On the evening of 5 August 1895, Frederick Engels died in London, unconscious since noon and gone without a struggle, after a cancer of the esophagus had been throttling him since March. The news struck the international labor movement as the heaviest blow since Marx’s death twelve years before. Karl Kautsky’s study of Engels—written in 1887 for an Austrian labor almanac and carried forward here through the end of Engels’s life—is a short biography with a large purpose: to show that the history of one man’s career is also the history of socialism across its decisive half-century.
“The whole life of Frederick Engels was given up to the emancipation of the laboring class.”
A Life Given to the Laboring Class
Kautsky opens at the deathbed and then steps back to take the measure of the man. Engels, he writes, stood with Marx at the cradle of the modern labor movement; their writings laid the scientific foundation of socialism and drew the line between modern social democracy and the dreams of the Utopians. The tribute insists on the breadth of Engels’s mind: a thorough education joined to a rare capacity for theoretic thought, a man who studied mathematics, physics, chemistry, and military history while writing political pamphlets, who analyzed the tactics of the armies of 1870 and the industrial condition of Russia, who worked on ancient history alongside the secrets of capitalist production. Everything he thought, said, wrote, or did was dedicated to suffering and struggling humanity—from his youth, when he fought weapon in hand for the freedom of the oppressed, to his last days.
Barmen, the Rhine, and the Revolution in Philosophy
Engels was born on 28 November 1820 in Barmen, the son of a manufacturer, in the Rhine Province—the most industrially and politically developed district in Germany. Proximity to England and France, the Rhine waterway, and rich coal and metal deposits had produced there, earlier than anywhere else in Germany, a powerful capitalist industry, a revolutionary bourgeoisie hostile to feudalism, and a strong proletariat already carrying the germ of class-consciousness. For twenty years before 1815 the district had belonged to France, and the views created by the great Revolution were still in force during Engels’s youth.
The other great current of his youth was German philosophy, at its high tide. The social revolution that took industrial form in England and political form in France appeared in Germany as a mental revolution—a revolution in philosophy—and it reached its peak in Hegel. Kautsky defends Hegel against the schoolmasters who read his famous formula, “all that is real is rational, and all that is rational is real,” as a vindication of the antiquated institutions around them; they forgot, he writes, that the germ of the new is no less real than the survival of the old. Hegelian philosophy is fundamentally revolutionary, not politically but philosophically, in its insistence on the continuous transformation of existing conditions and the continuous growth of new oppositions.
1848 and the Years of Reaction
The notes then follow Engels into the revolutionary years. In 1848, Kautsky writes, only the Neue Rheinische Zeitung and its men clearly recognized the situation; they refused to nourish the masses’ illusions with hollow phrases, destroying them instead through merciless criticism while still urging decisive action and the overthrow of every support of the old order. Conditions proved stronger than the paper. In May 1849 part of the Rhine Province rose; Engels hurried from Cologne to Elberfeld only to watch the uprising collapse, the laborers betrayed by the petty bourgeoisie. The paper was suppressed on 19 May and Marx was exiled. Engels, persecuted for his part in the Rhenish uprising, went to the Palatinate, joined a volunteer corps as adjutant, and fought in three battles and the decisive combat on the Murg, where 13,000 poorly led revolutionary soldiers faced 60,000 Prussian and imperial troops. His own verdict on the Baden-Palatinate insurrection was harsh: politically and militarily the plan was a failure, its only chance the victory of the Paris Republicans on 13 June, which did not come; the campaign became a bloody farce ruined by stupidity and treachery, ending in the bloodthirstiness of the counter-revolution.
Engels crossed into Switzerland in July 1849 and stayed a month; Marx, unable to remain in Paris after the June failure, went to London, and Engels followed by way of Genoa and Gibraltar. In London the two men labored to perfect the Communist League and to work in Germany through propaganda and criticism, publishing a monthly Neue Rheinische Zeitung in Hamburg that carried Marx’s critical history of the French movement (the foundation of The Eighteenth Brumaire) and Engels’s articles on the imperial plan of campaign, the English Ten-Hour Bill, and the German Peasants’ War—the first historical description of pre-capitalist relations from the materialist conception of history. Observing the facts, they concluded that an immediate revolution was impossible, and had the courage to publish it, demonstrating general prosperity in their review of 1 November 1850. The revolutionary fugitives rose against them; the paper lost readers and ceased; the League divided; members were imprisoned; propaganda collapsed.
Manchester, the Mill, and the Division of Labor
From 1850 literary activity was cut off for both men. Marx returned to the British Museum, laying the foundations of Capital and writing for the New York Tribune; Engels entered his father’s Manchester woolen mill in 1850, became a partner in 1864, and severed the connection in 1869, his name familiar through the firm of Ermen & Engels. For twenty years the friends were separated but corresponded almost daily. In Manchester Engels studied military history and science, comparative philology, and natural science. During the Italian war of 1859 he published The Po and the Rhine anonymously, opposing the Austrian theory and the “little German” Prussian Liberals; Savoy, Nice and the Rhine followed; during the Prussian military conflict of 1865 came The Prussian Military Question and the German Labor Party; during the Franco-Prussian war he wrote for the Pall Mall Gazette, prophesying the battle of Sedan. After his removal to London in 1870 a division of labor arose: Marx worked out fundamental theories while Engels sent out polemics and treated present questions, and Engels himself acknowledged Marx’s priority in the preface to Herr Eugen Dühring’s Revolution in Science. Kautsky calls Engels a master of popular exposition and advises studying his pamphlets before Capital, citing The Housing Question (1872, against Mühlberger), Social Conditions in Russia (1875, on the Artels and Mirs), and the origin of the Anti-Dühring against the salon-socialist Dühring, later titled The Development of Socialism from Utopia to Science.
The International and the Split with Anarchism
The labor movement revived in the mid-sixties, and the International, founded in London in 1864, was a society for organization and propaganda rather than an oath-bound association; its intellectual leadership fell on Marx with Engels’s assistance. The year 1870 brought revolution: Victor Emmanuel occupied Rome, the Czar repudiated the Black Sea neutrality contract, the French Empire fell, and Paris arose. The old drama of 1848 repeated, but the proletariat of 1871 was stronger and riper; International members guided the Commune economically; the International was banned throughout Europe, English laborers withdrew, and a split came.
Here Kautsky pauses over what Marx and Engels actually changed. Socialists before them had no conception of the class struggle, which is naturally political and aims at political power for the laboring class; earlier socialists refused to place their Utopia into the class struggle, advocated abstinence from political action, and pursued harmless propaganda. Marx and Engels substituted the power of the whole laboring class for individual exertions, “natural necessity” for the goodwill of “friends of humanity,” and united class-conscious international effort for small-scale colonies and communities; the new production, they held, could come only through appropriation of the means of production and systematic organization of labor. This was expressed in the Communist Manifesto, the foundation of the International. After 1848 destroyed the illusion of mere misunderstanding between laborers and the bourgeoisie, class struggle spread across Europe, and unpolitical socialism survived only in backward lands—in Paris, in Belgium, in Russia—turning to “Propaganda of the Deed” through conspiracy and force. Bakunin applied Proudhon’s unpolitical socialism this way, creating modern anarchism; his rising influence forced the conflict with Marx that led to the split and the end of the International, in whose general council Engels took a prominent part as corresponding secretary for Belgium, Spain, and later Italy.
The International ended because it had outlived itself: its object was reached, and the formal bond had become a fetter. The movement grew national in character while retaining international solidarity, and Marx and Engels remained its unacknowledged representatives from London, advising socialists of all lands.
Carrying Marx’s Burden Alone
After Marx’s death in 1883 Engels alone carried the burden. He brought out the third edition of Capital volume one that same year; The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State in the summer of 1884, carrying out Marx’s plan and defending Morgan; Capital volume two in 1885, on circulation; and volume three was expected in 1888. He produced journalism for the Zurich Social Democrat, the Stuttgart Neue Zeit, and the Paris Socialiste, revised translations, and oversaw Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling’s English rendering of Capital volume one in 1887. Dr. Adler, writing in the Vienna Arbeiterzeitung, stressed that publishing volumes two and three was really a new creation out of Marx’s fragments. Engels died on 5 August in the midst of these labors; his last completed work was the introduction to Marx’s The Class Struggle in France from 1848 to 1850, written on 6 March 1895, stressing legal means and suffrage over barricades.
What the Life Meant
Kautsky’s portrait is written from inside the movement, and its argument is cumulative: that the theoretical socialism of Marx and Engels became a practical labor movement because it refused to separate thought from struggle. The book’s Engels is the universal mind and the tireless fighter at once—the staff officer of the revolution in Baden and the student of comparative philology, the mill partner in Manchester and the editor of Marx’s unfinished volumes. The closing pages count victories at Halle, Zurich in 1893, and Palermo’s La Riscossa, and end with an image of Engels as the “Eckehard of united labor,” the faithful guardian of a cause he did not outlive by long. For a reader today, the study is valuable less as a neutral record than as a document of how the movement’s own leading theorists wanted its founding generation remembered: as men who sharpened the sword and taught its use.
