Date: Sat, 1 Feb 1997 19:35:39 +0100
From: Hugh-AT-pseud.pseud
Subject: Re: M-INTRO: Frederick Engels


Pooh writes:

>        Excuse me for being uninformed, but I have a rather basic
>question.  In the book Das Kapital credit is given to Karl Marx and
>Frederick Engels for writing it.  I have never heard of Frederick Engles
>and have yet to figure out what his contribution to the book might be.
>If he is responsible for many of the principles in the book how come he
>is so overlook in comparison to Marx?


Suggestion: Get hold of a copy of Selected Correspondence between Marx and
Engels. This'll give you some idea of how closely they worked together from
about 1844 till Marx's death in 1883. That's 40 years.


As for who did what, the main thrust of philosophical inquiry and
investigation was Marx's, but Engels was no slouch on his own account, as
his first big work, The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844
shows. Their ideas were developed

a) on the foundation of the independent positions they had reached in the
European and German ferment of the period of late Hegelianism and pre-1848
Revolutionary turmoil in the early 1840s

b) (and never forget this) in constant discussion with each other and
political and philosophical allies (and controversy with enemies), and in
constant battles with the forces of reaction. For instance, Marx was thrown
out of Belgium with one day's notice when his wife was nine months pregnant
in the late 1840s, and they'd already been hounded out of Prussia and
France. From 1844 on, Marx and Engels were leading figures in political and
philosophical movements involving the best minds of the day. And they
weren't just editors and leaders of opinion. Engels was active in the
military struggle for the Imperial Constitution during the 1848 Revolution
(and wrote a book about it).

c) as far as Capital is concerned, Marx was undisputably the sole author
and must be given all credit for the ideas in it and their development.
However, without Engels, the book would never have appeared in the form in
which it did, and the socialist movement and humanity would be the poorer
for it.

In the first place,  Engels provided both material support (money) and
intellectual support (testing out ideas and providing the kind of
information and insight that could only come from first-hand knowledge --
Engels was running a cotton-mill most of the time, in Manchester, and knew
the business inside out, so he was tremendously helpful on questions like
turnover etc).

In the second place, volumes 2 and 3 of Capital wouldn't have appeared the
way they did. When Marx died, only vol 1 had been published after being
prepared for the press by Marx himself. Vols 2 and 3 were edited and
prepared by Engels (though a lot of 2 had been thoroughly gone through by
Marx himself), and it took him the best part of the rest of his life to do
the job. His whole concern was to provide the public (most especially the
socialist movement) with *Marx's* ideas in as authentic a form as possible.

The extent of his success can be judged by the failure of Karl Kautsky at a
similar task. The butchery of Grundrisse performed by Kautsky when he
brought the book out edited from the manuscripts bears no resemblance to
Engels's achievement with Capital 2 and 3.

It took serious, state-funded, well-libraried professional institutions
(Institutes of Marxism-Leninism in the GDR and the Soviet Union) decades to
publish Theories of Surplus Value, the remaining section of Capital, in
three volumes.


It is commonplace these days to badmouth Engels as a vulgar nonentity, a
kind of Sancho Panza to Marx's Don Quixote, a proto-Stalinist hack etc.
This is libel. It would have been nonsense for either of them to duplicate
the work the other was doing, and most of the time they decided together
what would be the best division of their labours. Engels acknowledged the
superior genius of Marx in respect to his capacity for original theoretical
work and for the power of his intellect and method in developing and
demonstrating his propositions, and willingly helped him accomplish his
life's work to the best of his ability in the knowledge that this was the
best contribution the two of them could make together to the movement for
the revolutionary emancipation of the working class from the chains of
capitalism and bourgeois society.

Engels's own work on social and scientific history and theory is brilliant
in its own right (The Origin of the Family, and The Dialectics of Nature,
to take two examples of many).

The clinching argument as regards the inseparability of the two must be
their collaboration in the great fanfare of Communism published in 1848,
The Communist Manifesto.


So, don't look for any "hidden" Engels in Capital. Partly his direct
contributions are openly acknowledged as such, and partly he is in every
line -- as is Marx's wife Jenny, by the way, thanks to her incessant
labours to keep the family running, fob off creditors and write out reams
of manuscript turning Marx's almost illegible scrawl into legible pages.

There's a sight more to add, but this'll do for now.


Cheers,

Hugh




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