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.
For the full PDF version of this issue and all previouts issues, please click HERE. Below, we only include the tribute by Lenin, written in 1895, from whom we drew our inspiration for the cover of this issue.
What a torch of reason ceased to burn, What a heart has ceased to beat! – Tribute by Vladimir Lenin (1895)
Marx and Engels were the first to
show that the working class and its demands are a necessary outcome of the
present economic system, which together with the bourgeoisie inevitably creates
and organises the proletariat. They showed that it is not the well-meaning
efforts of noble-minded individuals, but the class struggle of the organised
proletariat that will deliver humanity from the evils which now oppress it.
In their scientific works, Marx
and Engels were the first to explain that socialism is not the invention of
dreamers, but the final aim and necessary result of the development of the
productive forces in modern society. All recorded history hitherto has been a
history of class struggle, of the succession of the rule and victory of certain
social classes over others. And this will continue until the foundations of
class struggle and of class domination – private property and anarchic social
production – disappear. The interests of the proletariat demand the destruction
of these foundations, and therefore the conscious class struggle of the
organised workers must be directed against them. And every class struggle is a
political struggle.
These views of Marx and Engels
have now been adopted by all proletarians who are fighting for their
emancipation. But when in the forties the two friends took part in the
socialist literature and the social movements of their time, they were
absolutely novel. There were then many people, talented and without talent,
honest and dishonest, who, absorbed in the struggle for political freedom, in
the struggle against the despotism of kings, police and priests, failed to
observe the antagonism between the interests of the bourgeoisie and those of
the proletariat. These people would not entertain the idea of the workers
acting as an independent social force. On the other hand, there were many
dreamers, some of them geniuses, who thought that it was only necessary to
convince the rulers and the governing classes of the injustice of the
contemporary social order, and it would then be easy to establish peace and
general well-being on earth. They dreamt of a socialism without struggle.
Lastly, nearly all the socialists of that time and the friends of the working
class generally regarded the proletariat only as an ulcer, and observed with
horror how it grew with the growth of industry. They all, therefore, sought for
a means to stop the development of industry and of the proletariat, to stop the
“wheel of history.” Marx and Engels did not share the general fear of the
development of the proletariat; on the contrary, they placed all their hopes on
its continued growth. The more proletarians there are, the greater is their
strength as a revolutionary class, and the nearer and more possible does
socialism become. The services rendered by Marx and Engels to the working class
may be expressed in a few words thus: they taught the working class to know
itself and be conscious of itself, and they substituted science for dreams.
That is why the name and life of
Engels should be known to every worker. That is why in this collection of
articles, the aim of which, as of all our publications, is 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.
Engels was born in 1820 in
Barmen, in the Rhine Province of the kingdom of Prussia. His father was a
manufacturer. In 1838 Engels, without having completed his high-school studies,
was forced by family circumstances to enter a commercial house in Bremen as a
clerk. Commercial affairs did not
prevent Engels from pursuing his scientific and political education. He had
come to hate autocracy and the tyranny of bureaucrats while still at high
school. The study of philosophy led him further. At that time Hegel’s teaching
dominated German philosophy, and Engels became his follower.
Although Hegel himself was an
admirer of the autocratic Prussian state, in whose service he was as a
professor at Berlin University, Hegel’s teachings were revolutionary. Hegel’s
faith in human reason and its rights, and the fundamental thesis of Hegelian
philosophy that the universe is undergoing a constant process of change and
development, led some of the disciples of the Berlin philosopher – those who
refused to accept the existing situation – to the idea that the struggle
against this situation, the struggle against existing wrong and prevalent evil,
is also rooted in the universal law of eternal development. If all things
develop, if institutions of one kind give place to others, why should the
autocracy of the Prussian king or of the Russian tsar, the enrichment of an
insignificant minority at the expense of the vast majority, or the domination
of the bourgeoisie over the people, continue for ever? Hegel’s philosophy spoke
of the development of the mind and of ideas; it was idealistic. From the
development of the mind it deduced the development of nature, of man, and of
human, social relations.
While retaining Hegel’s idea of
the eternal process of development, Marx and Engels rejected the preconceived
idealist view; turning to life, they saw that it is not the development of mind
that explains the development of nature but that, on the contrary, the
explanation of mind must be derived from nature, from matter....
Unlike Hegel and the other
Hegelians, Marx and Engels were materialists. Regarding the world and humanity
materialistically, they perceived that just as material causes underlie all
natural phenomena, so the development of human society is conditioned by the
development of material forces, the productive forces. On the development of
the productive forces depend the relations into which men enter with one another in the production
of the things required for the satisfaction of human needs. And in these
relations lies the explanation of all the phenomena of social life, human
aspirations, ideas and laws.
The development of the productive
forces creates social relations based upon private property, but now we see
that this same development of the productive forces deprives the majority of
their property and concentrates it in the hands of an insignificant minority.
It abolishes property, the basis of the modern social order, it itself strives
towards the very aim which the socialists have set themselves.
All the socialists have to do is
to realise which social force, owing to its position in modern society, is
interested in bringing socialism about, and to impart to this force the
consciousness of its interests and of its historical task. This force is the
proletariat. Engels got to know the proletariat in England, in the centre of
English industry, Manchester, where he settled in 1842, entering the service of
a commercial firm of which his father was a shareholder. Here Engels not only
sat in the factory office but wandered about the slums in which the workers
were cooped up, and saw their poverty and misery with his own eyes. But he did
not confine himself to personal observations. He read all that had been
revealed before him about the condition of the British working class and
carefully studied all the official documents he could lay his hands on. The
fruit of these studies and observations was the book which appeared in 1845: The
Condition of the Working Class in England. We have already mentioned what
was the chief service rendered by Engels in writing The Condition of the
Working Class in England.
Even before Engels, many people
had described the sufferings of the proletariat and had pointed to the
necessity of helping it. Engels was the first to say that the proletariat is
not only a suffering class; that it is, in fact, the disgraceful economic
condition of the proletariat that drives it irresistibly forward and compels it
to fight for its ultimate emancipation. And the fighting proletariat will help
itself. The political movement of the working class will inevitably lead the
workers to realise that their only salvation lies in socialism. On the other
hand, socialism will become a force only when it becomes the aim of the
political struggle of the working class.
Such are the main ideas of
Engels’ book on the condition of the working class in England, ideas which have
now been adopted by all thinking and fighting proletarians, but which at that
time were entirely new. These ideas were set out in a book written in absorbing
style and filled with most authentic and shocking pictures of the misery of the
English proletariat. The book was a terrible indictment of capitalism and the
bourgeoisie and created a profound impression. Engels’ book began to be quoted
everywhere as presenting the best picture of the condition of the modern
proletariat. And, in fact, neither before 1845 nor after has there appeared so
striking and truthful a picture of the misery of the working class.
It was not until he came to
England that Engels became a socialist. In Manchester he established contacts
with people active in the English labour movement at the time and began to
write for English socialist publications. In 1844, while on his way back to
Germany, he became acquainted in Paris with Marx, with whom he had already
started to correspond. In Paris, under the influence of the French socialists
and French life, Marx had also become a socialist. Here the friends jointly
wrote a book entitled The Holy Family, or Critique of Critical Critique.
This book, which appeared a year before The Condition of the Working Class
in England, and the greater part of which was written by Marx, contains the
foundations of revolutionary materialist socialism, the main ideas of which we
have expounded above.
“The holy family” is a facetious
nickname for the Bauer brothers, the philosophers, and their followers. These
gentlemen preached a criticism which stood above all reality, above parties and
politics, which rejected all practical activity, and which only “critically”
contemplated the surrounding world and the events going on within it. These
gentlemen, the Bauers, looked down on the proletariat as an uncritical mass.
Marx and Engels vigorously opposed this absurd and harmful tendency. In the
name of a real, human person – the worker, trampled down by the ruling classes
and the state – they demanded, not contemplation, but a struggle for a better
order of society. They, of course, regarded the proletariat as the force that
is capable of waging this struggle and that is interested in it.
Even before the appearance of The
Holy Family, Engels had published in Marx’s and Ruge’s Deutsch-Franz\"osische
Jahrb\"ucher his “Critical Essays on Political Economy,” in
which he examined the principal phenomena of the contemporary economic order
from a socialist standpoint, regarding them as necessary consequences of the
rule of private property. Contact with Engels was undoubtedly a factor in
Marx’s decision to study political economy, the science in which his works have
produced a veritable revolution.
From 1845 to 1847 Engels lived in
Brussels and Paris, combining scientific work with practical activities among
the German workers in Brussels and Paris. Here Marx and Engels established
contact with the secret German Communist League, which commissioned them to
expound the main principles of the socialism they had worked out. Thus arose
the famous Manifesto of the Communist Party of Marx and Engels,
published in 1848. This little booklet is worth whole volumes: to this day its
spirit inspires and guides the entire organised and fighting proletariat of the
civilised world.
The revolution of 1848, which
broke out first in France and then spread to other West-European countries,
brought Marx and Engels back to their native country. Here, in Rhenish Prussia,
they took charge of the democratic Neue Rheinische Zeitung published in
Cologne. The two friends were the heart and soul of all
revolutionary-democratic aspirations in Rhenish Prussia. They fought to the
last ditch in defence of freedom and of the interests of the people against the
forces of reaction. The latter, as we know, gained the upper hand. The Neue
Rheinische Zeitung was suppressed. Marx, who during his exile had lost his
Prussian citizenship, was deported; Engels took part in the armed popular
uprising, fought for liberty in three battles, and after the defeat of the
rebels fled, via Switzerland, to London.
Marx also settled in London.
Engels soon became a clerk again, and then a shareholder, in the Manchester
commercial firm in which he had worked in the forties. Until 1870 he lived in Manchester,
while Marx lived in London, but this did not prevent their maintaining a most
lively interchange of ideas: they corresponded almost daily. In this
correspondence the two friends
exchanged views and discoveries and continued to collaborate in working out
scientific socialism. In 1870 Engels moved to London, and their joint
intellectual life, of the most strenuous nature, continued until 1883, when
Marx died. Its fruit was, on Marx’s side, Capital, the greatest work on
political economy of our age, and on Engels’ side, a number of works both large
and small. Marx worked on the analysis of the complex phenomena of capitalist
economy. Engels, in simply written works, often of a polemical character, dealt
with more general scientific problems and with diverse phenomena of the past
and present in the spirit of the materialist conception of history and Marx’s
economic theory. Of Engels’ works we shall mention: the polemical work against
D\"uhring (analysing highly important problems in the domain of philosophy,
natural science and the social sciences), The Origin of the Family, Private
Property and the State (translated into Russian, published in St.
Petersburg, 3rd ea., 1895), Ludwig Feuerbach (Russian translation and
notes by G. Plekhanov, Geneva, 1892), an article on the foreign policy of the
Russian Government (translated into Russian in the Geneva Social-Demokrat, Nos.
1 and 2), splendid articles on the housing question, and finally, two small but
very valuable articles on Russia’s economic development (Frederick Engels on
Russia, translated into Russian by Zasulich, Geneva, 1894). Marx died before he
could put the final touches to his vast work on Capital. The draft,
however, was already finished, and after the death of his friend, Engels
undertook the onerous task of preparing and publishing the second and the third
volumes of Capital. He published Volume II in 1885 and Volume III in
1894 (his death prevented the preparation of Volume IV). These two volumes
entailed a vast amount of labour. Adler, the Austrian Social-Democrat, has
rightly remarked that by publishing volumes II and III of Capital Engels
erected a majestic monument to the genius who had been his friend, a monument
on which, without intending it, he indelibly carved his own name. Indeed, these
two volumes of Capital are the work of two men: Marx and Engels. Old
legends contain various moving instances of friendship. The European
proletariat may say that its science was created by two scholars and fighters,
whose relationship to each other surpasses the most moving stories of the
ancients about human friendship. Engels always – and, on the whole, quite
justly – placed himself after Marx. “In Marx’s lifetime,” he wrote to an old
friend, “I played second fiddle.” His love for the living Marx, and his
reverence for the memory of the dead Marx were boundless. This stern fighter
and austere thinker possessed a deeply loving soul.
After the movement of 1848-49,
Marx and Engels in exile did not confine themselves to scientific research. In
1864 Marx founded the International Working Men’s Association and led this
society for a whole decade. Engels also took an active part in its affairs. The
work of the International Association, which, in accordance with Marx’s idea,
united proletarians of all countries, was of tremendous significance in the
development of the working-class movement. But even with the closing down of
the International Association in the seventies, the unifying role of Marx and
Engels did not cease. On the contrary, it may be said that their importance as
the spiritual leaders of the working-class movement grew continuously, because
the movement itself grew uninterruptedly. After the death of Marx, Engels
continued alone as the counsellor and leader of the European socialists. His advice
and directions were sought for equally by the German socialists, whose
strength, despite government persecution, grew rapidly and steadily, and by
representatives of backward countries, such as the Spaniards, Rumanians and
Russians, who were obliged to ponder and weigh their first steps. They all drew
on the rich store of knowledge and experience of Engels in his old age.
Marx and Engels, who both knew
Russian and read Russian books, took a lively interest in the country, followed
the Russian revolutionary movement with sympathy and maintained contact with
Russian revolutionaries. They both became socialists after being democrats, and
the democratic feeling of hatred for political despotism was exceedingly strong
in them. This direct political feeling, combined with a profound theoretical understanding of
the connection between political despotism and economic oppression, and also
their rich experience of life, made Marx and Engels uncommonly responsive
politically.
That is why the heroic struggle
of the handful of Russian revolutionaries against the mighty tsarist government
evoked a most sympathetic echo in the hearts of these tried revolutionaries. On
the other hand, the tendency, for the sake of illusory economic advantages, to
turn away from the most immediate and important task of the Russian socialists,
namely, the winning of political freedom, naturally appeared suspicious to them
and was even regarded by them as a direct betrayal of the great cause of the
social revolution.
“The emancipation of the workers
must be the act of the working class itself” – Marx and Engels constantly
taught. But in order to fight for its economic emancipation, the proletariat
must win itself certain political rights. Moreover, Marx and Engels clearly saw
that a political revolution in Russia would be of tremendous significance to
the West-European working-class movement as well.
Autocratic Russia had always been
a bulwark of European reaction in general. The extraordinarily favourable
international position enjoyed by Russia as a result of the war of 1870, which
for a long time sowed discord between Germany and France, of course only
enhanced the importance of autocratic Russia as a reactionary force. Only a
free Russia, a Russia that had no need either to oppress the Poles, Finns,
Germans, Armenians or any other small nations, or constantly to set France and
Germany at loggerheads, would enable modern Europe, rid of the burden of war,
to breathe freely, would weaken all the reactionary elements in Europe and
strengthen the European working class. That was why Engels ardently desired the
establishment of political freedom in Russia for the sake of the progress of
the working-class movement in the West as well. In him the Russian
revolutionaries have lost their best friend.
Let us always honour the memory
of Frederick Engels, a great fighter and teacher of the proletariat!
Notes by Lenin
Special thanks for all trubute articles and sources: Marxists Internet Archive
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