What a torch of reason ceased to burn,
What a heart has ceased to
beat!
On
August 5 (new style), 1895, Frederick Engels died in London. After his
friend Karl Marx (who died in 1883), Engels was the finest scholar and
teacher of the modern proletariat in the whole civilised world. From the
time that fate brought Karl Marx and Frederick Engels together, the two
friends devoted their life’s work to a common cause. And so to understand
what Frederick Engels has done for the proletariat, one must have a clear
idea of the significance of Marx’s teaching and work for the development
of the contemporary working-class movement. 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,[1]
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[5] his “Critical Essays
on Political
Economy,”
[6] 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,
[7] 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[8] 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),[2]
The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State
(translated into Russian, published in St. Petersburg, 3rd ea.,
1895),
[9]
Ludwig Feuerbach (Russian translation and notes by G. Plekhanov,
Geneva,
1892),
[10] an article on the foreign policy of the Russian Government
(translated into Russian in the Geneva
Social-Demokrat, Nos. 1
and
2),
[11] splendid articles on the housing
question,
[12] and finally, two small
but very valuable articles on Russia’s economic development
(Frederick
Engels on Russia, translated into Russian by Zasulich, Geneva,
1894).
[13]
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).
[14] 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.”[15] 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,
[16] 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.[17] 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
[1]
Marx and Engels frequently pointed out that in their intellectual
development they were much indebted to the great German philosophers,
particularly to Hegel. “Without German philosophy,” Engels says,
“scientific socialism would never have come into
being.”
[18]
—
Lenin
[2]
This is a wonderfully rich and instructive
book.
[19] Unfortunately, only a
small portion of it, containing a historical outline of the development of
socialism, has been translated into Russian
(The Development of
Scientific Socialism, 2nd ea., Geneva,
1892).
[20]
—
Lenin
A
massive public meeting was organized by the workers’ organisations in
the industrial area of Gurgaon-Manesar, on 25th July, to mark the 10th
anniversary of the barbaric state attack against the struggle of the
workers of Honda Motorcycle and Scooters, Manesar.
Activists
of AITUC, CITU, AIUTUC, Hind Mazdoor Sabha, Mazdoor Ekta Committee,
INTUC, BMS, and ANTUI participated militantly in the meeting.
This
instance and other incidents of state terror before and after this, is
linked to the course of privatization, liberalization and globalization.
Earlier, the state had unleashed terror on the workers of Maruti Udyog
and RICO in Gurgaon. Other incidents following these were the attacks on
the workers of Orient Craft and Maruti Suzuki (Manesar). There are
countless such incidents of state terror across the whole country. The
State administration, police, courts, etc. become active to crush the
struggles of the workers the moment they come out to fight for their
rights.
The
speakers expressed their view that be it the state government or
central government, all are eager to be the first to take anti-workers
steps. They are stepping up attacks on the right to form trade unions.
it is the policy of the government to dismiss, terrorise, attack workers
through hired goondas, file fraudulent cased against them, and carry
out such like acts against workers who have formed their unions. Our
experience shows that whether the government is of the Congress or BJP
or any other party, their main aim is to protect the interest of the
bourgeoisie and work against the interests of the workers and peasants.
Lastly, the speakers gave a call to make the 2 September strike
successful.
