Publication : Engelsism

A: fikr ingilz. – F: engelsianisme. – G: Engelsismus. - R: ėngel’sizm. – S: engelsianismo. - C: Engesi zhuyi

In certain respects, what has, since about 1890, generally been referred to as ‘Marxism’ is the creation of Friedrich Engels more than that of Karl Marx, so that Arnold Künzli has been able to say the term ‘E’ would be more accurate (Hirsch 1968, 95). The texts that were generally studied by socialists were the Anti-Dühring and its abridged version, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, far more than Capital. It was Engels, not Marx, who developed a (putatively Marxist) worldview. To labor leaders and socialist theorists, Engels was, during the first years of the Second International, an undisputed highest authority, an oracle to be consulted in all theoretical and politico-strategic matters. It is therefore necessary to render visible the E in Marxism. ‘For it remains an open question,’ as Heinz Maus has remarked, ‘whether Engels's popular account of historical materialism, which was the first to render this theory accessible to a broad readership, did not also, doubtless unintentionally, lead to it drifting towards the prevailing positivism, thereby paving the way for Bernstein's revision of Marxism, for Austro-Marxism and Diamat, the Soviet version of positivism: an accommodation to the status quo that was sometimes dressed up in ethical, sometimes in scientifistic terms.’ (1981, 367)

The orthodox Marxist-Leninist myth sees Marx and Engels as intellectual twins who took divergent tasks upon them for practical reasons. According to this account, it was Engels who became the great populariser of their shared doctrine while Marx was already going about the task of elaborating their basic theory in Capital. In this context, reference has often been made to a remark by Engels: ‘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.’ (MECW 26/427 [MEW 21/328])

There were reasons for this division of tasks. Marx was more profound and creative than Engels; nor did Engels consider it an accident that not he, but Marx was the one to make the fundamental discoveries of Capital. Marx was capable of immersing himself in a particular problem or in empirical material for years, whereas Engels was able to orient himself more quickly within a new field of study. Engels was the first to engage critically with the new political economy; his Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy were published in 1844 and became a point of departure for Marx's own critique of political economy. His influential and in many ways exceptional analysis The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845) made him a pioneer of empirical sociology. In this work, Engels combines sharp-eyed observations with detailed class analysis and broad, often sweeping conclusions. His intellectual and scientific ability is demonstrated by this early work.

Engels was swifter than Marx to recognise the significance of the modern natural sciences for theories of history. Politically and strategically, his judgement was quick and competent. On 4 July 1864, Marx wrote to him: ‘As you know, 1. I'm always late off the mark with everything, and 2. I invariably follow in your footsteps.’ (MECW 41/546 [MEW 30/418]) Yet Marx's slowness also made him a more dependable and original scholar. When he finally concluded a research project, the result was always remarkable. Engels, by contrast, often mixed brilliant ideas with platitudes. Marx, given his slowness, did not serve him well as a critic.

Marx composed his works – Capital in particular – in an ingenious, genuinely dialectical manner, whereas the works of Engels are always simply composed, with one theme following another in a manner accessible to non-specialists. He was always a good educator and populariser, but unable or unwilling to engage with one and the same problem for years at a time. Simplification came easily to him, which is also why his writings – unlike those of Marx – have served as models for those ‘textbooks of Marxism’ or Marxism-Leninism that have played such a detrimental role within the labour movement and the countries of real socialism. Thus, far from being intellectual twins, Marx and Engels were two clearly distinct types of thinkers and writers.

It needs to be added at once that Engels also displayed profound insight into fundamental Marxian positions. Within the scholarly literature, a new myth has begun to be formulated, in opposition to the old myth of the two intellectual twins, namely that of a ‘tragic deception’ (Norman Levine) that Engels is seen as having enacted with regard to the Marxian position. On this view, Engels thoroughly misunderstood all of Marx's basic concepts; this is, however, not the case. Both had a very similar understanding of the ‘materialist conception of history’; after all, they devised its program together, in the German Ideology. What Engels has to say, in his late letters, about the limitations of this conception, coincides with what Marx wrote on the subject, especially in the introduction to the Grundrisse – without Engels having known about these Marxian statements. That the economic base is the determining factor in history only in the final analysis (Engels to Bloch, 21/22 September 1890; MECW 49/34 [MEW 37/462]) is perfectly compatible with Marx's comments on the complex relationship between production, distribution, exchange, and consumption – comments in which the same role is attributed to production.

As regards the conception of materialist method, there are however certain characteristic differences between Marx and Engels. Thus Marx says, in an important footnote to Capital I: ‘It is, in reality, much easier to discover by analysis the earthly kernel of the misty creations of religion than to do the opposite, i.e. to develop from the actual, given relations of life the forms in which these have been apotheosized. The latter method is the only materialist, and therefore the only scientific one.’ (C I, 494 [MEW 23/393]) Here, Marx seems to presuppose only one trajectory, from “below” to “above”. By contrast, Engels also formulates analyses “from above”, as when he discusses the variety of legal relations. On 14 July 1893, he makes a programmatic statement to Mehring, namely that Marx and he ‘began, as we were bound to do, by placing the main emphasis on the derivation of political, legal and other ideological conceptions, as of the actions induced by those conceptions, from economic fundamentals. In so doing we neglected the formal in favour of the substantial aspect, i.e. the manner in which the said conceptions, etc., arise.’ (MECW 50/164 [MEW 39/96]) This is a case of two different strategies that are, in some respects, quite different from one another. Here, it is not clear one can say that Marx is “more profound” and Engels “more superficial”. What Engels is proposing is not principally distinct from a materialistically conceived structuralist-semiotic analysis. Marx, by contrast, does not seem to engage in originary textual analysis.

That Engels's insights into Marx's basic economic theories were quite profound is already demonstrated by the fact that he was able to complete, in an outstanding manner, both the second and – a considerably more difficult task – the third volume of Capital. His summaries of the theory's basic considerations are always clear and concise, although they are also more “closed” and thereby less rich in ideas than those of Marx.

According to a widespread view, Engels's conception of social development was of a more naturalist bent than Marx's. While Marx often spoke, for example, of the future destruction of the state apparatus, Engels prefers describing this process by analogy to a natural process. Engels's concept of revolution was more strongly informed by the evolutionist considerations of the 19th century. Yet Engels is well aware of the active aspect of the social process. Of far greater importance for any assessment of Engels are his efforts to develop a general dialectics, including a dialectics of nature. On the one hand, these efforts see him attempt to determine the relationship between Marxian and other scientific theories of the present. On the other hand, he strives to develop a materialist ontology, a worldview in which the materialist conception of history functions as a hub.

The principle of the conservation of energy, Darwin's theory of natural selection, and other epochal new conceptions of the 19th century attracted his interest. From at least the late 1850s onward, when the distinguished chemist Carl Schorlemmer became his friend and advisor, Engels was a close observer of the development of the natural sciences as reflected in popular periodicals (Nature) and books. It was only in 1873 that he realised he wanted to elaborate a general dialectics. The most important products of these endeavors are Anti-Dühring (1878), its abridged version, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (first published in French, in 1880) and especially Dialectics of Nature – a collection of notes, excerpts, complete book chapters, and aphorisms written, aside from some later notes, between 1873 and 1882, but not published until 1925 under the more accurate title Dialectics and Nature.

Elaborating a general dialectics was a major concern for Engels. Marx offered friendly encouragement, but never displayed any genuine commitment to the project. To Engels, it was a question of elaborating a total conception: a grand proposition whose realisation lay far beyond the bounds of the possible. The uncompleted product of these efforts is far from unitary, containing as it does a number of tendencies, in particularly a positivist tendency in Comte's and Spencer's sense, a vulgar Hegelian tendency and a non-reductive materialist tendency. Engels's positivism is mainly evident in his efforts to formulate universally valid laws for all areas of reality, as well as in his tendency to absolutise science itself. Hegel's influence can be discerned in the notion of laws of thought that correspond to real developments, whereas the third tendency is more in line with the general considerations of Marxian theory, and more interesting. If one wanted to formulate a charitable assessment of Engels, one might say it is this third tendency that corresponds to his genuine intention. He states very clearly that the relationship of the animate to the inanimate, of men to apes, of thoughts to brain activity, of the superstructure to the base, and of later to earlier historical epochs is not one of reduction, thereby sketching out the point of departure for a conception that is not very clearly defined, but nevertheless fruitful.

To this one should add that firstly, his writings contain far more than this and secondly, that the use that was made of Anti-Dühring and Dialectics of Nature in the Soviet Union, and then in the entire world of “real socialism”, was mostly oriented in a different direction. There, it was a question of developing a putatively Marxist, scientific-socialist catechism whose primary purpose was to provide a ready-made schematism applicable to all human and scientific affairs. Engels was of course not personally responsible for this, but his writings lend themselves to such use.

In this, a key role was played by the so-called three dialectical laws, which play a dramatic role in Engels's writings. This conception is entirely undialectical. Its origin is surprising: it is to be found in Capital, where Marx says, apropos of the transition from artisanal labour to manufacture: ‘Here, as in natural science, is shown the correctness of the law discovered by Hegel, in his Logic, that at a certain point merely quantitative differences pass over by a dialectical inversion into qualitative distinctions.’ (C I, 423 [MEW 23/323]) This statement, which incidentally is not quite correct, since Hegel did not, in this context, speak of a ‘law’, is vehemently attacked by Eugen Dühring, along with a passage in which Marx speaks of a negation of the negation(C I, 929 [MEW 23/791]). Called upon by Wilhelm Liebknecht and others to defend Marx against this attack, Engels reluctantly agrees to do so. It is only now that the concept of a dialectical law appears in his notes. He toys with various possibilities. In Anti-Dühring (MECW 25), he really only speaks of two laws (the two attacked by Dühring: the transformation of quantity into quality, 110 et sqq., and the negation of the negation, 120 et sqq.). In another one of these drafts, which became part of Dialectics of Nature, he speaks of three such laws (MECW 25/356 [MEW 20/348]); this draft was seen as authoritative in the 1920s, which is how the Stalinist textbooks got their three laws, considered the centrepiece of dialectical materialism. To Engels, by contrast, these laws were so unimportant that when he summarises his doctrine in Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy, he never mentions any dialectical laws. The term disappeared from his work.

In spite of the ambitions underlying them, the influence of Engels's materialist-dialectical efforts is primarily a negative one. Nevertheless, some positive and interesting impacts of Engels's writing are worth recalling; they contain good remedies for all sorts of idealisms and superstitions.

His significance for the emerging socialist mass movements of the 1890s was more salutary, but also more fleeting. When the leading Social Democrats asked his advice, he consistently warned against putschist adventures, but also against diminishing or increasing radicalism. The electoral successes of the SPD in particular inspired in him a growing sense of optimism. He repeatedly expressed the opinion that the workers party would achieve a parliamentary majority, and then be in a position to build a socialist society, simply by virtue of workers being in the majority within society. A hundred years later, it is easy to accuse him of not having properly understood the dialectics of society. Such allegations are guilty of the very thing they accuse Engels of: they engage in simple extrapolations from present developments.

What seems more peculiar is Engels's view that ‘by 1900 the army, hitherto the most outstandingly Prussian element in Germany, will have a socialist majority.’ (MECW 27/240 [MEW 22/251]) Engels was a distinguished expert on military power and war, and is still valued for this by today's conservative and liberal military theorists. In socialist circles, he was nicknamed ‘the general’. He followed the war-related developments of his time with great attention, and his conclusions were almost always apposite. On the other hand, he (like Marx, incidentally) never freed himself from the ‘war logic’ of Clausewitz's dictum that war is the continuation of politics by other means. To him, and to the vast majority of Marxists, this meant that revolution, like class struggle, was a warlike business. Doing battle openly and bloodily was the necessary means to achieving the final goal, a peaceful communist society. Otherwise, socialists need to conquer the army from within; in this case too, mastering the war machine is necessary for realising socialism. Since then, experience has overwhelmingly demonstrated that in fact, military means tend to dominate the entire socialist project; beyond a commando state characterised by military discipline, classless society vanishes like an unachievable utopia.

The task of distinguishing E from Marxism is not immediately easy. To make E a meaningful concept, one needs to isolate all those elements of the putatively Marxist tradition that derive, without doubt, not from Marx but from Engels. Much of what is said about this in the scholarly literature is incorrect. It was not Engels (nor was it Hegel) who first introduced the concept of a ‘dialectical law’; it was Marx. Instances of an excessive faith in science can be found both in Marx and in Engels, as can the naturalism and positivism of the mid-19th century – though admittedly, they are far more pronounced in Engels. But there is an important difference: it is in Engels, not in Marx, that we find the attempt to construct general theories, philosophical systems, or worldviews. Or, to put this more directly: Engels, not Marx, is the one to introduce into Marxism the fatal tendency according to which Marxism qua Marxism (and the Marxist qua Marxist) has or should have an answer to every possible and impossible question. Such claims, which are basically preposterous, are not just evident in Marxist textbooks, where they are no doubt central: in principle, a Marxist-Leninist textbook provides answers to all questions; it is an encyclopedia, and there was a time when this encyclopedia was able to exclude new natural-science theories such as the theory of relativity or modern genetics from the Soviet Union and its sphere of influence. Marxism as an automat for answers is something we also experienced during later periods, including within Western Marxism. During the left-wing surge of the 1960s and 1970s, there repeatedly emerged currents and individuals who spoke of a “consistent Marxism”, by which was meant a consistency extending to all areas of life and knowledge. That is why there had to be a single Marxist conception of literature, legal theory etc. This way of thinking was also evident on the political level: while a political party must surely hold views on many issues, this was a case of orders being given as to what constitutes “genuine Marxism” with regard to every conceivable question of everyday and world politics. In countries where this type of Marxism was not predominant, such ambitions were often merely ridiculous; in “state-monopolistic” socialist societies, they became a threat to, and often eradicated, personal liberty and integrity, as well as healthy political, social, and intellectual development.

It must be conceded that Engels's efforts to move in this direction did have two positive aspects: first, a fervent struggle to elaborate the theoretical and ontological foundation of Marx's key notions; second, the effort to popularise those notions, that is, to render them accessible to the general public. However, it is possible to achieve these important tasks without making absolutist claims. In the post-communist situation, the putative omniscience of E does not pose a threat. Whoever thinks of themselves as belonging to the Marxian tradition must take care not to lapse once more into the worst varieties of E, though they also have every reason to devote their undivided critical attention to the best of what Engels achieved.

Bibliography: Th.Bergmann, M.Kessler, J.Kircz, and G.Schäfer (eds.), Zwischen Utopie und Kritik: Friedrich Engels – ein ‘Klassiker’ nach 100 Jahren, Hamburg 1996; H.Bollnow, ‘Untersuchung über Engels’ Auffassung von Revolution und Entwicklung’, Marxismusstudien, vol. 1, Tübingen 1954; T.Carver, Marx and Engels: The Intellectual Relationship, Brighton 1983; id., Friedrich Engels: His Life and Thought, London 1989; L.Colletti, Bernstein und der Marxismus der Zweiten Internationale (1968), Frankfurt/M 1971; A.Cornu, Karl Marx und Friedrich Engels: Leben und Werk, 3 vols., Berlin/GDR 1954, 1962, 1968; Engels’ Druckfassung versus Marx’ Manuskripte zum III. Buch des ‘Kapital’, Beiträge zur Marx-Engels Forschung (MEF), Neue Folge, ed. C.-E.Vollgraf, R.Sperl, R.Hecker, Hamburg 1995; F.Haug, ‘Entweder Geschlecht oder Arbeit – eine rätselhafte Disjunktion bei Engels’, Argument 214, vol. 38, 1996, 239–45; W.O.Henderson, The Life of Friedrich Engels, 2 vols., London 1976; H.Hirsch, Engels in Selbstzeugnissen und Bilddokumenten, Reinbek 1968; D.C.Hodges, ‘Engels’ Contribution to Marxism’, The Socialist Register 1965; L.A.Leontjev, Engels und die ökonomische Lehre des Marxismus, Berlin/GDR 1970; N.Levine, The Tragic Deception: Marx contra Engels, Santa Barbara 1975; S.-E.Liedman, Das Spiel der Gegensätze: Friedrich Engels’ Philosophie und die Wissenschaften des 19. Jahrhunderts, Frankfurt/M 1986; K.Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. I (C I), transl. from the German by B.Fowkes, London 1976; id. and F.Engels, The Collected Works (MECW), London 1975-2005; H.Maus, Die Traumhölle des Justemilieu: Erinnerung an die Aufgaben der Kritischen Theorie, ed. M.Th.Greven and G.van de Moetter, Frankfurt/M 1981; G.Mayer, Friedrich Engels, 2 vols., The Hague 1934; T.I.Oiserman, Die Enstehung der marxistischen Philosophie, Berlin/GDR 1965; A.Peralta, ...med andra medel. Fran Clausewitz till Guevara – krig, revolution och politik i en marxistik idétradition, Göteborg 1990; R.Rozdolsky, Engels and the ‘Nonhistoric’ Peoples: the National Question in the Revolution of 1848, Glasgow 1987; M.Rubel, ‘The “Marx Legend”, or Engels, Founder of Marxism’, Rubel on Karl Marx, ed. J.O'Malley and K.Algosin, New York 1981; A.Schmidt, Der Begriff der Natur in der Lehre von Marx, Frankfurt/M 1971; G.Stedman Jones, ‘Engels and the History of Marxism’, The History of Marxism, ed. E.Hobsbawm, vol. 1, Brighton 1982; H.Ulrich, Der junge Engels, 2 vols., Berlin/GDR 1961 and 1966.

Sven-Eric Liedman

Translated by Max Henninger

→ application, base, class reductionism, administrative command system, Darwinism, determinate negation, dialectics, dialectics of nature, dismantling of the state, encyclopedia, evolutionism, freedom/liberty, ideology, Marxism-Leninism, military, natural science, negation of negation, ontology, postcommunism, real socialism, reciprocity, revisionism, revolution, semiotics, social law, Stalinism, state monopoly socialism, textbook Marxism, theory of ideology, war, Western Marxism, withering away of the state, world view

→ Abbau des Staates, Absterben des Staates, Anwendung, Basis, befehlsadministratives System, bestimmte Negation, Darwinismus, Dialektik, Enzyklopädie, Evolutionismus, Freiheit, Gesetz (soziales), Ideologietheorie, Krieg, Lehrbuchmarxismus, Marxismus-Leninismus, Militär, Naturdialektik, Naturwissenschaft, Negation der Negation, Ontologie, Postkommunismus, Realer Sozialismus, Revisionismus, Revolution, Semiotik, staatsmonopolistischer Sozialismus, Stalinismus, Wechselwirkung, Weltanschauung, westlicher Marxismus