true propositions. With this, the becoming of nature is transformed for us into a being. With his statement, “Being, indeed, is always an open question beyond the point where our sphere of observation ends” (MEW 20, 41, CW 25, p. 41), Engels binds the concept of being—which he uses in the sense of the Hegelian concept of “existence” back to human subjectivity. In Engels’s materialist dialectic, as in Hegel’s logic, the selfreferentiality of essence underlies the step from becoming to existence—in Engels’s view concretely: it is the recursive relationship between labour and thinking subsumed under the category, in the doctrine of essence, of interaction [Wechselwirkung ]. Hence, Engels does not advocate a realist copy theory of cognition, as Lenin had assumed. The being that constitutes itself in our perspective is not a copy of becoming. The “in itself” of a causally ordered natural process—which, according to Engels, we cognize when we generate it outside of its natural conditions—is an “in itself” for us. In Engels the indeterminate term “becoming” stands for an “in-itself” that is absolutely independent of us. Strictly speaking, we may not even speak of “becoming”, because this is only identifiable as determinable and is only in that sense. Like for Marx, the object of cognition for Engels is constituted within the horizon of practice. The constitution of objective entities and the constitution of human subjectivity coincide. Thus Lukács was right to retract his accusation that Engels was blind to the dialectical mediation of subject and object in the historical process, and in the sense intended in Marx’s “Theses on Feuerbach”. Engels’s innovative philosophical achievement consists in his embedding of the Marxian concept of practice in the account of a materialist dialectic that points towards modern general system theory, and at the same time contains a reflective step that is absent in that modern theory. Jürgen Habermas objects to the claim to universal explanation in general system theory, as prominently expounded by Niklas Luhmann, because it remains within the descriptive-explanatory perspective of the observer.31 According to Habermas, social theory must link this perspective to the perspective of a participant in the life-world that ascribes to social actors a responsibility for their actions.32 Habermas takes up Edmund Husserl’s distinction between the natural presumptions of

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causal-explanatory science and the personalistic presumptions in the lifeworld through a methodological doubling of the perspectives of the observer and participant.33 That distinction is already substantially present in Engels’s work. The thesis that the systematic principle of self-organization is effective in nature as well as in social history is fundamental to his materialist dialectic. However, this view of society remains, according to Engels, “one-sided” (cf. MEW 20, 498). For the more distant human beings are from animals then “the more they make their history themselves, consciously” as responsible actors (MEW 20, 323 CW 25, pp. 330–331). Engels’s concept of practice is the counterpart to Husserl’s concept of the life-world, which Habermas takes up. In Engels’s materialist dialectic the step from the scientific explanation of the world to the self-reflection of social actors is conceived analogously to Hegel’s determination of subjectivity as the being-for-itself of self-referentiality. Like Husserl later, Engels understands natural-scientific research as a practice of responsible actors. Modern natural science continues the recursive relationship of thinking and labour, which forms the origin of the human form of life at the level of knowledge in which universally binding criteria of truth have evolved. Natural scientific practice expands to a comprehensive practice, in that social actors reflect on the self-organization of societies in history. Following the base/superstructure theory, they realize that social conflicts, which are rooted at the economic level, have permeated all forms of society. This is reflected in the ideological deformations of their normative self-descriptions. Through insight into these ideological distortions, we can emancipate ourselves and initiate social change that—if it is to be sustainable—must include economic relationships. In his confrontation with Luhmann, Habermas connects with historical materialism in this sense.34 The theory of communicative rationality that Habermas worked out, together with Karl-Otto Apel and in connection with Peter Frederick Strawson’s analytic transcendental philosophy, forms, in my opinion, the adequate framework for Engels’s pure theory of thought, the methodological status of which remains unclear. However, I see a limit to the position that Habermas maintains against Luhmann in the fact that Habermas bids farewell to the dialectic forms of thought of historical materialism to which Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno had still adhered.

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Confronting Engels can contribute to the revitalization of this form of thinking. We are still, as Habermas concisely put it, the philosophical contemporaries of the Young Hegelians and thus also we are contemporaries of Friedrich Engels.35

Notes 1. Dietzgen, Streifzüge eines Sozialisten in das Gebiet der Erkenntnistheorie, Chapter III: “Materialismus contra Materialismus” (1887), in Dietzgen, Schriften in drei Bänden, Hrsg. von der Arbeitsgruppe Philosophie der Deutschen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin (Berlin, 1961, vol. III), pp. 59–81; Plechanow, “Zu Hegels sechzigstem Todestag,” in Die Neue Zeit (1891/92), pp. 198–203, 236–243, 273–282. 2. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Werke. 43 Bde (Berlin, 1956 ff.) (in the following cited as: MEW ), Bd. 21, p. 293; translation from Engels, F. Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy, trans. Progress Publishers (1946), published at https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/ Marx_Ludwig_Feurbach_and_the_End_of_German_Classical_Phi losop.pdf. 3. Marx, Das Kapital, Erster Band. MEW 23, 27; translation adapted from Marx, K. “Capital, Volume One” in The Marx-Engels Reader: Second Edition, ed. R.C. Tucker (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1978), p. 301. 4. Hegel, Wissenschaft der Logik II, in Werke in 20 Bänden, Bd. 6. ed. Eva Moldenhauer und Karl Markus Michel, 20 Bde (Frankfurt a. M., 1970), p. 573. Translation from G. W. F. Hegel, The Science of Logic, trans. G. Di Giovanni (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 752–753. 5. V.I. Lenin, Collected Works Volume XIII: Materialism and EmpirioCriticism: Critical Notes Concerning a Reactionary Philosophy [1 1908, 2 1920], trans. D. Kvitkop and ed. A. Trachtenberg (New York: Martin Lawrence Ltd, 1927), p. 151. 6. MEW 3, 5; Lukács, Geschichte und Klassenbewusstsein. Studien über marxistische Dialektik [1922] (Neuwied and Berlin, 1968), p. 86; translation adapted from K. Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach” in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Tucker, p. 143. 7. Lukács, Geschichte und Klassenbewusstsein, pp. 61 f., 241 f.

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8. Ibid., p. 19 f. 9. Translation from Marx and Engels, Collected Works Volume 25: Engels, trans. E. Burns and C. Dutt (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1987), p. 357. Hereafter referred to as CW 25. 10. Hegel, Wissenschaft der Logik II = Werke, Bd. 6, p. 573; translation from Hegel, op. cit., pp. 752–753. 11. Lenin, Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, p. 74, n. 5. 12. loc. cit., p. 84. 13. loc. cit., pp. 77, 83. 14. loc. cit., p. 78. 15. George Berkeley, A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, ed. David R. Wilkins (Dublin, 2002), Part I, § 3, p. 12 f. 16. Lenin, Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, p. 47. 17. J. Stalin, Dialectical and Historical Materialism (New York: International Publishers Co., 1973), p. 20. 18. loc. cit., p. 23. 19. loc. cit., pp. 23–24. 20. loc. cit., p. 18. 21. Francis Bacon, Neues Organon, Lat.-dt. Hrsg. und mit einer Einl. von Wolfgang Krohn. 2 Bde (Hamburg, 1990). Bd. I, Aphorismus 3, p. 80 f. Bacon, Novum Organum, trans. J. Spedding, Book I, Aphorism III. 22. Lukács, Geschichte und Klassenbewusstsein, p. 242 n. 23. In the place cited, p. 63, note 6; Jean-Paul Sartre, Kritik der dialektischen Vernunft, I. Band: Theorie der gesellschaftlichen Praxis (Hamburg, 1967), p. 27 f., 33 f.; Ludwig Landgrebe, “Das Problem der Dialektik,” in ders.: Phänomenologie und Geschichte. Gütersloh [1968]), pp. 80–134, here: p. 127 ff.; Alfred Schmidt, Der Begriff der Natur in der Lehre von Marx, Neuausgabe (Frankfurt a. M. and Köln, 1971), p. 51 ff.; Albrecht Wellmer, “Kommunikation und Emanzipation. Überlegungen zur ‚sprachanalytischen Wende’ der kritischen Theorie,” in Theorien des Historischen Materialismus, ed. Urs Jaeggi and Axel Honneth (Frankfurt a. M., 1977), pp. 465–500, here: p. 469 ff. 24. Lukács, Geschichte und Klassenbewusstsein, p. 19 f., 61 f. 25. loc. cit., p. 20. 26. Bacon, Neues Organon (s. Fn. 21). Bd. I, Aphorismus 3, p. 80 f.

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27. Wissenschaft der Logik II = Hegel, Werke, Bd. 6, p. 24. Translation from Hegel, op cit., p. 346. 28. Johann Gottfried Herder, Ideen zu einer Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit, ed. Martin Bollacher (Frankfurt a. M., 1989), p. 669. 29. MEW 20, 499; cf. Bollachers commentary on Herders Ideen, op. cit., p. 922, 948. 30. Ludwig von Bertalanffy, General System Theory (New York, 1968), p. 45. 31. Habermas, “Theorie der Gesellschaft oder Sozialtechnologie. Eine Auseinandersetzung mit Niklas Luhmann,” in Theorie der Gesellschaft oder Sozialtechnologie, ed. Habermas and Luhmann (Frankfurt a. M., 1971), pp. 142–290, here: 144. 32. loc.cit., p. 220 f..; Habermas, Legitimationsprobleme im Spätkapitalismus (Frankfurt a. M., 1973), pp. 11–19. 33. Edmund Husserl, Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie, Zweites Buch, Phänomenologische Untersuchungen zur Konstitution, Hrsg. von Marly Biemel (Husserliana, Bd. IV). (Den Haag, 1952), p. 281. Cf. p. 288, n. 1. 34. Habermas, “Theorie der Gesellschaft oder Sozialtechnologie,” pp. 285–290. 35. Habermas, Nachmetaphysisches Denken (Frankfurt a. M., 1988), p. 277.

Bibliography Bacon, Francis. Neues Organon. Edited and with an Introduction by Wolfgang Krohn. 2 Vols (Hamburg: Meiner, 1990). Bacon, Francis. Novum Organum. Translated by James Spedding. Book I https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Novum_Organum/Book_I. Berkeley, George. A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge. Edited by David R. Wilkins (Dublin, 2002). Published at https://www.maths. tcd.ie/~dwilkins/Berkeley/HumanKnowledge/1734/HumKno.pdf. Bertalanffy, Ludwig von. General System Theory (New York: George Braziller, 1968). Dietzgen, Josef. Streifzüge eines Sozialisten in das Gebiet der Erkenntnistheorie, Chapter III: “Materialismus contra Materialismus” (1887). In Schriften in drei

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Bänden. Vol. III, edited by Der Arbeitsgruppe Philosophie der Deutschen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1961), pp. 59–81. Engels, Friedrich. Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy. Published at https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/ Marx_Ludwig_Feurbach_and_the_End_of_German_Classical_Philosop.pdf. Habermas, Jürgen “Theorie der Gesellschaft oder Sozialtechnologie. Eine Auseinandersetzung mit Niklas Luhmann.” In Theorie der Gesellschaft oder Sozialtechnologie (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1971), pp. 142–290. Habermas, Jürgen. Legitimationsprobleme im Spätkapitalismus (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1973). Hegel, G.W.F. The Science of Logic. Translated by G. Di Giovanni (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010). Hegel, G.W.F. “Wissenschaft der Logik I/II.” In Werke in 20 Bänden. Vol. 5/6, edited by Eva Moldenhauer und Karl Markus Michel (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1970). Herder, Johann Gottfried. Ideen zu einer Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit. Edited by Martin Bollacher (Frankfurt a. M.: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1989). Husserl, Edmund. Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie. Book II: Phänomenologische Untersuchungen zur Konstitution. Edited by Marly Biemel (Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1952). Landgrebe, Ludwig. “Das Problem der Dialektik [1968].” In Phänomenologie und Geschichte (Gütersloh: Verlagshaus Gerd Mohn, 2012), pp. 80–134. Lenin, V. I. Collected Works Volume XIII: Materialism and Empirio-Criticism: Critical Notes Concerning a Reactionary Philosophy [1908, 1920]. Translated by D. Kvitkop and edited by A. Trachtenberg (New York: Martin Lawrence, 1927). Lukács, Gy¯ orgy. Geschichte und Klassenbewusstsein. Studien über marxistische Dialektik [1922]. (Neuwied and Berlin, 1968). Marx, Karl. Das Kapital. Vol. 1. In MEW , vol. 23. Plechanow, Georgi. “Zu Hegels sechzigstem Todestag.” In Die Neue Zeit (1891– 92), vol. 1, nos. 7–9, pp. 198–203, 236–243, 273, 282. Sartre, Jean-Paul. Kritik der dialektischen Vernunft. Vol. I: Theorie der gesellschaftlichen Praxis (Hamburg: Rohwolt, 1967). Schmidt, Alfred. Der Begriff der Natur in der Lehre von Marx. New edition (Frankfurt a. M. and Köln: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1971). Tucker, Robert C. Ed. The Marx-Engels Reader: Second edition (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1978). Wellmer, Albrecht. “Kommunikation und Emanzipation. Überlegungen zur ‘sprachanalytischen Wende’ der kritischen Theorie.” In Theorien des Historischen Materialismus, edited by Urs Jaeggi and Axel Honneth (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1977), pp. 465–500.

CHAPTER 5

Engels and the End of Philosophy Changfu Xu

The traditional angle from which Marxist philosophy has been understood is that of Engels, which is based on his classic formulation of “the fundamental questions of philosophy.” From this perspective, Marxist philosophy is the later systematization of dialectical materialism and historical materialism. Since the reform and opening up of China, our understanding of Marxist philosophy has made greater reference to the young Marx perspective, which is grounded on sensuous practice. From this perspective, Marxist philosophy is the practical materialism accepted by most scholars. A direct consequence of this shift is the marginalization of Engels’s thought. In my view, Engels’s philosophy cannot necessarily be equated to what is defined by the system of dialectical materialism and historical

C. Xu (B) Department of Philosophy, The Institute of Marxist Philosophy and Chinese Modernization (Key Research Institute of Humanities and Social Sciences by the Ministry of Eduction), Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, People’s Republic of China e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 T. Carver and S. Rapic (eds.), Friedrich Engels for the 21st Century, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-97138-0_5

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materialism, and its content is much richer than usually thought. If the two above-mentioned perspectives can easily demonstrate the differences between Marx and Engels, there must be others that can reveal their common ground. The nature of Marxist philosophy likely resides in a complex picture formed on the basis of these heterogeneous perspectives. This chapter attempts to explain Engels’s thought on the end of philosophy and may hopefully launch a new perspective for interpreting Marxist philosophy. Engels is both one of the founders of Marxist philosophy and its first interpreter. Moreover, Engels’s systematic construction and clarification of Marxist philosophy was primarily accomplished in his later years. This chapter argues that his late work must be considered the most mature statement of his thought. This thought can be seen in the following works—Anti-Dühring 1 (written between September 1876 and July 1878), Dialectics of Nature 2 (written between 1873 and 1883 with a supplement written between 1885 and 1886) and Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy 3 (written in early 1886). It took Engels over a decade, when he was in his fifties and sixties, to finish these works, which feature a high degree of intellectual coherence. From these works, it can be seen that there are two basic dimensions of Engels’s philosophical thought (or at least Marxist philosophy as constructed and explained by Engels): metatheory and object theory. The core of metatheory is the thought on the end of philosophy that is to be discussed in this chapter, while the key point of object theory is the thought about the fundamental questions of philosophy and the dialectics with which everyone is familiar. In comparison, metatheory is more important than object theory, because one must first grasp the former to understand the latter. Discussing object theory without referring to metatheory means putting the cart before the horse. Therefore, the traditional Engels-perspective is based not on his metatheory but on his object theory.

Engels’s Proposition About the End of Philosophy and Relevant Elaboration Engels puts forward the proposition of the end of philosophy in the first part of Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy (the discussion of the fundamental questions of philosophy is in the second part). He writes:

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But if all contradictions are once and for all disposed of, we shall have arrived at so-called absolute truth – world history will be at an end. And yet it has to continue, although there is nothing left for it to do […] [T]he task of philosophy thus stated means nothing but the task that a single philosopher should accomplish that which can only be accomplished by the entire human race in its ongoing development – as soon as we realize that, it is the end of all philosophy in the hitherto accepted sense of the word. One leaves alone ‘absolute truth’, which is unattainable along this path or by any single individual; instead, one pursues attainable relative truths along the path of the positive sciences, and the summation of their results by means of dialectical thinking. With Hegel philosophy comes to an end altogether: on the one hand, because in his system he sums up its whole development in the most splendid fashion; and on the other hand, because, even if unconsciously, he shows us the way out of the labyrinth of systems to real positive cognition of the world.4

This paragraph means that the philosophy that attempts to exhaust absolute truth in a single system has already ended with Hegel, thereby allowing the empirical science of dialectics to take centre stage. While Engels does not use the term “the end of philosophy” elsewhere, his explanations are related to it. In Anti-Dühring, Engels argues: In both cases [that is regarding history and nature as processes – author’s note] modern materialism is essentially dialectic, and no longer needs any philosophy standing above the other sciences. As soon as each special science is bound to make clear its position in the great totality of things and of our knowledge of things, a special science dealing with this totality is superfluous. That which still survives, independently, of all earlier philosophy is the science [Lehre] of thought and its laws – formal logic and dialectics. Everything else is subsumed in the positive science of nature and history.5

In Dialectics of Nature, he also writes: “Natural scientists allow philosophy to prolong an illusory existence by making shift with the dregs of the old metaphysics. Only when natural and historical science has become imbued with dialectics will all the philosophical rubbish – other than the pure theory of thought – be superfluous, disappearing in positive science.”6 What these two quotations mean is that natural science and historical science, as the dialectical form of empirical science, make philosophy (except for the pure theory of thought) superfluous.

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While the angles of expression in the two aspects mentioned above are different, they have a shared core. That is, the end of philosophy and the success of empirical science are both correlated and reciprocal. The end of philosophy results from the fact that it is neither empirical nor dialectical. It is not empirical, because it often substitutes real relations that can be observed with fabricated relations that exist only in concepts. It is not dialectical, because it always aims at the exhaustion of absolute truth. Philosophy ends in Hegel, and not someone else, for the following two reasons. On the one hand, Hegel develops the system of non-empirical and non-dialectical absolute truth to such an extreme degree that it is on the brink of collapse. On the other hand, in the non-dialectical framework, Hegel allows dialectics to mature to its fullest extent in history, thereby preparing the only correct way of thinking for the dialectical transformation of empirical science. With the end of philosophy comes the highest elevation of empirical science. Empirical science has existed for a long time, but was unable to replace philosophy before. This was because it was empirical but not yet dialectical, and the dialectical relations in the world could only rely on philosophy. At the conclusion of the Hegelian age, empirical science became gradually dialectical, presaging the possibility of a science that is both empirical and dialectical. Thus, if science is both empirical and dialectical, philosophy that is neither empirical nor dialectical is superfluous, while dialectical philosophy that is not empirical (namely, dialectics as a theory of thought) can continue to exist. Therefore, in Engels’s proposition and explanation of the end of philosophy, the end of philosophy is a limited end. The philosophy that constructs systems of natural laws and historical rules comes to an end and gives way to science that is dialectical and empirical, but the philosophy that studies the law of thought (formal logic and dialectics) remains. Between them, Engels leaves significant space for different disciplines, where he situates thought and activities, such as “modern materialism” and “the use of dialectical reasoning to summarize these scientific outcomes” mentioned above. Nevertheless, Engels does not specify whether this space belongs to empirical science or philosophy.

Two Dimensions of the End of philosophy---The End of Idealism and the End of Metaphysics In Engels’s thought on the end of philosophy, there is a self-determined implication that is composed of two dimensions—the end of idealism

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and the end of metaphysics. The end of idealism brings about materialism, whereas the end of metaphysics marks the beginning of dialectics. Therefore, the two dimensions could also be called the dimension of materialism and the dimension of dialectics. In this sense, it is quite appropriate to call Engels’s philosophy (or Marxist philosophy as expounded by Engels) dialectical materialism. However, the problem is that the direct implication of Engels’s two dimensions is not the construction of a new philosophical system but “the end of philosophy.” If the end of philosophy is not used as a premise, the spiritual essence of dialectical materialism will be lost. This chapter first deals with the end of idealism. What is the idealism that Engels wants to end? Simply put, it is the philosophy that replaces real connections with fanciful or speculative connections in the study of nature and human history. There is not only the struggle between idealism and materialism, but also the conflict between idealism and empirical science (namely, between philosophy and empirical science). In other words, the end of idealism equals the end of philosophy. The objective of ending idealism is not to build a materialistic natural system and historical system, but to entrust the concrete relations about nature and history to empirical science. Engels’s slogan is to “start from facts.” He says: We all agree that in every field of science, in natural as in historical science, one must proceed from the given facts, in natural science therefore from the various material forms and the various forms of motion of matter; that therefore in theoretical natural science too the inter-connections are not to be built into the facts but to be discovered in them, and when discovered to be verified as far as possible by experiment.7

In fact, Engels opposes Hegel’s philosophy of nature and ridicules Dühring’s Neue Grundgesetze zur rationellen Physik und Chemie (New Basic Laws for Rational Physics and Chemistry) because they make the same idealist mistake—imposing the imagined law of nature on nature. Therefore, when differentiating the idealist and materialist camps, Engels explains idealism in the following way: “Those who asserted the primacy of the mind over nature and, therefore, in the last instance, assumed world creation in some form or other – and among the philosophers, e.g. Hegel, this creation often becomes still more intricate and impossible than in Christianity – comprised the camp of idealism.”8 In addition, he states that relevant terms should not be used in other contexts. What

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Engels means is that the problem of whether spirit produces nature, or whether nature produces spirit, cannot be solved by mere dialectical thinking. Rather, it is a problem of empirical science. As for this issue, materialist philosophy in the past seemed plausible, not because it was philosophy, but because its conclusions approximated the conclusions of empirical science. Next, this chapter addresses the dimension of metaphysics. Engels dedicates much more space to his criticism of metaphysics than to that of idealism. He gives a very clear definition of metaphysics: But this method of work has also left us as legacy the habit of observing natural objects and processes in isolation, apart from their connection with the vast whole; of observing them in repose, not in motion; as constants, not as essentially variables; in their death, not in their life. And when this way of looking at things was transferred by Bacon and Locke from natural science to philosophy, it begot the narrow, metaphysical mode of thought peculiar to the preceding centuries.9

This metaphysical mode of thought exists not only in natural science but also in historical science. It is manifested in both the bourgeois design of the rational kingdom and the idea of absolute truth held by utopian socialism. The end of metaphysics includes two aspects—the end of metaphysics as a way of thinking in empirical science and the end of metaphysics as a philosophical theory. With regard to the former, the development of empirical science itself leads to the end of metaphysics. “In any case natural science has now advanced so far that it can no longer escape dialectical generalization.”10 Marx reveals the laws of motion in human society, and particularly the law of surplus value in the capitalist economic mode, which brings about the dialectical revolution in the discipline of history. Concerning the second aspect, Hegel restores the highest mode of thought—dialectics—and inflicts a heavy blow on metaphysics. The moment that Hegel’s dialectics is freed from his rigid system (the shell of metaphysics) and repositioned on a materialist base, the bell tolls for philosophical metaphysics (including Feuerbach’s metaphysics). It should be noted that the end of metaphysics in empirical science does not signal the end of empirical science but its rebirth, thanks to dialectics. Moreover, this rebirth provides the necessary condition for the end of philosophy. Meanwhile, the end of metaphysics in philosophy indicates the end of philosophy itself. Therefore, the end of philosophy, however

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complex its forms, indisputably remains the end of philosophy. It does not mean replacing the metaphysical system of philosophy with a dialectical system of philosophy about nature and history and is even less the substitution of empirical science with this system of philosophy. In all, understanding the end of philosophy in combination with the end of idealism and metaphysics, and regarding the end of idealism and the end of metaphysics as two dimensions of the end of philosophy are of great significance to an accurate understanding of Engels’s philosophy (or Marxist philosophy as interpreted by Engels). Discussing the end of idealism and metaphysics, without considering the end of philosophy, will only lead to the reconstruction of Hegelian philosophy. Even if the Hegelian system could be both materialistic and dialectical, it would be totally different from Engels’s original intention.

Two Fields of the End of philosophy---The End of Natural Philosophy and the End of Historical Philosophy For the end of philosophy, the end of idealism and metaphysics is the end of two theories and ways of thinking, while the end of natural philosophy and historical philosophy is the end of two disciplinary fields. In other words, the former two involve implications intrinsic to the end of philosophy, whereas the latter two ensue from the ramifications of the end of philosophy. Here, natural philosophy and historical philosophy refer to disciplinary fields that use a philosophical approach to construct a system of natural and historical laws. They should be ended for no other reason than that they are the haunt of idealism and metaphysics. Thus, the end of natural and historical philosophy can be regarded as the end of idealism and metaphysics as well. With regard to the end of natural philosophy, Engels says: Thanks to these three great discoveries, and the other immense advances in natural science, we have now arrived at the point where we can demonstrate the interconnection between the processes in nature not only in particular spheres but also the interconnection of these particular spheres as a whole, and so can present in an approximately systematic form a clear picture of the coherence in nature by means of the facts provided by empirical natural science itself. To furnish this overall picture was formerly the task of so-called philosophy of nature. It could do this only by putting in

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place of the real but as yet unknown interconnections ideational, fancied ones, filling in the missing facts by mental images and bridging the actual gaps merely in imagination. In the course of this procedure it conceived many brilliant ideas and foreshadowed many later discoveries, but it also produced a considerable amount of nonsense, which indeed could not have been otherwise. Today, when one needs to comprehend the results of natural science only dialectically, that is, in the sense of their own interconnection, in order to arrive at a ‘system of nature’ sufficient for our time; when the dialectical character of this interconnection is forcing itself against their will even into the metaphysically trained minds of the natural scientists, today the philosophy of nature is definitively discarded. Every attempt at resurrecting it would be not only superfluous but a step backwards.11

Engels makes it clear that there is a system of laws with dialectical interconnection in nature, and a correct understanding of nature means drawing an intellectual map of this system. There are two requirements for drawing this map. First, the depiction should be experiential and empirical; second, it must be dialectical. Under certain conditions, natural science can be both empirical and dialectical, but natural philosophy will never be empirical. Therefore, natural philosophy is bound to be substituted by natural science. Thus, what Engels intends to end is not any particular theory of natural philosophy but the very discipline of natural philosophy. The problem of historical philosophy lies first in its metaphysical nature. The bourgeois ideals of the Enlightenment boast eternal truth, eternal justice, natural equality and inalienable human rights. However, what these ostentatious words produce is “bitterly disappointing caricatures.”12 Utopian socialism regards itself as the manifestation of absolute truth, rationality and justice, but it cannot avoid “drifting off into pure fantasies.”13 While Hegel restores dialectics, which is the supreme mode of thought, Here, too, the philosophy of history, of law, of religion, etc., has consisted in the substitution of an interconnection fabricated in the mind of the philosopher for the real interconnection demonstrable in events; has consisted in the comprehension of history as a whole, as well as in its separate parts, as the gradual implementation of ideas – and naturally always only the pet ideas of the philosopher himself.14

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In this way, historical philosophy further reveals its idealist nature. Hence, Engels points out, “Here, therefore, just as in the realm of nature, it was necessary to do away with these fabricated, artificial interconnections by the discovery of the real ones – a task which ultimately amounts to the discovery of the general laws of motion which assert themselves as the ruling ones in the history of human society.”15 Marx’s concept of history is the unveiling of these sorts of laws. “This conception, however, puts an end to philosophy in the realm of history, just as the dialectical conception of nature makes all philosophy of nature as unnecessary as it is impossible.”16 In this strict sense, Marx’s theories of historical materialism, surplus value and socialism are no longer philosophy but empirical science within the field of history. In other words, they are superior to those before them, not because they constitute a new philosophy, but because they have been demarcated from philosophy. When Engels says that with the discovery of historical materialism and surplus value “socialism became a science” and juxtaposes “theoretical socialism and extinct philosophy,”17 he simply means socialism is no longer philosophy, because philosophy is already extinct. In summary, with regard to the end of natural and historical philosophy, Engels holds: “It is no longer a question anywhere of inventing interconnections from out of our brains, but of discovering them in the facts. For philosophy, having been expelled from nature and history, there remains only the realm of pure thought, so far as anything is left of it: the theory of the laws of the thought process itself, logic and dialectics.”18 These words reveal clearly that for Engels, the philosophy of nature and history, regardless of whether it intends to construct partial or overall interconnections, sees the end of its mission because of its inevitable idealistic and metaphysical errors. In other words, according to Engels, the best critique of idealism and metaphysics is not filling the disciplinary fields of natural philosophy and historical philosophy with materialism and dialectics but the abolition of these fields.

Conditions for, and Limits of, the End of Philosophy As mentioned above, Engels’s end of philosophy is a limited termination. The limit is reflected in the following two aspects: first, it takes the unity of thought and existence as its basic premise; second, it keeps the domain of thought for philosophy. These two aspects are closely related.

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Like most philosophers, Engels believes firmly in the unity of thought and existence. He says, “The fact that our subjective thought and the objective world are subject to the same laws, and hence, too, that in the final analysis they cannot contradict each other in their results, but must coincide, governs absolutely our whole theoretical thought. It is the unconscious and unconditional premise for our theoretical thought.”19 Engels also remarks, “laws of thought and laws of nature are necessarily in agreement with one another, if only they are correctly known.”20 Engels means that there are laws in the objective world and there are laws in our thought. If they are understood correctly, they must be consistent with each other. Then, what are the “correctly known laws” according to Engels? They are, and can only be, the laws of dialectics. For Engels, dialectics and the laws of dialectics are two different concepts. With regard to dialectics, the following sentences are representative. “Dialectics, however, is nothing more than the science of the general laws of motion and development of nature, human society and thought.”21 “Dialectics is conceived as the science of the most general laws of all motion.”22 “Thus dialectics reduced itself to the science of the general laws of motion, both of the external world and of human thinking.”23 In relation to the laws of dialectics, Engels writes: It is, therefore, from the history of nature and human society that the laws of dialectics are abstracted. For they are nothing but the most general laws of these two stages of historical development, as well as of thought itself. And indeed they can be reduced in the main to three: The law of the transformation of quantity into quality and vice versa; The law of the interpenetration of opposites; The law of the negation of the negation,24 ... “two sets of laws [external world and human thought – author’s note] which are identical in substance, but differ in their expression in so far as the human mind can apply them consciously, while in nature and also up to now for the most part in human history, these laws assert themselves unconsciously, in the form of external necessity, in the midst of an endless series of apparent accidents.”25

Engels distinguishes dialectics from the laws of dialectics in order to clarify that dialectics is a form of cognition and a discipline, while the laws of dialectics are an objective existence. Dialectics reflects the laws of dialectics. This differentiation is linked to Engels’s division between

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subjective dialectics (namely, dialectics of concepts) and objective dialectics (or dialectical motion of the real world). As for the latter, Engels says, “so-called objective dialectics, prevails throughout nature, and socalled subjective dialectics, dialectical thought, is only the reflection of the motion through opposites.”26 “Thereby the dialectic of concepts itself became merely the conscious reflection of the dialectical motion of the real world and thus the Hegelian dialectic was placed upon its head; or rather, turned off its head, on which it was standing, and placed upon its feet.”27 Engels does not explain clearly here whether the task of studying the dialectical motion of the real world belongs to empirical natural science and historical science, and whether the task of studying and exploring objective dialectics should be left to philosophy. Nevertheless, from his oft-repeated claim that “dialectics is science,” it can be ascertained that the sort of dialectics that directly studies the laws of dialectics in nature and human society, that is to say, that adopts dialectical thinking in order to summarize these scientific outcomes, or to phrase it even more precisely, that includes Marx’s theory of historical materialism and theory of surplus value and Engels’s natural dialectics, pertains not to philosophy but to science. What then is dialectics qua philosophy? Or what is the dialectics qua pure theory of thought? Or more precisely, what is the dialectics that Engels leaves aside for philosophy? Engels does not give an answer. However, he has made it clear to readers. It is Hegel’s dialectics when its revolutionary aspect is restored and idealist ornament discarded. In a draft of the “Introduction” to Anti-Dühring, Engels writes: The Hegelian system was the last and most consummate form of philosophy, in so far as the latter is represented as a special science superior to every other. All philosophy collapsed with this system. But there has remained the dialectic method of thinking and the conception that the natural, historical and intellectual world moves and transforms itself endlessly in a constant process of becoming and passing away. Not only philosophy but all sciences were now required to discover the laws of motion of this constant process of transformation, each in its particular domain. And this was the legacy which Hegelian philosophy bequeathed to its successors.28

More importantly, once Hegel’s dialectics is reformed by materialism, its subjective dialectics in fact becomes the same thing as the objective dialectics revealed by empirical science. Under such a circumstance, the most

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urgent task is not to continue working on subjective dialectics, namely philosophy, but to probe into objective dialectics, in other words, science. This includes using a dialectical way to summarize scientific outcomes, just as Engels demonstrates in relation to natural dialectics. Thus, the limits of the end of philosophy for Engels are clear. First, natural philosophy and historical philosophy, or any philosophy about the external world, should be ended. In their place come experiential, empirical and dialectical natural science and historical science. The laws revealed by these sciences, if they are indeed laws, must be consistent with, and be reflections of, dialectics, even if they themselves do not directly concern dialectics. Second, “that which still survives, independently, of all earlier philosophy is the science [the original German word Lehre here is better translated into ‘theory’ than ‘science’ – author’s note] of thought and its laws [Gesetzen] – formal logic and dialectics.”29 In this passage, Engels uses the term “theory” (Lehre) and not “science” (Wissenschaft ) in relation to logic and dialectics. This clearly indicates that dialectics is still a part of philosophy and not a part of science. Formal logic and dialectics are preserved, because the former is equivalent to elementary mathematics in the field of thought and the latter to higher mathematics. Unlike scientific laws (natural laws, historical laws or laws of the external world) that are consistent with and reflections of dialectics, philosophical laws (laws of thought) are about dialectics itself. Finally, between the end and preservation of philosophy, as well as between the laws of science and philosophy, there is a special zone, where dialectics functions as science, instead of philosophy, and materialism as science, instead of philosophy, in other words, dialectical materialism as science instead of philosophy. It should be noted that classifying various Marxist theories according to Engels’s criteria of “science-philosophy” is not an easy job. Marx’s theories of surplus value and socialism can easily be subsumed within the category of empirical science; however, it might be difficult to subsume Marx’s theory of historical materialism within the same category and even more difficult to do the same for Engels’s dialectics of nature. Meanwhile, historical materialism and dialectics of nature are surely not philosophy; nor are the theories of surplus value and socialism philosophy, because the philosophy that has nature and history as its objects is exactly that to which Engels intends to put an end. Thus, whether several Marxist theories, particularly those of historical materialism and dialectics of nature, are science or philosophy becomes a point of contention. In this regard, Engels says, “This modern materialism […] is no longer a philosophy

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at all, but simply a world outlook which has to establish its validity and be applied, not in a science of sciences standing apart, but in the real sciences. Philosophy is therefore ‘sublated’ here, that is, ‘both overcome and preserved’ {D. K. G. 503}; overcome as regards its form, and preserved as regards its real content.”30 This means that modern materialism, or dialectical materialism, lies somewhere between science and philosophy; it is neither of them but exists in them. Therefore, Engels does not need to give a black or white answer to it. For Engels, materialist dialectics is in fact one thing, regardless of whether it is considered philosophy or science, and regardless of whether it is understood as a theory about laws of thought or as a science concerning the laws of the external world. The key is not to focus on its identity but to implement dialectical philosophy, or dialectics of thought, in empirical science, while elevating the outcomes of empirical science to the philosophical level in order to verify and enrich the theory of dialectics. Therefore, after the end of philosophy, the situation of disciplines is characterized by the combination of two disciplines and an intermediary—the two disciplines being science and philosophy, and the intermediary Marxism, especially its materialist dialectic. In such a situation, the special value and position of Marxism can be grasped. It is philosophy of science as well as science of philosophy. It is both that which brings about the end of philosophy as well as the leading figure for the development of science. In sum, there would be no Marxism without the end of philosophy. There could be no Marxism either without the premise and limits of the end of philosophy. This is where the secret of Engels’s end of philosophy lies.

Conclusions From the above discussion, the following conclusions can be drawn: 1. The angles from which we understand Marxist philosophy should be diversified, and the true picture of Marxist philosophy lies in the interaction of multiple viewpoints. The aim of studying Marxist philosophy is not to find a perfect or supreme perspective but to inspire continuously new perspectives in order to correct the deviations and defects of existent ones. 2. There are two theoretical dimensions of Engels’s philosophy (or Marxist philosophy as interpreted by Engels): the dimension of

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metatheory and the dimension of object theory. The former refers to Engels’s thought on the end of philosophy, and the latter concerns Engels’s thought on the fundamental questions of philosophy, and the distinction between dialectics and metaphysics. Metatheory is primary and object theory secondary. 3. The basic implication of Engels’s proposition about the end of philosophy is as follows: On the one hand, the philosophy that constructs a system of natural laws and historical laws through a speculative method (by imagination or conjecture) reaches its perfection in Hegel and is not likely to develop further. On the other hand, empirical science that includes the natural and historical sciences has grown mature enough to provide a complete picture of the relations and motions in the world. Therefore, it is imperative for empirical science to replace philosophy so that the external can be better understood, and a system of laws be constructed. The time for the end of philosophy has come. 4. As for the implications of Engels’s thought on the end of philosophy, there are two dimensions: the idealist end and the metaphysical end. As for its ramifications, there is the end in the field of natural philosophy and the end in the field of historical philosophy. The implications and ramifications of the end of philosophy are mutually coherent. 5. There is a fundamental premise for Engels’s thought on the end of philosophy, namely that thought and existence are united in the laws of dialectics. Moreover, subjective dialectics is the reflection of dialectical motions in the external world. Dialectical motions in the external world are studied by empirical science, while dialectics of thought and formal logic, as pure theory of thought, continue to be investigated by philosophy. Thus, the domain of thought becomes the reserve of philosophy, demonstrating that Engels’s concept of the end of philosophy is limited. 6. Marxist materialist dialectics (including the concept of nature and the concept of history) is not only a philosophy of science but also a philosophical science, or in other words, “a world outlook.” It does not intend to become a new system of natural philosophy or a new system of historical philosophy. Its mission is to improve the level of thought in empirical science as conscious dialectics, on the one hand, and to verify and enrich the theory of dialectics by summarizing the outcomes of empirical science, on the other.

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7. Engels’s thought on the end of philosophy grasps a philosophical trend of great significance for the trajectory of history. This is a major contribution of Marxist philosophy to modern and contemporary human thought. Engels’s views still are relevant today, such as his affirmation that knowledge of natural and historical laws is not the task of speculative philosophy, but belongs to empirical science; that philosophy should focus on the laws of thought; and that nature, history and thought have traceable rules despite their mutability. Of course, philosophy and its associated questions are complex and multifaceted. Views obtained from different perspectives may differ considerably. Just as this chapter considers Engels’s philosophy from a specific angle, so Engels examines the development of philosophy from a certain view. Just as the perspective of this chapter cannot be considered the only plausible or supreme perspective for understanding Engels’s philosophy, or even Marxist philosophy in its entirety, so it is unnecessary to treat Engels’s investigation of the development of philosophy as the only reasonable or supreme one. It should be recognized that Engels’s perspective is an epistemological one, which regards both philosophy and science as epistemic systems about laws. In fact, apart from identifying the laws, philosophy also explores values, shapes beliefs and designs the blueprint. Thus, in its epistemological sense, the end of philosophy, which properly speaking is a limited end, does not necessarily entail the end of philosophy in other dimensions. Moreover, the end of philosophy in a certain dimension may lead to its flourishing in other dimensions. In a word, the end of philosophy signifies a termination as well as a new start. On the one hand, studying Engels’s thought on the end of philosophy does not prevent scholars from viewing many Marxist theories as philosophical from other perspectives, but it helps us through the conscious selection and adjustment of perspectives to position Marxist philosophy more accurately and to explore and enhance its contemporary relevance. On the other hand, it reveals that the study of Engels’s thought on the end of philosophy does not lead to the belittlement and renunciation of philosophy. Its purpose is to ascertain which form of philosophy—be it the philosophy that has already ended or the philosophy that is in the process of rebirth—should be built in the twenty-first century. Translated by Dr. Ling Feixia and proofread by Dr. Daniel Canaris.

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Notes 1. Frederick [Friedrich] Engels, Anti-Dühring, in MECW , vol. 25 (London, 2010). 2. Engels, Dialectics of Nature, in MECW , vol. 25 (London 2010). 3. Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy, in MECW , vol. 26 (London 2010). 4. Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy, p. 362. 5. Engels, Anti-Dühring, p. 26. 6. Engels, Dialectics of Nature, p. 491. 7. Engels, Dialectics of Nature, pp. 342–343. 8. Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy, p. 366. 9. Engels, Anti-Dühring, p. 22. 10. Ibid., p. 14. 11. Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy, p. 386. 12. Engels, Anti-Dühring, p. 245. 13. Ibid., p. 246. 14. Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy, p. 386. 15. Ibid., p. 387. 16. Ibid.) pp. 396–397. 17. Engels, Anti-Dühring, p. 27. 18. Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy, p. 397. 19. Engels, Dialectics of Nature, p. 544. 20. Ibid., p. 505. 21. Engels, Anti-Dühring, p. 131. 22. Engels, Dialectics of Nature, p. 545. 23. Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy, p. 383. 24. Engels, Dialectics of Nature, p. 356. 25. Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy, p. 383. 26. Engels, Dialectics of Nature, p. 492. 27. Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy, p. 383.

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28. Engels, Anti-Dühring, pp. 594–595. 29. Ibid., p. 26. 30. Engels, Anti-Dühring, p. 129.

Bibliography Engels, Frederick. Anti-Dühring. In MECW , vol. 25, pp. 5–311. Engels, Frederick. Dialectics of Nature. In MECW , vol. 25, pp. 313–590. Engels, Frederick. Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy. In MECW , vol. 26, pp. 353–423.

PART II

Political Economy

CHAPTER 6

Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy: The is/Ought Question Hans Frambach

The “Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy” is an essay written by the autodidact Friedrich Engels—he graduated from neither school nor university—in October and November 1843 and published in the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, edited by Arnold Ruge and Karl Marx, in 1844. The work comprises central elements of Engels’s later economic and social thought. The framework of the critique of political economy propagated in the “Outlines” can also be found in The Condition of the Working Class in England, a seminal work of empirical social research which Engels began to write on his return to Wuppertal from the family company in Manchester in November 1844 and published in 1845.1 Karl Marx’s attention was drawn to Engels by the “Outlines”: Marx spoke of a “brilliant sketch,” one of the few relevant and original works of substance in German.2 Even though some insights of the “Outlines”

H. Frambach (B) Bergische Universität Wuppertal, Wuppertal, Germany e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 T. Carver and S. Rapic (eds.), Friedrich Engels for the 21st Century, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-97138-0_6

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do not withstand critical appraisal by the standards of either that time or our own, it remains a contribution of pioneering importance for the emergence and development of the Marxian theory of political economy.3 Special merit has even been assigned to the “Outlines” for directing Marx towards political economy in the first place, and thus opening the way for a combination of economic theory with private property.4 Marx and Engels themselves did not rate the “Outlines” very highly. Although Karl Kautsky, with the author’s consent, reprinted the essay on Engels’s 70th birthday in Die Neue Zeit (9, 1890/91), Engels had declined all earlier requests for further publication.5 The present chapter on the “Is/Ought” question in the “Outlines” argues from the perspective of Engels’s knowledge at the time of writing his essay, not that of his later thinking. From the perspective of the history of economic thought, different issues are touched upon: To what extent were Engels’s economic statements scientifically sound, even at that time? How far did he take note of existing approaches? Did he select economic literature and theories in an interest-driven manner or with a scientifically founded and/or political bias? Before coming to these questions, however, some biographical remarks will shed light on Engels’s life, and with it the background to his perceptions of society and the economy. Born in 1820, Engels grew up in a prosperous business family in Barmen and Elberfeld, two neighbouring cities located on the Wupper River, in the physical environment of the factory and residential buildings of his family, whose bleaching greens lined the river. Children of the ribbon weavers, cloth dyers, machine workers, craftsmen, etc. were among his playmates. He experienced first-hand the social surroundings of the working classes and their situation in life. Engels attended the municipal school in Barmen and proceeded at the age of fourteen to the secondary school in Elberfeld, which enjoyed the reputation of an elite Prussian academy. There his language talents were fostered, as well as his interest in poetry and Romantic literature, particularly in the mythology of the German Middle Ages. Against his desire to study law, with a view to entering the civil service, or even to become a poet, and also against the recommendations of his school director, Engels’s father took the young Friedrich out of school at the age of 17. For a year and more, he was introduced to the production and processing of linen and cotton, spinning and weaving, bleaching and dying. In 1838, Friedrich accompanied his father on a visit to the company Ermen & Engels in Manchester; on the return journey, he disembarked in Bremen to continue his commercial

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apprenticeship.6 There he learned the ins and outs of the export business, currency trading, import duties, etc. and gained deeper insights into the mechanisms of international trade. Engels grew up in the atmosphere of strict Pietism that dominated his hometown. However, he took an interest in critical theology and studied both Friedrich Schleiermacher’s salvation theology and David Friedrich Strauss’s (1808–1874) Life of Jesus, Critically Examined (1835/36). His desperate struggle with himself for Christian faith can be read in his letters.7 Thus, he wrote to his young friend Friedrich Graeber: “[…] I feel it, I will not be lost, I will come to God for whom my whole heart longs,”8 and half a year later: “Adios faith! It is as full of holes as a sponge.”9 Engels lost his faith and through Strauss—who wanted to adapt Christianity to the new scientific age but, in contrast to Engels, never intended to abolish it10 —he came to Hegelian philosophy and finally to the materialist atheism of Feuerbach. In the spring of 1841, Engels returned to the parental business in Barmen. In September of that year, however, he joined the Royal Prussian Guard artillery in Berlin as a one-year volunteer. There, he discovered his passion for warfare and laid the foundation for a later career as an artillery expert. As an officer cadet and son of a wealthy factory owner, he could afford to live outside the barracks and indulge in various wanton as well as serious pastimes—among them philosophical discussions—in pubs and reading rooms. As a guest student at the Friedrich Wilhelm University, he attended philosophy lectures by the Hegel critic Friedrich Schelling. At the same time, he joined the Berlin Young Hegelians, where leading personalities such as David Friedrich Strauss, Ludwig Feuerbach, Bruno and Edgar Bauer, Arnold Ruge, Moses Hess, Max Stirner, and Karl Friedrich Köppen held sway.11 They called themselves “the Freethinkers” and—often in the context of excessive drinking sessions— propagated their contempt for morals, religion, and bourgeois decency. Bruno Bauer himself spoke of “literary tosspots,”12 and a companion of Engels, Stephan Born (1824–1898)—founder of the “General German Workers’ Confraternity”—spoke of a “circle of noisy personalities.”13 Engels completed his military service in October 1842 and again returned to Barmen. His father was displeased with the critical atheistic standpoint of his son, and, hoping to bring him back to the path of virtue by hard work in the company, he sent him to Ermen & Engels in Manchester. In England, he was tasked with securing the family interests and familiarizing himself with English trading methods in order to apply

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these later in the factory in Engelskirchen.14 On his way to England, Engels visited the office of the “Rheinische Zeitung” in Cologne on 16 November 1842 and met Karl Marx, who had just been appointed leading editor of that paper. It was their first meeting, and it was characterized by mutual caution, because Marx knew about Engels’s link with the Berlin Freethinkers, whose poor reputation he feared as hindering his own political advancement.15 Engels also met Moses Hess (1812–1875), an early German socialist and co-founder of the “Rheinische Zeitung.” A year later Engels was to call Hess “the first Communist of the party.”16 In his book Die europäische Triarchie (1841) and the essay Sozialismus und Kommunismus (1842), Hess saw the solution of the social crisis in Germany as lying in a communist future to be achieved by radical turmoil. He blamed the increasing spread of egoism—supposedly propagated by English classical economists—for bringing on the crisis.17 From Hess, Engels took over the central idea that once private property and capitalism were abolished, egoism and competition would automatically be overcome, and a new (communist) society based on liberty and social unity would be established. In Manchester, Engels was confronted with the dire impoverishment and need of the industrial workers and its ever-widening impact. England had just undergone an economic crisis, and the class struggle between bourgeoisie and proletariat, with mass strikes and violent repression, had reached a peak.18 Engels’s knowledge—until that time mainly theoretical—was confronted with facts: the contrast of unprecedented wealth and boundless misery, the disastrous condition of the workers, and the moral decline and brutalization of those affected. An Irish factory worker, Mary Burns, whom he met at the beginning of 1843, provided him with information about the life of the workers and introduced him to places and situations of humanitarian catastrophe.19 At the same time, he virtually devoured the abundant critical descriptions and documents portraying the misery of the industrial workers. Engels keenly followed political and economic events, and read factory inspectors’ and medical reports on the abuse of working hours, the employment of children, and the cholera epidemics in the slums. He closely observed the English socialist workers’ movement and took part in many of its meetings. The leader of the Chartist movement in Manchester, James Leach, who had a bookshop not far from the city office of Ermen & Engels, provided the young Engels with detailed information about the working conditions in the factories, the development of wages, and the social results of technical innovation.20

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Engels attended speeches and discussion panels of the socialist orator John Watts (1818–1887), a thinker in the tradition of Robert Owen (1771–1858). He was deeply impressed by Watts’s Facts and Fictions of Political Economy (1842) and the views expressed there on political economy and religion.21 He adopted Watts’s critique of classic political economy,22 with its analysis of categories like labour, capital, landed property, and competition, its exclusive causal reduction of national wealth to labour, its rejection of the capitalist value system as based on force and deceit, its condemnation of the unequal distribution of the means of production and of the capitalist greed for profit, its rejection of competition and trade, and its widespread criticism of classical economists like Malthus, McCulloch or Mill.23 Arguments along these lines are not found in any of Engels’s writings before June 1843.24 In the opening passage of the “Outlines,” for example, Engels states that the place of a simple, “nonscientific huckstering” has been taken by political economy, which he stigmatized as “a developed system of licensed fraud, an entire science of enrichment,” exhibiting “the mark of the most detestable selfishness.”25 This corresponds with Watts’s remarks about “the evil nature” of business. For Watts, political economics was a science built up merely to systematize the details of distortion.26 Many of the concepts used by Charles Fourier (1772–1837), and his overall attitude to trade, were also taken over by Engels. Thus, for Fourier free trade was a mechanism of “liberal lies,” a “robber economy, organized and legitimized under the mask of law”; those who engaged in it were the “biggest of all liars,” and the economic concepts of trade balance and equilibrium were “commercial blather.”27 Other French representatives of socialism, such as Jean Charles Léonard Simonde de Sismondi (1773–1842) and Louis Blanc (1813– 1882), influenced Engels’s perspective on classic political economy,28 and he adopted many of their positions on the increasing separation of rich and poor, of those with and without property, of the exploiters and the exploited, and on the devastating effects of competition and resultant wage pressure on the living conditions of the workers. For the problems arising from these abuses, social reform was seen as a general solution.29 The young Engels also referred to the anarchist opinions of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809–1865), whose famous answer to the question What is property? (1840)—“property is theft”—became central to his economic thinking, in particular in the “Outlines.”30 Already in December 1842 Engels asked in the article “The Inner Crises,” referring to the future

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destiny of Manchester’s workers, the decisive question as to whether a revolution in England was possible or even likely.31 Industry would create a class of the absolute poor, a situation which could not be reversed because such people were excluded from the stable acquisition of property. Every economic crisis would trigger a humanitarian catastrophe in this social class, and a revolution must necessarily follow. First, however, this class must become conscious of its situation and power. After that, social revolution would take place in the form of radical and violent change, “fear of death from starvation […] will be stronger than fear of the law.”32 Engels concluded that, in the wake of this revolution, private property would inevitably fall, and communism, on the basis of common ownership of property, would follow.33 The foundation of what was later to be known as scientific socialism was then already laid in the “Outlines”: the unstable nature of industrial capitalism, the antagonism of the social classes, the inevitability of social revolution, the meaning of class consciousness, and the description of political economic theory as a bourgeois ideology.34 Engels’s negative perception of political economy arose from the identification of classical political economists with ruthless businessmen, whose single aim was to increase profits. Several circumstances coincided in this development: Engels’s experience of business people in his early youth and during his commercial education in Bremen; his primarily negative insights into the merchant class; his awareness of what he took to be the solution for the social crisis through a communist future, as suggested by Moses Hess; and the critique of classical political economy he found in the documents of early French socialists and especially in the speeches and writings of John Watts. The efforts of Smith, Ricardo, or Malthus to describe economic life in its complexity, with a view to improving the supply-side for a nation and with it the well-being of its people, were ignored. For Engels, the classical theorists were on a level with the despised merchant class. He had neither the knowledge nor the experience to distinguish more astutely between the role of observer and that of actor, between economic thinkers and entrepreneurs. Moreover, he was wrong in his assessment of quite a few postulates of classical political economy.35 For example, Engels generously conceded Smith to have realized the single-minded concern of mercantilism to fill the treasuries of the rulers by amassing precious metals. However, classical political economists had already criticized mercantilism for focusing one-sidedly

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on increasing the trade balance, as well as for the massive restrictions this imposed on the rights of the people. Engels’s main reproach in this context was against the lack of any critique of the legitimacy of private property. The continuation and development of an economic system built on private property, he argued, must necessarily lead to monopolization, and therefore, in the final analysis, to the abolition of private property itself. For Engels, the only progress classical political economy showed over mercantilism was to have explicitly (albeit unintentionally) clarified the factual negative consequences of an economy based on private property and capitalism. Far from accepting the broad range of classical economic thought, his efforts were dedicated to finding contradictions and ascribing bad intentions to it. From here, Engels turned to an analysis of the fundamental categories of the theory of political economy, beginning with the notion of national wealth, which, he said, was senseless as long as private property existed.36 It seems to have completely escaped him that the issue of the wealth of nations and its causes had already been raised by mercantilism and the physiocrats and merely been taken up and extended by Smith. Engels suggested that the wealth of the nation, built on private property, could only be private wealth. Thus, he recommended that instead of “political economy” one should speak of “private economy”37 —a suggestion no modern supporter of the free market economy would likely deny. Another category treated by Engels as having arisen on the basis of private property was trade. Ignoring the concept of trade as an elementary aspect of the provision of national wealth, he saw it as the hostile conflict of “people with absolutely opposed interests” seeking their own advantage in the context of sale and purchase.38 Engels undoubtedly appreciated Smith’s elaboration of the advantages of trade for all sides, including its humanitarian aspects. However, he restricted his commendation to noting that this was no more than a development of the medieval law of the fist and of highway robbery, a cover for the dishonourable motives of greed and covetousness that actually underlay the guise of friendship and mutual profit under which trade was conducted.39 From a modern viewpoint, Engels’s assessment can be accepted inasmuch as globalization and the free movement of goods has permanently increased not only the importance of trade but with it also the anonymization of the individual and the routine acceptance of dishonourable motives in the markets. With its emphasis on trade, Engels suggested, classical political economies had reinforced trade’s “real” (negative) consequences

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and thus contributed to the dissolution of nationalities and the growth of enmity between countries. Competition, for him, was nothing but “the transformation of humankind into a band of predatory animals.”40 That the systems of political economy had sought to terminate particularism, and to strengthen the growth of nations within which liberty and individual rights such as free choice of occupation and freedom of trade and commerce might flourish, was not touched upon by Engels. Again, it seems, he had simply transferred his image of the ruthless businessman to the national political economists, reproaching them for having constructed a theory which had given birth to the horrors of capitalism. As to the concept of value, Engels distinguished in the “Outlines” between abstract (or real) value and exchange value41 —the general notions of “value in use” and exchange value (market price) were only introduced later. Engels cited isolated concepts of national political economists like Ricardo, McCulloch, and Say and considered “the only just basis of exchange”42 to lie in the relation of production costs to usefulness; but this was unattainable, because nobody could measure usefulness. Hence, value was de facto determined by production costs alone, which, however, Engels saw as equally untenable.43 He suggested that economists (if they “were honest”) should replace the term “price” with “trade value.” The reason why this had not happened, he surmised, was the deliberate intention of economists to disguise the connection of price with value—otherwise “the immorality of trade [would] become too obvious.”44 It must be added here that in the 1840s, when Engels took up these issues, the conceptualization of value was far from complete. The clear distinction—still valid today—between production costs, as objective (or real) value, and prices, in the sense of exchange values as the expression of (individually perceived) usefulness and preferences, followed half a century later and was unknown to him. Referring to three production factors, land, capital, and labour, and their influence on the cost structure of a product, Engels considered two aspects: (1) Capital is nothing but accumulated labour; (2) the role of science as an expression of human ingenuity is ignored.45 Admittedly, a glance at the distinction made by the early national political economists—among them Smith in The Wealth of Nations —between productive and unproductive labour reveals some decidedly strange classifications: Intellectual activities such as inventiveness and governance, as well as medical, military, and artistic activities, are all considered unproductive. However, after the 1830s, these examples are little more than

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anecdotes. Smith was severely judged by classical economists like JeanBaptiste Say and John Stuart Mill, who pointed out the great importance of invention and intellectual work—everything that was later subsumed into the concept of human capital. And when the young Engels took it upon himself to pass sentence as a “knowing judge” on the economists, he was evidently unaware that Smith, far from denying the usefulness of so-called unproductive activities, in fact highly valued them. Now some further issues: Engels de facto equated monopolization with privatization. He ascribed to the economists the assertion that whatever cannot be monopolized is valueless.46 While he recognized the considerable influence of private property on the pricing of goods, he did not realize that this might also be the case with common property, where prices are determined not by supply and demand but by a central body. He implicitly assumed that goods that cannot be classified as private property can have no price. In his analysis of income from land Engels compared the definitions of Smith and Ricardo and defined it as the relationship of the earning capacity of the soil (what people can potentially get out of it) with the principle of competition (on what terms people are willing to lease their land). What he had in mind was the reality of the big estates, whose owners leased land to tenants whose labour increased its value; the landowner was the profiteer without having done anything to earn it. Engels concluded that in order for those whose work had really enhanced the value of the land to receive the natural result of their labour, private property had to be abolished. Private property was the root of all evil. If private property fell, the unnatural differences in the earnings from land, capital, and labour would fall with it.47 What Engels underestimated was the immense importance of private property for the provision of adequate supplies for the population. As long as those who work are sufficiently paid and supplied, they will not only not rebel against private property, they will even strive for it. Here, surely, lies a central reason why socialism, with its centrally controlled economic system, has not yet been successful, and the world revolution of the proletariat has failed to appear. What Engels, nevertheless, definitely suspected and critically anticipated was the unequal, and ever more unevenly developing, distribution of property and capital assets—a problem from whose solution we are nowadays further removed than ever. Private property, for Engels, led ineluctably to competition, and competition was a basic evil. All he saw was its destructive side. That

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competition can exist beyond private property as an incentive to team spirit and achievement, and hence with a positive impact on social togetherness, for example, was something he bypassed entirely. He juxtaposed competition with monopoly. Everybody endeavours to have everything but it is in the common interest that everybody should have the same. Everybody wants a monopoly, but the collective interest is to dissolve monopolies.48 Here, Engels picked out only a few aspects of a far-ranging and fundamental economic discussion. Under certain conditions—e.g. with regard to resource efficiency and cost saving—monopolies can even make sense, and within a framework of legal control mechanisms they can have positive effects on welfare and thus serve both the individual and the collective interest. The process of price fluctuations, in the context of the adjustment of supply and demand, was, on the other hand, something Engels described quite appropriately. This notwithstanding, he came to the far-fetched conclusion that no goal could ever be achieved, all progress was excluded; nor was an explanation offered for major economic crises. An overproduction crisis, he suggested, could be avoided by having producers organize and distribute production on the basis of knowledge as to what, and how much, their consumers needed.49 What is astonishing here is that Engels should appeal to businessmen, and in doing so assume behaviour on their part that was by no means in their own interests. In fact, he saw national political economists, rather than businessmen, as the true enemy. Here, one looks in vain for his otherwise so low opinion of the entrepreneurial class. In aspiring to behavioural principles beyond competition, “inspired by awareness and in the interests of all,”50 Engels argued from high moral norms—but it was wishful thinking, oblivious to reality. A peculiarity of the young Engels appears here: he mixed different levels and lines of reasoning, arguing appealing, and moralizing in the same breath. An explanation of economic values is suddenly offered on the level of moral values; ethical values are destroyed by competition, whose “immoral culmination” is gambling on the stock exchange.51 With the question of the mechanisms of specification, control, and allocation within a national economy—in other words what should be produced, for whom, and how—Engels raised a fundamental issue. His answer was social revolution, and with it specification by the community as steering body. Engels’s economic analysis was based on the economic situation that was so visible in the north of England: the enormous

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production capacity generating gigantic quantities of goods on the one hand, but leaving large segments of the population in misery and need on the other. At the same time, he was aware of an economic theory—the Malthusian population theory—that described the sad reality of workingclass existence and touched on some fundamental issues but offered no viable solution. Engels rejected the theory as nonsensical, even accusing it of cynicism. On the basis of an unfortunately formulated sentence, he interpreted Thomas R. Malthus (1766–1834) as claiming that in the event of overpopulation people “have to be disposed of in one way or another: either they must be killed by violence or they must starve.”52 With the population theory, the immorality of the economists was made manifest; and, as the “capstone of the liberal system of free trade, if it fell, the whole edifice would collapse.”53 The root cause of the malaise, for Engels, lay in competition based on private property. But again, he focused only on the dark side of the liberal economic system. The actual results of what he perceived as naked competition, the rise in productivity, output and per capita consumption, remained unmentioned. The economic pessimist Malthus saw the only solution for a supposedly finite food supply in the limitation of population growth. In accordance with his “population law,” rising prosperity leads to increasing population growth. But the population grows in geometric progression while the means for sustaining its livelihood grows in arithmetic (linear) progression. Population growth is restricted by the availability of means of sustenance. Conversely, the population, and with it the number of workers, will rise wherever intensive tillage, import of agricultural products and changes in the distribution of goods brings an increase in those means. As soon as these conditions cease to apply, the rise in population meets obstacles in the form of bad living conditions, illness, famine, war, late marital age, etc. For Malthus, the reason for poverty was simply an excessively high population in relation to what was necessary to sustain it. He considered the amount of food a country could produce or purchase as setting a natural limit to its population growth. Malthus’s population theory was severely criticized for at least two reasons. First, the dubious, axiomatically formulated relation between food supply and population growth in terms of arithmetic and geometric progressions. Secondly, the idea of setting the relation between wages and food prices primarily in terms of avoiding overpopulation, this being seen as the only way to really improve the situation of the lower classes. The reception of Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population was further

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tainted by some inacceptable wording (removed from later editions). Taken together, these circumstances gave rise to harsh criticism: JérômeAdolphe Blanqui (1798–1854), for instance, provided an exaggerated version of the offending passage, on which Engels drew.54 Leaving aside the prose, however, and concentrating on Malthus’s central statement, it becomes clear that he intended to render a description of contemporary reality through a statistical comparison of population growth in different states and regions of the world. It is certainly not the case, as Engels implied—he spoke of “Malthusian consequences” [Malthus’sche Konsequenzen]55 —that Malthus’s theory was responsible for (or even the cause of) working-class suffering. The criticism directed by Blanqui and others against Malthus and the national political economists would, however, have been welcome to his youthful ears, for it confirmed his own observations and assumptions. At all events, its influence on him was considerable. Engels was extremely biased in his positions and not very friendly in his criticism of those he considered “guilty.” But at the same time, he saw and stated key deficiencies of political economy: the egotistical and amoral behaviour of economic agents, the roots of value, negative aspects of private property and competition, or the unequal distribution of incomes and assets. And he identified weaknesses, e.g. in the Malthusian population theory or the presumed primacy of landed and capital property over labour.56 Land and capital assets generate income in the form of rents and interest, for which, in contrast with labour, the principal must not be permanently active. Hence, the normal income earner, the worker, is disadvantaged vis à vis the owner of private property (whether land or capital). In this respect, the institution of private property—or more precisely its potential for absolute accumulation—can be seen as causally related to the inequality of distribution and related problems. Today, a small segment of the population owns the lion’s share of existing assets—nor is any end in view to this development. The solution Engels suggested—the abolition of private property and consequent dissolution of competition and monopolies—was, he realized, impossible under the capitalist economic system, hence the need for social revolution. But this whole construct bypassed reality. Competition was, in fact, to develop into the most powerful driving force of production, generating sufficient per capita income and raising consumption standards all round. The mass of the population in western industrial and service societies today lives on a satisfactory level, at least with regard to material consumption. And in

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their regulatory and competitive policies states seek to strengthen competition mechanisms and to restrict the concentration of economic power arising from monopolization tendencies. The young Engels was driven by an idea. He was a visionary— emotional, moralizing, intuitive, and impulsive—driven by a natural sense of justice in response to the situations that unfolded before him. The destruction of families, the hardship of the poor, the inhuman circumstances of life, work, and child labour—all this enraged him. He refused to accept things as they were; he wanted to change the world for the better.

Notes 1. The 2nd edn. followed in 1892, and the 1st English edn. (London) after the American edn. in 1887 (New York). 2. Karl Marx, Zur Kritik der Politischen Ökonomie (1859), in MEW , vol. 13, p. 10; Marx, Ökonomisch-philosophische Manuskripte (Pariser Manuskripte). Written 1844, in MECW , I/2) pp. 317, 325. 3. E.g., Tristram Hunt, Friedrich Engels. Der Mann, der den Marxismus erfand (Berlin 2013), p. 136; Heinz D. Kurz, “Der junge Engels über die ‘Bereicherungswissenschaft’, die ‘Unsittlichkeit’ von Privateigentum und Konkurrenz und die ‘Heuchelei der Oekonomen’,” in Reiner Lucas, Reinhard Pfriem and Dieter Westhoff (eds.), Arbeiten am Widerspruch—Friedrich Engels zum 200. Geburtstag. Marburg 2020) pp. 65–121, here: 68. 4. Keith Tribe, The Economy of the Word: Language, History, and Economics (New York 2015) pp. 180–195, here: 188. 5. See, e.g., Friedrich Engels, “Brief an Wilhelm Liebknecht in Leipzig. London, 13. April 1871,” in MEW , vol. 33, p. 208; “Brief an Jewgenija Eduardowna Papritz in London. London, 26. June 1884,” in MEW , vol. 36), pp. 169–170. 6. William Otto Henderson, The Life of Friedrich Engels (London 1976), p. 7; Gustav Mayer, Friedrich Engels. Eine Biographie, Erster Band: Friedrich Engels in seiner Frühzeit 1820 bis 1851 (Berlin 1920) pp. 22 f. 7. Letter to the friend of youth, pastor son, and theology student Friedrich Graeber, end of April 1839. Friedrich Engels, “Engels an

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Friedrich Graeber, Bremen, vor dem 24. April—1. Mai 1839,” in MECW III/1, pp. 114–126, here: 114. 8. Engels, “Engels an Friedrich Graeber in Berlin, Bremen, 12.– 27. July 1839,” in MECW III/1, pp. 145–150, here: 149 (own translation). 9. Engels, “Engels an Wilhelm Graeber in Berlin, Bremen, 8. Oct. 1839,” in MECW III/1, pp. 160–162, here: 160 (own transl.). 10. David Friedrich Strauss, Das Leben Jesu, kritisch bearbeitet, 1. vol. (2 vols.). Tübingen 1835, e.g., p. 50. 11. Hunt, Friedrich Engels ) pp. 73ff; William J. Brazill, The Young Hegelians (New Haven/London 1970) pp. 179, 194. 12. Ibid., p. 194. 13. Stephan Born, Erinnerungen eines Achtundvierzigers. 3rd ed. Leipzig 1898 (Berlin and Bonn 1978, p. 19, s. a.) pp. 26 ff. 14. Friedrich Engels sen., “Friedrich Engels (sen.) an Karl Wilhelm Moritz Snethlage in Berlin, Barmen, 5. Okt. 1842,” in Die Herkunft des Friedrich Engels. Briefe aus der Verwandtschaft 1791– 1847 , ed. Michael Knieriem, (Trier 1991) pp. 590–591. 15. Hunt, Friedrich Engels, pp. 88 ff. 16. Friedrich Engels, “Progress on social reform on the Continent,” in The New Moral World 19 (Nov. 1843, No. I: France), 21 (Nov. 1843, No. II: Germany and Switzerland), in MECW I/3, pp. 495– 510, here: 509. 17. Moses Hess: Sozialismus und Kommunismus. Einundzwanzig Bogen aus der Schweiz (Zürich: Winterthur 1842) pp. 74–91, here: 77. 18. “Introduction” [Einleitung], in MECW I/3, pp. 13–54, here: 31. 19. Roy Whitfield, Frederick Engels in Manchester. The Search for a Shadow (Salford 1988), p. 21. 20. Eberhard Illner, Mensch und Maschine. Technikvorstellungen bei Friedrich Engels, Karl Marx und Ernst Kapp, in Friedrich Engels. Das rot-schwarze Chamäleon, ed. Eberhard Illner, Norbert Koubek and Hans Frambach (Darmstadt 2020) pp. 104–145, here 112f. 21. Engels, “Briefe aus London (I–IV),” in “Schweizerischer Republikaner” 39 (6. May 1843 I), 41 (23. May 1843 II), 46 (9. June 1843 III), 51 (27. June 1843 IV), in MECW I/3, pp. 451–466, here: 455, 458.

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22. Henderson, The Life of Friedrich Engels, p. 40; Kurz, “Der junge Engels,” p. 66; Gareth Stedman Jones, “Engels, Friedrich (1820– 1895),” in The New Palgrave 2 (New York 1987) pp. 144–146, here: 145; Tribe, The Economy of the Word, p. 187. 23. John Watts, The Facts and Fictions of Political Economists: Being a Review of the Principles of the Science, Separating the True from the False (Manchester 1842) pp. 5 f., 11 ff., 21 f., 28 ff., 35 f., 42, 48, 57 f. 24. Gregory Claeys, Machinery, Money and the Millennium. From Moral Economy to Socialism 1815–60 (Cambridge 1987) pp. 169ff; Tribe, The Economy of the Word, p. 187. 25. Engels, “Umrisse zu einer Kritik der Nationalökonomie” [“Outlines”], in Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher 1/2, 1844. Ed. by Arnold Ruge and Karl Marx. Bureau der Jahrbücher (Paris 1844) pp. 86–114, in MECW I/3, pp. 467–494, here: 467. 26. Watts, The Facts and Fictions, p. 6. 27. Charles Fourier, Ein Fragment über den Handel. Translated and provided with an introduction and a postscript by Friedrich Engels, 1st ed. 1846 (Duisburg/Istanbul, 2018), pp. 10 f., 14. 28. Tribe, The Economy of the Word, p. 182. 29. Louis Blanc, Organisation du Travail. 5th ed., 1st ed. 1840 (Brussels,1848) pp. 57 ff. 30. Engels, “Progress on Social Reform,” p. 503. 31. Engels, “Die innern Krisen,” in Rheinische Zeitung 343 (9. Dec. 1842), 344 (10. Dec. 1842), in MECW I/3, pp. 439–443, here: 493; Engels, Lage der arbeitenden Klasse in England, in Rheinische Zeitung 359 (25. Dec. 1842), in MECW I/3, pp. 447–448, here: 447. 32. Engels, “Die innern Krisen,” p.443. 33. Engels, “Progress on Social Reform,” p. 495. 34. Stephen Henry Rigby, Engels and the Formation of Marxism. History, Dialectics and Revolution (Manchester and New York, 1992) p. 63. 35. Kurz, “Der junge Engels,” p. 115. 36. Engels, “Outlines,” p. 473. 37. Ibid. 38. Ibid. 39. Ibid., p. 474. 40. Ibid., p. 475.

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41. Ibid., p. 475 f. 42. Ibid., p. 477. 43. Ibid. 44. Ibid., p. 478. 45. Ibid., p. 478 f. 46. Ibid., p. 479. 47. Ibid., p. 480 ff. 48. Ibid. 49. Ibid., p. 483 f. 50. Ibid., p. 486. 51. Ibid., p. 485 f. 52. Ibid., S. 487. 53. Ibid., S. 488. 54. Adolph Blanqui, Geschichte der politischen Ökonomie in Europa, translation of Histoire de l’économie politique en Europe 1837, repr. of the ed. 1841, vol. 2 (Glashütten im Taunus, 1971) p. 105 f. 55. Engels, Briefe aus London, p. 452. 56. Engels, “Outlines,” pp. 491, 493.

Bibliography Blanc, Louis. Organisation du Travail [1840]. 5th edition (Brussels: Meline, Cans & Cie, 1848). Blanqui, Adolph. Geschichte der politischen Ökonomie in Europa. Translation of Histoire de l’économie politique en Europe [1837]. Reprint of the 1841 edition, vol. 2 (Glashütten im Taunus: Verlag Detlev Auvermann, 1971). Born, Stephan. Erinnerungen eines Achtundvierzigers. Third edition, 1898 (Berlin and Bonn: Verlag J.H.W. Dietz, 1978). Brazill, William J. The Young Hegelians (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1970). Claeys, Gregory. Machinery, Money and the Millennium. From Moral Economy to Socialism 1815–60 (Cambridge: Polity, 1987). Engels, Friedrich. “Friedrich Engels (sen.) an Karl Wilhelm Moritz Snethlage in Berlin, Barmen, 5. Okt. 1842.” In Die Herkunft des Friedrich Engels. Briefe aus der Verwandtschaft 1791–1847 , edited by Michael Knieriem (Trier: MarxHaus, 1991), pp. 590–591. Engels, Friedrich. “Progress on Social Reform on the Continent.” In The New Moral World, vol. 19 (Nov. 1843, No. I: France), 21 (Nov. 1843, No. I.: Germany and Switzerland). In MEGA I, vol. 3, pp. 495–510.

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Engels, Friedrich. “Umrisse zu einer Kritik der Nationalökonomie” [“Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy”]. In Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher 1/2, 1844, edited by Arnold Ruge and Karl Marx. (Paris: Bureau der Jahrbücher, 1844), pp. 86–114. In MEGA I, vol. 3, pp. 467–494. Fourier, Charles. Ein Fragment über den Handel [1846]. Translated with an introduction and a postscript by Friedrich Engels (Duisburg/ and Istanbul: Dialog-Edition, 2018). Henderson, W. O. The Life of Friedrich Engels 2 vols (London: Frank Cass, 1976). Hess, Moses. “Sozialismus und Kommunismus.” In Einundzwanzig Bogen aus der Schweiz (Zürich/Winterthur: Verlag des Literar, 1842), pp. 74-91. Hunt, Tristram. Friedrich Engels: Der Mann, der den Marxismus erfand (Berlin: Propyläen Verlag, 2013). Illner, Eberhard. “Mensch und Maschine. Technikvorstellungen bei Friedrich Engels, Karl Marx und Ernst Kapp.” In Friedrich Engels. Das rot-schwarze Chamäleon, edited by Eberhard Illner, Norbert Koubek, and Hans Frambach (Darmstadt: WBG Academic, 2020). pp. 104–145. Jones, Gareth Stedman. “Engels, Friedrich (1820–1895).” In The New Palgrave 2 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1987), pp. 144–146. Kurz, Heinz D. “Der junge Engels über die ‘Bereicherungswissenschaft’, die ‘Unsittlichkeit’ von Privateigentum und Konkurrenz und die ‘Heuchelei der Oekonomen.’” In Arbeiten am Widerspruch—Friedrich Engels zum 200. Geburtstag, edited by Reiner Lucas, Reinhard Pfriem and Dieter Westhoff (Marburg: Metropolis, 2020), pp. 65–121. Marx, Karl. Ökonomisch-philosophische Manuskripte (Pariser Manuskripte) [1844]. In MEGA I, vol. 3, pp. 29-172. Marx, Karl. Zur Kritik der Politischen Ökonomie [1859]. In MEW , vol. 13. Mayer, Gustav. Friedrich Engels. Eine Biographie, Vol. 1: Friedrich Engels in seiner Frühzeit 1820 bis 1851 (Berlin: Springer, 1920). Rigby, S.H. Engels and the formation of Marxism. History, Dialectics and Revolution (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1992). Strauss, David Friedrich. Das Leben Jesu, kritisch bearbeitet. 2 vols (Tübingen: C.F. Osiander, 1835). Tribe, Keith. The Economy of the Word: Language, History, and Economics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015). Watts, John. The Facts and Fictions of Political Economists: Being a Review of the Principles of the Science, Separating the True from the False (Manchester: Abel Heywood, 1842). Whitfield, Roy. Frederick Engels in Manchester. The Search for a Shadow (Salford: Working Class Movement Library, 1988).

CHAPTER 7

The Young Engels and the Critique of Capitalism: His Influence on the Young Marx Marco Solinas

Du weißt, daß alles 1. bei mir spät kommt und 2. ich immer in Deinen Fußtapfen nachfolge. Marx to Engels, 4. Juli 1864, in: Marx/Engels: Werke (MEW ), vol. 30, p. 417.

The first step in the birth of Kapitalismuskritik, if we understand by this term the Left-Hegelian version of the socialist critique of political economy, must be ascribed to the twenty-two-year-old Friedrich Engels: he was the first to draw up a theoretical framework in which he combined the elements of French and English socialist intellectual movements with a reinterpretation of Hegel’s teleology of history and dialectic, starting

M. Solinas (B) Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies, Pisa, Italy e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 T. Carver and S. Rapic (eds.), Friedrich Engels for the 21st Century, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-97138-0_7

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from the concept of contradiction, and with a detailed empirical analysis of the social and political conditions of English society of that time. The first sketch of this critique was presented by Engels in five short, brilliant articles written from London and Manchester and published in the Rheinische Zeitung in December 1842, when Marx, who at that time was keeping himself distant from socialism, was the newspaper’s editorin-chief, having been appointed only a couple of months previously. And it was again the young Engels, who, the year after, in his essay titled Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy, developed the theoretical framework of the new Kapitalismuskritik, launching a wideranging research programme for a radical and socialist critique of British political economy, from the point of view of the necessity to abolish private property. This was a critical analysis grounded on the opposition between capital and labour, capitalists, and proletarians, which stressed the immanent economic laws of cyclical trade crises, pauperization of the proletarian masses, centralization of capital and property and the inevitability of a social revolution. This was the second step in the birth of Kapitalismuskritik. Engels sent his innovative essay to Marx at the end of 1843, or at the latest in January 1844. At that time Marx was occupied with a critical study of Hegel’s philosophy of law, and was still far from the field of political economy. This means that Engels’s early writings had surely contributed to the intellectual process that led Marx from a liberal critique of Hegel’s conception of the state to the socialist critique of political economy and capitalism. And this influence was actually greater than Marx has acknowledged—this is at least what I would try to show in this essay. At the same time, the historical reconstruction of the new framework can be useful to shed some light on the origin of Engels and Marx’s misleading prognosis of the inevitability and imminence of the end of the capitalist system of production.

1839–1842: K apitalismuskritik ’s First Step After one year of military service and of intensive philosophical study, especially of Hegel, at the beginning of October 1842 the young Engels leaves Berlin and his Hegelian democratic circles, heading for England. At the end of November he is in London, and in December he reached Manchester, epicentre of the great strike of the summer of 1842. And it is from England that Engels writes five articles for the Rheinische Zeitung in

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which he explains very briefly the first fundamental elements of the original programme of Kapitalismuskritik. In so doing, Engels also used some theoretical elements that were taken up by socialist intellectuals as well, firstly by Moses Hess—“the first Communist” of the New Hegelians1 — whom he met around 7–8 October in Cologne, in the editorial office of the newspaper Rheinische Zeitung, during his journey from Berlin to Manchester—while making a stop to visit his parents in Barmen. It was a journey that could also be interpreted as the passage from democratic liberalism to socialism, and from the deep study of idealist philosophy to the beginning of the critique of political economy; in other words, from Hegel, Schelling and Feuerbach to Adam Smith, David Ricardo and Robert Owen. This transition has to be understood as a sort of theoretical convergence between German philosophy and political economy, a convergence that is the basis of the birth of the new framework of Kapitalismuskritik. When Engels begins to develop this new framework, in fact, he does not dismiss the Hegelian conceptual tools; on the contrary, he uses, among other insights and perspectives, the crucial concept of contradiction, as well as Hegel’s philosophy of history, now gradually reinterpreted in a materialist way. Furthermore, the construction of the framework of Kapitalismuskritik already had a basis in Engels’s previous social critique, as emerges in his Letters from Wuppertal (1839): Terrible poverty prevails among the lower classes, particularly the factory workers in Wuppertal; syphilis and lung diseases are so widespread as to be barely credible; in Elberfeld alone, out of 2,500 children of school age 1,200 are deprived of education and grow up in the factories – merely so that the manufacturer need not pay the adults, whose place they take, twice the wage he pays a child. But the wealthy manufacturers have a flexible conscience, and causing the death of one child more or less does not doom a pietist’s soul to hell, especially if he goes to church twice every Sunday. For it is a fact that the pietists among the factory owners treat their workers worst of all; they use every possible means to reduce the workers’ wages on the pretext of depriving them of the opportunity to get drunk, yet at the election of preachers they are always the first to bribe their people.2

This was a denunciation that in 1839 was inscribed in a framework of democratic radicalism.3 At that time Engels has already begun to cultivate Hegel,4 as emerges clearly in a letter written on 13–20 November,

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where he declares to a friend (Wilhelm Graeber): “For I am on the point of becoming a Hegelian. Whether I shall become one I don’t, of course, know yet, but Strauss has lit up lights on Hegel for me which make the thing quite plausible to me. His (Hegel’s) philosophy of history is anyway written as from my own heart.”5 Two months later, on 20 January 1840, Engels then declares: “I have now entered on the straight road to Hegelianism,” and “I am studying Hegel’s Geschichtsphilosophie, an enormous work; I read out of it dutifully every evening, the tremendous thoughts grip me terribly.”6 The book is Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, in which history is presented as the teleological developing of reason: history is ruled by reason in a teleological way.7 The year in Berlin—from October 1841 till October 1842—was very important for the further study and defence of Hegel’s philosophy (against Schelling, and with Strauss and Feuerbach), the enthusiastic adhesion to the movement of Left Hegelianism, the adoption of “the Hegelian dialectic, this mighty, never resting driving force of thought,” and his “philosophy of world history.”8 Going further in the direction of a new political reinterpretation of Hegel’s philosophy, it is emblematic that already in September 1842 (when he was still in Berlin), Engels expresses clearly the idea that the English workers have a progressive task for the history of humanity: “history is making them the standard-bearers and representatives of a new principle of right.”9 But let us focus on the articles written from England at the end of 1842, starting from The Internal Crises, published on 10 December. Here Engels presents the fundamental argument that the industrial system is affected by an internal contradiction: “For although industry makes a country rich, it also creates a class of unpropertied (eine Klasse von Nichtbesitzenden), absolutely poor people, a class which lives from hand to mouth, which multiplies rapidly, and which cannot afterwards be abolished, because it can never acquire stable possession of property. And a third, almost a half, of all English people belong to this class.”10 It is a fundamental contradiction inherent in the sphere of civil society that Hegel had already clearly highlighted in his Elements of the Philosophy of Right, when he wrote that “despite an excess of wealth civil society is not rich enough, i.e. its own resources are insufficient to check excessive poverty and the creation of a penurious rabble.”11 Highlighting this process of socio-economic polarization, Engels remarks on the crucial role of economic stagnation and crisis in the

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impoverishment of the proletariat,12 and its meaning for the sociopolitical dimension of revolts. In this regard, he also makes reference to the great strike in England in summer 1842, and highlights the importance of the fact that, “English proletarians are only just becoming aware of their power, and the fruits of this awareness were the disturbances of last summer.”13 Outlining this process, Engels explains his thesis of the inevitability of a proletarian revolution from a perspective that is at the same time teleological and materialist, and that in this moment shows a sort of internal conceptual tension expressed as opposition between the adoption of an “English standpoint” and a German point of view: On the one hand, adopting a clearly and strictly teleological Hegelian perspective, Engels claims polemically that “there is one thing that is self-evident in Germany, but which the obstinate Briton cannot be made to understand, namely, that the so-called material interests can never operate in history as independent, guiding aims (leitende Zwecke), but always, consciously or unconsciously (unbewußt oder bewußt ), serve a principle which controls the threads of historical progress (das die Fäden des historischen Fortschritts leitet ),” in other words: “if one ignores the motivating idea, forgets the basis because of the surface appearance, and fails to see the wood for the trees,” a level that is also explained here in terms of a “progressed spiritual development” (fortgeschrittenen, geistigen Entwickelung ).14

On the other hand, Engels writes: “But let us leave aside questions of principle. In England … people know nothing of struggles over principles and are concerned only with conflicts of material interests. It is only fair, therefore, to do justice to this aspect as well.”15 And it is precisely working at this level that Engels begins to abandon the idealistic preconditions of the Hegelian philosophy of history, developing a new materialist but still teleological conception of history: However, the dispossessed have gained something useful from these events: the realisation that a revolution by peaceful means is impossible and 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. They are still held back from this violent revolution by the Englishman’s inherent respect for the law; but in view of England’s position described above there cannot fail to be a general lack of food among the workers

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before long, and then fear of death from starvation will be stronger than fear of the law. This revolution is inevitable for England, but as in everything that happens there, it will be interests and not principles that will begin and carry through the revolution; principles can develop only from interests, that is to say, the revolution will be social, not political (die Revolution wird keine politische, sondern eine soziale sein).16

Highlighting the fact that this revolutionary process takes place at the level of material interests, in the sense that “principles develop only from interests,” Engels has clearly begun the construction of the materialist theoretical framework that he and Marx will never abandon. However, this new materialist framework is, and will continue to be, Hegelian at least in two main senses: a .In the sense of the crucial role given to the power of “contradiction” in leading to new social formations; contradiction now understood first of all in terms of struggles between opposite interests and social classes, that is, between the proletariat and owner-capitalists. b .In the sense that history is always thought of from a teleological perspective: it always moves towards progress, but now it is the proletariat that has the “task” of leading to a new social formation, through a revolution that is presented as “inevitable.” In other words, now it seems to be for the proletariat to serve, consciously or unconsciously, as a principle which controls “the threads of historical progress.” Furthermore, building this new materialist teleological theoretical framework, Engels starts to work on the crucial distinction between two basic levels: (a) the “social,” understood as the decisive factor in historical struggles, first of all in an economic sense; (b) the “political,” understood as a dimension that plays a secondary role, compared to the dimension of material-economic interests and conflicts. It is a double level (social/political) that is anchored in the clear thematization and interpretation of political movements, parties and powers in terms of economic relations: that is, in terms of the domination (Herrschaft ) exercised by the ruling classes (herrschenden Klassen), the aristocracy, the capitalists (Kapitalisten) and the middle classes over the unpropertied (Nichtbesitzenden) or over the proletarian masses (Masse der Proletariat). In particular,

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Engels remarks on the centrality in the new industrial society of the new “extensive class of factory workers.”17 This Kapitalismuskritik includes at the same time a critique that embraces all the previous youthful analyses of hypocrisy and the moral deficit of the state: England with her industry has burdened herself not only with a large scale class of the unpropertied (eine große Klasse von Besitzlosen), but among these always a considerable class of paupers (Klasse von Brotlosen) which she cannot get rid of. These people have to rough it on their own; the state abandons them, even pushes them away. Who can blame them, if the men have recourse to robbery or burglary, the women to theft and prostitution? But the state does not care whether starvation is bitter or sweet; it locks these people up in prison or sends them to penal settlements, and when it releases them it has the satisfaction of having converted people without work into people without morals.18

In conclusion, in December 1842 the twenty-two-year-old Engels had started to outline several crucial elements of the original programme of Kapitalismuskritik, based first of all on the critique of the social relations of domination between capitalist and proletarians that take place in the new industrial capitalist society. Within this framework, Engels developed the thematization of the proletarian class as the new progressive driver of history: the class that has the inevitable historical task of revolutionizing the society of the time, due to the inevitable process of pauperization determined by economic crisis. This framework, therefore, represents a sort of preliminary theoretical basis of the whole political and economic conception that Engels and Marx will develop in the following years. It means that Engels’s articles should be understood not only as the first fundamental step in the building of the Kapitalismuskritik, but could also represent the beginning of his influence on the young Marx. At that time Marx—who had already left Berlin at the beginning of 1841, and had completed his studies in philosophy with the thesis Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature— continued to serve in the ranks of radical democratic political movements, explicitly keeping his distance from socialism. It can be seen from an article of 16 October 1842, where Marx writes: “The Rheinische Zeitung, which does not admit that communist ideas in their present form possess even theoretical reality, and therefore can still less desire their practical

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realization, or even consider it possible, will subject these ideas to thoroughgoing criticism.”19 Certainly it is true that, as he explains in this article, Marx was developing an interest in socialist literature and in social questions, which emerges in the articles devoted to the theft of wood.20 It was in this context that Marx, who, on 15 October 1842, had assumed the post of editor-in-chief of Rheinische Zeitung and after he had met personally (for the first time) Engels on 16 November at the offices of the newspaper, must surely have read Engels’ brilliant articles published in December.

1843: K apitalismuskritik ’s Second Step The second crucial step in Engels’s construction of the new framework of Kapitalismuskritik turns on a systematic confrontation and critical study of British political economy, condensed in Engels’s innovative essay titled Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy, written in October–November 1843, probably at the invitation of Moses Hess, and sent to Marx at the end of December or at the beginning of January.21 This transition to the critique of political economy happened during 1843, when Engels was already a firm socialist. Already in May and June, he had highlighted that “England is the homeland of political economy,” and had begun to criticize Adam Smith’s approach,22 and declared a fundamental agreement with Robert Owen’s basic principles: “According to Owen: ‘marriage, religion and property are the sole causes of all the calamity that has existed since the world began’.”23 Engels, who offers a wealth of empirical analysis of proletarian life conditions, also remarks very clearly “that a thorough revolution of social arrangements, based on community of propriety, has now become an urgent and unavoidable necessity … Communism is not the consequence of the particular position of the English, or any other country, but it is a necessary conclusion, which cannot be avoided to be drawn from the premises given in the general facts of modern civilization.”24 Engels—who also agrees with Proudhon’s critique of private property—develops a critique of liberal democracy from the point of view of communism: given that, “The French Revolution was the rise of democracy in Europe,” and that “Democracy is, as I take all forms of government to be, a contradiction in itself, an untruth, nothing but hypocrisy (theology, as we Germans call it), at the bottom,” he

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outlines a critique that will be at the basis of the future ideology-critique (Ideologiekritik): Political liberty is shame-liberty, the worst possible slavery; the appearance of liberty, and therefore the reality of servitude. Political equality is the same; therefore democracy, as well as every other form of government, must ultimately break to pieces: hypocrisy cannot subsist, the contradiction hidden in it must come out; we must have either regular slavery – that is, an undisguised despotism, or real liberty, and real equality – that is, Communism.25

But let us focus on the essay Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy, in which Engels goes further with his critique of hypocrisy and above all of the contradictions of an economic system centred on private property. The only way “to go beyond” this economic system is the “abolition of private property,” that is the founding of a communist society. This was an economic-political transition understood from the Hegelian perspective of a teleology of history reinterpreted in a materialist key: What else can result from the separation of interests, such as forms the basis of the free-trade system? Once a principle is set in motion, it works by its own impetus through all its consequences, whether the economists like it or not. But the economist does not know himself what cause he serves. He does not know that with all his egoistical reasoning he nevertheless forms but a link in the chain of mankind’s universal progress (in der Kette des allgemeinern Fortschrittes der Menschheit ). He does not know that by his dissolution of all sectional interests he merely paves the way for the great transformation to which the century is moving – the reconciliation of mankind with nature and with itself (der Versöhnung der Menschheit mit der Natur und mit sich selbst ).26

The most innovative element now introduced by Engels in the new framework is the systematic critique of political economy, which starts with the critique of “the system of free trade based on Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations,”27 and above all of David Ricardo’s and James Mill’s conceptions, highlighting that liberal trade economy can produce, in a contradictory way, the “restoration of monopolies” and a new slavery. In this sense, Engels launches a wide-ranging research programme: “In the critique of political economy, therefore, we shall examine the basic

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categories, uncover the contradiction introduced by the free-trade system, and bring out the consequences of both sides of the contradiction.”28 Here we are faced with the research programme that Engels, and then Marx, will try to realize throughout the whole of their intellectual lives. This original theoretical framework included in fact almost all the central issues and topics—even if future solutions and conclusions are not included—of the upcoming research: in addition to the critique of private propriety as a crucial socio-political element of liberal societies, Engels remarks on the absolute centrality of the category of “value,” which he starts to analyse in terms of “abstract or real value and exchange-value,” and above all in relation to the category of labour. At the same time, Engels highlights the crucial opposition between capital and labour, and its social and political meanings, including the political sense of Kapitalismuskritik already sketched in the articles of 1842 and 1843: The split between capital and labour resulting from private property (Die aus dem Privateigentum folgende Spaltung zwischen Kapital und Arbeit ) is nothing but the inner dichotomy of labour corresponding to this divided condition and arising out of it. And after this separation is accomplished, capital is divided once more into original capital and profit … All these subtle splits and divisions stem from the original separation of capital from labour and from the culmination of this separation – the division of mankind into capitalists and workers (in der Spaltung der Menschheit in Kapitalisten und Arbeiter) – a division which daily becomes ever more acute, and which, as we shall see, is bound to deepen … If we abandon private property, then all these unnatural divisions disappear. The difference between interest and profit disappears; capital is nothing without labour, without movement …. Labour – the main factor in production, the “source of wealth,” free human activity – comes off badly with economists. Just as capital has already been separated from labour, so labour is now in turn split for a second time: the product of labour confronts labour as wages, is separated from it … If we do away with private property, this unnatural separation also disappears. Labour becomes its own reward, and the true significance of the wages of labour, hitherto alienated, comes to light – namely, the significance of labour for the determination of production costs of a thing.29

It is no coincidence that Marx, in his notes Summary of Frederick Engels’s Article “Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy,” started

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remarking on “The separation of capital from labour.”30 Furthermore, Engels includes in his critical analysis many other questions and topics, such as the “original act of appropriation” and the “self-alienation” (Selbstveräußerung ), which confirm that “private property leads us into contradictions (das Privateigentum führt uns auf Widersprüche)”31 ; he remarks the “agonistic” opposition between capitalists and workers, capitalist and capitalist, labourer and labourer; briefly, in this society, “the general and the individual interest are diametrically opposed to each other.” Finally, Engels remarks—developing the assumptions already exposed in the sketch of 1842—that the economic laws of this system include, first of all, cyclical trade crises “which reappear as regularly as the comets, and of which we have now on the average one every five to seven years.” These crises are expressions of a way to produce a “thoughtless manner, at the mercy of chance,” and “each successive crisis is bound to become more universal and therefore worse that the preceding one; is bound to impoverish a larger body of small capitalists, and to augment in increasing proportion the numbers of the class who live by labour alone,” so that they “finally” cause “a social revolution.”32 This will be a revolution that will make possible a “rational” organization of production, in which “the community will have to calculate what it can produce with the means at its disposal,” and that will put an end to the oppositions and conflict between capitals, capitalists and workers and so on. Given these assumptions, Engels remarks: “Capital increases daily; labour power grows with population; and day by day science increasingly makes the forces of nature subject to man. This immeasurable productive capacity, handled consciously and in the interest of all, would soon reduce to a minimum the labour falling to the share of mankind.”33 On the other side, Engels highlights not only the process of the pauperization of proletarians, but also the centralization of capital: “in accordance with the law of the stronger, large capital and large landed property swallow small capital and small landed property … This law of the centralisation of private property is as immanent (immanentes Gesetz) in private property as all the others.”34

A Biographical Amendment Considering the extraordinary theoretical insights, questions, topics and issues posed by Engels in this essay, it’s not surprising to read that Marx

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defines it as a “brilliant essay” (geniale Skizze) in his autobiographical sketch written in 1859: Frederick Engels, with whom I have maintained a constant exchange of ideas by correspondence since the publication of his brilliant essay (geniale Skizze) on the critique of economic categories (printed in the DeutschFranzösische Jahrbücher), arrived by another road (compare his Condition of the Working-Class in England) at the same result as I (war auf anderem Weg … mit mir zu demselben Resultat gelangt ), and when in the spring of 1845 he too came to live in Brussels, we decided to set forth together our conception as opposed to the ideological one of German philosophy, in fact to settle accounts with our former philosophical conscience.35

In writing “the same result as I,” Marx seems to mean the conception of history as class struggle and the critique of capitalism understood in a broad sense, achieved first of all through the critical study of “political economy”; that is, what we have here defined with the term Kapitalismuskritik, to mark the link with Left Hegelianism. Looking more closely at this autobiographical sketch, we could however make a sort of “small amendment.” In the Preface, Marx starts his reconstruction from “the year 1842–43,” when he was the “editor of the Rheinische Zeitung,” but then goes on rapidly to his work on Hegel of 1843, partially published in the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher in 1844, but then he highlights the collaboration with Engels developed in Brussels from 1845, and the book Condition of the Working-Class in England, which was published only in 1845. However, it was actually Engels who already in 1842 had arrived at the first step of Kapitalismuskritik, understood from the point of view of the conflict between capitalists and workers and so on, when Marx was quite far from socialism. And it was again Engels, who in 1843, with his “brilliant essay,” arrived at the second step: at the critique of political economy. Yet, it’s true that during 1843 Marx’s attention was increasingly focused on the conflicts within civil society, understood in a Hegelian way,36 and on the opposition between private property and individual interests, on the one hand, and the general and universal interest of the state, on the other hand. As emerges clearly in the Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law, Marx, however, was still mainly grappling with the critique of the Hegelian philosophy of right, especially from the point of view of the critique of abstract and formal right,

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rather than beginning to follow the new path of political economy—as is also shown in the essay On the Jewish Question. It is also true that since Marx had arrived in Paris, in October 1843, he had begun to be ever closer to socialist theories and intellectual movements. However, also at the end of 1843, Marx was far from outlining a clear thematization or even a critique of the categories of political economy, starting from the crucial distinction and opposition between capital and wage labour. To conclude, it is reasonable to suppose that Marx does not exactly arrive at the same result as Engels at the same time: it is plausible to assume, then, that Engels exercised influence on the young Marx already since the end of 1842 with his articles written from England, and then with his geniale Skizze of 1843, in which he actually planned a wide-ranging research programme that would be developed in the intellectual lives of the two authors together. Past and Present Looking at the birth of Kapitalismuskritik, we could say that what was decisive for this process—among other elements—was the extraordinary ability of the young Engels to make an empirical analysis of the dynamics of emerging industrial capitalism in England, combining it with philosophical tools and perspectives, starting from a materialist reinterpretation of Hegel’s philosophy of history, and with a critique of political economy. This approach, which was further developed with Marx, had at the same time some negative theoretical effects on the scope of the framework proposed, starting from the assumption that the development of capitalism should definitely lead to a polarization of society between a very large and starving proletariat and a small and very rich class of capitalists, such that capitalism should certainly be revolutionized in a “near future.” This prognosis was directly linked to the historical condition that Engels and Marx saw before their eyes when the new framework was originally conceived: England in the middle of the nineteenth century. It was a historical context in which rising industrial capitalism had caused conditions that were actually really terrible regarding the standard of living (or survival) of the new proletariat, and also compared to the polarization between this new poor urban proletariat and the new rich upper class of capitalists. Here we can refer to both Engels’s articles of 1842 and to his Outlines to a Critique of Political Economy, as well as to The Condition of

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the Working Class in England, where he develops an even more specific empirical analysis. Now, according to the economic data analysed by contemporary economists, in the first three or four decades of the nineteenth century, the British proletariat derived in fact hardly any advantages from the process of the development of industrial capitalism, whereas capitalists exponentially increased their profits; the inequality between the two classes clearly continued to grow until approximately 1875. It emerges clearly in an analytical graph proposed by Robert Allen37 :

If therefore we read the theoretical-economic framework proposed by Engels and Marx in the light of these data, it is reasonable to assume that they correctly identified a radical social polarization between proletariat and bourgeoisie at that time and in that place. Starting from this social reality, they considered economic polarization to be a basic dynamic of the capitalist system, and then they projected its future development, placing at the same time that assumption into a Hegelian teleological and dialectical framework, understood in a materialist key: the proletariat was conceived as the historical force of future human conciliation. This prognosis, however, was misleading: the assumption of proletarian pauperization had been overthrown by the production capacity of capitalism during the nineteenth century, and by the capacity of politics to build the welfare state. Nevertheless, some crucial elements of Kapitalismuskritik have been partially but significantly “updated” by the establishment of the neoliberal order. Just think of partial proletarianization of the middle class, or at least a stagnation in middle and lower

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incomes, of an exponential increase in economic inequalities, and of new forms of exploitation. Yet, these processes have not led to the development of a revolutionary class struggle, but rather to a reactionary political and cultural drift. Despite this, the analysis of the opposition between capital and labour in the sense of the critique of exploitation, outlined in the “old” framework, is still current today, even too current.

Notes 1. See Friedrich Engels, “Progress of Social Reform on the Continent,” in The New Moral World, N. 21, 18 November 1843, in MECW , vol. 3, p. 406. 2. Engels, “Briefe aus dem Wuppertal,” in Telegraph für Deutschland 50, March 1839, trans., “Letters from Wuppertal,” in MECW , vol. 2, p. 10. 3. Engels, “German Volksbücher,” in Telegraph für Deutschland 186, November 1839, trans. in MECW , vol. 2, p. 32 f.; see also Engels, “Ernst Moritz Arndt,” in Telegraph für Deutschland 4, January 1841, trans. in MECW , vol. 2, pp. 144, 146, written in October-December 1840. 4. See, among others, the articles by Engels published in Telegraph für Deutschland 60, April 1840; Nr. 3, January 1841; Nr. 55, April 1841. 5. Engels, “Letter to Graeber, 13–20 November 1839,” in MECW , vol. 2, p. 486. 6. Engels, “Letter to Graeber, 9 December 1939–5 February 1840,” in MECW , vol. 2, pp. 489–490. 7. G.W.F. Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Geschichte. Published posthumously in 1837. 8. Engels, Schelling und die Offenbarung (Leipzig 1842), trans.: Schelling and Revelation, in MECW , vol. 2, pp. 236, 239, 1841– 1842. 9. Engels, “Zentralisation und Freiheit,” in Supplement to Rheinische Zeitung 261, 18 September 1842, trans., “Centralisation and Freedom,” in MECW , vol. 2, p. 357. 10. Engels, “Die innern Krisen,” in Rheinische Zeitung 344, 10 December 1842, trans., “The Internal Crises,” in MECW , vol. 2, p. 373.

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11. G.W.F. Hegel, Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts, trans.: Elements of the Philosophy of Right, trans. by H.B. Nisbet (Cambridge 1991), §245, p. 223. 12. Engels, “The Internal Crises,” p. 373, see also idem., “Die Lage der arbeitenden Klasse in England,” in Rheinische Zeitung 359, 20. December 1842, trans.: The Condition of the Working Class in England, in MECW , vol. 2, p. 378. 13. Engels, “The Internal Crises,” p. 373. 14. See ibid., p. 370 ff. 15. Ibid., p. 371. 16. Ibid., p. 374. 17. See also Engels, “Englische Ansicht über die innern Krise,” in Rheinische Zeitung 342, 8 December 1842, trans., “The English View of the Internal Crises,” in MECW , vol. 2, pp. 368; and Engels, “Stellung der politischen Partei,” in Rheinische Zeitung 358, 24 December 1842, trans., “The Position of the Political Parties,” in MECW , vol. 2. 18. Engels, “The Condition of the Working Class in England,” p. 379. 19. Karl Marx, “Der Kommunismus und die Augsburger Allgemeine Zeitung,” in Rheinische Zeitung 289, 16 October 1842, trans., “Communism and the Augsburg Allgemeine Zeitung,” in MECW , vol. 1, p. 220. 20. See, above all, Marx, “Verhandlungen des 6. Rheinischen Landtags. Dritter Artikel, Debatten über das Holzdiebstahlgesetz,” in Rheinische Zeitung 298, 25 October 1842; 300, 27 October 1842; 303, 30 October 1842; 305, 1 November 1842; 307, 3 November 1842; trans., “Proceedings of the Sixth Rhine Province Assembly— Third Article—Debates on the Law on Thefts of Wood,” in MECW , vol. 1. 21. See Terrell Carver, Friedrich Engels. His Life and Thought (London 1990) pp. 110 ff. 22. Engels, “Briefe aus London,” in Schweizerischer Republikaner 39 16 Mai 1843, trans., “Letters from London,” in MECW , vol. 3, p. 380. 23. Engels, “Briefe aus London,” in Schweizerischer Republikaner 46, 9 June 1843, “Letters from London,” in MECW , vol. 3, p. 386 f. 24. Engels, “Progress of Social Reform on the Continent,” in The New Moral World, No. 19, 4 November 1843, in MECW , vol. 3, p. 392.

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25. Ibid., p. 393. 26. Engels, Umrisse zu einer Kritik der Nationalökonomie, trans.: Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy, in MECW , vol. 3, p. 424. 27. Ibid., p. 420. 28. Ibid., p. 421. 29. Ibid., pp. 430–431. 30. Marx, Summary of Frederick Engels’s Article “Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy,” in MECW , vol. 3, p. 375. 31. Engels, Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy, pp. 428–429. 32. Ibid., pp. 433–434. 33. Ibid., pp. 435–436. 34. Ibid., p. 441. 35. Marx, Zur Kritik der Politischen Ökonomie, in MEW , vol. 13, “Vorwort,” p. 10, trans.: A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, in MECW , vol. 29, “Preface,” p. 264. 36. G.W.F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, cit., §289, p. 329; see K. Marx, Zur Kritik der Hegelschen Rechtsphilosophie, in MEW , vol. 1, trans.: Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law, in MECW , vol. 3, pp. 41–42. 37. Robert C. Allen, “Engels’ Pause: Technical Change, Capital Accumulation, and Inequality in rhe British Industrial Revolution,” in Exploration in Economic History 4 (2009), p. 123.

Bibliography Allen, Robert C. “Engels’ Pause: Technical Change, Capital Accumulation, and Inequality in the British Industrial Revolution,” Explorations in Economic History 46:4 (2009), pp. 418-435. Carver, Terrell. Friedrich Engels. His Life and Thought (London: Macmillan, 1990). Engels, Friedrich. “Centralisation and Freedom.” In MECW , vol. 2, pp. 355– 359. Engels, Friedrich. “Ernst Moritz Arndt.” In MECW , vol. 2, pp. 137–150. Engels, Friedrich. “German Volksbücher.” In MECW , vol. 2, p. 32–40. Engels, Friedrich. “Letters from London.” In MECW , vol. 3, pp. 379–391. Engels, Friedrich. “Letters from Wuppertal.” In MECW , vol. 2, pp. 7–25.

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Engels, Friedrich. “Progress of Social Reform on the Continent.” In MECW , vol. 3, pp. 392–408. Engels, Friedrich. “The Condition of the Working Class in England.” In MECW , vol. 2, pp. 378–379. Engels, Friedrich. “The Internal Crises.” In MECW , vol. 2, p. 370–374. Engels, Friedrich. “The Position of the Political Parties.” In MECW , vol. 2, pp. 375–377. Engels, Friedrich. Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy. In MECW , vol. 3, pp. 418–443. Engels, Friedrich. Schelling and Revelation. In MECW , vol. 2, pp. 189–240. Engels, Friedrich.“The English View of the Internal Crises.” In MECW , vol. 2, pp. 368–369; Hegel, G.W.F. Elements of the Philosophy of Right, translated by H.B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), Hegel, G.W.F. Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Geschichte (Berlin: Ducker & Humblot, 1837). Marx, Karl. “Preface” to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. In MECW , vol. 29, pp. 261–265. Marx, Karl. “Proceedings of the Sixth Rhine Province Assembly—Third Article— Debates on the Law on Thefts of Wood.” In MECW , vol. 1, pp. 132–181. Marx, Karl. Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law. In MECW , vol. 3, pp. 3–129. Marx, Karl.“Communism and the Augsburg Allgemeine Zeitung.” In MECW , vol. 1, pp. 215–222.

CHAPTER 8

Engels on the “External Market” and “Deindustrialization” Prabhat Patnaik

Marx and Engels had brought very different qualities to their joint enterprise. While Marx was deep, thorough and rigorous, Engels was full of brilliant flashes of insight and originality. Not only did his insights, notably in The Condition of the Working Class in England, get Marx started on his profound journey into unravelling the political economy of capitalism, but the origins of at least two of the most consequential ideas in Marx’s work can be traced to Engels’s opus. One is the “reserve army of labour,” which some consider to be the most important concept in Capital; and the other is the idea of “labour” becoming a commodity owing to the bourgeoisie’s gaining “a monopoly of all means of existence in the broadest sense of the word,”1 though the distinction between “labour-power” and “labour” had eluded Engels at that time.2

P. Patnaik (B) Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 T. Carver and S. Rapic (eds.), Friedrich Engels for the 21st Century, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-97138-0_8

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Engels’s brilliant flashes of insight would find expression later in his life through works such as The Peasant War in Germany, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, and The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man. I shall be concerned in this essay, however, with Engels’s political economy; and one cannot but feel sad that he had no time to develop his own ideas on political economy, which were by no means identical with Marx’s, and which displayed remarkable originality, because of his pre-occupation with preparing Marx’s volumes II and III of Capital for publication. Not that the latter was a task of lesser importance; but one only wishes that Engels could have had a lot more time than he had. Among his ideas which remain unexplored are those on the market question, which I shall discuss below.

The Market Question Three outstanding ideas run through Engels’s writings on the market question. The most basic one among these is that a capitalist economy cannot do without access to an external market, i.e. a market outside of this economy proper. In Engels’s writings, one can locate two reasons for it: firstly, capitalism being a system where there is no conscious macrolevel planning of the economy, different branches experience increases in their production capacity at different times, and such enormous bursts of expansion of production in particular branches cannot possibly be absorbed within this system itself; such instances of expansion necessarily have to find their market outside of the system itself (this is often referred to in the Marxist literature as the problem of “disproportionality”); secondly, even if all the branches of production within this economy simultaneously experienced an increase in their production capacity, the need for an external market would still necessarily arise, because the existence of the reserve army of labour would keep wages down, and hence also the demand arising from the side of the working class (this is often referred to in the Marxist literature as the problem of generalized “over-production”). It followed that a capitalist economy necessarily depended on an external market for both these reasons. In fact, Engels seems to have taken this feature to be almost a definition of capitalism, viz., its being a system that cannot possibly remain confined to the local market alone but had to go all over the world trying to sell its goods. Put differently, he seems to have almost taken it for granted that the counterpart to the massive

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development of the productive forces that capitalism brings about is a quest for markets beyond the local or the domestic one. And the intense contradiction that this gave rise to was expressed by Engels as follows: But the manufacturing monopoly of England is the pivot of the present social system of England. Even while that monopoly lasted, the markets could not keep pace with the increasing productivity of English manufacturers; the decennial crises were the consequence. And new markets are getting scarcer everyday … But what is to be the consequence? ... Here is the vulnerable place, the heel of Achilles for capitalistic production. Its very basis is the necessity of constant expansion and this constant expansion now becomes impossible. It now ends in a deadlock. Every year England is brought nearer face to face with the question: either the country must go to pieces or capitalist production must. Which is it to be?3

This perception of capitalism as being constrained by the availability of external markets is in stark contrast to the one generally attributed to Marx on the basis of his two-department schemes in Volume II of Capital, where the two departments, one producing the means of production and the other producing the means of consumption, are shown to provide markets to one another within a closed and isolated capitalist economy. Marx’s motivation for undertaking the analysis of capitalism in terms of his two-department schemes is not clear. In a letter to Engels after working out his reproduction schemes he wrote: “I have got my Tableau Économique.” 4 The Tableau Économique, it may be recalled, was the picture of circulation of commodities in an economy given by Dr. François Quesnay who was the leader of the physiocrats in France. The two-department schemes of Marx, like the Tableau Économique of Quesnay, were a brilliant scientific advance, encapsulating the millions of transactions that occur daily in a capitalist economy into a simple macroeconomic pattern; and having developed the schemes, Marx might have drawn the conclusion that the equilibrium conditions required to prevent crises in a capitalist economy were so stringent that they could not possibly be fulfilled in real life. In other words, Marx’s reproduction schemes might have been designed to show how difficult it was to achieve equilibrium if expanded reproduction occurred exclusively within a selfcontained capitalist economy. And given Marx’s rejection of Say’s Law, which David Ricardo believed in, and his acceptance of the phenomenon of generalized overproduction, it would stand to reason that Marx had

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something of this sort in his mind, i.e. the sheer difficulty that a capitalist system would face if it was confined exclusively to its domestic market. The fact that Engels, who prepared volume II for publication where the reproduction schemes appear, and who must have pondered deeply over these schemes, himself believed till his dying day that capitalism necessarily required external markets, should have strengthened this interpretation of the schemes, as suggesting that the equilibrium conditions thrown up by the schemes are impossible to fulfil in real life. But the standard interpretation that has been given to Marx’s reproduction schemes is quite different, namely that they depict a picture that holds on average in real life through crises, and the crises are seen essentially as cyclical crises. This is certainly the interpretation that Nikolai Bukharin gave to these schemes in his critique of Rosa Luxemburg’s theory of accumulation. Luxemburg, it may be recalled, had seen capital accumulation as necessarily entailing a process of exchange between the capitalist and the pre-capitalist sectors, rather than between the two departments of a capitalist economy; Bukharin’s criticism was that the pre-capitalist sector was not logically necessary for an explanation of accumulation, as Luxemburg had argued. Accumulation could occur, as Marx according to him had pointed out, through an exchange between the two departments, though such exchange would be accompanied by crises. To be sure, the proof given by Luxemburg for her proposition that a capitalist economy necessarily had to look for external markets was inadequate. But Bukharin’s conclusion from this, that the proposition itself was erroneous, was symptomatic of the general understanding that prevailed among Marxists. This held that, through the cyclical crises, the picture of expanded reproduction drawn by Marx in his schemes was a more or less accurate description of reality. The fact that Engels himself had rejected this understanding seems to have been missed by many Marxists, perhaps because his position on this question is outlined, not in any single major work, but in a series of communications.

Creation and Destruction The second major idea that Engels held all his life on the market question is the following: as capitalism acquires an external market for itself, it also destroys this market through this very process of acquiring it. It does not of course destroy this market immediately, or fully, for then there would be no net acquisition of an external market at all; but the point is

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that as capitalism creates a market for itself outside of itself, it becomes simultaneously engaged in a process of destruction of this market ipso facto, i.e. by the very act of this creation. Engels expressed the matter thus: For it is one of the necessary corollaries of grande industrie that it destroys its own home market by the very process by which it creates it. It creates it by destroying the basis of the domestic industry of the peasantry. But without domestic industry the peasantry cannot live. They are ruined as peasants; their purchasing power is reduced to a minimum; and until they, as proletarians, have settled down into new conditions of existence, they will furnish a very poor market for the newly-arisen factories.5

The example given by Engels here was of a peasant economy where the peasant household simultaneously carried on domestic industry, such as weaving, within the household itself in order to become viable. The pre-capitalist economy was thus characterized by a unity of agriculture and manufacturing. Capitalist industry encroaches upon this pre-capitalist economy by snatching away its market for its own products. But as it does this, the economy of the peasants becomes unviable, and the market that it had acquired gets lost, at least quite substantially, because of this unviability. One can for instance imagine different peasant households engaged in different domestic manufacturing activities and producing a variety of industrial goods which they exchange among themselves. Now, if capitalist products, being cheaper, supplant some of these pre-capitalist goods, with some peasant households, to start with, buying capitalist products and dropping out of the process of mutual exchange in which they had been engaged earlier, then those whose products are supplanted will experience a loss of income; the same would happen to other households too, so that all peasant producers would experience a loss of income, and hence there would be a destruction of the capitalist market that had been created by supplanting petty production. Marx had talked of the unity of agriculture and industry as being a characteristic of the Asiatic mode of production. The separation of agriculture and industry is brought about by the encroachment of capitalism. But this very separation through the supplanting of pre-capitalist industrial production, entails, simultaneously, however, a loss of market for capitalism itself through the mass impoverishment of the petty producers.

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This picture of a loss of market through the very process of creation of the market, which Engels had drawn in this letter to N.F. Danielson, the well-known Narodnik economist, has a more general validity: it is valid even when agriculture and industry are not carried out within the same household. This is evident from the experience of colonized third-world economies like India where there was a distinct class of artisans, separate from the peasants, producing manufactured goods for the consumption of the peasantry and also for the nobility. The supplanting of such production by cheaper machine-made goods imported freely, without any tariff protection, from the metropolis, did not immediately impoverish the peasantry as in Engels’ example (though of course the enormous increase in tax revenue by the colonial government, which was simply shipped out of the country without any quid pro quo in the form of goods required by the metropolis, did; but that is a separate matter). But as the displaced artisans, with no other occupation left to them, tried to move into agriculture, causing an immense increase in the pressure of population on land, land rents increased and agricultural wages declined, resulting in a loss of income of the agriculture-dependent population over time. This, for instance, is what happened in India in the latter half of the nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth6 and is the genesis of modern mass poverty. A similar phenomenon also occurred in other colonies of conquest7 and in semi-colonies like China. Engels, with his brilliant insight, was, as usual, sensitive to this phenomenon. We shall come back to this point later.

Monopoly and Competition The third major theme that Engels developed on the market question related to the entry of newcomers into the ranks of capitalist nations. When Britain had a monopoly position as the pioneer country of the industrial revolution, a vast segment of the world market was open to it. But as other countries began to develop their own industrial capitalisms, and began looking for external markets as a consequence, they began encroaching upon the markets that Britain had exclusive control over till then. As Britain had supplanted local producers in these farflung economies, the newly industrializing capitalist nations now began to supplant Britain in the world market, which brought in a protracted crisis in the British economy. This had the effect of giving a fillip, according to Engels, to the struggle of the working class in Britain for socialism.

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Engels had already linked the quietude of the British working class to the monopoly position of Britain in the world economy in his famous letter to Karl Kautsky on 12 September 1882.8 His letter to Kautsky, it may be recalled, had formed the basis on which V.I. Lenin had developed his idea of the “labour aristocracy.” But as this monopoly position began to collapse, so did the quietude of the British working class. It is worth quoting Engels here: The truth is this: during the period of England’s industrial monopoly, the English working class have, to a certain extent, shared in the benefits of this monopoly. These benefits were very unequally parcelled out amongst them; the privileged minority pocketed most, but the great mass had, at least, a temporary share now and then. And that is the reason why, since the dying out of Owenism, there has been no socialism in England. With the breakdown of that monopoly the English working class will lose that privileged position; it will find itself generally- the privileged and the leading minority not excepted-on a level with its fellow workers abroad. And that is the reason why there will be socialism again in England.9

Two points about Engels’ analysis of this phenomenon deserve attention. The first is the relationship he draws between developments in the economic realm and the rhythm of the revolution. The very idea of his seeing the revolution as being conditioned by economic phenomena, rather than other developments under capitalism such as wars, is itself rather significant. In addition, Engels emphasizes a link between Britain’s loss of monopoly and a revival of socialism in Britain. The question is: how does this link operate? The typical answer one may be tempted to give immediately is that the loss of monopoly entails a loss of monopoly super-profits out of which a section of the workers (Lenin’s “labour aristocracy”) was being bribed earlier. But Engels has a more subtle link in mind, which is that Britain’s monopoly was associated with a prolonged economic boom. It is in other words the level of activity rather than monopoly profits which he emphasizes (though of course the two are not mutually exclusive). Engels suggests that periods of pronounced economic boom, such as what Britain had enjoyed during its monopoly, are not very conducive to revolutionary struggles, while periods of economic slowdown and economic stagnation, such as what the end of that monopoly entailed, are. The unemployed according to him, whose ranks get swollen in periods of

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stagnation and crisis, may in their anger and frustration, be more willing to revolt against the system.10 This perception itself is rather unusual, since many see large-scale unemployment in a society as weakening not only the bargaining strength of the working class but also its political striking power; in fact unemployment is often seen as being conducive to the growth of right-wing and fascist forces. Engels’s remarks suggesting otherwise are quite significant in this context. The second point about Engels’s analysis is what it suggests regarding the future course of capitalism. As capitalism spreads among the nations (at least those to which substantial European immigration had taken place), there is likely to be an increase in the intensity of struggle over markets. Since capitalism requires external markets, the growth of markets cannot possibly keep pace with the growth of productive forces. Engels expresses this point as follows: “While the productive power increases in a geometric, the extension of markets proceeds at best in an arithmetic, ratio.”11 This contradiction must therefore lead to a growing tendency towards stagnation and crisis of the system, the exact incidence of this crisis upon the different nations depending upon their competitive strength and degree of dependence upon external markets. This prognostication about the system getting more and more embroiled in crises as it develops, if taken as an ex ante proposition, is both powerful and plausible. It is plausible once we break out of the notion of the two-department schemes of Marx depicting an actual picture of accumulation and see the necessity of external markets for capitalism. It is not surprising that Luxemburg had come to a somewhat similar conclusion with her theory of “collapse” which she had used against Eduard Bernstein’s proposal to change the agenda of the proletariat from a struggle for revolution to one for reform. In fact, it is a more powerful and plausible ex ante hypothesis around which one can analyze the long-term dynamics of capitalism than the one which Marx actually used in Capital volume III, which is in terms of the falling tendency of the rate of profit because of a rise in the organic composition of capital. There is no reason to expect the organic composition of capital to rise at all, even in an ex ante sense; a rise in the organic composition of capital is no more plausible than a fall; and of course a constancy (which is what “mainstream” economics is founded upon) is even less plausible.

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Marx was perhaps influenced by the theoretical legacy of classical political economy in suggesting his falling tendency of the rate of profit, since both Adam Smith and Ricardo had advanced similar theoretical prognostications, though on differing grounds. Engels, being relatively free of this theoretical legacy, was able to suggest an alternative reason for capitalism’s getting engulfed in crisis as it developed, which was better founded than Marx’s proposition. To be sure, one has to take Engels’s remark not as a prediction but as suggestive of an ex ante tendency. But seen this way, it becomes a powerful tool of analysis, which, strangely enough, has not been utilized by Marxist writers even at the present juncture, despite the fact that world capitalism has of late been embroiled in a protracted crisis where Engels’s analysis appears quite apposite. To say that capitalism gets embroiled in crisis and stagnation as it develops is not to advance a theory of automatic breakdown of the system. The point is that, as Engels had noted, the revolutionary overthrow of the system, which must be an act of conscious praxis, comes on to the agenda when the system gets embroiled in crisis and stagnation.

Colonialism, Capitalism, and Deindustrialization The term “deindustrialization” acquired currency through the work of the Indian nationalist writers who had provided a comprehensive critique of colonial rule. But Engels, as we have seen, had emphasized such a process of “deindustrialization” as anyway accompanying capitalist development. If an external market is necessary for capitalism, then supplanting pre-capitalist producers becomes a feature of such development; and this is what causes deindustrialization in the pre-capitalist economy.12 But deindustrialization, defined as a reduction in the number of persons employed in industry, can occur not only within the pre-capitalist economy, but even if we take the capitalist and pre-capitalist economies together. If the number of persons displaced in the pre-capitalist sector by the entry of capitalist products, exceeds the number of persons employed in producing the capitalist sector’s product that displaces them, which is obviously likely, then we have deindustrialization, ceteris paribus, in this sense of a reduction in the number of persons employed in industry, taking both the sectors together. This of course may happen within a country, with the capitalist sector encroaching upon the pre-capitalist sector of the same country; or it

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may happen across countries, as in the colonial situation, where the precapitalist sector’s workers remain a pauperized mass within the colonies because of the encroachment by metropolitan capitalism, and yet, even if they could migrate to the metropolis, there would be no jobs for them, because the total employment taking both sectors together has ceteris paribus shrunk. Such deindustrialization has to be distinguished from the destruction of the market referred to above. The creation of the market for capitalist goods creates deindustrialization, whether or not there is any destruction of the market so created. While Engels himself had talked of the destruction of the market created by capitalism, because the peasant, who also carried out manufacturing, suffered an income loss and hence cut down on demand when this supplementary source of income became unavailable owing to competition from the capitalist sector’s goods, deindustrialization would still have occurred if the peasants’ demand for the good in question had not shrunk. We had mentioned earlier that the destruction of the market is a phenomenon observable even in situations where the peasants themselves are not manufacturers but where there is a separate and distinct class of artisans. These artisans are the ones who get displaced; and that is what we call “deindustrialization.” But in addition, since the displaced artisans crowd onto the available land, they raise rents and lower wages, leading to a reduction in the incomes of the peasants and agricultural labourers and increasing the share of the landlords. If a dollar transferred from the peasants and labourers to the landlords entails a lower demand for capitalist manufactured goods, since the propensity to consume such goods is higher among the peasants and labourers than among the landlords, then we have the phenomenon of destruction of markets. But the destruction of markets has nothing to do with the phenomenon of deindustrialization as such. Deindustrialization in a country having both capitalist and precapitalist sectors, with the encroachment upon the latter being carried out by the former, was discussed by Engels in the same letter to Danielson that we quoted earlier. He was discussing the prospects of capitalist development in Russia, an issue that had exercised the Narodniks, who had wanted a direct transition to socialism from the old Russian commune (or mir) by avoiding capitalist development altogether and had entered into correspondence with Marx and Engels on the matter. It is in this

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context that Engels had written this important letter to Danielson on 22 September 1892, where he said: Your calculation that the sum of the textile products of grande industrie and of domestic industry does not increase, but remains the same and even diminishes, is not only quite correct, but would not be correct if it came to another result. So long as Russian manufacture is confined to the home market, its product can only cover home consumption. And that can only slowly increase, and, as it seems to me, ought even to decrease under present Russian conditions.13

Suppose we ignore the possibility of decrease of home consumption (which is linked to the question of the destruction of market mentioned earlier) and simply confine ourselves to a given home market (which has no reason to increase by the processes we are considering). If the total consumption remains the same, but more of it is catered to by capitalist products than earlier, at the expense of pre-capitalist products, then total employment clearly would have ceteris paribus diminished, since employment per unit output must be lower for the capitalist product than for the pre-capitalist product. Thus, Engels is clearly visualizing deindustrialization in the sense in which we have defined it within a country (in the present context Russia) as a consequence of capitalist development. Of course, if the encroachment upon the pre-capitalist sector is done not by the capitalist sector located within that country itself, but within another country, then matters are much worse for the recipient country of capitalist products. Engels considers this in the same letter: And as far as this side of the question: the destruction of home industry and the branches of agriculture subservient to it – as far as this is concerned, the real question for you seems to me this: that the Russians had to decide whether their own grande industrie was to destroy their domestic manufacture, or whether the import of English goods was to accomplish this. With protection, the Russians effected it, without protection, the English. That seems to me perfectly evident.14

Engels’s remark here raises two fundamental questions. One, it is as pithy and cogent an argument against free trade as is possible. Unlike all arguments in defence of free trade, from the times of Ricardo, Eli Heckscher and Bertil Ohlin, down to our own, which invariably ignore all income

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and employment effects of instituting free trade and talk only of “efficiency gains” (which in fact are non-existent because of the reality of these income and employment effects), Engels here is emphasizing precisely the income and employment effects. He is in effect justifying a policy of protection by Russia on the grounds that in the absence of such a policy English goods, as opposed to those produced by Russia’s own capitalist industry, will replace Russia’s domestic industry, whose employment effects for Russia will be infinitely more adverse. The second question raised by Engels’s remark is this: if protection for the products of Russia’s capitalist industry against the import of English goods is justified, then why can’t Russia’s domestic industry be protected against the products of Russia’s own capitalist industry? Engels’s argument in this context consists of two parts: one, that Russia had to have its own grande industrie; and two, that grande industrie in Russia could only be developed under the capitalist form. In his words, So far, then, we agree upon this one point, that Russia, in 1892, could not exist as a purely agricultural country, that her agricultural population must be complemented by industrial production. Now I maintain, that industrial production nowadays means grande industrie, steam, electricity, self-acting mules, powerlooms, finally machines that produce machinery. From the day Russia introduced railways, the introduction of these modern means of production was a foregone conclusion. You must be able to repair your own locomotives, wagons, railways, and that can only be done cheaply if you are able to construct those things at home, that you intend to repair …. One thing is certain: if Russia really required, and was determined to have, a grande industrie of her own, she could not have it at all except under some degree of protection, and this you admit. From this point of view, too, then, the question of protection is one of degree only, not of principle; the principle was unavoidable. Another thing is certain: if Russia required after the Crimean War a grande industrie of her own, she could have it in one form only: the capitalistic form. And along with that form, she was obliged to take over all the consequences which accompany capitalistic grande industrie in all other countries.15

Engels, however, has himself noted in the same letter the deleterious consequences of Russian capitalist development for employment within Russia (taking both capitalist and pre-capitalist sectors together) and

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predicted that employment “will only slowly increase” afterwards. And in view of what he himself has said about the slow growth of the external market and the competition among the capitalist powers for this slowly growing external market (whence the stagnation in Britain), the employment growth over time in a Russia where deindustrialization is allowed full play may be exceedingly slow indeed. The Narodniki in short were quite right in underscoring the acute misery that capitalism would bring to the Russian population. Under these circumstances, couldn’t an orderly and controlled transition from domestic to grande industry be visualized for Russia? And couldn’t such a transition, as opposed to the spontaneous transition that capitalism entails, be effected under a form other than capitalism, say for instance, through a collective of petty producers; indeed such a controlled transition could at all occur only through a form other than capitalism. Engels was right in ruling out any non-capitalist transition to modern industry in Russia under the then prevailing class configuration. But from his remarks, it is clear that he would not rule it out under all circumstances. There is in short no cosmic teleology that ordains all countries to pass through the full gamut of capitalist development irrespective of the misery being experienced by the working people. This misery might force them to move beyond capitalism and, through stages, move towards socialism, even before capitalism has acquired any degree of maturity. The Narodniki might have been wrong in believing that the mir still existed, and that a direct transition from the mir could be made to socialism; and Marx (in his letter to Vera Zasulich) and Engels in the above-mentioned letter were right in maintaining that in Russia of the time capitalism was the most potent force, which Lenin established through detailed statistics in his Development of Capitalism in Russia. But the idea of going beyond capitalism on the basis of a proletariat-led democratic revolution in a society like Russia, or any other third-world society, whenever an opportunity presented itself (and not necessarily only when capitalism had reached some sort of an “advanced status”), would have been welcomed by both Marx and Engels. The extreme sympathy with which Engels treats Danielson’s argument is a pointer in this direction. Within such an alternative mode of transition, there is no reason why pre-capitalist methods and pre-capitalist producers should not be protected from encroachment by capitalism of the same country, even while modern methods of production and grand industrie are being introduced in a controlled manner. Many third-world countries after

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decolonization have been concerned with this issue; and there is much in Engels that can be construed as forming a bridge between Marxism as it has developed in Europe, on the one hand, and the concrete concerns of third-world revolution, on the other hand. There has, alas, been a tendency, even among sections of the left, to see Engels only as a popularizer, and that too of a simpliste kind, of the profound ideas of Marx. This perception, however, is completely off the mark. Marx and Engels complemented one another; their views were not necessarily identical on all subjects; and from the perspective, at least of the third-world left, some of his insights which he alone has are quite invaluable. It is a pity that he did not have the time to develop these insights in greater detail.

Notes 1. Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845) (Cambridge 2010), p. 73. 2. The idea of “labour” becoming a commodity had already appeared in Adam Smith but the reason Smith had adduced for it, namely the advantages of division of labour, was altogether different from what Engels in 1845 and Marx later provided, which was the acquisition of monopoly control over the means of production by the bourgeoisie. 3. Engels, “Preface to the English Edition,” in The Condition of the Working Class in England, pp. 14–15. 4. Marx to Engels, 6 July 1863. 5. Engels, “Letter to N. F. Danielson, 22 September 1892,” in MECW, vol. 49, p. 537. 6. Bipan Chandra, “Towards a Reinterpretation of Nineteenth Century Indian Economic History,” in Indian Economic and Social History Review 1 (1968). 7. I use the term “colonies of conquest” to refer to tropical and semi-tropical countries like India, Indonesia, and the African colonies, as distinct from “colonies of settlement” which lie in the temperate regions, and which include countries like the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. The term “colonies” is sometimes used simply to refer to the former. 8. And also in Engels, “England in 1845 and 1885,” in The Condition of the Working Class in England.

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9. Ibid., p. 15. 10. Preface to English Edition of Capital, vol. I. 11. Ibid. 12. For a discussion of deindustrialization in colonial times see Amiya Kumar Bagchi, “Deindustrialization in India in the Nineteenth Century: Some Theoretical Implications,” in The Journal of Development Studies 2 (1976). 13. Engels, “Letter to N. F. Danielson, 22 September 1892,” p. 537. 14. Ibid. 15. Engels, “Letter to N. F. Danielson, 22 September 1892,” p. 535 f.

Bibliography Bagchi, Amiya Kumar. “Deindustrialization in India in the Nineteenth Century: Some Theoretical Implications,” Journal of Development Studies 12 (1976), pp. 135-164. Chandra, Bipan. “Towards a Reinterpretation of Nineteenth Century Indian Economic History,” Indian Economic and Social History Review 1:5 (1968), pp. 1-15. Engels, Friedrich. The Condition of the Working Class in England [1845] (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

PART III

The Condition of the Working Class

CHAPTER 9

The Constitution of the Proletariat: Bringing Together Friedrich Engels, Edward P. Thompson and Michael Vester Heinz Sünker

For Michael Vester on the occasion of the 9th of December 2021

As we know, debates and arguments concerning the theory and analysis of both class1 and capitalism2 have been ongoing for more than 200 years. In the context of studying social stratification and the transition from a corporative feudal society to a class-based capitalism,3 the question as to the very existence of a class structure in the first instance has often been at the centre of debates. Frequently, there are specific class positions embedded within these debates which, due to inherent class interests, affect analyses and results. Where the existence of a class structure is denied, the positions adopted arise because their proponents cleave to the

H. Sünker (B) Bergische Universität-Wuppertal, Wuppertal, Germany e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 T. Carver and S. Rapic (eds.), Friedrich Engels for the 21st Century, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-97138-0_9

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significance of the surface appearance of societies which are dominated by a capitalist mode of production rather than an examination of the essence of this. Overall, they follow the “perverse logic” (Verkehrungslogik) of capital. A deeper analytic reflection is necessary to go beyond the surface appearance, particularly amongst those who adopt these positions whilst claiming to belong to a Marxian critical perspective. The value of this is evident in a variety of other historical and contemporary arguments.4 The influential version of a structural analysis of bourgeois civil society that would serve as a template for further and more extensive analyses in the German literature (especially those of Marx and Engels) can be found in Hegel’s Philosophy of Right of 1821—a result of his reading of the Scottish moral philosophers. Proceeding from the statement in §185 that the reality of this society is characterized by contradictions such as that of “extravagance and misery as well as … the physical and ethical corruption common to both,”5 Hegel gives a critical account of the “work precept” that is characteristic for this type of society. An inherent part of this account lies in demonstrating the systemic division between rich and poor, poverty and wealth,6 and in showing the particular form taken by this division, the particular characters it produces and the effect it has on people’s ways of living, on their sense of self and on their prospects: When a large mass of people sinks below the level of a certain standard of living – which automatically regulates itself at the level necessary for a member of the society in question – that feeling of right, integrity Rechtlichkeit, and honour which comes from supporting oneself by one’s own activity and work is lost. This leads to the creation of a rabble, which in turn makes it much easier for disproportionate wealth to be concentrated in a few hands.7

The systemic basis for the regulation of poverty and of the poor lies in a precept established by this social formation which requires that the material conditions of existence must be reproduced through work, work which moreover is fundamental in preserving “the feeling of selfsufficiency and honour amongst its individual members.” This leads Hegel to the conclusion that “this shows that, despite an excess of wealth, civil society is not wealthy enough—i.e. its own distinct resources are not sufficient—to prevent an excess of poverty and the formation of a rabble.”8

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Fifteen years later, the Left Hegelian Eduard Gans, one of Hegel’s most important students and subsequent colleagues,9 who would become significant for the theoretical development of both Marx and Engels,10 highlights the social question emerging at the time even more emphatically: You have rightly observed that slavery is not really over, that it may be formally abolished, but that materially, it exists in its fullest form. Just as the master and the slave stood opposite each other, followed by the patrician and the plebeian and then the feudal lord and the vassal, so do now the person of leisure and the worker. Go and visit the factories, and you will see hundreds of men and women who, emaciated and miserable, for the sake of serving a single person sacrifice their health and their joy of life merely for a wretched kind of survival. Is not that slavery, if a human being is exploited like an animal, though he might be at liberty to die of hunger instead? Is it really going to be impossible to bring any spark of the ethical life to these miserable proletarians? Are they not to be raised to a participation in that which they are now compelled to do without spirit or consciousness? That the state must take care of the poorest and most numerous class, that, if its members want to work, they must never lack a fitting occupation, that the main concern must be to make thinner that crust of civil society which is usually called the rabble, says much about our time, and the pages of future history will have to tell more than once of the struggle of the proletarians against the middle classes. The Middle Ages with their guilds had an organic institution for labour. These guilds have been destroyed and cannot be reconstructed. But is labour to be liberated from the corporation and the dominion of the masters to fall prey to despotism and the dominion of the factory owners? Is there no remedy against this? Indeed there is: it consists in the free corporation, it consists in socialisation.11

The crucial aspect of Gans’s position here is this: he adopts the systematic meaning of Hegel’s conceptualization of “corporation”12 in his analysis of civil society in order to open up an emancipatory prospect. But he places an even greater emphasis than Hegel on its character as a force for social integration and on its role during the transition to the state against the systemic contradictions within society—as defined by Hegel previously.13

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Friedrich Engels After a very successful meeting with Karl Marx in Paris, the substance of which was of great importance to both of them,14 in October 1844 the young Engels writes from Wuppertal/Barmen to Marx in Paris. His letter is markedly influenced by Hegel’s philosophy and social analysis, and by Hegel’s critical students,15 but also stands in the context of Engels’s own early writings, starting with the social criticism of his generally satirical analyses in Letters from Wuppertal (1839/1841)16 as well as his first systematic text entitled Outlines of a Critique of National Economy (1843/1844).17 In this, his first letter to Marx in the long history of their relationship, he tries to give a vivid description of his life by interweaving family matters and the conditions of political work. But his main focus is on analysing political developments in Wuppertal, the state of which is very different to some years previously. He highlights advances in civilization, describing the positive effects of the industrialization and capitalization of production, whilst at the same time drawing attention to the increases in crime perpetrated, as it were, in bodily form against the victims, and finally he highlights the potential for the proletariat to be differently constituted: In general a remarkable movement has begun here. During my absence Wuppertal has made bigger advances in every respect than in the last fifty years. Social manners have become more civilised, participation in politics and in the opposition movement is widespread, industry has made enormous advances, new districts have gone up in the towns, entire forests have been cut down, and the whole region is now probably above, rather than below, the level of civilisation in Germany, though it was far below that level only four years ago – in short excellent soil for our principles is being prepared here, and once we are able to set in motion our wild, hot-tempered dyers and bleachers you won’t recognise Wuppertal. Even as it is the workers have during the past few years reached the final stage of the old civilisation, the rapid increase in crimes, robberies and murders is their protest against the old social organisation. At night the streets are not safe, the bourgeois are beaten up, knifed and robbed; if the local proletarians develop according to the same laws as the English proletarians, they will soon realise that it is useless to protest against the social system in this manner, as individuals and by force, and will protest in their general capacity, as human beings, by means of communism. If one could only show them the way! But that is impossible.18

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What Engels describes are the effects that class warfare from above has on the actions of the workers, in the form of “crimes, robberies and murders” as “their protest against the old social organization” embodied by the bourgeoisie. A crucial point, however, is the critical one at the end of this passage—made against the backdrop of his positive assessment of developments in the English labour movement—namely that this violent and individual form of action has no part to play in overcoming the existing social order. According to Engels, defiant action that transcends the system will only become important when actors acquire an insight into their actions, that is, when they know why, for what purpose and towards which aims they are acting. For Engels, who argues in terms of overall human evolution, as in the reference to a “general capacity,” this suggests a hope of enabling educative processes, and he associates the instigation of such processes with an idea of “instruction.” It remains decisive for this characterization that such “instruction” can be categorized and conceptualized both as a directive and as a maieutic process, something that is clearly apparent in Engels’s reflections. It is therefore significant that Engels takes a strong position in declaring that a—as it would turn out supremely “Leninist”19 —top-down attitude in the relation between either intellectuals or a “proletarian party” and the labour movement is “impossible.” This is evidenced also by his second letter to Marx of 19 November 1844,20 in which he reports on his participation in the founding of the “General Association for Relief and Education” in Cologne—as one way of attempting to advance processes of political education. In his book, The Condition of the Working Class in England, Engels expands and clarifies many aspects of the attempt to define and analytically reconstruct the conditions under which the proletariat and the labour movement are constituted. The young Engels wrote this large-scale study between November 1844 and March 1845 in Barmen, based on his twoyear stay in Manchester (from 1842 to 1844), where he experienced, and researched, processes of industrialization, urbanization, and the development of the capitalist mode of production along with its class-specific social and individual effects in that city. His work in the textile industry and his relationship with Mary Burn helped him with this, enabling him to acquire an accurate understanding and highly differentiated view of social reality along with its divergent elements, conditions, and socio-structural factors.21 From this, he built a generalized argument concerning the state of the working class in England.

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In evaluating the significance of this early work, Steven Marcus’s formulation in his 1974 book—which he intended also as a description of his own analytical approach and objectives—largely continues to hold true almost 40 years later: Almost nothing has been done to demonstrate concretely what kind of book The Condition of the Working Class in England is, what makes it outstanding among works of its kind and of its time, or to elucidate those qualities of mind that render it after such a considerable interval of history so readable, so moving, so vividly living a document. In other words, why is it still a classic?22

According to Marcus, Engels’s approach can be characterized as developing “a new mode of conceptual reflection and analysis” of English events and history in studying the significance of the industrial revolution for the transition from pre-capitalist rural life to capitalism.23 Marcus argues that Engels’s application of the concept of negativity and negation to analyse the situation of industrial workers in nineteenthcentury England, along with his application of it to the phenomenon of the industrial revolution itself, reveals both the power of this Hegelian category when utilized as a means of analysis and the way in which it can reveal universal conditions that prevail in respect of human-labour relations. Marcus seeks to underline the significance of negativity and negation through an assertion that it runs through all monumental shifts in human–material relations from the production of categories of otherness through to it being the process by which the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden, in the Christian tradition, can be read as the leap (or fall) into consciousness brought about through knowledge of alternatives. He argues that negation and negativity form an axis, albeit one lacking in stability, around which historical disruptions revolve.24 Moreover, Marcus convincingly points out previously neglected parallels in the early works of Engels and Marx (for example the “Paris Manuscripts”), which in my view enable a clearer understanding of the ongoing cooperation between them, both as regards its quality and the congruence in their way of thinking.25 Seeing the poverty and misery with which the industrial workers of England were afflicted, Marcus argues, Engels perceived the tangibility of negation (in the Hegelian sense) on a massive scale. For Engels, this in itself warranted the significance of this concept for describing the

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conditions in which they lived and worked, and its relevance to what he imagined as the historical journey that had brought this situation into being so comprehensively in the lives of industrial workers. From this historical perspective, he declares that the road to a full realization of self as a human being necessarily includes these atrocious points in time. Marcus comments: And now we are in a position to understand slightly better his reasons for saluting the English industrial workers in his dedication as the embodiment of the universal; they are for him, as they were becoming for Marx, the universally negated. As a class of men26 [sic] they had been deprived of everything except their humanity, and even that existed for them in an estranged and unachieved form. Universally negated, they represented in turn the power of universal negation ….27

In his 2006 paper, “Engels and the Invention of the Catastrophist Conception of the Industrial Revolution,” Gareth Stedman Jones is highly critical of Marcus’s analytical approach which he sees as a paradigmatic example of the kind of misguided historical analyses that end up with the negative, catastrophist conceptions which, in his view, have significantly skewed the anglophone historiography of the industrial revolution since Engels by becoming the standard account: Henceforth, it became the standard story of the “industrial revolution” – or at least, the “pessimist” account – from Arnold Toynbee in the 1880s and the Hammonds in the 1910s and 1920s through to Edward Thompson and Eric Hobsbawm in the 1960s and after.28

One thing to note here is that this amounts to a revision of Stedman Jones’s earlier positive appraisal of “Engels’ Contribution to Marxism” in 1982,29 where he emphasized Engels’s independent achievements in the cooperation with Marx. Moreover, it seems to me to be important both in terms of social analysis and historiography that in one of the most recent large-scale accounts of the history of the nineteenth century, Richard Evans, when summarizing the effects of the industrial revolution on the quality of the living conditions of the working classes—especially for the period from 1800 to about 1850 which is of interest here—comes to the following, historiographically important, conclusion: “Poverty, malnutrition, disease and infant mortality were not newly created by the industrial

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revolution, but the new world of the factory did nothing to alleviate them and in some respects made them worse.”30 Engels identifies different factors in the social development of England that led to a substantial change in the living conditions and the way of life of dependent workers. He accords central importance to the mechanization of production, which is linked to the development of the division of labour and the systematic use of water and steam power.31 For him, a representative and integral part of this development is the gradual disappearance of the class of “farming weavers” which was merged in the newly arising class of simple weavers “who lived wholly upon wages, had no property whatever, not even the pretended property of a holding, and so became working men, proletarians.”32 In terms of a structural analysis of the historical conditions, Engels accordingly finds that “[w]e have already seen how the Proletariat was called into existence by the introduction of machinery.”33 In context, his assessment is as follows: The industrial revolution is of the same importance for England as the political revolution for France, and the philosophical revolution for Germany; and the difference between England in 1760 and in 1844 is at least as great as that between France, under the ancien régime, and during the revolution of July. But the mightiest result of this industrial transformation is the English proletariat.34

For Engels, this leads to the decisive question of future social developments and the possibilities for addressing the acknowledged problems in the situation of the workers, whose miserable quality of life and whose large contribution to the life of society—in the form of social wealth—stand in such vehement contrast: What is to become of these destitute millions, who consume to-day what they earned yesterday; who have created the greatness of England by their inventions and their toil; who become with every passing day more conscious of their might, and demand, with daily increasing urgency, their share of the advantages of society?35

In conjunction with a further analysis and assessment of the condition of the workers, a clear perspective emerges regarding the solution to these problems, the political and social content of the necessary class war that

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must be fought in opposition to the one waged by those with power in society, and the conditions under which the proletariat is constituted: The workers begin to feel as a class, as a whole; they begin to perceive that, though feeble as individuals, they form a power united; their separation from the bourgeoisie, the development of views peculiar to the workers and corresponding to their position in life, is fostered, the consciousness of oppression awakens, and the workers attain social and political importance. The great cities are the birthplaces of labor movements; in them the workers first began to reflect upon their own condition, and to struggle against it, in them the opposition between proletariat and bourgeoisie first made itself manifest; from them proceeded the Trades Unions, Chartism and Socialism.36

In essence, Engels’s account describes how the awareness of social structures, of the relations of power and domination they contain, and of social warfare (particularly in the form of the Poor Law37 ) and thus an awareness of the experience of being exploited and of not having a share in the distribution of socially produced wealth, is being condensed in a process of consciousness raising.38 What is at issue here is, on the one hand, the realization of their own position of power as producers, and on the other hand the realization that their emancipation from oppression can be conceived of only on the basis of their own capacity for cooperation in Chartism39 or in the form of trade unions, and thus substantially only as a movement-based self-emancipation.40 First, Engels is thus able—also, and especially, with reference to the miserable position of the women and children who form an important part of the workforce41 —to set out what needs to be done: The workers must therefore strive to escape from this brutalizing condition, to secure for themselves a better, more human position; and this they cannot do without attacking the interest of the bourgeoisie which consists in exploiting them. But the bourgeoisie defends its interests with all the power placed at its disposal by wealth and the might of the State. In proportion as the workingman determines to alter the present state of things, the bourgeois becomes his avowed enemy.42

And secondly, he is able to come to the pithy and accurate conclusion that “the bourgeoisie has little to hope and much to fear from the education of the working class.”43

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Since Engels is concerned with the prospect of developing a political and social democracy,44 built on a groundwork of education,45 he stresses the importance of the “public sphere,” and speaks both of the importance of “public intelligence” for the workers46 and of the “public character of the English workingman, as it finds expression in associations and political principles.”47

Edward P. Thompson E. P. Thompson’s large-scale The Making of the English Working Class, which runs to a thousand pages and was first published in Great Britain in 1963, broke new ground in social history and class analysis for the period of ca. 1790–1840 in England. Stressing that “class is a relationship, not a thing,”48 and at the same time clearly distancing himself from modernization theory and criticizing the orthodoxies of the historiography of working people,49 he begins by setting out his own approach: By class I understand a historical phenomenon, unifying a number of disparate and seemingly unconnected events, both in the raw material of experience and in consciousness. I emphasize that it is a historical phenomenon. I do not see class as a ‘structure’, nor even as a ‘category’, but as something which in fact happens (and can be shown to have happened) in human relationships.50

In the very first paragraph, Thompson emphasizes something that in my view also characterizes Engels’s study and his analytical standpoint: This book has a clumsy title, but it is one which meets its purpose. Making, because it is a study in an active process, which owes as much to agency as to conditioning. The working class did not rise like the sun at an appointed time. It was present at its own making.51

Thompson continues to return to this leitmotif throughout this work: The making of the working class is a fact of political and cultural, as much as of economic, history. It was not the spontaneous generation of the factory system. Nor should we think of an external force – the “industrial revolution” – working upon some nondescript undifferentiated raw material of humanity, and turning it out at the other end as a “fresh race of beings.” The changing productive relations and working conditions of the

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Industrial Revolution were imposed, not upon raw material, but upon the free-born Englishman – … The working class made itself as much as it was made.52

Another aspect that is crucially important in reconstructing this genesis is the fact that it was not a linear process. As well as by the defeats and victories in the class struggle, the development of the movement was always also influenced by internal contradictions. For the sake of a realistic account, Thompson thus emphasizes that one tendency amongst the great movements of artisans and outworkers, which “continued over fifty years, was to resist being turned into a proletariat.”53 Time and again, Thompson’s descriptions and analysis show vividly how social and political constellations become relevant for the development of the consciousness of the working class—also and especially in connection with what he calls the “counter-revolutionary panic of the ruling classes”54 —and play a part in the constitution of the proletariat. For him, the significance of these constellations consists in the fact that, “while the years 1791–5 provided the democratic impulse, it was in the repression years that we can speak of a distinct ‘workingclass consciousness’ maturing.”55 He notes further that by 1811, a new popular radicalism can be seen to emerge simultaneously with a newly militant trade unionism.56 In short, this is about giving content to the democratic standpoint, particularly as found within the Chartist movement praised by Engels himself, by means of the concept of social egalitarianism57 ; it is about universal fundamental rights, brotherliness, autonomy, and self-sufficiency, in other words, the rejection of particular interests.58 The conclusion that Thompson draws from this still applies in his own time: “Class also acquired a peculiar resonance in English life: everything, from their schools to their shops, their chapels to their amusements, was turned into a battleground of class. The marks of this remain …,” something which also results also in the “pride” of the working class which is an important reason why the class consciousness of the English worker “has little in it of deference.”59

Michael Vester With regard to his objectives and his analytical approach, Michael Vester stresses that his study Die Entstehung des Proletariats als Lernprozeß 60

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(“The Emergence of the Proletariat as a Learning Process”) is an attempt to understand the history of the first labour movements and of the early socialist theories in England from 1792 to 1848 as a learning process. According to his analysis, this process was triggered by repressive radical changes in the political, economic and cultural spheres that occurred in connection with the first industrial revolution and the great political revolution in France. In dealing with these unreasonable demands, the ‘poor and labouring classes’ of England gradually realised the need for their own system of communication and their own institutions, for an independent role as a historical subject and for their own social theory. An underclass that had been lulled into a state of apathy, manipulated and fragmented, came together in solidarity as a class movement that sought to found all of society on different principles to those of capitalism.61

The distinguishing feature of this analysis is that it identifies, categorizes and explains a total of six cycles62 of struggle and learning63 between 1792 and 1848. These cycles are interconnected in sets of two and each of the six cycles of struggle can also be interpreted as a learning cycle.64 Vester is particularly interested in the mediation between learning from experience and the development of class consciousness in the labour movement. However, as with Thompson, it is a crucial aspect of the historiography that there are no linearities or unbroken continuities in the developmental processes. Vester instead underlines, each time within a particular context, how specific experiences in conflicts and class struggles accomplished class consciousness on the part of the workers and led them to “the insight that they would only be able to improve their situation in a lasting way by standing in solidarity with each other and by acting independently of the upper class.”65 But he also comes to the conclusion that [t]he defeats of revolutionary syndicalism and of the Chartist suffrage movement also motivated a regressive learning process in an increasing number of workers. The depoliticisation and bureaucratisation of the unions and the renunciation of their own political aims, which after 1848 was for decades a dominant feature of the English labour movement, had already begun to emerge as increasingly strong retarding moments alongside the progressive main tendency.66

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Beyond such analytical specificity and historiographical detail, Vester also emphasizes that his study, to a greater extent than Thompson’s, takes into consideration the existing and explicitly formulated social theories of the early socialists, which he thinks should be treated as a historical part of this class culture. According to Vester, an approach which takes into account socio-cultural value systems in the form of a “moral economy” must “make better use of the potential offered by the depth psychology of Freud’s and Reich’s character analysis”—particularly with reference to a distinction between “affective-paternalist” and “disciplined-egalitarian dispositions.”67 The crucial insight in the course of his analysis is as follows: A ‘homogenous’ historical subject does not arise by itself from these prepolitical and preconscious forces and from the homogeneity of popular value systems. What is needed in addition are acts that have become conscious, that have been undertaken consciously: the working class produces itself as much as it is produced.68

However, just as Thompson did when pointing out that there was resistance against being turned into a proletariat (see above), Vester, too, shows by his analysis that it was necessary for popular traditions to be transformed, and describes this in terms of a change from a restorative to a progressive anti-capitalism: This crisis of the values of economic autonomy and communal solidarity at the same time had a positive effect in that it induced learning. Due to the coexistence of old and new methods of production and ways of life, the old value patterns were a vivid presence and actively guided transformative praxis. The anti-capitalist utopia of the lower classes was at first restorative and aimed at recreating the small communities of artisans and smallholders. The experience of class struggle taught the movement that it was above all the technology of machines that, if managed democratically, could enable a considerable degree of autonomy and solidarity, of spontaneity and enjoyment.69

Another very important factor in this context is education as envisaged by the Chartists: “They demanded a systematic education by travelling speakers, circulating libraries, publications, teachers’ seminaries and workers’ schools, which also was to include nursery schools and recreational facilities.”70

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Conclusion In their preface to Vester’s study, Alfred Krovoza and Thomas Leithäuser underline the systematic importance of his historical analyses. As regards the main question of the conditions under which the proletariat is constituted, they stress that [a]ccording to Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological analysis … class consciousness need not by any means consist in each proletarian comprehending himself to be a proletarian as understood by the revolutionary theory. The politicisation of the proletarian consciousness begins … with the “restructuring of social space” … Class becomes conscious reality to the degree that the different factions of the proletariat perceive and experience “the common obstacle,” the social reality which exploits and oppresses them … Politicisation is thus the restructuring of the experience of social space in terms of a polarising process which makes radical change of an existing bad state of affairs a matter of increasing urgency.71

Krovoza and Leithäuser refer to what is perceived, lived and experienced in social conflicts and struggles. Following my reconstructions and interpretations of the studies by Engels, Thompson and Vester, we can arguably give a systematic and condensed description of this experience, when seen from the point of view of those who have until now been mostly on the losing side of history, as the initiation and promotion of educational processes. Referring to the fundamental studies analysed here, and their results and perspectives, one factor that should certainly be pointed out is the importance and democratizing potential of solidaristic, deliberative public spheres of the kind implicit in Henri Lefebvre’s social and political project of transforming everyday life through a cultural revolution.72 The inherent challenge, both for now and the future, is the question of how, in practice and with emancipatory aims in view, these educational processes can be made to last and to yield benefits for all. A “praxeological class theory”73 that highlights the difference between the logic of capital and the logic of praxis may be a starting point. Such a theory is moreover essential in order to give empirical content to theoretical contributions to the project of “Western Marxism,” a project that is arguably founded in a philosophy of praxis.74

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Notes 1. For the development of this debate in the second half of the twentieth century in the UK, see Richard Hoggart and his question of “who are the ‘working classes’?” in his The Uses of Literacy. Aspects of Working-Class Life with Special Reference to Publications and Entertainments (London, 1958), pp. 13–26; Gareth Stedman Jones, Outcast London. A Study in the Relationship Between Classes in Victorian Society (London, 1984), generally Erik Olin Wright, Class Counts. Comparative Studies in Class Analysis (Cambridge, 1997), and Mike Savage, who, sixty years after Hoggart, speaks of “the return of class today” in a large-scale study on class positions and class fractions in the UK: Social Class in the 21st Century (London, 2015), pp. 1–22. Michael Vester’s contributions are of central importance to the German and the international debate. See, for example, the most important empirical study of classbased milieux in the Federal Republic of Germany by his research group, Michael Vester, Peter von Oertzen, Heiko Geiling, Thomas Hermann, and Dagmar Müller, Soziale Milieus im gesellschaftlichen Strukturwandel (Frankfurt a. M., 2001). See also the papers in Hans-Günter Thien (ed.), Klassen im Postfordismus (Münster, 2011). 2. For a representative synopsis of this debate, see the assessment in Immanuel Wallerstein, Randall Collins, Michael Mann, Georgi Derlugian, and Craig Calhoun, Does Capitalism Have a Future? (Oxford, 2013), p. 2: “At bottom, most troubling is that with the end of the Cold War almost three decades ago it has become unfashionable – even embarrassing – to discuss possible world futures and especially the prospects of capitalism.” 3. Cf. Rudolf Herrnstadt, Die Entdeckung der Klassen (Berlin, 1965). 4. For a synopsis of the current state of the debate on class theory and class analysis, and a fundamental, incisive critique of existing orthodoxies (especially those of Marxism–Leninism), see Michael Vester, “Das Elend der Klassentheorie. Das erfundene Konzept der Klasse ‘an sich’ und der Entwurf einer Klassentheorie in Marx’ ‘Elend der Philosophie’,” in Karl Marx im 21. Jahrhundert. Bilanz und Perspektiven, ed. Martin Endreß and Christian Jansen (Frankfurt a. M., 2019), pp. 387–432. Vester shows that Marx and Engels never concerned themselves with “class in itself” (Klasse an sich),

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a concept that is not found in their writings, and “class for itself” (Klasse für sich). 5. G. W. F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge, 1991), §185, p. 222. 6. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, §§241–246, pp. 265– 268. 7. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, §244, p. 266. 8. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, §245, p. 267. 9. Cf. Klaus Vieweg, Hegel. Der Philosoph der Freiheit (Munich, 2019). 10. In his early study “Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy” of 1843–1844, Engels builds on the semantics of Hegel and Gans when he speaks of classes and divisions in describing the consequences of the capital–work relation: “the middle classes must increasingly disappear until the world is divided into millionaires and paupers, into large landowners and poor farm laborers.” Engels, Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy, in Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, ed. with an introduction by Dirk J. Struik, translated by Martin Milligan (New York 1964), Appendix, pp. 197–226, here p. 223; he also describes these consequences in terms of systemically necessary “competition,” here pp. 222–225. Furthermore, as regards the history of the relation between Engels und Marx, it is in my view important to know and to bear in mind that this text was published jointly with Marx’s texts Zur Kritik der Hegelschen Rechtsphilosophie (On the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right ) and Zur Judenfrage (On the Jewish Question) in the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, ed. A. Ruge and K. Marx, in 1844. 11. Cited following Günther Hillmann, Marx und Hegel. Von der Spekulation zur Dialektik (Frankfurt a. M., 1966), pp. 97–98. Hillmann links this assessment by Gans (from his “Rückblicke auf Personen und Zustände” of 1836) to writings by Heinrich Heine and Georg Büchner, according to whom “the social question was going to be at the centre of the coming political struggles.” 12. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, §§250–256, pp. 270– 274; see also Vieweg, Hegel, pp. 509–515. 13. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, §185, pp. 222–223.

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14. This after a first short meeting in Cologne two years previously, which, as is well-known and as all the biographies of Engels and Marx repeatedly underline, did not go particularly well, and thus cannot be said to have succeeded in building a relationship; on the context and circumstances, cf. Engels’s memories and appraisal in a letter to Mehring, end of April 1895 (MECW , vol. 50, pp. 503– 504). 15. On the formation of schools and factions amongst Hegel’s followers, see Michael Theunissen, “Die Verwirklichung der Vernunft. Zur Theorie–Praxis-Diskussion im Anschluss an Hegel,” in Philosophische Rundschau, Beiheft 6 (Tübingen, 1970). 16. In this context, he calls Wuppertal “the Zion of the obscurantists” (MECW , vol. 2, p. 7). 17. A text that also was to make a great impression on Karl Marx and which formed the basis of their discussion during the meeting in Paris in September 1844. 18. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Correspondence, trans. by I. Lasker, ed. S. Ryazanskaya (Moscow, 1965), pp. 20–21. 19. It continues to be very important analytically to realize the fundamental difference between Marx’s analysis and theory and Western Marxism on the one hand and the catechismal character of the Leninist doctrine on the other, a difference which can also be traced in the organizational chart of the Bolshevist Party, which is modelled after the autocratic constitution of the Catholic Church—with the pope corresponding to the general secretary etc., all the way down to the “ignorant laypeople.” Against this backdrop, it is not surprising that none of the editions of the works of Marx and Engels undertaken in the USSR or the GDR includes Marx’s view that political workers’ parties were something of a passing fashion and that the crucial organizational form for the labour movement was to be found in the unions. Jürgen Herres, Marx und Engels. Porträt einer intellektuellen Freundschaft (Ditzingen, 2018), pp. 204 f. 20. MECW , vol. 38, p. 10, see also p. 569 n. 12. 21. On Engels’s stay in Manchester, see the illuminating account of his activities, involvements, private life and political contexts in Harry Schmidtgall, Friedrich Engels’ Manchester-Aufenthalt 1842–1844. Soziale Bewegungen und politische Diskussionen. Mit Auszügen aus

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Jakob Venedeys England-Buch (1845) und unbekannten EngelsDokumenten (Trier, 1981). In my opinion, the best study of Engels’s analysis and its place in a variety of historical contexts and political and literary settings is Steven Marcus, Engels, Manchester, and the Working Class (New York and London repr. 1985). In this connection, see also his view at p. 145 that “[t]his chapter, ‘The Great Towns’, is without doubt the best and the most important section of The Condition of the Working Class; in my judgment it is the best single thing Engels ever wrote.” 22. Marcus, Engels, p. 29. 23. Marcus, Engels, p. 136. 24. Marcus, Engels, pp. 137–138. 25. It is not possible to pursue this here. On the relation between Engels and Marx in general, see Herres, Marx und Engels, on their analytical approach, see John Green, Engels. A Revolutionary Life (London 2012), Chapter 10, and for a psychoanalytical account, see Manfred Schneider, Die kranke schöne Seele der Revolution. Heine, Börne, das “Junge Deutschland,” Marx und Engels (Frankfurt a. M., 1980), pp. 242–258. 26. In Engels’ research this includes the women and children who were integrally part of the industrial workforce at the time of his writing. 27. Marcus, Engels, p. 138; cf. pp. 237–241. 28. Gareth Stedman Jones, “Engels and the Invention of the Catastrophist Conception of the Industrial Revolution,” in Douglas Moggach (ed.), The Young Hegelians. Politics and Philosophy in the Hegelian School (Cambridge, 2006), pp. 200–219, here p. 219. 29. Gareth Stedman Jones, “Engels’ Contribution to Marxism,” in Eric Hobsbawm (ed.), History of Marxism, vol. 1 (London 1982), pp. 290–326. This may be to do with a fundamental revision of Stedman Jones’s position, and his shift from a materialist to a poststructuralist approach that dissolves the subject matter of historical research into language. 30. Richard J. Evans, The Pursuit of Power. Europe 1815–1914 (London 2016), p. 139, cf. pp. 158–177, 331–346. 31. Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844, trans. F. K. Wischnewetzky (New York 1887), p. 6 f. 32. Engels, The Condition, p. 5. 33. Engels, The Condition, p. 12.

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34. Engels, The Condition, p. 12. As regards this comparison, see also Heinrich Heine, “Zur Geschichte der Religion und Philosophie in Deutschland,” in Heinrich Heine, Werke und Briefe. ed. Hans Kaufmann, vol. 5 (Berlin and Weimar, 1972), first published in 1834, a text which Engels certainly would have read. 35. Engels, The Condition, p. 13. 36. Engels, The Condition, pp. 81–82. 37. Engels, The Condition, pp. 190–196. 38. In the context of Engels’ Hegelianism, it is entirely possible to regard and describe this as a materialist transformation of the problem of comprehending thought (begreifendes Denken) and the certainty of myself that is fundamental for the Phenomenology of Spirit. 39. Engels, The Condition, pp. 152–156. 40. It should also be borne in mind that the massacre of Peterloo in August 1819 once more made abundantly clear to the incipient labour movement that this social formation was one characterized by violence. On this, see the contemporary documents in Humphrey Jennings, Pandaemonium 1660–1886. The Coming of the Machine as Seen by Contemporary Observers, ed. Mary-Lou Jennings and Charles Madge (London, 1995). 41. Cf. e.g. Marcus, Engels, pp. 211–213, 216–220. 42. Engels, The Condition, p. 142. 43. Engels, The Condition, p. 74. 44. Engels, The Condition, pp. 153–158. Engels stresses on p. 158 that there is a difference between Chartist democracy and the “previous political bourgeois democracy.” 45. Engels, The Condition, pp. 160–161. 46. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Werke (MEW ), vol. 2 (Berlin, 1970), p. 350. Kelley Wischnewetsky’s English translation renders the original “öffentliche Intelligenz” as “popular intelligence,” Engels, The Condition, p. 82. 47. Engels, The Condition, p. 83. 48. E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class. Reprinted with new preface (Harmondsworth and New York, 1980), p. 10. 49. Thompson, Making of , pp. 11–12. 50. Thompson, Making of , p. 8. 51. Thompson, Making of , p. 8.

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52. Thompson, Making of , p. 213. 53. Thompson, Making of , p. 914. 54. Thompson, Making of , p. 194. 55. Thompson, Making of , p. 199. 56. Thompson, Making of , p. 199. In this connection, see also this observation on p. 462, formulated in relation to an insight by R. Williams regarding alternative ideas of the nature of social relationship: “Their language of ‘social man’ also made towards the growth in working-class consciousness. It joined the language of Christian charity and the slumbering image of ‘brotherhood’ in the Methodist (and Moravian) tradition with the social affirmations of Owenite socialism.” 57. Thompson, Making of , p. 326. 58. Thompson, Making of , p. 326. 59. Thompson, Making of , pp. 914–915. 60. Michael Vester, Die Entstehung des Proletariats als Lernprozeß. Zur Soziologie der Arbeiterbewegung (Frankfurt a. M., 1970). 61. Vester, Die Entstehung, pp. 18–10; emphasis added. 62. Vester, Die Entstehung, pp. 20–24. 63. Vester, Die Entstehung, pp. 25–29. 64. First two cycles of struggle: 1792–1819; next two cycles of struggle: 1880–1832; least two cycles of struggle: 1832–1848. 65. Vester, Die Entstehung, p. 24. 66. Vester, Die Entstehung, p. 29. 67. Vester, Die Entstehung, p. 34. 68. Vester, Die Entstehung, p. 108; cf. p. 281. 69. Vester, Die Entstehung, p. 107. 70. Vester, Die Entstehung, p. 351. 71. Vester, Die Entstehung, p. 15. 72. Cf. Heinz Sünker, “On the Critique of Everyday Life to Metaphilosophy: Henri Lefebvre’s Philosophical-Political Legacy of the Cultural Revolution,” in Policy Futures in Education 2 (2014), pp. 323–339; Heinz Sünker, “Everyday Life,” in Concise Encyclopaedia of Participation and Co-Management, ed. György Széll (Berlin and New York, 1992), pp. 326–335. 73. Michael Vester, “Praxeologische Klassentheorie. Zur Logik des Kapitals und zur Logik der Praxis,” in Das Argument 322 (2017), pp. 190–202.

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74. Cf. Wolfdietrich Schmied-Kowarzik, Karl Marx – Die Dialektik der gesellschaftlichen Praxis (Freiburg, 2018); Heinz Sünker, “Traditionen der Praxisphilosophie: Henri Lefebvre und Theodor W. Adorno,” in Dialektik und Dialog. Kassel 2019) pp. 13–30; Heinz Sünker, Bildung, Alltag und Subjektivität, ed. Helmut Schneider and Dirk Stederoth (Weinheim, 1989).

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Jones, Gareth Stedman. “Engels’ Contribution to Marxism.” In History of Marxism, edited by Eric Hobsbawm, vol. 1 (Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 1982). Jones, Gareth Stedman. Outcast London. A Study in the Relationship Between Classes in Victorian Society (London: Verso, 1984). Marcus, Steven. Engels, Manchester, and the Working Class (New York and London: Norton & Co., repr. 1985). Marx, Karl, and Frederick Engels. Selected Correspondence. Translated by I. Lasker, edited by S. Ryazanskaya (Moscow: Progress, 1965). Savage, Mike. Social Class in the 21st Century (London: Penguin, 2015). Schmidtgall, Harry. Friedrich Engels’ Manchester-Aufenthalt 1842–1844. Soziale Bewegungen und politische Diskussionen. Mit Auszügen aus Jakob Venedeys England-Buch (1845) und unbekannten Engels-Dokumenten (Trier: MarxHaus, 1981). Schmied-Kowarzik, Wolfdietrich. Karl Marx – Die Dialektik der gesellschaftlichen Praxis (Freiburg, 2018). Schneider, Manfred. Die kranke schöne Seele der Revolution. Heine, Börne, das “Junge Deutschland,” Marx und Engels (Frankfurt a. M.: Syndikat, 1980). Sünker, Heinz. Bildung, Alltag und Subjektivität (Weinheim: Deutscher Studien Verlag, 1989). Sünker, Heinz. “Everyday Life.” In Concise Encyclopaedia of Participation and Co-Management, edited by György Széll (Berlin and New York: de Gruyter, 1992), pp. 326–335. Sünker, Heinz. “Traditionen der Praxisphilosophie: Henri Lefebvre und Theodor W. Adorno.” In Dialektik und Dialog, edited by Helmut Schneider and Dirk Stederoth (Kassel: Unikassel Bibliothek, 2019). Theunissen, Michael. “Die Verwirklichung der Vernunft. Zur Theorie–PraxisDiskussion im Anschluss an Hegel.” Philosophische Rundschau, Beiheft 6 (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1970). Thompson, E. P. The Making of the English Working Class. Reprinted with a new preface (Harmondsworth and New York: Penguin, 1980). Vester, Michael. “Das Elend der Klassentheorie. Das erfundene Konzept der Klasse ‘an sich’ und der Entwurf einer Klassentheorie in Marx’ ‘Elend der Philosophie.’” In Karl Marx im 21. Jahrhundert. Bilanz und Perspektiven, edited by Martin Endreß and Christian Jansen (Frankfurt a. M.: Campus Verlag, 2019), pp. 387–432. Vester, Michael. Die Entstehung des Proletariats als Lernprozeß. Zur Soziologie der Arbeiterbewegung (Frankfurt a. M.: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1970). Vester, Michael. papers in Hans-Günter Thien (ed.), Klassen im Postfordismus (Münster: Westfälisches Dampfboot, 2011).

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Vester, Michael, Peter von Oertzen, Heiko Geiling, Thomas Hermann and Dagmar Müller. Soziale Milieus im gesellschaftlichen Strukturwandel (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 2001). Vieweg, Klaus. Hegel: Der Philosoph der Freiheit (Munich: Beck C.H., 2019). Wallerstein, Immanuel, Randall Collins, Michael Mann, Georgi Derlugian, and Craig Calhoun. Does Capitalism Have a Future? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). Wright, Erik Olin. Class Counts. Comparative Studies in Class Analysis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

CHAPTER 10

The Question of Housing Revisited Regina Kreide

One characteristic of contemporary capitalism is the marketing of resources that were previously not commodities, at least not in the sense that they were speculated upon. These include not only human genomes and water, but also housing. Housing and housing shortages have always been a social issue. In ancient Rome, money-hungry landlords added further floors on multi-storey residential buildings, which often could not withstand the load and collapsed.1 In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Britain, France, and Germany, workers’ families lived crammed together in tiny dwellings that mocked any idea of hygiene and were disproportionately expensive. And nowadays there is ongoing speculation in housing, and a trade in condominiums that has reached a new dimension. Interestingly, much of this is not at all new. Friedrich Engels was aware of the “housing problem” in his time. He first wrote “On the Question of Housing” (Zur Wohnungsfrage)2 as a series of articles for the Leipziger Volksstaat in 1872, and a few years later

R. Kreide (B) Justus Liebig University, Giessen, Germany e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 T. Carver and S. Rapic (eds.), Friedrich Engels for the 21st Century, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-97138-0_10

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in 1887 he published it as a pamphlet. He was reacting to a series of anonymously published articles in the newspaper of the Social Democratic Workers Party, in which a certain Dr. Mülberg offered suggestions which Engels attributed to Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, rejecting these ideas down to the last detail. However, reading Zur Wohnungsfrage today, one gets the feeling that this is a recently published text. Nevertheless, the situation has changed markedly in some respects. Engels’s comments are highly polemical, and yet he was far ahead of his time in at least three aspects. These are: his idea of “Haussmannization” in urban planning, what is currently called “gentrification”; his criticism of socialist proposals to turn workers into condominium-owning “capitalists”; and, finally, his criticism of Christian philanthropy and social reforms which supposedly serve the workers but turn into moralization. All three aspects, I will show, have a systemic core that is useful in the current situation but can also be criticized. However, there are at least two further aspects that contribute significantly to understanding of the current housing problem that is missing in Engels’ work: the non-transparence of current international regulations concerning the purchase and sale of housing; and the role played by the human right to housing, notwithstanding all the criticism. In conclusion, I argue that the housing question cannot be resolved without reopening the ownership question.

Gentrification and Concentration Engels’s work under consideration here is a social history of housing and urban planning as well as a political intervention linking housing to the class question.3 He wrote his article during a brief, prosperous period in Germany after the war with France. Those favorable circumstances in Europe favoured large industries and thus the rapid transition from manufactories and small businesses to huge industrial plants. Many former farmers were drawn to the large cities, which developed into industrial centres. The urban layout of cities such as London, Paris, Berlin, and Vienna, with their confined inner cities, no longer met infrastructural requirements. What was needed were railway stations and tracks, and wide roads leading into the centre of the cities. To create these conditions for industrialization, inner-city workers’ housing, most of which was in poor condition, was torn down. While workers were urgently needed, and small businesses depended on their

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custom, the latter found no premises. The housing shortage was acute, and many families lived in extremely cramped conditions without sanitary facilities.4 In industrial cities that were newly built, such as Manchester, Leeds, Bradford, and Barmen-Eberfeld, there was no housing shortage, because workers’ housing was built in the immediate vicinity of the factories. It was this acute housing shortage in the older, larger cities of Germany and elsewhere in Europe that prompted Engels’s analysis. Diving into the text, one learns that merely living was becoming a commodity form: The expansion of the big modern cities gives the land in certain sections of them, particularly in those which are centrally situated, an artificial and often enormously increasing value; the buildings erected in these areas depress this value, instead of increasing it, because they no longer correspond to the changed circumstances; they are pulled down and replaced by others. This takes place above all with centrally located workers’ houses, whose rents, even with the greatest overcrowding, can never, or only very slowly, increase above a certain maximum. They are pulled down and in their stead shops, warehouses and public buildings are erected. Through its Haussmann in Paris, Bonapartism exploited this tendency tremendously for swindling and private enrichment. But the spirit of Haussmann has also been abroad in London, Manchester and Liverpool, and seems to feel itself just as much at home in Berlin and Vienna. The result is that the workers are forced out of the centre of the towns towards the outskirts; that workers’ dwellings, and small dwellings in general, become rare and expensive and often altogether unobtainable, for under these circumstances the building industry, which is offered a much better field for speculation by more expensive dwelling houses, builds workers’ dwellings only by way of exception.5

Engels understood Hausmannization to mean more than building long, straight, wide streets right through the middle of the workers’ quarters and thus creating luxury neighbourhoods, and at the same time also making barricade-fighting made much more difficult. Hence for him it means the generalized practice of “bridge-heading” into workers’ districts, especially when they are centrally located, with the result that the alleys disappear, and the bourgeoisie celebrates this as a tremendous success. Yet wretched districts immediately emerge elsewhere, mostly on the outskirts.6

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The access to housing as a scarce, qualified good was and is strongly stratified. Simply living has become a commodity, the scarcity of which also differs in terms of quality. In this way, those lacking financial resources are forced out of familiar surroundings through financial speculation on property and housing. A large portion of humanity is confronted with the grave consequences of capitalist conditions, including not only poverty and growing inequality, but also the feeling of being left behind. The housing market represents one such “construction site”: the issue does not concern the material basis for existence so much as capitalist machinations in getting the upper hand over others being able to live in a hospitable environment. It is the more affluent social groups which live in the quieter, brighter locations, better connected to public transport, and it is the poorer ones that are pushed to the edges. This situation has worsened as propertyownership becomes increasingly dependent on inheritance rather than on personal performance. This, too, has led to housing increasingly being seen, not as a necessary condition for life, but as an economic good.7 In Germany and other European countries, the urban middle class is frustrated, because even the higher earners in the big cities can no longer afford adequate housing—unless they have inherited capital funds, which is true of about half of those who belong to the middle class. The difference between Eastern and Western Germany is also quite considerable: in 2020, e137 bn euros were inherited in Western Germany, while in Eastern Germany, it was only e1.24 bn euros.8 Moreover, it is striking how well Engels’s description fits conditions today with regard to poverty. The housing situation is not just a symptom of poverty but creates it as well. The facts and figures for housing, whether rented or owned, show as much. Rental prices head in just one direction: up. Since the beginning of the 1990s, across the entire Federal Republic, rents have climbed by almost 62 percent, from e4.48 to e7.25 per square meter.9 During the same period, according to the German federal office of statistics, average household income has gone up by about 46 percent. For renters, this means that, out of income which has increased by only 46 percent, some 62 percent goes out on rent.10 Given rising charges for utilities, electricity, heating and water, rates of e16 euros per square meter are not uncommon. But since a high income is required to afford a high rent, this means that average prices in urban centers are more than poorer households can afford. The situation on the real estate market is even more dramatic. In Germany, prices for one- and two-family homes

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and condominiums rose by around 55 per cent between 2009 and 2019. By comparison, consumer prices rose by only 14 per cent over the same period.11

Anyone whose earnings fall below 60% of the median income of the population as a whole in Germany qualifies as poor. By this definition, some 16% of the population was poor in 2009. Housing represents an especially reliable indicator of the risk of poverty. According to data published by Bertelsmann, just 27% of all apartments suitable for families can be paid for with 30% of the average household income. For this reason, many families must accept rents that they cannot really afford; the alternative is to move to a peripheral location with poor infrastructure. Increasingly, this state of affairs is affecting the middle class, which is also moving to outer urban districts. The results include more commuting, which costs time, often creates personal stress, and burdens the environment. Furthermore, renters have become open to blackmail, and many have no choice but to stay in cramped and poorly maintained accommodation because they have nowhere else to go. The geographer Neil Smith, who made a major contribution to the “spatial turn” in the humanities and social sciences, opposes the notion, frequently put forward, that if there is no demolition and no new buildings, and then there is only renovation, hence no gentrification.12 In fact, according to Smith, since the 1960s and 1970s in the United States (and somewhat later in European countries), one has been witnessing a steadily increasing displacement of the poorer population from the popular neighbourhoods, just as described by Engels more than 150 years ago. Under these conditions, it is impossible to achieve ideals of municipal identity, civic duty, and belonging—much less any urban vision of a heterogeneous arrangement of social, political, and cultural offerings open to all in a dynamic public sphere. However, one has also to take a critical look at Engels. In his opinion, the solution to the housing shortage should be found by overcoming the urban–rural divide, not by making the countryside more urban, as has happened in the meantime, but rather by abolishing the modern big cities, which for him represented the concentration of capitalist power. Along with Smith, I assume that this demand must be seen in its historical context.13 Engels cites the transition of society to capitalism as the cause of the housing shortage. In view of developments in the Soviet Union—which, of course, took place later—Engels’s conclusion does not

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appear entirely wrong. His political strategy was to smash the power of the urban centres. This, of course, does not seem desirable to us. Not least because urban life itself offers potential for rebellion, as attested by David Harvey.14 Perhaps one should take another of Engels’s suggestions seriously, namely that every social revolution must take things as they are found.15 There is no fixed strategy or tactic and, moreover, it makes little sense to look at the housing issue today from the perspective of the transition to capitalism. Housing is a crucial aspect of the capitalist mode of production and financial capitalism. What this means exactly is something that I will look at more closely in the next section of this chapter.

Exploitation Among Mülberg’s proposals—alias Proudhon—was the abolition of rented apartments and the transformation of every tenant into an owner.16 The worker is therefore to become a capitalist and thus be protected against the dangers of unemployment and incapacity by means of mortgage credit, which guarantees the highest level of economic independence.17 Hence Engels quotes Proudhon: “What the wage worker is to the capitalist, the tenant is to the homeowner.”18 Engels considers the whole proposal to be completely mistaken. At the present time, when Germany is undergoing a transformation from rented apartments to condominiums, it is interesting to take a closer look at these historical arguments. How sensible is it to make workers into homeowners? Engels begins his response by pointing out that the housing issue has only just come into focus, because even the petty bourgeoisie is affected by the housing shortage. For them, as for the workers, buying an apartment should be treated with caution. The housing shortage, according to Engels, is one of the lesser, secondary evils arising from the capitalist mode of production.19 According to Engels, it is by no means a direct consequence of the exploitation of the worker by capitalists. This exploitation is the basic evil that the social revolution seeks to abolish.20 The worker approaches the landlord on the housing market as a buyer. The real misery of the workers lies in capitalist production, which only creates the reserve of unemployed workers who flock to the cities and drive up the price of housing. For Engels, then, the talk of property acquisition conceals the real cause of exploitation.

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Beyond that, however, the acquisition of property is not so simple. First of all, it is questionable what workers, who have to be highly flexible, should do with a percentage of a residential building when they have to move, and it is therefore questionable what they should do with acquired shares in one place when it is all the more difficult to buy such shares in another place. This is a problem that is faced today by highly flexible citizens who find it difficult to get rented or purchased flats in the big cities. And second, Engels describes how a home-purchase creates one thing above all: new dependencies on the financiers, i.e. the banks, and, if things go badly, on the “usurers, the lawyers, and bailiffs.”21 So the worker’s house only becomes capital if rented out. But where should workers live then? And furthermore, “the iron laws of the national economy”22 will cause the value of workers generally to be reduced, since workers live “freely,” and employers calculates that they can reduce wages by the average amount of rent saved. This means that workers would indeed pay rent for their own houses, which would eventually belong to them. But in the end workers are not paying for themselves, but paying out to capitalists. Third, and even more seriously, is the dependency related to company-owned flats. So what do workers do in case of a strike or dismissal? They are then completely in the hands of capitalists. For the capitalist, this is an excellent way not only to reduce wages, but also to exercise control. However, Engels’s criticism is not quite so clear-cut after all, because one has to ask what kind of good the apartment actually is. In Das Kapital Karl Marx writes that there are two main forms of social production: the actual means of production, i.e. raw materials, machines, factory buildings; and the means of consumption. This includes everything else, such as individual goods consumed by workers and capitalists alike. Housing belongs to both. On the one hand, it is a prerequisite for the well-being of the working body, and on the other hand, it is a commodity belonging to the individual that can be exchanged.23 Thus, with reference to Marx, one could speak here of “secondary exploitation,” as Harvey mentions in his book Rebel City. While primary exploitation is based on the capitalist retaining surplus value from the labour force, secondary exploitation occurs when this surplus value is increased, for example, when the capitalist, e.g. the bank, also grants loans to buy a house. And so it is in the case of real estate speculation. In the event of a crash, houses have not been paid off, hence they can be confiscated, so the market price of houses is definitively determined. Buying a

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house or an apartment without equity capital is another form of exploitation, one that strengthens the power of the capitalist, but not that of the worker or employee. Although Engels offers a convincing critique of wage-earners’ home ownership and propertorial individualism, he underestimates the double exploitation of both housing for rent and housing as property, which is purchased on credit. In the former case, not only do employers retain the surplus value over and above the wages paid, but other capitalists, the landlords, in turn deduct a share. In the latter case, exploited workers yield another part of their wages to lenders, usually private banks. In both cases, there is a twofold exploitation, which reduces the wage, and also gives others income independent of any active performance.

Moralization This immediately leads to a third and final point in the reconstruction of Engels’s arguments, namely his critique of paternalistic proposals to buy a home. He refers not only to Proudhon, but also to a certain Dr. Sax, who, as a bourgeois social reformer in the mid-nineteenth century, also saw buying a home as the ideal solution to the housing question.24 At this point, it is appropriate to add the social theorist Michel Foucault to the analysis, together with the architect Reinhold Martin.25 In his study The History of Sexuality,26 Foucault refers to sexuality as a dispositif first used in the eighteenth century to define the older, classical order: kinship, names, possessions, and the like. In this way, he wanted to question the “repression hypothesis,” according to which bourgeois modernity imposed a series of prohibitions and prudish silence on human sexuality, operated in conjunction with judicial power. Rather similarly in architecture, as the historian Robin Evans asserts, the modern house, without passage rooms, but rather with isolated rooms off a hallway, is an example of how sensuality ossifies and human community dies.27 For Foucault, however, and almost dialectically, there is also the other side of sexuality, as something that can be strategically deployed as a conduit for power relations. Although Foucault said little about housing, he was interested in ways to understand the take-off of heavy industry in city centres during the late 1820s. Factory cities, like Mulhouse in northwest of France, experienced this: people were put under pressure to marry, housing was made available, and workers’ estates were erected on the insidious system of indebtedness that Marx spoke of: collecting rent

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in advance while wages are paid in arrears. From this complex of relationships emerged the discourse of philanthropy, the moralization of the workers. Interestingly, another of Engels’s criticisms of proposals to bring workers into home ownership is constructed along in very similar lines. He refers to this almost sarcastically when he writes that living conditions contribute to the well-being of the working body. Medical science became concerned with working-class quarters in order to fight disease, such as cholera, typhoid, and smallpox, which, as Engels puts it, “infects the airier and healthier quarters inhabited by the gentlemen capitalists.” He explains: “The capitalist rule cannot allow itself the pleasure, with impunity, of displaying epidemic diseases among the working class; the consequences will reappear out of it, and the avenging angel would be as ruthless among the capitalists as among the workers.”28 According to Engels, it is those surveillance practices and moral preaching about what can be done for the workers (i.e. as property) which are rooted in capitalist production. The ostensible “improvement” in workers’ living conditions indicates, first, that workers are seen as undisciplined beings who must be made to function more consistently with the help of better architecture. In addition, the proposals also encroach on the freedom to lead one’s own life, in that it is not material improvements in the living situation that are being produced, but rather a form of property accompanied by moral shaping, i.e. a kind of education in responsibility—regardless of the actual level of material income, which cannot suffice for a good life under the bondage of a bank. Architecture and property are used in order—here we are following along with Max Weber—to be able to arrive at a rational and ethical way of life. This is a moralizing view, which results in further dependency. To a certain extent Engels’s critique anticipates Foucault’s concept of biopolitics, and it shows how closely housing policy is related to moralizing.

Lack of Transparency in the International System Despite these analyses, which show systematic points of connection between Engels’s study and today’s situation, there are at least two things that should be kept in mind: first, there is internationalization and financialization, which Engels could not have foreseen and which has given

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the housing market a “twist” that has shifted the balance of power still further; and second, we have a much different legal situation, including an international human right to housing. That is the reason why one has to have another look at what is going on when we talk about gentrification. And one can see, first, that we are not only dealing with individual “greedy” landlords, who, of course, also exist. Rather, it is large, globally operating corporations that systematically purchase apartments on a large scale. They scan cities for “undervalued living space,” i.e. living spaces in which tenants still live at acceptable rents, so they buy these houses, renovate them, and then rent them out much more expensively. But it is even more lucrative to leave the apartments, from which the tenants have had to vacate, lying empty in order to sell them at a higher price in the future.29

One example of this can be found in London where 80% of the apartments bought by corporations are empty. Whole streets and quarters are deserted. Many of these homes are owned by Blackstone, a globally active company, the largest landlord in the world. Moreover, 20,000 former social housing units have just been purchased by Blackstone in Copenhagen, and the market is huge. The sum of all the real estate traded as assets is $217 tr, a sizeable multiple of the world’s gross national product.30 Once again we go back to Engels, who also knew about vacancy, albeit not because a global real estate industry was at work: “But one thing is certain: there is already a sufficient quantity of houses in the big cities to remedy immediately all real ‘housing shortage’, provided they are used judiciously.”31 That sounds like a bold, even unrealistic suggestion. But just look at the numbers: there are more than 150,000 homeless people in London, and at least 14,000 empty luxury flats. This is a drop in the ocean, but 150 years after Engels it shows the scale of the capitalization of the housing market. Second, the housing market has evolved in ways that go beyond mere gentrification and may render the term inapplicable. Recent developments show that the financial market has changed fundamentally. Offices in urban areas have been in high demand over the past two decades. And the financial economy is already increasingly decoupled from the real economy.32 More investment capital has flowed into ownership of land, so that land has become a tradeable commodity, and speculation on land has become the basic premise of an erratic financial market. The additional inflow of international investment capital invested in real estate, so-called “concrete gold,” has ultimately become a delocalization from an existing

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market. Housing has evolved from a good needed for everyday living to a commodity that is traded. The housing market has become more and more determined by abstract imperatives in the money markets, such as stock market algorithms, and by the strategies of anonymous investors. In this respect, descriptions of mere gentrification or Haussmannization fall short. Third, on the basis of this one can observe substantial nontransparency in transnational rule systems. In Berlin, a multi-family residence is emptied of occupants, completely gutted, and remodelled in order to sell individual apartments at a high price. For the most part, the tenants were long-term renters; now, after protracted battles, they have been forced to move or simply evicted on the grounds that the building is required “for personal use.” During the process of demolition and renovation, the units are rented, on three-month contracts and at inflated prices, to jobseekers and families from Eastern Europe. Everything happens legally, and yet, at the same time, one is left with the feeling that the process is unjust. One problem here, as it turns out, is that the property owners are not easy to determine.33 Documents lead to shell corporations in Germany, Luxembourg, and Cyprus. Such detective work proves especially difficult, because Germany does not require owners to submit information to the land registry. A post-office box is all it takes for the backers to remain anonymous.34 No central office for obtaining data exists, except in Nordrhein-Westfalen and Berlin, nor is there a central property registry. This circumstance poses a problem for the German police, who cannot locate the parties responsible for organized crime and money-laundering, in sharp contrast, for example, to Italy. Every year in Germany e100 bn euros in tax revenue goes “missing” in the non-financial sector, especially in real estate.35 Kai Bussmann, of the “Economy and Crime Research Center” at Halle-Wittenberg University, has spoken of German and European Union complicity in money-laundering, since the federal government and the EU have opposed changes to European law that would set up a central property registry. One can see how existing regulations are leading to conditions of unjustified domination: housing is being turned into a commodity, tenants are being evicted, gentrification is proceeding unchecked, people with low incomes can no longer find housing, homelessness is mounting, cultural space for young people is disappearing, and so on. The social groups affected by an unjust rule system, or by the lack of any rules at all,

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are subject to the system all the same, but they clearly hold less political power than the beneficiaries. This is a case of structural injustice, and not just a consequence of unfair or unequal distribution of wealth. It demonstrates an enduring and deep-seated imbalance of power between social groups. Citizens are not only governed by their dependency—in Engels’s sense—on the labour market and on the owners of apartments, but moreover by an international regulatory system that is difficult to understand, and which systematically pursues the financialization of housing.

Housing as Human Right We saw that it makes sense to look “behind” actions on the housing market to structural considerations, as Engels did, in order to examine the present-day power relations that condition what we do.36 According to the philosopher Iris Marion Young, acts of injustice are inseparably tied to oppressive and exploitative relations, political marginalization, and cultural discrimination.37 Here a binary division does not hold between oppressors, on the one hand, and oppressed, on the other; instead, members of certain groups face structural disadvantages. As Sally Haslanger has recently argued, oppression is something “done” by agents, as we have just seen, but also done by structures—albeit in different ways. Agents cause unwarranted suffering by misusing power, say, by casting someone in a bad light, whereas structures cause injustice by producing wrongful concentrations of power.38 A given social structure may be understood as a system of formal and informal rules responsible for the power relations between the various social actors involved. It qualifies as unjust when the rules systematically place some social groups at a disadvantage relative to others—say, when it comes to leadership positions, or access to goods and opportunities such as education, healthcare, the job market, housing, etc. Research confirms that, across the globe, the wealth of the top 1% is staying in the same hands (that is, 80 people on the whole planet have the material means equal to what half of the world’s population—3.5 billion people—possess); the middle classes in global north countries are shrinking; and the opportunities for upward mobility through education are decreasing.39 Structural exclusion takes other forms, too. We have seen that the commodified nature of dwellings is itself unjust. What may seem unusual at first glance is this: to consider the role of human rights at the international legal level, and also to consider that

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Marx was explicitly critical of rights. But the human right to housing offers an interesting lever for asserting the rights of those affected, especially in view of the lack of international regulations. Moreover, the unbridled marketing of housing is contradicted by the claim that adequate housing is a human right. This means that people have a right to adequate affordable housing, with the necessary infrastructure present inside the home, such as drinking water and sanitation, as well as outside the home, such as shopping and recreation facilities, public transport, etc. . Housing is more than just giving everyone “a roof over his or her head.”40 It is the condition for being able to participate in social life and to enjoy a private life at the same time. It is this aspect of a social relationship that is mirrored in human rights. A human right to housing is already enshrined in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights and in the 1966 International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights,41 which came into force in 1976. Both declarations point in the same direction: housing is a necessary condition for leading a decent life, and it must be available in sufficient quality and quantity for everyone in society. The comments of the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights explicate this idea in more detail.42 A human right to housing requires, first, sufficient living space according to family size, including infrastructure, such as electricity and water. Second, all people should be granted legal and de facto protection against state and private interference in their housing. This applies not only to home ownership and rental housing, but also to refugee accommodation and informal settlements. Neither criterion is about equal distribution of an “X,” i.e. housing and infrastructure, but about providing conditions for a dignified life and protection from encroachment. Third, minimum conditions of habitability, health, and safety must be met, and the cultural diversity of housing must be taken into account—a distributive consideration: access to housing should be open to all social groups without discrimination, while taking the different needs of different cultural groups into account. And fourth, there should be an interactive, non-discriminatory relationship between people. However, one could object that privately rented housing which fulfils the above-mentioned criteria would also be compatible with human rights. And indeed there is a conceptual tension internal in human rights, which renders them prone to failure in this respect. The conceptual conundrum of human rights, which emerges from the housing examples

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above, is that there is a tension between political inclusion for the protection of rights, on the one hand, and the normative individualism that underlies rights, as attached to individual human beings by nature, on the other. The liberal tradition that informs our understanding of human rights construes them as natural in that sense. They are features of individual human beings qua humans that attach to their humanity, prior to and autonomously from, social and political associations and institutions. Human rights are claimed to be universally valid, to hold for every person, and to require a political order that protects individual freedom, life, liberty, and property securely.43 They are therefore the rights of the person against all contra mundum to the private exercise of freedom in safety. This strictly individualistic understanding of human rights disguises the social and political conditions, not only of human freedom and security, but also of the exercise and protection of rights. This individualistic theory of human rights was criticized by Marx, who emphasized the social and communal aspects of human freedom. Human rights and freedom, in his view, are not primarily about protecting the individual in terms of personal security or economic freedom against all, but about participation in shaping the social and political conditions of life lived in conjunction with others. Beyond Marx’s critique, the strict individualism of human rights faces an additional problem today: within the tradition of natural law, it was arguably possible to suppose that human rights are part of the natural moral order of the world, and, therefore, that they would eventually prevail. In a world deprived of a naturally progressive moral order, social and political conditions for human equality and freedom become necessary precondition, and all notions of individual rights must pay attention to them. Hannah Arendt’s often cited phrase that “one needs to have a right to have rights” means precisely this: that everyone has a fundamental claim to belong to a society and to a polity, and for their rights to be respected and protected because they are members and participants in that selfsame society and polity.44 What we are experiencing is the “sell-out” of the cities, in which apartments are bought and sold by often unknown investment corporations. The problem, as UN Ambassador Leilani Farha puts it, is that there is no human right to, e.g. gold, but there is a human right to adequate housing. Such clear words on the human right to housing are being heard more often. However, the right to adequate housing does not necessarily contradict the idea of home ownership, but it does contradict the commodification of housing in order to make the greatest possible profit.

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Profit maximization, and housing for the lower and middle classes, are in tension with each other. The human right to housing recognized by the United Nations already binds relevant international actors, requiring them to work for better enforcement. Policies are needed to make housing affordable for all in order to realize the human right to housing. Laws should be enacted to stop investors from purchasing living spaces and also to regulate financial investments. In addition, construction and cooperative projects should be promoted so that houses and apartments are withdrawn from the market. And finally, more state-sponsored housing projects should be built.

The Property Question Ultimately it is a question of who owns the housing. With Engels, and considering the human right to housing, we must again think further in this direction. One possible approach, and this should be noted here as a brief comment, comes from Thomas Piketty.45 His “participatory socialism” directs attention to a key concept of emancipatory thought: property. For a long time, there was only a faint mention of the unjust distribution of property.46 But since the financial market crash (Who owns the banks?) and rapidly rising housing prices in Europe (Who owns the city?), the “property question” is also back, as seen in Occupy Wall Street and Blockupy. Pikeety’s two-part reform proposal aims, on the one hand, at greatly expanded internal co-determination and equitably distributed employee ownership, complemented by a capital payout to all adults in order to enable equal entrepreneurial activities for everyone. The second aspect of reform is based on the original idea of limiting the accumulation of property over time through wealth taxation and a progressive inheritance tax, leading to a steady circulation of goods and wealth. “Property for time,” as Piketty calls it, would thus become— almost paradoxically—a particularly sustainable element in permanently containing social inequalities and making the market more participatory. The strength of this proposal is certainly its broad appeal: Even those who focus on their individual self-interest in the market, and are not particularly interested in cooperation and ties, will get their money’s worth. So here again we are dealing with the idea that we all become owners in common goods, such as water. And it is precisely in this that Piketty’s market democracy reveals its weakness. The proposal remains within the competitive logic of market

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participants, and thus tries to make better shareholders out of all citizens—with side effects, such as a fixation on high profit maximization within the existing tax policy framework, and also meritocratic incentives that give a clear advantage to those who are already economically “the fittest.” Nevertheless, Piketty succeeds in combining two mutually exclusive aspects, and so puts forward proposals for a democratization of property. Implementing those measures alone would radically transform our societies. And yet they are not enough. One way to begin to overcome the existing structural problems of the housing market is to develop cooperative forms of community ownership in order to counteract renewed concentrations of power and exploitative relationships. Raul Zelik’s proposals, all of which are based on existing, rather marginalized practices, range from “commoning,” i.e. concepts of communitization of goods, as already practised by feminists, Indigenous peoples, and free software developers, to a solidarity economy of cooperatives, to a communitized infrastructure, in which he includes health, education, transportation, childcare, care for the elderly, water and energy supply, and even housing. This looks forward to a new relationship between collective private and public life, housing and the economy.47 Engels already put us on this track, and we should stay on it.

Conclusion Rereading Engels, one finds that “On the Housing Question” is an eyeopener. First and foremost, this is because we learn about the mechanisms of gentrification, the ongoing, multiple forms of exploitation, and the moralization of property discourse, without which the financialization of the housing market would not work at all. Second, however, through this writing we learn about the structural obstacles to a transformation of the housing market that still exist today, or have recently reappeared. And we are forced to think about how to break through these structural injustices: this circle of marketization, eviction, financialization, and impoverishment flying in the face of a fundamental rights claim, namely the right to adequate housing. Engels pushes us to recognize the fact that this cannot be done if we do not also fundamentally reframe the question of property.

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Notes 1. Werner Onken, “Wem gehört die Erde? Zur Ideengeschichte von Boden, Ressourcen und Atmosphäre als gemeinsame Güter,” in Architektur auf gemeinsamem Boden. Positionen und Modelle zur Bodenfrage, ed. Florian Hertwck (Luxemburg, 2020). 2. Friedrich Engels, The Housing Question [1872] (Moscow, 1997). Online available at: http://www.marx2mao.com/M&E/HQ72. html. (For the German version see Engels, Zur Wohnungsfrage, in MEW , vol. 18 (Berlin, 1962), pp. 209–287; online: http://www. mlwerke.de/me/me18/me18_209.htm). 3. Reinold Martin, “Das Wohnungswesen in der Geschichte: der Fall des spezifischen Intellektuellen,” in Friedrich Engels. Zur Wohnungsfrage, ed. Haus der Kulturen der Welt, with comments by Reinhold Martin and Neil Smith (Berlin, 2015), pp. 173–208, here: 179. 4. Ibid., p. 192. 5. Engels, The Housing Question, p. 8. 6. Ibid., pp. 107–108. 7. Knoll, Schularick, and Steger, “No Price Like Home: Global House Prices, 1870–2012,” in American Economic Review 2 (2017), pp. 331–353. 8. Martin Gornig and Jan Goebel, “Ökonomischer Strukturwandel und Polarisierungstendenzen in deutschen Stadtregionen,” in Polarisierte Städte. Soziale Ungleichheit als Herausforderung für die Sozialpolitik, ed. Kronauer and Siebel (Frankfurt a. M., 2013), pp. 27–50; Arvid Krüger, “Beiträge der Wohnungswirtschaft zur Stadterneuerung: Möglichkeiten und Grenzen,” in Wohnungsfragen ohne Ende?! Ressourcen für eine soziale Wohnraumversorgung, ed. Schönigh and Vollmer (Bielefeld, 2020), pp. 113– 124. 9. Bernd Hunger, “Städtisches Wohnen am Scheideweg – Anforderungen an die Wohnungs- und Stadtentwicklungspolitik,” in Polarisierte Städte. Soziale Ungleichheit als Herausforderung für die Sozialpolitik, ed. Kronauer and Siebel (Frankfurt a. M., 2013), pp. 272–286, here: 275. 10. Andrej Holm, Mietenwahnsinn. Warum Wohnen immer teurer wird und wer davon profitiert (München, 2014).

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11. Bundeszentrale für Politische Bildung: Datenreport Wohnen 2020, retrieved from https://www.bpb.de/nachschlagen/datenreport2021/wohnen/. 12. Neil Smith, “Noch einmal zur Wohnungsfrage,” in Friedrich Engels. Zur Wohnungsfrage, ed. Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin, 2015), pp. 163–172, here: 165. 13. Ibid., p. 167. 14. David Harvey, Rebel City. From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution (New York, 2013). 15. Neil Smith, “Noch einmal zur Wohnungsfrage,” p. 168. 16. Engels, The Housing Question, p. 38. 17. Ibid., p. 70. 18. Ibid., p. 25. 19. Ibid., p. 192. 20. Ibid. 21. Ibid., p. 71. 22. Ibid. 23. Martin, “Das Wohnungswesen in der Geschichte,” p. 194. 24. Engels, The Housing Question, p. 40. 25. Martin, “Das Wohnungswesen in der Geschichte.” 26. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality Volume 1: An Introduction [1976] (London 1979). 27. Martin, “Das Wohnungswesen in der Geschichte,” p. 197. 28. Engels, The Housing Question, p. 38. 29. Butler, “One in Every 200 people in UK Are Homeless, According to Shelter,” in The Guardian, November 8, 2017, retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/nov/08/one-inevery-200-people-in-uk-are-homeless-according-to-shelter. 30. Cumming “‘It’s Like a Ghost Town’: Lights Go Out as Foreign Owners Desert London Homes,” in The Guardian, January 25, 2015, retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/ 2015/jan/25/its-like-a-ghost-town-lights-go-out-as-foreign-own ers-desert-london-homes. 31. Engels, The Housing Question, p. 30. 32. Markus Hesse, “Into the Ground. How the Financialization of Property Markets and Land Use puts Cities under Pressure,” in ARCH+, Journal for Architecture and Urbanism: The Property Issue (Berlin 2020), p. 103.

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33. Bussmann, Geldwäscheprävention im Markt. Funktionen, Chancen und Defizite (Berlin, 2018). 34. “How the Real Estate Business is Internationally Caught up in Organised Crime,” research on building in Berlin conducted by “Netzwerk Steuergerechtigkeit,” with the assistance of Christoph Trautvetter. 35. Bussmann, Geldwäscheprävention im Markt. 36. Regina Kreide, “Global (In)Justice and the Human Right to Housing. A Practice-Based Approach,” in Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, December 2020, https:// doi.org/10.1080/13698230.2020.1859225. 37. Iris Marion Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton, NJ, 2020), pp. 15–38. 38. Sally Haslanger, Resisting Reality: Social Construction and Social Critique (Oxford, 2012), p. 311. 39. Branko Milanovic, Global Inequality: A New Approach for the Age of Globalization (Cambridge, MA, 2016). 40. UN-Habitat commentary of 2009/2014: The Right to Adequate Housing, 2009, https://ohchr.org/Documents/Publications/ FS21_rev_1_Housing_en.pdf. 41. Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights 1966, retrieved from: United Nations Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner, https://www.ohchr.org/en/hrbodies/cescr/ pages/cescrindex.aspx. 42. Ibid. 43. John Locke, The Two Treatises of Government [1689], ed. P. Laslett (Cambridge 1988). 44. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, Orlando et al. 1968. 45. Thomas Piketty, Capital and Ideology (Cambridge, MA, 2020). 46. Alex Demirovic, Kritik und Materialität (Münster, 2008). 47. Raul Zelik, Wir Untoten des Kapitals: Über politische Monster und einen grünen Sozialismus (Berlin, 2020).

Bibliography Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Brace & World, 1968).

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Bundeszentrale für Politische Bildung. Datenreport Wohnen 2020. https://www. bpb.de/nachschlagen/datenreport-2021/wohnen/ Bussmann, Kai-D. Geldwäscheprävention im Markt. Funktionen, Chancen und Defizite (Berlin: Springer, 2018). Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. 1966. United Nations Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner. https://www.ohchr.org/en/ hrbodies/cescr/pages/cescrindex.aspx Demirovic, Alex. Kritik und Materialität (Münster: Westfälisches Dampfboot, 2008). Engels, Friedrich. The Housing Question [1872] (Moscow: Progress, 1997) published a Bussmann, Kai-D. Geldwäscheprävention im Markt. Funktionen, Chancen und Defizite (Berlin: Springer, 2018). http://www.marx2mao.com/ M&E/HQ72.html Engels, Friedrich. Zur Wohnungsfrage. In MEW , vol. 18, pp. 209–287, http:// www.mlwerke.de/me/me18/me18_209.htm Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality Volume 1: An Introduction [1976] (London: Vintage, 1979). Gornig, Martin, and Jan Goebel. “Ökonomischer Strukturwandel und Polarisierungstendenzen in deutschen Stadtregionen.” In Polarisierte Städte. Soziale Ungleichheit als Herausforderung für die Sozialpolitik, edited by Martin Kronauer and Walter Siebel (Frankfurt a. M.: Surhkamp, 2013), pp. 27–50. Harvey, David. Rebel City. From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution (New York: Verso, 2013). Haslanger, Sally. Resisting Reality: Social Construction and Social Critique (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). Hesse, Markus. “Into the Ground. How the Financialization of Property Markets and Land Use puts Cities Under Pressure.” ARCH+, Journal for Architecture and Urbanism: The Property Issue 231 (April 2017). Holm, Andrej. Mietenwahnsinn. Warum Wohnen immer teurer wird und wer davon profitiert (München: Knauer Taschenbuch, 2014). Hunger, Bernd. “Städtisches Wohnen am Scheideweg – Anforderungen an die Wohnungs- und Stadtentwicklungspolitik.” In Polarisierte Städte. Soziale Ungleichheit als Herausforderung für die Sozialpolitik, edited by Martin Kronauer and Walter Siebel (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 2013), pp. 272–286. Knoll, Katharina, Moritz Schularick, and Thomas Steger, “No Price Like Home: Global House Prices, 1870–2012.” American Economic Review 2 (2017), pp. 331–353. Kreide, Regina. “Global (In)Justice and the Human Right to Housing. A Practice-based Approach.” Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, published online 10 December 2020. https://doi.org/10. 1080/13698230.2020.1859225

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Krüger, Arvid. “Beiträge der Wohnungswirtschaft zur Stadterneuerung: Möglichkeiten und Grenzen.” In Wohnungsfragen ohne Ende?! Ressourcen für eine soziale Wohnraumversorgung, edited by Barbara Schönigh and Lisa Vollmer (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2020), pp. 113–124. Locke, John. The Two Treatises of Government [1689]. Edited by Peter Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). Martin, Reinold. “Das Wohnungswesen in der Geschichte: der Fall des spezifischen Intellektuellen.” In Friedrich Engels. Zur Wohnungsfrage, edited by Haus der Kulturen der Welt, with comments by Reinhold Martin and Neil Smith (Berlin: Haus der Kulture der Welt, 2015), pp. 173–208. Milanovic, Branko. Global Inequality: A New Approach for the Age of Globalization (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016). Onken, Walter. “Wem gehört die Erde? Zur Ideengeschichte von Boden, Ressourcen und Atmosphäre als gemeinsame Güter.” In Architektur auf gemeinsamem Boden. Positionen und Modelle zur Bodenfrage, edited by Florian Hertwck (Luxemburg: Lars Müller, 2020). Piketty, Thomas. Capital and Ideology (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2020). Smith, Neil. “Noch einmal zur Wohnungsfrage.” In Friedrich Engels. Zur Wohnungsfrage (Berlin: Haus der Kulture der Welt, 2015), pp. 163–172. UN-Habitat commentary of 2009/2014: The Right to Adequate Housing (New York: United Nations, 2009). https://ohchr.org/Documents/Publications/ FS21_rev_1_Housing_en.pdf Young, Iris Marion. Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020). Zelik, Raul Zelik. Wir Untoten des Kapitals: Über politische Monster und einen grünen Sozialismus (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2020).

PART IV

Theorizing Power

CHAPTER 11

Engels Theorizes Gender Hierarchy in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State Terrell Carver

Friedrich Engels wrote his short book The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884) just after the re-publication of August Bebel’s Women and Socialism (1879, 2nd edn 1883). That book was already a (banned) success and very soon one of the best-selling and most influential socialist tracts of the nineteenth century. It is likely that

This paper updates Terrell Carver, “Engels’s Feminism,” in History of Political Thought 6, no. 3 (1985), pp. 479–489; Terrell Carver, “Theorizing Men in Engels’s Origin of the Family,” in Masculinities 2, no. 1 (1994), pp. 67–77; and Terrell Carver, Men in Political Theory (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), ch. 10. T. Carver (B) University of Bristol, Bristol, UK e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 T. Carver and S. Rapic (eds.), Friedrich Engels for the 21st Century, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-97138-0_11

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Engels’s title comes from a line in Bebel’s book.1 Having got his start as a polemical and highly political journalist, Engels was well used to writing ripostes, in some cases inflammatory and satirical, and in other cases more rigorous and serious-minded. The Origin of the Family may be one of the latter, and unlike his already well-known Anti-Dühring (1878–1879),2 for instance, it is possible that it rather belies its original format as a riposte altogether, because Bebel and his book get no mention. Alternatively, it may be that Engels was not writing a riposte or a supplanting account and was happy instead with his positioning as a kind of addendum or footnote to Bebel’s more radical work.3 Certainly the latter argument would be more persuasive, if had Engels featured Bebel’s work in his own, though there may have been political risks here—Bebel’s work had been immediately and successively suppressed under the antisocialist laws in Germany, whereas Engels’s more heavy-weight scholarly study was not. Rather than self-censor it for publication in the ‘theoretical’ monthly of German socialism, Karl Kautsky’s Berlin-based Die neue Zeit, Engels published it in Switzerland, from whence it was clandestinely distributed. Engels’s ‘light touch’ strategy in not foregrounding Bebel’s work in The Origin of the Family was perhaps to spare the worthy trade unionist Bebel any discouragement, as he was very much an ally and friend rather than a rival and threat, like the academician Dühring. Bebel subsequently and modestly bowed to Engels’s (supposed) greater expertise in theoretical matters, and so never mounted any counter-challenge.4 Perhaps there was for Engels an element of being caught off-guard, and of damage-limitation, as well, in that he already had a clear agenda for intervention on ‘major’ theoretical questions to do with philosophical foundations, method, history, class struggle and revolution, on which he aimed to set people straight. The ‘woman question,’ on which he had had some experience, however (cf. The Communist Manifesto and some very early writings—and cartoons5 ), was never a central interest, nor included prominently in any previous overview of substantial issues for Marxists. It may be that Engels was not keen to publicize the matter all that much and thus to make it a central question of the age, since it would necessarily distract, in his view, from the central and singular focus on class politics (which we now see as masculinized) that Marxists had always argued was their mark of distinction. Moreover, it might pose awkward questions of organization, even separate organization in some sense, that from the (male) leadership’s perspective could only be unwelcome and divisive.

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Certainly, the text of The Origin of the Family overall is rather concerned to add women to the conception of history, philosophy and politics that Engels attributed to Marx, and that he himself had expounded in his various works and introductions to the master’s writings since 1859—but then to stir the mix as little as possible. Even merely ‘adding’ women raises the issue of gender, that is, ways that sex and sexuality become power relations in society.6 Such discussions are bound to raise issues of sexuality (typically through comments on marriage in some form and ‘the family’) and about men as men, being the ‘other half’ of gender-relations, and definitionally constituent to heterosexuality. Engels rose splendidly to the task, and indeed The Origin of the Family is remarkable for its sweep, taking the story of human reproductive and caring relationships from their earliest origins through to a post-capitalist future that he identified as socialism. It was very widely circulated in German and in translation, and by 1891 it was in its 4th edition. Certainly the terms of the title—‘family,’ ‘private property,’ ‘state’—would have had a familiar, safe ring to them for male socialists and trades unionists, to whom the book was primarily directed. Engels, knowingly I think, did not repeat the ‘woman’ signifier of Bebel’s title (Die Frau und der Sozialismus ), with its overt reference to the ‘woman question’ and the issues raised in, and by, the feminist movements of the time, diverse as they were, inside and outside of socialism. In short, Engels was the safe (male) pair of hands through which Marxism could meet any challenge, and if it needed any amendment or revision, he was the one authorized to make any changes. Engels not only lived his relationship with Marx, when the master was alive, he was also the first biographer of that relationship, as well as Marx’s literary executor (though not the sole owner of his papers), and from those unimpeachable credentials he brooked no rivals in speaking for Marx, nor during his own lifetime did any emerge. He went from ‘second fiddle’ and ‘junior partner’ to quite another role, that of near co-author and posthumous collaborator, though his self-acknowledgement in that regard was characteristically self-effacing.7

Relations of Production and Reproduction And changes there were in The Origin of the Family. Engels adapted Marx’s concept of ‘material’ production to include human reproduction and attempted to build on this revision an apparatus of twin-track

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‘determination’ in history, involving sex-oppression, as well as classoppression. Moreover this was also the occasion on which Engels made public his incorporation of Charles Darwin’s ‘great discovery’ into the actual conception of history bequeathed by Marx from the pre-Darwinian 1840s, and indeed to build it into Marx’s historical account of the transitions from one epoch to another that had been elaborated in published form (by both Marx and Engels, separately) in 1859.8 Bebel’s intervention on the ‘woman question’ was thus the occasion for no small revision to the ‘outlook’ which Engels attributed to Marx, but of which he was now in sole charge, Marx having died just the year before the first publication of Engels’s little book. Ritually, Engels linked his own work with unpublished manuscripts on anthropology that Marx had left behind, though without actually claiming that those writings were in any sense drafts of a work (by Marx), or indeed of Engels’s actual work as he conceived it, and as eventually published. The manuscripts themselves, while acknowledged at the outset, were not specifically cited in Engels’s text, and so the work has come down in the interpretive tradition as Engels’s alone. Moreover, scholarly analysis has shown that Engels’s claim, both vague and extravagant in terms of an overlap in content or imprimatur for the ideas, does not stand up to scrutiny. It is clear that Marx was interested in Engels’s main source, Lewis Henry Morgan, but it is not particularly clear why or what he thought about it.9 What the interpretive tradition has not grappled with very extensively, though, are Engels’s revisions and amendments to the ‘guiding thread’ that Marx had left behind in 1859 and had then briefly cited in the first volume of Capital (1867), in order to help readers understand his published critiques of political economy, the economic theory of the day.10 This reluctance to address Engels’s remarkable revisions to the very fundamentals of Marxism (and to rewrite one of Marx’s most famous texts, as rehearsed yet again by Engels in Anti-Dühring ) must be due to an association between those amendments, and the ‘woman question,’ gently transmuted by Engels into ‘family,’ ‘private property’ and ‘state’ in his title and in the structure of his short book. No (male) commentator on Marxism has taken The Origin of the Family as methodologically central to Marxism and to understanding Marx.11 Rather the work has occupied a place well down the line in the Engels canon, with its (shocking?) content recounted, but not critically assessed, and certainly not promoted to pride of place over Marx’s ‘Preface’ to A Contribution to the Critique of

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Political Economy (1859)—on the place of epochal ‘modes of production’ in history—or over the jointly written Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848)—on the nature of class struggles. Other late works by Engels, e.g. Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy (1886), did not attempt anything so ambitious, rather the reverse, in fact, as Engels argues there that Marx’s philosophical position can be traced back developmentally, in a smooth sweep, to the philosophical and political controversies of the 1840s, in which Engels was himself involved. The Origin of the Family thus has two strikes against it. One is that it complicates what was otherwise a settled and (reasonably) simple story of historical ‘determination’ by an identifiably singular factor (production, albeit of its means and relations)—as opposed to the obviously dual-factor ‘production’ and ‘re-production’ of The Origin of the Family. The other is that it raises issues to do with women which the (presumptively male) leadership were only to happy to shelve, preferably in a book whose title gave scant advertisement to the feminist cause, and whose argument, read as a whole, did not support separate organizations for women or take sexoppression in class society more seriously than class-oppression. In short Engels is the feminists’ Marxist; but left to his own devices, he was not much of a feminist by argument or action. The Origin of the Family thus poses problems for Marxism, in terms of its fundamental tenets, but those problems have rarely, if ever, been addressed outside the feminist context, and given the airing they evidently merit.

Feminist Receptions Engels’s book also poses problems for feminism, though these were explicitly taken up at length, and in depth, only in the 1980s. The main issues were the validity and utility of a ‘dual systems’ approach that would find social ‘determination’ in gender dynamics, and in class dynamics, equally or at least even-handedly. Moreover, the status and content of pre-historical accounts as such came under scrutiny in this literature, as Engels had made bold claims in this area and had constructed a highly readable, and widely read, discussion. Lastly, the extent to which Engels’s vision of a socialist future corresponded to any widely shared feminist ideals came under scrutiny. Was his claim that most gender-oppression would vanish, once class-oppression had been expunged through proletarian revolution, well-supported with theory or sadly facile in practice? Was he really in a position to theorize ‘woman’ and ‘women’s experience’

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at all? Had he in fact articulated a sufficiently nuanced, and in particular emotionally sensitive, vision of future familial and sexual relations? As a feminist text Engels’s work suffered from minority status—few works (perhaps no works?) by men could, by definition, count as central and essential feminist reading. While there is no particular reason why Marxism should not have been more influential in second- and thirdwave feminism than, say, psychoanalysis—and just as many reasons why both traditions carried heavy baggage of feminist-unfriendly, not to say misogynist associations—nonetheless few commentators would say that Marxism has counted for more in feminist thought than psychoanalytic theory. In general feminist history, feminist research and feminist theory do not take Engels all that seriously (Marxist feminists to the contrary, of course), and when they do, the upshot is that he is insufficiently interested in gender to deliver on his promises, or to show exactly how someone (more feminist) could do so.12 Despite this, Engels’s The Origin of the Family has become a minor point of reference for feminist theory, even if it is not in itself a feminist classic. For some, it is evidence why feminists should reject Marxism, or even Marx’s work, and for others it is the foundation of a Marxist feminism, its deficiencies notwithstanding. Michèle Barrett comments: Scarcely a Marxist-feminist text is produced that does not refer somewhere to Engels’s argument, and if one had to identify one major contribution to feminism from Marxism it would have to be this text.13

More strongly, I would argue that any text that self-identified as Marxist-feminist, or which figured as such by treating gender and class in tandem as determining social structures, would strike an odd note if it did not cite and then revisit Engels’s The Origin of the Family. Over the years, it has been regularly re-issued in English with appropriately updated introductions linking it to contemporary feminist politics, as well as to Marxist scholarship.14 Few commentators, feminist or otherwise, would defend very much of the anthropological material cited by Engels or very many of the anthropological points he makes independently. Too much has happened in the intervening years, both in terms of empirical research and fieldwork, and in terms of the scope and presumptions of anthropology itself, to sustain the certainties through which Engels wrote his text. The text is rightly described by Barrett as ‘flawed and disputed.’15 Moreover the kind of

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Marxism through which Engels conceived his account, and to which he aimed to contribute in The Origin of the Family in a quite fundamental and foundational way, has itself been subject to several generations of critique, rooted in issues to do with science, causation, knowledge, determinism, class, leadership and revolution. The Origin of the Family, in Marxist terms, has fallen somewhat to one side in all these Marxist critiques, without—as has been mentioned above—ever becoming truly central, or perhaps as central, as it should have been, given its relationship to the ‘materialist interpretation of history,’ the foundational concepts of production and labour, and Marxist predilections for developmental historical periodizations.

Gender Studies/Men’s Studies In terms of gender studies more broadly, and in particular, with reference to studies of men and masculinities, Engels’s work should have a lot to offer. He gives a gendered account of men (as men) in the famous sections on pre-history which cover the development of sexual and family relationships, something in which men figure by definition and with which, in practice, they are still involved, though as many feminists comment, not enough and/or not in the right ways. He also writes Darwinian concepts of sexual selection into this account, which necessarily make claims about male behaviour (and the ‘nature’ of men as men), an area in which males have an important stake in self-knowledge, never more so than today, given feminist and other challenges.16 And his account of private property and government in the historical and contemporary age is itself gendered (and not merely generic), in that he details the roles of both men (as men) and women in bringing those institutions about, and in enjoying (or suffering) the consequences. Why, then, is Engels’s The Origin of the Family not one of the foundational texts of men’s studies? Unfortunately, it takes some considerable work of analysis to make Engels’s views on these matters apparent. In common with other texts Engels’s overtly gendered account of men tends to slip into the background, as he also rather typically states his views and conclusions in apparently generic and gender-neutral terms. That is, Engels’s text moves rather easily from an overtly gendered concept of man to an apparently de-gendered one, without alerting anyone very markedly to the difference. He is hardly alone in this, as the analytical distinction has only recently been developed, and is not yet widely appreciated, by any

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means.17 Nonetheless, despite remarking on men in overtly gendered terms, and theorizing their nature and behaviour in explicitly drawn ways, Engels is hardly a gender pioneer in men’s studies, precisely because he does so little argumentatively with what he exposes to view. His text has no purchase on any critique of men as men, nor any exposure of ‘generic man’ as male (rather than female). Nor is there any evident suggestion that politically or personally he would have had any sympathy for such a notion (few men do, even now). Rather Engels derived considerable political and personal benefit, as men still do, from not raising transformative issues in any very serious way, and for reinforcing this complacency through a discursive strategy that ‘flickers’ between overtly gendered accounts of men as husbands and fathers, and covertly gendered accounts of ‘man’ as generic and gender-neutral. The overall effect is thus to rehearse certain naturalized and naturalizing presumptions about men, but without making them at all problematic with reference to culture and change. Politically, this then leaves men where they were, secure in their ‘nature,’ and immune from the challenges posed by feminisms, and by transformative thinking about what manners maketh man, and what masculinities are acceptable. Engels’s The Origin of the Family has been taken seriously by at least one men’s studies scholar, somewhat in the hope that Marxism will be taken seriously within gender studies, just as some feminists have found theoretical and political mileage in a critical engagement with Marx and Marxists. Jeff Hearn has argued that transformative thinking about labour could follow from the suggestion in manuscripts of 1845–1846 (by Marx and Engels) that human labour is materially productive and species-reproductive.18 Working from a feminist standpoint position on maternal labour, Hearn suggests a revisioning of human labour as both emotionally nurturing and technologically developmental.19 The ‘other’ to this conception is the narrow view of labour, inscribed within modern economics, as mere factor of production, a commodity with a marketvalue, albeit one rather inconveniently located in human bodies including brains, rather than in raw materials and machinery. The advantage of taking this earlier location for ‘dual systems theory,’ that is, a view that Marxism incorporates a gendered concept of labour related to human reproduction, is that the manuscripts of 1845–1846 do not pose issues about pre-history and anthropology in quite the explicit way that the later text, The Origin of the Family, poses so directly and at considerable length. Moreover Engels’s later work is inscribed within overt

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presumptions about social theory that incorporate a positivist view of science within a deterministic view of human behaviour, or at least his outlook seems to tip more that way than towards the more speculative and hermeneutic discourse of the 1840s. The manuscripts of 1845–1846 bravely call for empirical studies to fill out the conceptual framework that the joint authors have sketched in, but an identification of some notion of factual illustration for the 1840s with the positivistic notions of science that Engels himself developed only later during the 1860s and 1870s would surely be anachronistic.20 The upshot is that Engels’s The Origin of the Family is an undiscovered text for men’s studies and theoretical work on masculinities, as indeed are numerous classics in all fields of social studies written by male authors. Generally, these are replete with overtly stated yet unexamined presumptions about ‘what men are like’ (as men), and why that aspect of ‘human nature’ is simply factual, natural and cannot be made problematic. An important discursive strategy that ensures this outcome is the ‘flickering’ that the texts incorporate between overtly gendered and apparently degendered conceptualizations of ‘man.’ This not only naturalizes gendered behaviour as necessarily (because ‘biologically’) inherent in the ‘male of the species’ but also then generalizes this to humans as such through the (supposedly) generic concept of ‘man,’ in which much of this masculinized behaviour is said to inhere, again, ‘in the species.’ Of course at certain moments in these texts the feminine ‘other’ pops up, notably when the mechanics (literally) of pregnancy, parturition and lactation are in view, not to mention the ‘need’ (of men, of course) for sexual partners and domestic ‘partnership.’ Engels’s text is a particularly thorough portrayal of this typical and effective discursive strategy, and it is with this in mind that I revisit his arguments in The Origin of the Family.

Novelizing History There are numerous objections on any number of grounds to any given proposition or argument in Engels’s Origin of the Family.21 Rather than rehearse these, my strategy here will be rather different, namely revealing not just what the work says about men and masculinity (in Engels, masculinity is profoundly singular), but showing what role men play in his revised version of Marxism. My claim is that the work as a whole tells a story, and that piecemeal criticism misses the underlying point. Much

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of the significance of Engels’s text, and of others like it, is only recoverable through narrative analysis, and in that respect Engels’s work bears re-reading almost as a kind of novel. No doubt this does considerable violence to Engels’s intentions, but not so much, I think, to the way that his readers made sense of what he had written.22 Moreover, this approach does make his text a useful illustration of the point that in talking about women, one talks about men (and vice versa), even if the authorial and discursive strategies do not make this apparent, or indeed play it down. Gender is organized around a binary, and in asserting what is the case on one side, there is no escape from some implication for what obtains with respect to the other. The historical approach to sexuality was as unpopular in conservative quarters in the 1880s as it had been in the 1840s when the Manifesto of the Communist Party was written. Indeed, it is surprising even now how naturalistically rather than historically sexuality is still conceived, despite the appearance of influential, even landmark works in history and sociology, not to mention considerable feminist energy devoted to the subject.23 In The Origin of the Family Engels continued his critique of ‘the bourgeois family,’ begun many years before and notably present in his joint work with Marx, Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848): Transformation of the family! Even the most radical of the radicals flares up at this infamous proposal of the communists. What is the basis of the contemporary bourgeois family? Capital and private gain. It is completely developed only for the bourgeoisie; but it finds its complement in the enforced dissolution of the family among the proletarians and in public prostitution. The bourgeois family naturally declines with the decline of its complement, and the two disappear with the disappearance of capital … Bourgeois phrases about the family and child-rearing, about the deeply felt relationship of parent to child, become even more revolting when all proletarian family ties are severed as a consequence of large-scale industry, and children are simply transformed into articles of trade and instruments of labor. But you communists want to introduce common access to women, protests the whole bourgeoisie in chorus. The bourgeois sees in his wife a mere instrument of production. He hears that the instruments of production are to be utilised in common and naturally cannot think otherwise than that common use is equally applicable to women.

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He does not suspect that the point here is to transform the status of women as mere instruments of production … Our bourgeois, not content with having the wives and daughters of the proletariat at their disposal, not to mention legally sanctioned prostitutes, take the greatest pleasure in reciprocal seduction of married women. Bourgeois marriage is really the community of married women … In any case it is self-evident that with the transformation of the current relations of production, the community of women emerging from those relations, i.e. sanctioned and unsanctioned prostitution, will disappear.24

While daring, in a kind of add-on way, this discussion was notably negative in detailing what was wrong but saying little about how to put it right, and the same is true of Marx’s even earlier pronouncements on the position of women and the communist transformation of sexual relationships.25 Formally, in The Origin of the Family Engels aimed to survey the entire history of sexuality, reproduction of the species and production of goods and services in all societies, however ‘primitive,’ in order to produce a history of political forms leading up to the modern ‘bourgeois’ state. In common with other nineteenth-century accounts, his approach involved the demarcation of historical stages, causal explanations for change and an assumption of progress in the development of civilization. As a Marxist, he foresaw the resolution of the conflicts he detailed through the eventual victory of proletariat over their class oppressors. But unusually in his own time he considered women to be further oppressed, and moreover argued that this oppression was the historical product of a fundamental change in human relationships. Startlingly, he claimed that the imposition of male domination over women made them the first oppressed class. As a historical product, that oppression was judged by him to be remediable and transitory. Thus the story Engels told was ostensibly about changes in the relation of one sex to another, with a promise of further change as the class struggle develops. It is a complicated account that I will be examining here in detail. The status of Engels’s writing as history or anthropology is somewhat misleading anyway, though overwhelmingly it is viewed as a major contribution to the former and the sole contribution to the latter within the canon of classical Marxism. In important ways, though, it is much more like a historical novel—The Forsyte Saga comes continually to mind—as one follows Engels’s projection of nineteenth-century values back into the

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distant past, and his ruling device of generational upsets. Narrative analysis involves following the twists and turns of the plot, as Engels constructed it, ‘men’ and ‘women’ being his main characters, and this will, I hope, provoke renewed interest in the text. But another reason why the text is interesting is that it prompts us to reflect on the consequences of foregrounding ‘women’ as narrative subject and analytical object, as Engels does. Men appear in his account only secondarily in contrast to his focus on the oppression of women, yet women’s oppression is inexplicable for Engels without them. He clearly found that he needed to say little about men in order to make his narrative work. The assumptions about them that he employed were so obviously simple and ‘factual’ that they required little explanation. Women, of course, were more problematic for him, and doubtless in his view for (presumptively male) readers as well. Thus his narrative is preoccupied more with material concerning women than with a discussion of men, who were, nonetheless, the agents of domination. This preoccupation has the effect of covertly reproducing conventional ‘men’s history’ from a supposedly generic perspective (emphatically not a history of men as men), while appearing to be a history focused on women. Thus Engels’s theorizing about women proceeds against a background of unexamined assumptions concerning men, and the fact that he made women problematic obscures the fact that he treated men unproblematically. His story is actually driven by men, but they appear somewhat fleetingly and mechanically in the narrative. Men’s studies and studies of masculinities, by contrast, have attempted to ‘bring men in,’ this time as men, but in an appropriately critical framework, informed by feminist work and politics.26 Engels was not simply an unwitting victim of ‘traditional’ assumptions and values. Rather his narrative was itself a traditional exculpation of conventional hegemonic or dominant masculinity, conceived as monotonic and universal. This masculinity was important to him politically, as political action which did not validate those norms and conventions was virtually unthinkable. Despite the superficial feminism of The Origin of the Family, he never associated himself with women’s struggles as women. To do so would have lost him such political allies as he had and gained him little in the way of usable political clout. Moreover, conventional masculinity was important to Engels personally, as episodes in his self-development and later relationships were constructed from characteristically masculine ‘scripts.’ Examination of

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early letters and drawings reveals what might be termed ‘a secure gender identity’ that never rubbed against the class-based radicalism that he adopted early on and adapted but little throughout his political career. In life, he was quite capable of sympathizing with ‘the oppressed’ and ‘workers of the world,’ but then complaining vituperatively about his servants, who were always female.27 As argued above, the extent to which Engels’s work should be taken as evincing feminist sympathies in any depth seems very limited.

Conclusions Thus, there is very little in Engels’s The Origin of the Family that inspires much confidence today, though it must also be noted that it is difficult to see what can be said about pre-history that is not a re-tracing of modern ideas and concerns.28 By making women problematic in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, Engels became canonical for Marxist feminism. While the work has been subjected to various criticisms, including feminist ones, my claim is that as a whole it tells a story recoverable through narrative analysis. An important though little researched aspect of the story is that it is about men. This is not readily apparent, because men are theorized in Engels’s text through a theorization of women. Hence, it is my point that Engels did not make men problematic. Instead, he dissolved any problems that there might be with men into a developmental naturalism that effectively excused them all politically— as men. Thus, for Engels, in pre-history biology made men oppressors and women victims, but in historical times the class struggle made the bourgeoisie the oppressors and the proletariat the oppressed. Engels’s transmutation of pre-historical naturalism into historical politics left men where they always were and validated a masculinity of convenience, much like the one he lived out. More importantly it left dominant masculinities and dominating males quite untouched. Until we have credible ways of theorizing those masculinities, it will be as easy as ever to excuse men’s oppressions within the family, private property, the state—or wherever. Engels’s text has been vastly influential, but not for the right reasons. Studies of pre-history and historical teleologies are not as convincing as they once were (or least that is my hope), given that we are rightly focused today more on processes than on origins, and more on contingency than on over-determination. His feminism is just what we might expect from a

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man: full of knowingness about women, and near-deliberate recalcitrance about men. In so far as Marxism can be identified with a reductionist determinism (whether of one or two fundamental factors), Engels’s revisions in The Origin of the Family have not been much debated. In so far as Marx’s own views can be identified with a theoretical outlook that is more nuanced, and less deterministic, Engels’s sketchy discussion (a tissue of assumptions, really) looks even less satisfactory.29 As Gayle Rubin said, ‘Eventually, someone will have to write a new version of The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, recognizing the mutual interdependence of sexuality, economics and politics ….’30 Altogether, The Origin of the Family as it stands is a triumph of assertion and selfassertiveness over all else. In particular, it tells us a great deal about one man in particular—Friedrich Engels. The text also tells us a great deal about how masculine hegemony—i.e. domination by consent —is maintained in the gender order. While it does not endorse masculine domination and marginalization of women directly (indeed it makes quite the opposite claim), it emphatically reinscribes this through a subtle discursive strategy, namely that of naturalizing the masculine qualities that limn this oppression in the first place. This is subtly done, almost unnoticeably, as this naturalizing is already familiar to readers at the outset, and in fact it takes a great deal of work to make these beliefs about men problematic at all, so relentlessly are they—always and already—inscribed in ‘nature’ as gendered beings. Engels has only to allude to the ‘obvious,’ and the point is made.31 Given that he appears to be extending every courtesy and helping hand to women through his (apparently) feminist project of equality and transformation, his position in gender politics is secured. Unfortunately, his discursive strategy secures the existing gender order far more than a transformative one, precisely because of the way that he characterizes men.

Notes 1. Anne Lopes and Gary Roth, Men’s Feminism: August Bebel and the German Socialist Movement (Amherst, NY: Humanity/Prometheus, 2000), pp. 29–39, 73, 82 n. 55. 2. The title in full was Herr Eugen Dühring’s Revolution in Science, with fully intended irony. On the early Engels, see Terrell Carver, Friedrich Engels, His Life and Thought (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989), pp. 31–39; on Anti-Dühring, see pp. 241–244.

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3. Lopes and Roth, Men’s Feminism, pp. 73–75. 4. Lopes and Roth, Men’s Feminism, p. 82 n. 55. 5. Carver, Friedrich Engels, pp. 10–12, illustration no. 10 (between pp. 120–122, 145–148, 244–245); Terrell Carver, Marx and Engels, The Intellectual Relationship (Brighton: Wheatsheaf, 1983), pp. 78–95. 6. Terrell Carver, “A Political Theory of Gender: Perspectives on the Universal Subject,” in Gender, Politics and the State, ed. Vicky Randall and Georgina Waylen (London: Routledge, 1998), pp. 18–24. 7. Carver, Marx and Engels, pp. 118–151, 152–158; Terrell Carver, The Postmodern Marx (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), pp.163–180. 8. Karl Marx, “Preface” to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, in Karl Marx, Later Political Writings, ed. and trans. Terrell Carver (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996, repr. 2002), pp. 160–161; these transitions are critically discussed in Terrell Carver, Marx’s Social Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), pp. 38–57. 9. Lawrence Krader, intro. to The Ethnological Notebooks of Karl Marx, Studies of Morgan, Phear, Maine, Lubbock (Assen and New York: Van Gorcum and Humanities Press, 1972); Carver, Marx and Engels, pp. 144–145. 10. Carver, Marx’s Social Theory; Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986), pp. 175–176 n. 35. 11. The modern locus classicus for this version of Marxism, and this reading of Marx, is G. A. Cohen, Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), which does not take up the question of Engels’s revisions to this ‘outlook’ in The Origin of the Family. 12. In a recent essay, Heather A. Brown takes this position and provides a very useful listing and review of feminists’ encounters with Engels; see “Engels and Gender,” in Reexamining Engels’s Legacy in the 21st Century, ed. Kohei Saito (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), pp. 195–196 nn. 1–2, 203–206. 13. Michèle Barrett, “Marxist Feminism and the Work of Karl Marx,” in Marx, 100 Years On, ed. Betty Matthews (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1983), p. 214.

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14. This begins with the English translation (Chicago: C.H. Kerr, 1902); see also Frederick [Friedrich] Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, intro. Eleanor Burke Leacock (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1972); and Friedrich Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, intro. Michèle Barrett (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985). 15. Barrett, “Marxist Feminism,” p. 214. 16. Engels’s ‘biological’ and Darwinian framing (never mind his lifelong heterosexism) could make the text an interesting object of critique from the gay male standpoint, but to my knowledge no one has taken this up directly. 17. Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Cambridge: Polity, 1998), pp. 1–18; Carole Pateman, “Beyond the Sexual Contract?,” in Rewriting the Sexual Contract, ed. Geoff Dench (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1999), pp. 1–9; Terrell Carver, “‘Public Man’ and the Critique of Masculinity,” in Political Theory 24 (1996), pp. 673–686. 18. For a discussion of the current state of play regarding the posthumously published ‘book’ The German Ideology, see my review of MECW I/5 published in 2017: “Whose Hand Is the Last Hand? The New MECW Edition of ‘The German Ideology,’” in New Political Science 41, no. 1 (2019), pp. 140–148. 19. Jeff Hearn, The Gender of Oppression: Men, Masculinity and the Critique of Marxism (Brighton: Wheatsheaf, 1987), pp. 59–118. 20. Carver, Friedrich Engels, pp. 232–252. 21. Terrell Carver, review of Engels Revisited: New Feminist Essays, ed. Janet Sayers, Mary Evans, and Nanneke Redclift, in History of Political Thought 9 (1987), p. 180. 22. Kim Lane Scheppele, “Foreword: Telling Stories,” in Michigan Law Review 87 (1989), pp. 2073–2098; Don Lavoie, Economics and Hermeneutics (London: Routledge, 1990). 23. Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality, 3 vols, trans. Robert Hurley (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1984/86/88); Joan Wallach Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988; rev. edn., 1999). 24. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, “Manifesto of the Communist Party,” in Marx, Later Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge

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University Press, 1996), pp. 16–17; Engels’s authorial relationship to the Manifesto is discussed in Carver, Marx and Engels, pp. 78–95. 25. Karl Marx, “Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts” (1844), in Early Writings, trans. Rodney Livingstone and Gregor Benton (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975), pp. 346–347. 26. Lynne Segal, Slow Motion: Changing Masculinities, Changing Men (London: Virago, 1990), pp. 274–319; R. W. Connell, Masculinities, Gender and Power: Society, the Person and Sexual Politics (Cambridge: Polity, 1987), pp. 39–42. 27. Carver, Friedrich Engels, pp. 146–148, 152–153, 159, 169, 182– 183. 28. Michael Shanks and Christopher Tilley, Social Theory and Archaeology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). 29. See also Brown, “Engels and Gender,” pp. 195–196, 206–211. 30. Gayle Rubin, quoted in Joan Wallach Scott, Gender and the Politics of History, rev. edn. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), p. 202. 31. This point is more fully articulated, albeit in a slightly different context, in Terrell Carver, “Men and Masculinities in International Relations Research,” in Brown Journal of World Affairs 31, no. 1 (2014), pp. 113–127.

Bibliography Barrett, Michèle. “Marxist Feminism and the Work of Karl Marx.” In Marx: 100 Years On, edited by Betty Matthews (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1983). Brown, Heather A. “Engels and Gender.” In Reexamining Engels’s Legacy in the 21st Century, edited by Kohei Saito (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021).

CHAPTER 12

The Concept of Power in Engels’s Theory of the State Ana María Miranda Mora

Marx and Engels developed their position on the state in the context of their attempt to understand and analyze capitalist society. A common objection against the “Marxist state theory,” however, is that it lacks a coherent and comprehensive account of the state and state power suitable to its critique of the capitalist mode of production. It was Engels who developed a more systematic account of the origin and nature of the state, as well as the relations between state power and economic development. Although Engels ultimately was no more successful than Marx in developing a complete and coherent analysis of the state, it is not possible to understand Marx’s theory of the state without considering Engels. In what follows, I will first briefly reconstruct a general notion of the state in Marx’s and Engels’s theory, focusing on Engels’s contributions.

A. M. M. Mora (B) Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Mexico City, Mexico e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 T. Carver and S. Rapic (eds.), Friedrich Engels for the 21st Century, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-97138-0_12

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My aim in this chapter is to specify the main features on the state on Engels’s account and address some problems connected to the concept of power grounding it. For this purpose, I will focus mainly on The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884) of Engels. Then, I present the three dimensions of Marx’s and Engels’s notion of domination and explore some difficulties connected to the concept of state power. In the last part, I reconstruct Foucault’s critique of the “economism” in modern theories of power and explore to what extent can it be applied to Marx’s and Engels’s theory. Finally, I propose an alternative way of understanding Marx’s and Engels’s concept of power, which avoids the instrumentalist interpretation of the state implied by an economic justification of state power.

Marx and Engels on the State An historical approach to the concept of the state in Marx and Engels philosophy would cover the developments from 1840 to 1885. In these texts, we find a wide variety of themes, theoretical approaches combined in various ways with empirical studies of particular societies and political events.1 Which aspects of this heterogenous set of analyses and texts can be considered essential? From the perspective of a systematic account, Bob Jessop argues these texts contain four fundamental treatments of the state2 understood as: political domination, superstructure of the economic base, instrument of class rule, and factor of cohesion. (1) The state as political domination (abstract state). In his critique of Hegel’s idea of the state, Marx treats the state as an abstract organization of political domination which neglects the social nature of man and alienates him from genuine participation in public life.3 That is, the state is an elite institution representative only of private interests. This first approach to the state as a system of political domination does not yet include an account of the state as an organ of class rule. It discusses political matters not in terms of class struggle but rather in terms of the opposition between state and civil society, between the general and the particular, and between the real and the abstract.4 For Marx, Hegel fails to demonstrate the necessity of the constitutional monarchy and the Prussian bureaucracy as mediators between the state and civil society. It was Engels who first undertook a different theoretical path. His stay in Manchester from 1842 to 1844 influenced his fundamental understanding of political economy and enabled him to anticipate the Marxian class theory of the state.5 Thus,

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while Marx was engaged in political journalism and his critique of Hegel, Engels had already written his Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy (the Umrisse)6 (1844) as well as several articles on the social question in England. Engels formulated his earliest version of the class theory of the state in his articles on the English Constitution and his classic work on The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845). He introduced the class theoretical perspective in his examination of the institutions through which political domination of the middle class is secured within the state.7 Nevertheless, he didn’t develop a general “class–theoretical” account of the state until The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884). (2) The state as superstructure of the economic base. The idea that the state reflects the economic base of society and that its interventions reproduce the needs of the economy and the balance of economic class forces are the core features of the “base-superstructure” model. We can find this notion of the state in texts such as The German Ideology, Anti-Dühring (1877), and Engels’s letters on historical materialism, among others (1878).8 The problematic and extreme interpretation of this account could be taken to imply that the state is simply an accessory to the economic base; i.e. it has no autonomy, no reciprocal effectivity, and it presupposes the perfect correspondence between base and superstructure.9 This account is far from the Marx and Engels account of the state, though certain formulations of their theory are susceptible to such an interpretation. The materialist historical account of the state would be elaborated in relation to various stages in capital accumulation related to different historical moments of the division of labour.10 For instance, the anthropologic-historical approach of Engels in The Origin suggests that different forms of state and state mediation are required by different modes of production. Despite the emphasized role of the economic base for social developments (especially against the Hegelian Idea of the state),11 Marx and Engels did not assume a “monodeterminist line”12 or a sheer structuralist approach of the sort that would imply reductionism or economical determinism. The economical determinism connected to the base-superstructure model also implies theoretical challenges that can hardly be accepted such as reductionism concerning both social and political relations. However, as I will show in the third part of this chapter, the worse problem for this model, and for Marx’s and

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Engels’s emancipatory theory of power, is the reductionism and essentialism it implies for the notion of state power, which risk it assimilation to a liberal account of power. (3) The state as an instrument of class rule. This formulation can be understood in at least two ways. First, it can be connected with economic reductionism through the assumption that the economic base determines the balance of political forces in the struggle for state power. Second, it can also be developed as a voluntarist position focusing on the more or less independent role of political action in the transformation of the economic base and class struggle. The simple version of the instrumentalist thesis involves the claim that the state is not an independent and autonomous political order, but an instrument of coercion and administration which can be used by whatever groups or interests manage to appropriate it, as Marx already stated in his Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (1843).13 The more complex version is formulated by Engels, who combines this instrumentalist thesis with the claim that a specific class controls the state and uses its control to maintain economic and political domination.14 The instrumentalist approach developed by Marx and Engels is concerned mainly with the various ways in which the modern state is used as an instrument for the exploitation of wage labour by the capital and/or in the maintenance of class domination in the political sphere.15 There is little scholarly agreement as to whether the instrumentalist thesis is an adequate interpretation of Marx’s and Engels’s accounts of the state. A simple instrumentalist view implies that the state apparatus is neutral and passive, but Engels holds in The Origin that the state is both historically and structurally capitalist bias.16 My aim here is not to offer a solution to these problems facing the instrumentalist thesis, but rather to emphasize the complex relations between economic and political power so as to point to another way of understanding the relationship between the economical and the political dimension (a relationship I argue is not one of correspondence). This new understanding, in turn, helps us see how the irresolvable tension between economics and politics determines the concept of power on Marx’s and Engels’s accounts. (4) The state as a factor of cohesion. The anti-instrumentalist approach to the state claims, in continuity with both the Hegelian framework and the anthropologic-historical account of the state in The Origin, that an institutionally separated state emerges before the development of class antagonism to manage the common affairs of the members

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of gentile society.17 Such an institution is socially necessary because of the interdependence of the individuals in any society structured by a complex division of social labour. As Engels argues in the The Origin, the public power of gentile society is superseded by the emergence of class conflict rooted in an antagonistic mode of production and the division of labour.18 Subsequently, a socially necessary institution turns into a class institution, and the state is then determined by the complex relations between the common interest on the one hand, and the class interests on the other. In this respect, Engels suggests that the conquest of state power presupposes the successful representation of a single class’s interest as the general interest.19 Engels claims that the state is necessary to moderate the conflicts between antagonistic classes and to keep them within the bounds of social order.20 The state is thus a form of power born from society, but it puts itself above society and divorces itself from it.21 In doing so, the state transforms itself into a complex functional condition of bourgeois society: it divorces from society, but it must simultaneously mediate and keep class antagonisms in control. The separation of state and civil society was largely taken for granted by Marx and Engels in their earliest writings, and they did not concern themselves with its genesis until The German Ideology (1845/1846).22 In general, on Marx’s and Engels’s view, the state as a “public power” develops at a certain stage in the social division of labour and involves the emergence of a distinct system of government which is separated from the immediate control of the people. It was Engels who connected the emergence of the state, and its transformation from an organ of gentile society into an organ of class domination, with the privatization of the means of production and the emergence of capitalist class-exploitation.23 As has been shown, the lack of systematization of the various analyses and the lack of unity and coherence in the theory of the state does not exclude the possibility of delimiting some important features of Marx’s and Engels’s theory. Engels’s reconstruction of the state in The Origin presents an historical account of three different moments of state formation (in Greece, Rome and Germany), and an anthropological reconstruction of the social relations of power (savagery, barbarism and civilization). The materialist approach to the state is in contrast to a general and abstract theory of the origin of the state, which gives a univocal explanation of capitalist relations of production, or invokes a pure political theory of sovereignty, like the social contractual theories. In this way, Engels suggests that an adequate theoretical analysis of

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the state must consider not only its economic determinations but also those features of the state that are rooted in the distinctive organization of power in social relations, such as in relations of the family and the sexual division of labour (1884). This approach opens various lines of development, especially in relation to the role of the state in maintaining some interrelation between base and superstructure and in connection to the anti-mechanical approach to social cohesion in the analysis of hegemony and ideological and political practices. Cohesion as a necessary effect of state power is a function that cannot be taken for granted; this approach is associated with a complex concept of the state as comprising all those political and ideological apparatuses through which cohesion is maintained. The view of the state as an organ of class domination and as an instance of social unity requires an analysis of the various forms of domination that sustain the balance of political forces simultaneously compatible with social cohesion and the accumulation of capital.24 To avoid mechanical and deterministic approaches as well as economist and class reductionism, we should develop an account of the non–necessary but inevitable relation between base and superstructure. For the state is both a state of class interests (so a particular institution) and an institution that guarantees the accumulation of capital (a class interest relation). In addition, it is also an institution of social cohesion (in this regard it is not a particular but rather a general institution). In order to fully address the state’s role in social cohesion, a broader notion of power that goes beyond the exclusively class-based approach is required. In what follows, I will briefly present the three basic notions of domination that follow from Marx’s and Engels’s theory of state power. My aim is to examine the grounding notion of power understood as domination and its specific characterizations. Finally, on the basis of Foucault’s criticism of the “economic functionality” of power, I develop an alternative concept of power.

State Power and Class Domination Marxist approaches to state power are primarily interested in class domination in capitalist societies, in contrast for example to feminism, which prioritizes patriarchy. The state is considered to be particularly important for guaranteeing the conditions of class domination. The specific interest in domination is nevertheless not limited to economic class domination in the labour process, rather, class powers circulate throughout society,

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in political and ideological relations and practices.25 While some theories derive political and/or ideological domination more or less directly from economic domination, others emphasize the complexity of the relations among these different modes of class domination. Regarding the debate on whether to prioritize economic over political or ideological domination, it is crucial to acknowledge the central role of the state. The state not only maintains and reproduces political domination power, in its institutional narrow sense, but it also maintains and reproduces economical and ideological class domination. For on a non-reductionist approach, the state is seen as responsible for maintaining the overall structural integration and social cohesion of a “society divided into classes.”26 In what follows, I will address three ideas of domination that explain the class character of state power: economic class domination, political class domination and ideological class domination. To complete this section, I will discuss the relation between these three forms of domination. As I argue, the concrete forms of domination that embody the notion of power makes it impossible to derive all forms of power directly from economic domination. (1) The idea of economic-based class domination claims the primacy of social relations of production. These include social control over the distribution of resources and activities, the appropriation of the resulting surplus, the social division of labour, the class relations that result from property relations, the ownership of the means of production and the form of economic exploitation. The primacy of economic class domination and of social relations of production enable the antagonism between capitalists and workers. Power relations are rooted in the organization of the labour process. For securing the valorization of capital, forms of control operate over labour power, each with its own implications for class struggle and the distribution of power between capital and labour.27 (2) The core of political class domination is related to the state and to its direct and indirect roles for securing the conditions of economic class domination. For this purpose, an independent state is required, which means the state must be relatively autonomous in order to perform its functions on behalf of capital. The different accounts of the state question whether the state itself is class neutral or not. According to Jessop,28 there are three main Marxist approaches to the state linked to the form of domination they emphasize: instrumentalist, structuralist and strategicrelational. The instrumentalist position understands the state mainly as a neutral tool for exercising political power. The class that controls this tool

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can use it to advance its own interests, which means the state itself does not has an inherently capitalist form and does not necessarily perform capitalist functions. The connection between the state and the capital on this view is contingent, and any functions it does implement on behalf of capital follow from the context of pre-capitalist forces to secure key conditions for economic calculation. In contrast, the structuralists understands state control as having a prior bias towards capital and against the working classes. On this view, the capitalist state has an inherently capitalist form and is dependent on the owner class of the means of production for its own reproduction as a state apparatus. Finally, the strategic-relational theory argues that “state power is a form-determined condensation of the balance of class forces in struggle.”29 This approach builds in Marx’s insight that the capital is not a thing but a social relation (1894).30 For Marx and Engels, the state is unavoidably class-biased and is rooted in a historic-genetic form determined by the capitalist mode of production and the power social relations developed in connection with it. But once we have accepted the form of the state as having an in-built bias, it is not sufficient to explain how it ensures capitalist rule. The class-bias state through its structural selectivity makes institutions, capacities and resources more accessible to some political forces and more compatible with some purposes than others. In this respect, Engels indicates that the conquest of state power presupposes the successful representation of a class’s interest as the general interest, stressing the importance of ideological class domination aimed at winning the active consent of the dominated class (1884).31 (3) Marx and Engels first presented the ideological class domination form in The German Ideology (1845–1846) with the claim that the ruling ideas of any age are the ideas of the ruling class32 ; moreover, they connected this to control over the means of intellectual production. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal has control at the same time over the means of mental production. The different modalities of ideological class domination include the ways and means through which political, intellectual and moral leadership is mediated through a complex relation of institutions, organizations and forces operating within society. That includes the mechanisms and effects of ideological class domination. Social cohesion formation is the product of specific ideological and political practices mediated through the role of the state and/or private institutions.

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State power is constituted by the interrelation of these three forms of domination. The articulation of power relations (in economic, political and ideological domination) in capitalist societies is intrinsically connected to the role of the state in securing the conditions for class domination. This distinction enables us to expand a narrow account that identifies the state with the politico-juridical apparatus, its constitutional and institutional features of government, its formal decision-making procedures and its general policies; to include the analysis of mechanisms of coercion, consent and discipline. That is, rather than treating institutions and apparatuses as purely technical instruments of government, we can now see that state power is also grounded in social relations shaped by the different forms of domination discussed above.

State Power and Analytics of Power After having discussed the definition of the state and state power in Marx’s and Engels’s theory, I will now examine the concept of power that grounds the concept of state power as class domination. Power is different from state power, as the latter is only a special mode of the former. State power is the complex relation of economic, political and ideological domination, and its characteristic features are temporally and spatially determined. As we have seen, the interconnections between the exercise of social power and the reproduction (and transformation) of class domination are located primarily in the social relations of production, in the control of one class over the state, and in intellectual hegemony over minds. In what follows, I first address the well-known critique of the priority given to class domination, to show how it shapes a problematic concept of state power. To privilege class domination either marginalizes other forms of social domination—patriarchal, ethnic, racial, colonial—and leads to the reduction of these other forms to a unified and homogenous form of domination, or it makes them dependent on changes in class relations. Marx’s and Engels’s theory of the state and power should not exclude from its framework other forms of power. Second, I discuss the negative conception of power presupposed in the notion of state power and its undesirable consequences for the Marx-Engels state theory. The characteristic feature of Marx’s and Engels’s approach to power and its operations is connected to the specific mode of production or social formation in which it exists and is exercised. State power is the

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organized power of one class for oppressing another. Power as domination implies a specific understanding of power mainly as a suppressing force or a prohibition that is exercised by someone or a group who holds the power. This notion of power implements a set of rules for governing and secures it by institutions such a system of law. In the framework of this definition, the task for critical social sciences and philosophy is to determine the various power-apparatuses and relations that operate at various levels of society, in different social domains and with different extensions. “Can the analysis of power, or the analysis of powers, be in one way or another deduced from the economy?”33 Can the characteristic features of power all be deduced from class domination, particularly in its complex version? In what follows, I introduce Foucault’s critique concerning the “economic functionality” of the modern theories of power and offer an alternative reading of the concept of power which draws from Marx’s and Engels’s theory of labour and capital. In Society Must Be Defended (1976), Foucault raises doubts about the compatibility of the juridical conception of power, which is the liberal notion of political power, on the one hand, and the Marxist conception of power understood as class domination, on the other. According to Foucault, the common feature of these two accounts is what he calls the “economism” in the theory of power.34 In the case of the classic juridical theory of power, power is understood as a right which can be possessed in the way one possesses a commodity and can be transferred or alienated through a juridical act due to the surrender of something or through a contract. In this view, power is the concrete power that any individual can hold and which she can surrender to constitute a political sovereignty, i.e. the state. Thus political and state power are constituted by a juridical operation similar to an exchange of contracts. In a similar way, Marx’s and Engels’s notion of power is defined by its “economic functionality,” i.e. the role of power is essentially both to perpetuate the relations of production and to reproduce a class domination made possible by the development of the productive forces and their manner of appropriation.35 The negative consequence of these accounts of power is that state power finds its historical reason in the economy; in other words, the ground of state power lies in the economy. In the first case, power is determined by the process of exchange; in the second, power is rooted in and conditioned by social

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relations of production. The problem at stake here is the absolute determination of power by the economy and the reduction of its central role to its function. The critique of power raised by Foucault addresses not only the well-known risk of a reduction of the social or political to the economical, it also questions whether it is possible to think of power from a non-juridical and non-economical perspective. Given the deep interconnection of political relations with economic relations, what is at issue here is how to conceive of a non-reductive notion of power, given the inseparability of the economy and politics, which should be understood neither as a matter of functional subordination nor as a matter of formal isomorphism. How should we conceive power such that we do not characterize it only in a negative way or only from the point of view of a juridical model of prevailing rule and prohibition? How can we think of power without reducing it to economic functionality or juridical operation,36 and without simultaneously neglecting its indissociability from the economy? How can we reconcile the non-reductionism-thesis of power and the thesis of the inseparability of economy and politics? This concern is deeply connected with a further question: How can we understand power’s characteristic feature of domination without neglecting its positive character as a (potentially) liberating-emancipatory force? “How may we attempt to analyze power in its positive mechanisms?,” asks Foucault in his lecture The Mesh of Power (1976) at the Federal University of Bahia in Salvador, Brazil. For power involves domination as well as resistance.37 Foucault, like Marx and Engels, insisted on the correlation between power and resistance. Unfortunately, it is not possible here to address the productive and active features of power.38 However, an account that releases the notion of power from economic functionality—and its repressive and negative features—aims to reveal its active potentialities. In his lecture, Foucault considered some elements of the active mechanisms—in opposition to rule and prohibition—of power in an original interpretation of some passages of the first volume of Capital.39 This analysis is fruitful insofar as it releases Marx’s and Engel’s notion of power from the economism denounced above. For Foucault, power understood as class domination—in its three dimensions: political, economic and ideological—reveals that a single power doesn’t exist, many powers do. Power, in its concrete modes of domination, is forms of subjugation that function locally, for example in

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the workshop, the fabric, the army, the police or wherever there are relations of subservience. These are all regional forms of power, which have their own mode of functioning. All these forms of power are heterogeneous, as Marx and Engels showed in their historical and case analyses of the state (for example in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte or in The Origin). We should therefore speak of powers and attempt to localize them in their historic and geographic specificity. The emphasis given by Marx and Engels to concrete forms of domination supports Foucault’s idea of regions of power. These regions of power do not presuppose a unitary notion of society in which one and only one power is exercised, but rather they are connected to different relations of economic, political and ideological power. There can be no such thing as an abstract power in general or a general power; only particular powers and the sum of particular exercises of power are possible.40 Powers are not the derivation or consequence of a supreme power that is primary, central and unique. Marx and Engels don’t accept the jurist schema of society as a homogenous formation resulting from a pact or contract. On the contrary, starting from the primitive existence of these regions of power—like slavery, property, the workshop, the fabric, the army—Engels derived the origin of the state from the privatization of the means of production, the emergence of modes of production based on exploitation, the necessary division of labour, and a society where social cohesion is constantly contested, i.e. in class conflicts (1884). According to these alternative notions of power, regional powers have no function of prohibiting or preventing, but to produce the efficiency and skills of the subject producers of commodities, of products. Power produces enduring relations of reciprocal practices rather than one-off, unilateral impositions of will. This has the interesting implication that power is also involved in securing the continuity of social relations in compliance with the subjects implied in the relations. Thus, rather than A getting B to do something B would not otherwise do, social relations of power typically involve both A and B doing what they ordinarily do. “The capitalist wage relation illustrates this well. For in voluntarily selling their labor-power for a wage, workers transfer its control to the capitalist along with the right to any surplus.”41 On this approach to power, the question “who has power?” is secondary since it is no longer analyzed at the level of intentions or decisions. Rather power can be found by asking: “How are subjects constituted?” That is, power is understood by grasping the material agency

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of subjugation.42 By turning away from the juridical and economist approach, we are led to an analysis of the performance and concrete practices of power. The function of power is not primarily to prohibit something; rather it is essentially to obtain better performance, better production, better productivity—in short, better exploitation. In his analysis of the army, Foucault explains how the army as production of dead bodies was assured by a new technique of power (the gun). Foucault’s analysis of the workshop, the division of labour and its transformation into the large workshops in the eighteenth century is thus similar to Engels’s analysis in The Condition of the Working Class in England. The new division of labour produces new forms of domination, or in Foucault’s vocabulary, a new discipline, likewise the discipline of the workshop was the condition of possibility for such a division of labour. As Foucault points out, it seems that without hierarchy, surveillance, normalization, control and discipline of the subjects (bodies) and society (social body), it would not have been possible to achieve the capitalist division of labour. This is not meant to reduce the origin of the division of labour to discipline. It also is not meant to ignore the state’s origin in capitalist relations of production and class struggle. Anatomic and biopolitical approaches to power rather show how the division of labour is also an effect of different forms of production grounded in specific technologies and discipline. Foucault did not mean to dissolve economical domination into different powers but rather to consider how these practices came to serve capital and the modern state.43 The technological approach to power avoids essentializing the state apparatus and its reduction to a mere instrument of preserving the capitalist social order. Without an analysis of concrete powers in capitalist society, we run the risk of diluting Marx’s and Engels’s notion of state power into the liberal abstract notion of power as a commodity that can be alienated and exchanged. To reduce power to a juridical superstructure is to prioritize its unifying function and to assimilate Marx’s and Engels’s theory to a bourgeois liberal analysis of sovereignty grounded on an ahistorical and presupposed foundational contract. The biggest danger of the economists’ notion of power is the identification of power(s) with state power and the consequent restriction of state power to the liberal juridical notion of sovereignty. On the contrary, state power in Marx’s and Engels’s analysis—in its different forms of domination—reveals a meshed network of material coercions and therefore “define[s] a new economy of power based upon the principle that there

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ha[s] to be an increase both in the subjugated forces and in the force and efficacy of that which subjugate[s] them.”44 The disciplinary power, which can no longer be described in terms of sovereignty, is, according to Foucault, one of bourgeois society’s great inventions, and Marx and Engels uncovered it too in their critique of the state. A power that is no longer person-centred, agent-centred or state-centred was one of the basic tools necessary for the establishment of industrial capitalism and its corresponding social relations. Capitalism’s mode of production and society requires not only another form of state but also another form of power. Marx and Engels revealed not only its economic logic but also its internal power mechanisms. They also unveiled a change in the function of power, from a notion of sovereignty characterized by its absolute expenditure (cost) of power (sovereignty), to a power performing with minimum cost and maximum efficiency in capitalist societies.45

For an Analytics of State Power This alternative interpretation of Marx’s and Engels’s notion of power offers another argument against the instrumentalist thesis of the state and avoids the problem of the economical reduction of power. It shows that the notion of power as domination doesn’t restrict itself to the notion of state power and that its specific features cannot be reduced to class domination as sheer means of reproduction, conservation and control over the social relations required by the capital. In contrast, it shows how power structures and shapes social relations through different mechanisms, in which the state is only one of them.46 The role of the state in the strategic organization of power relations is still fundamental for social cohesion, which comprises all institutions and practices through which cohesion is maintained. The characteristic feature of Marx and Engels analysis of power does not lie in the univocal role of the state as an instrument of class domination, but in the heterogenous powers in the social domain shaped by class conflict. These powers are rooted in the antagonistic capitalist mode of production determined by concrete technologies and disciplines (biopower and governmentality) through which the state secures compliance. For the state is not an autonomous source of power, but a social relation structured and organized according to different mechanisms that produce the cohesion of society in class relations of domination (and

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which, one can further add, are located among other forms of domination like gender, race, ethnicity). The state is a relational ensemble of powers and a set of practices that operate in the space and time of political, social and economic relations. Foucault’s critique of the economical functionality of power and his development of a theory of power (sovereignty, disciplinarity and governmentality) offers a conceptual framework that allows us to reinterpret Marx and Engels so as to avoid the bourgeois juridical-political economic definition of power and the reductionism of the instrumentalist theses of the state. The distinction discussed in this chapter between state power and power makes it possible to develop a theory of power that goes beyond the narrow approaches of sovereignty theories and economical reductionism. Foucault’s analytics of power identifies how different mechanisms of domination are linked explicitly to the bourgeois identification of its own economic profit and political utility. The central role of the state in bourgeois societies, understood as the crystallization of class conflict rooted in an antagonistic mode of production, should be understood as a strategic ensemble of power relations that produce a necessary articulation and impossible correspondence between the economic and the political spheres. An analysis of the state and power should not only focus on the why of capitalism and state power, but also explain how economical exploitation and political domination are intertwined within a specific historical context in the construction of an analytics of state power.

Notes 1. These reflections include texts such as: The Critique of Hegel’s “Philosophy of Right (and the Introduction),” On the Jewish Question, The German Ideology, the Manifesto of the Communist Party, Poverty of Philosophy, the Preface to a Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, the third volume of Capital, Anti-Dühring, The Civil War in France, Engels’s letters on historical materialism. 2. Bob Jessop, The Capitalist State. Marxist Theories and Methods (Oxford, 1982); Bob Jessop, State Power (Cambridge, 2008); Bob Jessop, “Marxist Approaches to Power,” in The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Political Sociology, ed. E. Amenta, K. Nash and A. Scott (Oxford, 2012), pp. 3–14; Bob Jessop, “El estado y el

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poder,” in Utopía y praxis latinoamericana 19 (2014), pp. 19– 35; Bob Jessop, “Marx y el estado,” in Vientosur 158 (2018), pp. 60–69. 3. Jessop, The Capitalist State. Marxist Theories and Methods, p. 7. 4. Ibid., p. 8. 5. Michael Brie, Sozialist-Werden. Friedrich Engels in Manchester und Barmen (Berlin, 2019); Martín Mazora, Marx un discípulo de Engels. Una nueva lectura de la génesis del marxismo (Buenos Aires, 2017). 6. While Marx was writing his 1844 Paris manuscripts, Engels denounces the intrinsic connection between the state and capitalist form of relations. Marx-Engels-Werke, vol. 21 (Berlin, 1962), pp. 522–523. Marx-Engels-Werke, vol. 1 (Berlin, 1956), p. 522. I am quoting from Marx-Engels-Werke MEW , different volumes (OstBerlin, 1956) ff. Page references in the following refer to the pages of the German edition. 7. MEW , vol. 2, p. 430. 8. MEW , vol. 20, p. 241. 9. Jessop, The Capitalist State. Marxist Theories and Methods, p. 10. 10. MEW , vol. 21, p. 160. 11. MEW , vol. 1; MEW , vol. 21, p. 165. 12. Jessop, The Capitalist State. Marxist Theories and Methods, p. 12. 13. MEW , vol. 1, p. 214. 14. MEW , vol. 21, p. 162. 15. Jessop, The Capitalist State. Marxist Theories and Methods, p. 13. 16. MEW , vol. 21, p. 167. 17. Ibid., p. 165. An interesting example of the reformulation of Marx’s early critique of the Hegelian state and the state-civil society relationship is Gramsci’s conception of the integral state. Alternatively, to the interpretation of Marx understanding of the state-civil society antagonist relation in capitalist societies, Gramsci’s conception of the “integral state” posits an interconnection and necessarily unstable unity of the state and civil society, where the latter is integrated under the leadership of the former. The integral state can be understood as the complex oppositions, contraction and connections between capitalist social relations, civil society, political society and the state apparatus. Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks (New York, 2007), Q6, §24, pp. 20–21; Q6, §88, p. 75; Q6, §155, p. 117.

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18. MEW , vol. 21, p. 164. 19. Ibid. 20. Jessop, The Capitalist State. Marxist Theories and Methods, p. 18. 21. MEW , vol. 21, p. 165. 22. MEW , vol. 3, p. 25. 23. MEW , vol. 21, p. 167. 24. Jessop, The Capitalist State. Marxist Theories and Methods, p. 20. 25. Jessop, “Marxist Approaches to Power,” p. 3. 26. Jessop, “El estado y el poder,” p. 24. 27. Jessop, “Marxist Approaches to Power,” p. 5. 28. Jessop, “Marxist Approaches to Power,” in The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Political Sociology. 29. Jessop, “Marxist Approaches to Power,” p. 7. 30. MEW , vol. 25, p. 822. 31. MEW , vol. 21, p. 167. 32. MEW , vol. 3, p. 405. 33. Foucault, Society Must Be Defended (New York 2003), p. 13. 34. Ibid. 35. Ibid., p. 14. 36. Foucault’s genealogical theory of power traced the notion of power in the history of sovereignty. Power conceived as law and prohibition has its historical development in the monarchical power over the feudal power, through the emergence of the state and its final disposition of the monarchical state by the bourgeoisie, in securing a system of rights that would permit it to give form to economic exchanges that assured its own social development. “In other words, the West never had another system of representation, expression or analysis of power aside from that of rights, the system of law” (Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, p. 4). 37. Foucault, “The Mesh of Power,” in View Point Magazine, September 2012, https://www.viewpointmag.com/2012/ 09/12/the-mesh-of-power/. 38. Werner Goldschmidt (I.), Jan Rehmann (II.), Birgit Sauer (III.), “Macht,” in HKWM 8/II (2015) pp. 1485–1541. 39. Foucault is referring to the second volume of volume 1 of Capital, but since the French translation had been published in multiple volumes by Éditions Sociales, Foucault reference points to volume 1 (MEW , vol. 23), consisting of sections 4, 5, and 6, (Die Produktion des relativen Mehrwerts, Die Produktion des absoluten und

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relative Mehrwerts, Der Arbeitslohn) and contains the material on manufacture that he refers to in Discipline and Punish. 40. Jessop, “El estado y el poder,” p. 20. 41. Ibid., p. 2. 42. Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, p. 28. 43. Jessop, State Power (Cambridge, 2008), p. 146. 44. Foucault, “The Mesh of Power,” p. 36. 45. Ibid., p. 36. 46. Though maybe the most relevant, as Foucault will further elaborate in Security, Territory, Population (1977–1978) and in The Birth of Biopolitics (1978–1979). Foucault’s analysis on state phobia as a strategy of neoliberal governmentality warns us of the risks of understanding power and resistance primarily in terms of antistatism. Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics. Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–79 (New York, 2008).

Bibliography Brie, Michael. Sozialist-Werden. Friedrich Engels in Manchester und Barmen (Berlin: Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, 2019). Foucault, Michel. Society Must Be Defended (New York: Penguin, 2003). Foucault, Michel. The Birth of Biopolitics. Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978– 79 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). Goldschmidt, Werner, Jan Rehmann and Birgit Sauer. “Macht.” HistorischKritisches Wörterbuch des Marxismus 8/II (2015), pp. 1485–1541. Gramsci, Antonio. Prison Notebooks (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007). Jessop, Bob. “Marxist Approaches to Power.” In The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Political Sociology, edited by Edwin Amenta, Kate Nash, and Alan Scott (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), pp. 3–14. Jessop, Bob. State Power (Cambridge: Polity, 2008). Jessop, Bob. The Capitalist State. Marxist Theories and Methods (Oxford: WileyBlackwell, 1982). Mazora, Martín. Marx un discípulo de Engels. Una nueva lectura de la génesis del marxismo (Buenos Aires: Jarge Baudino, 2017).

CHAPTER 13

Re-Reading Engels in the Twenty-First Century: State, Nationalism, and Internationalism Michael Forman

Despite, or perhaps because of, the unfolding of neoliberal capitalism, globalism, and the attendant growth in international migrations, recent years have seen the resurgence of revanchist nationalism in liberal democracies, from India and Brazil to the United States and Europe. Whether posing as representatives of the working class, of the “true nation,” or “the common man,” these movements remain well-grounded in a capitalist order whose neoliberal regime of accumulation and hegemonic coalitions have lost legitimacy.1 Coming at a time when problems of a planetary scale, such as climate change, the multiplication of post-colonial conflicts, global pandemics, and international hegemonic transition, the resurgence of nationalism

M. Forman (B) University of Washington, Tacoma, WA, USA e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 T. Carver and S. Rapic (eds.), Friedrich Engels for the 21st Century, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-97138-0_13

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represents an important political and theoretical challenge made all the more significant by the fact that these movements cloak themselves in the language of the democratic republic while pursuing an often racist project which would destroy any substance of human rights or popular sovereignty. The political theory of Friedrich Engels, I want to propose, contains useful tools to advance our understanding of the contemporary crisis and the role of nationalism in this crisis. While it is still common to suggest that historical materialism has always been deaf to the appeal of nationalism, there is significant evidence that this is not the case. Marx and the critique of capitalism that he and Engels inaugurated have always had a concern with nationalism.2 Mostly peripheral in Karl Marx’s writings, this concern is central in many of Engels’s, because they consider the importance of nationalism as an alternative form of solidarity and a crucial element in the construction of the bourgeois state. For Engels, grasping the origins and appeal of nationalism was crucial to the politics of socialist transformation to which he devoted his scholarship and political practice. In his long partnership with Marx, Engels specialized in certain issues such as the family, the state, and nations and nationalism. Engels well understood that proletarian solidarity, both within the confines of each country and across borders, was a political question. Workers had to organize as a class and they had to build institutions such as parties and the International Working Men’s Association (First International— IWMA) if they were to confront the power of capital and the attraction of nationalism. The Communist Manifesto’s claim that “working men have no country” notwithstanding, it was always clear that national and ethnic allegiances loomed large as potential alternative forms of solidarity. This was not because such allegiances were “natural,” but because they had the advantage of the backing of the state and, for the most part, of domestic bourgeoisies for whose political organization it was crucial. Consequently, advancing the socialist project called for an understanding of the relationship between state formation, nations, nationalism, and capital. This was a central concern for Engels, who bequeathed to us important conceptual tools we can deploy to understand the resurgence of nationalism, particularly ethnic nationalism, in the twenty-first century. To wield these tools, however, we must engage with some of Engels’s own errors as well as the differences between the concrete situation he confronted and our own. To this end, I will first reconstruct Engels’s account of nations, nationalism, and their relationship to state formation

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and the politics of class struggle. Here, I hope to show, Engels elaborates a powerful theory which draws on categories derived from the French Revolution as it deploys the method of historical materialism. This method, however, calls for concrete engagement with given historical conjunctures. Thus, in the second section of this chapter, I will address the issues Engels missed and outline some of the distinctive elements of our epoch to illustrate both the limitations and the enduring qualities of Engels’s analysis.

Engels in the Nineteenth Century The intellectual roots of historical materialism include not only idealism and political economy, but also the normative categories associated with the historical events of the French Revolution of 1789. The Revolution, in effect, framed the values (liberty, equality, solidarity) that informed all early socialists and provided much of the political language and iconography for their discourse well into the late nineteenth century.3 For Engels, in particular, the République française of the Great Revolution exemplified both the potential and the limitations of a new political form, the nation-state. Beyond this, the battles of 1848 served to demarcate new lines of conflict and to offer practical experience. It was also in response to these that Engels and Marx confronted the political quandaries of the very first (failed) proletarian revolution. Finally, the rise and demise of the IWMA provided an institutional referent for the internationalist position. Borrowing Nancy Hartsock’s characterization, Marxism may be thought of as putting the “unity of outrage and observation” at the centre of a theory whose categories are in a constant interaction with practice.4 If in 1789 the outrage came from the poor people of Paris and their demand for popular sovereignty, by the middle of the nineteenth century it came from a new democratic force, the class of wage-workers. Even before his association with Marx, Engels observed the oppression and demands of this class and took sides with it in his first major work.5 It was this new force, well organized in England, significant in France and the Low Countries, but barely in its infancy in the German lands, that would pick up the struggle for democracy and human emancipation which the bourgeoisie had dropped in 1848.6 Along with Marx, Engels discerned a contest between a capitalism that was global in origin but rooted in states and a working class whose allegiances ought to be internationalist. Later, Marx and Engels saw in the

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First International an organization that furthered the proletarian cause by fostering international solidarity over nationalist concerns: the proletariat came into being in a national context, but its struggle had a cosmopolitan purpose and an internationalist practice. As Engels reiterated during the early years of the Second International: “[T]hat eternal union of the proletarians of all countries created by [the IWMA] is still alive and lives stronger than ever … [b]ecause today … the European and American proletariat is reviewing its fighting forces, mobilised for the first time, mobilised as one army, under one flag … as proclaimed by the Geneva Congress of the International in 1866, and again by the Paris Workers’ Congress in 1889.”7 Already in the Manifesto, Marx and Engels had argued that the struggle against the bourgeoisie had to be carried out in internationalist solidarity before a globalizing bourgeoisie. Normatively, this meant that it had to be informed by a cosmopolitan sensibility apt of actualization in the context of existing states. In effect, from its very beginnings in renaissance Italy, a global impulse had been central to capitalist accumulation. This drive would bring capitalist accumulation to the most remote corners of the planet. Yet this was not a simple linear development. Bourgeois internationalism was not the only product of the extension of capitalist relations. Despite the “cosmopolitan character” the bourgeoisie had given to production, this class had also created, or at least conquered, the modern representative state to regulate the modern capitalist economy. It was through this state, or, rather, through its executive, that the bourgeoisie “manag[ed] its common affairs.”8 This representative state was the republic, first proclaimed by the French Revolution of 1789. There, the nation would be formally represented and the republic would be the stage for the battle of democracy the proletariat had to win. This was a position Engels held to for the remainder of his life. In effect, Engels would always see in the democratic republic both a vehicle for social transformation and a battlefield. As vehicle for social transformation, the formal unity of the nation would become the democratization of the political order. As battlefield, it would be the stage for revolutionary transformation. Engels often returned to this position. For example, in an 1892 essay on the socialist position on democracy in Italy, he wrote that “the democratic republic is the only political form in which the struggle between the working class and the capitalist class can first be universalized and then culminate in the decisive victory of the proletariat.”9 The proletarian movement, in his view, would support

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the establishment of democratic republics not because it believed in some abstract norm of national sovereignty, but because republican forms were necessary to its own goals. The distinction is important because, along with the independence of Ireland and Poland, Italian unification had been among the causes célèbres of the nineteenth century and Engels shared these positions. Yet, he did not think of these drives, or of the unification of Germany in ethnic terms, as the real goals. He sought to clarify this view in a series of notes on the relationship between the decline of feudalism and the emergence of national states. His treatment of this issue relied on linguistic and anthropological evidence and was largely consistent with the approach he took to the history of the Germans in his 1878–1882 notes on the topic.10 In both pieces, Engels traced the development of German nationality by following linguistic evidence as presented by most sources, from Roman historians to nineteenth-century linguists. The latter, in particular, suggested that the geo-political divisions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries largely corresponded to Roman boundary lines. Yet, as a theorist, Engels went beyond to argue that “modern nationalities are … the product of the oppressed classes.”11 The oppressed classes in question were the peasantry and the emergent bourgeoisie in their struggles with the aristocracies. Language boundaries were important and they were not the mechanical product of economic forces. This is to say that, although Engels placed much of the explanatory burden on the development of the forces and relations of production, he thought the process was conditioned by the availability of cultural-historical elements for new purposes. Language and ethnic boundaries were something akin to Weber’s “elective affinity”: they facilitated rather than determined processes of state and nation formation. As early as the ninth century, Engels held, the emerging feudal states followed roughly the boundaries of language: “[I]t was natural for the linguistic groups to serve as the existent basis for the formation of states; for the nationalities to start developing into nations.”12 It was natural not because cultural and linguistic groups were entitled to become states or because sovereignty as such meant freedom, but because the historical task of monarchs was to forge centralized states by confronting the nobility and rival monarchs with the aid of the emerging urban middle classes. The process of state, and so national, consolidation was under way across Europe by the sixteenth century. Yet, well into the nineteenth century there remained two countries, Italy and Germany, “in which the monarchy and the

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national unity that was then impossible without it, either did not exist or existed only on paper.”13 Engels’s concern here remains an important question for modern historiography: the emergence of the system of states which became associated with the Peace of Westphalia. The treaties with which the European states more or less ended their hostilities and regulated their behaviour after 1648 ratified an arrangement whereby sovereigns were deemed juridically equal and sovereign within their territories. While, in practice, these formal standards were never realized, the juridical principles they introduced would become normative on a planetary scale by the twentieth century. The historical uniqueness and spread of this system have been amply documented and closely examined by later historians concerned with the emergence of the modern system of nation-states.14 Engels’s notes present us with an important and unfortunately incomplete effort to address these questions. In some ways, they went beyond later historians to offer explanations for why one particular set of arrangements and borders resulted from the conflicts that marked the end of the Middle Ages. Why did states associated with certain population groupings emerge? Why, for example, not multinational states? Some, such as the Habsburg Empire in fact did endure. But they were unstable, and in good measure owed their position to the need that more powerful states had for them in the balance-of-power diplomacy that evolved. Similarly, why did some peoples provide the bases for the establishment of successful state-building monarchies while others did not? Engels’s answers to questions such as these may be unsatisfactory, but one virtue of his approach is that it permitted him to ask them, because he did not take it for granted that transhistorical nations necessarily generated states or were entitled to them. Two elements turn out to be crucial here: the significance Engels attributed to force, and the distinction he drew between nationhood and nationality or ethnicity. Although the concurrent emergence of merchant capitalism played a crucial role in the development of the Westphalian system and its component states (“the Burgers of the towns had already become more indispensable to society than the feudal nobility”15 ), the central dynamic was political power. Because of their monetized wealth, the burghers constituted an ally and a resource for monarchies. These, in turn, were important for the new bourgeoisie, because they “stood for order amid disorder, the nation in the process of formation as opposed to disintegration into rebellious vassal states”; consequently these consolidating

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monarchies stood for “the progressive element” of history.16 Engels understood the importance of solidarity and saw that the monarchy offered a focus of solidarity against the centrifugal forces embodied in the feudal nobility. Once new military technologies gave infantry the upper hand, the monarchy was able to triumph by tapping into the resources of the burghers. In the event, one of the main factors that made the monarchy function as the new focus of solidarity was its ability to shape preexisting linguistic entities into nations. This was largely a mistake in historical and theoretical terms. In Engels’s view, the historical function of absolutism consisted precisely in the creation of national states. Still, he seemed to think that consolidating monarchs relied on preexisting national languages and cultures. This was not the case. While there were linguistic affinities in European regions, the various dialects were often mutually incomprehensible and the mores of peasants, no less than the legal systems under which they lived and toiled, were largely localized. Early consolidators, thus, launched academies of language and science and became patrons of the arts just as they consolidated the legal systems and institutions of kingdoms. Yet even in France where Louis XIII had established the Académie française, the process was far from complete by the time of the Revolution of 1789. It was the Revolution itself that attempted to create a national educational system for these purposes. The process of nation– building then involved not only the standardization of languages, but also the suppression of alternative modes of expression and culture. Contrary to later myths about long existing nations, force has played the crucial role in Europe, and since then elsewhere in the formation of nations. This, of course, is consistent with Engels’s analysis and more in keeping with historical materialism than some of his own earlier writing.17 In the event, Engels was very much aware of the importance of coercion and violence in the creation of states and nations. He addressed some of these issues in an 1887–1888 manuscript, posthumously published in Die Neue Zeit, and known as The Role of Force in History. Its purpose was to “apply our theory to contemporary German history and its use of force, its policy of blood and iron,” in short, to explain why Bismarck had to invade France in order to unify Germany. Engels argued that the arrangements of the Congress of Vienna (1815) went against the long term tendency to form “a Europe composed of large national states,” where the bourgeoisie could rule in constitutional republics and prepare

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the way for the “establishment of harmonious international co-operation between peoples, without which the rule of the proletariat is impossible.” Consequently, the division of Germany and Italy into small states, the subjugation of Hungary, and the partition of Poland stood in the way of history and peace. It is only from this perspective that Engels held that “each people must be independent and master in their own house.”18 From these premises, Engels went on to argue that the unification of Germany had been the product of larger historical trends that worked themselves out both through and in spite of the specific arrangements of the Congress of Vienna, which Bismarck manipulated to Prussian advantage. The emergent German bourgeoisie’s need for larger markets, and the national consciousness awakened by the Napoleonic invasions, had run into two barriers. First was the persistence of two conflicting states, Prussia and Austria; and, second, the rise of the proletariat had weakened the position of the bourgeoisie in a rapidly industrializing Germany. Of course, already by 1846 the bourgeoisie had chosen to cast its lot with Prussia because of the latter’s relation to the customs union, and because it had “two good institutions ahead of other large states: universal conscription and universal compulsory education.”19 Universal conscription and the rational organization of its army gave Prussia the upper hand within German lands, as it demonstrated first against Denmark, then against Austria, finally against France. Universal public education made a large number of people available to resolve one of the key barriers to German industrialization: the shortage of qualified personnel to fill supervisory positions.20 Finally, the political weakness of the German bourgeoisie meant that, despite its dominant economic position, it had been unable to triumph over Bismarck, so it had to settle for “the revolutionising of Germany from above.”21 Thus, the political history of Europe and the development of the capitalist mode of production in Germany called for a sovereign national state in central Europe. However, in contrast to France, the task of nationbuilding in Germany fell on Bismarck, who took it on as a process of annexation rather than consolidation. This meant that a number of issues, not least cultural issues, were left unresolved. Of special importance in this respect was Bismarck’s effort to ensure that the German lands would be Prussianized under Junker leadership. This, according to Engels, would require that the Junkers be transformed, despite their own inclinations, into the core of a party with a national ideology. Because the old upper

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classes lacked this ideology, Bismarck attempted to provide it through a policy of Kulturkampf (1871–1875), whereby he initiated an attack on separatist elements associated with the Catholic church and the Center Party. This, Engels held, was necessary to confront the even more radical working class forces then emerging.22 Unfortunately, the manuscript breaks off at this point, and we are left to speculate on how Engles would see the subsequent emergence of a national policy and what the consequences of its failure to develop would be. This failure is important because Engels never explored what the consequences of unification through annexation might mean for the political development of the German working class. There are, however, a number of indications as to where Engels might have gone with this. The development of capitalism remained the main factor, but other elements were also important, not the least among them was nationality. Again, this was important not because nations and nationalism were an autonomous force, but because they provided elements on which bourgeois states could be built and proletarian parties aiming to conquer the state might act. To understand this, we need to go back to Engels’s early work. There Engels observed that capitalism was a new way of life. It produced novel patterns of social interaction and brought different peoples into contact, thereby transforming the experience of everyday life, producing new conflicts. In effect, while the development of the new forces of production called for large state, the entailing social disruption precluded the solidarity necessary for the establishment of republics and the battle for democracy. Already in 1845, before his association with Marx, Engels had addressed the migration of the Irish and highlighted the subsequent ethnic tensions in England. Poverty pushed the Irish out of Ireland, and the relatively higher wages prevailing in England pulled them there. Irish immigrants made up “a reserve of labour,” living in dire poverty and consequently available at significantly lower wages than the English workers with whom they competed for jobs. While, as workers, Irish immigrants shared a class interest with their English counterparts, their availability to English capitalists served to depress wages and standards of living. Not surprisingly, then, tensions around ethnicity competed with class solidarity and put nationalism on the political agenda. Meanwhile, the English migration to Ireland was replacing the stagnant agriculture prevalent there with a more productive commercial agriculture. This, of course, also displaced the resident population and accelerated their impoverishment and emigration. Ireland, he continued,

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“has no cause to be grateful to the English immigrants. On the other hand the Irish immigrants in England have added an explosive force to English society which will have significant consequences in due course.”23 Solidarity was never spontaneous for Engels. Whether speaking of the solidarity of a nation or a class, Engels always meant the unity established through a political project rather than a problematic of essential identity. Both forms of solidarity arose from political projects. The working class self-consciousness of common interests and historical mission was disrupted by existential and experiential concerns. Similarly, la grande nation, the nation of the French Revolution, was a political project. It was not what we would call ethnicity or language that made it into a reality. Rather, la grande nation resulted from a political project where the people would come into being to exercise self-rule. It is thus that Engels observed that during the French Revolution, the German speakers of Alsace and Lorraine were as committed, if not more so, to the republic as French speakers. If the nation was very much a political entity, it could not exist without an institutional order, a superstructure. A nation presupposed a state. In his first major work after the death of Marx, The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, Engels made this point as he explored the relationship between juridical forms and the changing division of labor. In ancient Athens, he claimed, Theseus’s constitution had centralized authority, thereby fusing the tribes “into one single nation” with a civil law “which stood above the legal customs of the tribes and gentes.”24 Similarly, the growing differentiation of dialects in the wake of the dissolution of the Roman Empire resulted in the “elements of new nations” that nonetheless lacked the “strength to fuse these elements into new nations,” because the social division labour had not developed sufficiently.25 But, once there was a “cleavage of society into classes,” it would call forward an organization “grouping its members on a territorial basis ” and instituted as “a public force … no longer identical with the people’s own organization of themselves as an armed force.” This, in his estimation, was a state. The state, then, was not rooted in a moral idea or a set of customs but in irreconcilable social differences which it sought to contain as it fused its population into a nation. It was not custom or language that had made nations and underpinned states, but states which had made nations.26 Understood this way, Engels’s strongest claims about, for example, the primacy of material life are readily explainable in political terms. The solidarity of the proletariat as a class was always in question, always

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fragile. It was something that had to be sustained through political action and discursive intervention. Similarly, internationalism was not the automatic product of shared position in the relations of production; it was a matter of praxis. This was especially the case because internationalism, no less than the grande nation, was vulnerable to appeals to prejudices and commonalities of descent that really did not further the interests of working people. Thus, writing about anti–Semitism in 1890, Engels could both say that it had lost its social validity in places where “old social distinctions resolve themselves in the one great antithesis-capitalists and wage labourers,” and that it “is merely the reaction of declining medieval social strata … so that all it serves are reactionary ends under a purportedly socialist cloak.”27 Whether his assessment of the sources of anti-Semitism is correct or not (it is not), the important point for our exploration of Engels’s ideas is that hatreds are potentially political responses rooted in declining, but nonetheless established, sectors. And these hatreds then function as foci for solidarity. Appeals to prejudice and ethnicity might only serve to misdirect proletarian energies, but they were nonetheless effective and so a matter of concern for the workers’ movement and its institutions. The same could be said of nationalist appeals. In any case, nationality, understood in terms of ethnicity, was not the necessary basis for a nation. Most great nations, in fact, included more than one nationality, and the version of the national question Engels was concerned with was the claim to the loyalty of their citizens that states made. It was unavoidable, particularly in the view of the older Engels, that workers would be attracted by these appeals as long as they forgot the class nature of even the democratic republic. In fact, the democratic republic was the “highest form of the state,” where the “possessing class rules directly by means of universal suffrage,” relying on the cooperation of the working class as long as it remained immature.28 Engels, then, offered a sophisticated account of the importance of nations and nationalism in state formation and for socialist politics. His analysis combined outrage at the conditions of capitalist production with observation of the practices that came to constitute the late nineteenthcentury order, all with a view to the strategies the labour movement might adopt in its efforts to build the proletarian consciousness of a class for itself. Yet from the perspective of the twenty-first century, there are some glaring gaps.

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In this regard, it is especially surprising and significant that Engels never addressed the fact that, even before the Berlin Conference of 1884, the major European powers were engaged in a second round of imperialism which would soon engulf much of Asia and the Pacific, and almost all of Africa. This new round of colonialism would invigorate nationalisms among the workers and peasants of the colonial powers and appeal to their racist attitudes. Similarly, Engels did not address the inevitable divisions among the bourgeoisie which would shape the political scene once the efforts of European social democracy to expand the franchise succeeded. It is to these issues, which can no longer be ignored, that the rest of this chapter turns.

Engels in the Twenty-First Century Looking back on Engels’s observations in outrage, two omissions and one potential avenue for development stand out. Most surprisingly, in his writings on nationalism Engels never confronted one of the key issues of his day, imperialism. Less unexpectedly, perhaps, Engels did not explore the consequences of the political integration of the working class into the democratic republic. Finally, Engels’s explorations of the relationship between capitalism and nationalism do not sufficiently address the role of the interstate system in shaping states themselves. It is to these issues that I now turn. A little more than one year after the death of Marx, representatives of the United Kingdom, France, Belgium, Germany, and ten other powers met in Berlin to rationalize the colonization of Africa. Of course, the scramble for Africa (and parts of Asia) was already well underway, but the Berlin Conference placed it on a new footing and opened new lines of conflict from which millions died and major wars resulted, both in the colonies and between the great powers. While other factors, such as the need for markets, resources, and new areas for accumulation by dispossession, accounted for the imperial push, nationalism played a role.29 Appeals to national pride were crucial to recruiting troops and ensuring domestic support in the core countries. The potential of such appeals to rouse the demons of war and divide the working classes was evidenced in the debates at every subsequent congress of the Second International. While some socialist parties eventually declared against imperial projects, there were splits which had an impact on their development and subsequent events. Finally, the nationalism associated with the conquest of Africa and

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portions of Asia was accompanied by appeals to the “civilizing mission of the white race” and “scientific racism” that continue to impact political conflicts to our day. When W. E. B. Dubois observed that “the problem of the Twentieth Century was the problem of the color line,” he had mind much more than racism in the United States: his outrage was also directed at the imperialism of the age.30 Second, the political incorporation of the working class through the suffrage had not proceeded very far when Engels wrote much of his work on nations and nationalism at mid-century. By the end of the nineteenth century, however, this was changing. The stage for the battle for democracy was set when, in good part because of the struggles of socialist parties, the suffrage was extended to most adult men in the major countries and especially in those at the forefront of the imperial expansion. The result was plain in the revisionism debates that took place within and among most major political parties and movements of the left in the final decade of the nineteenth century. The extension of the suffrage offered new possibilities, but it also set up a situation where these political parties would have to abide by the rules to open up new possibilities for their constituencies. These in turn were able to secure a measure, albeit a small one, of distributive justice. More important, for our current exploration of Engels’s contribution to the theory of the nation, workers could now see themselves as part of self–legislating publics and these in turn could be presented as communities of descent calling on their members’ loyalty and limiting the appeal of class consciousness. In this respect, protest against military and imperial adventures became another way of integrating the working class into the political and social order.31 The extension of democratic institutions to incorporate the working class also affected the activities of the traditional bourgeois parties which now had to appeal to new constituencies and forge new electoral coalitions at least in part by appealing to shared national identities to pursue other projects. Indeed, the ruling class does not rule in today’s democratic republic, at least not directly.32 Given universal suffrage as well normative expectations resulting from well over a century of popular struggles, it is political elites who rule more or less on behalf of the bourgeoisie. As we have seen, Engels was aware of the possibility that the dominant class would not be the same as the ruling class: in his account of The Role of Force he made it plain that it was Bismarck and the Junkers who came to rule on behalf of the German bourgeoisie and to rely on a newly constructed nationalism to

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further its projects. Yet, there is another problem here: there is no reason to believe that, at least in the normal course of events, the bourgeoisie of a given country could unite behind a given programme. This is partly because the short to mid-term interests of different sectors of capital (e.g. manufacturing and finance) do not necessarily coincide. Furthermore, even were interests to coincide perfectly, differences in values and views among a more secure bourgeoisie mean that there is no reason to expect that the factional conflicts similar to those that have always plagued the left do not arise among capitalists. Engels, as his prefaces to Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire and The Civil War in France suggest, was also aware of this possibility but did not extend this analysis to the importance nationalism might take on in the context of popular politics. A liberal bourgeoisie, for example, might line up behind its own ideas of justice and internationalism, while their conservative brethren seek to advance an exclusionary politics of nationalism and even racism. In both cases, in the democratic republics such programmes can only proceed by enlisting broad constituencies. Such has been the case with the pursuit of neoliberalism since the early 1980s. In order to rule, political elites adopting specific programmes must forge coalitions, what Nancy Fraser, evoking Gramsci, has called “hegemonic blocs.”33 Even before the end of the Cold War, as the crises of the Keynesian welfare state loomed, a new agenda was constructed around the primacy of financial capital. This new agenda would rely on a mixture of bourgeois internationalism and nationalist symbolism proclaiming the national interest. Particularly in the United States which took over the leadership of the neoliberal agenda from Britain, this project would be furthered by two distinct blocs whose agenda coincided in the main, but whose political bases were different. One of them sought the support of relatively privileged groups around a traditionalist, misogynistic, and often outright racist programme which always built on envious distinctions to explain the increasing insecurities resulting from neoliberal policies. Fraser terms this “Reactionary Neoliberalism,” a position initially associated with Ronald Reagan in the United States and Margaret Thatcher in Britain. The other, “Progressive Neoliberalism,” sought to integrate and transform the demands of social movements associated with long excluded groups such as women and racial and sexual minorities. This position was associated with the so–called Third Way of Bill Clinton and Tony Blair. It resulted in various degrees of abandonment of their traditional constituencies by socialist and social democratic parties in the west and

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beyond. Today neoliberalism faces a crisis of legitimacy, both because of the attendant deindustrialization of the global north, and because it has also displaced peasant masses in the global south, leading to migrations similar to those Engels discussed in his account of the Irish in England at the mid–century. Engels would not have been surprised by the conflicts over immigration which have ensued. The crisis of legitimacy of neoliberalism became apparent during the 2007–2010 great recession, with the rise of the global Occupy Wall Street movement which challenged its practices and ideology, and attracted support from traditional working class organizations. Occupy, however, was more refusal than coherent movement with clear analysis and organization so its appeal could open the door to other agendas.34 This became clear with the election of Donald Trump in the United States and the British exit from the European Union, both promoted by elites claiming to represent “the people” against obscure conspiracies of sinister elites bent on undermining the nation. In effect, the rhetoric of “economic nationalism” and the promotion of anti-immigrant sentiment, racism, and antisemitism effectively divided a much more diversified working class than Engels ever witnessed.35 There were precedents in the reactionary neoliberal experiments already underway, especially in Poland and Hungary, and in sympathetic movements and parties across Europe, South America, and South Asia. All of these may still pursue neoliberal policies, though perhaps not as dogmatically as their predecessors. The point here is that Engels elaborated a theory of nationalism and its potential to detract from a socialist project of human emancipation. However, the complex connections between nationalism, racism and imperialism, and neoliberalism and global capitalism in the context of democracy require a careful reconsideration of his contribution. The extension of political rights to the working class may offer important opportunities for a socialist agenda, for the battle for democracy, but it also integrates the traditional constituencies of the labour movement into the social order. This is especially the case in times of crisis when dominant interests may use the attendant sense of belonging to the national community as a means of promoting their own agendas. Finally, Engels’s account of the modern state does not sufficiently consider its object in terms of the international environment in which it is constituted. If Engels elaborated a theory of nationalism, he did not elaborate a theory of internationalism. Of course, Engels and the

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tradition he and Marx founded always proclaimed class solidarity across borders. Yet, the entire tradition is void of a concrete analysis of internationalism and how this form of solidarity might be elaborated in the face of actual developments. Of course, Engels was aware of international power politics, as his account of the failure to unite Germany and Italy during the early modern period indicates. Furthermore, certainly by the time of the establishment of the Second International, he was worried about the potential for an all out war in Europe and the need to organize the working class against this possibility. Yet, there is little doubt that in his view states once established were mostly autarchic. Despite the predominance of Britain for much of the century, there was no sense in his writings of an international order which generated norms and practices out of its distribution of economic and military power and the political choices of state elites. Such an order clearly exists today. Some have even spoken of a “voluntary empire,” where the United States acts to ensure the viability of the international order.36 This order, too, is facing changes, such as the relative decline of the United States, the proliferation of conflicts, global pandemics, mass migrations resulting from these conflicts, and increasingly from climate change. Such transformations of the international order, in turn, present us with the opportunity to elaborate a theory of internationalism in the face of the revival of nationalism. Yet in this, Engels provides little help, because he never examines how notions of democracy might extend beyond the borders and territories claimed by states. Solidarity also requires institutions.

Conclusions Engels constructed a sophisticated analysis of the importance nations and nationalism in state formation, capitalist development, and socialist politics. His analysis combined outrage at the conditions of capitalist production with observation of the practices that came to constitute the late nineteenth-century order. His was world of free trade and self–regulating markets where the notion of rights restricted itself to those of property in the countries at the centre of capitalist modernity. Nationstates themselves were relatively new institutional formations. The rest of the planet, or more precisely its population, was subsumed under colonial rule or remained outside capitalist structures.

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Any treatment of the revival of nationalism in the twenty-first century must take the above factors into account. Still, my own discussion of these factors and the sketch of the current situation that I offer are deeply indebted to the method that Engels and Marx developed and deployed over their long literary partnership, and beyond. The importance of Engels in this collaboration cannot be overstressed.37 Engels, largely an autodidact with a limited formal education, was not the philosopher of the pair. He was, however, the more politically aware. His work was always informed by the concrete political situation within which the critique of capitalism and the pursuit of the socialist project took place. It is thus that his writings did much more than “popularize” Marx’s own, and he was much more than “Marx’s general.”38 His contribution to historical materialism in particular, and more generally to critical theory, was crucial and indispensable. And there are few areas in which it is not more important than in the theories of the nation and the state.

Notes 1. Nancy Fraser, “From Progressive Neoliberalism to Trump and Beyond,” in American Affairs Journal 4 (Winter 2017). https:// americanaffairsjournal.org/2017/11/progressive-neoliberalismtrump-beyond/. 2. I advance this argument in Nationalism and the International Labor Movement: The Idea of the Nation in Socialist and Anarchist Theory (University Park, PA 1998). 3. Axel Honneth, The Idea of Socialism, trans. J. Ganahl (Cambridge 2017). 4. Nancy C.M. Hartsock, The Feminist Standpoint Revisited and Other Essays (Boulder, CO 1998), p. 91. 5. The Condition of the Working Class in England, trans. W. O. Henderson/W. H. Chaloner (Stanford, CA 1958). 6. Stephen Eric Bronner, Socialism Unbound (New York 1990) pp. 7– 14. 7. Frederick [Friedrich] Engels, Preface to the Fourth German Edition (1890) of the Manifesto of the Communist Party, in MECW , vol. 27, p. 60. 8. Marx/Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, in Tucker (ed.): The Marx-Engels Reader, 2nd edn. (New York 1975) pp. 469–500, here p. 475.

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9. Engels, “Reply to the Honourable Giovanni Bovio,” in MECW , vol. 27, p. 271. For the part of Marx and Engels in the development of practices of popular sovereignty see August H. Nimtz, Jr., Marx and Engels, Their Contribution to the Democratic Breakthrough (Albany, NY 2000). 10. Engels, “Manuscripts on Early German History (August 1882),” in MECW , vol. 26, pp. 5–107. 11. Engels, “On the Decline of Feudalism and the Emergence of National States (1884),” in MECW , vol. 26, p. 559. 12. Ibid., p. 560. 13. Ibid., p. 565. 14. For example, Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times (New York 1994); Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (New York 1987); Charles Tilly (ed.), The Formation of National States in Western Europe (Princeton 1975); and Svere Bagge: State Formation in Europe, 843–1789: A Divided World (New York 2019). 15. Engels, “On the Decline of Feudalism and the Emergence of National States (1884),” p. 556. 16. Ibid., p. 561. 17. I refer here to a series of articles Engels had published in Neue Rheinische Zeitung, between 1847 and 1850, where he exhumed the Hegelian notion of the “nations without history.” For a discussion of this, see Michael Forman, Nationalism and the International Labor Movement: The Idea of the Nation in Socialist and Anarchist Theory (University PA 1998) pp. 52–59. 18. Engels, The Role of Force in History (1887), in MECW , vol. 26, p. 455. 19. Ibid., p. 470. 20. Ibid., p. 471. 21. Ibid., p. 499. 22. Ibid., pp. 508–510. 23. Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England, trans. W. O. Henderson/W. H. Chaloner. Stanford 1958, pp. 104–7, 306– 10. 24. Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, intro. by E. B. Leacock (New York 1972), p. 172. 25. Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, p. 208.

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26. Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, pp. 228–230. 27. Engels, “On Anti-Semitism,” in MECW , vol. 27, pp. 50–51. 28. Engels, Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, pp. 231–232. 29. Of course neither Engels nor Marx had a theory of imperialism, this had to await later work by Rosa Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital. Trans. Agnes Schwarzschild (London 1951); V.I. Lenin, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (London 1996); David Harvey, The Limits of Capital (London 2006); Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin, The Making of Global Capitalism (London 2013). 30. W.E.B. Dubois, The Souls of Black Folk. Introduction by Henry Louis Gates (New York 1989), p. xxxi. 31. For an account of these developments in the French context, Paul B. Miller, From Revolutionaries to Citizens: Antimilitarism in France, 1870–1914 (Durham, NC 2001). 32. Fred Block, “The Ruling Class Does Not Rule: Notes on the Marxist Theory of the State,” in Socialist Revolution 33 (1977) pp. 6–28. 33. Fraser, “From Progressive Neoliberalism to Trump.” op. cit. 34. I elaborate on this argument in “Marcuse in the Crisis of Neoliberalism: Revisiting the Occupation,” in A. Lamas/T. Wolfson/P. Funke (eds.), The Great Refusal: Herbert Marcuse and Contemporary Social Movements (Philadelphia 2016) pp. 29–54. 35. Michael Forman, “The Nationalist Temptation: Labor and the Crisis of Global Capitalism,” in New Labor Forum I (2018) pp. 1–7. 36. Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin, The Making of Global Capitalism: The Political Economy of American Empire (London 2012). 37. See for example Terrell Carver, Marx and Engels, The Intellectual Relationship (Brighton 1988). 38. Cf. Tristam Hunt, Marx’s General: The Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels (New York 2009).

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Bibliography Arrighi, Giovanni. The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times (New York: Verso, 1994). Bagge, Svere. State Formation in Europe, 843–1789: A Divided World (New York: Routledge, 2019). Bronner, Stephen Eric. Socialism Unbound (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990). Carver, Terrell. Marx and Engels: The Intellectual Relationship (Brighton: Harvester/Wheatsheaf, 1988). Dubois, W.E.B. The Souls of Black Folk. Introduction by Henry Louis Gates (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989). Engels, Friedrich. “Manuscripts on Early German History [August 1882].” In MECW , vol. 26, pp. 5–107. Engels, Friedrich. “On Anti-Semitism.” In MECW , vol. 27, pp. 50–52. Engels, Friedrich. “On the Decline of Feudalism and the Emergence of National States [1884].” In MECW , vol. 26, pp. 556–565. Engels, Friedrich. “Preface” to the Fourth German Edition [1890] of the Manifesto of the Communist Party. In MECW , vol. 27, p. 53–60. Engels, Friedrich. “Reply to the Honourable Giovanni Bovio.” In MECW , vol. 27, pp. 270–272. Engels, Friedrich. The Condition of the Working Class in England. Translated by W. O. Henderson and W. H. Chaloner (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1958). Engels, Friedrich. The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, introduction by E. B. Leacock (New York: Penguin, 1972). Engels, Friedrich. The Role of Force in History [1887]. In MECW , vol. 26, pp. 453–510. Forman, Michael. “Marcuse in the Crisis of Neoliberalism: Revisiting the Occupation.” In The Great Refusal: Herbert Marcuse and Contemporary Social Movements, edited by Andrew Lamas, Todd Wolfson, Peter Funke and Angela Y. Davis (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2016), pp. 29–54. Forman, Michael. “The Nationalist Temptation: Labor and the Crisis of Global Capitalism.” In New Labor Forum I (2018), pp. 1–7. Forman, Michael. Nationalism and the International Labor Movement: The Idea of the Nation in Socialist and Anarchist Theory (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998). Hartsock, Nancy C.M. The Feminist Standpoint Revisited and Other Essays (New York: Routledge, 1998). Harvey, David. The Limits of Capital (London: Verso, 2006). Honneth, Axel. The Idea of Socialism. Translated by Joseph Ganahl (Cambridge: Polity, 2017).

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Hunt, Tristam. Marx’s General: The Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels (New York: Henry Holt, 2009). Kennedy, Paul. The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (New York: Random House, 1987). Lenin, V.I. Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (London: Progress, 1996). Luxemburg, Rosa. The Accumulation of Capital. Translated by Agnes Schwarzschild (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1951). Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. Manifesto of the Communist Party. In Robert C. Tucker (ed.), The Marx-Engels Reader. 2nd Edn (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1975), pp. 469–500. Miller, Paul B. From Revolutionaries to Citizens: Antimilitarism in France, 1870– 1914 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001). Nimtz, August H., Jr. Marx and Engels: Their Contribution to the Democratic Breakthrough (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000). Panitch, Leo, and Sam Gindin. The Making of Global Capitalism: The Political Economy of American Empir. (London: Verso, 2012). Tilly, Charles. Ed. The Formation of National States in Western Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975).

PART V

Engels and Literature

CHAPTER 14

The Proletariat and the “People”: Engels and the “Social Prose” of the 1840s Wolfgang Lukas

The years around 1840 marked an important threshold in Germanlanguage literature. Then for the first time the underclass became a central literary interest and subject in its own right. Earlier literature had, of course, represented the lower classes, their predicaments and problems, for example the Bildungsromane of the late Enlightenment. But around about 1840 we can speak of “social prose” for the first time in the genuine, more restricted sense of a new fictional genre which considers the classes beneath the bourgeoisie, be they urban or rural, factory workers or rural village labourers, in themselves and thus as a “class.”1 Like theoretical writings of this period, this literature was a reaction to the growing pauperization brought about by industrialization and the concomitant emergence of the so-called social question. As is wellknown, the heyday of this literature in Germany was very short, roughly

W. Lukas (B) Bergische University Wuppertal, Wuppertal, Germany e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 T. Carver and S. Rapic (eds.), Friedrich Engels for the 21st Century, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-97138-0_14

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ten years, lasting only until the first years of Nachmärz period. The new, so-called poetic-realist literature then became established from the 1850s at the latest. A notable characteristic of that literature was its strong strictures on what could be depicted. Certain areas of reality, including the social underclasses and social misery, according to these new aestheticpoetic norms, were no longer worthy of representation and thus became taboo. Social prose fell foul of these new restrictions. In my chapter, I will try to show some points of connection between the literature and the theoretical writings of the Vormärz period. To this end, I have selected three novels that mark the high point of the literature of social prose in the mid-1840s. These works were published or originated roughly contemporaneously with Engels’s early work The Condition of the Working Class in England. The works I will examine are: Ernst Adolf Willkomm’s Weisse Sclaven oder die Leiden des Volkes [White Slaves, or the Suffering of the People] (1845), Georg Weerth’s fragment of a novel (written 1845/1846) and Louise Otto-Peters’ Schloß und Fabrik [Castle and Factory] (1846). Through comparison, I will investigate the similarities and differences between these genres (fiction and theoretical writings) over and beyond direct lines of influences. But it is indisputable that there were such direct influences between these genres. The authors mentioned above all knew Engels’s writings. Weerth was celebrated by Engels as “the first and most important poet of the German proletariat,”2 and The Condition of the Working Class in England is cited in Weerth’s novel fragment. OttoPeter’s novel quotes verbatim from the 1845 Elberfeld lectures, including Engels’s contribution. These passages were subject to censorship.3 And Engels himself was very familiar with the then-contemporary literature, which he knew from reviews if not at first-hand. However, my interest is not so much in the reception of these authors’ works but rather in the question of how they respectively modelled the new social underclass. Modelling of reality is meant here in the sense of a historical discursive analysis that can be applied to both fictional and theoretical literature. Even Engels, as innovative and new as his study of the working classes was, did not write in a vacuum but wrote on the basis of specific, pre-given discursive influences and optics that are as apparent in his work as in works of fiction. But these two fields are also distinct to the extent that literature, be it “social,” “sociological” or even “socialist,” always aims at something other than social criticism. In this chapter, I will thus

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be concerned with how social differences are modelled and constructed in these different fields. More specifically, I will examine the following themes: • Social classes and constellations of conflict in “social” fiction. • The personalization and psychologization of the conflict. • The “narrative of industrialization”—the modelling and semantics of historical change.

Social Classes and the Constellations of Conflict in “Social” Fiction How are the worlds depicted in these texts socially structured or stratified? Where do we find the lines of conflict drawn? In the novels of this period, we usually discover a threefold division between the landowning nobility, the bourgeoise and the people [Volk], that is, proletariat, the social stratum beneath the bourgeoise. It is sometimes explicitly stated that this latter is a new “class.” For example, in Otto-Peters’s Schloß und Fabrik the bourgeois must first become aware “that beneath the class of bourgeoisie is an even lower class, which also makes up a large part of the people.”4 “Bourgeoisie” means the propertied class, including the factory owners, and it tends to designate the large-scale bourgeoisie. A notable variation on this theme can be found in the most wide-ranging novel treated here, Ernst Adolf Willkomm’s work in five parts and ten books, Weisse Sklaven oder die Leiden des Volkes. There the middle, bourgeois class is (only apparently) omitted. The novel plays out in two timeframes, in 1790 and in 1832 respectively, thus in a distant and a more recent past, and both in the immediate aftermath of two revolutions, the French revolution of 1789–95 and the July revolution in France of 1830, with the resulting unrest in Poland. The more recent past is thus almost the present. Willkomm thereby combines the historical and the social novel: the opposition between the nobility and the serfs in the past parallels the opposition between the bourgeois nobility [verbürgerlichter Adel ] and the working class in the present. The social structure of the reality represented is isomorphic, that is to say, the structure itself remains constant but simply acquires a new content over time.

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In both timeframes, there is also a significant group external to society. In the past timeframe, the onetime house tutor and educator, who has been cast out after a liaison with a noble patron’s sister, now lives in the woods leading a Robin Hood existence. He ultimately stands in solidarity with the people as opposed to the nobles. In the present-day timeframe, the urban demimonde of Hamburg, where a part of the novel plays out, makes up the stratum outside of society. But the members of this class are portrayed in an extremely negative fashion: criminals, murderers, thieves, pimps—the scum of modern big cities. Eugène Sue’s Mystères de Paris [Parisian Mysteries] is a well-known precedent for this. Even from this handful of references, we can see that this literature was not, as one might have expected, restricted to the opposition between capital and labour but also dealt with the nobility. In other words, it associates industrialization with the changeover from a traditional community based on landed estates to a modern bourgeois society, and it treats both the problems of the newly emergent proletariat and of the declining aristocracy. On an extra-literary, factual level, too, the front line of the economically more powerful bourgeoisie, who strove for political representation against the feudal order, was central to the Vormärz period. Weerth and also Otto-Peters mainly focus on the bourgeois owners, the new middle class that had established itself as the most significant social stratum. They portray this latter as embroiled in a twofold struggle to demarcate themselves, both from those above as well as from those below. Hence the factory owners strive for twofold domination, that is, not just over wage labourers but also over the nobility, who are to be rendered completely dependent on them. In both Weerth’s as well as Otto-Peters’s novels, the impoverished nobles have already had to sell off a large part of their land and property on which factories were then to be erected. The factory owners’ greatest triumph in Otto-Peters’s work lies in severing from their noble neighbours yet another piece of land on which to build yet another factory. In Weerth’s work, the factory owners, who bear the revealing term Preiss [Price], strive to buy the indebted Baron d’Eyncourt’s castle and garden, the last remnant of his family’s once proud estate. The loss of this castle, in which the old noble dynasty is present in every part and piece, is tantamount to the annihilation of the whole dynasty. This would be the greatest victory for the factory owners. This shows that the rising bourgeoisie was by no means merely intent on acquiring economic capital through financial gain, and

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indeed by exploiting the workforce, but also and more so on attaining the symbolic capital that was hitherto the exclusive property of nobility. By winning this, the bourgeoisie can ascend to the “aristocracy … of money” (SuF, p. 93). The texts sympathize with the nobility to the extent that they are also the victims of the capitalist bourgeoisie. This is true of Weerth’s work in particular. The nobility and workers have only indirect contact, while the bourgeoisie has direct contact with both classes. But the socially superior and inferior constitute a secret community of solidarity against the bourgeoisie. Thus, much to the chagrin of the factory owners, the baron, an “upright patriarchal philanthropist”5 advocates letting the workers’ children go to school, instead of doing life-threatening factory work. At the end of the novel, the baron procures a copy of Engels’s recently published The Condition of the Working Class in England and has his daughter read it out loud to him. The semantics surrounding the nobility in these texts is ambivalent and ultimately follows a traditional romantic codification that negatively correlates the economy and aesthetics. The economic losers are the aesthetic victors, at least for a time. And the aesthetic includes both physical characteristics (physiognomy, physique and posture), forms of social interaction as well as lifestyle—architecture, furnishings, clothes etc. For example, the baron in Weerth’s work is a wholly positive figure, both from an inner moral perspective and also outwardly, being of very noble appearance and “of a splendid noble race” (!). His counterpart on the other hand is depicted extremely negatively. Another good example of this is the factory owner in Otto-Peters’s work: Mr Felchner was a small man, desiccated like mummy. His complexion was yellow, the skin leathery and wizened, the nose was uncommonly pointed and between it and the forehead was a deep cleft. The eyes lay close together, they were small, grey and piercing ….6 [Pauline’s bedroom] was lavishly furnished, like that of a countess except too lavish, it was overburdened with ostentation. The wallpaper was silver-grey with red flowers, the curtains of yellow silk with gold tassels, the foot rugs likewise yellow with red borders, a glaring, tasteless gaudiness abounded throughout the entire room ….7

This raises the question of the extent to which, in this so-called social prose that is supposedly dedicated to the proletariat, the representatives

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of this class are actually the protagonists. Willkomm’s novel certainly lives up to its name, but the central working class figure turns out to be the natural son of a noble lord, conceived through the rape of one of the serfs. There are three such illegitimate children in the novel, all conceived by rape. They find themselves up against the three legitimate children, including the present factory owner. The novel’s main interest is in the fate of these noble and semi-noble descendants who stand on both sides of the conflict between capital and labour. In Otto-Peters, the prominent representative of the working class does not really belong to this class either. He is an impoverished petit bourgeois with a university education and literary ambitions (“He is not crude and uncivilized like the lowly factory workers” (SuF, p. 79). “Real” workers do exist but more as accessories, as it were, and they are not subject to further characterization. Weerth focuses on three youthful protagonists: the first from the nobility (the daughter of the baron); the second from the bourgeoise (a son of a factory owner); and the third from the working classes (the son of a worker family). Significantly less space is given to the latter than the other two, at least as far as the novel fragment shows. It seems to me to be significant that the so-called social literature, the only form of literature that moves towards depicting the proletariat—and, as we already noted, only for a very limited time—also has a secret and unacknowledged problem when it comes to depicting the working class. For this class is somehow less of a presence than the other two classes; it tends to be depicted in a negative and disparaging light as completely feral, brutish, crude and criminal people who are deeply offensive to any moral or aesthetic feeling—and thus in complete conformity with Engels’s thesis about the dehumanization of the worker. Modern capitalist working conditions, as Engels never tires of emphasizing in The Condition of the Working Class in England, and also in the 1844 Outlines of a Critique of the Political Economy, amongst other writings, such working conditions lead not only to the physical and mental deterioration of the workers but also to all-out depravity by transforming “humanity into a horde of wild animals.” Can it be wondered that, in such localities, health, morals, and common decency should be at once neglected? No; all who know the private condition of the inhabitants will bear testimony to the immense amount of their disease, misery, and demoralisation. Society in these quarters has sunk to a state indescribably vile and wretched … Thieving and prostitution are

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the main sources of income of these people. No one seems to have taken the trouble to clean out these Augean stables, this pandemonium, this nucleus of crime, filth and pestilence in the second city of the empire. A detailed investigation of the most wretched slums of other towns has never revealed anything half so bad as this concentration of moral iniquity, physical degradation and gross overcrowding.8

Both the literary and the theoretical writings of the period tend to describe the working classes by implicitly ontologizing class differences. The emphasis on the proletarian underclass as a social class of its own is accompanied by very telling biological metaphors that turn this class into a “race.” For instance, we read in Engels that: In view of all this, it is not surprising that the working-class has gradually become a race wholly apart from the English bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie has more in common with every other nation of the earth than with the workers in whose midst it lives. The workers speak other dialects, have other thoughts and ideals, other customs and moral principles, a different religion and other politics than those of the bourgeoisie. Thus they are two radically dissimilar nations, as unlike as difference of race could make them ….9

And Willkomm’s aristocratic factory owner reasons as follows: Indeed, I don’t know whether I should more deplore or despise these people, for whoever sees them like this, sunken equally deep in filth and mental torpor is be forgiven when he is suddenly gripped by the irksome thought that these misfortunates of a predestined unfortunate physiognomies might not be creatures of his kind! – I cannot deny that quite involuntarily, I have sometimes surprised myself with this aristocratic intellectual sin. But let us assume there really is a secret difference between the high and low born, what, I ask you, is the use of fruitlessly striving to rise to our level a lineage of lesser gifts and incapable from the outset of intellectual development?10

There is, of course, a clear difference: in Engels, the socio-economic and thus manmade conditions produce this distinction, and the concept of race thus remains ultimately a metaphor (albeit one he often resorts to), while the cynical factory owner tends to take the concept literally and thus to pay tribute to an aristocracy with a putatively biological foundation. But what both authors have in common is an ontologizing perspective.

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Personalization and Psychologization of the Conflict I now turn to the question of how this literature shapes and models the central conflict between capital and work, factory owners and factory workers. A theme of all three novels is the system of continual wage reductions, which leads to destitution for the factory workers, another is child labour, which repeatedly leads to fatal machinery accidents. These are the external features of the conflict. These conflicts, however, are shaped very specific ways. What is most striking is how this conflict is personalized and psychologized. This literature does indeed thematize the workforce for the first time, as a collective and, in the context of a final insurrection, as a mass. But what is for the most part portrayed is a conflict between two men, the factory owner and a prominent factory worker who acts as the leader. The following figures confront each other in these novels: Adrian vs. Martell (Willkomm); Franz Thalheim vs. Georg Felchner (or the father Felchner, in Weerth); Eduard Martin vs. August Preiss (or the father Preiss, in Otto-Peters). Even if the father still acts as the factory owner, the conflict is primarily with the three sons as representatives of the paternal system, thus taking place within the same generation. In Willkomm’s Weisse Sclaven, the central showdown between the factory owner and the leader of the workers is really one in which two half-brothers face each other, both being the sons of the “wild” aristocrat Magnus von Boberstein from times past. This is undoubtedly a feature typical of popular literature, although it only makes manifest a general tendency towards personalization in a particularly dramatic fashion. This tendency to personalization goes together with a conspicuous psychologization and emotionalization of the conflict. The dependency of the labourers on the factory owners now appears as a subjugation and humiliation. The wage reductions are not simply, or only to small extent, made for economic reasons, such as gaining a competitive advantage in the textile market. The economic reason is a mere pretext: the wage cuts are really perpetrated as an instrument of power: On the basis of deliberately disseminated rumours about the poor turnover of cotton goods, to which the English competition and the popular English products supposedly contributed, Herr am Stein reduces wages in all sectors. We didn’t have enough to eat before them, now it is completely

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unthinkable. But the rich man speculates on this. He knows full well that he owns us skin and hair because we are all indebted to him … We haven’t a stick, we have to run in the woods naked and bare, and live on roots and tree seeds! – Thus we are forced to work, are forced to kiss the scourge that beats us raw and to gratefully smile while suffering the most excruciating torments of the soul. Meanwhile Herr am Stein becomes a millionaire because the surplus of money that the wage reductions yield grows to a significant capital that he can invest at great profit in the expansion of his factory.11

With the capital acquired, the factory owner wants to re-claim those landed estates and goods that the immoral father had lost in the serf uprising. This means that the restoration of the old feudal relations is the secret goal and that this in turn has a twofold sense: in an external sense, the reacquisition of lost estates, and in an internal sense, the restoration of old relationships of power and bondage. The hungry person had to see that he [the factory owner] had neither ear nor eye for their suffering, so long as they wanted to force him to do so. He had to compel obedience, subjugation, patience, patience unto starvation in the workers, otherwise his victory was not be complete or enduring.12

Willkomm thus consistently frames the confrontation with the workers as a power struggle. When, towards the end of the novel, the workers pile up the corpses of dead children on his doorstep—a mute, desperate act of protest—he contrives a cynical revenge. He puts these bodies at their parents’ workplace, beneath and at the weaving and spinning machines and feels triumph and “satanic satisfaction” (IV 172) at their horror. This psychologization is also true to the novel’s title. The metaphor of the proletarians as the new slaves is a topos in the Vormärz literature. Engels uses it, too, on multiple occasions, for example in the 1844 essay on The Condition of England, published in Vorwärts! in the second section that is dedicated to the eighteenth century: Man has ceased to be the slave of men and has become the slave of things; the perversion of the human condition is complete; the servitude of the modern commercial world, this highly developed, total, universal venality, is more inhuman and more all-embracing than the serfdom of the feudal

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era; prostitution is more immoral and more bestial than the jus primae noctis.13

Engels interprets the historical change from pre-industrial to industrial times with regard to the qualitative nature of social ties, that is, as the transformation of an external into an internal compulsion, the substitution of “political means,” which do indeed employ external compulsion but which leave those subjugated with a partial autonomy, with “social means,” which entails a more refined, psychological and at the same time total heteronomy of the workers (“theological serfdom” as Engels calls it) because they are compelled to sell themselves in all freedom. Willkomm spells out this thesis in his novel when he attributes just this interpretation of the historical transformation to his negative protagonist, the factory owner, as being a conscious calculation which aims to restore feudal power relations under modern conditions: When I now consider this much vaunted people, these clumps of graceless, scarcely educated humans who find pleasure and purpose in exhausting work and who are alien to every higher intellectual or sensual delight, I am possessed by an inexpressible disgust that, however, soon had to yield to a silent jubilation of the soul. The proliferation of so-called freedom for the people, combined with the pronounced and express hate of the nobility, was always a thorn in my side and outraged me … I believe I have found the means to abase these insolent, ungainly, stupid people overweeningly proud of their recent freedom and capable of making them unconditionally subject to us, their ancestral and legitimate masters … I am determined to make freedom into a minion. If my plan now should have an enduring goal, then these free ones, who as a people would so like to raise themselves above us and lay down the law for us, must be made into serfs through themselves and indeed free serfs, that is, into those whose yoke is freedom.14

The factory owner thus creates an elaborate system of manifold dependencies, binding the workers to him, first through an apparent generosity, so as to then introduce wage cuts. Under the old serfdom system his father only had access to the body but not to the soul of the subjugated, for example that of the young woman he would later rape under the claim to jus primae noctis after she had confessed her love for a young man from the people:

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You will henceforth serve me with your body and put it entirely at my disposal, you may give your heart, if it gives you pleasure, to the butterflies or a dirty fisherman for my sake.15

But his son extends his claim to power to the very soul of the worker: These wretched creatures must serve me, for without me they could not live a single day. I am their lord, their God! Not just their huts, but their bodies and souls belong to me.16

The historical change to heteronomous work conditions now brings us to the third point I want to consider.

The “Narrative of Industrialization”: The Modelling and Semantics of Historical Change In The Condition of the Working Class in England, as well as in the 1844 essay The Condition of England, Engels outlines the historical process of industrialization with regard to the working population by using a narrative form that describes the transformation of the old system (left column) to the modern system (right column): Old System: The pre-industrial era

New System: The industrial era

Manufacture (non-centralized; home-based work) Country/ Small town Life in/with nature (farming, cattle breeding possible) Heteronomy, with partial autonomy Property/ownership possible No competition among themselves Division of labour: reduced Relationship to the landlord: Patriarchal (despite formal serfdom) Intact families Intact sexual relationships

Factory (central) Big city Total separation from Nature

Physical and mental health (Relative) conformity to norms Peaceful and “romantic-cosy” existence Almost outside the world

Total heteronomy No property/ownership Competition Division of labour: radicalized Relationship to the factory owner: Slavery Broken/destroyed families Dysfunctional sexual relationships (“castration” of the man) Physical and mental sickness Criminality “Social war” In the world (continued)

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(continued) Old System: The pre-industrial era

New System: The industrial era

Static/continuity (“without movement”)

Dynamic/discontinuity (“whirlpool of history”) Non-awareness/immaturity (“social childhood”) (Potential) awareness/adult “Not living” (mentally dead, apathy) ≈ non–human status existence “Living” ≈ chance for “humanization”

The process of historical change is ambivalent in manifold respects: for one thing it concerns a great history of a civilization that has made fascinating technological progress in the form of the new machinery, as Engels never tires of emphasizing. But for another this has all too negative social consequences and leads to a comprehensive crisis that Engels understands using the concept of “social war.” But the previous romantic and idyllic existence in the old system is itself equated with intellectual “death” and a pre-human form of existence, as it were. The human beings there do not really live, but vegetate, lead a “quiet plant-like life,” and only modernity provides the opportunity for awareness, for a mature, grown-up existence and for humanization in the strong sense of the world. The historical-philosophical roots of this narrative in the late Enlightenment are clear. Moreover the last four characteristics mentioned in the table are part of a basic semantics that Engels shares with the Biedermeier or Vormärz literature, such as the later Joseph von Eichendorff, particularly his novel of revolution Das Schloß Dürande (1837) or the early Adalbert Stifter or Jeremias Gotthelf. However, solutions must be provided for the social crises depicted in the novel, especially since the narrative demands a conclusion. This does not necessarily have to be positive, but it has at least to be meaningful. Engels and social prose both agree that a revolution must take place. Its necessity is consistently inferred from the personalization, psychologization and emotionalization of the class conflict. Engels speaks here of “hate” and “bitterness” on the side of the workers that can only be discharged through violence. “Revenge” is the anthropological paradigm that he retrospectively applies to the worker’s uprisings: … individual actions which can be explained only by hatred wrought to the pitch of despair, by a wild passion overwhelming all restraints.17

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And he prophesies that in the future: … the vengeance of the people will come down with a wrath of which the rage of 1793 gives no true idea.18

In Schloß und Fabrik, an attack is ultimately made on the machines and the manufacturer’s villa. But this revolution does not seek to bring about a new social system but is rather a purely instinctual outbreak of passion and aggression that is described using the naturalizing metaphor of a natural catastrophe: … they knew nothing of communist theories which they wanted to realize … They were united in that they all had something to avenge on the factory owner: hunger, frost, nakedness, sickness, mutilated limbs, death and destitution of their children, harsh treatment and all the woes and cares from one miserable day to the next.19

Willkomm’s Weisse Sklaven can serve as a final example on this point. There the question of how accounts will be settled between the factor owner and his half-brother, the leader of the workers, is treated at length. After the court judgement, which ultimately awards the natural children of the noble forefather a share of the inheritance, the leader of the workers receives financial restitution. Neither the factory owner nor the worker’s wife understands what he could still want: “Settlement! What have do you still have to demand? No more wages are in arrears.”20 However, because the conflict was ultimately non-material, it cannot be resolved on the material level. Not a financial but a “moral settling of accounts” is required, not money but “satisfaction” (WS V, p. 192). The “unforgivably insulted” and humiliated character wants to take “revenge” for the “theft of my better self” (WS V, p. 195). The showdown takes place as a special duel, namely at midnight in the factory’s spinning room with the machines as the weapons. The factory owner must work a full shift, twelve hours, at the spinning machine so as to experience first-hand what he inflicts on his workers. He cannot long endure it, and, after a short time, he gets entangled in the machine and literally scalped. Following this “internal” solution comes the external one. The former worker becomes the factory owner—he is of course now legally ennobled!—and he humanizes the working conditions by doubling the workers’ wages and introducing profit-sharing. That roughly corresponds

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to bourgeois-democratic attempts at a solution as then propagated by Robert Blum, for instance.21 While Engels, too, applies an anthropological-psychological interpretative paradigm, which goes beyond acts of passionate revenge, it is comprehensive social reform that is at stake. This should be brought about through—on a philosophical-historical utopian level—the “reconciliation of humanity with nature and with itself.”22 Such a final “reconciliation” as the resolution to the crisis can also be found in fictional works, but in contrast to Engels’s it remains primarily anthropological. In his review of contemporary German literature from the second half of the decade, Engels does not mention Otto-Peters and Willkomm’s novels, but both belong to the petty bourgeois literature that he ridicules, a literature that humanizes working conditions but does not want to fundamentally revolutionize them. But as I have tried to show in the preceding analysis, this polemic masks the extent to which Engels shares a basic semantics and modelling of the “social question” with the Vormärz literature.

Notes 1. Cf. Erich Edler, Die Anfänge des sozialen Romans und der sozialen Novelle in Deutschland (Frankfurt a.M. 1977); Hans Adler, Soziale Romane im Vormärz. Literatursemiotische Studie (München 1980). 2. Friedrich Engels, “Georg Weerth, der erste und bedeutendste Dichter des deutschen Proletariats,” in Der Sozialdemokrat 24, Zurich, June 7, 1883. 3. Louise Otto-Peters, Schloß und Fabrik. Erste vollständige Ausgabe des 1846 zensierten Romans. Hrsg. und mit einem Nachw. von Johanna Ludwig (Leipzig 1996) pp. 162–168, 270–280, 324. Henceforth cited as SuF. 4. “… daß es noch unter der Klasse der Bürger eine noch tiefer gestellte gibt, welche auch einen großen Teil des Volkes ausmacht” (SuF, p. 216). 5. Georg Weerth, Romanfragment, in Werke in 2 Bd. Ausgew. u. eingeleitet von Bruno Kaiser. Bd. 2. Leipzig 1976, p. 289. (Henceforth cited as RF). 6. “Herr Felchner war ein kleines, mumienartig zusammengetrocknetes Männchen. Seine Gesichtsfarbe war gelb, die haut lederartig

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und in vielen Runzeln zusammengezogen, die Nase war ungemein spitzig, und zwischen ihr und der Stirn befand sich ein tiefer Einschnitt. Die Augen lagen dicht beieinander, sie waren klein, grau und stechend …” (SuF) pp. 70–71). 7. “[Paulines Schlafzimmer] war prachtvoll eingerichtet, wie das einer Fürstin, nur zu prachtvoll, es war durch Prunk überladen. Die Tapete war silbergrau mit roten Blumen, die Vorhänge von gelber Seide mit goldnen Quasten, die Fußteppiche ebenfalls gelb mit roten Kanten, es herrschte ein grelles, geschmackloses Bunt durch das ganze Zimmer …” (SuF, p. 75). 8. Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working-Class in England. From Personal Observation and Authentic Sources, in MECW, vol. 4 (London 2010) pp. 340, 342. 9. Ibid., pp. 419–420 (my emphasis). 10. “Ich weiß in der That nicht, ob ich diese Menschen mehr beklagen oder verachten soll, denn wer sie so sieht, in Schmutz und geistige Dumpfheit gleich tief versunken, dem ist es zu verzeihen, wenn er sich urplötzlich auf dem ärgerlichen Gedanken ertappt, es möchten diese prädestinirten Unglücksphysiognomieen wohl nicht Geschöpfe seines Gleichen sein! – Ich kann nicht läugnen, daß ich mich selbst einigemale auf dieser aristokratischen Gedankensünde überrascht habe ganz wider meinen Willen. Nehmen wir aber an, es bestünde wirklich ein geheimer Unterschied zwischen hoch und niedrig Geborenen, was, ich frage Dich, was könnte es dann nutzen, wenn wir uns fruchtlos abmühten, ein von Ur[an]fang an minder begabtes, geistiger Entwickelung unfähigeres Geschlecht zu uns heraufzuheben?” E.A. Willkomm: Weisse Sclaven oder die Leiden des Volkes (Leipzig 1845), vol. IV, pp. 254 ff. (Henceforth cited as WS, with volume number and page number(s).) 11. “Auf Grund absichtlich ausgestreuter Gerüchte von schlechtem Absatz baumwollener Waaren, wozu vorgeblich die englische Concurrenz und die beliebteren englischen Fabrikate beigetragen haben sollten, setzt Herr am Stein den Arbeitslohn in allen Branchen herab. Wir hatten schon vorher nicht satt zu essen, jetzt ist vollends gar nicht mehr daran zu denken. Darauf aber speculirt der reiche Mann. Er weiß genau, daß er uns, die wir ihm alle verschuldet sind, mit Haut und Haar besitzt … Kein Stecken blieb uns übrig, nackt und bloß müßten wir in die Wälder laufen, und von Wurzeln und Baumsamen leben! – So sind wir

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denn gezwungen zu arbeiten, sind gezwungen, die Geißel zu küssen, die uns wund schlägt, und unter den qualvollsten Seelenschmerzen dankbar zu lächeln. Herr am Stein wird aber inzwischen ein Millionär, denn der Ueberschuß an Geld, den ihm der verminderte Lohn abwirft, mehrt sich zu einem bedeutenden Kapital, das er mit großem Gewinn zur Erweiterung seiner Fabrik anlegen kann.” (WS I, pp. 253–254). 12. “Die Hungernden mußten sehen, daß er weder Ohr noch Auge habe für ihre Leiden, so lange sie ihn dazu nöthigen wollten. Gehorsam, Unterwerfung, Geduld, Geduld bis zum Hungertode mußte er sich bei den Arbeitern erzwingen, eher war sein Sieg kein vollständiger, kein dauernder.” (WS IV, p. 160). 13. Friedrich Engels, “The Condition of England. II. The English Constitution,” in Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 3 (London 2010), p. 476. 14. “Das Umsichgreifen der sogenannten Volksfreiheit verbunden mit dem offen ausgesprochenen Haß gegen den Adel war mir von jeher ein Dorn im Auge und empörte mich … Betrachtete ich nun dieses gerühmte Volk, diesen Klumpen anstandsloser, wenig gebildeter Menschen, die in ermattender Arbeit Zweck und Lust des Lebens finden und jedem höhern geistigen wie sinnlichen Genusse fremd bleiben, so bemächtigte sich meiner ein unaussprechlicher Ekel, der jedoch bald einem stillen Jubel der Seele weichen mußte. Ich glaubte nämlich das Mittel gefunden zu haben, dies freche, plumpe, auf seine junge Freiheit überstolze dumme Volk demüthigen und es uns, seinen angestammten rechtmäßigen Herren, wieder unbedingt unterwürfig machen zu können … Ich beschloß, die Freiheit zum Büttel zu machen! … “Sollte nun mein Plan einen dauernden Zweck haben, so mußten diese Freien, die sich als Volk so gern über uns erheben und uns Gesetze vorschreiben möchten, durch sich selbst zu Knechten gemacht werden und zwar zu freien Knechten, d.h. zu solchen, deren Joch die Freiheit … ist.” (WS III, pp. 348–350, my emphasis). 15. “Du wirst mir von jetzt an mit Deinem Leibe dienen und ihn ganz meiner Willkür anheim geben, Dein Herz magst Du, wenn es dir Vergnügen macht, meinetwegen den Schmetterlingen oder einen schmutzigen Fischer schenken.” (WS I, p. 250).

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16. “Diese elenden Creaturen müssen mir dienen, weil sie ohne mich keinen Tag leben können. Ich bin ihr Herr, ihr Gott! Nicht blos ihre Hütten, auch ihre Leiber und Seelen gehören mir!” (WS III, p. 336, my emphasis). 17. Engels, The Condition of the Working-Class in England, p. 508. 18. Ibid., p. 581. 19. “… von kommunistischen Theorien, die sie etwa verwirklichen wollten, wußten sie nichts … Darin waren sie einig, daß sie alle etwas zu rächen hatten an dem Fabrikherrn: Hunger, Frost, Blöße, Krankheit, verstümmelte Glieder, Tod oder Elend ihrer Kinder, harte Behandlung und all die Not und Sorge von einem jammervollen Tag zum anderen.” (SuF, p. 313, my emphasis). 20. “Abrechnung! Was hast Du denn noch zu fordern? Es ist kein Lohn mehr rückständig.” (WS V, p. 250). 21. Cf. Adler, Soziale Romane im Vormärz, pp. 59–60. 22. Umrisse zu einer Kritik der Nationalökonomie, in MECW I,3, pp. 467–494, here: 475. From “Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy,” in MECW, vol. 3, p. 424.

Bibliography Adler, Hans. Soziale Romane im Vormärz. Literatursemiotische Studie (München: Wilhelm Fink, 1980). Edler, Erich. Die Anfänge des sozialen Romans und der sozialen Novelle in Deutschland (Frankfurt a.M: Vittoriao Klostermann, 1977). Engels, Friedrich. “Georg Weerth, der erste und bedeutendste Dichter des deutschen Proletariats,” in Der Sozialdemokrat 24, June 7, 1883. Translated as “[Georg Weerth]” in MECW , vol. 26, pp. 108–111. Engels, Friedrich. “The Condition of England. II. The English Constitution,” in MECW , vol. 3, pp. 489–513. Engels, Friedrich. The Condition of the Working-Class in England. From Personal Observation and Authentic Sources, in MECW, vol. 4, pp. 295–596 . Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. “Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy,” in MECW , vol. 3, pp. 418–443. Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. Umrisse zu einer Kritik der Nationalökonomie, in MEGA I, vol. 3, pp. 467–494. Otto-Peters, Louise. Schloß und Fabrik. First complete edition of the censored novel of 1846, edited with an afterword by Johanna Ludwig (Leipzig: Gesellschaft c.V. Leipzig, 1996).

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Weerth, Georg. Romanfragment, in Werke in two volumes, selected and introduced by Bruno Kaiser, vol. 2 (Leipzig: Aufbau-Verlag, 1976). Willkomm, E.A. Weisse Sclaven oder die Leiden des Volkes (Leipzig: Kollmann, 1845).

CHAPTER 15

Engels’s Philosophical Mock-Epic: The Triumph of Faith Mattia Luigi Pozzi

The date was December 1842 and the place Neumünster, close to Zurich. In the print shop of a certain Johann Friedrich Heß—a typesetter for the Literarisches Comptoir, which German radicals used “as a kind of ‘lightning rod’ for new publications especially at risk of censorship”—a “saucy libel”1 was published anonymously. It had this highfaluting title: The Insolently Threatened Yet Miraculously Rescued Bible. Or: The Triumph of Faith. To Wit, the Terrible, Yet True and Salutary History of the Erstwhile Licentiate Bruno Bauer; How the Same, Seduced by the Devil, Fallen from the True Faith, Became Chief Devil, and Was Well and Truly Ousted in the End. A Christian Epic in Four Cantos.2 The work immediately attracted attention,3 and in April of the following year it was attributed to the then twenty-two-year-old Friedrich Engels—who, at the time, was

M. L. Pozzi (B) Catholic University of the Sacred Heart, Milan, Italy e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 T. Carver and S. Rapic (eds.), Friedrich Engels for the 21st Century, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-97138-0_15

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only known to the public by the pseudonym Friedrich Oswald—and also to Edgar Bauer, who, incidentally, was the same age. As can be inferred from the title alone, the historical background of the text is the academic plight of Bruno Bauer, a so-called Privatdozent — i.e. a tutor paid directly by students’ fees—at Bonn University. In his teaching capacity, he had set off a firestorm of outrage among conservative theologians, all due to his radical critique of the Gospels. In the end, his venia docendi was revoked in March 1842 on the orders of Karl Friedrich Eichhorn, the Prussian minister of religious and educational affairs. As a direct reaction to Bauer’s dismissal, his younger brother Edgar and Engels composed The Triumph of Faith in April and May. In that work they revisited Bauer’s case and reappraised it allegorically and satirically. The importance of the text is not only in its being a living testimony to the intimate relationships Engels developed within the circle of “the Free” in Berlin, but also that it marks the point of maximum proximity between him and the Young Hegelians, whose canon and themes he also adopted from a literary point of view. It could perhaps even be called Engels’s only Young Hegelian work.

Engels and “The Free” At the end of September 1841, Engels made his way from Bremen to Berlin. The ostensible purpose of this trip was to do his military service. In truth, however, it was to spend his leisure time attending lectures in the university town, which was then the central battleground of intellectual discourse. And that being so, he had the occasion to experience first-hand Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling’s inaugural lecture on the philosophy of revelation, which took place in November 1841. Those in attendance included figures such as Mikhail Bakunin, Søren Kierkegaard, and Jacob Burckhardt, all sitting together with the young Engels, who impatiently waited to hear the case that the “dead” Schelling, as the Young Hegelians would have it, would present against the “living” Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, who had died already in 1831. The king of Prussia, Friedrich Wilhelm IV, had called Schelling to Berlin University specifically to counteract the growing influence of Hegelian philosophy. For Engels, this was an event of world-historical magnitude, just as much as Bruno Bauer’s dismissal, and worthy of

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polemic. Thus Engels writes the following in his article “Schelling on Hegel,” published in the Telegraph für Deutschland in December 1841: Ask anybody in Berlin today on what field the battle for dominion over German public opinion in politics and religion, that is, over Germany itself, is being fought, and if he has any idea of the power of the mind over the world he will reply that this battlefield is the University, in particular Lecture-hall No. 6, where Schelling is giving his lectures on the philosophy of revelation.4

In the Schelling vs. Hegel controversy, Engels vehemently took the side of the Young Hegelians. Though he had never conducted systematic philosophical studies, he felt justified, by virtue of his belief that the good cause shall emerge victorious, in challenging such a distinguished professor as Schelling. After publishing two pamphlets, Schelling and Revelation in April 1842, and the sequel Schelling, Philosopher in Christ, in May, Engels caught the attention of German intellectual circles. Schelling’s supporters described the attacks on their master as absurd, whereas the Young Hegelians were enthusiastic over their radicalism. As a result, Arnold Ruge, editor of the Young Hegelian journal Hallische Jahrbücher, wrote the following about the anonymous author of Schelling and Revelation: “This charming young lad is overtaking all the old asses living in Berlin.”5 As soon as Ruge found out that the author was Engels, he invited him to collaborate on the Deutsche Jahrbücher, a new title to get around government suppression. Engels thereupon sent him his literary-critical essay, “Alexander Jung, ‘Lectures on Modern German Literature’,” which was published in July of the same year. In the meantime, Engels eagerly attended the meetings of the Berlin Young Hegelians, who went by the name of “the Free.” These took place in venues such as the red room of the Café Stehely at the Gendarmenmarkt, Hippel’s wine bar on Friedrichstraße, Clausing’s tobacco emporium on Zimmerstraße, or inside one of Berlin’s many coffee houses.6 This band of journalistic Bohemians—to whose ranks belonged, among others, figures such as Ludwig Buhl, Karl Friedrich Köppen, Eduard Meyen, Adolf Rutenberg, Max Stirner, as well as the Bauer brothers— made it their mission “To raise the flag of the autonomy of spirit and to introduce the basic conviction of modern philosophy into the wider circle of life, taking it out of the limited sphere of science, and to assert its place

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there.”7 Or as Stirner succinctly put it, cutting right to the chase of the matter: “The ‘Free’ … just want to be free, free from all faith, from all tradition and authority, because these are inhumane.”8 The idea of freedom was not only reflected in the declared intentions of its members, but also in their lifestyle. Their opponents were therefore fond of calling them “men of letters and beer.” In contrast, the young Engels was fascinated by the “lack of restraint,” the “boyish audacity,” as well as by the intentional “mocking of all bourgeois forms” that reigned supreme in this circle.9 It was precisely this personal contact with the group that allowed him, on the one hand, to so aptly characterize the protagonists of his mock–heroic epic, and, on the other hand, to internalize the central role of the comedic in the discourse of the Young Hegelians.

The Role and Function of the Comedic in Young Hegelianism When one looks at all the different attempts to define Young Hegelianism, one inevitably comes across a single, common feature: it always aims to mount a kenosis, an externalization, or—put differently—philosophy has to forsake the heights of theory and must be hoisted on to the real ground of praxis. This demand was the battle cry of the radical philosophical movements of that era, a battle cry that was first sounded in 1838 in the text Prolegomena to Historiosophy, written by the Polish philosopher of history August von Cieszkowski. As is common knowledge, the Young Hegelians perform this step by applying the forever self-propelling Hegelian dialectic, which they interpreted as both the principle of historical development and as a method for criticizing the status quo by appealing to reason. In contrast to the Old Hegelians, however, they turned against the conservatism that is supposedly immanent in Hegel’s system, according to which everything connected to the status quo is explicable as necessary and in principle rational. Accordingly “the Hegelian [philosophy] portrays itself as the thought which cannot remain such but … has to become deed … In this sense, Hegelian philosophy is the philosophy of revolution, and the last of all philosophies in general.”10 This necessity was reflected in aesthetics.11 As a result, a characteristic component of the Young Hegelian understanding of art is “the consideration of art as part of a ‘philosophy of the deed’ … The approach is fundamentally antimetaphysical, and is marked by the determination to

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draw out the social and political consequences of Hegel’s philosophy, and to realize them.”12 Even if art is objectified in works, it accordingly remains for Hegel—just as much as with religion and philosophy—a phenomenon of absolute spirit and consequently categorially distinct from historical facticity. By way of contrast, the Young Hegelians historicized the task and purpose of art. Art should not only depict reality (or, in Hegelian terms, “actuality”), but rather must also exert an influence upon it. It could therefore be brought to bear as a driving force for the practical implementation of the Young Hegelians postulated freedom.13 Here freedom is to be equated with the liberation of humanity from its religious and secular self-alienation. It is precisely in such liberation that we can observe the function of the comedic, and, in particular, the function of humour, in contrast to metaphysical irony.14 While irony remains abstract and, as per Hegel’s conception of reality as rational (the Hegelian meaning of “actuality”), an abstraction only refers to the infinite, humour is firmly rooted in the finite world. The Young Hegelians interpreted this world as a site of historical oppositions, which they regarded as something to be overcome via humour. In this way humour functions for them as a performative device exerting an influence on political and historical conditions which they considered, in light of the Zeitgeist, to be obsolete. Marx put this very aptly when he wrote: History is thorough and goes through many phases when carrying an old form to the grave. The last phase of a world-historical form is its comedy. The gods of Greece, already tragically wounded to death in Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound, had to re-die a comic death in Lucian’s Dialogues. Why this course of history? So that humanity should part with its past cheerfully. This cheerful historical destiny is what we vindicate for the political authorities of Germany.15

This is exactly what Ruge had in mind when he celebrated Bruno Bauer’s masquerading as a Pietist in his Young Hegelian satire The Trumpet of the Last Judgement and Hegel’s Doctrine of Religion and Art (1842), as well as Engels’s polemical pamphlets against Schelling, as examples of historical comedy. The latter “is history-making,” he said, since it presents a “turning point in the world” “in the process of which one form of spirit perishes and a new one arises.”16 “To comedify” is thereby a “conspicuous criticizing, laughter being critique at a glance: as

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soon as something appears as what it is, namely, as the confused existence of self-consciousness, that’s, well, the end of the matter.”17 Ruge, who took Hegel’s aesthetics as the starting point for his own reflections, radicalizes comedy in the Young Hegelian sense by turning it into a dramatic genre that “corresponds to political life.”18 Its subject matter is no longer the dialectical movement between abstract ideas, but rather the polarization of the conflicting principles that appear “on the political scene,” “dressed up as parties.”19 “It is only then that they will be able to stand facing one another with complete consciousness; only then will their struggle, will all the friction between them, lead to a productive conclusion.”20 For the Young Hegelians, these battles are a matter of “faith” and “science,” when viewed from a philosophical perspective. We can already find a description of this process in Stirner, who shows us how art and comedy in particular have an effect on religion: But, at the last, art will stand at the close of religion … In reclaiming its creature [religion], art rediscovers itself and renews its creative powers as well. It appears, at the decline of religion, as a trifling with the full seriousness of the old belief, a seriousness of content which religion has now lost, and which must be returned to the joyful poet. Hence, religion is presented as a ridiculous comedy.21

According to Stirner, this is comedy’s mission: “Comedy, in openly displaying the emptiness, or better, the deflation of the Object, frees men from the old belief, and so their dependency upon this exhausted being.”22 And “[t]he same dissolution23 of the old spirit, which comedy presents, is proved by philosophy.”24 In this way, the comedic, and the literary genres connected to it, become the instruments of philosophical critique to be employed in the attempt to overcome the crisis of their era. It is for this reason that the Young Hegelians avoid systematic treatises, up till then the norm, in favour of producing pamphlets and parodic literature, thereby showing us a new way of doing philosophy. Here critique also carries the meaning of “self-critique,” since intellectual production is understood as a social act of a community, and it is not for nothing that the Young Hegelians were a group in continual dialogue with one another and whose members also fiercely hit out at each other: Debate, theoretical controversy, the exchange of arguments, is the element that gives life to this group … Arguments are redistributed anew from one

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stage of the discussion to the next. The members of the ground constantly react to one another; their writings form a network of acceptance and critique, counter-critique and allusions.25

Engels’s The Triumph of Faith is a striking example of this.

Choice of Genre and Intertextuality It is no coincidence that Engels opted for the genre of mock-epic, which is characterized by the comedic effect that is supposed to be produced with reference to the tradition of epic-heroic poetry itself, but is further intended to be parodic and travestying.26 In a manner of speaking, this is “an inverted ideal of narrative art.”27 La secchia rapita (1622), written by Alessandro Tassoni, and originally conceived as a parody of the chivalric epics of the Middle Ages, is the first mock-heroic poem of modernity. In the eighteenth century, the genre subsequently found its way to Germany, particularly thanks to a translation of Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock (1712), which soon afterwards gained great popularity. Other examples include Der Renommist by J.W.F. Zachariäs (1744),28 Das Toppé by J.J. Dusch (1751), and Der Sieg des Liebesgottes by Johann Peter Zu (1753). In fact The Triumph of Faith stands out because of the complex textual strategy it employs, and because even internally it displays a high level of intertextuality. It should be stressed in this context, however, that the subject matter of the parody there is another “epic,” and, indeed the Christian epic in contemporary Pietistic literature—take, for instance, Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock’s Messiah—which actually included the sacred scriptures themselves. Hence Engels implicitly advocates the central theses advanced by Bruno Bauer’s critique of the Gospels, according to which, in Biblical texts we are dealing exclusively with an “artistic composition” “of literary origin.”29 As a consequence of this, the Bible itself is up for parody.30 The “insolence” and “mockery” that Engels refers to, in his article of 14 July 184231 “On the Critique of the Prussian Press Laws,” is represented here in the earlier text as an “immoral” use of language, to be condemned by the conservative milieu and culture to which Engels was opposed.32 Insolence and mockery are thus turned into weapons of philosophical critique, as well as political critique. The rhetorical effect here is additionally reinforced inasmuch as Engels, like Bruno Bauer in The Trumpet of the Last Judgment, adopts the tone

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of older theological poems and shrouds himself hypocritically in the vestments of orthodox Pietism. The way that parody is deployed is reminiscent of Karl Marx’s fragmentary humorous novel Scorpion and Felix (1837), in which Hegel is, at the same time, the “voice” and the intended target of the satire, along with the Streitschriften zur Verteidigung meiner Schrift über das Leben Jesu by David Friedrich Strauss (1837). In that text, Strauss responds to Bruno Bauer’s critique of his work but also shares Bauer’s target, which was conservative theology. By looking at the content of Engels’s work it becomes clear why he opts for the mock-epic, with the strict separation it makes between friend and foe, good and evil, in order to stage—as in Bruno Bauer’s Hegel’s Doctrine of Religion and Art —“the two extremes, philosophy and consistent Christianity,” as “hostile forces” “caught in the most brutal conflict.”33 The conflict here plays out on two levels: on one level, there is the battle between God and the Devil for Bruno Bauer’s soul, and, on the other level, there is a parodic doubling: the dispute between the Pietists34 and the Young Hegelians. Hence, discernible in the Engels’s protagonist’s Faustian opening monologue, we hear of his own past as a speculative theologian and supporter of conservative Hegelianism, as well as his encounter with the enduring inner conflict surrounding questions of faith: A house of pious people and a dingy room Stacked high with books, and Bauer pondering in the gloom, The Pentateuch in front of him, the Devil behind, A tug of war twixt Faith and Doubt within his mind. “Did Moses write this book, and is it true for sure? Philosophy, your meaning is so oft obscure! I’ve studied matters Phenomenological, Theological also, to my distress, Aesthetical too, Metaphysical, Logical, Not entirely without success. ... I’ve married, by Speculation astute, Faith and the Concept Absolute. ... Name me the dogma I haven’t been into – Creation, Redemption, Original Sin, too. … Lock, stock and barrel – but all that stuff Still doesn’t prove the Pentateuch is not a bluff. ... (p. 322).

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Shortly after this, Engels recounts the biographical stages of Bruno Bauer’s life—after the fashion of an epic travelogue and symbolized by those cities where he had been most active: Bonn, Berlin, and Leipzig35 — right up to his radical transformation into one of the leading minds of the Young Hegelians, and thus the true herald of the revolutionary message contained in Hegelian philosophy. To that effect, Hegel, whose presence is constant throughout Engels’s mock-epic, is portrayed—once again, in the style of Bruno Bauer’s The Trumpet of the Last Judgment —as an atheist and Antichrist, as well as someone continuing the French Revolution (see pp. 320–321, 348). Thus the Young Hegelians are turned, in the manner of Heinrich Heine’s satirical poetry, into personifications of the notorious revolutionaries: The Great Whore comes from Babylon with its pollution, And that Great Whore is Reason’s Goddess, Revolution! Bauer is Robespierre, Ruge’s Danton; and worse, Feuerbach is Marat. O God, send down Thy curse! (p. 341)

The radical call for action that characterizes the entire work also reveals, moreover, the clashes internal to the group itself: Oswald and Edgar cannot wait until he’s done. They both jump on the table, then they shriek as one: “Ruge, we’ve had enough of all this talk from you! What we want now is deeds, not words. We want some action!” A frenzied bravo! is the ill–advised reaction; Everyone keeps demanding: “Action, action, action!” Then with a mocking laugh shouts Arnold in reply: “Our actions are just words, and long they so shall be. After Abstraction, Practice follows of itself.” (p. 338)

In its fourth canto this Christian mock-heroic poem culminates in the following situation: the former theologian Bruno Bauer, after being cast down by God and the Devil, is turned, via pure reason, into the chief devil, who leads the Young Hegelians into the final battle against the Pietists and the heavenly host.36 And so the work concludes with the real dismissal of Bruno Bauer—to wit, with the eponymous “triumph of faith,” thanks to which—paradoxically—“the Free” are chased away to earth and their true battleground reconquered.

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Even if The Triumph of Faith does exhibit, both thematically and stylistically, all the features of a mock-epic, it can, according to what has been argued here, be defined as a philosophical mock-heroic epic. What’s more, the theatrical exchange of battle slogans, all the invocations of God and the Devil, the use of Biblical images and passages from the Gospels, as well as the rhythm of the Alexandrines in rhyming couplets, make the text sound like a tune played on a barrel organ that gets stuck, so all its philosophical content gets stuck in the reader’s head.

Caricature Last but not least, I draw attention to the significance of the living portraits of Engels’s drinking and debate buddies that he has left for us. His perspicacity, as well as his remarkable sensitivity to detail, come to full expression in his talent as a caricaturist, excelling in visually depicting the essential features of a situation. Engels’s private letters to his sister Marie, or to his friends Friedrich and Wilhelm Graeber, were also frequently accompanied by humorous sketches. Famous ones include the portrait of his close friend Stirner (the only images existing of the philosopher), and a drawing of a turbulent meeting of “the Free” with Arnold Ruge and Otto Wigand that took place on 10 November 1842 in the Walburg wine bar in Berlin. What’s more, that sketch almost seems to be a visual reference to The Triumph of Faith.37 Here are some examples from the text, which show how aptly Engels is able to depict both the outward appearance and the thought processes of his comrades-in-arms. Starting with Arnold Ruge: Wild Ruge’s one of those around the table there, His broad fists propping up a head that’s full of care. A valiant warrior, stout, seemingly hard to rattle; But sharp as rapiers are his claws, well trained in battle. He seems a philistine, beer-sodden, casual, But deep inside his breast he bears the whole of Hell. (p. 331)

And in his entourage, we find the whole “Atheistic mob” (p. 335): That is to say, we find, first, Ludwig Buhl: Next, baring greenish teeth, comes tripping on his way, His hair unkempt and tousled, prematurely grey,

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A soap-and-water-shy and blood-shy Patriot, So smooth and soft inside; outside a sansculotte. (p. 336)

Next, Max Stirner, who is here portrayed as an anarchist (which assuredly impacted his later reception): See Stirner too, the thoughtful moderation-hater; Though still on beer, he’ll soon be drinking blood like water. And if the others shout a wild: à bas les rois! Stirner is sure to add: à bas aussi les lois! (p. 336)

Then Karl Marx, whose subversive powers Engels was already at the time impressed with, even though he still had not had the chance to get to know him personally: Who runs up next with wild impetuosity? A swarthy chap of Trier, a marked monstrosity. He neither hops nor skips, but moves in leaps and bounds, Raving aloud. As if to seize and then pull down To Earth the spacious tent of Heaven up on high, He opens wide his arms and reaches for the sky. He shakes his wicked fist, raves with a frantic air, As if ten thousand devils had him by the hair. (p. 336)

Now comes Ludwig Feuerbach, who was not a card-carrying member of the group, but who, however, was recognized by it as the intellectual authority and representative of anthropological materialism, which is humorously exaggerated here: A one-man host of Atheists fanatical, A one-man treasure store of craft Satanical, A one-man fount of wicked blasphemy and shame? Help us, Saint John, it’s Feuerbach of dreadful name! … Guzzling, boozing, bathing, firmly he maintains, Are all the truth the holy sacrament contains. A storm of shouts and cheers succeeds the first hurrah! And then he must be taken to a public bar. (p. 337)

And, finally, there is an ironic description of the two young authors themselves:

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Engels, or Oswald: Right on the very left, that tall and long-legged stepper Is Oswald coat of grey and trousers shade of pepper; Pepper inside as well, Oswald the Montagnard; A radical is he, dyed in the wool, and hard. Day in, day out, he plays upon the guillotine a Single solitary tune38 and that’s a cavatina, The same old devil-song; he bellows the refrain: Formez vos bataillons! Aux armes, citoyens ! (p. 335)

And Edgar Bauer: Who raves beside him, with the muscles of a brewer? It’s old Bloodlust himself in person, Edgar Bauer. His brown-complexioned face through bushy whiskers peers; And he’s as old in cunning as he’s young in years. Outside, a smart blue coat; inside he’s black, lacks polish; Outside he’s dandified; inside he’s sansculottish. (pp. 335–336)39

To this work, however, we must attach to caricature not only a historical significance, but also a philosophical significance. In it caricature no longer strives for a dialectical reconciliation of the ugly and the beautiful, as it does on the models put forward by Christian Hermann Weisse and Karl Rosenkranz.40 Rather, caricature depends on, indeed immerses itself in, the case of the singular individual, who, via the use of bathos, is presented in the manner of an exemplar. In that way, caricature directs our attention to real life.

Mundus Concentratus: A Nominalist Vision of the World To conclude, I would like to argue the thesis that The Triumph of Faith represents a nominalist vision of the world. After the fashion of Jean Paul,41 for whom humour is characterized “by a particularly intense focusing on details and what is merely finitely concrete,”42 Engels sketches the image of a world according to which its value is no longer exclusively derived from universals ante rem, but rather consists in res singularis. When viewed through the lens of the comedic, the definition of realism handed down to us by Engels, according to which the meaning

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of “Realism … implies, besides truth of detail, the truthful reproduction of typical characters under typical circumstances,”43 can be understood in the sense of mediaeval nominalism.44 If, accordingly, “Each person is a type, but at the same time a distinct personality, ein dieser,”45 then an art work puts a reality into operation (or, again, an actuality in the Hegelian sense), in which the haecceitas (Duns Scotus)46 of the individual (“an irreducible ultimate”47 ) comes to expression. Since, in this way, specific existence and essentiality coincide, the real protagonists of the heroic poem are turned into important “figures of thought,” who have permanently established “the philosophical discourse of modernity.” As a result, Engels creates a sort of mundus concentratus, a cross-section exemplar of that epoch, of which we are, according to Jürgen Habermas, still contemporaries.48 Translated by Joseph Carew, edited by Terrell Carver.

Notes 1. Gustav Mayer, Friedrich Engels. Eine Biographie, vol. 1 (Dordrecht 1934) p. 83. 2. In the following, all citations are taken from Alex Miller’s translation in MECW , vol. 2, pp. 313–351. 3. As a result, the Zurich magazine Schweizerischer Republikaner 98 (9 December 1842) made no delay in mentioning the publication of the work, which was also commented upon in the Hamburger Literarischen und Kritischen Blättern 220 (12 December 1842) and in the Hamburger Neuen Zeitung 303 (3 December 1842). Excerpts of the text were also published in several periodicals in Leipzig, including Freikugeln 52 (30 December 1842). 4. MECW , vol. 2, pp. 181–187, here: p. 181. 5. “Arnold Ruge, To Rosenkranz (April 1842),” in Paul Nerrlich (ed.), Ruges Briefwechsel und Tagebuchblätter aus den Jahren 1825– 1880, vol. I, 1825–1847 (Berlin 1886) pp. 271–274, here: p. 273. 6. Ernst Schulte-Holtey, “Die Freien [Berlin],” in Wulf Wülfing/Karin Bruns/Rolf Parr (eds.), Handbuch literarischkultureller Vereine, Gruppen und Bünde 1825–1933 (Stuttgart/Weimar 1998) pp. 102–111. 7. Max Stirner, “Die Freien,” in Leipziger Allgemeine Zeitung 195 (14 July 1842). Now in John Henry Mackay (ed.), Max Stirner’s kleinere Schriften und Entgegnungen auf die Kritik seines Werkes

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“Der Einzige und sein Eigenthum” aus den Jahren 1842–1848 (Treptow bei Berlin 1914) pp. 132–141, here: p. 132. 8. Max Stirner, “Über die Verpflichtung der Staatsbürger zu irgendeinem Religionsbekenntnis” (Berlin, 4 July 1842, censored text), in Max Stirner, Parerga Kritiken Repliken, ed. Bernd A. Laska (Nürnberg 1986) pp. 111–116, here: p. 112. 9. Mayer, Friedrich Engels, p. 82. 10. δ.γ. (Arnold Ruge?), Review of “(Bruno Bauer). Die Posaune des jüngsten Gerichts über Hegel, den Atheisten und Antichristen. Ein Ultimatum. Leipzig 1841. Otto Wigand,” in Deutsche Jahrbücher für Wissenschaft und Kunst 149 (22 December 1841) pp. 594– 596, here: p. 594. 11. For more on Young Hegelian aesthetics, see the following works for a good overview: Ingrid Pepperle, Junghegelianische Geschichtsphilosophie und Kunsttheorie (Berlin 1978); Marco Ravera, Estetica posthegeliana. Figure e problemi (Milano 1978) pp. 131–149; Lucien Calvié, “Die Junghegelianer und die Literatur ihrer Zeit. Von der theologisch-philosophisch zur politisch-sozialen Kritik,” in Helmut Reinalter (ed.), Die Junghegelianer. Aufklärung, Literatur, Religionskritik und politisches Denken (Frankfurt a.M. 2010) pp. 19–40; Gabriele Schimmenti, “Young Hegelian Aesthetics,” in International Lexikon of Aesthetics 2 (2019) pp. 191–197; Marta Famula, “Ästhetik,” in Norbert Otto Eke (ed.), VormärzHandbuch (Bielefeld 2020) pp. 502–509. 12. Bernadette Collenberg-Plotnikov, “The Aesthetics of the Hegelian School,” in Douglas Moggach (ed.), Politics, Religion, and Art: Hegelian Debates (Evanston 2011) pp. 203–230, here: p. 211. 13. See ibid., p. 213. 14. For more on this point, see Mattia Luigi Pozzi, L’erede che ride. Parodia ed etica della consumazione in Max Stirner (Milano/Udine 2014) pp. 52–133. 15. Karl Marx, “Contribution to Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law. Introduction” (1844), in MECW , vol. 3, pp. 175–187, here: p. 179. 16. Arnold Ruge, “Die historische Komödie in unserer Zeit,” in Arnold Ruge (ed.), Anekdota zur neuesten deutschen Philosophie und Publicistik, vol. II (Zürich/Winterthur 1843) pp. 194–205, here: p. 196. 17. Ibid., p. 198.

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18. Wolfgang Eßbach, Die Junghegelianer. Soziologie einer Intellektuellengruppe (München 1988) p. 163. 19. Ibid., p. 162. 20. Arnold Ruge, “Die Restauration des Christentums,” in Deutsche Jahrbücher für Wissenschaft und Kunst 153 (27 December 1841) pp. 609–611, here: p. 609. 21. Max Stirner, “Art and Religion” (1842), in Lawrence S. Stepelevich (ed.), The Young Hegelians. An Anthology (Cambridge 1983) pp. 327–334, here: p. 332. 22. Ibid., p. 333. 23. Corresponding to this, according to Bruno Bauer, is the dissolution of religion in art. See Bruno Bauer, Hegel’s Lehre von der Religion und Kunst von dem Standpuncte des Glaubens aus beurtheilt (Leipzig 1842) pp. 222–227. See Ernst Müller, “Bruno Bauer implizite Ästhetik. Zur posthegelianischen Figur der ‘Auflösung der Religion in der Kunst’ – mit einem Seitenblick auf Marx,” in Klaus-Michael Kodalle/Tilman Reitz (eds.), Bruno Bauer (1809– 1882). Ein “Partisan der Weltgeist”? (Würzburg 2010) pp. 165– 176; Gabriele Schimmenti, “Bruno Bauer’s Critical Theory of Art and Hegel’s Lectures on Aesthetics in 1828–29,” in Studi di estetica 16 (2020) pp. 147–164. 24. Ruge, “Die historische Komödie,” p. 200. 25. Eßbach, Die Junghegelianer, p. 46. 26. See Burkhard Moenninghoff, “Komisches Epos,” in Klaus Weimar et al. (eds.), Reallexikon der deutschen Literaturwissenschaft (Berlin/New York 2007), vol. 1, pp. 296–298; Friedrich Sengle, Biedermeierzeit. Deutsche Literatur in Spannungsfeld zwischen Restauration und Revolution 1815–1848, vol. II, Die Formenwelt (Stuttgart 1972) pp. 731–742. 27. Karl Julius Weber, Democritos oder hinterlassen Papiere eines lachenden Philosophen, vol. I (Stuttgart 1839) p. 121. 28. A new edition of the work, that Engels likely knew, was published in Berlin in 1840, illustrated with pen-and-ink drawings by Theodor Hosemann. 29. Bruno Bauer, Kritik der evangelischen Geschichte der Synoptiker (Leipzig 1841), “Vorrede,” p. XIV. 30. In this sense the Young Hegelianism in general can be understood as “practice of textual criticism” (Warren Breckmann, “The Symbolic Dimension and the Politics of Left Hegelianism,” in

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Douglas Moggach (ed.), The New Hegelians: Politics and Philosophy in the Hegelian School (Cambridge/New York 2006) pp. 67–90, here: p. 68). 31. Manuscript version in MECW , vol. 2, pp. 304–311. 32. See Claudio Cesa, “Il caso Stirner,” in Enrico Ferri (ed.), Max Stirner e l’individualismo moderno (Napoli 1996) pp. 13–26, here: p. 19. 33. Ruge, Die historische Komödie, p. 195. 34. Referring to Engel’s polemical writings from the years 1839– 1840, we see that the “Pietists” are described as the “opponents” of Bruno Bauer and the Young Hegelians, meaning specifically Heinrich Leo (the “faded Pietist”), Ernst Wilhelm Hengstenberg, Friedrich Wilhelm Krummacher (“man of God”), Carl Heinrich Sack (“Brother Bag”), Julius Müller (“Julius Sinck von Sinnes”), Karl Immanuel Nitzsch (“Brother Nix”), Bernard Hirzel, along with others (see, among other possible sources, “Letters from Wuppertal I-II,” in MECW , vol. 2, pp. 7–25 and “Rationalism and Pietism,” ibid., pp. 126–128). Leo, a long-time enemy of the Young Hegelians (see Die Hegelingen. Aktenstücke und Belege zu der sog. Denunziation der ewigen Wahrheit (Halle 1838, 18392 )), had already been—together with Karl Ludwig Michelet—the target of one of Engels’s parodic portrayals Horned Siegfried, “Fragment of a Tragicomedy” (see “Letter to Friedrich Graeber, 27 April 1839,” in MECW , vol. 2, pp. 428–437, particularly pp. 435– 436). Engels published at the same time as The Triumph of Faith, however, the article “Polemic Against Leo” (in MECW , vol. 2, pp. 281–283). Interestingly, several chapters in the Preface to Bauer’s Hegel’s Doctrine of Religion and Art are devoted to Leo, Sack, Müller, and Nitzsch (see ibid., pp. 23–35). 35. We encounter similar symbolism in The German Ideology; in this text, Leipzig becomes, with some humour one must say, the site of the “council” of the three “church fathers” “Saint Bruno” (Bauer), “Saint Max” (Stirner) and the “gnostic Feuerbach.” See MECW , vol. 5, pp. 19–581, particularly pp. 94–95. Cf. Karl Marx/Friedrich Engels, Deutsche Ideologie. Manuskripte und Drucke, MEGA I, vol. 5, ed. Ulrich Pagel/Gerald Hubmann/Christine Weckwerth (Berlin/Boston 2017) pp. 140– 143.

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36. Where books are used—and not only metaphorically—as weapons (see p. 346). 37. Thus we see, apart from “the Free,” a guillotine and in the upper left a squirrel, an allusion to Minister Eichhorn (“Eichhörnchen” being the German word for “squirrel”). 38. See Karl Marx, “The Leading Article in No. 179 of the Kölnische Zeitung” (10, 12, 14 July 1842), in MECW , vol. 1, pp. 184– 202, particularly p. 196: “The Augsburg paper plays only one instrument in its anti-philosophical cat’s concert, the monotonous kettle-drum.”. 39. Engels also paints the portrait of Otto Wigand (p. 331), Robert Prutz (ibid.), Köppen (p. 335), Meyen (ibid.), Georg Jung (pp. 336–337), and Rutenberg (p. 337). 40. See Christian Hermann Weisse, System der Ästhetik als Wissenschaft von der Idee der Schönheit (Leipzig 1830), vol. I, pp. 207– 251; Karl Rosenkranz, Ästhetik des Häßlichen (Königsberg 1853) pp. 386–428. On this see Margaret A. Rose, “Karl Rosenkranz and the ‘Aesthetics of the Ugly’,” in Moggach, Politics, Religion, and Art, pp. 231–253. 41. Engels cites Jean Paul in the first of the “Letters from Wuppertal,” in the Letter to Wilhelm Graeber written 8 October 1839, as well as in “Modern Literary Life. II. Modern Polemics” (21 May 1840) (in MECW , vol. 2, pp. 81–83, particularly p. 82). 42. Oliver Koch, “‘Ohne Ernst kenn’ ich keinen Scherz’. Jean Pauls Humorkonzept vor dem Hintergrund Jacobis,” in Gerald Hartung/Markus Kleinert (eds.), Humor und Religiosität in der Moderne (Wiesbaden 2017) pp. 41–60, here: p. 47. See Jean Paul, Vorschule der Ästhetik, in Sämtliche Werke, vol. 5, ed. Norbert Miller (München 1960) pp. 7–514, here: p. 140. Concerning the influence Jean Paul had on Feuerbach (Äbalard und Heloise) and Ruge (Neue Vorschule der Ästhetik), as well as on Young Hegelianism generally, see Claudio Cesa, Studi sulla sinistra hegeliana (Urbino 1972), p. 29. 43. “Letter to Margaret Harkness, April 1888” (Draft), in Lee Baxandall/Stefan Morawski (eds.), Marx and Engels On Literature and Art (St. Louis/Milwaukee 1973) pp. 114–116, here: p. 114. For more on this point, see Georg Lukács, “Friedrich Engels als Literaturtheoretiker und Literaturkritiker,” in Probleme der Ästhetik (Neuwied/Berlin 1966) pp. 505–535, particularly pp. 529–532.

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44. See Jean-François Courtine’s remarks regarding the value of an art work in his article “Res singularis,” in Rivista di Filosofia Neo-Scolastica CVII (1–2) (2015) pp. 255–273, particularly pp. 266–271. See also Jean-François Courtine , “Realitas,” in Joachim Ritter/Karlfriend Gründer (eds.), Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, vol. 8 (Basel 1992) pp. 177–188. 45. “Letter to Minna Kautsky, 26 November 1885,” in Baxandall/Morawski, Marx and Engels On Literature and Art, pp. 112– 113. See Georg Lukács, “Einführung in die ästhetischen Schriften von Marx und Engels,” in Probleme der Ästhetik) pp. 205–231, particularly pp. 221–222. 46. See Iohannes Duns Scotus. Super lib. II Posterium, q. 4, 329b: “Individuum enim per se et primo existit, essentia non nisi per accidens.”. 47. Martin Heidegger, Duns Scotus’ Theory of the Categories and of Meaning, trans. by Harold J. Robbins, Diss. (Ann Arbor 1978), p. 70. 48. Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. Twelve Lectures, trans. Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge 1998), p. 53.

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Collenberg-Plotnikov, Bernadette. “The Aesthetics of the Hegelian School.” In Politics, Religion, and Art: Hegelian Debates, edited by Douglas Moggach (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2011), pp. 203–230. Courtine, Jean-François. “Realitas.” In Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, vol. 8, edited by Joachim Ritter/Karlfriend Gründer, (Basel 1992), pp. 177– 188. Courtine, Jean-François. “Res singularis.” Rivista di Filosofia Neo-Scolastica CVII (1–2) (2015), pp. 255–273. Duns Scotus, Iohannes. Super lib. II Posterium. In Opera omnia, vol. II (Parisiis: apud Ludovicum Vivès, 1891). Engels, Friedrich. “Letters from Wuppertal.” In MECW , vol. 2, pp. 7–25. Engels, Friedrich. “Modern Literary Life. II. Modern Polemics.” In MECW , vol. 2, pp. 71–93. Engels, Friedrich. “Letter to Minna Kautsky, 26 November 1885.” In Marx and Engels On Literature and Art, edited by Lee Baxandall and Stefan Morawski (St. Louis and Milwaukee: Telos, 1973), pp. 112–113. Engels, Friedrich. “Rationalism and Pietism.” In MECW , vol. 2, pp. 126–128. Engels, Friedrich. “Schelling on Hegel.” In MECW , vol. 2, pp. 181–187. Engels, Friedrich. “Polemic Against Leo.” In MECW , vol. 2, pp. 281–283. Engels, Friedrich. “On the Critique of the Prussian Press Laws.” In MECW , vol. 2, pp. 304–311. Engels, Friedrich. “Letter to Friedrich Graeber, 27 April 1839.” In MECW , vol. 2, pp. 428–437. Engels, Friedrich, and Edgar Bauer. The Insolently Threatened Yet Miraculously Rescued Bible. Or: The Triumph of Faith. To Wit, the Terrible, Yet True and Salutary History of the Erstwhile Licentiate Bruno Bauer; How the Same, Seduced by the Devil, Fallen from the True Faith, Became Chief Devil, and Was Well and Truly Ousted in the End. A Christian Epic in Four Cantos. In MECW , vol. 2, pp. 313–351. Ernst, Schulte-Holtey. “Die Freien [Berlin].” Handbuch literarisch-kultureller Vereine, Gruppen und B¨unde 1825–1933, edited by Wulf W¨ulfing/Karin Bruns/Rolf Parr (Stuttgart/Weimar 1998) pp. 102–111. Eßbach, Wolfgang. Die Junghegelianer. Soziologie einer Intellektuellengruppe (München: W. Fink, 1988). Famula, Marta. “Ästhetik.” In Vormärz-Handbuch, edited by Norbert Otto Eke (Bielefeld: Aisthesis Verlag, 2020). pp. 502–509. Habermas, Jürgen. The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. Twelve Lectures. Translated by Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge: Polity, 1998). Heidegger, Martin. Duns Scotus’ Theory of the Categories and of Meaning. Translated by Harold J. Robbins. Dissertation (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1978).

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Koch, Oliver “‘Ohne Ernst kenn’ ich keinen Scherz’. Jean Pauls Humorkonzept vor dem Hintergrund Jacobis.” In Humor und Religiosität in der Moderne, edited by Gerald Hartung and Markus Kleinert (Wiesbaden: VS Verlag, 2017), pp. 41–60. Leo, Heinrich. Die Hegelingen. Aktenstücke und Belege zu der sog. Denunziation der ewigen Wahrheit (Halle: Eduard Anton, 1838, 18392 ). Lukács, Georg. “Friedrich Engels als Literaturtheoretiker und Literaturkritiker.” In Probleme der Ästhetik (Neuwied and Berlin: Luchterhand, 1966), pp. 505– 535. Lukács, Georg. “Einführung in die ästhetischen Schriften von Marx und Engels.” In Probleme der Ästhetik pp. 205–231, particularly pp. 221–222. Marx, Karl. “Contribution to Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law. Introduction” [1844]. In MECW , vol. 3, pp. 175–187. Marx, Karl. “The Leading Article in No. 179 of the Kölnische Zeitung ” [10, 12, 14 July 1842]. In MECW , vol. 1, pp. 184–202. Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. Deutsche Ideologie. Manuskripte und Drucke. MEGA I, vol. 5, edited by Ulrich Pagel, Gerald Hubmann and Christine Weckwerth (Berlin and Boston: de Gruyter, 2017). Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. The German Ideology. In MECW , vol. 5, pp. 19–581. Mayer, Gustav. Friedrich Engels. Eine Biographie. vol. 1 (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1934). Moenninghoff, Burkhard. “Komisches Epos.” In Reallexikon der deutschen Literaturwissenschaft, vol. I, edited by Klaus Weimar et al. (Berlin and New York: de Gruyter, 2007), pp. 296–298. Müller, Ernst. “Bruno Bauer implizite Ästhetik. Zur posthegelianischen Figur der ‘Auflösung der Religion in der Kunst‘ – mit einem Seitenblick auf Marx.” In Bruno Bauer (1809–1882). Ein “Partisan der Weltgeist”?, edited by KlausMichael Kodalle and Tilman Reit (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2010), pp. 165–176. Paul, Jean. Vorschule der Ästhetik. In Sämtliche Werke. vol. 5, edited by Norbert Miller (München: Carl Hanser, 1960), pp. 7–514. Pepperle, Ingrid. Junghegelianische Geschichtsphilosophie und Kunsttheorie (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1978). Pozzi, Mattia Luigi. L’erede che ride. Parodia ed etica della consumazione in Max Stirner (Milano and Udine: Mimesis, 2014). Ravera, Marco. Estetica posthegeliana. Figure e problemi (Milano: Mursia, 1978). Rosenkranz, Karl. Ästhetik des Häßlichen (Königsberg: Verlag der Gebrüder Bornträger, 1853). Ruge, Arnold. “Die historische Komödie in unserer Zeit.” In Anekdota zur neuesten deutschen Philosophie und Publicistik, edited by Arnold Ruge. vol. II

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(Zürich and Winterthur: Verlag des literarischen Comptoirs, 1843), pp. 194– 205. Ruge, Arnold. “To Rosenkranz (April 1842).” In Ruges Briefwechsel und Tagebuchblätter aus den Jahren 1825–1880: 1825–1847 , vol. I, edited by Paul Nerrlich (Berlin 1886) pp. 271–274, here: p. 273. Ruge, Arnold. “Die Restauration des Christentums.” In Deutsche Jahrbücher für Wissenschaft und Kunst 153 (27 December 1841), pp. 609–611, here: p. 609. Ruge, Arnold. Review of “[Bruno Bauer], Die Posaune des jüngsten Gerichts über Hegel, den Atheisten und Antichristen. Ein Ultimatum. Leipzig 1841. Otto Wigand.” In Deutsche Jahrbücher für Wissenschaft und Kunst 149 (22 December 1841), pp. 594–595. Schimmenti, Gabriele. “Bruno Bauer’s Critical Theory of Art and Hegel’s Lectures on Aesthetics in 1828–29.” In Studi di estetica 16 (2020), pp. 147– 164. Schimmenti, Gabriele. “Young Hegelian Aesthetics.” In International Lexikon of Aesthetics 2 (Milan: Feltrinelli, 2019), pp. 191–197. Sengle, Friedrich. Biedermeierzeit. Deutsche Literatur in Spannungsfeld zwischen Restauration und Revolution 1815–1848. vol. II, Die Formenwelt (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1972). Stirner, Max. “Art and Religion” [1842]. In The Young Hegelians. An Anthology, edited by Lawrence S. Stepelevich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 327–334. Stirner, Max. “Die Freien,” Leipziger Allgemeine Zeitung 195 (14 July 1842). In John Henry Mackay (ed.), Max Stirner’s kleinere Schriften und Entgegnungen auf die Kritik seines Werkes “Der Einzige und sein Eigenthum” aus den Jahren 1842–1848 (Treptow bei Berlin: Bernhard Zack’s Verlag, 1914), pp. 132–141. Stirner, Max. “Über die Verpflichtung der Staatsbürger zu irgendeinem Religionsbekenntnis” (Berlin, 4 July 1842, censored text). In Parerga Kritiken Repliken, edited by Bernd A. Laska (Nürnberg: LSR, 1986), pp. 111–116. Weber, Karl Julius. Democritos oder hinterlassen Papiere eines lachenden Philosophen. vol. I (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1839). Weisse, Christian Hermann. System der Ästhetik als Wissenschaft von der Idee der Schönheit. vol. I (Leipzig: Hartmann, 1830).

CHAPTER 16

Engels and German Literature: A Political History to the Present Anne-Rose Meyer

To speak of figures is to use an equivocal term capable of several different meanings. We use “figure” as a name for the invariant, extrinsically defined human form. We speak of “figures in public life” or of “historical figures” and refer thereby to history, be it contemporary or more remote. And as we know, “figure” is also a designation for literary characters that seem human or life-like. There are “figures of speech” in rhetoric, that is, linguistic embellishments or ornaments in speech. And when we consider a historical personage like Friedrich Engels, these various meanings of “figure” come into play. Engels is the subject of biographies and of historical research—and so a historical figure1 — and also an anthropomorphic figure in literary texts.2 Yet how Engels appears in the latter has not been systematically investigated. What traces has Engels left in literature up to now? And for what reasons has this

A.-R. Meyer (B) Bergische University-Wuppertal, Wuppertal, Germany e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 T. Carver and S. Rapic (eds.), Friedrich Engels for the 21st Century, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-97138-0_16

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historical person been treated ever anew from the nineteenth century right down to today? In taking up these questions, we must recall that this also means dealing with the depiction of a historical person who himself was a writer. There are thus intertextual references that must be taken into account with respect to Engels that provide the theoretical framework: What Engels himself wrote, and what was written about Engels, necessarily intersect, thus raising the question of what was of interest to those who wrote about him. What does the literature focus on and why? Are there constants in this depiction?

Poems to Engels and Engels in Poems---Fritz Kunert, Josef Hannich, Wilhelm Ludwig Rosenberg, Bertolt Brecht, Reiner Kunze, Kathrin Schmidt Manfred Häckel, who edited the only anthology of poetry on Marx and Engels, states that the “impact of the greatest German thinkers Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels … remained almost unechoed in the belles lettres of the time,” that is, in the nineteenth century. However, he regards the few poems that do exist as “harbingers of German socialist and national literature.”3 In many cases, social-democratically inclined autodidacts took up their pens, though not so much as to pay homage to Engels as to Marx. While poems about Marx praise the enduring power of his theories, Engels mainly appears only as Marx’s friend. In very few texts are either Engels’s own intellectual achievements acknowledged or does he emerge as an author in his own right. But this is the case, for instance, in Wilhelm Ludwig’s poem which emphasizes the immortality of Engels’s thought and the man himself as an “intellectual hero.” He sought humanity’s common bond and “deliverance from the yoke of slavery.”4 Josef Hannich’s Nachruf an Friedrich Engels [Obituary of Friedrich Engels] goes in much the same direction.5 He emphasizes Engels’s significance as a political-ideological guide. A poet named Hunold6 equates Engels’s impact with that of a force of nature. These poems, pathos-laden but lacking aesthetic innovation, were mostly written on the occasion of Engels’s death and set the path for subsequent developments in reception of Engels. Writings in the twentieth century on Marx and Engels are both aesthetically and substantively more interesting, for instance the poem Mohr

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[Moor] by Reiner Kunze, who was born in 1933 in the Ore Mountains [Erzgebirge] and was a lyric poet, prose writer, GDR dissident and Büchner Prize winner. It is true that in Kunze, too, Engels appears only in the role of a friend, and, aesthetically speaking, the poem is certainly not one of Kunze’s best. However, what is revealing here is that, when compared with his other works, we can see how the poet moves from being an enthusiastic socialist to becoming the regime-critical thinker who left the GDR in 1977 and settled in West Germany. It is no accident that Kunze’s first volume of poetry, in which the poem Mohr can be found, is called Die Zukunft sitzt am Tische [The Future Sits at the Table]. It was published in Halle an der Saale in 1955. The entire volume takes a positive stance towards socialism, as Kunze indicates right at the outset. Against this background, the poem Mohr in Kunze’s first volume of poetry is an important artistic and political statement. The poet not only affirms the political ideals of socialism but also gives a rather pathos-laden expression to the deep bond between Marx the theorist and Engels, his supportive friend. For example in the stanza: “Mohr… Friend Mohr” – Thus his loyal comrade said to him. Their friendship, the most beautiful That ever grew That gave him the power, And thus he fashioned the unbridled will – And gave us victories, Victories – His whole life.7

Kunze’s second volume Vögel über dem Tau. Liebesgedichte und Lieder [Birds over the Dew. Love Poems and Songs] (1959), still contains poems attesting to a pro-socialist stance. The poet praises workers, miners, farmers and lets his lyrical self make friendly and respectful contact with them.8 And it is no accident that he dedicates the volume to “the Czech people, the Slovakian people.” Kunze took some poems from his first volume and reprinted them in the Vögel über dem Tau. However, the poem Mohr is not among them. We can see in this—and in the content of Kunze’s later poetry collections—a gradual turn from socialism and the development from a venerator of Marx and Engels and a convinced socialist into a critic and ultimately an opponent of the regime.9

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Often the traces of Engels in literature are only faint. Even in Bertolt Brecht, we find only a few vague references. Engels is present in Brecht through quotations, for instance through allusions to the “German misery,”10 as in the play Der Hofmeister [The Tutor].11 Brecht often subsumes Marx, Engels and Lenin under the heading of “the classics,” frequently in connection with the “writings of the classics,” for instance in the play Die Maßnahme [The Decision]12 and in the poem Inbesitznahme der großen Metro durch die Moskauer Arbeiterschaft am 27. April 1935 [The Moscow workers take possession of the great Metro on 27 April 1935] from the Svendborger Gedichten [Svenborg Poems].13 Marx and Engels are also subsumed under “classics” in poems from 1934 too, for instance in Als nun aber die immer fortschreitende Menschheit [Now, however, that humanity, in its unending progress...],14 Reise der Volksvertreter an die Front [Journey of the People’s Representatives to the Front],15 and in 1936, for example in Der Gedanke in den Werken der Klassiker [Thought in the works of the classics],16 and in poems from the year 1940 Briefe der Mutter an ihre Kinder in der Ferne [Letters from mothers to their children in foreign parts],17 in poems from 1941/2, such as the Selbstzerfleischung des Proletariats [Self-laceration of the proletariat].18 The “classics” are invoked as guarantors who foresaw the path of the proletariat and its better future, for instance in the USSR. But, as in the poem above, these figures also appear as obstructions, for they theorize too much. In other poems, such as Die handelnd Unzufriedenen [The active discontented] (1943) they trade under the name of “your great teachers” and are venerated as heroes.19 The Buch der Wendungen [Book of Changes] makes many and diverse allusions to the “great method,” the dialectical-materialist thinking and acting that Brecht derives from philosophical writings, especially those of Hegel, Marx and Engels. Accordingly, Engels does not become palpable as a historical figure in Brecht’s work, but he does become so in other authors from the 1960s onwards, for instance, in the first collection of lyric poetry by Katherin Schmidt, born in Gotha in 1958. In the poem Die Deutsche Reichsbahn lädt zum revolutionären Ausflug [The German Imperial Railway Invites to a Revolutionary Excursion] she writes with humorous ambiguity of a journey of “progressives [vorwärtsbringern],”20 including “jeanne d’arc and engels/(aside the mary the lizzy)/the Mohr” seated together in a compartment. The luminaries have nothing to say—“strange is simply the silence/no one speaks no one

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asks.”21 For Schmidt it is not the thoughts of these figures that are meaningful but the results of their thinking whose quintessence she sees in the struggle for social justice. Thus the poem concludes: the tracklayers unpack their bread much bread that is the movement lenin begins to sing22

The “movement” here has a double meaning. The trains, halting at a fertile potato field, and the abundantly available bread concretely illustrate the harvest that can be reaped through the work of the “progressives [vorwärtsbringer].” Engels is mentioned on an equal footing with Marx and Lenin.

Engels in Biographical Novels: From Walter Victor, Robert Jordan, Walter Baumert ¨ and Gerhard Hardel to Tilmann Rohrig From the 1960s onwards Engels was the subject of biographical novels for children and young people which helped popularize his way of life and thinking, especially in the GDR. There is a constant therein: all these novels discussed here emphasize the two thinkers’ friendship and portray this in terms of Marx’s dependence on Engels, as in the oldest of these biographical novels, that of the writer Walther Victor (1895–1971), Der General und die Frauen. Vom Erlebnis zur Theorie [The General and the Women. From Experience to Theory] from the year 1932.23 Victor sets the interpretive course that is followed by most subsequent biographies: he sees Engels’s departure from the gymnasium school as a free renunciation on boy’s part, who preferred writing poetry, painting and composing to studying. Nothing is said of the strict father, who forbade further attendance at higher educational institutes. The friendship between Engels and Marx is centrally celebrated by Victor in empathetically, emotive terms as a “lifelong bond” between two exceptional personages.24 Marx trades under the name of “thinker,” Engels as “lad,”25 extremely successful with women, who sacrificed his interests in his factory so as to earn money for Marx’s growing family. Nevertheless, Victor’s depiction also acknowledges Engels’s intellectual contribution to Marx’s various

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writings and theories.26 This biographical novel is allied with a positive vision of society under Marxist communist auspices: The general returns home. An incredible life is at an end. But humanity will make it.27

The cultural journalist and writer Robert Jordan (1885–1970)28 represents Engels similarly. In Lizzy Burns. Das liebe dreckige Leben [Lizzy Burns. The Dear Dirty Life] he appears as a beau and bon vivant, a loyal friend and brilliant thinker. Moreover, Jordan pays unequivocal tribute to Engels’s meritorious help with Marx’s writings. Thus in Jordan, we read a speech which Marx gives on Das Kapital: “My book is also his book! I would never get finished it without him!”29 And in another passage, from the clearly evaluative perspective of the narrator, we read: To be brutally frank, without Engels he would be long ruined together with the great work. To put it starkly, his family and the brilliant book would have sunk into nothingness if Engels had withdrawn his hand. Karl Marx saw and felt the grace of this great friendship.30

But Jordan and also Victor hardly touch on Engels’s own work. This also holds of the young adult novel Marie und ihr großer Bruder [Marie and her Big Brother] by Gerhard Hardels (1912–1984),31 which depicts Engels from his younger sister Marie’s point of view as a subject of her diary. Such an approach lets “Fritz” be seen in his private life and opens up the possibility of presenting the development of socialist thinking to a younger readership,32 providing them with basic information, for instance on London as a workers’ metropolis and economic centre. Marie is depicted as an inquisitive pupil who finds out about her father’s and brother’s professional travel destinations and records these in her diary. The internal focus is strongly directed towards psychological dynamics within the family, for instance on Engels’s disputes with his father and with the pastor Leipold. It describes a visit by Marie and young Engels to the family textile plant in graphic detail. This confrontation with poverty, child labour and exploitation explains Engels’s social and political engagement and motivates his turn away from the church. The novel ends with an account of how Marx, Engels and Moses Heß got to know each other, and with Engels taking up his post in the textile spinning plant in England. It also sketches out his acquaintanceship with his later

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companion Mary Burns and his shock at the desperate plight of the workers in the family business. The novel culminates in Engels’s political affirmation to a colleague in London: I am a communist. I have come here because I want to learn about the people, the conditions and the social relations in England. Because I want to tell the German workers about his!33

The narrative spans roughly a decade, during which Marie matures from a girl into the young woman who marries Engels’s friend Emil Blank. Their mutual attraction in the novel is motivated by comparable social-liberal ideas. One of the merits of this novel is that it elucidates Engels’s intellectual and political development and also traces it back to familial and social constellations. The perspective of a growing girl allows complicated situations and historical circumstances to be described without pedantic undertones. It is thus not surprising that the novel was reprinted nine times before 1981 and that it was one of the most popular youth books in the GDR. Walter Baumert also provides a differentiated portrait of Engels’s development in his young adult novel34 which was published in both German states, in the GDR with the title Schau auf die Erde [Look at the Earth] and in the FRG as Der Flug des Falken [The Flight of the Falcon]. It does, however, have an educational goal: every chapter on Engels’s life is preceded by a section on contemporary historical events. And in the chapters themselves, Engels’s life is closely interwoven with the wider history: thus just as Engels suffers under a bigoted and extremely authoritarian paternal upbringing, so too Germany suffers under Prussian rule. In 1834, after the founding of the German customs union, there was a markedly increased stagnation and censorship as well as in Engels’s life, because he wanted to record social injustice, to read books and to think. However, this was strictly regulated by his father. The biographical novel makes a clear link between strict religious orthodoxy and the authoritarian state or family. Baumert’s biographical novel breaks off at the point at which Marx’s and Engels’s acquaintanceship becomes closer. Thus he vividly portrays Engels’s intellectual development, but does not explore his adult thinking. What Baumert’s novel has in common with those of Hardel, Victor and Jordan is that Engels’s own work is scarcely mentioned, if it is mentioned at all. Jordan does in fact depict the adult Engels—his biographical

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novel plays out against the background of the Baden-Palatine uprising of 1849—but the author is primarily interested in Engels’s love affairs. This is particularly true of Victor’s novel, which is mainly dedicated to Engels’s relationship with the Burns sisters. The closest to an insight into Engels’s writings can be found in Hardel, who mentions some of these at the end of the novel.35 The actor and writer Tilman Röhrig (b. 1945) has published the most recent biographical novel on the occasion of Engels’s two hundredth birthday, broaching his main character using a vividly realistic writing style. From the perspective of Helene Demuth, the long-standing domestic help and companion in the Marx household, it clearly shows the disorder and dilapidation after the forced move from Paris to Brussels. Engels is introduced as a drunken carouser whose first act is to make a spirited grab at Helene’s crotch. Immediately afterwards, there is a graphic reference to the nappy that little Jenny, the youngest Marx daughter at the beginning of the novel, has just filled. Röhrig’s novel, like Jordan’s, aims to acknowledge Engels’s charity towards the Marx family and to show this as indispensable to the genesis of Marx’s various writings. Both authors likewise aim to give literary credence to Engels’s appeal to women using several examples. There are also parallels between Röhrig’s biographical novel and that of Baumert: both point out contradictions in the lives of the two theorists. Hence in Röhrig’s novel, Marx calls Engels as a “capitalist with a heart for the poor.” To which Engels replies: “And you? The husband of a noblewoman who wants to be a communist.” And on Marx from Engels’s perspective: “If someone from the committee were to see you like this: you sit there in the fine landau, slurping wine and sunning your damned skull … It’s already questionable enough that you still like to title Jenny ‘Baroness’. The only thing that connects you with the poor is your poverty, nothing else, except that some of our theories are based on them.”36 Despite such dialogue, all five novels stress, and not without a degree of pathos, the friendship between Marx and Engels. This can be seen as an attempt not only to bring the figure of Engels to life but also to bring him down to a human scale through the detailed description of everyday events and to supplement the widely received theories with portrayals of Engels as he grew up and with descriptions of his private and love life. The authors take different approaches to this: while Baumert provides a detailed and accurate account of the formative years of the young Engels,

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Jordan and Victor concentrate on impassioned descriptions of Engels’s magnanimity and virility. On his part, Röhrig reports, as it were, from out of the “workshop” of communism. Hence Marx and Engels are shown as enthusiastic smokers and drinkers who give a title to the Communist Manifesto in a pub: “What about the title then? I think we really should leave out the catechism form. It’s too reminiscent of the church and sanctimony. I suggest we call the thing: Communist Manifesto.” The friend [Marx] takes a slug of punch and savours it with a light smack. “I agree.” That raises us above all the woolly-minded social compassion and gives the whole an intellectual coating.37

Through such descriptions, these authors—like Röhrig and also Hardel, Victor, Baumert and Jordan cited above—provide a counterpoint to ideologically coloured confrontations with Marx and Engels in the humanities and emphasize the practical considerations that drive diverse political actions and writing strategies.

Engels in Novels by Ingeborg ¨ Drewitz and Emine Sevgi Ozdamar While the biographical novels trace Engels’s intellectual development more or less clearly, but do not focus on the results of his thinking, the situation is different in historical novels from the last third of the twentieth century. Both Ingeborg Drewitz (1923–1986) and Emine Sevgi Özdamar (b. 1946) deal with the ramifications of Engels’s theories in their respective presents. Drewitz’s 1979 novel Das Hochhaus [The Highrise] is a work of social criticism that captures the negative consequences of urbanization and industrialization as exemplified by a Berlin building. Engels is mentioned in relation to migrant workers by the only upper-class character, the director of a factory in West Berlin. Their low remuneration, which is a theme of the novel, enables the payment of higher wages to locals. It is in this context that Marx and Engels are mentioned in reflections quoted from the director, which occur in conversation with an unnamed former colleague whose remarks the director remembers while eating in the factory canteen.

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“… What do you really think of Marx? Isn’t he just a crank? Rabbi’s son – Hegel student, editor, author of books, kept by the capitalist Engels, isn’t that your opinion? And that he knew nothing of such a factory at his little table in the dim library room or London villa that Engels also paid for him? Nor the balance sheet you’re supposed to put in order! Admit it, you think nothing of him! You only pretend you do, for Mr Marx doesn’t help in your new position and in the goal of your new life: above!”38

The reference to Marx in this novel is also a significant pointer to the social problematic of the labour force, a theme in many diverse novels from the 1960s up to the 1980s.39 In her tower-block novel, Drewitz unfolds a panorama of different characters who are strongly influenced by their social class. The factory director lives above them all on the 18th floor. Further down live bus drivers with their large families, and a single mother with a child whose precarious situation eludes the other families until the woman disappears without a trace and the son’s classmates alert them to the situation. In the novel, living in solidarity thus seems utopian, incapable of being realized, even in part, without an impetus. The director’s musings on the remuneration of the migrant workers also illustrate this and provocatively emphasize the apparent ineffectualness of Marx’s and Engels’s theories. Emine Sevgi Özdamar shows the opposite in her 1998 novel Die Brücke vom Goldenen Horn [The Bridge of the Golden Horn]. The first-person narrator, who remains nameless, arrives as a migrant worker in Germany at the end of the 1960s and comes into contact with communists in the women’s hostel. The novel’s title suggests a clear geographical location for the plot and characters: The Golden Horn Bridge was a construction existing in extra-literary reality which spanned the Bosphorus and connected different districts in Istanbul. Berlin, the narrator’s destination, and temporarily the centre of her life, does not give the novel its title but is nevertheless present in various geographical and historical details. Nonetheless even a quick first reading shows that the author by no means restricts herself to these two settings, Istanbul and Berlin, but transcends these concrete locations through numerous intertextual references, creating a broader space of reference. The extent of this space is difficult to gauge because it spans from the eighteenth century up to the second half of the twentieth century, encompassing Johann Wolfgang von Goethe as well as Tennessee Williams and Peter Weiss, including Franz Kafka, Albert Camus and Leo Tolstoy, as well as

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Garcia Lorca and Nazim Hikmet, Bertolt Brecht, William Shakespeare, Charles Baudelaire and also non-literary texts. Engels’s The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State is the most important of these and the one which is treated most extensively. The extremely broad spectrum of intertextual references could first seem like an eclectic dive into the literary-historical archive. But on closer consideration, it emerges as a productive procedure for rendering migration in particular, and the related educational experiences in general, as aesthetically perceptible. The selection of this work is significant for the overall context of the novel: The protagonist reads The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State as she begins to make contact with communists in Germany. Engels is present as an author40 in diverse inquit formulas, such as “Engels says,” “Engels writes,” together with terminology like “group marriage,” “food, clothing, provisions, work, housing,” “production and reproduction” from his writing.41 The reading of Engels is part of an educational process in which the narrator also liberates herself sexually and becomes aware of the working conditions in their factory: Since there was piecework, women could no longer go to the toilet. Their hair often fell out and lay on their table, but they went on working on the radio lamps between their hairs. Sometimes they said: “This piecework will kill me.” Through piecework the women in the factory were divided into two groups, the women who made the piecework and those who didn’t.42

Moreover, the novel also thematizes the hard living conditions in the workers hostel. The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State is also related to the narrator’s bourgeoning interest in sexuality. She doesn’t want a husband but wants to lose her virginity, inspired by the attractive communist hostel director, an important mentor for the narrator in Berlin, and also by her reading of Engels, which gives the narrator carte blanche in sexual matters: Engels says: “It has recently become fashionable to deny this initial stage of human sexual life [i.e. group marriage]. One wants to spare humanity this ‘shame’. Birds only lived in pairs, because the woman sat on her eggs and brooded and needed help, so the bird was faithful to her. But human beings were not descended from birds.”43

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On the basis of this natural and social history, the novel underscores concepts of free love that become increasingly important as the plot progresses. And Özdamar uses, among other things, Engels’s digressions on the love life of tapeworms to depict women who married multiple times as a phenomenon that transcends culture, position and nation: Women who had many husbands reminded me of the Hollywood actresses Zsa Zsa Gabor, Liz Taylor and of Turkish farmwomen. Their husbands go to work in the big cities … die young or die in war and their women were given to their brothers as wives. So Turkish village women also had many husbands.44

As this statement already shows, Özdamar’s novel is not concerned with interpreting or giving a subtle commentary on Engels’s The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. The author and his work rather serve to introduce the narrator’s gradually dawning political awareness and to provide a paradigmatic illustration of a generational experience: the renewed confrontation with Marx and Engels around 1968. At the end of the novel, the narrator uses the precarious situation of the farmers on the Iran-Iraq border as an opportunity to travel there and to write a socially critical report. In her luggage are Marx’s Capital and Lenin’s State and Revolution.45 At the time of the confrontation with Engels, featured at the outset of the novel, there is a significant amount of talk about non-understanding: both the German and Turkish translations are only partly comprehensible to the narrator. The reading of The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State turns out to be hard intellectual work that the narrator is not always up to. The fact that in the novel the title of the work is first rendered in capital letters in Turkish and the German translation of the title in brackets and in regular typography afterwards is significant. The translation does not only serve to orient the German-language novel reader in terms of content, but it also, when seen together with the Turkish, illustrates the great impact of Engels’s work, which had already been translated into thirteen languages at the time. Özdamar also refers to this reception by commenting on the first three translations. However, this is from a purely aesthetic perspective, in accordance with the naïve view of the picaresque narrator, which stands in stark contrast to Engels’s fundamental work of Marxism:

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I also loved the title translations of Engels’s book. I really like the Italian: L’origine della Famiglia, della proprieta [!] privatà [!] e dello stato. The Romanian was: Originà Familiei proprietátei, private si a Statului. The Danish was: Familjes, Privatejendommens og statens Oprindelse. On the book was: pocketbook. A book that fits in the jacket pocket, the coat pocket. It was nice to think that a book was made for the pocket.46

The book The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State has a physical, tangible presence, harbouring within itself the traces of different readers: The book smelt of cigarettes … Between the pages there were not only tobacco crumbs, but also eyelashes, hair, flakes of skin, the book had folds like the clothes of Taube and Engel when they slept in their clothes some nights in the hostel director’s room. The book also had coffee cup stains. Many lines had pencil markings and there were lots of crumbs of rubber between the pages.47

Thus in Özdamar’s novel, Engels is only present as a historical figure in rudimentary way in the introductory formulas, but Özdamar shows the enormous social influence of his thought—and independently of texts by both Marx and Engels. Besides Baumert and Röhrig, Özdamar is thus the only author who produces a differentiated picture of Engels. While Röhrig aims at illustrating in a concrete, realistic way Marx’s and Engels’s collaboration in a definite time and place, and Baumert at narrating Engels’s formative years [Bildungsgeschichte], Özdamar articulates a generational experience by focusing on the reception of The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. Engels is unmistakeably present there as an author and theorist.

¨ Engels in Dramatic Texts: Gunter Kaltofens/Hans Pfeifers, Karl Mickels and Michael Knieriems The published dialogues in which Engels appears as a speaker all aim, like the biographical novels, to give an authentic impression of his familial situation and of his thinking as well as providing a mimetic “re-living”48 of the young Engels’s situation. In 1976, for example, the East German screenwriter Günter Kaltofen (1927–1977) wrote, together with Hans Pfeiffer (1925–1998), a documentary drama largely based on original letters between Karl and Jenny Marx and Engels49 : Salut an alle. Marx

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[Greetings to All. Marx]. Through Jenny’s letters, the economic misery of the Marx family becomes clear. Constant financial difficulties brought about hunger, necessitated changes of residence and aggravated the fragile health of the children. The death of two infants and an older child is also a theme. This underscores the need for Engels to constantly support of the family. The Marxes’ married couple relationship, including the erotic, takes up the most space, while the relationship between Engels and Mary Burns is scarcely mentioned.50 Marx’s death brings the play to decisive end. The text also aims to condense psychological, theoretical and social developments in the three protagonists. Letters from the Bremen business office to Engels’s sister Marie illuminate his literary as well as his literary-critical productions and subsequent turn to politics and to philosophical-political theory. As prescribed by stage directions, projections of Engels’s caricatures from his Berlin period and of the front pages of the Rheinische Zeitung and the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, for instance, convey the source material visually, corroborate the characters’ speeches and divide the piece into individual, chronologically successive sections. The play offers insight, through the vividness of the letters of all three persons, into the private, vocational and philosophical-political spheres. Thus, for instance, the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher and the associated connection with Arnold Ruge are understood as essential points of contact and starting points for Marx’s and Engels’s shared work. The authors achieve a high degree of dynamism and liveliness through citations from letters of varying length. This impression is reinforced by rapid changes of scene and person, of their perspectives and manners. While Kaltofen and Pfeifer’s collaborative work encompasses several decades of the life of the Marx family and of Engels, the play Marx wird Marx [Marx becomes Marx] (1976) by Karl Michel (1935–2000) concentrates on the period between 1837 and 1848. It is also documentary piece, based on Marx’s and Engels’s writings as well as their letters to each other and to family members. The first part consists of the correspondence between father and son concerning Marx’s stay in Berlin. There follows a trialogue between David Friedrich Strauß, Ludwig Feuerbach and Marx, then a dialogue between Marx and a Rhineland deputy on the 1842 timber theft act. The use of a speaker orients the spectator/reader concerning the changing circumstances, and a chorus comments on political statements

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and provides information on Marx’s appearance. As the title already indicates, Marx has the largest share of the dialogue. Engels is mainly present in the fourth scene: in 1844 he writes from Barmen to Marx in Cologne, commenting on the workers’ situation in Germanic countries and in England. Statements on “forced labour” as “the hardest, most degrading torment”,51 as well as on the situation of poor children, illustrate the starting points for Engels’s social and political engagement and are based on his The Condition of the Working Class in England published in 1845. In the fifth section, Engels is the addressee of a letter in which Marx describes his precarious financial situation, and in 1847 Engels writes a letter from Paris to Marx in Brussels dealing with the name and arrangement of the Communist Manifesto. In the sixth section, Marx, Engels, the singer and the chorus cite passages in turn from the Communist Manifesto. The play ends with declarations by Marx and Engels drawn from the text, thus framing it as the most important result of their collaboration. Condensed into a few moments, Mickel provides a depiction of the Marxist way of thinking and thereby portrays Engels as an equal to Marx and an equally important partner. The men behind the names, however, do not come to life. Marx and Engels function—like the other characters—only as bearers and disseminators of ideas. The central aspects of their philosophy are thereby clearly recognizable, but these are not embedded in a wider context. Collected in the volume Gelehrtenrepublik—Beiträge zur deutschen Dichtungsgeschichte [Scholar’s Republic—Contributions to the History of German Poetry] from Mickel’s Schriften [Writings], the text can also be read as a commentary on the author’s own intellectual and artistic development. This began with his state-aligned anti-imperialist book Lobverse und Beschimpfungen [Verses of Praise and Abuse] (1953) and continued with the epoch-making, already ironically state-critical lyrical anthology In diesem besseren Land [In this Better Land] (1966) that was an irritant to the GDR leadership. Michael Knieriem’s short piece Einen Widder in die Wüste treiben [Driving a Ram into the Desert] (2008) provides further evidence that it is not so much the older but rather the younger Engels, with his development into a radically subversive thinker, who is of literary interest. He describes a tense family scene, focused on only a handful of persons, at the dining table in early 1845 in Barmen. Present are Engels, his sister Marie and their parents, a maid and Pastor Snethlage. The young Engels appears as an eloquent, quick-witted, verbally aggressive denouncer of the bourgeoisie, politicians, businessmen and the king. He prophesies the

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inevitability of a revolution, as many workers are threatened with starvation. The dining table functions as a flashpoint for social processes and allows the author to play off the different parties against each other: Snethlage pleads for understanding for the businessmen, whereas the young Engels indicts them as exploiters. The father urges patience, humility and restraint; the son strives for an immediate, radical change of conditions. The play ends with the young Engels agreeing with his parents to move to Brussels so as not to compromise the family any further.52

A Provisional Conclusion Engels has been a present as a figure in different literary genres in Germanic lands since the nineteenth century. Starting from the scene at the dining table, mentioned above, a reason for the appeal of the young Engels in literary depictions becomes apparent: in his well-researched life and writings, it is not only the essential problems of the nineteenth century that can be recognized. It offers a portrayal of the acute social fault lines of the time in a concentrated form; in brief sections it personifies the opposing camps, for instance in the father, son and the pastor Snethlage. Additionally, Baumert and Özdamar’s novels, as well as the pieces by Kaltofen and Pfeifer, contribute decisively to diversifying the image of Engels’s life and works. Moreover, as Brecht, Kunze and Schmidt’s poems show, authors in different epochs use Engels as an ideological reference point for taking an aesthetic position in the field of literature as well an ethical, i.e. a socio-political position, within their respective communities. The engagement with Engels in the works discussed above can thus be identified as a moment which can initiate or reinforce a powerful literary self-reflection. This has had far-reaching consequences for a number of twentieth-century authors.

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Notes 1. Cf. the biographical novels by Walter Victor, Walter Baumert, Gerhard Hardel, Robert Jordan, Tilmann Röhrig discussed below in this essay and ET: Tristam Hunt, Marx’s General: The Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels (New York 2009). 2. Cf. the dramatic texts by Günter Kaltofen/Hans Pfeifer, Karl Mickel and Michael Knieriem as well as the novels by Ingeborg Drewitz and Emine Sevgi Özdamar discussed in the present essay. 3. [Manfred Häckel], “Einleitung” in Gedichte über Marx und Engels, pp. XI–XXI, here: p. Xf. 4. Wilhelm Ludwig Rosenberg, “Den Manen Friedrich Engels (August 1895)” in ibid., p. 44. 5. Ibid., p. 45f. 6. No first name is given. See ibid., pp. 53–55. 7. Reiner Kunze, Die Zukunft sitzt am Tische (Halle/Saale 1955), p. 18f. 8. See Reiner Kunze, “Mein fünfundzwanzigster Geburtstag” in Vögel über dem Tau, pp. 23–27, especially p. 26. 9. Cf. For example Reiner Kunze, “Variation 1 und 2” from the cycle “Einundzwanzig Variationen über das Thema ‘Die Post’” in his Sensible Wege, Achtundvierzig Gedichte und ein Zyklus, Reinbek 1976 (EA 1969) pp. 73–74, as well as his “Konsequenz Leben – Schriftsteller sein im geteilten Deutschland” in his Das weiße Gedicht. Essays (Frankfurt a.M. 1989) pp. 89–117, here: p. 89f. 10. An expression from Engels’s letter to Franz Mehring of the 14 July 1893. 11. Cf. Bertolt Brecht, “Der Hofmeister” in his Große kommentierte Berliner und Frankfurter Ausgabe, ed. Werner Hecht/Jan Knopf/Werner Mittenzwei u.a, vol. 8: Stücke 8 (Berlin/Weimar/Frankfurt a.M. 1992) pp. 319–371, p. 321. 12. Cf. Brecht, “Die Maßnahme” (1930 version) in ibid., Vol. 3: Stücke 3. 1988) pp. 73–98, p. 75. 13. In ibid, vol. 12: Gedichte 2, Sammlungen 1938–1956. 1988, p. 45. 14. In ibid, vol. 14: Gedichte 4. 1993, S. 250. 15. Ibid., p. 274. 16. Ibid., p. 337. 17. In ibid., Vol. 15: Gedichte 5. 1993, p. 18f. 18. Ibid., p. 61.

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19. Ibid., p. 96f. 20. Kathrin Schmidt, Poesiealbum 179 (Berlin 1982), p. 23f, here: p. 23. 21. Ibid. 22. Ibid., p. i. 24. 23. Published in Berlin. On Victor’s life, see https://www.lexikon-wes tfaelischer-autorinnen-und-autoren.de/autoren/victor-walther/# biographie. 24. See Walther Victor, “Der General und die Frauen,” Vom Erlebnis zur Theorie (Berlin 1932), p. 69. 25. Ibid., p. 70. 26. See ibid., p. 96: “It is the General who makes the draft for the document which, under the name of the ‘Communist Manifesto’, will be immortalized in world history.”. 27. Ibid., p. 151. 28. On Jordan’s biography, see Camerer, Luitgard, “Jordan, Robert” in Camerer /Garzmann, Manfred/Schuegraf, Wolf-Dieter (ed.), Braunschweiger Stadtlexikon (Braunschweig 1992), p. 118. 29. Robert Jordan, Lizzy Burns. Das liebe dreckige Leben. Erzählung (Braunschweig 1968), p. 105. 30. Ibid., p. 66. 31. See https://www.deutsche-biographie.de/pnd130237582.html# indexcontent. 32. The book has boys and girls from fourteen as its target audience, see Gerhard Hardel, Marie und ihr großer Bruder, illustrations by Renate Jessel (Berlin 1976), p. 4. 33. Ibid., p. 188. 34. Walter Baumert, Schau auf die Erde (Berlin 1981) and his Der Flug des Falken (Dortmund 1981). This is the same novel but published under different titles. 35. With the references to the critique of Thomas Carlyles’s Past and Present and “Umrisse zu einer Kritik der Sozialökonomie” for the Deutsch-französischen Jahrbücher, Engels’s first two publications are thus mentioned, see Hardel, Marie und ihr großer Bruder, p. 203f. 36. Tilman Röhrig, Und morgen eine neue Welt. Der große FriedrichEngels-Roman (München 2019), p. 491f. 37. Ibid., p. 234. 38. Ingeborg Drewitz, Das Hochhaus (Munich 1979), p. 196.

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39. Gruppe 61 was a center for this. It strove to support “literature from the world of work.” On this, see Britta Caspers, Dirk Hallenberger, Werner Jung, Rolf Parr, Ruhrgebietsliteratur seit 1960. Eine Geschichte nach Knotenpunkten (Berlin 2019), especially pp. 21–58 and pp. 87–170. 40. See Emine Sevgi Özdamar, Die Brücke vom Goldenen Horn. Roman (Cologne 1998), p. 94 “in Friedrich Engels’s book,” “Engels said.”. 41. Ibid., p. 93. 42. Ibid., p. 91. 43. Ibid., p. 94. 44. Ibid. 45. Cf. ibid., p. 265. 46. Ibid., p. 95. 47. Ibid., p. 95. 48. Günter Kaltofen/Hans Pfeifer, “Vorbemerkung” in their Salut an alle. Marx. Ein Stück nach Briefen von Karl und Jenny Marx und Friedrich Engels (Berlin 1976). 49. Other sources are Marx’s youthful poems to his wife, her work Kurze Umrisse eines bewegten Lebens as well as Engels’s Bekenntnisse und die Rede am Grabe von Jenny Marx. 50. Cf. ibid., p. 36, pp. 57–59. 51. Karl Mickel, “Marx wird Marx” in his Schriften 5. Gelehrtenrepublik. Beiträge zur deutschen Dichtungsgeschichte (Halle 2000), pp. 331–359, here p. 344. 52. See Michael Knieriem,“Einen Widder in die Wüste treiben” in Johann-Günther König, Friedrich Engels. Die Bremer Jahre 1839– 1841 (Bremen 2008), pp. 519–526.

Bibliography Baumert, Walter. Der Flug des Falken (Dortmund: Neuer Weg, 1981). Baumert, Walter. Schau auf die Erde (Berlin: Verlag Neues Leben, 1981). Brecht, Bertolt. “Der Hofmeister.” In Große kommentierte Berliner und Frankfurter Ausgabe, edited by Werner Hecht, Jan Knopf, and Werner Mittenzwei et al. vol. 8, Stücke 8 (Berlin, Weimar and Frankfurt a.M.: Aufbau Verlag and Suhrkamp, 1992), pp. 319–371.

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Brecht, Bertolt. “Die Maßnahme” [1930 version]. In Große kommentierte Berliner und Frankfurter Ausgabe, edited by Werner Hecht, Jan Knopf, and Werner Mittenzwei et al. vol. 3, Stücke 3 (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1988), pp. 73–98. Camerer, Luitgard. “Jordan, Robert.” In Braunschweiger Stadtlexikon, edited by Luitgard Camerer, Manfred Garzmann and Wolf-Dieter Schuegraf (Braunschweig: Joh. Heinrich Meyer, 1992). Caspers, Britta, Dirk Hallenberger, Werner Jung, and Rolf Parr. Ruhrgebietsliteratur seit 1960. Eine Geschichte nach Knotenpunkten (Berlin: J.B. Metzler, 2019). Drewitz, Ingeborg. Das Hochhaus (Munich: W. Goldmann, 1979). Häckel, Manfred. “Einleitung.” In Gedichte über Marx und Engels (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1963). Hardel, Gerhard. Marie und ihr großer Bruder. Illustrations by Renate Jessel (Berlin: Kinderbuch Verlag, 1976). Hunt, Tristam. Marx’s General: The Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels (New York: Metropolitan, 2009). Jordan, Robert. Lizzy Burns. Das liebe dreckige Leben. Erzählung (Braunschweig: Waisenhaus, 1968). Kaltofen, Günter, and Hans Pfeifer. “Vorbemerkung.” I Salut an alle. Marx. Ein Stück nach Briefen von Karl und Jenny Marx und Friedrich Engels (Berlin: Litera, 1976), vinyl LP. Knieriem, Michael. “Einen Widder in die Wüste treiben.” In Friedrich Engels. Die Bremer Jahre 1839–1841, edited by Johann-Günther König (Bremen: Kellner Klaus, 2008). Kunze, Reiner. “Konsequenz Leben – Schriftsteller sein im geteilten Deutschland.” In Das weiße Gedicht. Essays (Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer Verlag, 1989), pp. 89–117. Kunze, Reiner. “Mein fünfundzwanzigster Geburtstag.” In Vögel über dem Tau (Halle/Saale: Mitteldeutscher Verlag, 1959), pp. 23–27. Kunze, Reiner. “Variation 1 und 2” from the cycle “Einundzwanzig Variationen über das Thema ‘Die Post.’” In Sensible Wege, Achtundvierzig Gedichte und ein Zyklus (Reinbek: Rohwolt, 1976), pp. 73–74. Kunze, Reiner. Die Zukunft sitzt am Tische (Halle/Saale: Mitteldeutscher Verlag, 1955). Mickel, Karl. “Marx wird Marx.” In Schriften 5. Gelehrtenrepublik. Beiträge zur deutschen Dichtungsgeschichte (Halle/Saale: Mitteldeutscher Verlag, 2000), pp. 331–359. Özdamar, Emine Sevgi. Die Brücke vom Goldenen Horn. Roman (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1998). Röhrig, Tilman. Und morgen eine neue Welt. Der große Friedrich-Engels-Roman (München: Piper Verlag, 2019).

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Rosenberg, Wilhelm Ludwig. “Den Manen Friedrich Engels (August 1895).” In An der Weltenwende Gedichte (Cleveland: Windsor Avenue Publishing Company, 1910). Victor, Walther. “Der General und die Frauen.” Vom Erlebnis zur Theorie (Berlin: Büchergilde Gutenberg, 1932).

PART VI

Emancipation—Revolution—Communism

CHAPTER 17

Engels on Post-capitalist Society: Continuity or Discontinuity with Marx’s Concept of the Alternative to Capitalism? Peter Hudis

A comparison of Engels’s and Marx’s views of post-capitalist society may seem to be the sort of subject that one relegates to a footnote in a scholarly work, but the ongoing resurgence of interest in socialism, including in places like the United States, suggests that a closer look at the issue may be in order. This is because after a hundred years of aborted and unfinished revolutions, the very meaning of socialism remains unclear, even as a new generation seeks its renewal. Is socialism about redistributing wealth and value more equitably, or is it about transforming social relations of class, race and gender that treat people as a mere source of economic value and profit? What is required to uproot a system that treats the augmentation of value, or wealth in monetary form, as an end in itself? Is it even

P. Hudis (B) Oakton Community College, Des Plaines, IL, USA e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 T. Carver and S. Rapic (eds.), Friedrich Engels for the 21st Century, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-97138-0_17

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possible to abolish value production, or is it a transhistorical feature of human existence that we must ultimately accommodate to? Marx himself thought long and hard about these questions, and as I have argued elsewhere,1 his reflections produced a distinctive understanding of the transcendence of capitalism that takes on new importance for our time. Capital, according to Marx, is self-expanding value, and value is the expression of a specific kind of labour—abstract or alienated labour. The value of a commodity is not determined by the actual amount of time taken to produce it but by the socially necessary labour time required to do so. This social average is imposed upon producers irrespective of their will, as technological innovations increase the productivity of labour. As multiple acts of labour are forced to adhere to this social average, they take on an increasingly homogenous form. Concrete labour—the varied kinds of labour employed in making use-values— becomes increasingly dominated by abstract labour. Abstract labour is the substance of value and socially necessary labour time is the measure of value. Value, as an economic category,2 may be a rather abstract notion, but it expresses a very real kind of activity: labour that is constrained by an abstract time determination outside of the workers’ control . Although Marx refrained from speculating about the future, he made it clear that socialism represents the annulment of value production. As he put it in one of his last writings, “I do not divide value into usevalue and exchange-value as opposites into which the abstraction ‘value’ splits up” since “value has nothing in common with [use value], except that ‘value’ occurs in the term ‘use value.’”3 Use-value refers to material wealth; it is not a form of “value,” which is the (abstract) measure of material wealth. It would be more precise to refer to the commodity as the unity-in-difference of use-worth and value.4 Marx hits out against the “professorial confusion between ‘use-value’ and ‘value,’ just because both have the word ‘value’ in common”5 throughout his work. He does this to stress the historical specificity of value. All societies, including socialism, employs use-values, but only in capitalism do they become bearers of exchange value. On these grounds he insisted, “In my investigation of value I have dealt with bourgeois relations, not with the application of this theory of value to a ‘social state.”6 Nevertheless, this hardly served as the conceptual ground of Marxism after Marx. The Marxist movement exhibited a striking lack of unanimity, or even clarity, concerning the need to surmount value production.

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Critiquing capitalist formations was one thing; envisioning a viable alternative to them has proven to be far more difficult. This chapter will explore the roots of this problem by discussing whether Engels, Marx’s closest collaborator and follower, adhered to the conception of a postcapitalist society that is found in Marx’s work or instead departed from it. Although Engels was far too modest to claim that he made a decisive contribution to the development of the Marxian critique of capital, there is no question that Marx never ceased to express his debt to such works of Engels as The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845) and Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy (1844). The latter proved especially crucial in assisting Marx’s turn to “material matters” following his break from the Young Hegelians and conversion to communism. This is not only because of its discussion of economic categories like value, exchange value, and price but also its delving, however provisionally, into the form of life that will arise after capitalism. In a communist society, Engels writes, “The community will have to calculate what it can produce with the means at its disposal; and in accordance with the relationship of this productive power to the mass of consumers it will determine how far it has to raise or lower production, how far it has to give way to, or curtail, luxury.”7 Nowhere in the Outlines does Engels suggest that capitalistic categories like commodity exchange and value production continue to exist under socialism or communism.8 Over the next fifteen years Marx and Engels carried on an active correspondence on political economy, which no doubt proved of assistance in the development of Marx’s Poverty and Philosophy (1847) and the Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859). Nevertheless, when it comes to Capital, what is striking is how tangential was Engels’s contribution. Its central categories—the distinction between labour and labour power, abstract and concrete labour, surplus value and profit, value and value-form—are all Marx’s creation. The same goes for such concepts as socially necessary labour time. Perhaps most striking is that Engels was not even directly aware of the content of volume one of Capital until Marx sent him the galley proofs shortly before its publication in 1867 . Engels’s initial reaction to chapter one of Capital is revealing. He urges Marx to provide “more extensive historical evidence for the conclusions you have reached dialectically,” since it would demonstrate “the need for the development of money and the process by which this takes place.” He adds, “In these rather abstract elaborations you have

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committed the great mistake [!] of not making the sequence of thought clear by a larger number of small subsections and separate headings.”9 Marx responds by ignoring Engels’s advice to arrange the chapter in a historical sequence and agrees only to add some headings and an appendix on the forms of value. He says he does so to “behave dialectically.” Chapter one of Capital is dialectical insofar as it begins with the “simplest” or most immediate form of appearance of the commodity in highly developed capitalist society and proceeds to trace out its immanent contradictions and determinations. The most immediate—the commodity as it presents itself to present-day consciousness—is then shown to be “abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.”10 As in Hegel’s Logic, the object generates its own categories of knowledge. The latter is neither imposed upon history nor reduced to a one-to-one expression of it. Engels’s letter indicates that he did not fully understand the mode of presentation employed by Marx in analyzing the commodity-form in the first chapter of Capital. It should be noted, however, that nowhere in the 1867 letter does he refer to “petty commodity production”—a term never used by Marx, but which Engels claimed, after Marx’s death, to be the subject of Capital ’s opening pages. His effort to read a historical sequence into a logical deduction may have opened the door to imposing the category of pre-capitalist petty commodity production onto Marx’s work after his death, but there is no evidence that he advanced such a claim before then. None of this, however, directly addresses whether Marx and Engels were in accord on the nature of post-capitalist society, since that was not the subject of their correspondence in 1867 or in other letters of the period. We can determine his view of this issue only by examining his direct discussions of the law of value, both before and after Marx’s death in 1883. Engels wrote a series of reviews of volume one of Capital shortly after its publication, which despite their popular style are not without theoretical significance. He cogently writes that “the substance of exchange value is abstract labor and its magnitude is the measure of time of abstract labor,” thereby explicitly positing the distinction between actual labour time (which does not create value) and socially necessary labour time, which makes possible the substance of value, abstract labour. This point is often missed; the failure to distinguish actual labour time from socially necessary labour time continues to define much of Marx scholarship to

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this day. Engels, in contrast, writes, “The process of exchange gives the commodity which it converts into money, not its value, but its valueform.”11 This is a crucial distinction. If the process of exchange gives the commodity its value, it follows that abolishing capitalism hinges on regulating or organizing the process of exchange. Marx’s insistence on distinguishing value from value-form directly pushes against such a notion. If exchange is not responsible for the creation or existence of value but for the form in which value appears, it follows that exiting capitalism hinges on abolishing that which exchange value is the phenomenal expression—production for the sake of augmenting value, as concrete labour is pounded into abstract labour through the hegemon of socially necessary labour time. As Engels puts it, “Money, as the measure of value, is the necessary phenomenal form of the measure of value immanent in commodities, i.e., labor time .”12 More telling than these reviews are what can be regarded as Engels’s most important theoretical work—Anti-Dühring (1878). In opposition to Dühring’s claim that Marx has a theory of “natural costs” that treat all historical eras as governed by an exchange of equivalent commodity values, Engels writes: “Marx is not discussing any of these things, but only the value of commodities: and that in the whole section of Capital which deals with value there is not even the slightest indication of whether or to what extent Marx considers this theory of the value of commodities applicable also to other forms of society.”13 He goes on to stress that value does not prevail before capitalism: “Commodity production, is by no means the only form of social production. In the ancient Indian communities and in the family communities of the southern Slavs…the members of the community are directly associated… Direct social production and direct distribution preclude all exchange of commodities, therefore also the transformation of the products into commodities (at any rate within the community) and consequently also their transformation into values.”14 The point could not be clearer: Engels’s position in AntiDühring is that commodity production and the law of value do not govern pre-capitalist societies. To be sure, trade based on exchanging objects of equal worth existed before capitalism. However, this was restricted to the margins of society, in the trading zones between communities. Social relations within the community, as Engels notes, were not characterized by a drive to augment exchange value. For this reason, the ancients looked upon retail trade, commerce, and usury as “unnatural.” As they saw it, they were external

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impositions upon social existence rather than its operative law. It could not be otherwise, since the separation of the producers from the objective conditions of production and the commodification of labour power had not yet arisen. In contrast, in capitalism even the greatest minds tend to view production for the sake of augmenting value as natural, since it is the operative law of society. This naturalization of a social construction is reflected in the widespread view (shared, incredibly enough, by many “Marxists”) that value production characterizes all of human history. However, the law of value is a contingent product of a peculiar social form of labour—abstract or alienated labour. Once the latter is overcome, the law of value is annulled; where it persists, capitalism lives on, regardless of what name is given to the particular system. Engels addresses this in stating, “Labor ‘has’ no value; it creates value.”15 This is in direct contrast to the view of many Marxists, from Paul Sweezy to Ernest Mandel, who held that labour “has value.”16 “Labor” is of course not specific to capitalism: if “labor” “has” value, it follows that production for the sake of augmenting value is an intrinsic property of labour. A specific feature of capitalism—labour power that assumes a value-form—is treated as a transhistorical fact of human life. Engels correctly notes, “Though … labor as such can have no value, this is by no means the case with labor power. This acquires a value from the moment it becomes a commodity.”17 Engels sums up the issue as follows: “For socialism, which wants to emancipate human labor power from its status as a commodity, the realization that labor has no value and can have none is of great importance. With this realization all attempts … to regulate the future distribution of the necessities of life as a kind of higher wages falls to the ground.”18 The twentieth century was defined by many so-called socialist or communist regimes that sought to “regulate the necessities of life” through a “kind of higher wages.” It was summed up in the slogan, “From each according to their ability, to each according to their work!” Socialized or statified wage labour was posed as the “alternative” to “free market” capitalism, but it proved to be completely non-viable. Engels could not have anticipated such regimes, but his discussion speaks to their fate. He writes, “Once the commodity producing society has further developed the value form, which is inherent in commodities as such, to the money form, various germs still hidden in value break through to a generalization of the commodity form.”19 Do note that a “commodity producing society” is not the same as a society that exchanges

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commodities. Commodity exchange can exist on the margins of society, in trade between communities, without the communities themselves being governed by commodity production. No planner in the USSR or Mao’s China could claim that commodities only existed on the margins of society, even as they isolated themselves from the world market and tried to build “socialism in one country.” Commodity production was integral to their internal existence. Hence, it was inevitable that they would mutate sooner or later into full-blown market capitalism shorn of any “socialist” pretenses, since, as Engels writes, the germs hidden in societies that maintain value production inevitably “break through to a generalization of the commodity form.” Statist socialists and market socialists, please take notice—the Engels of Anti-Dühring is not in your corner. Throughout the book he takes issue with the notion that commodity production, money, and exchange value exist in socialism or communism. “With the seizing of the means of production by society,” he states, “production of commodities is done away with, and, simultaneously, the mastery of the product over the producer.”20 He acknowledges that “it will still be necessary for society to know how much labor each article of consumption requires for its production. It will have to arrange its plan of production in accordance with its means of production, which include, in particular, its labor powers.” But he goes on to say, “The useful effects of the various articles of consumption, compared with one another and with the quantities of labor required for their production, will in the end determine the plan. People will be able to manage everything very simply, without the intervention of much-vaunted ‘value.’”21 The distribution of the social product will be handled “far more simply,” he emphasizes, “if it used the natural measure of labor-time, with the labor hour as unit.”22 Indirectly social labour will be replaced by directly social labour once social relations are based on “their natural, adequate, and absolute measure, time”—that is, actual, not abstract, labour time.23 Engels concludes that “on the assumptions we made above, society will not assign values to products.”24 Engels is here restating Marx’s invitation to “imagine, for a change,”25 a post-capitalist society, voiced in the section on commodity fetishism in Capital and more extensively developed in the Critique of the Gotha Program. Marx writes in the latter, “Within a cooperatively organized society based on common ownership of the means of production, the producers do not exchange their products; just as little does the labor

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expended on the products appear here as the value of these products … Accordingly, the individual producer receives back from society, after the deductions have been made, exactly what he gives to it. What he has given to it is his individual quantum of labor. For example, the social working day consists of the sum of the individual hours of work; the individual labor time of the individual producer is the part of the social working day contributed by him, his share in it. He receives a certificate from society that he has furnished such-and-such an amount of labor (after deducting his labor for the common funds); and with this certificate, he draws from the societal supply of means of consumption as much as the same amount of labor cost. The same amount of labor that he has given to society in one form, he receives back in another.”26 Value production, according to Marx, is thereby abolished from the inception of the initial phase of socialism or communism. Norman Levine (among others) has argued that Marx “rejected” what he calls “the Lassallean idea of labor certificates” and that Engels “deviated” from Marx in upholding it.27 However, the idea of certificates based on actual units of labour time—not to be confused with socially necessary labour time—derives not from Ferdinand Lassalle but from Robert Owen. And Marx repeatedly praised Owen for the idea, writing in volume one of Capital, “Owen presupposes directly socialized labor, a form of production diametrically opposed to the production of commodities. The certificate of labor is merely evidence of a part taken by the individual in the common labor, and of his claim to a certain portion of the common product [that] has been set aside for consumption.” What Marx opposed was Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s idea—later popularized by Lassalle—that labour tokens could be used in a society that maintains commodity production and socially necessary labour time.28 As Marx put it, unlike them, “Owen never made the mistake of presupposing the production of commodities.”29 Marx explicitly reiterates this in volume two of Capital: “With collective production, money capital is completely dispensed with. The society distributes labor power and means of production between the various branches of industry. There is no reason why the producers should not receive paper tokens permitting them to withdraw an amount corresponding to their labor time from the social consumption fund. But these tokens are not money; they do not circulate.”30 Levine is apparently unaware of these passages.31 No less remarkably, he is so obsessed with posing Engels as the total opposite of Marx on all issues that he claims

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that Marx “abandoned labor as the equation of distribution” when the text of his 1875 Critique clearly says the opposite.32 It is clear from this summary that Engels concurred with Marx that commodity production and the law of value are specific to capitalism and will be abolished in a post-capitalist society. Nor is there much evidence to suggest, at least as of the 1880s, that Engels held that value production prevails in pre-capitalist society.33 While Marx was alive, Engels took great pains to follow him on these issues (this did not mean he followed him on other ones). However, this still does not get us to the critical issue, since a new reality confronted Engels after Marx’s death—the need not just to be a follower but a continuator. The former is relatively easy, especially when Marx is there to guide you along. But what happens when the founder is no longer around and you must now continue the legacy not simply by repeating what Marx said but reconstituting his ideas in the light of questions or realities that Marx himself didn’t face? In the years immediately after Marx’s death in 1883 Engels continues to argue for the historical specificity of the law of value. In a letter to Karl Kautsky of September 1884 he critiques Johann Karl Rodbertus for “looking for the true, eternal content of things and of social relations of which, however, the content is essentially transient.” He then turns to critique Kautsky, stating “You do the same kind of thing in the case of value. [You contend that] present value is that of the production of commodities, but with the suppression of the production of commodities, value ‘changes’ or rather, value as such remains and merely changes its form. But in fact [as I see it] economic value is a category that appertains to the production of commodities disappearing with it, just as it did not exist before it. The relation of labour to product prior to and after production of commodities no longer expresses itself in the form of value.”34 Engels is issuing what may be one of the earliest critiques of a follower of Marx for implying that value prevails in socialism.35 However, near the end of Engels’s life things take a different turn. In response to Werner Sombart’s Zur Kritik des ökonomischen Systems von Karl Marx (the first appreciative book on Marx by an academic), Engels writes in a letter to him in March 1895 that Marx had “very little to say” about the “very interesting” question of how the equalization of profit rates occurred historically. He tries to fill this gap as follows: “The concept of value … has, or had, more reality than you ascribe to it. In the early days of exchange when products gradually changed into commodities, exchanges were made in proportion to value … at that

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time, value existed in an immediate and real sense.” Prior to capitalism the prices of commodities immediately or directly reflect their value, whereas in capitalism they increasingly diverge. He adds, “A genuinely historical exposition of this process would be a most valuable pendant to Capital .”36 In stepping out on his own to answer a question left unaddressed by Marx, Engels now claims that value production existed before capitalism—in contrast to his earlier view that “Direct social production and direct distribution preclude all exchange of commodities … and consequently also their transformation into values.”37 A day later he continues this line of reasoning in a letter to Conrad Schmidt, who held that the concept of value is a “necessary fiction” rather than a reality.38 Engels counters by stating that a historical approach would show that the law of value governs commodity exchange in both pre-capitalist and capitalist societies. In a sense Engels’s approach is understandable: how better to counter a nominalist view of value as a “necessary fiction” than to show it is an actual historical reality.39 But at what price is such realism obtained? By stretching the value-theoretic categories of Capital beyond the framework employed by Marx, Engels risks posing value production as a transhistorical phenomenon. His effort to respond to the idea that value is a “fiction,” I contend, led him to claim, for the first time in his 1895 Preface to volume three, that pre-capitalist commodity production is the subject matter of the first section of volume one of Capital. As C. J. Arthur showed many years ago, however, the term never appears in Marx’s work and has led to massive confusion when it comes to understanding the actual object of critique in Capital .40 Things get even worse from here, since in the last days of his life Engels proceeded to write a Postface to volume three of Capital which states, “the Marxian law of value holds generally, as far as economic laws are valid at all, for the whole period of simple commodity production, that is, up to the time when the latter suffers a modification through the appearance of the capitalist form of production. Up to that time prices gravitate toward the values fixed according to the Marxian law and oscillate around these values … Thus the Marxian law of value has general economic validity for a period lasting from the beginnings of exchange, which transforms products into commodities, down to the fifteenth century of the present … thus the law of value has prevailed during a period of five to seven thousand years.”41 This is a fantastic claim. Not only is it contradicted by

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Marx’s insistence that “The economic concept of value does not occur among the ancients … [it] wholly belongs to the latest political economy, because that concept is the most abstract expression of capital itself and of the production based upon it.”42 It is contradicted by Engels’s own earlier writings on pre-capitalist society! Moreover, the argument fails even on historical grounds. Engels provides no explanation for how the split between concrete and abstract labour and socially necessary labour time can exist prior to labour power becoming a commodity. If the substance of value is abstract labour, value governs pre-capitalist societies only if abstract or alienated labour is their governing principle. In that case, the “peculiar social form of labor” that characterizes capitalism becomes enshrined as a veritable principle of human development. And how can a “law” of value exist in societies without a mechanism to enforce it, such as a world market that compels commodity producers “under penalty of death” to adhere to socially necessary labour time? Moreover, did Marx spend so much time and trouble delineating the logic of capital simply in order to point out that values and prices tend to converge before capitalism whereas in capitalism they diverge? Engels not only muddies the waters when it comes to understanding the logic of capital, but also he fails to provide anything close to a coherent explanation of the historical emergence and dominance of the law of value. The latter requires an extensive historical inquiry that cannot be shoehorned into a ten-page appendix to one of Marx’s greatest works, which Engels himself spent a decade preparing for the press. It isn’t that he was disloyal. It’s that he succumbed to a problem common to many talented followers—a failure to reconstitute a body of thought for new realities without losing the thread of continuity with its most unique (as well as unheralded) contributions . The main problem with Engels’s late writings on political economy is that if the law of value has existed for “five to seven” thousand years, why presume it will disappear with the advent of socialism? The question becomes especially pertinent if it is assumed—as Engels himself did not — that “socialism” and “communism” represent distinct historical phases. But many Marxists after Engels’s death adopted this dubious notion,43 leading many to presume—right to this day—that value production persists in the initial stage of a post-capitalist society. Engels have may inadvertently opened the door to such a conception, but he did not walk through it himself. Nowhere in any of his writings, including those of 1895, does he even hint, let alone assert, that the law

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of value operates in “socialism.” Nor did almost anyone else before the rise of Stalinism.44 But that changed in 1943, when Vasily Leontief, at Stalin’s bequest, proclaimed that the teaching of political economy in the USSR be changed to affirm the compatibility of the capitalist law of value and “socialism.” As Raya Dunayevskaya, who first broke the news of this revision in the American Economic Review in 1944 put it, “This startling reversal of Soviet political economy is neither adventitious nor merely conciliatory … [it is a] theoretical justification … for the continuance of a social relation that had no place in the conception of the founders of communism”— the persistence of alienated labour in a so-called socialist society.45 Its publication resulted in a vigorous debate between apologists for the USSR—Oskar Lange, Paul Baran, and Leo Rogin—and Dunayevskaya, who had developed the first Marxist economic analysis of the USSR as a state-capitalist society.46 That debate may now seem to be only of historical interest, but the appearance is deceptive. The 1943 revision in the law of value set the ground for how “socialism” was viewed in all of the so-called socialist and communist regimes of the twentieth century, whether it was the USSR, Mao’s China, or “revolutionary” regimes in the global south. It also shaped (however indirectly) the view of many independent Marxists. Engels’s last writings became a pawn in this debate. Leontief directly cited his 1895 writings on petty commodity production and the “five to seven thousand years” existence of the law of value in arguing that the latter operates in “socialism.” So did Oskar Lange, who called Stalin’s revision “a return to the original Marxian doctrine.”47 Neither, of course, cited Engels’s radically different views in Anti-Dühring and elsewhere. Engels, like Marx, was quoted selectively in creating a new form of statist domination that neither would have recognized as even remotely connected to their body of work.48 The collapse of these regimes and their transition into “normal” market capitalism does not mean the ideas developed to justify them have passed from the scene. Ideas live on, long even after their material embodiment has passed. It is seen in the number of anti-Stalinist, independent Marxists who today continue to claim that Marx held that abstract labour and value continue to exist in the initial phase of socialism or communism. As one recent discussion in Endnotes put it, Marx’s reference in the Critique of the Gotha Program to an “exchange of equal values” in the lower phase signifies the continuance of abstract labour.49 They base this claim on Marx’s statement that in this lower phase, “the same principle prevails

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as that which regulates the exchange of commodities, insofar as this is exchange involving equal worth” [Gleichwertiger].50 However, the “same principle” refers not to the existence of commodity exchange but to the fact that a quid pro quo prevails, insofar as one receives goods equivalent to the actual number of hours of labour provided to the community. As Marx states in the previous sentence, “a given amount of labor in one form is exchanged for an equal amount of labor in another form.” This is no way, shape, or form that implies the existence of value, abstract labour, or socially necessary labour time, since what is referenced is the exchange of units of actual concrete labour time. Marx makes this clear just a few sentences earlier in writing, “just as little does the labor expended on the products appear here as the value of these products.”51 Either Marx is an extremely inconsistent and careless thinker, or such critics as Endnotes have it wrong. And they indeed have it wrong, since Marx does not speak of an “exchange of equal values” but of Gleichwertiger, an exchange of equal items of worth! All of the current English translations of the Critique obscure this by not informing the reader that Wert can be translated as either value or worth, and that in the passage under consideration Marx is exclusively referring to use-values. If there is any chance that humanity will find a path out of capitalism, as its future existence clearly demands, much will depend on whether we clear away the debris that has blocked access to the liberatory vision of a post-capitalist society that lies embedded, though rarely studied or understood, in Marx’s critique of political economy. For this reason, the affinities as well as differences between Marx and Engels on this issue take on altogether new importance.

Notes 1. See Peter Hudis, Marx’s Concept of the Alternative to Capitalism (Chicago 2013). For a more recent discussion, see my “Marx’s Concept of Socialism,” in Economic and Political Weekly 51 (2019) pp. 47–53. 2. A common barrier to understanding Marx’s critique of capitalism, at least in the English-speaking world, is the conflation of value as moral signifier (“I value your friendship”) with value as an economic one. Marx only refers to the latter when he uses the term “value,” since that is what is adequate for his object of investigation, capital.

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3. Karl Marx, “Marginal Notes on Adolph Wagner’s Lehrbuch der politischen Ökonomie,” in Marx-Engels Collected Works, vol. 24 (New York 1975–2004), p. 545. Hereafter MECW . 4. No such distinction is necessary in German, since wert can mean worth or value, depending on the context. What Marx’s means by Wert therefore requires careful attentiveness to the conceptual context and object of his discussion. Although English has the benefit of two separate words for worth and value, few translators have chosen to take advantage of this. Confusion on this issue therefore continues to reign supreme. 5. Marx, “Marginal Notes on Adolph Wagner’s Lehrbuch der politischen Ökonomie,” p. 534. It should be noted that the great African-American scholar W.E.B. Dubois was a student of Wagner during his stay in Berlin in the 1890s. 6. Ibid., pp. 536–537. 7. Friedrich Engels, Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy, in MECW , vol. 3, p. 435. 8. As with Marx, “socialism” and “communism” are completely interchangeable terms in Engels’s work and do not express discrete historical stages or phases of development. 9. “Engels to Marx, June 16, 1867,” in MECW , vol. 42, pp. 381–2. For Marx’s reply, see his letter of 22 June 1867, in MECW , vol. 42, p. 384: “With regard to the development of the form of value, I have both followed and not followed your advice, thus striking a dialectical attitude in this matter, too.” The emphasis is Marx’s. 10. Marx, Capital, vol. I. Translated by Ben Fowkes (New York 1976), p. 163. 11. Engels on Marx’s Capital (Moscow 1972) pp. 51, 54. 12. Ibid., p. 54. 13. Engels, Anti-Dühring: Herr Eugen Dühring’s Revolution in Science, in MECW , vol. 25, p. 184. 14. Ibid., p. 294. The argument directly correlates with Aristotle’s distinction between household management and retail trade in the Politics, which holds the latter to be “natural” and the former “unnatural.” Marx rephrases this in distinguishing between socialform and natural form in Capital. 15. Ibid., p, 186. Engels’s statement is completely consistent with Marx’s argument in volume one of Capital: “Human labor power in its fluid state, or human labor, creates value, but is not itself

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value. It becomes value in its coagulated state, in objective form” (p. 142). Value is intrinsic not to “labor” but to the commodity, labour power. 16. Ernest Mandel asserts that “For Marx labor is value.” See “Karl Marx,” in J. Eatwell et al. (eds.), The New Palgrave: Marxian Economics (London 1990), p. 11. It is incredible that such a basic and crude error could be made by a man that many still consider to have been an important Marxist theorist. 17. Engels, Anti-Dühring, p. 190. 18. Ibid., p. 186. 19. Ibid., p. 296. 20. Ibid., p. 270. 21. Ibid., p. 295. 22. Ibid., p. 288. 23. Ibid., p. 294. 24. Ibid. 25. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1, pp. 171. 26. Marx, Critique of the Gotha Program, in MECW , vol. 24, pp. 85– 86. Translation modified. 27. Norman Levine, “Engels’ Co-option of Lenin,” in Tom Rockmore/Norman Levine (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Leninist Political Philosophy (London 2018) pp. 178–179. 28. Engels was of course fully aware of the crucial difference between the idea of labour notes or “time chits” as advocated by Lassalle as compared with Owen. Engels writes, “In a word, in the trading of the economic commune with its members it functions merely as Owen’s ‘labor money,’ that ‘phantom’ which Herr Dühring looks down upon so disdainfully” (Anti-Dühring, p. 288). Engels was also fully aware that Marx held that tokens based on actual labour time (as against an abstract average of labour time) prevails in the lower phase of socialism or communism but not in a higher phase: “With Owen the labor notes are only a transitional form to complete community and free utilization of the resources of society” (Ibid., p. 291). Undeveloped and as naïve as some of Owen’s reflections on this issue may have been, there is no question that Marx acknowledged his positive contributions to the end of his life—something that certainly cannot be said of his view of Lassalle. In any case, Levine’s claim that “According to Marx, production was not based on time” is clearly contradicted by Marx’s texts.

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For more on this, see Hudis, Marx’s Concept of the Alternative to Capitalism, pp. 147–182. 29. Marx, Capital, vol. 1, pp. 188–189. 30. Marx, Capital, vol. 2. Translated by David Fernbach (New York 1981) pp. 188–189. 31. It is one thing to acknowledge the fact that both Marx and Engels at various points supported the use of labour certificates based on actual labour time in the initial or lower phase of communism; whether it was correct of them to do so and whether such an approach has practical value today is a totally different question. This chapter addresses the former, not the latter. It may be that the idea of labour certificates, which Marx critically appropriated from Owen (while opposing the form in which they were advanced by Proudhon and Lassalle), is unrealistic given today’s highly complex economic realities. But that does justify ignoring the reason that Marx and Engels advocated such certificates. They were trying to think out an issue that most contemporary Marxists ignore—namely, what specific economic forms can be utilized to liberate humanity from the dominance of the law of value. Those who ignore the question do so at their peril; it is best to pay need to Gramsci’s quip that “History teaches, but has no pupils.” 32. Levine, “Engels’ Co-option of Lenin,” p. 176. 33. The one possible exception is the following sentence in AntiDühring: “Hence the law of value, is the fundamental law of precisely commodity production, and hence also of its highest form, capitalist production” (p. 297). The “hence also” seems to imply that the law of value operates in “commodity production” prior to “its highest form” in capitalism. This is at variance with his earlier statement that “Direct social production and direct distribution preclude all exchange of commodities, therefore also the transformation of the products into commodities (at any rate within the community) and consequently also their transformation into values ” (p. 294). A conceptual slippage appears here in Engels that at least opens the door to his later notion that the law of value applies to “simple commodity production,” although Engels says not a word about that in Anti-Dühring or any other work prior to 1895. 34. “Engels to Kautsky, September 29, 1884,” in MECW , vol. 47, p. 184.

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35. There may be a parallel between the history of debates over political economy and that of revolutionary organization within the Marxist tradition. Although Lenin is often credited (or condemned) for the elitist concept of a “vanguard party to lead,” by his own admission that notion was not his invention but derived from German Social Democracy and especially the work of Karl Kautsky. Likewise, the later effort to claim that the capitalist law of value operates in “socialism,” expressed by such apologists for Stalinism as Oskar Lange and Ronald Meek, may be said to indirectly derive from the work of such democratic socialists as Kautsky. In some respects, he may be considered the first putatively “Marxist” market socialist. 36. “Engels to Werner Sombart, March 11, 1895,” in MECW , vol. 51, p. 462. 37. Engels, Anti-Dühring, p. 190. 38. See “Engels to Conrad Schmidt, March 12, 1895,” in MECW , vol. 51, pp. 463–467. 39. One thing that makes the neglect of medieval philosophy so unfortunate, common among academic philosophers but ubiquitous among the most sophisticated Marxist theoreticians, is that so many unknowingly assume theoretical positions that were carefully considered, debated, and in some cases resolved a millennium ago. The nominalist/realist debate of the medieval schoolman is actually of great relevance to the debates in Marxist value theory, insofar as the latter generally divides into those viewing such concepts as a “fiction” (Althusser, Foucault et al.) versus those insisting it is the operative law of actual social reality (Grossman, Rubin, et al.). Marx was definitely not a nominalist when it came to the theory of value and surplus value, though he exhibited nominalist tendencies when it came to some broader historico-theoretical claims—such as whether a single theory can define or explain human history. 40. See Christopher J. Arthur, “Engels as Interpreter of Marx’s Economics,” in Christopher J. Arthur (ed.), Engels Today: A Centenary (New York 1996) pp. 173–210, and his The New Dialectic and Marx’s Capital (Leiden/London 2004) pp. 17–24. 41. Engels, “Supplement to Capital, Volume Three,” in Engels on Marx’s Capital ) pp. 109–110. It is one of the great virtues of recent English-language editions of volume three that this supplement is no longer included in them.

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42. Karl Marx, Outlines of the Critique of Political Economy (Rough Draft of 1857–58), in MECW, vol. 29, pp. 159–160. 43. Lenin is primarily responsible for reading the spurious notion of “socialism,” as distinct from “communism,” into Marx in his 1917 State and Revolution. The Critique of the Gotha Program—the text from which Lenin tries to build his argument—does not so much as mention the word “socialism”; it instead speaks of “the lower” and “a higher” phase of communism. 44. Although Kautsky suggested that the law of value continues in “socialism” in his 1884 letter to Engels, he does not return to the issue in such later widely-read works as The Socialist Revolution (1902), whose second part is entitled “What Happens the Day After the Revolution?” This does not mean that he left his earlier view completely aside, as seen in his discussions of the 1920s on the compatibility of the market with “socialized production.” Nevertheless, the widespread injunction against discussing the future society as “utopian speculation” by the Marxists of his generation provided scant opportunities for such tendencies to be openly voiced. 45. Raya Dunayevskaya, “A New Revision of Marxian Economics,” in American Economic Review 3 (1944), p. 534. 46. For the responses to the revision in the law of value by Baran, Lange, and Rogin, as well as Dunayevskaya’s response to them, see American Economic Review, respectively, 4 (1944) pp. 862–871; 1 (1945) pp. 127–133 and pp. 137–143; 4 (1945) pp. 660–664. 47. See Oskar Lange, “Marxian Economics in the Soviet Union,” in American Economic Review 1 (1945), p. 128. 48. The same is true of the theorists and advocates of Social Democracy in the “democratic” capitalist west. Virtually all of them have taken it for granted (and indeed continue to do so today) that commodity exchange and value production prevails in “socialism.” That such a conception was unthinkable for those of Marx and Engels’s generation shows the extent to which a social prejudice can become so deeply rooted as to be rendered invisible to its adherents. 49. See “A History of Separation,” in Endnotes 4 (2015), 185–186. 50. Marx, Critique of the Gotha Program, p. 86. 51. Ibid., p. 85.

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Bibliography Arthur, Christopher J. “Engels as Interpreter of Marx’s Economics.” In Christopher J. Arthur (ed.), Engels Today: A Centenary (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1996), pp. 173–209. Arthur, Christopher J. The New Dialectic and Marx’s Capital (Leiden and London: Brill, 2004). Dunayevskaya, Raya. “A New Revision of Marxian Economics,” American Economic Review 34:3 (1944), pp. 531–537. Eatwell, J. et al. Eds. The New Palgrave: Marxian Economics (London: Palgrave, 1990). Engels, Friedrich. “Supplement to Capital, Volume Three.” In Engels on Marx’s Capital (Moscow: Progress, 1972), pp. 109–110. Engels, Friedrich. Anti-Dühring: Herr Eugen Dühring’s Revolution in Science. In MECW , vol. 25, pp. 5–309. Engels, Friedrich. Engels on Marx’s Capital (Moscow: Progress, 1972). Engels, Friedrich. Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy. In MECW , vol. 3, pp. 418–443. Hudis, Peter. Marx’s Concept of the Alternative to Capitalism (Chicago: Haymarket, 2013). Lange, Oskar. “A History of Separation.” In Endnotes 4 (2015), pp. 185–186, published at endnotes.org.uk Lange, Oskar. “Marxian Economics in the Soviet Union,” American Economic Review 35:1 (1945), pp. 127–133. Levine, Norman. “Engels’ Co-option of Lenin.” In Tom Rockmore and Norman Levine (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Leninist Political Philosophy (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), pp. 178–179. Marx, Karl. “Marginal Notes on Adolph Wagner’s Lehrbuch der politischen Ökonomie.” In MECW, vol. 24, pp. 531–559. Marx, Karl. “Outlines of the Critique of Political Economy (Rough Draft of 1857–58).” In: MECW , vol. 29, pp. 5–417. Marx, Karl. Capital. Vol. 2. Translated by David Fernbach (New York: Penguin and New Left Review, 1981). Marx, Karl. Capital. Vol. I. Translated by Ben Fowkes (New York: Penguin and New Left Review, 1976). Marx, Karl. Critique of the Gotha Program. In MECW , vol. 24, pp. 75–99.

CHAPTER 18

Engels and the Remaking of Communism in the Twenty-First Century Regletto Aldrich Imbong

Several interventions have treated the contemporary problem of the party as a political organization. Joseph Ramsey’s How do Communists Party, for example, shifts the question from “whether or not we need a communist party” to “what does it mean to ‘party’ like a communist.”1 Here, he highlighted as an essential task of the communists “to meet the masses where they are.”2 Jodi Dean advocates a party that, rather than national and mass-electoral goals, “envisions a solidary, militant, international organization.”3 Yahya Madra and Ceren Özcelçuk agree with Dean that the party is the reactivation of a communistic desire. But they argue that while “communism is about the reactivation of desire,” the burning question, however, involves the “practices that are needed to support the traversal of the fantasy that would unleash desire.”4 These interventions presuppose the party in the practice of a communist or post-capitalist

R. A. Imbong (B) University of the Philippines Cebu, Cebu, Philippines e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 T. Carver and S. Rapic (eds.), Friedrich Engels for the 21st Century, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-97138-0_18

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politics. But none, so far, has answered the rejectionist claims of Alain Badiou towards the party. Jörg Nowak mentions Badiou in his work on Louis Althusser’s critique of the communist party. However, his discussion of Badiou is rather on the latter’s “tense and difficult relationship with Althusser’s writings,”5 and simply discusses rather than questions Badiou’s stand on the state and the party. This chapter will refute the claims made by Badiou in many of his works by employing the ideas of Engels. The chapter will be divided into four parts. After a brief introduction, it will discuss Badiou’s notion of the communist hypothesis and what it claims as the problem of the political organization. This will be followed by an exposition of Engels’s thoughts on the proletarian party. The exposition will be historical. It will trace into three stages the development of Engels’s thoughts on the party. The last part will sketch a notion of a party of a new type informed by both the contributions and limits of Engels’s thoughts.

Communist Hypothesis and the Problem of Organization Learning from the tragedies of revisionist Russia, then, Badiou was motivated to recast the question of politics, especially the so-called classical revolutionism.6 From a Marxist perspective, the proletariat is considered as the historical agent that will offer the possibility of emancipation. But for the proletariat’s historical task to be realized, it must “be transformed into a subjective power” which will be “represented by a specific organization.”7 The classical name for this organization used to be the communist party. In discussing the notion of the classic revolutionism, Badiou highlights the two sides of an emancipatory politics: movements and the party. According to him, there are social movements that raise particular demands, and there is also the party element “present in all possible sites of power” that brings together “the strength and content of the social movements.”8 But this classic conception of revolutionism, according to Badiou, was slowly dying especially after the 70 s when the traditional organizations of the left, including the communist party, were hugely challenged concerning their legitimacy.9 The supposed rightist and “ultra-leftist” failures obviously questioned the party’s reputation as the vanguard of liberation. Even the great proletarian cultural revolution, according to

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Badiou, was a response to the degeneration of the ruling communist party in China.10 In this context, Badiou described today’s era, starting from May 1968, as “the era of the reformulation of the communist hypothesis.”11 This is the era when, specifically, the question of organization has to be seriously reconsidered. For Badiou, we are still contemporaries of May 1968 because we are still confronted with the same problem, that of the political organization.12 The question however does not entail an abandonment of organization in relation to the subjective realization of an emancipatory politics. Rather, a new form of organization has to be discovered. This obviously is not the classic communist party anymore. For Badiou, emancipatory politics today must “affirm a politics without a party.”13 In conceptualizing the state from the resources of set theory, Badiou revised it away from its Marxist-Leninist meaning. For him, this state cannot be a mere instrument possessed by any class as it is the structure that guarantees the law of the count for all the other sets or classes.14 Since the state “is what ensures the structural count of a situation’s parts,” Badiou claims that “the rule of counting does not hold forth any particular part as being paradigmatic of being-a-part in general.”15 There is no privileged subset or ruling class in possession of the state that does the counting for the situation. In this way, Badiou departed from the MarxistLeninist analysis of the state and ventured into the heights of abstract or transcendental thought. Badiou favoured the transcendental conceptualization of the state where it is no longer an instrument in possession of any ruling class but a metastructure that, while guarantees the count for particular classes, is also beyond or independent of classes.16 The notion of a state independent of society’s classes has a serious repercussion to basic Marxist-Leninist principles. On the one hand, the state, because of its inability to be instrumentalized for a particular class rule, has to be distanced instead of engaged (by the party).17 Badiou believes that instrumentalizing the state would only lead to a disastrous suture characterized by either or both bureaucratic formalism or red terror.18 On the other hand, the party, where the locus of a communist politics takes place, is immediately denied. Since the state is beyond classes, not even a party that represents a particular class can access or seize it. Using Marx, Badiou argues that politics cannot be represented. Badiou contended that politics is unrepresentable because “its subject-effect is in the perceivable order of the symptom.”19 Indeed, Marx set out his

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politics through or on the basis of the symptomal or evental episodes that fractured the course of history. This is evident in the case for example of Marx’s intervention-interpretation of the Paris Commune in his The Civil War in France.20 This is what Badiou described politics to be as an “actively intervening-interpreting thought.”21 But Marx did not stop from this framework of interventioninterpretation. He argued, in the same work mentioned above, how “after every revolution marking a progressive phase in the class struggle, the purely repressive character of the state power stands out in bolder and bolder relief.”22 And this is why, for Marx, such a state has to be overcome through the dictatorship of the proletariat that aims at bringing about communism. The assumption of power, and not mere interventioninterpretation, is but a necessary procedure of a communist politics. This means the conquest of state power and wield it against counterrevolution. This is verified by Engels who claimed how the “state is nothing but a machine for the oppression of one class by another.”23 Since representation is already denied by Badiou from the party, Badiou predicated the meaning of the communist to the proletariat (as if both are identical), a distortion which was long ago and in a slightly similar vein suggested by Ludwig Feuerbach but which was criticized by Engels and Marx. Feuerbach transformed the concept “communist” as a predicate of “man,” which in Badiou’s case is the predicate of the proletariat. But Engels and Marx categorically contended that the word “communist” means, in the real world, “the follower of a definite revolutionary party.”24 In this statement, Engels and Marx clarified that the being of a communist originated from and is sustained by the revolutionary party of the proletariat. Communist subjectivity rests on the constitution of the proletariat as a party, i.e. the overcoming of empirical givenness in favour of a self-conscious constitution of itself. It can be said that Badiou’s rejection of the party is rooted in his deviation from the empirical in favour of the mathematical. Badiou’s mathematical turn made him conceptualize a transcendental understanding of the state and with it laid the basis for the dismissal of the party, a category whose functionality rests on the instrumentalization of the State.

Engels and the Communist Party Employing Engels in advancing the notion of a proletarian party as the locus still of an emancipatory politics is a rather difficult task. Engels,

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and also Marx, were not particularly preoccupied with formulating the principles of party building. Particularly more difficult is drawing out Engels’s thoughts of what the party will be after the victory of the revolution. Jörg Nowak explained how Marx’s and Engels’s ideas on the post-revolutionary role of the proletarian party are either vague or absent.25 This is because Marx and Engels were generally concerned of discovering a scientific basis for both the understanding and overcoming of capitalism and not of theorizing the party. Further, the limitations of their knowledge and especially the social circumstances then hindered them from formulating a theory of the party. This section will discuss Engels’s thoughts on the proletarian party by tracing its development across three periods. The Embryonic Stage: 1843–1848 The first stage of development began even when the so-called scientific socialism was not yet fully developed but with the capitalist system of production having fully emerged especially in England. The capitalist system of production succeeded in developing and concentrating the proletariat in the industrial centres. Engels was not only able to analyze the industrial conditions in England in particular, but also study the English workers’ movement in general.26 In Germany, philosophy has matured, enabling Engels to identify in the so-called philosophical communism his theoretical support for communism. He considered philosophical communism to have been forever established in Germany. His challenge was that the “party has to prove that either all the philosophical efforts of the German nation, from Kant to Hegel, have been useless… or, that they must end in Communism.”27 The party must actualize philosophy’s potency. In the early years of this embryonic stage, especially before Engels and Marx worked The German Ideology, Engels identified the religious revolution of Christianity in the antiquity and philosophical communism in Germany to be the guiding ideologies of the workers’ movement, especially in England and Germany. Despite the obviously idealist leaning, Engels articulated an important political principle of the proletarian party. For him, a party must not adopt sectarian and elitist views and membership. This is why for him, “socialism does not form a closed political party.”28 In England, for example, Engels explained how the party “derives its supporters from the lower middle class and the proletarian

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class,”29 i.e. the “uneducated” and the poor.30 But this anti-sectarian principle in no way denied the educated class from being members of the party.31 Engels also saw the struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie in its abstract and general sense, i.e. between the rich and the poor. He expressed, however, that later on, this struggle will explode into an open revolution. Nevertheless, Engels saw the need to have an “intelligent comprehension of the social question among the proletariat.”32 This comprehension manifested a yet unarticulated relationship between the empirically given class of workers and the communistic elements who are presumed to have grasped proletarian consciousness. The former risks the danger of reducing the revolution to nihilistic violence and personal revenges. For Engels, “in proportion as the proletariat absorbs socialistic and communistic elements, will the revolution diminish in bloodshed, revenge and savagery.”33 This necessitates the communist party, for it will conquer “the brutal element of the revolution” and thereby prevent another Ninth Thermidor.34 Engels assigned to the party the ideological task of clarifying among the proletariat the nature of the revolution to curb possible excesses and terror. The question of the communist party was later on better clarified by both Engels and Marx. In The German Ideology, Engels and Marx explained that the communist is a “follower of a definite revolutionary party.”35 They did not only assert the necessity of the party but also located in it the support for the communist’s being, the communist’s subjectivity. In the most mature work of Engels (co-authored with Marx)36 in this period, the concept of the communist party is further clarified. In the Communist Manifesto, Engels and Marx explained that “the communists do not form a separate party opposed to other working-class parties.”37 This statement is one of Badiou’s frequently used proof to support his argument that “the communists constitute an existing dimension of the whole set of the working-class movement, of that which Marx calls ‘working-class parties.’”38 In other words, the empirically given class of workers, who Engels earlier warned might only succumb to forms of nihilistic violence, is for Badiou, the party. In this regard, it is wrong to create another faction out from the empirically given dimension of the working-class and make itself into a communist party.

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But what Badiou does here is to remove the statement from its context. Engels and Marx simply did not want the party to be sectarian, i.e. separated from and opposed to the mass of the workers. In fact, in the succeeding paragraph which Badiou failed to quote, Engels and Marx underscored the dialectical relationship between the communists, the most advanced and resolute section of the workers, from the mass of the proletariat.39 Here, the party assumed the task of representing and articulating in general and political terms what the workers in their dispersed and ununited givenness could only express, at best, as economistic calls. Being the material location for communist subjectivity, only through the party can proletarian consciousness come out. The party’s assertion to leadership is “grounded in its superior knowledge and consciousness.”40 But this in no way signals sectarianism but the concentration of dispersed power. The Revolutionary Stage (1848–1871) The second stage of Engels’s development started after the Manifesto was published and when both Engels and Marx were witnessing the maturation and the eve of bourgeois democratic revolutions across Europe.41 Engels described the year 1848 as turning out well as the “French proletariat has once again placed itself at the head of the European movement.”42 Both Engels and Marx saw the bourgeois democratic revolutions, especially that of Germany, as the prelude to a proletarian revolution.43 And while the revolutions, especially in France in 1848– 1850, were defeated, Marx saw in this defeat the victory of the party of insurrection as it “ripened into a really revolutionary party.”44 In their address to the Central Authority of the League, Engels and Marx laid out some of the basic principles of the Marxist programme and tactics, particularly that of the proletarian party. In summing up the experience of the 1848–1849 bourgeois democratic revolution in Germany, Engels and Marx explained that, as early as 1848, both have already warned how the German liberal bourgeois would inevitably gain political power and would use the same power against the proletariat, its own allies.45 The proletariat was more vulnerable to be repressed by the bourgeoisie as the former was yet unable to build for itself an independent political party. The problem of an autonomous political party became a decisive issue in terms of strategy and tactics. Engels and Marx stressed how the proletariat “must act in the most organised, most unanimous

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and most independent fashion possible” for it not to be exploited and taken in tow again by the bourgeoisie as in 1848.46 The proletariat can enter into alliances not as a tail of some existing bourgeois party but as an independent party, an expression of power. The notion of an independent political party of the proletariat would later on be advanced and elaborated by Engels in some of his solely authored works like the Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Germany, The Late Trial at Cologne, Karl Marx: A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Prussian Military Question and the German Workers’ Party and To the Spanish Federal Council of the International Working Men’s Association, among others. Engels traced the historical development of the proletarian party. He reechoed how the demands of the proletariat were put in the sidelines by the democratic party, how an independent proletarian party would only be possible if the conditions have been met (i.e. the achievement of the demands of the bourgeoisie), and how the proletarian party gradually separated itself as an independent party apart from the democratic movement.47 Engels advanced three important claims in relation to the independent proletarian party. First, organizationally this party must not be limited within the legal form of association determined by the state. Being a revolutionary party that confronts the power of the state, the latter could easily suppress the party by denying the rights of association and meeting and thus invalidate its legal status.48 The proletarian party should be fluid enough to shift to clandestine status if the political situation rightly demands. Its clandestine nature limits the hold of the state thereby allowing it to manoeuver on terrains that, at the very least, are beyond the control and knowledge of the latter. In this way, the proletarian party is unlike all the other bourgeois parties that need the State for its validation. Second, ideologically, this party must study the new scientific world outlook which was gradually formulated by Engels and Marx then. The works of both Engels and Marx, during this period were mainly concerned with completing the theoretical foundations of Marxism as the proletariat’s ideology and with making the initial steps towards the formulation of a proletarian party which this time must be based on the principles of so-called scientific socialism.49 It was around this time that Marx founded the Neue Rheinische Zeitung to aid in reaching and influencing the masses, to help in their political and ideological education and consolidation, and to prepare the basis for a German proletarian party.50 It was also around this time that Marx wrote the Wage Labour

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and Capital, an important document for the ideological development of the proletariat and, consequently, the building of an independent proletarian party.51 Engels narrated how the relative peace after the 1848–1849 uprisings allowed the party an advantage of formulating a new scientific outlook which became the basis for its theoretical foundation.52 Third, politically, this party must create for itself a power. Engels identified the proletarian party’s independence with power. This is worthy of note, as Badiou’s version of communism flatly rejected communism as power. Badiou confused the concept of communism by merely emphasizing one of its aspects, i.e. movement.53 For Badiou, communism as movement ought to be separated from power, a concept he unequivocally identified with corrupt state power.54 But Engels posited that the proletariat will become a power only when an independent party has been formed.55 Further, for Engels, this power is not something abstract but is rather a force to be reckoned with, the basis out from which the struggle with the bourgeoisie is possible. For the struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie could only be if it is between one power and another.56 In other words, for class contradictions to transform into class struggles, the creation of an independent party as power is necessary.57 Politics is determined by the constitution of the proletarian party.58 This realization is further galvanized especially after the historic Paris Commune, when Engels had verified and further developed his views on class antagonism, revolution, and the state. For Engels, the abolition of classes will only be achieved if the proletariat dominates in politics. But this political domination does not just fall from the skies like how an event does. This domination has to be forced through the supreme act of politics, the revolution.59 The Mature Stage: 1871–1894 Maturity in this sense refers to Marxism’s being able to articulate the basic scientific foundations of political economy, scientific socialism, and philosophy, the three main sections of Engels’s Anti-Dühring which Lenin will later identify as the three component parts of Marxism.60 During this period, Engels was already able to trace the materialist development of the state most notably in his The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State. What is particularly interesting especially in the analysis of Engels is the intersection of the concepts of state, authority, and politics,

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an intersection which is rather helpful in clarifying Engels’s position on the proletarian party. In On Authority Engels refuted the claims of the Bakuninists who denied all authority as it supposedly presupposes subordination.61 The Bakuninists regarded authority as an absolute evil and must therefore be done away with. Engels refuted by citing different forms of necessary authority. Among others, Engels cited the example of a ship’s captain whose will all the members of the ship must absolutely obey especially in times of danger.62 Engels defended the notion of authority by dismissing as absurd an understanding of authority or autonomy as either absolutely evil or absolutely good, respectively.63 In another work, a letter to Theodore Cuno, Engels once again dismissed this absolutist idea of authority by the Bakuninists. Engels explained that “[Mikhail] Bakunin wanted the International to be, not an organization for political struggle but a copy of the ideal society of the future.”64 The International must not have leaders or any organ of authority.65 But because of this rejection of authority, Engels explained that Bakunin likewise rejected the state, for authority = state = absolute evil, the epitome of all evil.66 This rejectionist attitude towards the state ultimately gave rise to the Bakuninist position of complete abstention from all politics. It was presupposed that the state is not to be confronted or engaged but to be distanced away with. The rejection of the state as a possible site of struggle consequently led to the banning of the formation of the workers’ party, for example in Italy where Bakunin had a strong influence. This would mean neglecting all the possible forms of struggle including immediate reforms and merely wait until the revolution drops from the skies, like an event.67 While both Engels and Bakunin believed that the state ought to be abolished, the latter, however, maintained that the state be abolished “at one stroke, even before the social conditions that gave birth to it have been destroyed.”68 And this is an essential difference, according to Engels. For “without a previous social revolution the abolition of the state is nonsense;”69 and the revolution, for Engels, is “the most authoritarian thing there is”70 being the supreme act of politics. Here, the notions of the state, authority, and politics intersect, and the party could be situated in this intersection as the authority of proletarian politics violently engaging with the state. What is rather interesting today is that Badiou resurrected this rejectionist attitude on the state in his version of the withering away of the

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state. Again, Badiou’s rejectionist attitude towards the state is a result of a fundamental thesis in his ontology, i.e. the transcendent and independent nature of the state inaccessible to any class or part of society. But this transcendent or independent nature of the state is what Engels, a long time ago, simply dismissed as an appearance. Recognizing the inevitable class antagonisms within a state, Engels argued the necessity of having a power “seemingly standing above society that would alleviate the conflict and keep it within the bounds of ‘order.’”71 What Engels took to be the appearance of the state, Badiou assigned as its nature. And what for Engels is the structure that organizes one class’s domination over another is for Badiou a metastructure that is beyond the domination of a class. In the same way as Bakunin did, Badiou still affirmed the abolition of the state, i.e. in its process of withering away.72 But until the revolution has finally commenced the process of the state’s withering, emancipatory politics is still, for Badiou, expressed by and must follow the formula “politics at a distance from the state.”73 Generally, this means non-engagement with the state, the epitome of all evil, especially by the party. Hence, for Badiou, “we need to be concerned at all times with the way communism exists as a movement,” i.e. a movement that does not and will not concern itself with party politics, power, and its seizure.74 Reading communism only from the point of view of movement would ultimately lead Badiou to the same Bakuninist or anarchist rejection of the party. This is a more radical position than that of his master Louis Althusser. Althusser still presupposed the party but located its operations “outside the state, both under the bourgeois state, and even more so under the proletarian state.”75 With the party absent in Badiou’s notion of emancipatory politics, communism is surrendered to the evental occurrence of a transtemporal Idea, rather than to the struggles the proletariat “is daily and hourly compelled to wage.”76 Engels was then already conscious of what Badiou today is most wary of, i.e. the corruption of the proletarian party and its suture with the state. But unlike Badiou, who dismissed the party as the possible site of corruption through the state-party suture, Engels, with only the Paris Commune as his single living lesson of a proletarian revolution, took the problem of the party seriously and in the most radical fashion. In his 1894 essay entitled The Future Italian Revolution and the Socialist Party, Engels reemphasized the importance of an independent party of the proletariat in winning the revolution.77 Here, Engels sketched what the party will be

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after the revolution has attained victory. For him, victory is only a temporary stage, yet “a new base of operations for further conquests.”78 The day of victory itself is the moment of new struggles and new contradictions. In other words, victory is the reminder of the constant overcoming of new contradictions in order to make the revolution in permanence, or to wage new forms of revolution within a revolutionary and withering state.

Towards a Party of a New Type Engels took a firm defence of the proletarian party. However, the major errors the proletarian party has committed especially throughout the twentieth century could not just be dismissed. This dismissiveness would be a disservice to Marxism as the latter, correctly pointed out by Althusser, is a finite theory. Its finiteness renders it as an incomplete system always in need of both continuities as well as ruptures for its self-development. But Engels did not live long enough to have witnessed, for example, the errors of Soviet and Chinese communist parties. His thoughts could not as yet articulate the nature of the party in a post-revolutionary state. All that Engels had witnessed was the victory of the Paris Commune, a victory which was short lived but, nevertheless, informative. Furthermore, Engels’s thoughts rarely touched on the dialectics between the state, the party, and the mass movement, a dialectic which is important in the reformulation of the communist hypothesis. In this regard, it is important that the reformulation of the communist hypothesis today must proceed from the theoretical richness of the victorious moments when the party fused itself with the masses and not with the state. Here, it is not the “bad thing of failure” but the theoretical richness of success that is transformed into the “combative excellence of knowledge.”79

Notes 1. Joseph Ramsey, “How do Communists Party,” in Rethinking Marxism 3 (2015), p. 381. 2. Ibid. 3. Jodi Dean, “The Party and Communist Solidarity,” in Rethinking Marxism 3 (2015), p. 332.

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4. Yahya Madra and Ceren Özcelçuk, “The Party and Post-capitalist Politics: A Missed Encounter,” in Rethinking Marxism 3 (2015), p. 36. 5. Jörg Nowak, “Louis Althusser’s Critique of the Communist Party and the Question of the Postrevolutionary State,” in Rethinking Marxism: A Journal of Economics, Culture, and Society 2 (2017), p. 252. 6. Ibid., p. 57. 7. Ibid., p. 53. 8. Ibid., p. 54. 9. Ibid., p. 55. 10. Ibid., pp. 113–114. 11. Ibid., p. 66. 12. Ibid., p. 62. 13. Ibid., p. 155. 14. Ibid. 15. Alain Badiou, Conditions, trans. Steven Corcoran (New York 2008, p. 167. 16. Badiou, Being and Event, p. 105–106 and Badiou, Logics of Worlds, p. 101. 17. Badiou, The Communist Hypothesis, trans. David Macey, Steven Corcoran (New York 2012), pp. 256–257. 18. Badiou, The Communist Hypothesis, p. 113. 19. Badiou, Can Politics be Thought, trans. Bruno Bosteels (London 2018), p. 38. 20. Karl Marx, “The Civil War in France,” in MECW, vol. 2 pp. 178– 246. 21. Badiou, Can Politics be Thought?, p. 36. 22. Marx, “The Civil War in France,” p. 218. 23. Frederick Engels, “Introduction to The Civil War in France,” ibid., p. 189. 24. Marx/Engels, “The German Ideology,” in MECW , vol. 5., p. 57. 25. Nowak, “Louis Althusser’s Critique of the Communist Party and the Question of the Postrevolutionary State,” p. 248. 26. Neil Harding, “Marx, Engels and the Manifesto: Working Class, Party, and Proletariat,” in Journal of Political Ideologies 1 (1998), p. 16. 27. Engels, “Progress of Social Reform on the Continent,” in MECW , vol. 3,. p. 406.

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28. Engels, “Letters from London,” in MECW , vol. 3, p. 379. 29. Ibid. 30. Ibid., p. 380. 31. Ibid., p. 407. 32. Engels, “The Condition of the Working-Class in England,” in MECW , vol. 4., p. 582. 33. Ibid. 34. Ibid. 35. Ibid. 36. There is, however, a contention that the Manifesto was not really a joint authorship of both Engels and Marx. See, for example, Neil Harding, “Marx, Engels and the Manifesto: Working Class, Party, and Proletariat,” in Journal of Political Ideologies 1 (2007), p. 13. 37. Marx/Engels, “Manifesto of the Communist Party,” in MECW , vol. 6, p. 497. 38. Badiou, Can Politics be Thought?, p. 65. 39. Marx/Engels, “Manifesto of the Communist Party,” p. 497. 40. Harding, “Marx, Engels and the Manifesto: Working Class, Party, and Proletariat,” p. 25. 41. Editor, “Preface,” in MECW , vol. 6, p. xv. 42. Engels, “Revolution in Paris,” in MECW , vol. 6, p. 558. 43. Marx/Engels, “Manifesto of the Communist Party,” p. 519. 44. Marx, “The Class Struggles in France: 1848–1850,” in MECW , vol. 10, p. 47. 45. Marx/Engels, “Address of the Central Authority to the League: March 1850,” in MECW , vol. 10, p. 278. 46. Marx/Engels, “Address of the Central Authority to the League: March 1850,” p. 278. 47. Engels, “Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Germany,” in MECW , vol. 11. Moscow 1979, p. 37–38. 48. Engels, “The Late Trial at Cologne,” in MECW , vol. 11, p. 388. 49. Ibid. 50. Editor, “Notes,” in MECW , vol. 8. Moscow 1977, p. 533. 51. Editor, “Preface,” in MECW , vol. 9. Moscow 1977, p. xvii. For the work to be understandable to the proletariat themselves, Marx made the presentation “as simple and popular as possible” because they wished “to be understood by the workers.” Karl Marx, “Wage Labour and Capital,” in MECW , vol. 9, p. 198.

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52. Engels, “Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy,” in MECW , vol. 16. Moscow1980, p. 470. 53. Badiou and Peter Engelmann, Philosophy and the Idea of Communism, trans. Susan Spitzer (Cambridge 2013), p. 50. 54. Ibid. 55. Engels, “Prussian Military Question and the German Workers’ Party,” in MECW , vol. 20, p. 70. 56. Ibid., p. 78. 57. In another work, Engels and Marx echoed the determinative role of the party in constituting a proletarian politics. They argued that “the working class cannot act, as a class, except by constituting itself, into a political party, distinct from, and opposed to, all old parties former by the propertied classes.” Marx/Engels, “Resolutions of the London Conference,” in MECW , vol. 22, p. 427. 58. In his letter To the Spanish Federal Council of the International Working Men’s Association dated 13 February 1871, Engels stressed the importance of organizing an independent proletarian party within national boundaries. As the forces of reaction then differ in various forms of government in each of their respective countries, the same reactionary tendencies continued to threaten the independence of the working class. Engels drew out from experience how “the best means of freeing the workers” from the domination of reactionary parties “is to found in each country a proletarian party with a political programme of its own.” Engels, “To the Spanish Federal Council of the International Working Men’s Association,” in MECW , vol. 22, p. 278. 59. Ibid. See also Marx/Engels, “Resolutions of the London Conference,” in MECW , vol. 22, p. 427. 60. These three elements of Marxism are also how Engels structured his Anti-Dühring. Engels, Anti-Dühring. V.I. Lenin, “The Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism,” in Lenin Collected Works, vol. 19 (Moscow 1977), p. 23. 61. Engels, “On Authority,” Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Works, vol. 2 (Moscow, Progress, 1969), p. 376. 62. Ibid., 378. 63. Ibid. 64. Engels, “Engels on Bakunin (Letter to Theodore Cuno, January 24, 1872),” in In Defence of Marxism. Retrieved 3. February

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2020 from https://www.marxist.com/engels-on-bakunin-lettercuno-january-24-1872.htm. 65. In “The Congress of Sonvillier and the International,” Engels explained that the Bakuninists wanted to reduce the functions of the general council of the International to the role of mere correspondence. Engels, “The Congress of Sonvillier and the International,” in MECW , vol. 23, pp. 66–67. 66. Frederick [Friedrich] Engels, “From Italy,” in MECW , vol. 24, p. 175. 67. Ibid. 68. Engels, “On Authority,” p. 376. 69. Engels, “Engels on Bakunin (Letter to Theodore Cuno, January 24, 1872).”. 70. Engels, “On Authority, p. 379. 71. Engels, “Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State,” in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Works, vol. 3 (Moscow: Progress, 1983), p. 327. 72. Badiou, The Communist Hypothesis, p. 248. 73. Badiou, The Communist Hypothesis, p. 256. 74. Badiou/Engelmann, Philosophy and the Idea of Communism, p. 50. 75. Louis Althusser, “Marxism as a Finite Theory,” in Viewpoint Magazine, 14 December 2017, retrieved from https://www.viewpoint mag.com/2017/12/14/marxism-finite-theory-1978/. 76. Engels, “The Congress of Sonvillier and the International,” p. 66. 77. Engels, “The Future Italian Revolution and the Socialist Party,” in MECW , vol. 27, p. 440. 78. Ibid. 79. Badiou, The Communist Hypothesis, p. 12.

Bibliography Althusser, Louis. “Marxism as a Finite Theory.” In Viewpoint Magazine, 14 December 2017, published at https://www.viewpointmag.com/2017/12/ 14/marxism-finite-theory-1978/. Badiou, Alain, and Peter Engelmann. Philosophy and the Idea of Communism. Translated by Susan Spitzer (Cambridge Polity, 2013). Badiou, Alain. Being and Event (London: Bloomsbury, 2013).

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Badiou, Alain. Can Politics be Thought? Translated by Bruno Bosteels (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2018). Badiou, Alain. Conditions. Translated by Steven Corcoran (New York: Bloomsbury, 2008). Badiou, Alain. Logics of Worlds (London: Bloomsbury, 2019). Badiou, Alain. The Communist Hypothesis. Translated by David Macey and Steven Corcoran (New York: Verso, 2012). Dean, Jodi. “The Party and Communist Solidarity.” In Rethinking Marxism 27:3 (2015), pp. 332–342. Engels, Friedrich, “Introduction to The Civil War in France.” In MECW , vol. 27, pp. 179–191. Engels, Friedrich. “From Italy.” In MECW , vol. 24, pp. 174–178. Engels, Friedrich. “Karl Marx: A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy.” In MECW , vol. 16, pp. 465–477. Engels, Friedrich. “Letters from London.” In MECW , vol. 3, p. 379–391. Engels, Friedrich. “On Authority.” In Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Works, vol. 2 (Moscow: Progress, 1969), pp. 376–379. Engels, Friedrich. “Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State.” In Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Works, vol. 3 (Moscow: Progress, 1983), pp. 191–334.. Engels, Friedrich. “Progress of Social Reform on the Continent.” In MECW , vol. 3, pp. 392–408. Engels, Friedrich. “Revolution in Paris.” In MECW , vol. 6, pp. 556–558. Engels, Friedrich. “The Condition of the Working-Class in England.” In MECW , vol. 4, pp. 295–596. Engels, Friedrich. “The Congress of Sonvillier and the International.” In MECW , vol. 23, pp. 64–70. Engels, Friedrich. “The Future Italian Revolution and the Socialist Party.” In MECW , vol. 27, pp. 437–440. Engels, Friedrich. “The Late Trial at Cologne.” In MECW , vol. 11, pp. 388– 394. Engels, Friedrich. “To the Spanish Federal Council of the International Working Men’s Association.” In MECW , vol. 22, pp. 277–280. Engels, Friedrich: “Prussian Military Question and the German Workers’ Party.” In MECW , vol. 20, pp. 37–79. Engels, Friedrich: “Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Germany.” In MECW , vol. 11, pp. 3–96. Engels, Friedrich: Anti-Dühring (Peking: People’s Press, 1976). Harding, Neil. “Marx, Engels and the Manifesto: Working Class, Party, and Proletariat.” In Journal of Political Ideologies 3:1 (1998), pp. 13–44. Lenin, V.I. “The Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism.” In Lenin Collected Works, vol. 19 (Moscow: Progress, 1977), pp. 21–28.

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Madra, Yahya, and Ceren Özcelçuk. “The Party and Post-capitalist Politics: A Missed Encounter.” In Rethinking Marxism 27:3 (2015), pp. 360–363. Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels, Friedrich “Manifesto of the Communist Party.” In MECW , vol. 6, pp. 477–519. Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. “Address of the Central Authority to the League: March 1850.” In MECW , vol. 10, pp. 371–377. Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. “Resolutions of the London Conference.” In MECW , vol. 22, pp. 423–431. Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. “The German Ideology.” In MECW , vol. 5. Marx, Karl. “The Civil War in France.” In MECW, vol. 22, pp. 307–359. Marx, Karl. “The Class Struggles in France: 1848–1850.” In MECW , vol. 10, p. 45–239. Nowak, Jörg. “Louis Althusser’s Critique of the Communist Party and the Question of the Postrevolutionary State.” In Rethinking Marxism: A Journal of Economics, Culture, and Society 29:2 (2017), p. 234–255. Ramsey, Joseph. “How do Communists Party?” In Rethinking Marxism 27:3 (2015), pp. 381–384.

CHAPTER 19

Afterword: Whither Engels? Terrell Carver

We have an awful lot of Engels, and more and more all the time. That archival accumulation is itself an indicator of continuing interest, access to funding and commercial success with publishers. He is now more than ever firmly in the ranks of recoverable historical figures, rather than those who are disappearing and disappeared, tarnished with complicities and buried under opprobrium. Those towering figures in the global foreground and still on the rise, of which Engels is certainly one, maintain or obtain an entry in the various handbooks, textbooks, encyclopaedias and dictionaries of academia and in the documentaries that provide content for “serious” programming. Engels never dropped out of those media outlets as they have developed over the last one hundred years. He always had a place in any reference work or collection of texts on Marxism and in any biographical study of Marx, whether hagiographical, demonizing, or balancing between the two. And since the 1920s he’s had his own biographical studies in one or more volumes.

T. Carver (B) University of Bristol, Bristol, UK e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 T. Carver and S. Rapic (eds.), Friedrich Engels for the 21st Century, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-97138-0_19

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Curiously Engels was never foregrounded as a stabilizing prop when biographers and commentators made their Marx. Marx has never been made nicer, or nastier, or more or less “human” by referencing him to Engels as an independent entity and agent. Engels has always been a background character in the main drama, yet not really in the shadows, whether the genre was tragedy, comedy, romance, or satire. Downstage he has been something of a Greek chorus or repetitive Polonius, entering and departing, helping us to get on with the plot, yet puzzling us a bit with what he actually says. Engels puzzles us because it is not entirely clear that in his life and thought we are listening in on a duet, or following instead a counterpointed second entry or additional musical subject. What is clear is that Engels constructed a view of himself that is easy to grasp, because it is so readily intelligible—comrade, associate, benefactor, partner, friend, collaborator, editor, supporter, and any number of helper roles. He became the pair of eyes through which we gaze at Marx with unqualified admiration. The one time (that we know about) when he lost it and told Marx off—for insensitivity to his grief—has itself become the sole exception that proves the rule. Any number of other people in Marx’s circles and networks, went their own way—critiqued, dropped, ignored, disdained. Only Engels stuck it out, though we do not know very much from him about why. He told Marx, their friends and us that communism was the reason, but little of his other life, whether with his tee-total Pietist family or champagne-drinking business connections, is there in the archive or in the memoirs. Perhaps what we see is what there was, but it sets us a puzzle: apart from his curated image: what else was going on? Just occasionally a bit of mystery emerges when someone is looking for something else. Not long ago a local authority librarian in north London contacted me, having found Engels’s signature as mortgage guarantor for a house purchase. We could not trace a connection from that bare record, though I am sure that the celebrity-minded librarian did her best. Engels-in-the-archive, and thus in the general reception, has been almost exclusively a tale often told, and little varied—till now. Archival work began in the early twentieth century, though archive is a rather grand misnomer—Eleanor Marx, Eduard Bernstein, and Karl Kautsky had charge of various papers in a rather unsorted state, though Engels himself had made a start. His papers were not only mixed in with Marx’s manuscripts, notebooks, and book-collection, but also all those

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items circulated in a rather disorganized way among the three senior interested parties, and doubtless others got a look-in, though sometimes it took persistence. Tracing that process requires access to materials other than the Marx-Engels papers, namely relevant correspondence of those individuals between themselves and with others that has perhaps been preserved—somewhere. The patient scholarship that has gone into establishing and contextualizing the works and letters in the post-war Gesamtausgabe edition relies on mole-like burrowing into places where there might be clues. Some years ago an associated researcher noticed an agency sale of Marxletters in London from a decade previously. My sleuthing correspondent wondered if perhaps the seller could be traced and contacted to see if there were any items as yet unsold? Tracing the name to a London address was not that difficult, and as I was handier to Fulham SW6 than anyone in Berlin or Vienna, I made the phone calls and found myself in a basement kitchen looking at nineteenth-century envelopes and stamps. tipped out onto the table from a plastic bag. That small trove was certainly worth a visit from an experienced archivist, and excitingly it contained some letters which were “unknown unknowns,” i.e. not deductively on a list of items referenced elsewhere. While not exactly archaeological, there is a resemblance—various “finds” get collected together, interpretation generates reconstruction, and pictures of lives emerge for us to consider, eventually in well-guarded archival surroundings. The Engelshaus in Wuppertal, now part of a local industrial museum complex, used to have a selection of archival items on display, and presumably many others in store. At the time of writing that operation is being revisioned for the twenty-first century in celebration of the bicentenary. As a background figure to the memorialized Marx, Engels is doing really well and better than ever. But there is really no suggestion—from him anyway—that he is actually an also—ran, or even runner-up to the champ. He haunted himself with the spectre of Marx. However, the present volume is something of a turning point in his career. What is at work in these scholarly contributions is not simply a result of archival accumulation, though that certainly plays a part. What the volume makes visible in English (various translators have been involved behind the scenes) is the globalized interest in Engels well beyond Germany and England. Different cultural environments, each

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having its own histories of scholarly interest and public political reception, are getting a voice now in the digital realm of globalized English, without—so your volume-editors firmly hope—killing off how he is interpreted and represented in other languages and cultures. Engels himself operated culturally, literarily, politically, and socially in anglophone, German-speaking and francophone milieux, breaking into any number of other languages on occasion, boastful autodidact that he was. To correspondents he was Friedrich, Frederick, Federico, and doubtless other monikers. There is really no evidence that he was personally shy, and indeed plenty of evidence that he was a born communicator, even orator on occasion, and certainly readable and effective as a journalist and pamphleteer. But how does that persona fit with the unshowy image of a Boswell-to-Johnson self-effacing humility, overawed in the presence of evident greatness? The archival traces of the two as they lived out their association, which was very seldom co-residential, do not help us to resolve this puzzle, given that those materials collapse into what we started with in the first place, which was Engels’s characterizations and recollections of what has become a familiar set of biographical word-pictures. Indeed there is now a whole genre of fictionalized photo-images of what I have just been describing, more or less available via internet searches, and lately in a handsome art-book. They were photographed together only once— “Uncle” Engels, Marx, and Marx’s three daughters. Given that collapse of questions into the same answers and dead-ends, there has been an on-going and often bad-tempered dispute over whether there is indeed anything to puzzle over, and thus whether one has any right even to ask that kind of question: how exactly were they differently, intellectually and politically? The hermeneutics of suspicion got to work on this way back in the very early twentieth century, as did the resulting blowback and siege-mentality from those resenting the idea. I do not think that Engels would have been very amused at this, but rather more likely to take it as an unwarranted questioning of Marx, rather than anything particularly about himself. He was quite good at that kind of deflection and displacement. Of course it might seem to be an admirable Engels-centric, even Engels-boosting exercise actually to ask that question—and find out the answer. In what ways was he—is he—comparable to Marx, even superior, notably different, possibly contradictory? Perhaps Engels brought more to the partnership, and indeed more to Marx, than he liked to admit or

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to credit himself with. Perhaps he was more of an independent intellect than he liked to pretend, and perhaps we could find traces of his distinctiveness in the very materials that he used to tell a different story. These are issues that arise in the present volume, where readers will find quite different “takes” on all these questions. Within the established Marx-Engels frame, or at least ignoring any wobbling that the above questioning might possibly engender, the archival researches have become very lively in recent years, particularly in relation to textual and manuscript studies on what was, for a time, his most famous book and presumed pinnacle of intellectual achievement. That text is the “Dialectics of Nature,” and of course a “dialectic” or “dialectics” as an important philosophical principle of Marxism, and then self-evidently, for Marx. Dialectic(s) is not original with Engels or Marx, but dates back to classical times. Rather similarly, and recursively, those debates, views, and schools are related to questions about the status of concepts as such, whether they are projected into the world as perceived by the senses, or alternatively are found by the mind as the senses report the world as it is. Late in life Engels produced manuscripts, posthumously edited in ways reflecting later contexts, through which philosophy was deployed politically, as indeed was his evident intention as he put pen to paper. In itself that activity with those intentions has provoked, since classical times, differences of opinion on the necessity, or alternatively, illegitimacy of using that kind of knowledge with that kind of intention. In the chapters presented here we are therefore not just revisiting Engels as a philosopher, but reviewing how he positioned himself with respect to those various horned-dilemmas and conceptual distinctions. In turn, we learn where each of our chapter-authors stands in relation to these philosophical staples, and indeed each has a different stance. In one way or another Engels as a philosopher, drawing on the classics and originating a genre—Marxist philosophy—gets to be taken seriously. Over the period from the 1930s to the 1990s that kind of respectful engagement was comparatively rare, since Engels was more commonly an icon, whether of certitude or misprision, so at worst he was sacred dogma and at best simply ignored. The archival resources today, both for texts and manuscripts, and for further contextualizing materials, allow scholars to explore what Engels said, why he said it, what effects he had, and how those scenarios play today some 150 years later .

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In his youthful context Engels was something of a shooting star in political economy, a leader intellectually in the German context, but— owing to his politics and the exigencies of censored publication—his “Outlines” on the subject found few readers at the time. His critical thoughts had better traction in his articles for the English radical press, though rather little local reception there, so far as we know. The basics of political economy, and the will to political critique, as Engels himself testified at the time, were present in political meetings and study-lectures, monitored suspiciously by local police and magistrates. But as a foreign correspondent Engels was perhaps rather lucky to get published, and in that anglophone context he was not outstandingly original. Engels’s originality in the German context, on the other hand, sparked excitement in one reader in particular—Karl Marx, but beyond that reaction, which was not very visible to anyone else at the time, we have little record of further interest. This was not so much because of Engels’s selfdeclared communism as because the whole idea of theorizing an economy was so odd in the German states of the Vormärz, a world of patchwork, neo-medieval authoritarian states, and state-lets. Perhaps in some of the more commercially minded Hanseatic “free cities” he could have found an audience, which is what he tried to find at the time when he organized a brief duo of speech-making events in his hometown after leaving the “Outlines” with his editors, Ruge and Marx, in Paris. We don’t know quite why Engels’s projected three-part book review of Marx’s first published half-volume “instalment” on his political critique of the classical economic theorizing of his era was left unfinished—the last section, part three, was intended to cover the actual economic theorizing in Marx’s recently published work, so we don’t have a continuation of the “Outlines,” or its revision, or indeed a dialogue on the subject with Marx. Chapter-contributions to the present collection reflect on this trajectory, and further on his editorializing advice and editing work on Marx’s multimanuscript attempts to get his “Capital” volumes, following one plan or another over the years, into print . Engels’s major full-volume study, The Condition of the Working Class in England, obtained a considerable readership among the German-speaking audience where it was targeted, and indeed he also wrote a preface in English which was dedicated to the working class depicted in his book. As a large empirical, descriptive, documentary study—incorporating his own eyewitness and ear-witness—the work was necessarily topical and contemporary, hence ephemeral unless updated, which the later Engels was never

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in a position to undertake. He also clearly indicated that it wasn’t his vocation anyway, namely to keep doing that kind of research and writing that kind of book. In any case Engels’s youthful magnum opus couldn’t have been researched locally and then published in the German-states and Austrian empire, because even as industry and commerce developed there, democratic political change and uncensored publication remained verboten for decades. While the work has a clear political message, it was de te fabula narratur (quoting one of Marx’s later Latin tags from Horace). That is, Engels intended the study to be a warning about the industrialized capitalism that was inevitable in the German future, though for censors and readers in the mid-1840s it was really a tale told about somewhere else. For that reason, it wasn’t really threatening, precisely because England was assumed be so very different. In those days, the British Isles were far away for most people, somewhere to emigrate to, rather than merely to visit. In Engels’s time learning English was rare, and anyway there was plenty to read about between the Rhine and the Black Sea, and northwards along the Baltic, where German was the language of education and literacy. Francophone culture was much nearer at hand, and French a language of cultural superiority, though this was contested by some, and one could always travel to exotic Italy as a privileged foreigner, bathed in the sunlight of the glorious renaissance. The book was republished during the revolutionary events of 1848, but only revived in American English late in Engels’s life. The chapters in the present volume consider the work in the context of much later historiography, and also revive the later Engels’s one short newsworthy pamphlet that bears some comparison with his earlier work in urban political studies. The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State has shot to the top of the list in Engels’s popularity charts, but only since the 1980s, when it became a classic of Marxist feminism, and indeed an exemplar of pioneering, proto-feminist works that regularly appear in reading lists. In the early days of anglophone feminist campus-activism it featured quite centrally, engaged with as both wrong and right, promising and disappointing, given that theories of revolutionary resistance to oppression looked like a good model. Ever since then this book has maintained its status in the feminist canon, even if critical opinion fluctuates, as it always does, though that is itself an indicator of continuity. That book doesn’t go away to await revival.

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There is plenty of theoretical material in The Origin to engage with, both on the subject of women, men and the family; and on the subject of the state, historical and modern, and on the concept of power, its use and effects. What doesn’t read well now is the anthropology and paleohistory, given the intervening and debatable histories of those modes of enquiry. At the time of writing Engels was rather more interested in the state, its histories in relation to modes of production, and its contemporary transitional formations, than in the other issues raised in the short book, though he was notably passionate and engaged on “the woman question.” That was quite unusual at the time, indeed about 100 years ahead, though it was not in fact original to him at that moment, since the issue had just surfaced in German socialist politics via a banned book smuggled in from Switzerland. His exploratory interest in indigenous, pre-industrial societies, and further back into pre-history, mirrored Marx’s voraciousness in enquiring into the latest investigations into human social relations and material technologies, which was also recorded in manuscripts published after Engels’s time. As ever, though, there is some question, and thus rather different answers, on how each of the two operated as an explorer when considering pre-literate cultures and contemporary “primitive” peoples. The breakthrough in the present volume, at least for anglophone readers, comes in the chapters where Engels is taken seriously as a writer, and considered within the framework of literary studies. In that way we learn about Engels within fictional genres of social critique, which of course raises interesting questions about political traction. What works best? Manifestos, propaganda, empirical studies, intellectual critiques, journalistic reportage, or just perhaps penny-novels and magazine stories framed as fictions? Fictions, of course, deal with the realities of experience, though rather carefully framed as not-real—when everybody knows that those characters and narratives are based on some experiential realities somewhere. Very often, especially these days, readers want to know exactly where “it happened,” who the characters “really were,” and many even visit the “real” houses and environs. In political terms, because fictional prose is angled at emotion, fiction is a winner, as any number of socially conscious studies of Dickens, for example, have been testifying for at more than fifty years. As a writer Engels makes considerable sense in that genre, which—perhaps sadly—he didn’t in fact attempt. His metier, at least early on, was the over-the-top outrageous political satire, targeted then at fellow Young Hegelians, whose politics was necessarily confined

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to their neo-academic settings of cafes and beerhalls, rather than actually under discussion in their classrooms and hallowed lecture halls. The intricacy of the allusions and word-play, and the poetic and rhetorical skills, get an appreciative reading today, even if it takes considerable time to get up to speed with the university-wits, or with the would-be universitystudent, in Engels’s case. The wit comes to life on the page, once the author is taken seriously. Rather akin to Woody Allen’s movie character and on-screen persona “Zelig,” Engels rather surprisingly pops up in various works and genres in German prose and poetry throughout the twentieth century, including in children’s books. There are also “traces” of himself, we might say, when fictional characters mention him or display his books in rather peripheral but semiotically significant ways. And finally the send-off in the present volume that Engels would have wanted: emancipation-communism-revolution. This is very much where his heart was, and where he made his vocational choice, when he was just turning twenty-two, which lasted until his dying day. In his own time, as Engels found, explaining communism was no easy task. And—following Marx’s example—he had a tendency to throw it out there as a somewhat empty signifier. Given the complexity of the democratizing struggles of the time, and the well-established genre of quasi-religious utopia-making, this was an understandable strategy. It’s also the case that appropriations of the term communism, where it did get considerable traction in statebuilding contexts of national liberation, not to mention mass strikes and working-class protests at numerous global sites, have generated vastly different axes of reception and historical memory. Engels features very prominently in the history of those ideas, though rather more for saying what he says Marx was saying, than for original insights and bold theorizations. But then that discourse was dictated by his character, so far as we know, since he—more than anyone else—is responsible for the persona that we reference when we type or speak his name. Indeed when we see his image or, on occasion, a statue, that is the Engels who is referenced, because that is the Engels we know, because that is the Engels he wanted us to know. In that mode Engels has been starring on stage and screen, quite recently, so perhaps he is in the running for “best supporting character in a historical drama bio-pic,” where’s he attractively youthful and fun. Whether that’s a better place to be in popular political culture than the way he formerly appeared, frozen-faced on banners as a stony-bearded grand old man, I leave to readers to judge. The chapters in this collection

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indicate the breadth and depth of Engels’s interests and intellect, because we have many volumes of texts, even images and artefacts to work with, and all manner of contextual materials relevant to whatever questions we want to ask him. Engels made Marx a very big part of his life, even if we don’t know all that much about what else he valued and how exactly he dealt with his different personae, hence different worlds, on an experiential day-to-day basis. But we can try to find out, because it is an interesting question about an evidently paradoxical figure. Marx was obviously a martyr to his perhaps over-intellectualized political interests. Engels doesn’t fit that mold, didn’t want to, and made strategic choices otherwise. In some respects, though, he’s a mirror to many of those interested in him. Perhaps these lived-paradoxes and guilty complicities, where professions of socialism are said to clash with comfortable jobs and lifestyles, involve rationalizations which we don’t like to record, and perhaps he was no exception. But then perhaps he commented on this disjuncture in conversations of which we have no record, or letters that got sifted out. He did that kind of “sorting” exercise himself, and indeed most probably so do the rest of us. Rather similarly no one really wants to be summed up easily in a single persona that supposedly captures everything of interest, though biography as a genre has made us rather used to that alleged service. The genre is applied to make the great (or otherwise) figures in history knowable at a sitting or two. Historians who used to exclude and excoriate any fictionalizing departures from archival, evidential facts are now rather more friendly to the idea of plausible speculation, both in novelized historical biography and drama, and in alternative histories that arise when known events hypothetically take a different turn. Engels figures in at least one of those novelistic efforts, written in the first person by his housekeeper “Mrs Lizzie,” who in fact left no written words. Now, however, she springs into life for us in the novel as a garrulous narrator. Perhaps we could resolve some of our biographical issues by making Engels himself give voice in a first-person long-lost autobiographical manuscript? Rather less fictionally and rather more prosaically Engels as social scientist and auto-ethnographer is something of a fixture among academic geographers, particularly for his use of maps and drawings in his largescale empirical study. His considerations of spatial relationships as class relationships, and his hand-drawn maps and graphic figurations of data, are also noted with approval, and even recommended to students, subject

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to improved technologies That his researches are drawn from experience, where his experience and observation form the data, is now very much to his credit, and he is on the way to becoming an exemplar. Engels’s auto-ethnography is very much in vogue, where the researcher-observer is foregrounded as reflexively within the scene and thus part of the action as eyewitness. He has even been compared, as an observer of urban diseases with Thucydides’ near-scientific recording of plague-symptoms in Athens. Indeed Engels was accompanied in his fieldwork, so it emerges in memoirs, by a woman! His choice of guide is presumed to be part of an intimate relationship, since Mary Burns was distinctly working class, hence he was digging deeper into auto-ethnography than many researchers today would consider ethical. Yet that itself is an interesting point of enquiry that surfaces now in methodological commentary: what is the appropriate, ethically validated degree of distance vs intimacy, voluntary vs paid (exploitative?) participation, future relationship between research-subject, research-assistant, and the researcher-author as “principal investigator”? Engels can’t be right or wrong here, given the anachronism, shifting definitions of authorial enterprise, and political contexts that have arisen since, and certainly weren’t there at the time. Though at the time his cross-class, rather under-the-radar sexual or quasi-sexual relationships were not unremarked, one way or another, though they are chiefly observable now only through quotidian correspondence and years-after, axe-grinding memoirs. Once again, and one interrogated, Engels repays consideration. Perhaps most in tune with the man and his mission, it might be that a revival of interest in, and recovery of, Engels the philosopher is on the cards. Now that dialectical materialism as Stalinist “diamat” is adjudged for the crude conception that it is, philosophically driven and historically informed enquiries into nineteenth-century materialisms are emerging, re-evaluating these propositions as worthwhile objects of recovery. That idea was the context that the later Engels placed himself in, and where he would—so I speculate—most likely be pleased to be receiving respectful academic consideration. That of course discounts his disdain for footling academics whose efforts are directed at self-advertisement, or at producing high-flown justifications for, and rationalizations of, capitalism as an acceptable status quo, or indeed joyous end of history.

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Engels was not at all bad as a historian, and his enquiries into late medieval history, of course from a class struggle perspective, are perhaps undervalued and due for scrutiny, methodologically as well as substantially. Perhaps as a philosopher of history, rather than critical researcher into historiography, he is worth a look. But rather centrally he positioned himself as a political philosopher, well able to expose the ideological character of conventional and unconventional philosophizing, whether propounded from Schelling’s lectern at Berlin university or over messy tavern tables with “The Free” in Berlin. There are plenty of classical references and classic aporia in his writings, from early on till very late. Philosophy has moved on, of course, but reculer pour mieux sauter . In one guise or another Engels has been with us, since the day he departed for another world. However, we are still left in something very much like his world, not completely different, and regrettably very much the same, in so many respects. Same issues, similar problems, familiar disappointments. Engels is one of the most published and translated figures in the world, leaving us much to explore, and much to puzzle over. Lately some of this recovery is quite remarkably lively, affecting, and enjoyable. We’re lucky to have him around.

Index

A absolute truth, 94–96 absolutism, 253 abstract (real) value, 116 abstract labour, 337–339, 345–347 Académie française, 253 accumulation, 148, 152, 250 Adorno, Theodor W., 7, 84 aesthetics, 292–294 Africa, colonization of, 258–259 alienated labour, 339–340, 345 Allen, Robert, 140 allocation, mechanism of, 118–119 Althusser, Louis, 355–356, 365, 366 anarchism, 113–114 Ansel, Michael, 21–22 antagonism, 55 anthropological paradigm, 282, 284 anthropology, 214, 216–217 anti-capitalism, 175 anti-immigrant sentiment, 261 anti-instrumentalist approach, 232–233

anti-Semitism, 256–261 anti-theoreticism, 63 Apel, Karl-Otto, 84 appropriation, 136–137 archives, 374–375 Arendt, Hannah, 201 Aristotle, dialectics and, 53–54 art, 292–294, 300–301. See also aesthetics Arthur, Christopher J., 8, 344 atheism, materialist, 111 Austria, 254 Austrian Social Democrats, 20 authority, 363–364

B Backhaus, Hans-Georg, 8 Bacon, Francis, 77, 78–80, 94–95 Badiou, Alain, 23–24, 355–358, 360, 361, 363–366 Bakuninists, 364 Bakunin, Mikhail, 290–365

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 T. Carver and S. Rapic (eds.), Friedrich Engels for the 21st Century, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-97138-0

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INDEX

Baran, Paul, 345–346 Barrett, Michèle, 216 Bartelmus, Martin, 21–22 base/superstructure theory, 77, 231–234 Baudelaire, Charles, 320–321 Bauer, Bruno, 111, 290–291, 293–297 Bauer, Edgar, 111, 289–292, 300 Baumert, Walter, 317–319, 326 Bebel, August, 16, 20, 211–214 becoming, 81, 83 being, 83 Belgium, 258–259 Berkeley, George, 76 Berlin Conference, 258–259 Bernstein, Eduard, 20, 57, 374–375 Bildungsromane, 271–272 Bismarck, Otto von, 254–255 Blackstone, William, 196 Blair, Tony, 260–261 Blanc, Louis, 113–114 Blank, Emil, 317 Blanqui, Jérôme-Adolphe, 119–120 Blunden, Edmund, 43 Bolsheviks, 4, 20–21, 72 Born, Stephan, 111 bourgeoisie, 252, 259–260, 360–362 bourgeois rights, 9–10 capitalism and, 8, 9–13, 23 critique of bourgeois family, 220–221 in German-language literature, 273–275 Brecht, Bertolt, 314, 320–321 Brexit, 261 Briese, Olaf, 21–22 Britain industrial revolution and, 150–152 monopoly position of, 150–152 British empiricism, 63 Bublies-Godau, Birgit, 21–22

Buhl, Ludwig, 291–292, 298–299 Bukharin, Nikolai, 148 Burckhardt, Jacob, 290 Burns, Lizzie, 318 Burns, Mary, 112, 167, 316–318 Bussman, Kai, 197 C Camus, Albert, 320–321 capital, 116–117 accumulation of, 148, 152, 250 centralization of, 137, 128 labor and, 116–117, 128, 136–137, 140–141, 235, 278–281 logic of, 345 Marxian critique of, 337 perverse logic of, 163–164 primacy of, 260–261 as self-expanding value, 336 as social relation, 234–237 capital assets, 117, 120–121 capitalism, 111–112, 114–116, 140–141, 248–250, 261. See also Kapitalismuskritik bourgeoisie and, 8–13, 23 colonialism and, 153–158 constitution of proletariat and, 176–178 creation and, 148–150 crises and, 152, 153 critique of, 127–141, 248 de-industrialization and, 153–158 destruction and, 148–150, 153–158 development of, 255–256, 262 future course of, 152 in England, 139–140 nationalism and, 258 as new way of life, 255–256 post-capitalist society and, 335–347 power and, 242 pre-capitalist forms of society and, 22, 148–150, 153–158

INDEX

predicted collapse of, 17–18 real estate industry and, 23 social disruption of, 255–256 systematic crisis in, 22 the market question and, 146–150, 150–153 capitalist accumulation, 250 capitalist internationalism, 23 capitalist nationalism, 23 caricature, 298–300 Carver, Terrell, 23, 24 categories dialectics of, 60 motion of, 60 system of, 60–61 Catholic church, 254–255 causality, in general systems theory, 82 causa sui, 82 cell physiology, 61 Center Party, 254–255 Central Authority of the Communist League, 361–362 centralism, 13, 14 certificate of labour, 342–343 change formal, 64 processes of, 41, 42, 43 Chartist movement, 112, 173, 175 China, 150 communist party in, 356–357 reform and opening up of, 89 view of socialism in, 346 Christianity, religious revolution of, 359–360 Christian philanthropy, 188 discourse of, 194–195 Cieszkowsi, August von, 292 civil society, 14 class. See also class struggle biological metaphors for, 277 capitalism and, 163–176

387

constitution of proletariat and, 163–176 ontologization of class differences, 277 social fiction and, 273–277 class consciousness, 114 class domination, 23, 239–240 economic-based, 235 ideological, 236 state power and, 234–242 classical revolutionism, 356–357 class struggle, 130–133, 138–141, 152, 166–172, 360–362 history and, 138 personalization of, 278–281 psychologization of, 278–281 social fiction and, 273–277 state as crystallization of, 243 unemployment and, 151–152 women and, 223 climate change, 261–262 Clinton, Bill, 260–261 coalitions, 260–261 cognition. See also knowledge object of, 83 practice and, 83 realist copy-theory of, 80–83 of the world, 74–75 cohesion, 232–234 Colletti, Lucio, 35, 38, 43 colonialism, 150, 153–158, 258–259 comedy, 295–298 religion and, 294 Young Hegelianism and, 292–295 commodities, 339 commodity exchange, 340–341, 344, 346–347 commodity prices, 343–344 commodity production, 339–341, 343 common property, 117 communism, 16, 23–24, 111–112, 114, 134, 135

388

INDEX

remaking of in twenty-first century, 355–366 communist hypothesis, 356–358, 365–366 communist party, 360, 355–366 as avant-garde of proletariat, 77 development of Engels’s thought on, 358–366 embryonic stage of Engels’s thought on, 359–361 mature stage of Engels’s thought on, 359–366 revolutionary stage of Engels’s thought on, 361–363 communist society, 10 communist subjectivity, 358, 360, 361 community ownership, 201–202 competition, 111–112, 115–121, 150–153 complexity, 81 concrete labour, 337–339, 345, 347 conflict, 55 Congress of Vienna, 254 consumption, 118–119 contradiction, 35, 36, 43, 60, 65, 132 democracy and, 134–135 Hegelian concept of, 55, 127–128 in nature, 55–56 natural structures of, 55–56 private property and, 136–137 social structures of, 55–56 control, mechanism of, 118–119 corporation, Hegel’s conceptualization of, 165 cosmology, 81–82 creation, destruction and, 149–150 crises capitalism and, 152 capitalism and, 152, 153 cyclical, 148 crisis of legitimacy, 260–261

critical material, Engels’s contribution to, 263 critique, 294–295 Cuno, Theodore, 364

D Danielson, N.F., 17–18, 150, 154–155, 157 Darwin, Charles, 43, 82, 213–214 Darwinism, 217 Dean, Jodi, 355–356 Deborin, Abram, 58 de-industrialization, 145–158 democracy contradiction and, 134–135 democratic institutions, 259 hypocrisy and, 130–135 democratic republic, 257, 259–260 as battlefield, 250–251 as vehicle for social transformation, 250–251 Demuth, Helene, 318 Dennett, Daniel C., 40 destruction, creation and, 148–150 determinism, 6, 16, 72–73, 77, 223–224, 231–232 Deutsche Jahrbücher, 291 development organic process of, 61 processes of, 41, 42 D’Holbach, Baron, 37 dialectic(s), 53–66, 92–93, 140, 253, 377. See also materialist dialectics in Anti-Dührung , 65 applications of, 55–56 Aristotle and, 53–54 of categories, 60 in Dialectics of Nature, 60–66 as discipline, 98–99 in Engels’s 1882 letter to Marx, 63–66

INDEX

as form of cognition, 98–99 Hegel and, 53–54, 90–92, 94–96, 98–100, 127–128 historical sciences and, 99 laws of, 98–99 laws of dialects and, 98–99 laws of motion and, 98 logic and, 100 materialism and, 99–100 metaphysics and, 94–95, 101–102 motion and, 61, 62 natural, 54, 99–100 natural knowledge and, 58 natural realm and, 46–47 natural sciences and, 61–62, 99 in nature, 53–66 objective, 62–63, 98–100 in philosophical theory of social knowledge, 55 pure theory of thought and, 99 relationality and, 61 as science, 99 science and, 100 social realm and, 45–47 subjective, 62–63, 98–99, 102 subjective dialectics, 102 theory of, 100–102 of thought, 100–101 dialectical laws, 22, 33–47, 73–75, 100 dialectical materialism, 22, 34, 73, 91–93, 100–101, 383 determinism and, 72–73 Engels and, 71–85 Lenin and, 75–78 Marxist philosophy as systematization of, 89 philosophy and, 100 Stalin and, 75–78 dialectical motions, 102 dialectical philosophy, 100–101 dialectical thinking, Hegel and, 62

389

Dietzgen, Joseph, 71 difference, 62 distributive justice, 259 dogmatism, 1–2, 16–19, 22, 33–47 domination, 230, 233–234. See also masculine hegemony forms of, 234–237 instrumentalist, 234–237 mechanisms of, 240–243 power and, 234, 237–242 state as political domination and, 230–231 state power and, 234–237 strategic-relational, 234–237 structuralist, 234–237 three basic notions of, 234–237 dramatic texts, Engels in, 323–326 dualism, 37–43, 46 dual systems approach, 215–216, 218–219 Dubois, W.E.B., 258–259 Dühring, Eugen von, 15, 34–35, 37–38, 339 Cursus , 55 Natural Dialectics , 54, 55 New Basic Laws for Rational Physics and Chemistry, 93–94 review of Capital , 54–55 Dunayevskaya, Raya, 345–346 Dusch, J.J., 295 E economic class domination, political class domination and, 235–236 economic nationalism, 261 economic planning, 9–10 economic power, political power and, 232 economic reductionism, 243 economic relations, 10 economic values, moral values and, 118, 120–121

390

INDEX

economism, 230, 238, 239 efficiency gains, 155–156 egoism, 111–112 Eichendorff, Johann von, 282 Eichhorn, Karl Friedrich, 290 Elbe, Ingo, 1–2, 4–14 elective affinity, 251–252 electrical energy, mathematical formulation of, 64 elites, 259–261 emancipation, 8–10, 13–14, 18, 23–24, 84, 261, 356 emancipatory politics, 356, 357 emancipatory theory of power, 231–232 emergence, 43, 65–66 empirical science, 91, 92, 100–103 end of philosophy and, 92 history and, 97 idealism and, 93–94 metaphysics and, 94–95 empiricism, 22, 23, 63, 74, 75, 100 end of philosophy, 102 conditions for and limits of, 97–101 empirical science and, 92 Engels’s proposition about and revelation of, 90–92 epistemology and, 103 Hegel and, 92 idealism and, 92–95, 102 as limited end, 92, 97–102 Marxism and, 101 metaphysics and, 92–95, 102 two dimensions of, 92–95 Engels, Friedrich, 21–22, 249–258, 299–300. See also Engels, Friedrich, works of accused of ideological and restricted reception of Marx, 10 as advisors, 18–19 background of, 110–112 on Bakuninists, 364

bicentenary of, 1–2, 18, 33 in biographical novels, 315–319 Christian faith and, 111 communist party and, 358–366 concept of state and, 14 concern with nationalism, 248 constitution of proletariat and, 166–172 continuation of Marxian concept of practice, 73 contribution to idea of socialism, 23–24 contribution to Marxism, 18–19 controversies in recent Germanlanguage interpretations of, 2–21 critical distance from his own productions, 17 death of, 10 defence of proletarian party, 366 denigration of, 33–34 description of his role in collaboration with Marx, 2 dialectical materialism and, 71–85 in dramatic texts, 323–326 epistemological perspective of, 103 feminist receptions of, 215–217 foreword to Volume III of Capital , 17 as founder and first interpreter of Marxist philosophy, 90, 23 friendship with Marx, 318–319 geniale Skizze of, 137–139 German-language literature and, 271–284, 311–326 as historic figure, 21–22 historicist interpretation by, 7–9, 12–13 influence on young Marx, 127–141 invention of Marxism and, 15 joins Young Hegelians, 111

INDEX

journalistic and political interventions of, 18–21 lack of interest in, 1–2 literary criticism of, 21–22 literary estate of, 57 literature and, 21–23 marginalization of his though, 89 Marx’s biographical note on, 137–139 materialism and, 38–43 as materialist atheist, 111 materialist dialectic of, 22, 71, 73, 80 meets Marx, 111–112, 166 non-mechanistic, non-reductive, dialectical form of materialism, 38–43 in novels, 315–323, 335–347 as object of literary writing, 23 on the party, 356 as philosopher, 377, 384 as philosopher of history, 384 poetry on, 312–315 political awareness of, 263 political testament of, 20 popularization of Marxist theories by, 15, 17 on post-capitalist society, 335–347 pragmatism of, 18–19 preparation of/contribution to/response to Capital , 339 reformism and, 20 rejection of dualism, 38–43, 46 re-reading in 21st century, 247–263 revolution and, 19–20 role in socialist movement, 18–21 scientific and political function of publications, 15–18 seen as popularizer of Marx, 158 ‘semantic struggle’ and, 18–19 ‘start from facts’ slogan, 93 studies of, 111

391

thesis that nature becomes and passes away, 82–83 ‘the Free’ and, 111–112, 290–292, 297–300 in twenty-first century, 258–262 undogmatic character of his thinking, 15 ‘utopianism’ of, 13–14 view of materialism in Hegel, 73–75 as visionary, 121 younger socialists and, 18–19 Engels, Friedrich, works of Anti-Dührung , 2–3, 5–6, 9–10, 12–13, 15, 22, 34–35, 65, 90, 91, 211–212, 231–232, 339, 341, 346, 363–364 Basic Forms of Motion, 63 Cola di Rienzi, 21–22 Communist Manifesto, 19, 20, 220–221, 248, 250, 318–319, 360 The Condition of the Working Class in England, 23, 109, 138–140, 145, 167–169, 230–231, 241, 272, 275–277, 279–282, 337, 378–379 correspondence of, 15–18 Dialectics of Nature, 3, 17, 34, 54–56, 59–66, 90–91 Elberfeld lectures, 272 The Future Italian Revolution and Socialist Party, 365–366 The German Ideology, 17, 231–233, 236, 360 The Internal Crises , 130 “Introduction” to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, 7–8 introduction to The Civil War in France, 19, 20 late work of, 90

392

INDEX

late writings on political economy, 344–345 Letters from Wuppertal , 129–130, 166 Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy, 3, 5–6, 34, 73–74, 77, 78, 90–91, 214 Nachlass , 20, 22 The Natural Research in the Spirit-World, 63 On Authority, 14, 364 “On the Housing Question,” 34.30, 187–202 The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, 146, 211–224, 229–243, 256, 320–323, 363–364, 379, 380 Outlines of a Critique of National Economy, 166 Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy, 22, 109–121, 128, 134–137, 139–140, 230–231, 276, 337, 378 The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man, 146 The Peasant War in Germany, 146 Plan 1878, 56–60 Plan 1880, 56–57, 59–60 preface to Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire, 259–260 preface to Marx’s The Civil War in France, 259–260 preparation of/contribution to/response to Capital , 7, 9, 17, 145–147, 152, 337–339, 344–345 Private Property and the State, 146 The Role of Force in History, 253–254, 259–260

Schelling, Philosopher in Christ , 291, 293–294 Schelling and Revelation, 291, 293–294 Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, 2–3, 10 The Triumph of Faith, 21–22, 23, 289–301 Engels, Marie, 298–300, 316–317, 324 Engels-ism, 2–15 England, 152, 255–256. See also Britain capitalism in, 140 class struggle in, 112 economic crisis in, 112–114 English standpoint vs. German standpoint, 130–132 industrial workers in, 150–152 labor movement in, 167 revolution in, 113–114 socialist movement in, 112, 150–152 Enlightenment, 96 epistemology, 22 Ermen & Engels, 110–112 essence, 80 Hegel and, 80–83 reflection and, 81 self-referentiality of, 81, 83 ethnic boundaries, 251–252, 256–257 ethnicity, 257 ethnic nationalism, 248 Evans, Richard, 169–170 Evans, Robin, 194 evil, 364 evolutionary theory, 82 exchange of equivalents, principle of, 9–10, 12, 13 exchange-value, 7, 8, 116, 136, 336–339 existence, 80–81

INDEX

393

being and, 83, 98, 102 thought and, 98, 102 exploitation, 192–194, 232–233 double exploitation, 193–194 political domination and, 243 secondary exploitation, 193–194 externalization, 292

French Marxism, 23–24 French Revolution, 134–135, 248–250, 256 Freud Sigmund, 175 Friedrich Wilhelm IV, King of Prussia, 291 Füllner, Bernd, 21–22

F faith, 296, 297 family, 233–234 critique of, 220–221 Farha, Leilani, 200–201 feminism, 215–217, 222–224 Marxist feminism, 216, 223 feudalism, 11–12, 251–252 Feuerbach, Ludwig, 111, 128–129, 299, 324, 358 First International, 248–250, 364 food supply, 119–120 formal change, 64 Foucault, Michel, 23, 194–195 critique of ‘economic functionality’ of power, 234, 238–239, 243 critique of ‘economism,’ 214.160, 238, 239 critique of power, 239–243 on juridical conception of power, 238–239 on positive mechanisms of power, 239 Fourier, Charles, 113 Frambach, Hans, 109–121 France, 253, 256, 258–259 Fraser, Nancy, 260–261 freedom, 292–293 human beings and, 46 knowledge and, 46 ‘the Free,’ 111.30, 111, 290–292, 297–300 free trade, 115–116, 155–156, 262

G Gans, Eduard, 165 Garaudy, Roger, 59 Gassendi, Pierre, 37 gender gender hierarchy, 211–224 gender studies, 217–219 Marxism and, 211–224 relations of reproduction and production and, 213–215 theorizing, 23 general systems theory, 82, 83–84 Geneva Congress of the International, 249–250 gentrification, 188–192, 196 German idealism, 63 German-language literature, 271–284 poems, 312–315 political history to the present, 300–301 German philosophy, political economy and, 129–130 German Social Democrats, 20–21 German standpoint, vs. English standpoint, 130–132 Germany, 251–256, 258–259, 261–262 Gleichwertiger, 346–347 global capitalism, 261 globalization, 115–116 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 320–321 goods, 12, 117

394

INDEX

Gotthelf, Jeremias, 282 Graeber, Friedrich, 111, 298–300 Graeber, Wilhelm, 129–130, 298–300 Gramsci, Antonio, 260–261 Greater Logic, 60 idealism of, 43, 71–72, 131–132 immanent critique of, 74 inversion of his system, 71, 73–75 Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, 129–130 Logic, 7, 60–61, 80–81 materialism and, 73–75, 99–100 on mechanistic view of, 36–37 natural knowledge and, 58 philosophy of history and, 129–130 philosophy of history and, 131–132, 139–140 philosophy of law, 128 philosophy of nature and, 93–94 Philosophy of Right , 164 philosophy of right and, 138–139 real philosophy of, 73–75 Schelling and, 290–291 teleology of history and, 127–128, 132, 135–136 theory of the state and, 230–232

H Habermas, Jürgen, 6, 83–85, 300–301 Häckel, Manfred, 312 Hallische Jahrbücher, 291 Hannich, Josef, 312 Hardel, Gerhard, 316–319 Hartsock, Nancy, 249 Harvey, David, 191–194 Haslanger, Sally, 198 Haussmannization, 188, 189, 196. See also gentrification Hearn, Jeff, 216–219 Heckscher, Eli, 155–156

Hegel, G.W.F., 16, 33–34, 39–41, 73, 76, 102, 111, 128–129, 132, 290, 292–294, 314, 359 Anti-Dührung and, 99–100 on change, 42 ‘dialectical thinking’ and, 62 dialectics and, 53–54, 90–92, 94–96, 98–100, 127–128, 292 Elements of the Philosophy of Right , 14, 130 empiricism and, 74 end of philosophy and, 92 essence and, 80–83 freedom and, 46 Hegelianism, 138–140, 164–166, 168–169, 290–297. See also Young Hegelians Hegelian dialectic, 292 Heraclitus, 81 Herder, J.G., 81–82 Herres, Jürgen, 17, 18 Hess, Johann Friedrich, 289–290 Hess, Moses, 111–112, 114–115, 128–129, 134, 316–317 heteronomy, aesthetics of, 21–22 Hikmet, Nizim, 320–321 historical change, 274, 279–284 historical laws, 102–103 historical materialism, 84, 97, 99–101, 248–249, 253, 262 Engels’s contribution to, 263 intellectual roots of, 249 Marxist philosophy as systematization of, 89 nationalism and, 248 historical philosophy, 100–102 end of, 95–97, 100 idealism and, 97 metaphysical nature of, 96 historical process, dialectic mediation of subject and object in, 83

INDEX

historical sciences, 10, 91, 99, 100, 102 history, 73–74, 293 class struggle and, 138 concept of, 102 dialectical laws and, 73–75 empirical science and, 97 Marxian school of, 2–3 Marx’s concept of, 97 natural, 81–82 ‘naturalization’ of, 4 novelizing, 219–223 philosophy of, 129–130, 139–140. See also historical philosophy science of, 46–47. See also historical sciences teleology of, 127–128, 132, 135–136 trajectory of, 103 history of science, 78–79 Hobbes, Thomas, 37 Horkheimer, Max, 7, 84 Horst, Johanna-Charlotte, 21–22 housing, 188, 198–201 affordable, 198–199 concentration and, 188–192 corporate-owned, 195–198, 200–201 gentrification and, 188–192 human right to, 188, 198–201 international regulations and, 188, 195–198 ownership question, 188 power relations and, 198 revisiting question of, 187–202 shortage of, 195–198 social history of, 188–192 structural exclusion and, 198 housing market, capitalization of, 196 Hudis, Peter, 23–24 human activity, excepted from mechanistic view, 43–47

395

human beings excepted from mechanistic view, 38 freedom and, 46 mechanistic view of, 38 human labour. See labour human rights housing and, 188, 198–201 Marx’s critique of, 198–200 human thought, excepted from mechanistic view, 38–47 humour, 292–295 Hungary, 261 Husserl, Edmund, 84 hypocrisy, democracy and, 134–135

I idealism, 43, 63, 73–74 critique of, 97 definition of, 71–72 empirical science and, 93–94 end of, 92–95 end of philosophy and, 102 Hegel and, 71–72, 131–132 historical philosophy and, 97 materialism and, 71–73, 75–78, 92–94 identity, 62 ideological class domination, 236 ideological distortions, 84 ideology-critique, 134–135 Imbong, Regletto Aldrich, 23–24 imperialism, 258–259, 261 indebtedness, system of, 194–195 indeterminacy, 81 India, 150, 153 industrialization, 271–272, 274, 281–284. See also industrial revolution industrial revolution, 169–170 Britain and, 150–152 industrial workers

396

INDEX

Britain and, 150–152 misery of, 118–119, 121, 128–131, 137, 140–141, 151–152 needs of, 112, 139–140 injustice, 198 instrumentalist thesis, 232, 234–237, 242, 243 interconnection, 64 system of, 64 interest, 120–121 International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, 199 internationalism, 23, 247–263 International Working Men’s Association (First International–IWMA). See First International intertextuality, 295–298, 320–321 intervention-interpretation framework, 358 Ireland, 251, 255–256 Irish, migration of, 255–256, 260–261 irony, 293 is/ought question, political economy and, 109–121 Italy, 250–254, 261–262

Kapitalismuskritik, 127–141 English vs. German standpoints, 130–132 first step, 128–134 second step, 134–138 Kautsky, Karl, 13, 20, 71, 109–110, 151, 211–212, 343, 374–375 Keckeis, Paul, 21–22 Kedrov, B.M., 57 Kelley-Wischnewetzky, Florence, 16 kenosis, 292 Kierkegaard, Søren, 290 Klopstock, Friedrich Gottlieb, 295 Knierem, Michael, 325–326 knowledge, 84 freedom and, 46 natural, 58 Köppen, Karl Friedrich, 111, 291–292 Krätke, Michael, 15–19 Kreide, Regina, 23 Krovoza, Alfred, 176 Kugelmann, Ludwig, 54–55 Kulturkampf, 254–255 Kunze, Reiner, 312–313

J Jessop, Bob, 230–236 Jordan, Robert, 316, 318–319 Junkers, 254–255 juridical forms, 256 justice, 9–10, 12, 14, 96, 121, 259–260

L labour, 9–12, 79, 116–117, 120–121, 145, 337, 341–342 abstract, 338–339, 345–347 alienated, 336, 339–340, 345 capital and, 116–117, 128, 136–137, 235, 278–281, 140–141 certificate of, 342–343 as commodity, 340 concrete, 336, 338–339, 345–347 definition of, 79 division of, 241, 256 monetary value and, 7–8 productive vs. unproductive, 116–117

K Kafka, Franz, 320–321 Kaltofen, Günter, 323–324, 326 Kangal, Kaan, 22 Kantianism, 59 Kant, Immanuel, 41, 44, 45, 76, 81–82, 359

INDEX

sexual division of, 233–234 social division of, 232–233, 256 thinking and, 80–84 value and, 136, 337–340 labour movement, 257, 261 labour power, 145, 235, 337, 339–343 labour time, 336–339, 341–343, 345–347 labour tokens, 342–343 Lafargue, Laura, 15 La Mettrie, Julien Offray del, 37 land, 116–117, 120–121 Landgrebe, Ludwig, 4, 73, 78 Lange, Oskar, 345–346 language boundaries, 251–253, 256 Lassalle, Ferdinand, 342–343 laws, 6, 100, 103 natural, 6, 102, 103 of dialectics, 98, 99, 102 of motion, 98 Leach, James, 112 Lefebvre, Henri, 176 Left Hegelianism, 138 Leithäuser, Thomas, 176 Lenin, V.I., 2–3, 20, 71–73, 80, 83, 363–364 canonization of Anti-Dühring , 15 centralism of, 13 concept of state and, 4 Development of Capitalism in Russia, 157 dialectical materialism and, 75–78 ‘labour aristocracy’ and, 151 Materialism and Empiro-Criticism, 72 October revolution and, 13 poetry on, 314–315 State and Revolution, 322 Leontief, Vasily, 345–346 Levine, Norman, 342–343 liberation, 292–293. See also freedom

397

Liebknecht, Wilhelm, 55 life-world, 83–84 Literarisches Comptoir, 289–290 literary design elements, 23 literary modes of representation, 21–22, 23 literature Engels and, 21–22, 23 German-language, 271–284, 300–301, 312–315 as social practice, 21–22 living conditions, 195 living organisms, higher principles in force in, 39–41, 42, 43–47 Locke, John, 8, 11, 12, 36–37, 94–95 logic, 60–61, 100 Lohmann, Georg, 11–12 Lorca, Federico Garcia, 320–321 Louis XIII, King of France, 253 Ludwig, Wilhelm, 312 Luhmann, Niklas, 83–84 Lukács, Georg, 5–6, 36, 83 History and Class Consciousness , 3–5, 58, 72–73, 78–80 interpretation of Engels, 73 self-correction in 1967 forward to History and Class Consciousness , 73 Lukas, Wolfgang, 21, 23 Luxemburg, Rosa, 148

M Madra, Yahya, 355–356 Malthus, Thomas R., 113–115, 118–121 Mandel, Ernest, 340 Marcus, Steven, 168–170 the market question, capitalism and, 146–153 markets destruction of, 148–150, 153–158

398

INDEX

struggle over, 152 market socialism, 341 marriage, 134 Martin, Reinhold, 194 Marx, Eleanor, 374–375 Marx, Jenny, 323–324 Marx, Karl, 22, 109, 299 authorial intentions of, 8–9 biographical note on Engels, 137–139 Capital , 6–8, 11, 12, 17, 18, 54–55, 71, 145–147, 152, 193, 214, 239, 316, 322, 337–339, 342, 345 The Civil War in France, 19–20, 357–358 Communist Manifesto, 19–20, 248–250, 319–325, 360 communist subjectivity and, 358 concept of alternative to capitalism, 347 concept of material production, 213–214 concern with nationalism, 248 Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law, 138–139 Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, 7, 8, 337 conversion to communism, 337 Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right , 232 Critique of Political Economy, 7–8, 13 Critique of the Gotha Program, 9–10, 341–343 death of, 256 dialectics in Engels’s 1882 letter to, 63–66 Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature, 133–134

in dramatic texts, 323–325 as editor of Rheinische Zeitung , 128–129, 133–134, 138 The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, 6 founding of Neue Rheinische Zeitung , 362–363 friendship with Engels, 2, 111–112, 127–141, 166, 318–319 gender and, 224 The German Ideology, 231–233, 236, 359–360 Hegel’s theory of the state and, 230–231 on history as comedy, 293 intervention-interpretation framework and, 357–358 “Introduction” to Critique of Political Economy, 8 invention of, 15 Kapitalismuskritik and, 127–141 literary estate of, 57 logical method of, 7–8 Manifesto of the Community Party, 220–221 marriage of, 323–324 meets Engels, 111–112, 166 Nachlass manuscripts, 17 new reading of, 8–9 in novels, 315–318 on capital, 336, 337 On the Jewish Question, 138–139 in Paris, 138–139 poetry on, 312–314 on politics as unrepresentable, 357–358 on post-capitalist society, 335–347 on post-revolutionary role of the party, 358–359 The Poverty of Philosophy, 16, 337

INDEX

“Preface” to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, 214 reproduction schemes and, 148 rights and, 198–200 Scorpion and Felix, 295–296 on socialism, 336, 346–347 social theory of, 53 state as political domination and, 230–231 theory of the state and, 229–234 “Theses on Feuerbach” 9.30, 3–4, 72, 78, 83 two-department schemes and, 147–148 Wage Labour and Capital , 362–363 ‘woman question’ and, 212–213 Marx-Engels-Gesamstausgabe, 57–58 Marx-Engels Institute, 57 Marxism, 44, 340, 346–347 in ‘actually exiting socialist’ states, 4 end of philosophy and, 101 as ‘Engels-ism,’ 7.110, 2–15 Engels’s appropriation of the term, 15, 16 French, 23–24 gender and, 211–224 as hostile designation within socialist movement, 2 ideological function of, 4 after Marx, 336–337 popularized by Engels, 15, 17 reductionist determinism and, 224 spread of the term, 15 Marxist feminism, 216, 223 Marxist-Leninism, 8–9. See also Lenin, V.I. Marxist philosophy, diversified viewpoints to understand, 101, 103 Marxist state theory, 229–234 Marxist theories

399

‘degeneration’ of, 4 ‘science-philosophy’ and, 100–101 masculine hegemony, 219–224 masculinity, 222, 223 materialism, 3, 38–43, 233–234. See also dialectical materialism; historical materialism definition of, 71–72 dialectics and, 99–100 Hegel and, 73–75, 100 idealism and, 71–73, 75–78, 92–94 mechanistic, 38 modern, 92, 100–101 non-mechanistic, non-reductive, dialectical form of, 38–43 philosophy of history and, 129–130 science and, 100 materialist dialectics, 71, 73, 78–85, 100–102 material life, primacy of, 256–257 McCulloch, John Ramsay, 113, 116 means of consumption, 193 means of production, 193, 232–233 mechanics, 38–39 laws of, 41–47 medical science, 195 men’s studies, 217–219 men, theorizing, 23 mercantilism, 114–115 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 73, 176 metaphysical irony, 293 metaphysics, 22, 33–47 critique of, 97 definition of, 94–95 dialectics and, 94–95, 101–102 empirical science and, 94–95 end of, 92–95 end of philosophy and, 102 natural sciences and, 94–95 metatheory, 90, 101–102 Meyen, Eduard, 291–292 Meyer, Anne-Rose, 21–23

400

INDEX

Mickel, Karl, 324–325 Mill, James, 135–136 Mill, John Stuart, 113, 116–117 Miranda, Ana, 23 mock-epic, genre of, 295–298 modernity, ‘repression hypothesis’ and, 194–195 monarchy, 251–252 monism, 3 monopolies, 117–118, 120–121, 135–136 monopolization, 114–115, 117 monopoly, competition and, 150–153 moral economy, 175 moralization, 188, 194–195 moral values, economic values and, 118, 120–121 Morina, Christina, 18–19 motion, 62–66 of categories, 60 definition of, 63 dialectics and, 61, 62 hierarchical categorization of, 58 laws of in human society, 94–95 real and categorial, 61 movements, 356 Mülberg, Dr, 187–188, 192–194. See also Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph mundus concentratus , 300–301

N Nachmärz period, 271–272 Napoleonic invasions, 254 Napoleon, 21–22 Narodniks, 150, 154–157 nationalism, 23, 248, 257–263 appeal of, 248 capitalism and, 258 economic, 261 Engels’s account of, 248–249, 261, 262

historical materialism and, 248 imperialism and, 258 origins of, 248 resurgence of, 247–248 revival of, 262 solidarity and, 248 symbolism and, 260–261 twenty-first-century revival of, 263 nationality, 257 national wealth, 115–116 nation-building, 253–255 nations, 248, 257 Engels’s account of, 248–249, 262 state and, 256 superstructure and, 256 nation-states, 249, 262 coercion and, 253–254 development of, 256 emergence of, 251–256, 262 violence and, 253–254 natural dialectics, 54, 99–100 natural history, 81–82 natural knowledge, 58 natural laws, 6, 92–103 natural philosophy, 78–79, 100–102 end of, 95–97, 100 natural sciences and, 96 natural process, ‘in-itself’ of, 82–83 natural realm, dialectic and, 46–47 natural sciences, 4–6, 22, 34, 38–39, 57–59, 75, 78–79, 93, 100, 102 dialectics and, 61–62, 99 genus-historical classification of, 79, 80 instrumentalized for claims to dominance, 78–79 metaphysics and, 94–95 natural philosophy and, 96 philosophy and, 74, 91 philosophy of nature and, 74 practice of, 84

INDEX

principle of self-organization in, 82, 84 nature, 73–74, 76 becoming and, 83 concept of, 102 conceptual determinations and, 81 contradiction in, 55–56 definition of, 63, 64 dialectics and, 33–47, 53–66, 73–75, 78, 80 human ‘mastery’ of, 45 mechanistic view of, 36–43, 58 philosophy of, 22, 33–47, 63 spirit and, 93–94 unhistorical view of, 41 vitalist-idealist view of, 58 negation, 36–37, 42, 61–62, 168–169 negativity, 36 neoliberalism, 260–261 New Hegelians, 128–129 Newton, Isaac, 36–37 Nikolaevskii, Boris I., 57 nobility, 274–275, 277 nominalism, 300–301 Norman, Richard, 35, 37–38 nothing, 81 novels, 315–323 Nowak, Jörg, 358–359 O objective dialectics, 98–100 objectivity, 83, 98 object theory, 90, 101–102 observers, 83–84 Occupy Wall Street movement, 261 October revolution, 4, 13 Ohlin, Bertil, 155–156 Old Hegelians, 292 O’Neill, John, 15 opposites, 55, 60–66 Otto-Peters, Louise, 272–276, 278, 283, 284

401

overproduction, 147–148 overview of present volume, 22–24 Owen, Robert, 113, 128–129, 134, 151, 342–343 ownership question, 188, 195, 201–202 Özcelçuk, Ceren, 355–356 Özdamar, Emine Sevgi, 320–323, 326

P Paris Commune, 357–358, 363, 365–366 Paris Workers’ Congress, 249–250 parody, 295–296 parts, whole and, 64 party, 366 as political organization, 366 Patnaik, Prabhat, 22, 158 Paul, Jean, 301 Peace of Westphalia, 252 Pfeiffer, Hans, 324, 326 philosophical communism, 359, 360 philosophical laws, 100 philosophical science, 102 philosophical theory of social knowledge, dialectics in, 55 philosophy, 22, 58, 89, 91, 100, 103, 130 philosophy of history, 74, 130, 132, 140 philosophy of nature, 22, 47, 63, 74, 94 philosophy of right, 139 philosophy of spirit, 74 physicalism, 38 physical sciences, 38 physics, 39 physiocrats, 115 Pietism, 296, 297 Piketty, Thomas, 201, 202 Plato, Theaetetus , 81

402

INDEX

Plekhanov, Georgi, 71, 72 poetry, 315 Poland, 251, 261 the political, vs. the social, 133 political class domination, economic class domination and, 236 political domination, exploitation and, 243 political economic theory, as bourgeois ideology, 114, 115 political economists, 118 political economy, 7, 22, 115, 121, 130, 137, 138, 141, 153, 337, 364, 378 political means, vs. social means, 280, 281 political organization, 356–358 political power, economic power and, 232 political rule, vs. social administration, 14 politics, 358, 364 Pope, Alexander, 295 popular radicalism, 173 population theory, 119–121 positivism, 75 post-capitalist society, 347 power, 23, 230, 232, 234, 238–243, 358 Pozzi, Matteo, 22, 23 practice, 5, 73, 77–79, 83, 84 praxeological class theory, 176 pre-capitalist forms of society, 13, 22, 150 prejudice, 257 price, 116, 337 price fluctuations, 118 primitive accumulation, 12 private property, 112, 115–119, 121, 128, 135–137 privatization, 117 privilege, unwarranted, 9

production, 137, 146, 147, 215, 233, 235 production costs, 116 production factors, 117 productivity, 119 profit, 337 profit rate, tendency to fall, 17, 18, 153 profit rates, equalization of, 344 proletarian movement, 251 proletarian party, 356, 359, 360, 362, 363, 366 proletariat, 176, 248, 257, 276, 280, 284, 356, 358, 360, 362 property, 114, 121, 128, 134, 137 property question, 188, 195, 202 prostitution, 221 Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph, 114, 135, 188, 194, 343 Prussia, 254, 255 public administration, 14 public institutions, administrative tasks of, 14 pure theory of thinking, 74, 84 pure theory of thought, dialectics and, 99 Q Quesnay, François, Tableau Économique, 148 R racism, 261 Ramsey, Joseph, 356 Rapic, Smail, 22, 85 rate of profit, falling tendency of, 17, 18, 153 rationality, 96 rational kingdom, 95 Reagan, Ronald, 261 real estate industry, 23

INDEX

realism, 76, 301 realist copy-theory of cognition, 83 reality, 301 recursion, thinking and, 79 reflection, 81 reformism, 20 Reich, Wilhelm, 175 Reichelt, Helmut, 8 Reichstag, 20 relationality, 61, 63, 64, 66 religion, 134, 294 renters, exploitation of, 194 rents, 121 repression hypothesis, 195 reproduction, 213, 215, 220, 221, 384 reproduction schemes, Marx, Karl and, 148 République française, 249 resistance, power and, 239 revisionism debates, 259 revolution, 24, 114, 119, 121, 128, 131, 132, 134, 137, 140, 151, 152 Revolution of 1789, 253 Rheinische Zeitung , 112, 128, 129, 134, 138 Riazaov, David, 20, 57 Ricardo, David, 115–117, 129, 136, 148, 153, 156 rights, housing as human right, 201 Rogin, Leo, 346 Röhrig, Tilman, 318, 319 Roman Empire, 256 Rome, boundaries of, 251 Rosenkranz, Karl, 300 Roth, Regina, 17, 18 Rubin, Gayle, 224 Ruge, Arnold, 109, 111, 291, 294, 298, 300, 324, 378 Russia, 155–157, 356 Rutenberg, Adolf, 292

403

S Salzborn, Samuel, 1, 14 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 3, 36, 38, 59, 73, 78 Sax, Emil, 194 Say, Jean-Baptiste, 116, 117, 148 Sayers, Sean, 22, 47 Say’s Law, 148 Schelling, Friedrich, 111, 129, 290, 291, 294 Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 111 Schmidt, Alfred, 4, 36, 73, 78 Schmidt, Conrad, 16, 17, 344 Schmidt, Katherin, 315 scholarship, 375 science, 22, 58, 100, 103, 117 ‘science-philosophy,’ Marxist theories and, 101 scientific socialism, 114, 363, 364 ‘scientific socialism,’ 25.220, 359 scientism, 5 secondary exploitation, 194 Second International, 18, 250, 259 self-alienation, freedom from, 137, 293 self-contradiction, 35 self-critique, 295 self-organization, principle of, 82, 84 self-referentiality, 83, 84 self-reflection, 84 self-regulating markets, 262 sexuality, 194, 195, 213, 220, 221, 224 Shakespeare, William, 321 Simonde de Sismondi, Jean Charles Léonard, 114 Smith, Adam, 115–117, 129, 134, 136, 153 Smith, Neil, 191, 192 the social, vs. the political, 133 social administration, vs. political rule, 14

404

INDEX

social change, 84 Social-Democratic Party (SPD), 16, 19, 20 Social Democratic Workers Party, 188 ‘social’ fiction, class struggle and, 277 social history, 81, 82, 84 socialism, 2, 13, 17, 22, 24, 97, 101, 114, 200, 261, 335, 336, 341, 343, 345–347, 359, 360, 363, 364 socialist movement, 2, 20, 21, 24, 112–115, 128, 139, 150–152 socialist politics, 262 socialist society, 6 Socialist Workers Party of Germany, 9 social labour, 341 social means, vs. political means, 280, 281 social movements, 356 social practice, 3–5, 22 social production, 193 social realm, dialectic and, 46, 47 social reform, 284 social relations, 235, 237, 240, 242, 243 social research, 23, 79 social theory, 84 ‘social war,’ concept of, 282 solidarity, 248, 250, 252, 256, 257, 262 Solinas, Marco, 22, 141 Sombart, Werner, 344 sovereignty, 234, 242, 243, 252, 255 Soviet Union, 192, 346 specification, mechanism of, 119 Spinoza, Baruch, 82 spirit, 76, 94 Stalin, J.V., 73, 77, 78, 80, 346 Stalinism, 346 the state, 4, 14, 23, 133, 231–234, 236, 243, 256, 262, 263, 357, 358, 364, 365, 384

state formation, 234, 248, 249, 252, 256, 257, 262 state power, 237, 242, 243 statist socialism, 341 Stedman Jones, Gareth, 170 Stifter, Adalbert, 282 Stirner, Max, 111, 292, 294, 299, 300 strategic-relational theory, 237 Strauss, David Friedrich, 111, 130, 296 Strawson, Peter Frederick, 84 structuralist theory, 237 subjective dialectics, 99, 102 subjectivity, 83, 84, 98 subjects, constitution of proletariat and, 241 Sue, Eugène, 274 suffrage, 257, 259, 260 Sünker, Heinz, 23 supplies, 117 supply and demand, 118 surplus value, 97, 99, 101, 337 surveillance practices, 195 Sweezy, Paul, 340 synthesis, 76

T Tassoni, Alessandro, 295 Taylor, Charles, 5 technology, 78 Telegraph für Deutschland, 291 teleology of history, 128 Thatcher, Margaret, 261 theory, vs. science, 100 Theseus, 256 thinking, 79, 80, 83, 84 Thompson, Edward P., 173 thought, existence and, 98, 102 Tolstoy, Leo, 321 tools, practice of using, 79 totality, theory of, 64, 66

INDEX

trade, 116, 340 trade crises, 128, 137 trade unionism, 173, 213 trade value, 116 transmission, 64 Trump, Donald, 261 truth, absolute, 95, 96 U UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, 199 unemployment, class struggle and, 152 United Kingdom, 259, 261 United States, 261, 262 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 199 universal suffrage, 257, 260 urban planning, 188, 192 usefulness, 116 use-value, 336, 347 usurpation, 11, 12 utopian socialism, 95, 96 V Vaßen, Florian, 22 vacancy, 196 value, 116, 121, 136, 336–341, 343–347 value-form, 337, 339, 340 value production, 337, 340, 342, 344 Vester, Michael, 175, 176 Victor, Walther, 315, 316, 318, 319 Virchow, Rudolf, 15 vitalism, 59 Voß, Wolfgang Lukas Torsten, 22 Vollgraf, Carl-Erich, 17, 18 voluntarism, 6, 232 Vormärz period, 272, 274, 280, 282, 284, 378

405

W Watts, John, 113, 115 Weber, Max, 14, 195, 252 Weerth, Georg, 272, 275, 276, 278 Weiss, Peter, 321 Weisse, Hermann, 300 Wellmer, Albrecht, 4, 73, 78 Westphalian system, 252, 253 Wigand, Otto, 300 Wilhelm II, Kaiser, 20 will, 6 Williams, Tennessee, 321 Willkolm, Ernst Adolf, 272, 273, 276–281, 283, 284 women, 23, 223, 224 work conditions, historical change to, 281 workers, moralization of, 188, 195 working body, well-being of, 195 working class, 249, 250, 256, 259, 384 working conditions, 321 world financial crisis of 2008, 1

X Xu, Changfu, 22

Y young adult novels, 316–318 Young Hegelianism, 294, 295 Young Hegelians, 85, 111, 290–292, 294–297, 337, 381 Young, Iris Marion, 198

Z Zachariäs, J.W.F., 295 Zelik, Raul, 202 Zhou, L., 54 Zu, Johann Peter, 295