Friedrich Engels at 200: A Revolutionary Historian

200 YEARS OF FRIEDRICH ENGELS

Christian Hogsbjerg

HISTORY WORKSHOP | November 23, 2020

28 November 2020 marks the bicentenary of the birth of Friedrich Engels. The German revolutionary philosopher made pathbreaking and profound contributions to modern social and political theory, playing a critical role in the forging and development of classical Marxism.  The renewed relevance of many of his ideas in our crisis-ridden world of late capitalism, where profits come before people and the planet, are rightly foregrounded by those marking the #Engels200 commemoration.

Engels’ study of The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845) is a pioneering work of urban political ecology and urban sociology, that offers a vivid and human portrayal of the horrors which accompanied the Industrial Revolution.  It includes an analysis of ‘social murder’, a concept which has taken on a new resonance in contemporary Britain after years of neoliberal privatisation, austerity and racism culminated in the Grenfell Tower fire of 2017.   Even hitherto under-regarded works, such as Dialectics of Nature (1883), have found new audiences, given the clear and present dangers of catastrophic climate change. Engels is now hailed as ‘one of the foundational ecological thinkers of modern times’.

Engels Against Reformism in Germany and France

200 YEARS OF FRIEDRICH ENGELS

Doug Enaa Greene

Left Voice | November 28, 2020

Illustration: Mar-Ned – Enfoque Rojo

More than a century ago, Eduard Bernstein claimed that it was time for socialists to abandon their revolutionary goal of overthrowing capitalism. He argued that the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) should adopt a reformist approach that strictly relied on legal channels, such as elections in which socialism could slowly be voted into power. To support his position, Bernstein cited the authority of Friedrich Engels, who had allegedly reached similar conclusions in one of his last works. Citing Engels’s introduction to Marx’s Class Struggles in France, Bernstein argued, “Engels is so thoroughly convinced that tactics geared to a catastrophe have had their day that he considers a revision to abandon them to be due even in the Latin countries where tradition is much more favourable to them than in Germany.”¹ Bernstein is not alone in claiming Engels for reformism; he was later joined by others such as Karl Kautsky, Ralph Miliband, and Santiago Carrillo.² Even the American democratic socialist Michael Harrington, who otherwise viewed Engels as a “distorter” of Marxism, had no problem using him to vindicate a democratic socialist strategy: “In his 1895 Preface to a new edition of Marx’s Class Struggles in France, Engels summarized the democratic strategy in sweeping historical terms…. Engels’s turn toward what can only be called democratic socialism was a critically important deepening of the idea of socialism itself.”³

200th Birth Anniversary of Friedrich Engels

200 YEARS OF FRIEDRICH ENGELS

Sumanasiri Liyanage

CEYLON TODAY | November 27, 2020

The birth anniversary of Friedrich Engels, collaborator, co-thinker and a long-time friend of Karl Marx falls tomorrow, 28 November 2020. Having heard of the death of Friedrich Engels in 1895, Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov alias Lenin wrote: “The name and life of Engels should be known to every worker… Above all, he taught the working class to know itself and be conscious of itself, substituting science for dreams… Let us always honour the memory of Friedrich Engels – A great fighter and teacher of the proletariat!”

Friedrich Engels: Organiser, Thinker and Joint Author of The Communist Manifesto

200 YEARS OF FRIEDRICH ENGELS

John Foster

Morning Star | November 28, 2020

Engels (right) with Marx, statue in Berlin Photo: Manfred Bruckels/cc

IN CELEBRATING the 200th anniversary of the birth of Friedrich Engels it is difficult to overestimate his contribution both to the development of the international working-class movement or to Marx’s own theoretical work and its wider dissemination.

Women’s Oppression, The Origins of the Family and The Condition of the Working Class

200 YEARS OF FRIEDRICH ENGELS

Engels Memorial Lecture given by Professor Mary Davis at the Marx Memorial Library earlier this week

Morning Star | November 28, 2020

Peasant Woman Cooking by a Fireplace by Vincent Van Gogh

THE great significance of Friedrich Engels’s Origins of the Family, Private Property & the State is that it is one of the first Marxist analyses of development of family and origins of women’s oppression (the first was August Bebel’s Women & Socialism, 1879) — a subject in which most men were uninterested.