16
FRIEDRICH ENGELS (1820–1895)
More than meets the eye
To most people, Friedrich Engels is to Karl Marx what Art Garfunkel is to Paul Simon. If you Google-search the word “Engels”, Karl Marx’s birth and death date sometimes pop up. Despite his shared paternity of the Communist Manifesto (1848), there are relatively few academic papers or books dealing with his ideas or his life–certainly, in comparison with Marx. Those who do bother to write about him tend to be disparaging. But is Engels’s lowly position in the history of economic thought justified? He played a crucial role in supporting Marx’s endeavours both financially and intellectually. And he had plenty of interesting ideas of his own.
Engels was certainly a radical. Like Marx, he wore a beard, which in the 1840s was a sign of seditiousness. He travelled all over Europe meeting dangerous intellectuals. As Tristram Hunt shows in his biography of Engels, he enjoyed success as a radical political journalist under the pseudonym Friedrich Oswald.
But he was an odd kind of radical. At heart Engels was an unashamed bourgeois, much more so than Marx ever was. Engels was born into a rich family in 1820. His father owned a textile factory in Barmen and was a partner in a cotton-spinning factory in Manchester. Before he was 20 Friedrich went to England to learn the trade. Throughout his life, Tristram Hunt demonstrates, Engels enjoyed the finer things in life: in 1865, when asked his definition of the word “happiness”, he responded “Château Margaux 1848”. (He knew what he was talking about; 1848 was a good year for Bordeaux, and the bottle would have been at prime drinking age in 1865.) He boasted of “delicious encounters” with prostitutes. Engels, The Economist has noted, always seemed oblivious to the irony that this opulent lifestyle was funded by the back-breaking labour of Manchester’s working classes.
Engels and Marx collaborated on several publications, of which the most famous was the Communist Manifesto. “A spectre is haunting Europe–the spectre of communism,” it begins, unforgettably, but the whole thing is packed with good lines. The purpose of all this flourishing rhetoric is simple: to encourage the “formation of the proletariat into a class, overthrow of the bourgeois supremacy, conquest of political power by the proletariat”. The relationship between the bourgeoisie and the working classes, they say, is simply another manifestation of a class struggle that has existed throughout recorded history (its predecessors include “Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf”). Marx and Engels have ten specific demands, including “Abolition of all rights of inheritance” and “Abolition of property in land”.
The pamphlet was highly influential. Perhaps four of the manifesto’s demands, notes The Economist, have been met in many rich countries, such as “free education for all children in public schools” and a “heavy progressive or graduated income tax”. Unsurprisingly, Engels is best remembered for this piece of work.
From the barricades to the library
Yet Engels was more than just a high-living agitator. Like Marx, he was also a deep thinker about economics and philosophy. As a young man he studied the works of G. W. F. Hegel (1770–1831). Hegel had an “idealist” view of history, which in plain English means that ideas determine everything. “From the development of the mind”, Vladimir Lenin wrote, Hegel’s philosophy “deduced the development of nature, of man, and of human, social relations.” Hegel also believed in a “universal law of eternal development”, in which old, repressive structures would gradually disappear.
The fundamental implication of Hegel’s work, in which Engels shared a belief with Marx, was that revolutionary change was possible. Practices that seemed normal at one time would not necessarily be so for long. This promise captivated Engels. He (and Marx) took Hegel’s philosophy and twisted it in one important way. Hegel’s philosophy is called “idealism” because it rests on the notion that ideas can change the world. Engels rejected this. He instead took a “materialist” approach to history, which flipped Hegel on his head. Under the Marxist schema, the principle of “never-ending development” remains, yet this time economic relations (rather than ideas) determine everything (including ideas). This is the fundamental starting point for all Marxist theory.
The bad
So Engels was interested in theory. But was he smart? Many would say no. According to his detractors, he took Marx’s ideas and “vulgarised” them. After Marx’s death in 1883 Engels tasked himself with collating the notes for volumes II and III of Capital, Marx’s magnum opus. In these volumes (and in his own published works), the argument goes, Engels twisted and exaggerated Marx’s subtle ideas, such that Marxism (and by extension the great man himself) lost intellectual credibility. Jean-Paul Sartre referred to Marx’s “destructive encounter with Engels” and suggests that he would have been better off going it alone.
At times it is easy to see why Engels has come in for such criticism. Take, for instance, his unimpressive advocacy of “scientific socialism” in Anti-Dühring (1878), chapters of which were published as a shorter pamphlet, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (1879). The book, which is a lot easier to understand than Marx’s Capital (1867), shaped Marxist thought in the 1880s and 1890s. It is probably the second-most influential Marxist text behind Capital.
Engels differentiates his own theories from those of the “utopian socialists” such as Henri de Saint-Simon (1760–1825) and Robert Owen (1771–1858). The utopians had devised general principles for organising a just society. They hoped that with encouragement ordinary people would see the problems in day-to-day life–poverty, inequality, illness and so on–and agree to move towards a better world together.
Robert Owen tried to do exactly this in New Lanark, a settlement in Scotland. Owen ran the town’s mill, the biggest employer. Education and welfare were provided at little or no cost to the working classes. Working conditions were far better than what the average working-class person could expect elsewhere. Owen wanted to show people that another world was possible. He hoped that the masses would follow his lead.
In Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, Engels grudgingly acknowledges that much of New Lanark worked pretty well. “Whilst his [Owen’s] competitors worked their people 13 or 14 hours a day, in New Lanark the working-day was only 10 and a half hours,” he says. Owen introduced infant schools; the children “enjoyed themselves so much that they could scarcely be got home again”.
Yet Engels had two big problems with Owen’s model. First, “Owen’s communism was based upon this purely business foundation, the outcome, so to say, of commercial calculation.” Owen, unfortunately, was still a capitalist. As we saw in the chapter on Marx, the theory goes that capitalist social relations are inherently exploitative. So just tinkering around the edges, as Owen was accused of doing, is not enough. And while Owen’s workers were well treated, they had little say in how to run the town.
Second, Engels argued that people such as Owen were ultimately on the road to nowhere, since they had not properly grasped the theory of socialism. Owen had been “ruined by his unsuccessful Communist experiments in America, in which he sacrificed all his fortune”, Engels caustically noted.
What had Owen got wrong? Deploying his theory of “scientific socialism”, Engels argued that in Owen’s time a total transition to socialism was impossible. This was because the right social and economic conditions had not yet formed. Society first had to progress through the necessary stages: from feudalism, to “petty capitalism”, to full-blown industrial capitalism–and then crisis, and then socialism. “Modern Industry develops, on the one hand, the conflicts which make absolutely necessary a revolution in the mode of production.” Technology, for instance, had to be sufficiently advanced to allow people not merely to work in a single, mind-numbing job, but (as Engels and Marx wrote in 1845) “to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner… without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic”. People’s consciousness had to undergo a rapid change, too: they had to appreciate that capitalism simply could not work. In other words, social and technological conditions had to coalesce in such a way as to make socialism not just possible but inevitable. Socialism would not and could not emerge simply because an Owen or a Saint-Simon willed it.
Engels writes well–better than Marx, actually. It is easy to see why the book became so popular so quickly. Unfortunately, however, his argument is confused. For starters he ignores the substantial positive impact that people like Owen had on the working classes. It was all very well for Engels to object to Owen’s theories from the comfort of his writing desk while quaffing Château Margaux, but Owen’s workers really were better off. More fundamentally, Engels’s scientific–socialist theory is too deterministic, an approach to history that both he and Marx had inherited from reading too much Hegel. Individual humans seem to have no control over their surroundings. Instead they are merely cogs in a big historical machine.
Engels’s methodology is also suspect. He uses no data to support his argument or to predict when socialism will in fact emerge. Critics have levelled the charge of “unfalsifiability” at the theory. Karl Popper’s dismantling of Marxist theory is the snappiest. He compares the approach to that of a dodgy doctor.
[T]he argument becomes as circular as that of the doctor who was asked to justify his prediction of the death of a patient, and had to confess that he knew neither the symptoms nor anything else of the malady, only that it would turn into a “fatal malady”… If the patient did not die, then it was not yet the fatal malady and if a revolution does not lead to socialism, then it is not yet the social revolution.
What Popper is saying is that no matter how much evidence you put in front of Engels to show that socialism was never going to emerge, it was impossible ever to prove his theory wrong. Which makes it a bad theory.
The good
Criticisms like those above help explain why many scholars think little of Engels. The accusation is that Engels turned Marxism from a questioning, tentative set of ideas into a simplistic theory about the world: this will happen because the laws of Marxism say that it must. But not all the accusations levelled at Engels are valid.
Take the question of Engels’s supposed corruption of Marx’s ideas in the later volumes of Capital. One can assess the before-and-after effect of Engels by studying different manuscripts of the third volume. As well as the standard version of the text, editions comprised solely of Marx’s drafts and notes have become widely available. While Engels claimed to have made minimal edits to Marx’s work (“I limited this to the essential”, he said), Marx scholars accuse him of having made far-reaching changes–and bad ones at that.
But on closer inspection the case against Engels looks thin. Here’s a representative example. In his original draft, Marx wrote the sentence, “In the case of the simplest categories of the capitalist mode of production, in the cases of commodities and money, we have already pointed out the mystifying character…”
Engels then replaces it with the following sentence: “In the case of the simplest categories of the capitalist mode of production, and even of commodity-production, in the cases of commodities and money, we have already pointed out the mystifying character…”
This will strike most readers as a minor change–perhaps, one that is hard even to notice. But dedicated Marxist scholars see as a horrible corruption of Marx’s work. One paper claims that this qualifies as a “far-reaching adaptation of the original manuscript”. It goes on: “Commodities and money are now no longer the simplest categories of the capitalist mode of production, but of commodity-production.”
The average reader may conclude: so what? And that would be fair. This scholar is so exercised about what Engels has written because it ends up making capitalism seem less historically unique. Basically, Engels is saying that “there are some aspects of pre-capitalist societies which are also found in capitalist societies”. That statement rubs some scholars up the wrong way, because they view capitalism as beyond the pale: nothing else is like capitalism, they argue. Yet of course capitalist and pre-capitalist modes of production share many common attributes, including the role of trust and convention.
This particular example hints at a wider practice among Marxist scholars. The accusations against Engels often amount to little more than scholastic hair-splitting, made only by the most dedicated researchers who adhere to a doctrinal reading of what Marx “really meant”. Such interpretations should not concern us.
But while Engels’s edits may not have radically changed Marx’s work, he certainly did have a big impact on the great man. Take finance. Engels lived the high life but his biggest expenditure was probably Marx. Karl was demanding: he had many children and no taste for wage-labour. He also had a hearty appetite. Marx’s poor financial management repeatedly threw his family into abject poverty.
To fund his comrade, Engels gave up his journalism and returned to Manchester, where he could earn a lot more money. By one estimate, half his income went to his friend. Gareth Stedman Jones’s brilliant intellectual biography of Marx is filled with letters from the protagonist, begging yet more money.
There were intellectual debts, too. Most writers tend to judge Engels on the “scientific socialism” stuff discussed above. But what he wrote in the early period is perhaps more important, since it helps us understand what Marx would later publish.
The Communist Manifesto (1848) is Engels’s most famous publication but is not worth taking seriously as an economic document. This was a pamphlet, not a study. A review of Engels’s economic writings must instead begin with The Condition of the Working Class in England, written in 1845. This is essentially an ethnographic study. It was not Engels’s first such work: his Letters From Wuppertal (1839) was an eyewitness account of the consequences of early capitalism in the Rhineland district. But it is justifiably famous. Engels was already familiar with Manchester when he decided to study it in detail (since his family had investments there). As he wandered around the city, and looked more closely, he was horrified by what he saw.
Child’s play
Engels begins with a Sismondian account of the transition from bucolic rural life to brutal industrial capitalism. Manchester’s workers, he surmises, used to have complete freedom over their working day and lived a “passably comfortable existence, leading a righteous and peaceful life in all piety and probity”. He goes on: “They had leisure for healthful work in garden or field, work which, in itself, was recreation for them, and they could take part besides in the recreations and games of their neighbours, and all these games–bowling, cricket, football, etc., contributed to their physical health and vigour.” Engels, like Sismondi, underplays the high prevalence of disease, low life expectancy and other socio-political problems with life in pre-capitalist England.
The ascent of capitalism, however, ruined the idyll. Legal changes (which historians group together under the term “enclosure”) deprived rural dwellers of their common lands. Mechanisation put farmers out of work. Technology and the law, in effect, forced large numbers of people to migrate to the city–and, in particular, to cities in the north-west of England, the centre of the industrial revolution.
As Marxist books go, The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845) is a strikingly immediate read. In one district of Manchester, Engels reports, he “found a man, apparently about sixty years old, living in a cowstable. He had constructed a sort of chimney for his square pen, which had neither windows, floor, nor ceiling… the rain dripped through his rotten roof.” Engels is particularly harsh on Irish people, whom he blames for pushing down the wages of the English (and then, for good measure, insults in racially tinged language).
All this suffering leads Engels, in bloodcurdling prose, to conclude that a revolution is just around the corner. Surely, he seems to think, the people will not take this for much longer. He speaks of the “deep wrath of the whole working-class, from Glasgow to London, against the rich, by whom they are systematically plundered and mercilessly left to their fate”. So acute is this anger that when the riots begin, “the French Revolution… will prove to have been child’s play”.
This book is easy to criticise on methodological grounds. Its predictions of impending revolution were clearly wrong, as Engels himself partially acknowledged later in his life. Yet it has many strong points, too. Engels demonstrated to Marx the benefit of writing interesting prose. Marx had finished a PhD in philosophy in 1841 and was inclined to write impenetrable sentences. Over time, however, Marx tried to be a little bit more accessible. Capital, though heavy on the theory, also contains easier-to-follow discussions of day-to-day problems. Without Engels’s influence it is hard to see Capital turning out this way.
Engels also demonstrated to Marx the benefits of empirical research. He draws on countless newspaper articles and government reports to build up a rich argument about the poor quality of housing in Manchester. In Capital Marx drew on a range of statistics, government reports and pieces of journalism in order to show just how hard life was for many people living in the most industrially advanced country in the world. He was not the world’s best empiricist; far from it. He ignored the rapid improvements in living standards that were occurring just as he was writing. Nonetheless, without Engels’s influence, Marx might well have stuck to the abstract philosophy–and would have had far less impact as a result.
Engels’s Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy, published in 1843, is another important early work. Joseph Schumpeter dismisses it as “a distinctly weak performance” (though without explaining why). Yet Marx himself was deeply impressed by it, calling it a “brilliant sketch on the criticism of the economic categories”. The book encouraged him to turn away from purely philosophical concerns towards economics and history.
The tract contains the germ of ideas that would soon be thought of as classically “Marxist”. For instance, Engels focuses heavily on economic crises. He was not the first to point out that capitalism was prone to slumps, of course. Sismondi (see Chapter 12) and Mandeville (Chapter 3) had already floated the idea of “underconsumption”. But Engels put a new spin on things. The early theories seemed to suggest that the government would be at least partly responsible for fostering a boom that subsequently led to a bust–in Mandeville’s case, for instance, by government intervention outlawing certain sorts of purchases. Engels, by contrast, argues that crises are inherent to any capitalist system.
In Outlines he excoriates economists for their naivety about capitalism’s inherent instability. They regard the “law” of supply and demand “as their chief glory”, he says, which supposedly proves that “one can never produce too much”. Think of what Jean-Baptiste Say (see Chapter 10) argues regarding supply and demand. For Say, the notion of oversupply, at least in the long term, was impossible. Left to its own devices the market will reach a stable equilibrium.
Engels, however, continues caustically: “practice replies with trade crises, which reappear as regularly as the comets… What are we to think of a law that can assert itself only through periodic slumps?” Engels is saying that the classical economists view the economy as basically stable, when day-to-day living would suggest anything but. During the 19th century Italy and Spain were in the middle of a banking crisis 4% of the time; Britain 10% of the time; and France 15% of the time.1 Could capitalism really be as harmonious as the classical political economists had asserted?
In the same essay Engels offers a useful corrective to Thomas Malthus’s theory of population. Marxists have never been fans of Malthus, not only because Malthus believes the working classes are stupid but also because of his blithe acceptance that they would face mass starvation. The first hint of their aversion to Malthus is found in Outlines, when Engels argues that Malthus ignores “the advance of scientific knowledge”. What Engels means by this is quite simple. Recall Malthus’s theory, which held that because the quantity of land was fixed, but the population was liable to grow, at some point population would be out of kilter with food supply. A famine would follow, which would bring the ratio of population to land back into equilibrium.
Engels accuses Malthus, however, of ignoring a third important factor, besides land and population: technology. “[H]ave not the advances in Science greatly increased production?” he asks: “what is impossible to science?” As technology improved, Engels reasoned, Malthus’s pessimistic views of population growth would prove to be incorrect. More food could be produced on a given acre of land. Advances in medicine and public health would ensure that people could live longer. Engels’s suppositions proved thumpingly right: Britain’s population is over twice what it was in the 1840s and for the whole period since Malthus wrote his book, there has been no famine.
The ugly
There is one uncomfortable part of Engels’s work, however. It is often asserted that regimes that took inspiration from Marx and Engels–say, Soviet Russia or Ceausescu’s Romania–did not follow Marxist ideas. In particular, Marxists react with horror to the suggestion that the violence of the communist era was in any way justified by Marx and Engels’s texts.
On this question, however, one part of Engels’s work gives pause for thought. It concerns the notion of the “withering away of the state”, a notion that Marx believed in but which Engels laid out most explicitly in Anti-Dühring. What does this concept mean?
Many Marxists view the state as the means by which the ruling class cements its rule–say, by operating a police force to ensure that property rights are maintained and the working classes unable to rebel. However, following a social revolution, people gradually adopt a communist consciousness. When fully adopted there is no longer the need for anyone to enforce anything. Therefore, the state will become redundant. As Engels puts it, “[t]he interference of the state power in social relations becomes superfluous… The state is not ‘abolished’, it withers away.”
This argument informs the popular notion that absolutely nothing in Marx or Engels’s original texts can be used to justify state repression in communist states. How could the writings be used in that way, if they explicitly envisage the withering away of the state?
Yet it is not as simple as all that. Engels left open the possibility that the state might not disappear immediately.2 Technology might not be sufficiently advanced for all members of society to satisfy their needs. And crucially, people might not yet have the right mind-set to be good communists. If so, Engels writes in Principles of Communism (1847), then “industry will have to be run by society as a whole for everybody’s benefit. It must be operated by all members of society in accordance with a common plan.”
The phrase “common plan”, in light of 20th-century history, takes on a sinister connotation. The Communist Manifesto is even clearer. “The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the State.” T. H. Henderson, an authority on Engels, is blunt in his assessment. “Never has there been a wider contrast or more extreme contradiction between short-term, ‘transitional’ aims and methods requiring the creation of vast bureaucratic vested interests and, on the other hand, what was professed to be the long-term objective of the ‘withering away’ of the state.” The need to “educate” people about how to behave like a proper communist is not the invention of socialist leaders, but clearly revealed in Engels’s writings.
All of which leaves the legacy of Friedrich Engels in an odd place. The implicit justifications of totalitarianism in his writing deal a terrible blow. Yet the sniffiness with which some hard-line Marxists treat him is not deserved. And there is little doubt that he is an underappreciated thinker. He had more of an impact on economic theory, and especially Marx’s intellectual development, than is commonly acknowledged. For good or ill he was genuinely a source of inspiration to Marx, and by extension to the thinkers and world leaders who followed him. Few economists can claim such far-reaching influence.