Socialists cannot pay tribute to Marx without at the same time noting the role of his comrade and collaborator, Engels. It was Engels’ financial support which enabled the penurious Marx to carry out his researches into political economy.
But this financial support was not the least of Engels’ contributions. It is reckoned that about 1500 letters passed between Marx and Engels. They thought along the same lines, they spoke the same language, yet their life-experience was different. For Engels, there was the practical world of the Manchester cotton trade, he read widely, keeping himself fully informed of the latest developments in physics, chemistry and other sciences, with a special interest in comparative physiology and the controversies surrounding Darwin’s theory of evolution.
To Engels we owe volumes II and III of Marx's unfinished Capital, which he completed with difficulty from quantities of rough drafts and notes. After Marx’s death. Engels continued to publish translations and new editions of Marx’s works, providing prefaces in many languages. Yet it would be wrong to regard Engels only as Marx's editor, publisher and lifelong friend. His contributions to the socialist movement stand in their own right.
Many of the issues he discussed in his early work, The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844, were taken up again by Marx in volume 1 of Capital. Engels' passionate indictment of slums, and the diseases and deformities of children at sweated labour (as in his analysis of the real cost of lace for fashionable ladies), such themes permeate his book. Yet there is more in it than indignation at the social evils of industrial capitalism.
Engels described how new technology and the division of labour were accompanied by the emergence of a new class, the urban proletariat. He posed the fundamental question: "What is to become of these propertyless millions who own nothing and consume today what they earned yesterday?’’ Industry, he wrote. ". . . regards its workers not as human beings but simply as so much capital for the use of which the industrialist has to pay interest under the name of wages”. Describing how competition affected the level of wages, he also emphasised the "cycles of boom and slump”; the Malthusian "surplus population” was the reserve army of the unemployed, available for industry's booms, and condemned to destitution and the Poor Law workhouses between-times.
Discussing both the value and the limitations of trade unionism (a theme to which he returned in some later writings [1]), and the main working class movements of the time. Engels criticised the English socialists for being metaphysical, lacking awareness of the significance of historical development. It seemed to him that they preached "philanthropy and universal love . . . the improvement of humanity in the abstract". He reiterated this criticism in his preface to the 1892 edition:
And today, the very people who. from the ’impartiality' of their superior standpoint, preach to the workers a Socialism soaring high above their class interests and class struggles, and tending to reconcile in a higher humanity the interests of both the contending classes — these people are either neophytes, who have still to learn a great deal, or they are the worst enemies of the workers — wolves in sheep’s clothing.
This first socialist examination of the effects of industrial capitalism, written from the standpoint of historical materialism, touched on many issues later developed in other works by Marx and Engels. Written in Germany on Engels’ return from two years in Manchester, The Condition of the Working Class has some faults. He was not able to check all of his quotations, and some are inaccurate; later, he acknowledged that his prediction that with the next crisis would come the revolution was “youthful ardour”.
Although the Communist Manifesto was published as their joint work, Engels himself expressly stated:
The basic thought running through the Manifesto — that economic production and the structure of society of every historical epoch necessarily arising therefrom constitute the foundation for the political and intellectual history of that epoch; that consequently (ever since the dissolution of the primeval communal ownership of land) all history has been a history of class struggles, of struggles between exploited and exploiting, between dominated and dominating classes at various stages of social development; that this struggle, however, has now reached a stage where the exploited and oppressed class (the proletariat) can no longer emancipate itself from the class which exploits and oppresses it (the bourgeoisie), without at the same time forever freeing the w'hole of society from exploitation, oppression and class struggle — this basic thought belongs solely and exclusively to Marx. [2]
One persistent criticism of Marx is that human behaviour is said to be influenced exclusively by class interests and material factors and nothing else. This is a gross distortion and Engels explicitly argued against such nonsense:
According to the materialist conception of history, the ultimately determining element in history is the production and reproduction of real life. More than this neither Marx nor I has ever asserted. Hence if somebody twists this into saying that the economic role is the only determining one he transforms that proposition into a meaningless, abstract, senseless phrase. [3]
Criticisms of Marx as an "economic determinist” arise from "the common undialectical conception of cause and effect as rigidly opposite poles, the total disregarding of interaction. These gentlemen often almost deliberately forget that once a historic element has been brought into the world by other, ultimately economic causes it reacts, can react upon its environment and even on the causes that have given rise to it" [4]. In Anti-Dühring Engels showed that science had revealed just such a dialectical process in nature. There are no absolute truths, everything is changing: "motion is the mode of existence of matter".
Anti-Dühring supplies a thorough grounding in dialectical materialism, applied not only to science and philosophy (attacking with gusto the nonsense about "eternal truths" propounded by metaphysical thinkers), but also to the development of socialist theory from "Utopian" socialism to "scientific” socialism. Some chapters from Anti-Dühring were soon republished as a pamphlet, Socialism, Utopian and Scientific, and the central section of the book ("Political Economy”) serves as a helpful introduction to Marx’s Capital. Both the book and the pamphlet had an immediate and lasting influence in many countries.
In his next book, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884). based on Lewis H. Morgan’s Ancient Society, Engels analysed the way civilised, class-divided society had evolved from barbaric and savage societies, and how property relationships changed family relationships. Engels also showed how the changing division of labour, with the introduction of herding, "forced women into second place": mother-right gave place to father-right. He showed how the state arose from the need to hold class antagonisms in check, so that the state "is, as a rule, the state of the most powerful, dominant class, which, through the medium of the state, becomes also the politically dominant class". It follows that the socialist has no choice but to emphasise that every class struggle is a political one.
The superficial objection to socialism — that it is against "human nature” — is based on ignorance of the fact that civilised society, with its class divisions and state coercive institutions, "has not existed from all eternity. There have been societies that did without it (the state), that had no conception of the state and state power". Engels described primitive societies which managed their affairs democratically and without the coercion that is considered right and natural today. Such societies demonstrate that it is not "human nature" which requires humanity to be divided into nation-states and opposing classes, or which would make socialism impossible.
This article has only discussed Engels's main works. There were others which are both readable and helpful. How far was the theory of "Marxism” his work? His own view was emphatic and consistent:
What I contributed — at any rate with the exception of a few special studies — Marx could very well have done without me. What Marx accomplished I would not have achieved . . . Marx was a genius; we others were at best talented. Without him the theory would not be what it is today. It therefore rightly bears his name. [5]
Charmian Skelton
References:
1. Cf. The Wages System (Progress Publishers)
2. Preface to the German edition. 1883
3. Letter to Bloch, 1890 (Marx and Engels — basic writings ed. Feuer, Fontana)
4. Letter to Mehring, 1893 (Feuer)
5. Ludwig Feuerbach, 1886 (Chap. IV. footnote)
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