Review Engels on the Road

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Are a closed book beyond his comprehension He who acquires a thorough textbook grounc In Botany, won't hear the grass that grows.

He is not wise who from his reading draws Nothing but floods of useless erudition. For all his learning, life's mysterious laws The child is father to the man. Frederick Engels was a revolutionary - in politics and in philosophy -almost all his adult life. But he began as a bourgeois revolutionary, and only later became a proletarian More, he was the co-founder of the scientific programme of the proletarian revolution. Engels' trans formation was no easy process, since what was involved was not merely the changing of his views, but the struggle - reflected in thought - of two mighty social orders, the dictatorships of capital and of the working class.

It is therefore an important gain for us to be able to approach the study of an essential part in the first stages of this process. The second volume of the Marx-Engels Collected Works contains the writings of the young Engels between the ages of 17 and 22 (i.e. up to 1842). The first volume covering Marx's earliest writings, has already been reviewed in Socialist Press, no.1 (6.2.75). This second, in which nearly every item appears in English for the first time, also helps us to understand some of the difficulties in the paths by which the founders of scientific socialism move towards its essentail principles The strongest fledgling is often the one who must break through the toughest eggshell. Engels was born in 1820, into a family of conservative and religious German industrialists. He moved in the direction of philosophical materialism and scientific socialism initially through the wholehearted defence of Hegelian philosophy against its religious opponents and interpreters and through political support for German nationalism, and the democratic bourgeois revolution which was necessary at that time to achieve its aims.

NATIONALISM

Engels says of the great German idealist philosopher Hegel that he "came under his own pronouncement that every philosophy is but the thought content of its own time". . Engels would not have considered himself immune from such a comment, and his earliest statements certainly reflect his origins in the German bourgeoisie. He belonged to a class which at that time faced the task of carrying through the democratic aims of the bourgeois revolution, of freeing Germany from the survivals of feudalism and superstitution, and of bringing together its numerous tiny principalities into a modern nation state.

In the mid-nineteenth century the political and economic unification of Germany appeared as the task of the capitalist and middle classes, who were only just beginning to feel the working: class at their backs. Engels began to form his ideas at a time when in many parts of Europe, including Germany: the modern working class was still being formed, and had only in Britain yet begun to lay claim to its political independence against the bourgeoisie. Today the situation is far different. The partition in Germany and Europe at the end of the war was the fruit of a conspiracy between capitalism and Stalinism. The existing state boundary and national antagonisms can only be eradicated by the revolutionary working class, establishing its power on a basis that breaks open the historical limits of the nation state. But when Engels began to write, the class into which he was born still faced some national revolutionary tasks. In this sense he was a child of his country.

In the late 1830's and early 1840's Engels formed his worldview in the study and defence of Hegel's philosophical system - the most advanced that was to be produced by bourgeois thinkers. At the same time he took up the political cause of German nationalism. Unlike Hegel, however, he did not consider that this carried any obligation to echo the reactionary forms of German chauvinism. Thus he attacks "the servile twaddle which without any principle all newspaper: now serve up against the French" Like Hegel, he admired the French revolution of 1789 and its achieve'exposted by ofe armies of Napereon.

He also began, even betore Marx to study in detail the nature and significance of the growth of the industrial proletariat. While Marx was still seeking in a more abstract way for the role of the working class as a 'universal' class, resolving the crisis of society as a whole, Engels was already looking at the lives of workers in those parts of Germany where industry had developed. In 1842 he visited Britain where the number of workers and their battles for their rights had reached a more advanced stage than anywhere else in the world. Thus (as Marx acknowledged) it was En gels who took one of the essential first steps in probing beyond the basis it concealed.

But Engeis also took up an independent struggle - initially as a distinct task - to work through to the inner meaning of the body of theoretical knowledge that he had inherited. He did this by using it to criticise the literary and religious life of his own land and his own time.

More positively, some of Engels earliest passages show him reach out towards a unified view of social life and nature. The short aphoristic essay on' 'Landscapes' organised and without leadership" which had swept Lancashire. These were movements which none of his former 'philosophical categories'

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mystical framework of Hegel's sys- tem towards the rational, material