The
state is nothing but an instrument of oppression of one class by another—no
less so in a democratic republic than in a monarchy.
Friedrich
Engels, Preface to Marx’ The Civil War in France
Friedrich
Engels was born into a privileged family, but fought all his life for the
poor. The eldest son of a prosperous
textile manufacturer, young Friedrich both trained on the job at Ermen and
Engels, the company of which his father was a co-owner, and excelled at his
studies—from an early age he had an extraordinary proficiency in
languages. In a sense, this opposition
between intellectual and businessman was to define Friedrich Engels’ entire
life: he was to become a political-economic theorist, a prolific writer, and a
revolutionary, but he also worked dutifully at a job he detested for decades,
primarily in order to provide financial support to his friend and collaborator
Karl Marx. Over the course of his life
Engels wrote several influential and theoretically substantial books, as well
as hundreds of pamphlets, reviews, and articles; in fact, he actually wrote
many of the articles purportedly written by Marx, so that upon publication,
Marx would have the royalties. Engels
eventually co-authored several books with Marx, edited Marx’ work, and
translated some of Marx’ writing into English.
But Engels was also a brilliant organizer, publicist, and man of
action. Unlike Marx, Engels took up arms
and put his life on the line, fighting alongside his comrades in several
pitched battles against the forces of oppression and autocracy.
Friedrich
Engels was born on 28 November 1820 in Barmen, near Düsseldorf, in the Rhine
province of Prussia. Just five years
prior to his birth, Napoleon’s defeat had led to the formation of reactionary
tyrannies throughout central Europe.
However, when Engels was only seventeen, while working as an apprentice
to his father’s export agent in the seaport city of Bremen, he was already
publishing writings which showed that he was fully aware of the new
revolutionary spirit sweeping Europe. In
1839 young Friedrich published the anonymous Briefe aus dem
Wuppertal [Letters from Wuppertal], a scathing exposé of
the backwardness, hypocrisy, and prejudice of his home region. Significantly, even this piece of juvenilia
involves analysis of class antagonism: Engels painted a vivid portrait of
exploitation, and the physical and mental degradation of the workers in the
coal mines, tanneries, and textile mills.
Letters from Wuppertal documents the destructive effects of
industrialization in Engels’ home district, and draws attention to the function
of religion in diverting the local population away from realizing the rapid
degeneration of their society and environment.
By the time he left Bremen, although he was only twenty years old,
Friedrich Engels had already anonymously published thirty-seven short texts,
including articles, reviews, translations, and poems. Many of his early writings have an atheistic,
revolutionary-political strain that the stolid Engels clan would have found
disconcerting, to say the least.
Engels
served his obligatory year with the Prussian army in 1841-42. Because he was stationed in Berlin, he was
able to attend lectures at Berlin University, including the inaugural lecture
series given by the conservative German Idealist philosopher Friedrich von
Schelling. At Berlin University, Engels
further developed his proficiency in languages and also threw himself into the
study of philosophy and political theory.
Significantly, he was not overly impressed by the elderly Schelling’s
lectures, which consisted largely of diatribes against Schelling’s deceased
rival, G. W. F. Hegel. Engels, always a
voracious reader, immersed himself in the study of Hegel, particularly Hegel’s
philosophy of history. He soon began to
conceive human history as developing through revolutionary struggle, and the
social antagonism between the oppressors and the oppressed. Engels’ classmates in Berlin included various
members of the leftist group known as the Young Hegelians, and after becoming
associated with these radical followers of Hegel, he turned much more active
and audacious as a journalist. Engels
was soon to publish (under the pen name Oswald) several widely-read and
influential critiques of Schelling’s philosophy.
Here
again we encounter the split or antagonism that defined Engels’ existence:
while doing his duty as a Prussian citizen and serving in the army, he studied
philosophy and wrote passionate, leftist critiques of the most acclaimed living
philosopher in Christian-monarchic Prussia.
Throughout his life Engels paid just enough attention to his
responsibilities as a member of the middle class to secure a steady income, but
covertly he was doing everything in his power to promote the interests of the
radical left and the working class, and thus to undermine the very bourgeoisie
of which he was—at least nominally—a member.
In
1842 Engels moved to Manchester, England, at the centre of the British
Industrial Revolution. He worked as an
accountant in the English branch of Ermen and Engels, and studied political
economy in his spare time. Engels was
outraged by the misery and poverty of the factory workers in the squalid slums
of Manchester; but because he had arrived shortly after the Chartist general
strike of 1842, he grasped immediately the revolutionary potential of a unified
and educated working class. By this
time, Engels had already met the communists Moses Hess and Karl Marx, editors
of the Rheinische Zeitung.
Engels contributed several studies of the economic conditions from which
class antagonism arises, and became one of the correspondents in England for
the Rheinische Zeitung.
Engels’ writings from this period are remarkable in that they combine
Hegelian dialectics with atheistic socialism in order to forge a perspective
that was universal but purely human.
Having observed firsthand the methods of factory production, the
struggles of labourers, and the results of class antagonism, Engels’ astute
articles from England drew the attention of the relatively detached and
idealistic socialists in Germany to the cost in real human suffering of the
so-called “free-market” system. Engels’
unique approach conjoined political philosophy and social science, and this
orientation decisively influenced later critical analyses of political economy,
such as those of his friend and—after 1844, collaborator—Karl Marx. Engels’ essay “Umrisse zu einer Kritik der
National-Ökonomie” [Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy] was
published by Marx in 1844 in the Deutsch-französische Jarbücher. This article analyses capitalist economic
theories, including those of Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, David Ricardo, John
Ramsay McCulloch, and James Mill. Engels
argues that this body of so-called “theory” is in fact nothing more than a
pseudoscientific justification of the exploitative practices of
capitalists. In Engels’ view, any
approach to human relationships that emphasizes competition over cooperation is
not only mistaken—insofar as it ignores the fundamentally
interrelational dimension of human nature and society—but also immoral:
In
other words, because private property isolates everyone in his own crude
solitariness, and because, nevertheless, everyone has the same interest as his
neighbour, one landowner stands antagonistically confronted by another, one
capitalist by another, one worker by another.
In this discord of identical interests resulting precisely from this
identity is consummated the immorality of mankind’s condition hitherto; and
this consummation is competition.
(“Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy”, Marx/Engels, Collected
Works, London 1975, vol. 3, p. 418)
Despite
Engels’ later deferential attitude toward Marx, there is no doubt that early on
in the relationship Engels’ critique of political economy impressed Marx
deeply, and was instrumental in shaping Marx’s own views. Engels’ observations and research led to the
publication in 1845 of what is perhaps his masterpiece, Die Lage der
arbeitenden Klasse in England [The Condition of
the Working Class in England]. Here
is how Engels begins:
Working
men!
To
you I dedicate a work, in which I have tried to lay before my German countrymen
a faithful picture of your condition, of your sufferings and struggles, of your
hopes and prospects. I have lived long
enough amidst you to know something about your circumstances; I have devoted to
their knowledge my most serious attention, I have studied the various official
and nonofficial documents as far as I was able to get hold of them—I have not
been satisfied with this, I wanted more than a mere abstract knowledge
of my subject, I wanted to see you in your own homes, to observe you in your
everyday life, to chat with you on your condition and grievances, to witness
your struggles against the social and political power of your oppressors. (Marx/Engels, Collected Works,
London 1975, vol. 4, p. 296)
The Condition of the Working Class in England documents the brutality of the capitalist system:
competition between factory owners induces them to pay their workers minimal
wages, while squeezing out as much labour as possible. These circumstances put the workers in
competition against one another for jobs, and create a pool of unemployed
workers. The desperate situation of the
unemployed induces them to work for lower wages and under worse conditions than
anyone else, and this holds down wages, prevents the improvement of working conditions,
and hinders the organisation and empowerment of the proletariat. Obviously a workers’ strike is futile if the
unemployed are ready to step immediately into the vacated positions and work
under poor conditions for low wages.
Engels described the book in a letter to Marx on 19 November 1844:
I
shall be presenting the English with a fine bill of indictment; I accuse the
English bourgeoisie before the entire world of murder, robbery and other crimes
on a massive scale, and I am writing an English preface which I shall have
printed separately and sent to English party leaders, men of letters and
members of Parliament. That’ll give
those fellows something to remember me by.
It need hardly be said that my blows [...] are meant for [...] the
German bourgeoisie, to whom I make it plain enough that they are as bad as
their English counterparts.
(Marx/Engels, Collected Works, London 1975, vol. 38, pp.
9-11)
This
influential book not only gives accurate and sympathetic descriptions of the
appalling conditions under which the factory workers lived, worked and
died. In addition, it also indicates how
these conditions might be changed; in short, the book contains a social history
of England, an investigation of the factory system, and a political-economic
critique of capitalism. Writing near the
end of his life, Engels referred to his time in Manchester as follows:
While
I was in Manchester, it was tangibly brought home to me that the economic
facts, which have so far played no role or only a contemptible one in the writing
of history, are, at least in the modern world, a decisive historical force;
that they form the basis of the origination of the present-day class
antagonisms; that these class antagonisms [...] are in their turn the basis of
the formation of political parties and of party struggles, and thus of all
political history. (Marx/Engels,
Selected
Works, London 1968, p. 436)
In 1844
Engels visited Marx in Paris, and this was the beginning of their lifelong
collaboration. Engels was to remain on
good terms with Marx even though Marx censured, at one time or another,
virtually every other significant communist or socialist thinker. Marx and Engels co-authored Die Heilige Familie
oder Kritik der kritischen Kritik: Gegen Bruno Bauer und Konsorten [The Holy Family or Critique of Critical Criticism:
Against Bruno Bauer and Company]. The Foreword, written by Engels, begins: “Real
humanism has no more dangerous enemy in Germany than spiritualism or speculative idealism, which
substitutes ‘self-consciousness’
or the ‘spirit’
for the real individual man [...]”. Marx and Engels argued that philosophers such as Edgar
and Bruno Bauer were poor socialists because they were too mystical and
idealistic; they neglected real empirical observations and also disengaged from
political struggle. The Holy Family reveals
the dangers of rejecting practical activity and preoccupying oneself with
speculative, anti-revolutionary theories of gradual philosophical
enlightenment. Against this detached and
utopian “pure” socialism, Engels and Marx showed that true understanding is not
based simply on abstract concepts, but also on empirical observations of the
material conditions of existence, as well as a comprehensive grasp of economic
interrelations and social antagonism.
In
1846 they wrote Die deutsche Ideologie [The
German Ideology], in which they argue that the approach of such German
socialist philosophers as Ludwig
Feuerbach, Bruno Bauer, and Max Stirner was too conceptual and too
speculative. Engels’ and Marx’
materialist version of Hegelian
dialectics treated capital not as a personal power but as a collective, social
power:
The ideas of the ruling class
are in every epoch the ruling ideas: i.e., the class, which is the ruling material force of society,
is at the same time its ruling intellectual
force. 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 German Ideology,
London 1965, pp.37f.)
In
early 1846 Engels and Marx set up the Communist Correspondence Committee in
Brussels. Their plan was to organize and
to unify socialist leaders and politically aware workers in different European
countries. Influenced by this plan,
English socialists convened in London in June of 1847. This congress reformed an already existing
organization, the “League of the Just”, and renamed it the “Communist
League”. The new organization also
adopted a motto suggested by Engels and Marx: “Proletarians of all countries,
unite!” In 1848, Engels settled permanently in England, in
order to work in the textile factory and provide financial support to
Marx. In February 1848, Engels and Marx
published a programmatic statement, written in German, for the international
Communist League. Engels wrote the first
two drafts, and then Marx provided most of the finishing touches. In its final, published form this slim
pamphlet was titled by Engels Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei [The
Manifesto of the Communist Party] or, as it is more commonly known today, The
Communist Manifesto. The most widely
read political treatise of all time, this concise masterpiece has proved to be
even more influential in human history than its predecessors, the American Declaration
of Independence (1776) and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man
and of the Citizen (1789). The Communist
Manifesto contains a precise and trenchant critique of the global effects
of industrial capitalism, especially the way that human relations are redefined
in terms of market relations, and persons themselves come to be viewed as
commercially exchanged commodities.
These descriptions of how social relations have been dehumanized
by developments in systems of production are just as relevant today as when
Engels and Marx first wrote them:
The
bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honored and
looked up to with reverent awe. It has
converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science,
into its paid wage-laborers. The
bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced
the family relation to a mere money relation.
(The Communist Manifesto, p. 5)
Most importantly, Engels and Marx interpreted
historical developments in terms of dialectical materialism, and showed that
the key to understanding political events is insight into the conflict of
economic interests; thus the allegedly apolitical character of the economic
sphere is an illusion. This means that
the primary locus in the struggle for human emancipation is not the realm of
politics, but relations within the system of production. Far from indicating a naive economism, this
is an insight that remains valid today.
It was further elaborated in the early twentieth century by Max
Horkheimer and other theorists of the Frankfurt School of Western Marxism, and
more recently by the contemporary Western Marxists Fredric Jameson, Alain
Badiou, and Slavoj Zizek. As Zizek puts
it, the economy functions as a formal structuring principle; it is a global,
generative matrix (something like a Kantian transcendental condition of
possibility), and is the secret point of reference of political struggles.
During the period of their closest collaboration
(1844-1848), the writings and the political interventions of Engels and Marx
were unique, even when compared to the works of other socialists. While other forms of socialism shared the
belief that private ownership of the means of production must be replaced by
cooperative management, Engels and Marx went far beyond this. In the first place, they revealed the extent
to which all recorded history has been the history of class struggles, and
disclosed the profound antagonism between the working class and the
bourgeoisie. Their aim was to transform
socialism from a utopian fantasy into a reality, and they tried to teach other
socialist intellectuals that the working classes need not be feared, but only
educated, united, and guided. More than
any other revolutionary intellectuals of their time, Marx and Engels educated
and inspired the working classes, and turned suffering, exploited labourers
into a unified force to be reckoned with.
They provided hope to workers and socialist intellectuals alike, by revealing
the extent to which capitalism undermines itself, due to an inherent limitation
or self-contradiction.
The claim that capitalism undermines itself is not an
indication of economic determinism; rather, it involves the dialectical insight
that the inner limitation and weakness of capitalism is the obverse of
capitalism’s strength. Put simply,
capitalism negates itself insofar as the pure focus on ever-increasing profits
turns out to be unprofitable. This means
that the inherent self-negation of capitalism is irresolvable, because capitalist
circulation cannot endlessly reproduce itself on its own. Insofar as the development of the productive
forces of capitalism deprive the majority (the workers) of property and
concentrate more and more property in the hands of an ever-shrinking group of
capitalists, capitalism furthers one of the goals of socialism, namely the
abolishment of private property. And the
more the capitalist squeezes surplus value out of the workers, the more he will
have to provide means of subsistence for his workers. As Slavoj Zizek points out, this inner
contradiction of capitalism is manifested in the phenomenon of the charitable
capitalist: in order to sustain the cycle of expanded production, capitalism
depends on an extra-economic charity.
Today, in light of the looming ecological catastrophe
and the dismantling of the welfare state, such basic insights of Engels and Marx remain
vitally relevant. And insofar as post-Fordist
capitalism excludes and disenfranchises more and more workers around the globe,
the spectre of communism continues to haunt the world.
Friedrich
Engels died of throat cancer in London on 5 August 1895. When he heard the news, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
wrote: “After his friend Karl Marx, who died in 1883, Engels was the finest
scholar and teacher of the modern proletariat in the whole civilized world.”
