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A look at the remarkable partnership and friendship of Marx and Engels from the Soviet Magazine Socialism: Theory and Practice, December 1985. It follows it from Paris, 1844 to after Marx's death as Engels worked to ensure that volumes two and three of Capital were finished and published.
Preface:
The 1 9th century produced an extraordinary number of giants of the human spirit in all areas – great writers, composers, scientists, philosophers. But two of mankind's luminaries stand out even among them. They are Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, the founders of scientific communism and leaders of the international proletariat.
Article:
In late August, 1844, Engels went to Paris. He loved this city. There in Paris was a brilliant cohort of poets and thinkers. Among them was young Marx whom many, Engels included, viewed as the finest mind of the time.
They met in a cafe. That was a joyous and cordial meeting. Marx and Engels spent ten whole days together, Theirs was the joy of genuine friendship and complete understanding.
The friends spent entire days, and sometimes nights, deep in discussion. They were happy and surprised to reach complete agreement on any topic of their discussion.
Indeed, they became fellow thinkers.
Shortly afterwards Engels wrote to Marx: “I have not been again in so happy and humane a mood as I was during the ten days I spent with you’'. 1
In their personal communication and conversations each of the friends opened up a virtual well of ideas and thoughts in the other. Marx was enthralled by Engels' vast economic knowledge and knowledge of the British workers' life and customs, the political situation in England. He admired the way Engels spoke with youthful enthusiasm of the inevitability of social revolution, of communism, of the British proletarians, to whom the future belonged. Engels marveled at the powerful spirit and depth of Marx's theoretical insight, his universal knowledge of philosophy, history, sociology. Moreover, Marx had firm convictions in all these areas. He expressed ideas, striking by their novelty and daring. He pronounced resolute “verdicts’' on individuals and principles. There were no ambiguities, nor overcautious half-truths. A clear and merciless logic prevailed.
In their long conversations the friends recalled their recent past Berlin University: the Young Hegelians debates, (2) the Bauer brothers – Edgar and Bruno, one of whom was an old friend of Marx, the other of Engels.
"How are they doing now?'’ asked Engels. Bruno Bauer and his associates gave up their democratic convictions entirely as was to be expected. They superciliously counter posed their own “self -awareness of a genius’' and “critical criticism'’ to the people’s '’ignorant mass". Now they targeted their criticism not only against the church, religion and the aristocracy but also against the proletariat which they depicted as ossified, crude matter, interfering with the “action-oriented spirit" of geniuses.
For all that, the Bauer brothers and Co. were still immensely popular in Germany. They were regarded as a mouthpiece of progressive philosophical ideas. These were the people who had to be dealt with in the first place! Germany’s readers should be shown the true face of these “advocates of freedom'’!
Marx and Engels enthusiastically set about writing their first book together. It was conceived as a brief satirical pamphlet stingingly deriding the pretentious and empty verbiage employed by Bauer and Co. and their like.
The creative individuality of each manifested itself as this work progressed. It took Engels only a few days to write his portion of the work – one and a half signatures, or roughly half of the amount agreed upon with Marx. Having written it, he left it with Marx and went to Germany.
As for Marx. he toiled for long over his manuscript. It grew and grew, swelling with new digressions, commentaries and twists. It mushroomed to the size of a bulky volume and kept growing.
Engels gasped when he saw the manuscript. He expected a brochure, but in front of him lay a thick volume entitled The Holy Family, or Critique of Critical Criticism. Against Bruno Bauer and Company. Authorship was credited to “F. Engels and K. Marx".
Engels realized that the book's volume would enable it to easily overcome the censor, for books over twenty signatures long were not censored. But this volume frightened away not only censors but readers too.
But in one way or another, the job was done.
Marx and Engels fought the ’'holy family’' from materialistic positions. The joint work's first lines proclaimed that “real humanism'’ – as the authors of the book then called communism – had no more dangerous foe in Germany than idealism, especially in that extremely subjective form propounded by the “holy family’'. These gentlemen placed "self-awareness“ or the '’spirit'’ above the real human being, and claimed, together with the Bible, that the spirit was life-giving, while the flesh was barren. Needless to say, this immaterial spirit possessed some mysterious strength only in the imagination of the Young Hegelians. Only they ascribed some mysterious potential to their '’critical criticism".
Marx and Engels mercilessly derided these empty and absurd claims “critical criticism” was presented as the successor of Hegel’s philosophy, but in actual fact it was only a miserable caricature of the philosopher’s system. Engels wrote: “It is and remains an old woman – faded, widowed Hegelian philosophy which paints and adorns its body, shrivelled into the most repulsive abstraction, and ogles all over Germany in search of a wooer." (3)
To spite the French Socialists, who averred that the workers created everything and received nothing in return, Edgar Bauer claimed that the worker created nothing. Why? Because, this thinker reasoned, the worker produced material, crude objects, not ideal, fantastic creations of "critical criticism".
Engels ridiculed this “extravagant gibberish'’ and replied that far from creating nothing, the worker created everything.
“Critical criticism'’ painted the vast majority of mankind as an '’inert mass’' to which it counterposed itself, that is, a handful of the elect allegedly destined to play an active role in history, Haughtily treating the masses, that is, the people, “critical criticism” declared that great historical undertakings were supposedly doomed to failure, for they involved the ’'masses“, and because the 'masses'’ were interested in and enthusiastic about them.
This fully revealed the polarity between the positions of the Bauer brothers and Co. and that of Marx and Engels. Turning to the experience of the Great French Revolution, Marx showed that its success was precisely due to the interest of the bourgeois masses. The sole reason for the revolution’s set back was the fact that the bourgeoisie's interest never reflected that of the people as a whole.
This leads to the conclusion of the fundamental importance of the decisive role the masses have to play in history and their material interest as a stimulus of revolutionary action. A cornerstone was thus laid for the materialistic interpretation of history.
Thus, the masses play a decisive role in history. But the authors of The Holy Family do not stop at this. The notion ’'the masses'’ is vague, indefinite, amorphous. The masses comprise classes. What classes are emerging to the forefront of history? The development of private property, the book explains, leads to two contradictions, two poles. with the bourgeoisie at one and the proletarians at the other.
By its whole life, living conditions and labour the proletariat is placed in a situation where it cannot but protest against the world of private property. By virtue of its world-historic role the proletariat is called upon to destroy the inhuman conditions of its existence. But it cannot remove them without having first freed society as a whole. Therefore, its class interest. In the final analysis, is the interest of all humanity.
Later, V. I. Lenin wrote that The Holy Family laid the foundations of revolutionary-materialistic socialism, and that Marx and Engels jointly came out in the name of the real human being – the worker flouted by the ruling classes and the state. They advocated not critical contemplation but the struggle for a better social structure. He also said that they saw in the proletariat a force capable of leading this struggle and with a vested interest in it.
For almost 39 years Marx and Engels were linked by the common revolutionary struggle, a creative identity of views and remarkably warm friendship. Together they wrote dozens of works, including The German Ideology – an example of militant criticism of a philosophy alien to the proletariat, and the Manifesto of the Communist Party the first programme document of scientific communism. On March 14, 1883, Engels lost his great friend. He wrote: '’Mankind is shorter by a head, and that the greatest head of our time.’' (4)
Engels realized the responsibility he shouldered now. Marx once called him his alter ego. Now this was to be so in a literal sense. He was called upon to replace Marx as a "pivotal point'’ both in the international labour movement and in the area of theory. He was to complete his friend's unfinished works and, above all, prepare for publication the second and third volumes of Capital, his principal lifelong work.
The two geniuses’ creative cooperation, unexampled in history, was destined to continue even after Marx's death. After his friend's funeral, Engels resolutely put aside his own scientific activities and projects and plunged into a profound study of Marx’s manuscripts.
He realized how much effort would be required to hand the yet unpublished legacy down to posterity. But this work appealed to Engels, also because it brought him close to his friend again.
But what was uppermost in his mind, of course, was the destiny of the second and third volumes of Capital which needed copy editing before publication. Marx's associates in all countries were likewise concerned.
There were maligners among bourgeois economists who claimed that all talk about the impending publication of the second volume was nothing more than a ruse enabling Marx to dodge polemics.
Such assertions were made, for instance, by the Italian economist Loria who published a slanderous article about Marx. Engels angrily rebuked him. One must have a very undeveloped mind to think that a man like Marx would have threatened his opponents with a second volume which he didn’t intend to write, and to imagine that the second volume was a diversion to avoid scientific contention. Engels said that the second volume existed and would soon be published.
This meant that the world was awaiting Marx's book! So were friends and foes alike!
At first, Engels did not know what state the manuscript of the continuation of Capital was in or what had to be done prior to its publication, A few days after Marx's death a small bundle containing the manuscript of the unpublished text of Capital was discovered among numerous packages and files. Looking through it, Engels was delighted to see that the second volume was complete, even though much work on it was needed. Completed sections alternated with drafts, outlines and rough copies.
Marx's handwriting was a formidable hindrance, it resembled hieroglyphs with lots of abbreviations and constantly switched from one language to another.
The problems were compounded by Engels' failing eyesight, together with an illness that made him bed ridden for six months. Bouts of despair afflicted him. He was anxious about it all as he was the only person alive who could decipher Marx's handwriting and abbreviations.
Before the manuscript could be edited it had to be completely rewritten. And for hours on end Engels would rewrite Marx’s script, inserting necessary additions, but in such a way that would be '’exclusively the work of its author". (5) He took care to preserve every word of Marx, for each was worth its weight in gold.
For two years Engels waged a herculean struggle deciphering Marx's manuscript and grappling with his own ailment. And he won this battle. Moreover, he gave his great friend particular credit. On finishing his introduction to the completed second volume, he made the following postscript:
'’London, on Marx’s birthday, May 5, 1885, Frederich Engels"
The title page carried the following inscription under the title: ’'Karl Marx. Edited by Frederick Engels."
Again the friends’ names were together!
Engels hoped to finish editing the third volume within a year. But in fact this work took him a good ten years. The last ten years of his life were given entirely to completing Capital.
The third volume required incomparably more work than the second. Not only editing was involved here Marx's uncompleted thoughts had to be finished, gaps had to be filled and logical links added. Whole chapters, at times. Here and there he had to be co-author of the book.
This time too he was confronted with having to rewrite the thousand odd page manuscript all over again.
In a letter to Bebel Engels acclaimed the third book as a wonderful, brilliant production, an unheard-of revolution in the old political economy.
The work proceeded slowly. Engels could not give as much time to it as he wanted. For it was he and he alone that had to assume leadership of the international communist movement. Previously, Marx shouldered the load. Now it was Engels’ sole responsibility.
Engels' words about Marx apply equally to Engels himself: “For Marx was before all else a revolutionist. His real mission in life was to contribute, in one way or another, to the overthrow of capitalist society and of the state institutions which it had brought into being, to contribute to the liberation of the modern proletariat, which he was the first to make conscious of its own position and its needs, conscious of the conditions of its emancipation. Fighting was his element. And he fought with a passion, a tenacity and a success such as few could rival.” (6)
Consequently, Engels also viewed Capital as a powerful weapon in the hands of the proletariat. He remembered Marx's words that this was the most terrible missile ever launched at the bourgeoisie and landowners In late 1894, shortly before his death, he finished editing the third volume of Capital.
Thus, at long last, he performed a great feat in the name of friendship, freedom and the proletariat’s victory. - Genrikh Volkov. One Genius Worked Alongside Another, Moscow, Detskaya Literatura Publishing House, 1984 (in Russian)
Postscript:
1985 marks the 165th anniversary of Engels’ birth and the 90th anniversary of his death. as well as the 140th anniversary of the publication of his book “The Condition of the Working Class in England, in which he first showed that the proletariat was not only a suffering class but also one fighting for its emancipation. It also marks the 140th anniversary of ''The Holy Family", a joint work by Marx and Engels, and the 100th anniversary of Engels' completion of the second volume of "Capital’'. which he inherited from Marx. The following excerpts from Genrich Volkov's book "One Genius Worked Alongside Another"- tell of the friendship and cooperation between Karl Marx and Frederick Engels.
1) K. Marx, F. Engels, Selected Correspondence, Progress Publishers, p. 20
2) The Young Hegelians (or Left Hegelians) the radical wing of Hegel’s philosophical school. The limited character of their teaching consisted in the negation of the class struggle, the objective laws of social development, the significance of economic relations in the life of society and in underestimation of the role of the masses in history - ed.
3) K. Marx and F. Engels, Collected Works vol. 4, p. 20, Progress– Publishers, Moscow 1975
4) 4 K. Marx and F. Engels, Selected Correspondence, p. 340, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1975
5) 5 K. Marx and F. Engels, Selected Works, p. 430. Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1975
6) K. Marx and F. Engels, Selected Works, p. 430, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1975
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