The Contribution of Engels 19 Engels, Manchester, and the Working Class. Of biographies, there is the bridged Gustav Mayer, Friedrich Engels- no more than a pale shadow of Mayer's splendid two-volume biography in German, which is the best so far available. Grace Carlton's Friedrich Engels: The Shadow Prophet is rather thin. The Russian biography in English, Frederick Engels: A Biography, con- tains a lot of details-but is also an extreme example of hagiography. The same is true of the East German Frederick Engels: A Biography. Recently there has appeared w.O. Henderson's two-volume Life of friedrich Engels This is strong on the personal side and also on the factual historical, but is uniformly unsympathetic to Engels and has virtually no assessment of him as a theorist. For the personal side of Engels's later years, see also Y. Kapp, Eleanor Marx: The Crowded Years. There is a short treatment in McLellan's Modern Masters Engels. Chris Arthur's centenary volume is excellent, as is the collection by Steger and Carver. Bibliography Texts Karl Marx- Frederick Engels: Collected Works(London, 1975) Karl Marx- Frederick Engels: Selected Works, 2 vols(Moscow, 1962) Marx and Engels: Basic Writings on Politics and Philosophy, ed. L. Feuer(New York 1959) Marx-Engels Reader, ed R. Tucker(New York, 1972) Engels: Selected Writings, ed W.O. Henderson(London, 1967) Engels as Military Critic, ed W.O. Henderson and O. Chaloner(London, 1959) Frederick Engels, Anti-Duhring(Moscow, 1954). The Condition of the Working Class in England, ed. W.O. Henderson and O. Chaloner(Oxford, 1958) -The Condition of the Working Class in England, Introduction by Eric Hobsbawm (London, 1969). Yo The Condition of the Working Class in England, ed. D. McLellan(Oxford, Dialectics of Nature(Moscow, 1972) Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy(Moscow, 1946) he Origin of the Family Private Property and the State, ed. with an Introduction by Eleanor Burke Leacock( London, 1972) The Peasant War in Germany(Moscow, 1965) - Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Germany in 1848, ed. Eleanor Marx (London, 1971) commentaries Chris Arthur, Engels Today: A Centenary Appreciation(London, 1996) Grace Carlton, Friedrich Engels: The Shadow Prophet(London, 1965) T Carver, Engels(Oxford, 1981) Heinrich Gemkow et al., Friedrich Engels: A Biography(Dresden, 1972)
20 Marxism after Marx W.O. Henderson, The Life of Friedrich Engels, 2 vols(London, 1976) L E. llyichov et al., Friedrich Engels: A Biography, trans V. Schneierson (Moscow, 1974) Yvonne Kapp, Eleanor Marx, voL. 2, The Crowded Years(London, 1976). David McLellan, Engels(London and New York, 1977) Steven Marcus, Engels, Manchester and the Working Class(New York, 1974) Gustav Mayer, Friedrich Engels: A Biography, trans. G and H. Highet and ed. R H.S. Crossman(London, 1936) Fritz Nova, Friedrich Engels: His Contribution to Political Theory( London, 1967) John Plamenatz, German Marxism and Russian Communism(London, 1954) S. Rigby, Engels and the Formation of Marxism: History, Dialectics, and Revolution (Manchester, 1992) J. Sayers et al. (eds), Engels Revisited: New Feminist Essays(London, 1987) Gareth Stedman Jones, 'Engels and the End of Classical German Philosophy,New Left Review, 79(1973). Engels and the Genesis of Marxism, New Left Review, 106(1977) M. Steger and T Carver(eds), Engels after Marx(Philadephia, 1999)
2 The revisionist Controversy The spread of Marxism outside Germany The boundaries of the revisionist controversy were set by the boundaries of the spread of Marxism. Thus the controversy was largely confined to Germany, with Austria and Russia in second place. Kautsky,'s comment on the Belgian socialist leader Vandervelde could apply equally to france and italy the talk about their revisionism leaves me cold. They have nothing to revise, for they have no theory. The eclectic vulgar socialism to which the revisionists would like to reduce Marxism is something beyond which they [the Belgians] have not even begun to advance. Proudhon, Schaffle, Marx- it is all one to them; it was always like that, they have not retrogressed in theory, and I have nothing to reproach them with In Italy, the workers'movement had been largely anarchist from the 1860s onwards: Marxism had only begun to make an impact in the 1890s with the formation of an increasingly successful socialist party. Nevertheless, the party remained"very weak and confused, 2 lacking a firm industrial base and continually threatened by the anarchosyndical ists. The party managed to attract several intellectuals in the 1890s, among them Antonio Labriola, a professor of philosophy, who after a period of youthful Hegelianism, became a Marxist in 1894. In spite of a tendency to regard Marxism as merely a method (and thus compatible with several different sorts of philosophy), Labriola was probably the best interpreter of Marx in any country during the years immediately ollowing Engels's death 3 In his classic work Essays on the Materialist Conception of History he opposed materialistic interpretations of Marxism 21
22 Marxism after marx and, a forerunner of Gramsci and Lukacs, made an anti-positivist and historicist Marxism welcome in Italy. But he was alone. The only other Italian socialist of international eminence-Benedetto Croce- was not a ocialist at all: he remained all his life a liberal Hegelian. Croce was interested in what he considered to be Marxism's insights but not in viewing it as a theory predicting a given development of society. He therefore rejected the idea of Marxism as a science, criticised Marx's eco- nomics and particularly his theory of value and laid emphasis on the ethical side of socialism. 4 In France, there were three main factors militating against the emer gence of a revisionist movement. Firstly, the key opposition was between socialism and syndicalism rather than between different varieties of Marxism. In Germany, the trade unions had been suppressed during the anti-socialist legislation of 1878-90 whereas the party had been allowed to function electorally and thus became dominant; in France, the trade unions escaped from such political control. Secondly, the leadership of the french movement as a whole was never Marxist: France-like Italy and Spain- was only growing slowly economically and lacked the mod- ern industrial working-class base that characterised Germany. Thirdly, none of the French Marxists were really interested in economics, which was one of the central points of the revisionist controversy. The only organised Marxists were the followers of Jules Guesde grouped in the small Parti Ouvrier Francais. Although initially strong on revolutionary principles, they were weak on theory and had to rely largely on Lafargue to propagate Marxs ideas in an exceptionally super- ficial manner. Marxs well-known remark that he himself was not a Marxist was inspired by his would-be French followers and certainly his work was very little read there in the original or even in translation Guesde's Parti Ouvrier Francais had only six out of the thirty-seven socialist deputies elected in 1893; the rest were shared among four other parties with a considerable number of independents. But with the par- liamentary success of 1893, the PoF promptly became 'revisionist: it was committed to parliamentary collaboration with the other socialist parties, to the achievement of socialism by peaceful means, and even(in an effort to attract votes) modified its programme to make it acceptable to medium-sized farmers. with the foundation of the unified Sfio in 1905, all the Marxist leaders had become reformist socialists. An addi tional reason that prevented the emergence of an orthodox versus revi- sionist debate was the role played by Jean Jaures who dominated the French political left for the twenty years before his assassination in 1914. Jaures tended to subordinate theory to the tactical needs of the
The Revisionist Controversy 23 moment. He is best characterised as a revolutionary democrat: he cer- tainly had more Marxist revolutionary spirit' than almost all his Marxist'contemporaries. But intellectually, Jaures was an idealist who had no particular class reference for his ideas, which did not go beyond a Republican form of government inspired by a unity of idealism and historical materialism (by which he meant no more than French eighteenth-century materialism) on a moral basis The origins of german revisionism Indeed, it can be shown that even in Germany the spread of Marxist ideas was not very far advanced in the 1880s: of the two parties which united to form the Sozialistische partei Deutschlands(sPD) at Gotha in 1875, one held strongly to the state socialism preached by its founder, Ferdinand Lassalle, whose ideas were still the predominant influence in socialist cir cles in Germany during the 1870s and 1880s; the other party - the so-called Eisenach Party led by Marx's followers Liebknecht and Bebel had very little Marxism in it, in spite of Marx's optimistic opinion to the contrary. Marx's views made such slow progress initially that it has been calculated that by 1880 there were only five men in Germany who had a well-founded understanding of his economics. With the rather dubious exceptions of Eccarius and Dietzgen, Capital made no impression on the German working class. There were two factors that helped Marxism become the dominant view of the SPd by the end of the 1880s. Firstly, the anti-socialist law of 1879-90 inevitably radicalised the left opposition to the government, but at the same time seemed to give the lie to Lassallean socialism which evidently lacked the support from the state that it relied on for its socialist schemes. The experience of the 1880s appeared rather to support the Marxist view of the state as an instrument of the ruling class. Secondly, the expanding party had the need for an ideology and there was simply no systematic alternative to Marxism. Marxists also occupied key positions in the party's theoretical debates: Bernstein was editor of the party's official newspaper Sozialdemokrat from 1881 and Kautsky's Neue Zeit, founded in 1883, the year of Marx's death, consis- tently publicised the views of Marxists in all questions of interest to the party; Bebel, whose gifts as a practical politician and organiser were out standing, exercised considerable influence as a Reichstag deputy. By the end of the 1880s there was a growing consensus that Lassalleanism and the previously popular economics of Rodbertus had been discredited by their Marxist critics. The right wing of the party broke away in 1887, leav. ng the way open for a simplified form of Marxism to be enthroned as the