Friedrich Engels

M.A.R. Habib

Engels, Friedrich (1820-1895) political economist, activist and philosopher. Engels' importance lies in his collaboration with KARL MARX to produce a critique of capitalist society based on a materialistic conception of history, his attempt to formulate a "scientific" basis for socialism, his explorations of the connections between dialectics and natural science, his analyses of working class conditions as well as of the development of the family and State. The initial dissemination, clarification and popularisation of Marxist ideas owed more to Engels than to the endeavours of Marx himself.

Born in Barmen, Prussia as the son of a textile manufacturer, Engels commenced training in 1838 for a business career. But, pursuing his philosophical and political reading, and moving to Berlin in 1841, he quickly became influenced by the thought of HEGEL, the dominant figure in German philosophy. For a while Engels associated with Bruno Bauer and the Young Hegelians. The following year was to prove equally decisive in the formation of Engels' thought: settling in Manchester, England, he started work at a factory in which his father was a shareholder. He saw at first hand the miserable conditions suffered by British workers, his research into these conditions being published as The Conditions of the Working Class in England in 1845. Here, Engels argued that the degraded conditions of the English proletariat, generated by its industrial exploitation, would eventually mould it into a revolutionary political force.

At this time English labour interests were particularly active and pressing for reform: Chartism was a widespread movement and the Welsh utopian social reformer Robert Owen had gained a following, as had his counterpart Charles Fourier in France. It was in this agitative climate that Engels became a socialist. He had already started to correspond with Marx whom he met in 1844 in Paris. Here, through his own reading of the French socialists as well as of Feuerbach, Marx also had turned to socialism. In early 1844 Engels had published an article "Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy" in the Deutsch-franzosische Jahrbucher to which Marx had also contributed two essays. Engels' arguments, charging that private property and accumulation of capital increased the degradation of the workers and therefore the class struggle, had alerted Marx to the importance of economics in historical analysis. Engels and Marx produced in the same year a joint book, The Holy Family, expressing their now common antagonism against the "Holy Family" of the brothers Edgar and Bruno Bauer and their Young Hegelian circle. In an incisive critique, Marx and Engels undermined from every aspect the views of this circle: its renunciation of radicalism and espousal of a moderate liberal philanthropy; its speculative idealism which substituted a Hegelian Self-Consciousness for real people, with its implication that thought could somehow generate change; its apriorism and the sheer inacuracy of its empirical knowledge of the working classes; and its self-entrapment in the "mire" of Christian-Germanic nationalism. Marx and Engels argued that the proletariat or masses, so derided by the "Absolute Criticism" of Bauer and company, were actually the real agents of historical change. The difference between Marx's and Engels' materialist approach and the idealism they attack is crystallised in Engels' pithy statement that "History does nothing, it `possesses no immense wealth', it `wages no battles'. It is man, real, living man who does all that...history is nothing but the activity of man pursuing his aims" (Marx, Engels, 1956, 116).

Engels and Marx further collaborated to produce The German Ideology (1846) which marked their break with Feuerbach's materialism and expressed their own materialistic conception of history, characterised by a number of features: (a) it is the activity and conditions of material production, not mere ideas, which determine the structure of society and the nature of individuals; law, art, religion and morality are an efflux of these material relations; (b) the evolution of division of labour issues in the concentration of private property, a conflict between individual and communal interests (the latter assuming the status of an independent power as the State), and estrangement or alienation of social activity; (c) all struggles within the State are euphemisms for the real struggle between classes; it is this struggle which generates social change; (d) once technologically assisted capitalist accumulation, concentration, and world expansion has led to a world of sharply contrasting wealth and poverty, and working classes become conscious of their historical role, capitalism itself will yield to a communism which will do away with private property and base itself on human need rather than the greed of a minority for increasing profit.

Between 1845 and 1847 Engels lived in Brussels and Paris where he and Marx, attempting to forge international working class co-operation, were commissioned by the German Communist League to set forth the main tenets of communism. The result was The Communist Manifesto of 1848. This astonishingly compressed book described the victorious revolution of the bourgeoisie against feudalism, the principles of capitalist society, centred on private property, the need for expansion of markets, and the reduction of all human relations, including family and gender relations, to commercial relations. It expressed also the aims of the communists: to abolish not only private property but the other foundational institutions of capitalism such as nation, State and class itself.

In 1848 revolutions broke out in France and elsewhere in Europe. Both Engels and Marx returned to Prussia where their democratic journal was eventually suppressed. Marx was deported and Engels took part in the armed popular struggle against the reactionary and victorious counter-revolution. Both soon returned to England, Engels settling as a clerk in Manchester until 1870 while Marx lived in London. Their collaboration continued, however, Engels also providing his friend with financial support. Engels pursued his interest in the natural sciences from an historical materialist standpoint, his observations eventually being published in the 1920s as Dialectics of Nature. The themes of these essays include developments of the natural sciences in both inorganic and organic realms, the historical connections between science and religion, spiritualism and the poverty of naive empiricism. Engels traces the development of the scientific "revolution" to the period of the Reformation and Renaissance, where thinkers had universal interests, not being in thrall to the modern bourgeois division of labour. At that time, says Engels, science was revolutionary, especially in emancipating itself from theology. But by the first half of the eighteenth century, science offered a conservative vision of nature as eternal and immutable rather than historical. In this domain, advances were made by French materialism and in particular by Kant who attempted to explain the solar system as a process, possessing a history, rather than as something created by God. Through such figures as Laplace and Herschel, science eventually accommodated Kant's insights. It was through Darwin and his contemporaries that nature was shown to be in eternal flux; hence modern thought returned to the outlook of the great Greek philosophers. Only with man, says Engels, do we enter history insofar as this is self-created through material production. But the modern technologised bourgeois subjugation of nature has produced increasing misery of the masses, the much-lauded free competition between human beings actually being the normal state of the animal kingdom as described by Darwin.

Engels effectively places man within a materialist cosmology: the cycle of matter is eternal and indestructible, thinking humanity being but one of its changing faces. He views nature as proving the truth of dialectics: it does not merely revolve in a recurring circle but undergoes genuine change (see also MATERIALISM). Engels' views here arguably reflect the limitations of nineteenth century science, a point stressed by those such as LUKACS who have charged him with positivism. Engels' work on science and dialectics in general has generated much controversy, especially some of his comments on the scientific status of Marx's economic "laws" and the inevitability of their operation: these have helped inspire deterministic readings of Marxism.

Retiring in 1870 to London where Marx was suffering from ill health, Engels continued alone as leader of the First International, founded by Marx in 1864 to unite workers' movements of all countries. He produced Anti-Duhring, a polemical tract directed against Eugen Duhring of Berlin University who in propounding his own socialist theory had attacked Marx. In the course of expounding his own and Marx's socialist principles (extending through natural science, morality and political economy) Engels attacked the socialist state envisaged by Duhring, which would effectively replicate the gendarmerie of the existing Prussian state. According to Engels, Duhring's insistence that religion should be prohibited in his future State represented a naive misunderstanding of the dialectical nature of economic forces and of the fact that religion was but one form of alienation which would die a natural death. In primitive societies, suggests Engels, men had externalised forces of nature, which were reflections of their own mentalities. In more developed societies, social forces emerge as equally alien. In bourgeois society God is "the alien domination of the capitalist mode of production". Duhring does not understand that it is not knowledge, but social action, namely the repossession of the means of production, which will bring social forces under the domination of society rather than appearing as something foreign and transcendent. An abridged version of Engels' book appeared in 1880 under the title Socialism: Utopian and Scientific: translated into at least ten languages, this enjoyed a wider circulation among working class movements than even the Communist Manifesto.

In the year after Marx's death in 1883, Engels wrote The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, a text widely regarded as the pivotal Marxist document for feminist theory since it alone, among the works of Marx and Engels, offers a comprehensive attempt to explain the origins of patriarchy. Lewis H. Morgan's Ancient Society (1877), through its research into prehistoric American Indian systems of kinship, had arrived at similar conclusions to Marx's in his critique of a society based on commodity production. Drawing on this book and Marx's own detailed notes on it, Engels traced the rise of patriarchy through increasingly sophisticated economic and social configurations, from primitive communal systems to a class society based on private property.

Following Morgan's schematisation, Engels describes three main forms of marriage, conforming to three stages of human development: "for the period of savagery, group marriage; for barbarism, pairing marriage; for civilization, monogamy supplemented by adultery and prostitution" (Engels, 1972, 105). With the tribe, descent and inheritance occurred through the female line. But as wealth increased, the man acquired a more important status in the family than the woman and this "mother right" was eventually overthrown in what Engels sees as a momentous revolution in prehistory: "The overthrow of mother right was the world historical defeat of the female sex" (Engels, 1972, 87). Engels says that, with the predominance of private property over common property, father right and monogamy gained ascendancy, marriage becoming increasingly dependent on economic considerations. Because of the economic dependence of the woman on the man in bourgeois society, the husband "is the bourgeois, and the wife represents the proletariat" (Engels, 1972, 105). Engels suggests that the first premise for the emancipation of women is the reintroduction of the entire female sex into public industry and that when the means of production become common property, the indidvidual family will cease to be the economic unit of society. The economic foundations of monogamy as it presently exists will vanish, along with the institutions of the State which preserved them.

In 1886 Engels wrote Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy in which he attempted to broach once again a subject only sporadically addressed during his forty years of collaboration with Marx since The German Ideology: the relation of historical materialism to Hegel. Engels' treatment is comprehensive, elucidating the Hegelian dialectic and its historical division into conservative and radical factions, a dichotomy inhering in its revolutionary form and reactionary content. He also addresses more fully the limitations of Feuerbach's materialism and morality which are "cut exactly to the pattern of modern capitalist society". He offers acute analyses of ideological developments, especially in religion and law; as for philosophy in Germany, it is at the end of its tether, the 1848 revolution marking the eclipse of idealist theory by revolutionary practice: "The German working class movement is the inheritor of German classical philosophy" (Marx, Engels, 1968, 622).

At this late stage of his life, Engels was active in the formation of the Second International. He undertook the additional labour of editing and publishing the second and third volumes of Marx's Capital in 1885 and 1884 respectively. He began work on the fourth volume, incompleted, however, because of his death, and eventually published as Theories of Surplus Value. All in all, despite his modesty, Engels exerted considerable influence on Marx's thought and life. In his speech at Marx's graveside, Engels had emphasised Marx's combination of intellectual gifts with practical commitment: he was not only "the greatest living thinker" but "before all else a revolutionist". In his own clarity of moral vision, intellectual subtlety and political daring, Engels was not far behind.