A World to Win

by Sven-Eric Liedman

  This encounter with economics was brought about by a single person: Friedrich Engels.

  Friedrich Engels

  The names of Marx and Engels are often mentioned in the same breath. Marx always comes first; he is the central figure who, in the heroic pictures of the Soviet era, is often portrayed sitting while Engels stood somewhat discreetly beside him. This was also the way they were immortalized in bronze in the mid-1980s, in what was called the Marx-Engels-Platz in Berlin during the GDR era. (Today, the location is called Schloss-Platz; the statues have been moved.)

  In Soviet and East German literature, Marx and Engels are often portrayed as some kind of kindred souls, agreed in all essentials and fighting for the same thing: the victory of communism. They are also portrayed this way in the authoritative foreword to the entire Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe with which the Institute for Marxism–Leninism in the Soviet Union and the GDR introduced the first volume in 1975. Their names are repeated like a mantra: ‘Marx and Engels … Marx and Engels …’ They have a central place in the history of revolutionary thought, it is said; they were giants of learning and at the same time champions of a new society, they vanquished idealism in philosophy and created a firm materialist basis for dialectical thought, and so on.

  At the same time, there were authors outside the Soviet sphere of influence who painted the opposite picture. Engels never understood Marx’s theory, but interpreted it in an absurd direction. But there are also more well-balanced portrayals such as Tristram Hunt’s 2009 book Marx’s General: The Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels. The only major problem with it is that Hunt exaggerates Engels’s importance for Marx.28 We will illustrate the relationship between Marx and Engels in more detail in a later chapter. For now, only their initial meeting and the start of their collaboration is of concern.

  Even in outward appearance, they both were different. Marx was so dark-skinned that his children called him ‘the Moor’; on the other hand, Engels was blond – a Nordic type, in fact – tall, slim, and vigorous, and moreover a skilled fencer, rider, and dancer. Marx was shorter, without being short, had an enormous head and a powerful chest with stouter legs.

  Both had grown up in affluent homes. Engels’s father, also named Friedrich, was a well-to-do partner in the firm Ermen & Engels, which he ran with the Dutch brothers Godfrey and Peter Ermen. The elder Friedrich was a brilliant entrepreneur who focused his activities on cotton, and opened factories both at home in Barmen and in Salford, the junior twin city of Manchester.

  The Engels family was strictly religious – Lutherans with a Pietistic orientation. Fervent piety was to be united with strict fulfilment of duty. Earthly successes meant that God was on your side. Life was a grimly serious business.

  But the younger Friedrich did not want to follow in these footsteps. He developed his own interests and an independent will. He did remarkably well in high school, but before finishing, his father decided he had learned enough of dry theory. It was now time he learned what it meant to work in commerce and industry. He had to acquaint himself with the secrets of cotton manufacture and travel around England with his father. After that, he was sent to the office in Bremen to get some idea of international business. The younger Friedrich was already open to new, radical ideas, and it only got worse when he chose to train as an artillery officer in Berlin. There he learned military tactics and strategy, something he took pleasure in throughout his life. He became a military expert, earning the nickname ‘The General’ from Jenny and Karl’s youngest daughter Eleanor. The name stuck.

  But what is more important is that in Berlin, he joined the circle of Young Hegelians, as Marx had done earlier. We have already encountered Engels as a Young Hegelian of the radical type. Society had to be changed – not through business or industry, but through thought.

  Marx and Engels met for the first time in 1842. Engels had finished his military training, and on the way home he visited the editors of Rheinische Zeitung. Under the name Friedrich Oswald, he had already published a number of minor essays, including on Schelling’s lectures in Berlin. Now he was ready for new journalistic adventures.

  The encounter, as Engels would remember long afterwards, was a chilly one.29 Marx still had a bit of the Young Hegelian notions but was already on the way towards new horizons. Engels still had the glow of the proselytizer. It was Moses Hess whom Engels hit it off with instead. Everything indicates that it was Hess who got Engels interested in communism, and soon to see himself as a communist, too.

  But now Engels would use the situation to his advantage. His father sent him to Manchester to work for the firm. It was, to say the least, an instructive period. Apart from his work, Engels managed to both carry out intensive studies in the new economic theories, and survey the social relations that industrialism brought in its train.

  The Manchester he came to was a remarkable city. It was ‘the cradle of the Industrial Revolution’, as it is called in the tourist brochures. During the 1830s and 1840s, it was an exceptionally creative environment. The famous Manchester liberals who created modern laissez-faire liberalism dominated its Chamber of Commerce; Manchester workers created Chartism, the first workers’ movement; consumer cooperatives began in nearby Rochester; Engels himself, though also others in Manchester, took the first steps in empirical sociology; and in Salford, the brewer James Prescott Joule was one of the first to discover the principle of energy.30 It was another kind of creativity than that of Vienna at the turn of the previous century; more down-to-earth but just as fateful.

  The first result of Engels’s diligent studies was an article he sent to Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, Marx’s and Ruge’s journal. The article enjoyed great success; it influenced Marx in particular. We must examine it in a little more detail.

  The article was called ‘Umrisse zu einer Kritik der National-ökonomie’. It is only an Umrisse, a few pen strokes, or – as the English translation goes – ‘An Outline of a Critique of Political Economy’. The draft is approximately twenty-five pages, and constitutes at one and the same time a presentation of and a furious reckoning with modern economic theory as created by Adam Smith and further developed by David Ricardo, John Ramsay McCulloch, and others.

  It is worth noting that Engels calls the theory ‘the liberal one’. The word ‘liberal’ as a designation of a political concept was rather new at the time; it showed up in 1812. Even later, it became the usual characterization of the economic doctrine that Adam Smith laid the foundation for.31 For Smith himself, ‘liberal’ meant generous, and nothing more.

  In the same breath, Engels condemned liberal theory as hypocritical. He said that Smith had the same role in economics as Luther had in Christianity.32 Before Smith, mercantilism ruled with Catholic straightforwardness, but Luther – alias Smith – introduced hypocrisy. Smith proved that there was human feeling in the new economic system, and that trade created peace and friendship among the nations. At the same time, he knew very well that the system enslaved people and drove them into the deepest poverty. Riches and poverty lived side by side; since the days of Smith it had only got worse. Families were torn apart by the factories. Workers’ children began work at the age of nine, transforming the family home into only a place for room and board. But Smith’s followers had become even more hypocritical than their master.

  The comparison between economic theories and the development of Christianity contained much of Engels’s own personal struggle for liberation. In his house, a strict, introspective Pietist Protestantism reigned. In Engels’s eyes, Pietism was the counterpart to Smith’s followers like David Ricardo or John R. McCulloch, who had worsened his hypocritical stance.

  The reality that the economists’ theories dealt with was the daily bread of the Engels family. Even Marx called Smith the Luther of the economists in a text he would soon write. But for him, the comparison did not have the same emotional charge at all.

  In the continuation of his ‘Outline’, Engels discusses the theory of value that stands at the
centre for Smith and his followers. In the same breath, he accuses them of ignoring the significance of technological inventions. The forces of production grew through their science and their discoveries, he emphasized. (He still speaks of ‘forces of production’ (Produktionskräfte) and not, as later, of ‘productive forces’ (Produktivkräfte), but the origin is of course Smith’s ‘productive powers’.)33

  He emphasizes that it is work itself that was the original capital, but now a definite ‘Entzweiung’ (‘dichotomy’ according to the English translation) had emerged between capital and labour that had not only separated them but had also turned them into the antitheses of each other.34 The word Entfremdung (‘estrangement’ or ‘alienation’) is conspicuous in its absence despite the fact that it is a word Engels had certainly met in Hegel as well as in Feuerbach and Hess. The ‘Outline’ had no place for more philosophical vocabulary. In fact, it is only when Engels, in the spirit of Feuerbach, speaks about the Gattungsbewusstsein of humanity (its ‘species consciousness’) that he comes close to philosophy. The ideal is that people work consciously as people, and not as splintered atoms for which the human element (the species being) plays no role.

  The comparison between beings without a mutual context and atoms is hackneyed today, but in 1843 it was fresh and new. The atomic theory has roots in antiquity, but remained a mere intellectual curiosity until around 1800 when a poor private teacher in Manchester, John Dalton, gave it its modern form. It is Dalton’s image of atoms in a gaseous state, separated from each other, that inspired Engels’s description of work in contemporary capitalism.35

  Factory work was an emblem of this inhuman activity; but it was better represented by speculation on the stock exchange. For Engels, speculation in shares marked ‘immorality’s culminating point’ in which people tried to make a profit from everything, especially the misfortunes of others. This did not mean that everyone who speculated had to be immoral. Competition forced them into it, whatever their personal motives may have been. The alternative was that they would be out-competed and go under.

  There was thus something wrong with the system, and not private individuals. In a good society, they would function as actual people, conscious of their humanity. And a society of this kind was the dream of the future! Early on in the article, Engels said that the progress the current system delivered, despite everything, would clear the way for a world that entailed ‘the reconciliation of mankind with nature and with itself’. And humanity’s forces of production are infinite – something that would then become clear. The deadly competition of today would then be replaced by the peaceful rivalry that Fourier wrote about.36

  But the road there would be difficult. Stiffening competition led to constantly recurring crises that cast workers into unemployment and destitution, and ruined many capitalists as well. And within the crises, the risk always lurked that someone would knock out all their rivals and create a monopoly on the market, with all the ruthlessness that entailed.

  In the final paragraph, Engels flew the colours for another, even more important, writing task that now awaited him – dealing with the factory system and pitilessly revealing ‘in detail the despicable immorality of this system, and to expose mercilessly the economist’s hypocrisy which here appears in all its brazenness’.37 This would clearly be his later Condition of the Working Class in England.

  Engels began writing his article late in 1843 and was finished with it in January, 1844. He then sent it to Marx and Ruge for the Jahrbücher. Marx, who in the environment of Paris had already absorbed a number of new lessons that affected him deeply, must have realized immediately that Engels’s work contained subject matter that he too had to assimilate. Now economic theory was the most important of all! He took to the work with his customary energy. He certainly had the article in his hands in January 1844; it came out in print at the end of February, and by April he was ready to start writing his own work in which economics, politics, and philosophy would be moulded together.

  The project was never completed. A few notebooks remain, which posterity has chosen to call the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. They are sometimes also spoken of as the Paris Manuscripts. The text covers approximately 120 printed sheets.

  We do not know what made Marx stop the project at that exact point. We only know that Engels came to Paris during the summer of 1844 and stayed there for ten days, during which time Marx and he became friends. They spent most of those days together, drinking beer and discussing economics and politics and philosophy. They discovered that they agreed on almost everything and decided to join forces in a new project where they would settle accounts with the doctrine they both had once been followers of: Young Hegelianism. In that radical idealism, they now saw a danger for the future fate of Germany, namely that idealism blocked the way of real humanism in the spirit of Feuerbach.

  It is quite probably that this project, which resulted in a few joint writings, gave Marx a reason to discontinue the work on the Manuscripts. Engels should not be blamed for this, however. No one was more eager than he that Marx should finish his criticism of contemporary society. In his letters later on, he would constantly encourage Marx to bring his work to an end. But Marx was constantly finding new books that he first had to read, and new problems he first had to solve.

  The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, which he wrote over a few months in the spring and summer of 1844, were so important both in themselves and for his development, that they receive their own chapter here.

  5

  The Manuscripts

  Belated Renown

  The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 lay with the rest of the papers left by Marx for nearly ninety years. They were finally printed in 1932, in the Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe. One of the first people to comment on the text was Herbert Marcuse, in an article in the journal Die Gesellschaft, in which he drew the basic ideas in the incomplete manuscript into the contest over what constituted the core of Marx’s theory.1 Marcuse was at that time one of the leading representatives of the ‘Frankfurt School’, which had its centre in the Institut für Sozialforschung in Frankfurt. Like his new colleagues, Marcuse distanced himself from the Marxism–Leninism that was being developed in the Soviet Union, the chief task of which was to defend the policies the new country was carrying out. In that context, the central ideas of the Manuscripts – such as humanity’s essence and alienation – had no place. Those parts of Marx’s theories that filtered through were largely limited to what had been passed on by Lenin.

  It would be a long time before the Manuscripts were published in what after the Second World War was called the Eastern Bloc. In the standard collected works, the Marx-Engels-Werke (or MEW), the first thirty-nine volumes had no space for them. Finally, in 1968, they were included in the first of both supplementary volumes (Ergänzungsbände) that, at that time, completed the work. By then, the manuscripts had already been in print in countries in the West, and the central idea – alienation – had become the subject of lively, sometimes heated, discussions. The showdown that drew the most attention played out in Poland between the young philosopher Leszek Kołakowski and the then ‘chief ideologist’ of the Communist Party, Adam Schaff. We will deal with that in more detail in the final chapter.

  Several years earlier, the same manuscript had provided arguments against orthodox Marxism–Leninism in Western Europe. People began to speak of a humanistic Marxism in which people, and not the class struggle or the Party, stood at the centre. Roger Garaudy, who throughout his long life would adopt many different points of view, was still a member of the French Communist Party in 1957, when he published a book called Humanisme marxiste (Marxist Humanism). Even among non-Marxists, the Manuscripts aroused great positive interest. They played a crucial role in Jesuit author Jean-Yves Calvez’s 1956 book La pensée de Karl Marx (The Thought of Karl Marx), and in particular they contributed to Jean-Paul Sartre beginning to consider himself a Marxist in the late 1950s. The most important result of th
is new orientation was his substantial 1960 work Critique de la raison dialectique (Critique of Dialectical Reason).2

  In Moscow, the new image of Marx roused vexation. The most influential philosopher there, Teodor Oizerman, published among other things a furious article that was also published in German translation. In it, he branded the ‘bourgeois and revisionist “critique” of Marxism’ as a ‘funhouse mirror’. In 1965 a French Marxist philosopher, Louis Althusser, went on an all-out attack on humanistic Marxism in his book For Marx. We will have reason to return to Althusser.3

  But now, to Marx’s work.

  A Great Project Is Born

  Through the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts we come close to Marx’s first, somewhat wary encounter with political economy.4 Previously, he had only encountered economic theories in a roundabout way – first, perhaps, through Hegel’s writings and then through various socialists and communists. Engels, as we already know, was the one who gave him the impulse to start reading Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and James Mill (John Stuart Mill’s father) himself. Obviously, Marx had quickly arrived at the insight that he had to get to the sources himself. Moreover, with his considerable self-esteem, he was convinced that he also could achieve something that no one else, not even Engels, could manage.