Friedrich Engels

Friedrich Engels (* 28 November 1820 in Barmen (now a district of Wuppertal) in the Prussian province of Jülich-Kleve-Berg; † 5 August 1895 in London) was a German philosopher, social theorist, historian, journalist and communist revolutionary. He was also a successful entrepreneur in the textile industry. Together with Karl Marx, he developed the social and economic theory now known as Marxism.

Engels had already been working on the critique of political economy before Marx. The outlines of a critique of national economy, published in 1844, became the starting point for Marx's own work. As early as 1845, the joint paper Die heilige Familie (The Holy Family) appeared, with which Engels and Marx began to formulate their understanding of theory. In 1848 they wrote the Communist Manifesto on behalf of the League of Communists.

With his influential study The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845), Engels was one of the pioneers of empirical sociology. His publishing activity contributed significantly to the spread of Marxism. In addition to the Anti-Dühring (1877), the short The Development of Socialism from Utopia to Science (1880) was particularly well received. After Marx's death in 1883, Engels edited the second and third volumes of his magnum opus, Das Kapital. Critique of Political Economy, respectively. He also continued to work on the theoretical elaboration of their shared worldview, including The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State (1884) and Ludwig Feuerbach and the Exit of Classical German Philosophy (1888).

In addition to his economic and philosophical studies, Engels was also intensively concerned with the development of the natural sciences and mathematics, thus laying the foundation for the later dialectical materialism.

He clearly foresaw the danger of a world war in Europe, and as late as 1893, in a series of articles in the Vorwärts, he attempted to give an impetus to the reduction of standing armies.

Basic theoretical concepts

Although Engels put most of his theoretical and practical activity at the service of Marx, he opened up areas of Marxist theory to which Marx paid little attention. Especially in the classical disciplines of philosophy such as epistemology, ontology and anthropology, and the theory of history, Engels is considered an independent thinker.

Philosophy

Starting point

Unlike Marx, Engels did not develop his philosophical views until later, when he became intensively involved with the natural sciences - especially with regard to the problem of dialectics. At this point, Engels was faced with the task of defending dialectics against Dühring's attacks and, at the same time, setting forth the principles of a new philosophy that differed both from the previous idealism and from the vulgar materialism that was dominant at the time. In all his fundamental discussions, Hegel was the formative figure to whom he oriented his reflections.

The dialectic

Engels understands dialectics not only as a historical, but above all as an ontological and epistemological principle. It is the way of movement and development of all that exists and at the same time the method of thinking. Engels develops three dialectical laws:

1. "the law of the interpenetration of opposites"
2. "the law of turning quantity into quality and vice versa"
3. "the law of the negation of the negation"

For Engels, matter is essentially in motion. Motion is contradictory, which already follows from the fact that a moving body "is in one and the same moment of time at one place and at the same time at another place, at one and the same place and not at it". On the basis of Engels' presupposition that everything real is material and everything material is essentially moved, it can then be said that contradictions are contained in everything real, or that opposites necessarily interpenetrate in reality.

The law of the change of quantity into quality states "that in nature [...] qualitative changes can only take place through quantitative addition or quantitative withdrawal of matter or movement".

The law of the negation of negation is, according to Engels, a general "law of the development of nature, of history, and of thought," which is presented by him only by means of examples. Thus the plant which arises from a grain of barley is its negation, the numerous grains which the plant produces are the result of the negation of negation.

Engels contrasts the dialectical with the metaphysical way of thinking. The latter works with "fixed" categories, whereas the dialectical - among whose representatives he counts Aristotle and above all Hegel - works with "fluid" categories. In Engels' view, the "fixed opposites of reason and consequence, cause and effect, identity and difference, appearance and essence" of the metaphysical mode of thought are untenable, since in each case one pole is already "present in nuce" in the other and "at a certain point one pole changes into the other". The metaphysical mode of thinking is the "ordinary" one, which both everyday thinking and science need in order to orient themselves in the world, and it "had a great historical justification in its time". It is a necessary stage of everyday and scientific knowledge, which may not simply be skipped in favour of dialectics, but is suspended in it as a moment.

Cognition and logic

In the Anti-Dühring Engels develops his theory of image in principles. Consciousness and thought are for him the "products of the human brain"; man is "himself a product of nature". The "logical schemes" refer to "forms of thought," which are themselves "forms of being, of the external world." Engels, like Hegel, denies the thesis of the "thing-in-itself"; for this adds "not a word to our scientific knowledge, for if we cannot concern ourselves with things, they do not exist for us." Knowledge is a "historical product, which at different times assumes very different forms and thus very different contents. The science of thinking is therefore, like every other, a historical science, the science of the historical development of human thinking".

Engels joins Hegel's critique of the formal-logical principle of identity. Natural science had proven that identity also included diversity. Also in the sense of Hegel, Engels interprets judgment as the unity of the general and the particular.

Ideology, morality and religion

Ideology is for Engels "a process which is carried out with consciousness by the so-called thinker, but with a false consciousness. The actual driving forces that move it remain unknown to him". To the ideologue his ideas, "because mediated by thought, also appear in the last instance to be founded in thought." These driving forces include both obscure subjective interests and the objective economic constellation. Engels, on the other hand, also stresses the "historical effectiveness" of ideology. To "deny it independent historical development" does not mean that it cannot "once set into the world by other, finally economic causes, now also react" and have an effect on its surroundings, indeed its own cause.

The development of an ideology follows a certain logic of its own, it develops "in connection with the given material of ideas". Thus, "the philosophy of every epoch has as its prerequisite a certain material of thought which has been handed down to it by its predecessors and from which it proceeds". Nevertheless, economic influences are decisive in determining "the kind of modification and further development of the given material of thought. They usually do not have a direct effect, but are mediated, since "it is the political, juridical, and moral reflexes that exert the greatest effect on philosophy.

Typical examples of ideologies for Engels are morality and religion. Morality was "always a class morality; either it justified the rule and the interests of the ruling class, or else, as soon as the oppressed class became powerful enough, it represented the indignation against this rule and the future interests of the oppressed". The origin of the ideological form of religion is man's powerlessness in the face of nature. The low level of control over nature and the dependence on unknown natural events caused religious-magical practices to compensate for the economic-technical and scientific underdevelopment: "These various false ideas about nature, about the nature of man himself, about spirits, magic powers, etc., are mostly based only on negative economics; the low economic development of the prehistoric period has as a supplement, but in places also as a condition and even cause, the false ideas about nature".

History

Engels shared with Marx the basic assumption that the history of mankind was a "history of class struggles" and that its course was essentially determined by economic conditions. In the Anti-Dühring and in his late writings, Engels further elaborated the philosophical conceptions of history.

Engel's conception of history is characterized by a fundamental optimism. Like Hegel, he understands the history of mankind not as a "desolate tangle of senseless violence", but as a process of development whose inner regularity can be perceived through all apparent coincidences.

Although for him history is primarily a work of human beings - "we make our own history" -, "the really active motives of the historically acting human beings are by no means the ultimate causes of historical events". Rather, "behind these motives there are other moving powers [...] that need to be investigated". For Engels, the connection between the freedom of the individual and the lawfulness of the course of history can only be grasped dialectically. The "ends of actions" are willed, but not "the results which really follow from the actions." Historical events thus appear "as governed by chance," but are "governed by inner hidden laws." In order for these to become effective, however, a certain degree of maturity must first have been reached in historical development: 'history has its own course, and however dialectically this may ultimately proceed, dialectics must often wait long enough for history'.

The decisive condition for historical development is represented by economic relations - the way in which people produce their subsistence and exchange their products. They and the social division that follows from them form the basis "for the political and intellectual history" of every historical epoch.

The economic factors

Especially in his later work, Engels developed a comprehensive concept of the determining "economic factors". In his letter to Borgius, he counts among them "the entire technique of production and transport", geography, "tradition" and also "race". They form the basis of the course of history, but they are not the only determining factors. The "various moments of the superstructure - political forms of the class struggle and its results - constitutions, established after a battle has been won by the victorious class, etc. - legal forms, and now even the reflexes of all these real struggles in the brains of the participants, political, juridical, philosophical theories, religious views and their further development into systems of dogma, also exert their influence on the course of historical struggles and in many cases predominantly determine their form."

For Engels, economic laws are not eternal natural laws of history, but historical laws that arise and pass away. Insofar as they express "purely bourgeois relations," they are no older than modern bourgeois society. They retain their validity only as long as this society, based on class domination and class exploitation, remains alive. Engels also comments in this context on Malthus's law of population. It is only a law for bourgeois society and proves that this has become a barrier to development and must therefore fall.

Primitive communism and civilization

An essential element of Engels's late work was his engagement with prehistory, the significance of which first became clear to him through his reading of the works of Haxthausen, Maurer, and Morgan.

For Engels, all history proceeds from the original community of the landed property of the tribal and village communities. He raves about the gentile society and its "wonderful constitution in all its childishness and simplicity." Like Rousseau, he contrasts the present with two golden ages - at the beginning and end of history.

Engels describes the age preceding all division of labour and foundation of states vividly in romantic language:

But the original gentile communities were doomed because they did not go beyond the tribe; "what was outside the tribe was outside the law." They could exist only so long as production remained wholly undeveloped. Despite this insight, Engels is scathingly critical of the civilizational development that set in thereafter:

State

For Engels, the state is a historical product. Engels explains this with the example of the emergence of the Athenian state. This had developed out of the originally communist gentile society. With the inheritance of wealth to the children, the accumulation of wealth was favoured in certain families, which thus gained a strong position of power vis-à-vis the gens. Finally, to protect family privileges, the state was "invented." It was supposed to "secure against the communist traditions of the gentile order" the newly created private property of individuals, to elevate it to the "highest purpose of all human community" and to "stamp it with the stamp of general social recognition." In so doing, it perpetuated the "division of society into classes" and "the right of the possessing class to exploit the non-propertied and the domination of the latter over the latter."

The form of state power is conditioned by the form of the communities at the time when state power becomes necessary. Where, for instance, as among the "Aryan peoples of Asia and among the Russians", "private property in the soil has not yet been formed, state power appears as despotism". In the Roman lands conquered by the Germans, on the other hand, the individual portions of land have already been transformed into "allod" - into the "free property of the owners, subject only to the common obligations of the market.

The state arose "from the need to keep class antagonisms in check". But since at the same time it "arose in the midst of the conflict of these classes, it is as a rule the state of the most powerful economic class". The latter, through its help, also becomes the politically ruling class, which "thus acquires new means for the suppression and exploitation of the oppressed class." Exceptionally, situations may also arise where "the struggling classes keep the balance so close to each other that the state power, as an apparent mediator, momentarily acquires a certain independence vis-à-vis both." Engels mentions as examples "the absolute monarchy of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries" - which mediated between the nobility and the bourgeoisie - and the "Bonapartism of the first and especially of the second French empire, which pitted the proletariat against the bourgeoisie and the bourgeoisie against the proletariat".

Engels, however, believes that the working class still needs the state for the time being in order to overcome the power of the bourgeoisie and to be able to begin the organization of the new society. With the disappearance of society divided into classes, the state then loses its very raison d'être. It renders itself superfluous when it is no longer the representative of a privileged class but of the whole of society. "Government over persons is replaced by the administration of things and the management of production processes. The state is not 'abolished', it dies off".

Nature

Whereas Hegel had regarded nature as a mere "enunciation" of the idea, incapable of any development in time, for Engels nature is not merely the logical precursor of spirit. Rather, the history of mankind is for him "different from the history of nature only as a process of development of self-conscious organisms." Inspired by Darwin's theory of descent, Engels conceives of nature as a historical phenomenon.

History of science and philosophy

Engels looks at the history of science primarily in terms of the development of the understanding of nature and dialectical thinking.

For the "natural materialism" of the Ionian natural philosophers, the unity and objectivity of nature was a matter of course. Because one had not yet advanced to the analysis of nature, it was still regarded as a whole. For them, the "overall context of natural phenomena" was the "result of direct observation", which revealed the "inadequacy of Greek philosophy".

With the victory of Christianity, the cosmological-dialectical traditions of the Greeks were lost. Engels assesses the subsequent period of the Middle Ages largely negatively - as a "dark night" in which the sciences would not have developed further. Nevertheless, he emphasizes the "great progress of the Middle Ages" - especially with regard to the "expansion of the European cultural area" and the emergence of the "viable great nations".

The Renaissance was the first great epoch that was based entirely on experience. The earth was "actually only now discovered and the foundation laid for later world trade and for the transition of craftsmanship to manufacture, which again formed the starting point for modern great industry. The spiritual dictatorship of the church was broken." However, the Renaissance was primarily concerned with the mechanics of "earthly and heavenly bodies" and the "perfection of mathematical methods." This development was "brought to a certain conclusion" with Newton and Linné. The special characteristic of this epoch was that it took - contrary to the developmental approach of the Greeks - the "absolute immutability of nature" as its starting point.

Engels sees the dissolution of this static understanding of nature only beginning with Kant's General Natural History and Theory of the Heavens (1755). Kant had eliminated the "question of the first impulse" and presented the earth and the whole solar system "as something that has become in the course of time". This work of Kant, however, was ignored by natural science until the appearance of Laplace and Herschel, and it was left to the newly emerging geological sciences to prove that "nature is not, but becomes and passes away."

The rigid system of an "unchangeably fixed organic nature" was finally dissolved by Darwin, who liquefied the concept of species. A new view of nature was thus completed in its basic features: "Everything rigid was dissolved, everything fixed evaporated, everything special that was considered eternal became transient, the whole of nature was proven to be moving in eternal flux and circulation".

With Hegel, the dissolution of the rigidity of the image of nature was followed by that of the concepts. Engels sees the significance of the epoch from Kant to Hegel in the rebirth of dialectics. Kant appears to him to have been superseded by Hegel. In particular, Engels opposes the undialectical Kant interpretation of Neo-Kantianism and a philosophy that sees the essential in epistemology. He calls agnosticism a "disguised materialism".

Engels regarded Hegel's system as "the last, most complete form of philosophy"; with it "the whole of philosophy failed". What remained, however, was "the dialectical way of thinking and the conception of the natural, historical, and intellectual world as one that moves without end, transforms itself, is conceived in a constant process of becoming and passing away. Not only philosophy, but all the sciences were now called upon to demonstrate the laws of motion of this constant process of transformation in their particular field".

Economics

Engels criticised classical national economics - as represented by Adam Smith, David Ricardo and John Stuart Mill, among others - as an "enrichment science", since it was based on private property. Its representatives were not prepared to examine the "contradictions" of existing economic conditions. The liberal economic system was to be rejected above all because of the principle of competition on which it was based, which amounted to the "right of the strongest". The principle of competition divides people by creating a constant conflict between buyers and sellers, and causes trade to become a "legal fraud". It leads to the formation of monopolies and induces speculation. Engels criticizes this - in reference to Kant's categorical imperative - as the "culmination of immorality" because through it "history and in it humanity is reduced to a means." In the final analysis, according to Engels, competition has led to the loss of human freedom: "Competition has permeated all our living conditions and completed the mutual bondage in which men now hold themselves."

For Engels, in the capitalist economy "all natural and reasonable relations are turned upside down". Only with the abolition of private property are natural relations restored and a "state worthy of humanity" created. Engels envisages a planned economy in which it is the task of the community to calculate "what it can produce with the means at its disposal and, according to the ratio of this productive power to the mass of producers, to determine to what extent it must increase or slacken production, to what extent it must indulge in luxury or restrict it".

Memorials and honors

In numerous cities around the world (e.g. Berlin, Wuppertal, Vienna, Moscow) there are streets, squares, buildings, statues and the like named after Engels. Especially in places where Engels stayed for a longer time, there are references to him. In Wuppertal-Unterbarmen is the historical center, which includes the estate of the Engels family of industrialists, including the Engels House and the Engels Garden with the Engels Monument, inaugurated in 2014. In London-Primrose Hill there is a plaque on a house commemorating the stay of Frederick Engels and his family. In Salford, there is an Engels House. In Manchester there is a commemorative plaque on the site where Engels once officially resided from April 1858 to May 1864: "Friedrich Engels (1820-1895) social philosopher and writer, lived at No. 6 Thorncliffe Grove, which once stood on this site".

Especially under real socialism, Engels was commemorated in many ways. In Berlin, there is a statue of Friedrich Engels on the Marx-Engels-Forum, which was erected in 1986 by the then GDR leadership in the course of Berlin's 750th anniversary. Likewise, in the GDR, he was depicted on the 50-mark note. The city of Engels in Russia was named after him. There is also a statue of Engels in Dresden, where it was erected in front of a section of the Berlin Wall after the fall of communism. The NationalPeople's Army of the GDR named its guard regiment, used for representative purposes, after Friedrich Engels in 1970; with central functions stationed in the Friedrich Engels Barracks in Berlin, in a former artillery barracks, in whose predecessor building "Garde-Artillerie-Kaserne" Engels himself served. From 1959 to 1969, the coastal protection ship Friedrich Engels, a frigate of the Soviet Riga class, belonged to the People's Navy of the GDR. The military academy of the NVA was also named after Friedrich Engels. In 1920, the Russian destroyer Woiskovoi (Voiskovoy/Войсковой), built in 1904, was renamed Friedrich Engels (Фридрих Энгельс) and deployed to the Caspian Sea as part of the Russian Civil War. However, three years later it was already renamed Markin. In exchange, the Orfei-class destroyer Desna (Десна) was given the name Engels.

The German Federal Post Office honoured Engels in 1970 with a special stamp on the occasion of his 150th birthday.


Monument to Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Marx-Engels-Forum in Berlin-Mitte.


50 mark banknote