A new biography looks at the life and work of Frederick Engels, whose brilliant survey of the condition of the English working class was the prelude to joint authorship of the Communist Manifesto…
Western philosophy’s ‘greatest intellectual partnership’
WORKERS, JULY 2009 ISSUE
The frock-coated communist: the revolutionary life of Friedrich Engels, by Tristram Hunt, hardback, 443 pages, ISBN 978-0-712-99852-8, Allen Lane, 2009, £25.
Tristram Hunt, a lecturer in British history at Queen Mary, University of London, has written a fine biography of Frederick Engels, who was Karl Marx’s co-author on the Communist Manifesto in 1848. He shows how Engels developed by working through Shelley’s poetry, Strauss’ Life of Jesus, Georg Hegel’s Philosophy of History, Ludwig Feuerbach’s critique of Christianity, and Thomas Carlyle’s two volumes on Cromwell.
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| Frederick Engels, one of the founders of Communism |
Hunt notes how Engels was both a patriot and an internationalist. Engels reported capitalism’s human costs, first in Barmen in Prussia, then in Manchester, in the brilliant Condition of the Working Class in England, written in 1844, where Engels wrote, “I accuse the English bourgeoisie before the entire world of murder, robbery and other crimes on a massive scale.”
Apart from his work on the Communist Manifesto, Engels made a huge contribution to Das Kapital, “the foundation text of scientific socialism and one of the classics of Western political thought”. His work with Marx was “Western philosophy’s greatest intellectual partnership”.
Engels was a great enthusiast for science. In one of his letters he notes: “Darwin, by the way, whom I’m reading just now, is absolutely splendid.” As a materialist and atheist, he knew that matter existed independently of, and before, any consciousness.
Hunt notes that “(Engels) always believed in a workers’ party led by the working class itself (rather than intellectuals and professional revolutionaries)”. He worked in the General Council of the First International and with Britain’s trade unions.
Against colonialism
Engels opposed colonialism and supported the Indian and Chinese peoples’ wars for independence. Hunt writes, “When it came to the raw politics of race, Engels was always on the right side.” He exposed the ruling classes’ exploitation of the colonies’ raw materials, cheap labour and unprotected markets. In 1882 he forecast, “I would consider a European war to be a disaster; this time it would prove frightfully serious and inflame chauvinism everywhere for years to come.”
Hunt concludes, “He remained that restless, inquisitive, productive and passionate architect of scientific socialism who first emerged in the 1840s. ... His critique speaks down the ages”. For example, his insight that “the modern state was merely a front for bourgeois class interests”, the growth of finance capital, the instability of capitalism, its inevitable crises and its absolute decline.