Engels: A Very Short Introduction by Terrell Carver

Author:Terrell Carver [Carver, Terrell]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 0192804669
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 1981-01-15T07:00:00+00:00

These, strictly scientifically proved – and the official economists take great care not to make even an attempt at a refutation – are some of the chief laws of the modern, capitalist, social system. But does this tell the whole story? By no means. Marx sharply stresses the bad sides of capitalist production but with equal emphasis clearly proves that this social form was necessary to develop the productive forces of society to a level which will make possible an equal development worthy of human beings for all members of society. All earlier forms of society were too poor for this. Capitalist production is the first to create the wealth and the productive forces necessary for this, but at the same time it also creates, in the numerous and oppressed workers, the social class which is compelled more and more to take possession of this wealth and these productive forces in order to utilize them for the whole of society . . . (i.462, 463, 464, 468–9; xvi.217)

By 1878 Engels had also become, in a small way, Marx’s biographer, contributing a sketch for a German almanac on ‘the man who was the first to give socialism, and thereby the whole labour movement of our day, a scientific foundation’. He chose to dwell on only two of Marx’s discoveries: his ‘new conception of history’ and the ‘final elucidation of the relation between capital and labour’. The discussion of the former proceeded in very positive terms. ‘Marx has proved that the whole of previous history is a history of class struggles’, and that ‘these classes owe their origin and continued existence’ to the ‘particular material, physically sensible conditions in which society at a given period produces and exchanges its means of subsistence’. From this point of view ‘all the historical phenomena are explicable in the simplest possible way – with sufficient knowledge of the particular economic condition of society’. In the published version of Engels’s rather more famous ‘Speech at Marx’s Graveside’, this point of view was again likened to Darwin’s work – described as ‘the law of development of organic nature’ – and was termed ‘the law of development of human history’. The theory of surplus value became, in Engels’s eulogy, ‘the special law of motion governing the present day capitalist mode of production’. He then alluded rather vaguely to other ‘independent discoveries’ made by Marx and linked the man of science with the ‘revolutionist’ (ii.156, 162–6, 167; emphases added).

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