Friedrich Engels (1820–1895)After spending much of this year marveling over the militant ignorance of characters like Glenn Beck and his Tea Party fans, who talk about Obama and liberalism and Marxism and socialism and communism and fascism and Nazism and who knows what all else as being pretty much the same thing, it's nice to see an article that talks about the real history of the actual Karl Marx and, more particularly, about Fred Engels.
Kirsch spends way too much of his article trying to make much of the fact that Engels was the son of a wealthy industrialist and made a lot of money working in his family business but politically supported Marx, the First International (International Workingmen's Association) and revolutionary social-democratic parties. Kirsch seems to find that contradiction very hard to grasp. He seems to be working from some comic-book image that rich guys could never support revolutionary politics, and that real revolutionaries should be grim, obsessed characters living in squalor.
But when he's not displaying that particular frat-boy-style 'tude, he actually manages to say some decent things about history. Marx and Engels were both students of philosophy and adhered in their earlier years to the theories of Hegel, the dominant figure in German philosphy of that time, and more particularly to the views of the Left Hegelians. The French Revolution of 1879 had introduced mass democracy to Europe. Napolean's conquest's in the German lands had dealt a severe blow to the aristocratic monarchies and various and sundry principalities and duchies there. French rule had introduced some democratic practices into that part of the Continent, and the Wars of Liberation against France themselves began to stimulate democratic sentiment in Germany. The word "guerrilla" (little warrior) was supposedly first applied to the irregulars in Spain who found a bitter war of liberation against their French rulers in 1808-1814. In the Americas, the former English and Spanish colonies were making revolutions of their own.
A decisive experience for Marx and Engels, and for all of Continental Europe, were the democratic Revolutions of 1848 in Germany, Austria, Hungary, France and other areas.
Those known as "republicans" in France, Germany and elsewhere fought for classical liberal ideals: individual freedoms of speech, press and assembly; equal protection of the laws; broadbased male suffrage (though property requirements were fine for many of them); constitutional and representative government; and, freedom of businesses from governmental restrictions and from any formal obligations to labor. They were the leading partisans of the 1848 revolutions all across Europe.
The business class (capitalists) were the leaders of the republican movement, while aristocrats seeking to hang on to their power, based on heritary landholding stemming from the centuries old feudal system, backed the monarchs and the royalist parties. Neither European socialism nor the labor movement originated in 1848. But 1848 was a decisive turning point in the development of both. They were partisans of the German National Assembly meeting in the Paulskirche in Frankfurt and of the république démocratique et sociale in France. From 1848 on, it was clear that the urban working classes in Europe were interested in additional demands beyond those of formal democracy: protection of labor organization; a more fair distribution of wealth; the widest possible distribution of male suffrage without property requirements.
The strong point about Kirsch's article is that he shows how traumatically new the conditions of the emerging capitalist order were. There was a new industrial working class, dependent on wages to live but largely forced into apalling poverty. The political order gave very limited direct voice to the general public. And even in England, where parliamentary government became incresingly dominant in the early 19th century and the power of the monarch receded, there was not yet universal male suffrage and the practical barriers to reformist legislation and government policies were huge. The capitalist class, which in the French Revolution and the revolutions of 1848 were the leading advocates of democratic government, generally adhered to a liberal ideology - what we now would call classical liberalism - that favored democratic rights and the rule of law but also favored minimal regulation of business.
Engels' first book was The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845), first published in German; the first English edition appeared in 1887. Kirsch writes:
What set The Condition of the Working Class in England apart from [popular fictional treatments of the same subject] was that Engels's was not intended to cajole or shame the rich into doing their duty by the poor. Rather, Engels promised while writing it, "I shall be presenting the English with a fine bill of indictment. I accuse the English bourgeoisie [capitalist class] before the entire world of murder, robbery and other crimes on a massive scale." And he was certain that only a violent revolution could put an end to those crimes. "The war of the poor against the rich will be the most bloodthirsty the world has ever seen," Engels predicted, and no parliamentary legislation or Dickensian sentimentality could avert it. "Even if some of the middle classes espouse the cause of the workers—even if the middle classes as a whole mended their ways—the catastrophe could not be avoided."Later in the 19th century, and even more dramatically after the First World War and the Russian Revolution when the Communists split from the Social Democrats, the question of a revoltionary road to socialism versus a peaceful or reformist one loomed very large. In the 1960s, the polemics between the Soviets and the Chinese over the necessity of violence took up the issue in a very different historical context.
In fact, while most of Engels's book is devoted to the plight of the working class, its motive force — the animus that makes it such electric reading, even today — is his feelings about his own class, the bourgeoisie [capitalists]. ...
"The members of the bourgeoisie are imprisoned by the class prejudices and principles which have been ruthlessly drummed into them from childhood. Nothing can be done about people of this sort," he writes. Indeed, the incorrigibility of the bourgeoisie is central to Engels's vision of class conflict. It is not a matter of the hard-heartedness of this or that factory owner, or even of all the factory owners; the problem is a capitalist system that is structurally oppressive. That is why only revolution, not reform, can help the proletariat. [my emphasis]
In the first half of the 19th century, those distinctions didn't take the form they did in 1848. The European monarchies and the aristocratic class that was their main backing weren't open to the notion of evolving out of existence. It took violent uprising to give the democratic revolutionaries of 1848 a chance at power and at fundamental reform of the political system. And the repression by which the reaction overcame those democratic revolutions - less completely in France than elsewhere - left little doubt that the defenders of the old order were ready to apply large doses of violence to prevent the victory of parliamentary democracy, much less massive changes imposed by a democratic state to protect the industrial working class.
Engels in his 1892 Preface to the English edition discusses various ways in which, "The state of things described in this book belongs to-day, in many respects, to the past, as far as England is concerned." He briefly reviews the major developments in the English economy in the previous decades, including the expansion of international trade, the growth of labor unions and various political reforms that had been enacted. He still argued that developments at the present time (1892) in England "more and more evident the great central fact that the cause of the miserable condition of the working-class is to be sought ... in the capitalistic system itself."
In terms of the theory of historical development that Engels and Marx shared, the force driving the working class to overthrow the capitalist system was the internal development of capitalist society. In terms of their dialectic materialist system, the working class had a fundamental interest in achieving dominance to end its "alienated", powerless situation under capitalism. The impoverishment of the workers was not, in theory, the driving motive of this process but rather the historical state of alienation of the working class.
David Ricardo (1772-1823)But in practice their view, and the general view of the social-democratic parties of the First International which Marx and Engels supported strongly, was based on the notion of the inevitable impoverishment of the workers. This was a view that Marx and Engels and many of their contemporaries took from the formulations of the English political economist David Ricardo (1772-1823). As John Kenneth Galbraith explains in The Age of Uncertainty (1977), Ricardo expected a continually growing population:
Among the workers such would be the competition for work on the one hand and for the food supply on the other that all would be reduced to bare subsistence. It was man's fate.Kirsch describes the situation that Engels was analyzing in his 1845 book and which was also forming the views of Ricardo and his contemporaries:
In an "improving society" this fate might be postponed, and, as a moment's thought will suggest, in the England of the nineteenth century this was a major qualification. But Ricardo's qualifications never caught up with his majestic generalizations. In the Ricardian world workers would receive the minimum necessary for life, never more. This was the iron law of wages. It led, among other things, to the conclusion that not only was compassion wasted on the working man but it was damaging. It might raise hopes and income in the short run. But it accelerated the population increase by which both were brought down. And any effort by government or trade unions to raise wages and rescue people from poverty would similarly be in conflict with economic law, be similarly frustrated by the resulting increase in numbers.
These problems were, it is useful to remember, totally unprecedented, not just in English but in human history. The sudden eruption of vast polluted slums in the North of England baffled both the institutions of government and the prevailing theories of economics and society. Engels was writing at perhaps the worst period in Manchester's history, before the introduction of free trade, the expansion of the franchise, unionization, and regulation of factory work and child labor helped to improve the lives of the workers. [my emphasis]These assumptions and political position are important to understanding the history of European social democracy in the 19th century. And both Karl Marx and Friederich Engels were important players in that history. Adam Kirsch does a good job in this article of looking some of Engels' basic economic and political assumptions in that context without getting too much distracted by the various later ideological prisms through which that history has been refracted. Even if his obsessing over Engels' respectable capitalist lifestyle is a bit silly.
I was reminded again in reading this article that terms commonly used in discussing the socialist movement - the real one of history, not the bizarre ideological construct Glenn Beck and his fans use - isn't made any easier by the inevitable need to use terms like bourgeoisie and proletariat. They mean, respectively, the capitalist class and the working class. But they are typically used in America when discussing some variety of Marxism. And my impression is that their use does more to mystify and fog up the discussion than to clarify it.
Franz von Baader (1765-1841)How those French terms came to be used in English in those contexts, I'm not exactly sure. I did recently come across a article that claimed to identify the writer who seems to have introduced at least the term "proletariat" into German. The article is by Ernst Benz, "Franz von Baaders Gedanken über den 'Proletair'" Zeitschrift für Religions- und Geistesgeschichte 2/1948. Benedikt Franz Xaver von Baader (1765-1841) was a conservative, religious-minded Catholic philosopher. Lenz calls him the first social theorist from the German lands who occupied himself with the "social problem" of the new industrial working class. His political activity largely consisted of advice to monarchist regimes and to the Churches to come up with ameliorative reforms based on Christian principles before the workers came to prefer a non-religious, materialist revolutionary approach. The article by which Benz says Von Baader introduced the term "proletarian" into German (in the form "Proletair") was published in 1833; as Benz notes, this was 15 years before the Communist Manifesto appeared.
Based on his observations of the French Revolution of 1830 and also of conditions among the workers of England, Von Baader concluded like Marx and Engels that the new working class would produce not only a political but a social revolution if trends continued as they were. But he was terrified of the prospect and wanted urgently to head it off, instead of welcoming it and attempting to push it along. Benz in that article discusses several ways in which Von Baader's analysis of the social situation in Europe anticipated that of Marx in coming years, a reminder of how many of these ideas were "in the air" during that period.
Tags: david ricardo, franz von baader, frederick engels, karl marx, marxism
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