On 28 November 1820, Frederick Engels was born. This was a little over two years after the birth of his great friend and collaborator, Karl Marx. We are thus celebrating the 200th birth anniversary of one of the greatest teachers of the working class, a friend and collaborator of Marx.
Engels and Marx are the fathers
of what we today refer to as “Marxism-Leninism”, that is, scientific socialism
– also well known as the materialist conception of history and dialectics, or
simply, as we refer to it today, dialectical and historical materialism. This
new science, a new approach to understanding and changing society, is the most
reliable and consistent tool at the hands of the modern working class, the
proletariat, in its struggles against the bourgeoisie. Ever since the two
friends presented scientific socialism through their joint work in 1846, the Critique
of The German Ideology, as well as more other works through their lives,
the working class has correctly relied on this science and succeeded in most
battles.
It is remarkable that Engels did
not acquire university qualification, yet by the time he was in his early 20s
he was already critically reading and analysing the philosophical works of
great philosophers such as that of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. This should
be a lesson and inspiration to many of our comrades in Swaziland. It is
important that comrades do not allow themselves to be prohibited by personal,
family and community circumstances from engaging fully in the revolution,
including pushing themselves to transcend societal boundaries.
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| Engels in 1841 |
At 24, Engels started working on
his ground-breaking work, The Condition of the Working Class in England,
in September 1844 and published it in March 1845. To produce this work, Engels
personally lived with the working people in England, Manchester, where he
worked for his father. He was a direct witness to the plight of the workers and
saw the terrible conditions they lived in. He also read many books and reports that
were published by various commissions, the government, parliament, and other
independent bodies. The result was the colossal work from which even Marx heavily
relied when he worked on his earth shattering work, Capital: A Critique of
Political Economy. Up till The Condition, no writer had ever presented
the situation, sufferings and struggles of the working class with such utmost clarity.
Additionally, this work placed the working class as the major class to take on
the bourgeoisie in the struggles that were taking place – and moving forward.
The Condition, therefore,
is a prerequisite for every class conscious worker and any communist, along
with others which Engels and Marx wrote.
Marx and Engels are thus the true
guiding light in the struggle of the working class against the bourgeoisie. They
brought to the working class the most advanced revolutionary theory – a
consistent scientific method – in their struggles, struggles which they
themselves partook in.
As Marx stated in 1845 in his Theses
on Feuerbach, the philosophers have interpreted the world, in various ways;
the point is to change it. Both Marx and Engels marked a great shift from the
academics, thinkers, and philosophers of the time – as well as previous ones.
They did not analyse society and its struggles for the sake of it. They
personally participated in the working-class revolution with the aim of
changing society towards socialism. Their works were thus always directed at
giving the correct strategy and tactics for the working class to fight and
defeat the bourgeoisie as well as to build the new society that was to emerge
after the defeat of this oppressing class.
Engels is well known for his
fierce engagement in polemics, especially in defence of scientific socialism.
This was necessary as their collaboration meant that the work had to be divided
and the load shared accordingly. Marx, meanwhile, worked diligently and
studiously on political economy, using their scientific method, resulting in Capital.
No Marxist can ever be a true Marxist, we dare say, until they have thoroughly
studied this work. As things stand, therefore, most of the Marxists of this
world are, in truth, merely aspirant Marxists. The road to Marxism is very
long!
Notwithstanding the above remark,
however, one who is well armed with the basic method of scientific socialism –
dialectical and historical materialism – will be in the best position to
analyse society and devise strategies and tactics for the masses of each
society.
By taking a materialist
standpoint, they meant, as Engels explained in Ludwig Feuerbach and the end
of classical German philosophy, that nature and history must be comprehended
just as it presents itself to everyone who approaches it free from preconceived
idealist crotchets. The world must thus be taken as it is, not as it has been
presented to us by this or that “great thinker”. We must trace history as it is
and not rely on some unexplainable and unexplained idea, the “Word”. Thus, everything
must be capable of being proved empirically and not be left to speculations and
superstitions. Elaborating on this point, Marx made the declaration in 1859 in
his A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, that “at the
entrance to science, as at the entrance to hell, the demand must be made: Here
must all distrust be left; All cowardice must here be dead.” Marx had already
clearly elaborated their scientific outlook in a polemic with Proudhon, in Poverty
of Philosophy (1847).
In further unpacking the materialist
conception, Engels clarified further in 1884 in his book The Origin of the
Family, Private Property and the State as follows:
“…the
determining factor in history is, in the final instance, the production and
reproduction of the immediate essentials of life. This, again, is of a twofold
character. On the one side, the production of the means of existence, of
articles of food and clothing, dwellings, and of the tools necessary for that
production; on the other side, the production of human beings themselves,
the propagation of the species. The social organisation under which the
people of a particular historical epoch and a particular country live is determined
by both kinds of production: by the stage of development of labour on the
one hand and of the family on the other.” (emphasis added)
Engels was elaborating on a point
he had made some four years earlier, in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific,
where he pointed out that the materialist conception of history starts from the
proposition that the production of the means to support human life and, next to
production, the exchange of things produced, is the basis of all social
structure; that in every society that has appeared in history, the manner
in which wealth is distributed and society divided into classes or orders is
dependent upon what is produced, how it is produced, and how the products are
exchanged.
As such, one can never understand any society without, as a basis of all study, analysing the way that particular society produces its means of life. The discovery of this secret, Engels attributed to Marx. That is, the secret that humans must first of all eat, drink, have shelter and clothing, BEFORE pursuing politics, science, art, religion, etc.; that therefore the production of the immediate material means, and consequently the degree of economic development attained by a given people or during a given epoch, form the foundation upon which the state institutions, the legal conceptions, art, and even the ideas on religion, of the people concerned have been evolved, and in the light of which they must, therefore, be explained, instead of vice versa, as had previously been the case (Engels’ Speech at the Grave of Karl Marx in 1883).
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| Cover of the first edition of Engels's The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State |
The bourgeoisie and the monarchies of the world are, of course, happy with a working class that keeps thinking that the world is directed by some invisible superbeing in the sky, whose intentions should never be questioned. They are happy to lull the world into holding on to the concept that, somewhere out there, there is someone who knows it all and who has a plan for everyone; that, therefore, if one is enslaved and poor, it is in accordance with the “grand plan” of that particular superbeing – that the oppressed must accept such enslavement with utmost grace! This is why they are fierce enemies of communists and the class conscious worker. They know that, armed with the knowledge of scientific socialism, workers will remove all the fog that has been placed on their faces over the centuries, overthrow the present system and take and wield state power for the benefit of the whole of society.
Marx and Engels did not end with
materialism, however. They also dealt with dialectics. They proved that Nature
works dialectically – with continuous interconnections, intersections and
interpenetrations as well as changing over and over again, giving birth to new
societies. Engels showed in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific that Nature
does not move in the eternal oneness of a perpetually recurring circle, but that
it goes through a real historical evolution. Dialectics had already been well
presented by Hegel. Hegel’s dialectics, however, were idealistic and not
materialistic. The whole thing was thus upside down, standing on its head. Marx
and Engels sought to turn this on its feet and gave it life. They showed that
the world we must focus on is the real world as it has evolved through the part
played by labour, among other material realities.
Viewing the world from a materialist dialectics, Marx and Engels showed that Nature goes through an uninterrupted change of coming into being and passing away, in which, in spite of all seemingly accidentally and of all temporary retrogression, a progressive development asserts itself in the end (Ludwig Feuerbach and the end of classical German philosophy).
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| Engels in the 1860s |
Through the scientific presentation of materialism and dialectics, Marx and Engels were thus able to prove in the Manifesto of the Communist Party, in 1848, that the history of all society, with the exception of its primitive stages, is the history of class struggles: “that these warring classes of society are always the products of the modes of production and of exchange — in a word, of the economic conditions of their time; that the economic structure of society always furnishes the real basis, starting from which we can alone work out the ultimate explanation of the whole superstructure of juridical and political institutions as well as of the religious, philosophical, and other ideas of a given historical period” (Ludwig Feuerbach and the end of classical German philosophy).
The employment of materialist dialectics was important because they were able to prove that the capitalist system, like all other modes of production, is a product of human interaction through production. They showed that the system emerged from feudalism and that, since it is also a product of human action, it would also reach its highest stage and be overthrown. Capitalism did not end the domination of one class by another, however. Instead, it revamped and complicated the class organisation of society and maintained class domination of the majority by the minority bourgeoisie. The defeat of the capitalist class will not be by persuasion, but by forcible action which must be undertaken by the class working class in conscious action to build a totally new society.
The two friends committed themselves to directly participate it the working-class struggles that were happening, learn from them and thus constantly improve their tools. They participated in the various working-class organisations, helping to lead, guide and unite the entire working class as they shared in their struggles. They understood fully that no one should ever undertake the struggle with “clean” hands, that one had to throw themselves in the mash and wage the revolution – and not be a mere “critic” of the revolution, insulated from all mistakes. They were practical revolutionaries till their last breath!
Engels, like Marx, was a prolific
reader and writer. They wrote letters to each other almost on a daily basis,
analysing various countries and societies, and helped each other in their
respective works. The final product (scientific socialism) was thus always a
joint product through and through. In a June 1853 letter to Adolf Cluss, Marx
described Engels as “a veritable walking encyclopaedia, he's capable, drunk or
sober, of working at any hour of the day or night, is a fast writer and
devilish QUICK.” In 1880, he remarked that Engels was “one of the foremost
representatives of contemporary socialism…” On the other hand, Engels described
Marx as “the greatest living thinker”, a “man of science” who “fought with a
passion, a tenacity and a success such as few could rival”, declaring that just
as Darwin discovered the law of development or organic nature, so Marx
discovered the law of development of human history.
Throughout history, no bond has
ever been as strong and unbreakable as the bond of Marx and Engels. This does
not mean, of course, that some have not tried to break this bond, for many have
tried, and failed. Especially after the death of Marx in 1883, some tried – and
some still try – to consecrate Marx as a saint and at the same time attacked
Engels. Others, on the other hand, have tried to ignore Engels’s contribution
to scientific socialism by talking only about Marx, silencing Engels. But
history has no blank pages. Following Engels’s death in 1895, Vladimir Lenin
would proclaim as follows about Engels:
What a torch of
reason ceased to burn,
What a heart has
ceased to beat!
Lenin further proclaimed that the
name and life of Engels should be known to every worker, and that “to awaken
class-consciousness in the Russian workers, we must give a sketch of the life
and work of Frederick Engels, one of the two great teachers of the modern
proletariat.”
After the 1848 February
Revolution, shortly after both Engels and Marx had presented the Communist
Manifesto to the Communist League, Engels became one of the editors of the Neue
Rheinische Zeitung (Nouvelle Gazette Rhénane), founded in 1848 by Marx in
Cologne and suppressed in June 1849 by a Prussian coup d'état. After taking
part in the uprising at Elberfeld, Engels fought in the Baden campaign against
the Prussians (June and July 1849).
Both Marx and Engels contributed
to the formation of the International Working Men’s Association (the First
International) in 1864 to which they directly contributed to its growth. Their
works are constituted in very large volumes and have stood the test of time,
despite incessant attacks from bourgeois scholars. Capitalist regimes have
poured billions and trillions in monies in the fight against these two men.
They have tried to shut their voices and reverse the growth of the working
class, the bourgeoisie’s natural grave digger, but the wheels of nature
continue to vindicate the two giants of revolution. In the end, Communism will
win!
Today, the Communist Parties of
the world remain with the task of leading, guiding and uniting the oppressed
peoples of the world, the majority of which is the working class. The tools
given to us by Marx and Engels remain the most trusted in this regard. The
Communist Party of Swaziland (CPS) bears that duty as well. Until the birth of
the CPS in 2011, the class struggle in Swaziland had never had the benefit of a
consistent Marxist-Leninist approach. It is thus not surprising that, since
2011, the workers of our country have increasingly called for the
intensification of the struggle against the capitalist class, not merely for “bread
and butter” issues, but for socialism. The idea of overthrowing the absolute
monarchy and forming a democratic republic has permeated through the working
people. Until the CPS came into being, the highest point of consciousness that
the people had reached, and which they had been organised for, was for the
formation of a constitutional monarchy, a backward objective.
Just like other Communist Parties
in the world have to fend off attacks from many noisy bourgeois propagandists,
the CPS also faces the same struggles in Swaziland. It had to wage this
struggle as soon as it announced its birth in 2011. Within the pro-democracy
movement, the petty bourgeois element has been the most incessant attacker of
the Party. This is to be expected, of course, for the Party speaks the language
of total revolution, automatically proclaiming death to the reformism which had
gagged the movement for a very long time.
In the conditions of Swaziland, the
petty bourgeois element is automatically monarchist, often presenting
sugar-coated criticism of the monarchy, but at the same time promising to offer
protection for the same monarchy in a democratic Swaziland with the
constitutional monarchy position. This petty bourgeois element has openly
declared non alliance with the communists, its reason for such a position being
that the Communist Party is openly fighting to uproot the monarchy while they
(the petty bourgeois) have had long friendly relations with monarchists within
the pro-democracy movement. For the CPS’s dedication to work within the
workers, at shopfloor level, helping to conscientise them as to the need for
the communistic approach and learning from the practical work of the workers,
the petty bourgeois propagandists have claimed that the CPS has a “divisive agenda.” It is thus
claimed, foolishly, that the CPS is “dividing” the mass democratic movement by
infusing Marxism in the revolution. The workers are now, correctly, divorcing
the backward “constitutional monarchy” propaganda and engaging in a true
working-class struggle against the oppressor. The CPS continues to grow from
strength to strength.
To conclude on the life of
Engels, we present below a list of some of his most important works, excluding the
joint works he wrote with Marx:
1.
Dialectics of Nature
2. Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of
Classical German Philosophy
3.
Outlines
of a Critique of Political Economy
4. Socialism:
Utopian and Scientific
5. The
Condition of the Working Class in England
6. The
Housing Question
7. The
Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State
8. The
Peasant War in Germany
9. The
Principles of Communism
In this list we say we do not include the two
revolutionaries’ joint works, but we know that for most, if not all, their
works, they collaborated. In some of these works, one job is begun by one and
finished by the other, while in another they contribute prefaces or
introductions, and so on. The element of collaboration is forever permanent in
their works. The reader must therefore always have this in mind whenever
engaging on the above listed works as well as all writings of Marx and Engels.
