Friedrich Engels: The First Marxist Historian
Aytek Soner Alpan
By focusing on Friedrich Engels’ three book-length studies (The Condition of the Working Class in England, Germany: Revolution and Counter-Revolution, German Peasants’ War) this article deals with this revolutionary figure’s craft of writing history. Not only was he one of the founders of Marxism, continuing his historical research throughout his life Engels was also entitled as first Marxist historian. The works bearing his signature demonstrate that Engels uncovered both the economic foundations of social transformations and the course of history, as well as the historical and social essence of the economic realm; illuminated the ability of the economically and socially disadvantaged classes, especially the working class, to make history in their struggle against the ruling classes and exhibited the class quintessence of legal, political, religious/ideological forces, shaped by the material interests of social subjects.
Keywords: Friedrich Engels, history, Marxist historiography, historical materialism, revolution
Friedrich Engels and Revolution Theory: The Legacy of a Revolutionary Life
Frank Jacob
Çiğdem Demircan-Simon
The Perception of Nature in Engels and “Metabolic Rift” in Marxism
The relationship between humans and nature is dialectical. Our evolution to the modern-day social beings is a result of having a long history of humanity behind us and getting a social drive from what came before, but as the human species, we owe our existence to natural history that is longer than human history and that continued, continues and will continue with or without us. We are all a part of an organism in that we are mutually acting, changing, and transforming. In this study, I will try to discuss how we, as social, conscious transformative beings, have caused destruction in this organism due to the capitalist mode of production, with the reference to the especially early works of Engels, the second violinist of the orchestra of Marxism, one of the two great explorers of Marxism who played with a similar harmony and rhythm.
Keywords: Engels, Marxism, ecology, alienation, metabolic rift
Friedrich Engels, a Cosmopolitan Materialist or Why No Real Engelsism
Has Emerged
Karl Hermann Tjaden
From “The Origins” to “The History Thesis”: On the Track of the Continuity between Engels and Kivilcimli
Mert Büyükkarabacak
History Thesis (HT) is one of the foci of the theoretical work of Hikmet Kıvılcımlı, who died 50 years ago on October 11th, 1971. HT was mostly inspired by the anthropological search of L.H. Morgan, which was also the main source of Engels’s “The Origins, and the historical sociology developed by İbn Khaldoun, who used the conflicts between the nomadic and the city-based civilized communities as a leading force for change and development. Kıvılcımlı, like his other contemporary communist theoreticians, tried to develop an alternative for the economistic interpretations of Marxism, especially the ones which were based on the Second International tradition. To manage this, he transformed the productive forces’ definition and expand it with new attachments like geography, history (traditions), and collective action capacity. He classified history and collective action as “humanistic productive forces”. HT, on the one hand, was an effort to clarify how the pre-capitalist structures, classes, and institutions affect the capitalist development in an underdeveloped society and on the other hand an offer a kind of solution to the subject-structure dilemma of the early Marxist literature. This original intervention of HT’s was interpreted by some Marxist critics as non-Marxist. In this paper, I showed that Kıvılcımlı’s HT can be seen as an elaborated expansion of the themes developed by Engels in the “Origins”. A parallel reading of Engels and Kıvılcımlı easily deciphers the continuities of their approaches.
Key Words: Engels and the Origin, Kıvılcımlı and his History Thesis, Historical Revolutions, Hikmet Kıvılcımlı, Friedrich Engels
Class, Morality, Politics: The Concept of the Lumpen in Marx and Engels
Selin Dingiloğlu
Marx and Engels’ works contain highly rich descriptions about the unstable, fragmented and heterogeneous character of the proletariat’s relationship both with cultural dynamics of industrial cities and political practices of the time. One of the most controversial concepts in this particular context is lumpenism. The literature regarding the use of the term lumpen (proletariat) in Marxist classics usually and mainly focuses on Marx’s writings on 1848 French revolutions and the role attributed to the declassed poor in the defeat of revolutions. However, Engels’s vivid portrayal of working-class culture and identity, especially in The Condition of English Working Class, suggests a much further and larger scope as far as lumpenism is concerned –i.e. ethico-political formation of the proletariat as the agency of a social and political revolution. By scanning mainly Engels’ work, this article focuses on the following questions: Does the category of lumpen offer any analytical function in terms of structural class analysis based on production relations? How is the concept lumpen relevant to the debate on the political agency and potency of the working class, especially in terms of divergence between Marxism and other (early) socialist doctrines? How can we assess the moralist implications of degeneration inherent in the concept of “lumpen”, especially considering the relationship between bourgeois moralism of the 19th century and Marxism?
Keywords: Lumpen, declassed, working class, Marxism, moralism
War and Revolution: Friedrich Engels as a Military and Political Thinker
Paul Blackledge
This article explores the link between political and military strategy and tactics in the work of Friedrich Engels. Though widely praised for his understanding of military affairs, Engels’ interlocutors have tended to be dismissive of his political works. By exploring his politics through the lens of his military writings this article challenges the view that Engels was a mechanical materialist and political fatalist thinker. It argues that his military writings cannot be understood apart from his political works, and that, whatever the historical limitations of the specific conclusions to which he came, his method in these writings illuminate his profound grasp of the relationship between strategy and tactics at both the military and political levels.
Keywords: War, revolution, Engels, strategy, tactics
Dialectic Theory: “Dialectic of Nature” or Dialectic of Thought?
Engin Delice
The books titled Anti-Dühring and the Dialectic of Nature aim to link the historical and social assumptions of Marxism with the natural sciences. The explanations here give Engels a distinctive place within the Marxist tradition of philosophy. The term “dialectics of nature”, which Engels never used, represents this place. However, is this dialectic the “dialectic of nature” or the dialectic of thought that processes information about nature? (The question will be answered against Engels by standing on Engels’ side.) “Dialectic in nature” has turned into a dialectical understanding that functions like the law of the elements of nature. This is a controversial result. But this is not the dialectic applied by Engels. Engels does not use the operation of facts, but a dialectic, which is the method of operation of knowledge about facts. “Dialectic in nature” of which Engels speaks limited to the processing of knowledge about the objects of their science. This basically means applying the dialectic as a method, which is the definition of the dialectic of thought. To justify this assumption: First, the images that cause the dialectic to be seen in different forms are analysed. Secondly, Engels’ dialectic is shown as a method in general and as a method of thought in particular. Then, the relationship between dialectic and science is shown as a search to bring objectivity to the method and the problematic relationship of orthodox Marxism and Western Marxism with the scientific nature of dialectics is summarized. The article concludes by referring to the political needs behind Engels’s dialectical treatment of the natural sciences.
Keywords: Engels, Marx, Marxism, dialectics of nature, dialectical method, philosophy
