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Post by dodger on Sept 30, 2013 20:58:26 GMT
Very useful life of Engels, 11 Dec 2008
By William Podmore
This review is from: A Revolutionary Life: Biography of Friedrich Engels (Paperback)
John Green, a journalist and trade union official, has produced a useful biography of the great revolutionary Friedrich Engels. Marx and Engels always stressed that the working class, who are the vast majority in industrial countries, must take responsibility for their countries by seizing control from the selfish minority capitalist class.
They wrote in the Communist Manifesto, 'The modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie ' the bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into paid wage-labourers.'
But Engels later slipped back from this clarity and suggested that skilled workers were labour aristocrats, 'bought off' with crumbs from Britain's trade and industrial monopoly
Green points out that the Manifesto gives an answer to 'social instability, unemployment, homelessness, pension uncertainty and social breakdown, by explaining that their causes are intrinsic to the system and do not lie in individual inadequacy.'
He quotes Fidel Castro, 'Marxism taught me what society was. I was like a blindfolded man in a forest, who doesn't even know where north and south is. If you don't eventually come to truly understand the history of the class struggle, or at least have a clear idea that society is divided between the rich and the poor, and that some people subjugate and exploit other people, you're lost in a forest, not knowing anything.'
Green sums up, 'Engels deserves to be not only remembered, but his works re-examined. Our society, on a global scale, is still divided into rich and poor, we still have rapacious capitalism, now on a much more globalised scale than in his day. In many countries of the world we still have slum housing, child labour and social conflict. His vision of a better and more just world and his understanding of history have not lost their relevance ''
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Post by dodger on Sept 30, 2013 21:12:01 GMT
Great biography of a fine man, 27 May 2009
By William Podmore
This review is from: The Frock-Coated Communist: The Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels (Hardcover)
Tristram Hunt, a lecturer in British history at Queen Mary, University of London, has written a fine biography of Engels. He shows how Engels developed by working through Shelley's poetry, Strauss' Life of Jesus, Hegel's Philosophy of History, Feuerbach's critique of Christianity, and Carlyle's two volumes on Cromwell.
He shows how Engels was both a patriot and an internationalist. Engels reported capitalism human costs, first in Barmen in Prussia, then in Manchester, in the brilliant Condition of the Working Class in England, where, as Engels, wrote, "I accuse the English bourgeoisie before the entire world of murder, robbery and other crimes on a massive scale."
He co-wrote the Communist Manifesto and made a huge contribution to Das Kapital, `the foundation text of scientific socialism and one of the classics of Western political thought'. His work with Marx was `Western philosophy's greatest intellectual partnership'.
Engels was a great enthusiast for science: "Darwin, by the way, whom I'm reading just now, is absolutely splendid." As a materialist and atheist, he knew that matter existed independently of, and before, any consciousness.
Hunt notes, "He always believed in a workers' party led by the working class itself (rather than intellectuals and professional revolutionaries)". He worked in the General Council of the First International and with Britain's trade unions.
He opposed colonialism and supported the Indian and Chinese peoples' wars for independence. Hunt writes, "When it came to the raw politics of race, Engels was always on the right side." He exposed the ruling classes' exploitation of the colonies' raw materials, cheap labour and unprotected markets. In 1882 he forecast, "I would consider a European war to be a disaster; this time it would prove frightfully serious and inflame chauvinism everywhere for years to come."
Hunt concludes, "He remained that restless, inquisitive, productive and passionate architect of scientific socialism who first emerged in the 1840s. ... His critique speaks down the ages" - `the insight that the modern state was merely a front for bourgeois class interests', the growth of finance capital, the instability of capitalism, its inevitable crises and its absolute decline.
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