114th Death Anniversary of Frederick Engels
What a torch of reason ceased to burn,
What a heart has ceased to beat!
What a heart has ceased to beat!
Vladimir Ageu DE SAFI'I
On August
5 (new style), 1895, Frederick Engels died in London. After his
friend Karl Marx (who died in 1883), Engels was the finest scholar and
teacher of the modern proletariat in the whole civilised world.
From the time that fate brought Karl Marx and Frederick Engels
together, the two friends devoted their life’s work to a common
cause. And so to understand what Frederick Engels has done for the
proletariat, one must have a clear idea of the significance of
Marx’s teaching and work for the development of the contemporary
working-class movement. Marx and Engels were the first to show
that the working class and its demands are a necessary outcome of
the present economic system, which together with the bourgeoisie
inevitably creates and organises the proletariat. They showed that it is
not the well-meaning efforts of noble-minded individuals, but the
class struggle of the organised proletariat that will deliver
humanity from the evils which now oppress it. In their scientific
works, Marx and Engels were the first to explain that socialism is
not the invention of dreamers, but the final aim and necessary
result of the development of the productive forces in modern
society. All recorded history hitherto has been a history of class
struggle, of the succession of the rule and victory of certain
social classes over others. And this will continue until the
foundations of class struggle and of class domination – private
property and anarchic social production – disappear. The interests of
the proletariat demand the destruction of these foundations, and
therefore the conscious class struggle of the organised workers
must be directed against them. And every class struggle is a
political struggle.
These views of Marx and Engels have now been adopted by all
proletarians who are fighting for their emancipation. But
when in the forties the two friends took part in the socialist
literature and the social movements of their time, they were absolutely
novel. There were then many people, talented and without talent,
honest and dishonest, who, absorbed in the struggle for political
freedom, in the struggle against the despotism of kings, police
and priests, failed to observe the antagonism between the
interests of the bourgeoisie and those of the proletariat. These
people would not entertain the idea of the workers acting as an
independent social force. On the other hand, there were many
dreamers, some of them geniuses, who thought that it was only
necessary to convince the rulers and the governing classes of the
injustice of the contemporary social order, and it would then be easy to
establish peace and general well-being on earth. They dreamt of a
socialism without struggle. Lastly, nearly all the socialists of
that time and the friends of the working class generally regarded
the proletariat only as an ulcer, and observed with
horror how it grew with the growth of industry. They all,
therefore, sought for a means to stop the development of industry
and of the proletariat, to stop the “wheel of history.” Marx and
Engels did not share the general fear of the development of the
proletariat; on the contrary, they placed all their hopes on its
continued growth. The more proletarians there are, the greater is
their strength as a revolutionary class, and the nearer and more
possible does socialism become. The services rendered by Marx and
Engels to the working class may be expressed in a few words thus: they
taught the working class to know itself and be conscious of itself,
and they substituted science for dreams.
That is
why the name and life of Engels should be known to every worker.
That is why in this collection of articles, the aim of which, as
of all our publications, is to awaken class-consciousness in the Russian
workers, we must give a sketch of the life and work of Frederick
Engels, one of the two great teachers of the modern proletariat.
Engels was
born in 1820 in Barmen, in the Rhine Province of the kingdom of
Prussia. His father was a manufacturer. In 1838 Engels, without
having completed his high-school studies, was forced by family
circumstances to enter a commercial house in Bremen as a clerk.
Commercial affairs did not prevent
Engels from pursuing his scientific and political education. He
had come to hate autocracy and the tyranny of bureaucrats while still
at high school. The study of philosophy led him further. At that
time Hegel’s teaching dominated German philosophy, and Engels
became his follower. Although Hegel himself was an admirer of the
autocratic Prussian state, in whose service he was as a professor
at Berlin University, Hegel’s teachings were
revolutionary. Hegel’s faith in human reason and its rights, and
the fundamental thesis of Hegelian philosophy that the universe is
undergoing a constant process of change and development, led some
of the disciples of the Berlin philosopher – those who refused to
accept the existing situation – to the idea that the struggle
against this situation, the struggle against existing wrong and
prevalent evil, is also rooted in the universal law of eternal
development. If all things develop, if institutions of one kind give
place to others, why should the autocracy of the Prussian king or
of the Russian tsar, the enrichment of an insignificant minority
at the expense of the vast majority, or the domination of the
bourgeoisie over the people, continue for ever? Hegel’s philosophy
spoke of the development of the mind and of ideas; it was idealistic.
From the development of the mind it deduced the development of
nature, of man, and of human, social relations. While retaining
Hegel’s idea of the eternal process of development,
Marx and Engels rejected the preconceived idealist view;
turning to life, they saw that it is not the development of mind
that explains the development of nature but that, on the contrary,
the explanation of mind must be derived from nature, from
matter.... Unlike Hegel and the other Hegelians, Marx and Engels were
materialists. Regarding the world and humanity materialistically,
they perceived that just as material causes underlie all natural
phenomena, so the development of human society is conditioned by
the development of material forces, the productive forces. On the
development of the productive forces depend the relations into
which men enter with one another in
the production of the things required for the satisfaction of
human needs. And in these relations lies the explanation of all
the phenomena of social life, human aspirations, ideas and laws.
The development of the productive forces creates social relations
based upon private property, but now we see that this same
development of the productive forces deprives the majority of their
property and concentrates it in the hands of an insignificant
minority. It abolishes property, the basis of the modern social
order, it itself strives towards the very aim which the socialists
have set themselves. All the socialists have to do is to realise
which social force, owing to its position in modern society, is
interested in bringing socialism about, and to impart to this
force the consciousness of its interests and of its historical
task. This force is the proletariat. Engels got to know the
proletariat in England, in the centre of English industry, Manchester,
where he settled in 1842, entering the service of a commercial firm
of which his father was a shareholder. Here Engels not only sat
in the factory office but wandered about the slums in which the
workers were cooped up, and saw their poverty and misery with his
own eyes. But he did not confine himself to personal observations.
He read all that had been revealed before him about the
condition of the British working class and carefully studied all
the official documents he could lay his hands on. The fruit of
these studies and observations was the book which appeared in
1845: The Condition of the Working Class in England. We have already mentioned what was the chief service rendered by Engels in writing The Condition of the Working Class in England.
Even before Engels, many people had described the sufferings of
the proletariat and had pointed to the necessity of helping it.
Engels was the first to say that the proletariat is not only
a suffering class; that it is, in fact, the disgraceful economic
condition of the proletariat that drives it irresistibly forward
and compels it to fight for its ultimate emancipation. And the
fighting proletariat will help itself. The political
movement of the working class will inevitably lead the workers to
realise that their only salvation lies in socialism. On the other
hand, socialism will become a force only when it becomes the aim
of the political struggle of the working class.
Such are the main ideas of Engels’ book on the condition of the
working class in England, ideas which have now been adopted by all
thinking and fighting proletarians, but which at that time were
entirely new. These ideas were set out in a book written in absorbing
style and filled with most authentic and shocking pictures of the
misery of the English proletariat. The book was a terrible
indictment of capitalism and the bourgeoisie and created a
profound impression. Engels’ book began to be quoted everywhere as
presenting the best picture of the condition of the modern
proletariat. And, in fact, neither before 1845 nor after has there
appeared so striking and truthful a picture of the misery of the
working class.
It was
not until he came to England that Engels became a socialist. In
Manchester he established contacts with people active in the English
labour movement at the time and began to write for English socialist
publications. In 1844, while on his way back to Germany, he
became acquainted in Paris with Marx, with whom he had already
started to correspond. In Paris, under the influence of the French
socialists and French life, Marx had also become a socialist.
Here the friends jointly wrote a book entitled The Holy Family, or Critique of Critical Critique. This book, which appeared a year before The Condition of the Working Class in England,
and the greater part of which was written by Marx, contains the
foundations of revolutionary materialist socialism, the main ideas
of which we have expounded above. “The holy family” is a
facetious nickname for the Bauer brothers, the philosophers, and
their followers. These gentlemen preached a criticism which stood
above all reality, above parties and politics, which rejected all
practical activity, and which only “critically” contemplated the
surrounding world and the events going on within it. These gentlemen,
the Bauers, looked down on the proletariat as an uncritical mass.
Marx and Engels vigorously opposed this absurd and harmful
tendency. In the name of a real, human person – the worker,
trampled down by the ruling classes and the state – they demanded,
not contemplation, but a struggle for a better order of society.
They, of course, regarded the proletariat as the force that is
capable of waging this struggle and that is interested in it. Even
before the appearance of The Holy Family, Engels had published in Marx’s and Ruge’s Deutsch-Franz\"osische Jahrb\"ucher his “Critical Essays on Political Economy,”
in which he examined the principal phenomena of the contemporary
economic order from a socialist standpoint, regarding them as
necessary consequences of the rule of private property. Contact with
Engels was undoubtedly a factor in Marx’s decision to study
political economy, the science in which his works have produced a
veritable revolution.
From 1845
to 1847 Engels lived in Brussels and Paris, combining scientific
work with practical activities among the German workers in Brussels and
Paris. Here Marx and Engels established contact with the secret
German Communist League, which commissioned them to expound the main principles of the socialism they had worked out. Thus arose the famous Manifesto of the Communist Party
of Marx and Engels, published in 1848. This little booklet is
worth whole volumes: to this day its spirit inspires and guides
the entire organised and fighting proletariat of the civilised
world.
The revolution
of 1848, which broke out first in France and then spread to other
West-European countries, brought Marx and Engels back to their
native country. Here, in Rhenish Prussia, they took charge of the
democratic Neue Rheinische Zeitung
published in Cologne. The two friends were the heart and soul of
all revolutionary-democratic aspirations in Rhenish Prussia. They
fought to the last ditch in defence of freedom and of the
interests of the people against the forces of reaction. The
latter, as we know, gained the upper hand. The Neue Rheinische Zeitung
was suppressed. Marx, who during his exile had lost his Prussian
citizenship, was deported; Engels took part in the armed popular
uprising, fought for liberty in three battles, and after the
defeat of the rebels fled, via Switzerland, to London.
Marx also
settled in London. Engels soon became a clerk again, and then a
shareholder, in the Manchester commercial firm in which he had worked in
the forties. Until 1870 he lived in Manchester, while Marx lived
in London, but this did not prevent their maintaining a most
lively interchange of ideas: they corresponded almost daily. In
this correspondence the two
friends exchanged views and discoveries and continued to
collaborate in working out scientific socialism. In 1870 Engels moved to
London, and their joint intellectual life, of the most strenuous
nature, continued until 1883, when Marx died. Its fruit was, on
Marx’s side, Capital, the greatest work on political
economy of our age, and on Engels’ side, a number of works both
large and small. Marx worked on the analysis of the complex
phenomena of capitalist economy. Engels, in simply written works,
often of a polemical character, dealt with more general scientific
problems and with diverse phenomena of the past and present in
the spirit of the materialist conception of history and Marx’s
economic theory. Of Engels’ works we shall mention: the polemical work
against D\"uhring (analysing highly important problems in the
domain of philosophy, natural science and the social sciences), The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (translated into Russian, published in St. Petersburg, 3rd ea., 1895), Ludwig Feuerbach (Russian translation and notes by G. Plekhanov, Geneva, 1892), an article on the foreign policy of the Russian Government (translated into Russian in the Geneva Social-Demokrat, Nos. 1 and 2), articles on the housing question, and finally, two small but very valuable articles on Russia’s economic development (Frederick Engels on Russia,
translated into Russian by Zasulich, Geneva, 1894). Marx died
before he could put the final touches to his vast work on capital.
The draft, however, was already finished, and after the death of
his friend, Engels undertook the onerous task of preparing and
publishing the second and the third volumes of Capital.
He published Volume II in 1885 and Volume III in 1894 (his death
prevented the preparation of Volume IV). These two volumes
entailed a vast amount of labour. Adler, the Austrian
Social-Democrat, has rightly remarked that by publishing volumes
II and III of Capital Engels erected a majestic monument
to the genius who had been his friend, a monument on which, without
intending it, he indelibly carved his own name. Indeed these two volumes of Capital
are the work of two men: Marx and Engels. Old legends contain
various moving instances of friendship. The European proletariat
may say that its science was created by two scholars and fighters,
whose relationship to each other surpasses the most moving
stories of the ancients about human friendship. Engels always – and, on
the whole, quite justly – placed himself after Marx. “In Marx’s
lifetime,” he wrote to an old friend, “I played second fiddle.”
His love for the living Marx, and his reverence for the memory of
the dead Marx were boundless. This stern fighter and austere
thinker possessed a deeply loving soul.
After the
movement of 1848-49, Marx and Engels in exile did not confine
themselves to scientific research. In 1864 Marx founded the
International Working Men’s Association,
and led this society for a whole decade. Engels also took an
active part in its affairs. The work of the International
Association, which, in accordance with Marx’s idea, united proletarians
of all countries, was of tremendous significance in the
development of the working-class movement. But even with the
closing down of the International Association in the seventies,
the unifying role of Marx and Engels did not cease. On the
contrary, it may be said that their importance as the spiritual
leaders of the working-class movement grew continuously, because
the movement itself grew uninterruptedly. After the death of Marx,
Engels continued alone as the counsellor and leader of the
European socialists. His advice and directions were sought for equally
by the German socialists, whose strength, despite government
persecution, grew rapidly and steadily, and by representatives of
backward countries, such as the Spaniards, Rumanians and Russians,
who were obliged to ponder and weigh their first steps. They all
drew on the rich store of knowledge and experience of Engels in
his old age.
Marx and
Engels, who both knew Russian and read Russian books, took a
lively interest in the country, followed the Russian revolutionary
movement with sympathy and maintained contact with Russian
revolutionaries. They both became socialists after being democrats, and the democratic feeling of hatred for political despotism was exceedingly strong in them. This direct political feeling, combined
with a profound theoretical understanding of the connection
between political despotism and economic oppression, and also
their rich experience of life, made Marx and Engels uncommonly
responsive politically. That is why the heroic struggle
of the handful of Russian revolutionaries against the mighty
tsarist government evoked a most sympathetic echo in the hearts of
these tried revolutionaries. On the other hand, the tendency,
for the sake of illusory economic advantages, to turn away from
the most immediate and important task of the Russian socialists,
namely, the winning of political freedom, naturally appeared
suspicious to them and was even regarded by them as a direct
betrayal of the great cause of the social revolution. “The emancipation
of the workers must be the act of the working class itself” – Marx
and Engels constantly taught. But in order to fight for its economic emancipation, the proletariat must win itself certain political
rights. Moreover, Marx and Engels clearly saw that a political
revolution in Russia would be of tremendous significance to the
West-European working-class movement as well. Autocratic Russia
had always been a bulwark of European reaction in general. The
extraordinarily favourable international position enjoyed by
Russia as a result of the war of 1870, which for a long time sowed
discord between Germany and France, of course only enhanced the
importance of autocratic Russia as a reactionary force. Only a
free Russia, a Russia that had no need either to oppress the
Poles, Finns, Germans, Armenians or any other small nations, or
constantly to set France and Germany at loggerheads, would enable
modern Europe, rid of the burden of war, to breathe freely, would
weaken all the reactionary elements in Europe and strengthen the
European working class. That was why Engels ardently desired the
establishment of political freedom in Russia for the sake of the
progress of the working-class movement in the West as well. In him
the Russian revolutionaries have lost their best friend.
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