Friedrich Engels is often overlooked as one
of the most important theoreticians of Marxism. Much of what Marx has written
was written with Engels. They both had the same ideas and we could not have
Marxism today without Engels. The two wrote the Communist Manifesto together.
While Marx wrote Das Kapital, he died before he could finish the second and third parts, so
Engels put those together, using Marx’s notes after he died.[1] It
was his book, The Peasant War in Germany, that I learned about
the radical leader Thomas Müntzer.[2] So this is a fitting tribute to Engels:
-SJ Otto
OUR IMMORTAL
COMRADE FREDREICH ENGELS IS 200 TODAY. SPIRITUALLY HE IS NOT DEAD AND BURIED
AND SPIRIT STILL SHIMMERING LIKE AN INEXTINUISHABLE FLAME. THE TIMES HAVE
CHANGED WITH CIRCUMSTANCES DRASTICALLY CHANGED BUT IN ESSENCE REPRESSION ON THE
WORKING CLASS IS MORE INTENSE WHO ARE TODAY IN ANOTHER FORM GREATER VICTIMS OF
CAPITALIST SLAVERY. HIS CONTRIBUTION IS ON THE SAME PEDESTAL AS MARX, LENIN,
STALIN AND MAO.[3] WITHOUT
ENGELS MARXISM WOULD NEVER HAVE COME INTO BEING.
CHOSEN EXCERPTS OF WRITINGS OF ENGELS
Quoting Engels
Introduction to ‘Dialectics
of Nature.’
'MODERN natural science, which alone has achieved an
all-round systematic and scientific development, as contrasted with the
brilliant natural-philosophical intuitions of antiquity and the extremely
important but sporadic discoveries of the Arabs, which for the most part
vanished without results – this modern natural science dates, like all more
recent history, from that mighty epoch which we Germans term the Reformation,
from the national misfortune that overtook us at that time, and which the French
term the Renaissance and the Italians the Cinquecento, although it is not fully
expressed by any of these names. It is the epoch which had its rise in the last
half of the fifteenth century. Royalty, with the support of the burghers of the
towns, broke the power of the feudal nobility and established the great
monarchies, based essentially on nationality, within which the modern European
nations and modern bourgeois society came to development. And while the
burghers and nobles were still fighting one another, the peasant war in Germany
pointed prophetically to future class struggles, not only by bringing on to the
stage the peasants in revolt – that was no longer anything new – but behind
them the beginnings of the modern proletariat, with the red flag in their hands
and the demand for common ownership of goods on their lips. In the manuscripts
saved from the fall of Byzantium, in the antique statues dug out of the ruins
of Rome, a new world was revealed to the astonished West, that of ancient
Greece: the ghosts of the Middle Ages vanished before its shining forms; Italy
rose to an undreamt-of flowering of art, which seemed like a reflection of
classical antiquity and was never attained again. In
It was the greatest progressive revolution that mankind
has so far experienced, a time which called for giants and produced giants –
giants in power of thought, passion, and character, in universality and
learning. The men who founded the modern rule of the bourgeoisie had anything
but bourgeois limitations. On the contrary, the adventurous character of the
time inspired them to a greater or less degree.'
Quoting excerpt of Engels on Dialectics from book
‘Dialectics of Nature.”
'It is, therefore, from the history of nature and human
society that the laws of dialectics are abstracted. For they are nothing but
the most general laws of these two aspects of historical development, as well
as of thought itself. And indeed they can be reduced in the main to three:'
The law of the transformation of quantity into quality
and vice versa;
The law of the interpenetration of opposites;
The law of the negation of the negation.'
'All three are developed by Hegel in his idealist fashion
as mere laws of thought: the first, in the first part of his Logic,
in the Doctrine of Being; the second fills the whole of the second and by
far the most important part of his Logic, the Doctrine of
Essence; finally the third figures as the fundamental law for the construction
of the whole system. The mistake lies in the fact that these laws are foisted
on nature and history as laws of thought, and not deduced from them. This is
the source of the whole forced and often outrageous treatment; the universe,
willy-nilly, is made out to be arranged in accordance with a system of thought
which itself is only the product of a definite stage of evolution of human
thought. If we turn the thing round, then everything becomes simple, and the
dialectical laws that look so extremely mysterious in idealist philosophy at
once become simple and clear as noonday.'
'Moreover, anyone who is even only slightly acquainted
with his Hegel will be aware that in hundreds of passages Hegel is capable of
giving the most striking individual illustrations from nature and history of
the dialectical laws.'
'We are not concerned here with writing a handbook of
dialectics, but only with showing that the dialectical laws are really laws of
development of nature, and therefore are valid also for theoretical natural
science. Hence we cannot go into the inner interconnection of these laws with
one another.'
'1.The law of the transformation of quantity into quality
and vice versa. For our purpose, we could express this by saying that in
nature, in a manner exactly fixed for each individual case, qualitative changes
can only occur by the quantitative addition or subtraction of matter or motion
(so-called energy).'
'All qualitative differences in nature rest on differences
of chemical composition or on different quantities or forms of motion (energy)
or, as is almost always the case, on both. Hence it is impossible to alter the
quality of a body without addition or subtraction of matter or motion, i.e.
without quantitative alteration of the body concerned. In this form, therefore,
Hegel's mysterious principle appears not only quite rational but even rather
obvious.'
'It is surely hardly necessary to point out that the
various allotropic and aggregational states of bodies, because they depend on
various groupings of the molecules, depend on greater or lesser quantities of
motion communicated to the bodies.'
But what is the position in regard to change of form of
motion, or so-called energy? If we change heat into mechanical motion
or vice versa, is not the quality altered while the quantity remains the
same? Quite correct. But it is with change of form of motion as with Heine's
vices; anyone can be virtuous by himself, for vices two are always necessary.
Change of form of motion is always a process that takes place between at least
two bodies, of which one loses a definite quantity of motion of one quality
(e.g. heat), while the other gains a corresponding quantity of motion of
another quality (mechanical motion, electricity, chemical decomposition). Here,
therefore, quantity and quality mutually correspond to each other. So far it
has not been found possible to convert motion from one form to another inside a
single isolated body.
We are concerned here in the first place with nonliving
bodies; the same law holds for living bodies, but it operates under very
complex conditions and at present quantitative measurement is still often
impossible for us.'
If we imagine any non-living body cut up into smaller and
smaller portions, at first no qualitative change occurs. But this has a limit:
if we succeed, as by evaporation, in obtaining the separate molecules in the
free state, then it is true that we can usually divide these still further, yet
only with a complete change of quality. The molecule is decomposed into its
separate atoms, which have quite different properties from those of the
molecule. In the case of molecules composed of various chemical elements, atoms
or molecules of these elements themselves make their appearance in the place of
the compound molecule; in the case of molecules of elements, the free atoms
appear, which exert quite distinct qualitative effects: the free atoms of
nascent oxygen are easily able to effect what the atoms of atmospheric oxygen,
bound together in the molecule, can never achieve.'
But the molecule is also qualitatively different from the
mass of the body to which it belongs. It can carry out movements independently
of this mass and while the latter remains apparently at rest, e.g. heat
oscillations; by means of a change of position and of connection with neighbouring
molecules it can change the body into an allotrope or a different state of
aggregation.
Thus we see that the purely quantitative operation of
division has a limit at which it becomes transformed into a qualitative
difference: the mass consists solely of molecules, but it is something
essentially different from the molecule, just as the latter is different from
the atom. It is this difference that is the basis for the separation of
mechanics, as the science of heavenly and terrestrial masses, from physics, as
the mechanics of the molecule, and from chemistry, as the physics of the atom.
In mechanics, no qualities occur; at most, states such as
equilibrium, motion, potential energy, which all depend on measurable
transference of motion and are themselves capable of quantitative expression.
Hence, in so far as qualitative change takes place here, it is determined by a
corresponding quantitative change.
In physics, bodies are treated as chemically unalterable
or indifferent; we have to do with changes of their molecular states and with
the change of form of the motion which in all cases, at least on one of the two
sides, brings the molecule into play. Here every change is a transformation of
quantity into quality, a consequence of the quantitative change of the quantity
of motion of one form or another that is inherent in the body or communicated
to it. "Thus, for instance, the temperature of water is first of all
indifferent in relation to its state as a liquid; but by increasing or
decreasing the temperature of liquid water a point is reached at which this
state of cohesion alters and the water becomes transformed on the one side into
steam and on the other into ice." (Hegel, Encyclopedia, Collected
Works, VI, p. 217.) Similarly, a definite minimum current strength is required
to cause the platinum wire of an electric incandescent lamp to glow; and every
metal has its temperature of incandescence and fusion, every liquid its
definite freezing and boiling point at a given pressure - in so far as our means
allow us to produce the temperature required; finally also every gas has its
critical point at which it can be liquefied by pressure and cooling. In short,
the so-called physical constants are for the most part nothing but designations
of the nodal points at which quantitative addition or subtraction of motion
produces qualitative alteration in the state of the body concerned, at which,
therefore, quantity is transformed into quality.'
In a famous chapter “The Role of Work in Transforming Ape
into
Engels goes on: “in fact, with every day that
passes we are learning to understand these laws more correctly and getting to
know both the more immediate and the more remote consequences of our
interference with the traditional course of nature. … But the more this
happens, the more will men not only feel, but also know, their unity
with nature, and thus the more impossible will become the senseless
and antinatural idea of a contradiction between mind and matter, man and
nature, soul and body. …”
'It required the labour of thousands of years for us to
learn a little of how to calculate the more remote natural effects of our
actions in the field of production, but it has been still more difficult in
regard to the more remote social effects of these actions. We mentioned the
potato and the resulting spread of scrofula. But what is scrofula compared to
the effects which the reduction of the workers to a potato diet had on the
living conditions of the popular masses in whole countries, or compared to the
famine the potato blight brought to Ireland in 1847, which consigned to the
grave a million Irishmen, nourished solely or almost exclusively on potatoes,
and forced the emigration overseas of two million more? When the Arabs learned
to distil spirits, it never entered their heads that by so doing they were
creating one of the chief weapons for the annihilation of the aborigines of the
then still undiscovered American continent. And when afterwards
[1] Das Kapital, also called Capital.
A Critique of Political Economy (German: Das Kapital. Kritik der politischen Ökonomie, pronounced [das kapiˈtaːl kʁɪˈtiːk deːɐ poˈliːtɪʃən
økonoˈmiː]; 1867–1883), is a
foundational theoretical text in materialist philosophy, economics and politics by Karl Marx. Marx
aimed to reveal the economic patterns underpinning the capitalist mode of production in
contrast to classical political economists such
as Adam Smith, Jean-Baptiste
Say, David Ricardo and John Stuart Mill.
While Marx did not live to publish the planned second and third parts, they
were both completed from his notes and published after his death by his
colleague Friedrich Engels. Das Kapital is
the most cited book in the social sciences published before 1950.
[2] Müntzer, Engels,
Marx, Lenin, Stalin, Mao and other Marxist theoreticians’ writings can be found
in Marxist and
revolutionary online libraries, here at Otto’s War
Room.
[3] Karl Marx,
V.I. Lenin/ Владимир Ильич Ленин,
Joseph
Stalin/ Иосиф Виссарионович Сталин/ იოსებ ბესარიონის ძე სტალინი, Mao Zedong/ 毛泽东.
[4] For example: ‘Dialectics of Nature.’
[5] Albert Einstein
was a socialist most of his life. Joseph Reed Petticrew, writing “The one
and true Albert Einstein,” for the People’s Weekly World,
January 8, 2000, vol. 14, No. 31, p. 9, pointed out that he was a
socialist and while all kinds of conservative people were willing to
acknowledge him as “Person of the Century,” a title bestowed by Time magazine,
they all ignored his left-wing views and focused only on his scientific
contribution.
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