Epilogue: On Engels and the “Closure” of Marx’s System

F. Epilogue: On Engels and the “Closure” of Marx’s System

As promised in the Introduction we allow the last word to Frederick Engels. We are unfortunately obliged to leave textual support for our attributions for another occasion, and proceed here assertively.

The range of Marxian theoretical issues touched on by Engels in his Outlines of a Critique published in 1844 but composed in 1843 – the Umrisse – is impressive; and it can be shown that Marx owed a largely unacknowledged debt to Engels for many of the themes discussed in Chapters 6 and 7. Beyond this, all the Marxian predictions regarding a revolution emerging from the processes of capitalist development – processes generating untenable conditions for labor including essentially increasing instability and secular depression of living standards – are to be found in Engels’s writings during the 1840s before Marx devised his technical notions of “surplus value” and “exploitation.” Engels in fact provided the vision, and went far beyond “moral indignation” (upon which commentators tend to focus) into the theoretical processes at play.

Of high significance is Engels’s discussion of the impact of mechanization on both the aggregate demand for industrial labor and population, specifically net secular growth in aggregate labor demand – any displacement more than compen- sated for – and consequently rapid population growth. The Reserve Army emerges as a force available to service capitalists’ exceptional requirements at peak levels of cyclical activity, the requisite labor supply to meet long-term industrial growth deriving not from the pool of unemployed but largely from population growth.

F. Epilogue: On Engels and the “Closure” of Marx’s System 489 This is precisely the picture of industrial development later elaborated by Marx.

And much of his later discussion regarding concentration of capital, the Reserve Army in a cyclical context, inflows into the labor force from the middle classes, the use of female and child labor leading to absolute immizeration, rehearse the earlier formulations in Engels’s Outlines.

Engels’s objections to Malthusian population theory proceeded at an impressive level, incorporating the role of science both in eliminating the problem of excess population relative to subsistence and replacing it by one of excess population rela- tive to means of employment considering the labor-saving bias of new technology. In this context too we encounter the implication that prudential population control would be damaging to labor by encouraging the adoption of machinery. All of this, of course, is to be found later in Marx.

The Communist Manifesto of 1848 was formulated by Marx but its substance is provided by Engels’s Principles of Communism of 1847. The main technical themes of the Manifesto already found in the Principles include the matter of regularly repeated crises which threaten the existence of bourgeois society; the treatment of the “commodity” labor including its pricing in terms of its production costs, namely subsistence; the destruction of the lower middle classes; the “concentration of labor” with a consequential growth of its political and social power; the deterioration of living standards – more specifically “pauperism” – and prospective revolution. Even the “stunning prediction of the nature and effects of globalization” in the Communist Manifesto referred to by Eric Hobsbawm (Guardian, 14 July 2005) in justification of the outcome of the BBC-poll (see Preface), was originally conceived by Engels (MECW 6: 345). 33

Marx also had at hand The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845) where the major themes of Engels’s Outlines appear in more elaborate form, includ- ing technical change and its adverse impact on labor, increasing firm size, the Reserve Army concept, worsening crises, and deteriorating real wages. This work

33 The passages to which Hobsbawm presumably refers scarcely constitute a “prediction”; rather they are a stunning description of what was well under way. For example:

The needs of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connexions everywhere. The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. To the great chagrin of Reactionists, it has drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood. . . .

The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilisation. The cheap prices of its commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians’ intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilisation into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image. (MECW 6: 487–8)

See also above Chapter 5, note 3, for a remarkable passage by Marx of 1873 on globalization and cyclical activity.

Conclusion – A Recapitulation and Overview

is therefore of prime importance in the development of Marx’s mature position, whether directly or indirectly. And we reiterate that the general “Marxian” vision of capitalist development and several of the technical concepts used to interpret it already appear in Engels’s Outlines.

We turn to what may be considered as the “closure” of Marx’s system. We recall that Marx, writing in the late 1840s and early 1850s, recognized the progressive factory legislation enacted by the British Parliament, but emphasized the practical impediments imposed by the industrialists rendering such measures a dead letter (Chapter 15, p. 449). We have encountered a transformation of viewpoint in the 1860s apparent in Capital where, despite continued pessimism regarding the course of real wages, Marx outlined the positive consequences for labor emanating from the effective operation of the Factory Acts. Moreover, Marx now welcomed such leg- islation – forced on Parliament by working-class pressure and effective in practice – contrasting sharply with his hostility in 1850 based on the grounds that capitalist development would be restrained thereby.

Engels’s adoption of this “revisionist” position regarding effective – and desir- able – reform within a capitalist state is somewhat delayed, but in the mid-1870s and thereafter he takes up Marx’s recognition of progress on the welfare front with respect to improved working conditions, but also makes greater allowance for real-wage increase in the factories and unionized trades. Subsequently, advance is noted even in the unskilled sector under pressure of the “New Union” movement with respect to hours and pay. It is surprising that Engels did not recognize the “revisionism” apparent in Capital immediately upon its appearance, and for this

I have no explanation, but that he did ultimately come to do so is apparent and confirms that his famous 1895 Introduction to Marx’s “The Class Struggles in France 1848–50” indicates no radical change of position late in the day, and certainly no “deception” of Marx such as has been attributed to him (Levine 1975). The first “revisionist” was Marx himself. However, with respect to the ability of unions to assure improved real wages for their members and the extensions made to unskilled workers we do find Engels taking a more positive view than had Marx, at least Marx in the mid-1860s.

What stands out in all this is the representation of social reform as a necessary feature of advanced capitalism. Marx had already intimated in Capital that the (successful) Ten Hours’ legislation was the inevitable consequence of the devel- opment of modern industry (Chapter 15, p. 452). And “all these concessions to justice and philanthropy,” Engels wrote in 1892 of the Factory Acts and acceptance of unions, were “but means to accelerate the concentration of capital in the hands of the few . . . ” (MECW 27: 259). But all this creates an obvious dilemma since growing dissatisfaction with capitalism by the proletariat also plays a key role in the Marxian vision, requiring (in Engels’s terms) “the development . . . of a class whose conditions of life necessarily drive it to social revolution” (“The Housing

F. Epilogue: On Engels and the “Closure” of Marx’s System 491 Question” 1872; MECW 23: 377). It is of high interest that Engels was concerned

from an early date – even before reliable empirical evidence came in of rising real wages and improving conditions – with “the fact that the English proletariat is actually becoming more and more bourgeois, so that the ultimate aim of this most bourgeois of all nations would appear to be the possession, alongside the bour- geoisie, of a bourgeois aristocracy and a bourgeois proletariat” (Engels to Marx, 7 October 1858; MECW 40 : 344).

The solution to the dilemma lay in Engels’s perception that British industrial supremacy was now under threat, so that what advantages had admittedly been enjoyed by labor could not be sustained. The imminent revolution would now fol- low upon secular stagnation, the supercession of British industrial power breaking the last bond between the working and middle classes. Engels’s Preface of 1886 to the first English edition of Capital elaborates the replacement of the cyclical pat- tern recurrent from 1825 to 1867 by “a permanent and chronic depression,” with dire consequences for labor: “The decennial cycle of stagnation, prosperity, over- production and crisis, ever recurrent from 1825 to 1867, seems indeed to have run its course; but only to land us in the slough of despond of a permanent and chronic depression” (MECW 35: 35). This then is the primary qualification to Engels’s “revisionism” dating from the mid-1870s which recognized welfare progress, including real-wage improvement under capitalist organization – such progress was unsustainable. Doubtless Marx would have approved. For in taking this line Engels was actually unearthing a forty-year-old theme, The Holy Family (1845) – formally a joint composition but in fact by Marx – containing brief remarks on the undermining of Britain’s international competitiveness, and on centralization, promising a grim future for labor under capitalism (MECW 4: 14). 34

The transition from Marx’s vision of a regular trade cycle around a rising trend path of national income to one of secular stagnation, is dramatic indeed. Yet this vision was already compromised by the restriction of key relationships to small private firms rather than the increasingly important joint-stock companies (above, p. 471).

34 A second lifeline was provided for Engels by the prospect of massive immigration from China, replacing that by the Irish earlier in the century.