The Classics,
Beginnings, Part 1b
Frederick Engels, 1841
Engels and the Labour
Movements
The Marxists
Internet Library’s Encyclopedia’s entry on Rheinische Zeitung starts thus:
“The Rheinische Zeitung für Politik, Handel und
Gewerbe was founded on January 1 1842. It was, generally, a
pro-democracy reformist publication
of the Rhine's bourgeois opposition to Prussian absolutism. [Dr] Karl Marx
wrote his first news article for it on May 5 1842 [his 24th birthday].
By October 1842, he was named editor.
“On November 16 1842, en
route to England, Engels paid a visit to the Rheinische Zeitung offices –
where he first met the new editor. Engels' time in England would result in a
series of articles for the RZ – and those would, in turn, lead to his famous
book, The Condition of the Working Class in England.”
The Rheinische
Zeitung was Karl Marx’s first, and
probably his only ever regular employer, but the record shows that Frederick
Engels had an article published in the Rheinische Zeitung even before
Marx arrived there. Therefore they must have known each others’ writing even
before they met in 1842.
The two teamed up
for good in Paris, in August 1844, by which time Marx was already in exile from
his native Germany. The question in this first part of our “Classics” course
remains: When did these two become “Marxists”? And the answer is that the
crucial transition took place through their joint writing of “The German Ideology”,
from 1845 onwards.
A related question
could be: What did each of them separately bring to “Marxism”? The text today
can serve to show that Frederick Engels brought with him a strong sense of the historical
destiny of the working class. It is the chapter on “Labour Movements” from
Engels’ “The Condition of the Working Class in England” (download linked
below).
It seems
that by 1844 when they re-met in Paris, these two young men, Engels at 24 and
Marx at 26 years old, had both already formed the unusual opinion that the
working class was destined to be the gravedigger of the capitalist bourgeoisie.
For all of
the historical materialism, and the later discovery of the Marx’s theory of
surplus value, yet without a candidate for the role of free-willing revolutionary
agent and Subject of History there was never going to be a communist movement.
Marx and Engels agreed that the revolutionary Subject was bound to be the
working proletariat, and they never subsequently wavered from that view.
Engels’
research into the working class in (at the time) its most advanced condition in
the world was quite crucial for both of their ability to take the partisan view
in favour of the working class that they did take. It gave them the empirical,
abstract factual knowledge that allowed them to concretise their revolutionary
project with confidence. Hence this book of Engels’ book, his first, is
certainly a classic. As he put it in our downloadable chapter:
“These strikes… are the strongest proof that
the decisive battle between bourgeoisie and proletariat is approaching. They
are the military school of the working-men in which they prepare themselves for
the great struggle which cannot be avoided…”
It is a classic
in at least two other ways. It is a classic example of the well-organised marshalling
and synthesis of library research, interview research and personal observation.
It is also a classic of urban social theory or urbanism, of which it is a
pioneering example.
Image: Frederick Engels in his military year, 1841.
Please download
and read some of this text:
Further
reading:
Theses on Feuerbach, 1845, Marx
(789 words)
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