In the context of the 21st century multi-dimensional crisis visited upon the planet and its many species of life-forms, it has become popular in some circles to suggest reaching back to the writings of long dead individuals for contemporary guidance. The ones chosen have invariably made outstanding contributions to the understanding of life on earth, and that is the prime reason normally given to urge some of us to consult their opinions. A recent suggestion from some on the left in 2024 has been to study the works of Fredrick Engels.

However, three cautionary factors need to be recognised before undue reliance is placed upon any past researcher’s and their conclusions – and that includes Engels. The first is that they were limited by the quality and quantity of the evidence they had available and chose to base their conclusions upon: Second; they were subject to at least some of the general, class based socio-economic assumptions that were popular and taken for granted during the period they existed on earth; and third, they, like all human beings, were subject to their own emotional responses to events as well as to the intellectual processing of their experiences.

In this article I will provide some additional evidence for recommending a degree of caution before anyone relies too heavily on recent uncritical suggestions that the 19th century opinions of Fredrick Engels are still worth accepting in the 21st. Although Engels was a consistent radical, he nevertheless shared many assumptions typical of the educated men of that period. It was generally assumed by most of the educated elite in the 19th and 20th centuries that the history of humanity – and thus the world – had evolved through a sequence of definite stages.

Crucially, it was imagined that  one stage preceded another and created the conditions and an accumulation of knowledge which was necessary for the development of the subsequent stages. Evolutionary developments were assumed to have a ‘progressive’ purpose! This assumption was a retrospective application to history of the bourgeois  notion of human ‘progress’ which itself had been adopted from the Abrahamic religious traditions of assuming a purposeful ‘creation’ of life on earth, by some invisible mystical being.

Fragments of  what was then known about history and  pre-history were selectively attached to this idea of human progress. Certain historical facts were selected from the historical record which ‘appeared’ to fit this theoretical construction of progress and the resulting assumptions presented as a series of necessary sequences. That type of purposeful narrative became part of a commonly held set of theoretical abstractions  across a range of religious and non-religious educated Europeans.  Unsurprisingly, perhaps, it was an accepted historical perspective shared by a broad spectrum of conservative, liberal and radical educated gentlemen. They generally only differed on the relative (and not the absolute) merits of this supposed historical ‘progress’ unfolding by the mystery of God’s will or by the unfolding of another abstraction known as ‘natural selection’.

Fedrick Engels, the revolutionary minded friend and collaborator of Karl Marx  provides us with an excellent example of this general  retrospective idea of progress as applied to some pre-supposed  stages of history and pre-history. It was most clearly contained within in his lengthy polemic against a religious intellectual called Duhring and carrying the title; ‘Anti-Duhring’. In the section on Force Theory Engels justifies the existence of slavery on the basis that it served a necessary purpose. He asserted that;

“Without slavery,  no Greek state, no Greek art and science; without slavery no Roman Empire, no modern Europe either. We should never forget that our whole economic, political and intellectual development presupposes a state of things in which slavery was as necessary as it was universally recognised. In this sense we are entitled to say: Without the slavery of antiquity, no modern socialism…..When we examine these questions , we are compelled to say  – however contradictory and heretical it may sound – that the introduction of slavery under the then prevailing conditions was a great step forward…..Given the historical antecedents of the ancient world, and particularly of Greece, the advance to a society based upon class antagonisms could only be accomplished in the form of slavery. This was an advance even for the slaves; the prisoners of war, from which the mass of the slaves was recruited, now at least saved their lives, instead of being killed as they had been before, or even roasted as at a still earlier period.” (Engels. Anti-Duhring. Section 4;  Force Theory concluded.)

Engels concludes from this 19th century general anthropocentric perspective that slavery was a “necessary stage”, “a great step forward” in the  “advance” of human hierarchical mass society that was leading toward socialism. He goes even further in his assumptions and considers that the slaves at the time should have viewed their slavery as an advance for themselves as it spared them from being killed or killed and eaten. With only limited 19th century knowledge of pre-history and history,  Engels accepts the general reactionary and bourgeois Hegelian perspective on assuming there is not only  a ‘purpose’ to the unfolding of history, but a necessary one, leading to a stage he and others actually desired – called socialism. How intellectually convenient and counterfactual was that?

Note also that Engels  accepts the 19th century prejudice against an imaginary pre-historical stage of humanity they called ‘barbarism’ in which they arrogantly assumed past Homo sapiens were so ‘ignorant’ that they didn’t know any better than to eat each other. Therefore, they concluded on the basis woefully insufficient evidence that the human species – as a whole – were then prone to routine killing and cannibalism. The well known fact at the time of Darwin and Engels, let alone the ancient Greeks and Egyptians, that no other species of life on earth, including predatory species, routinely turned on their own species for their sources of nutrition, did not cause them (or Engels) to question or refute that prejudiced assumption. He goes on to add imaginatively that;

“So long as the effective working population were so much occupied with their necessary labour that they had no time left for looking after the common affairs of society – the direction of labour, affairs of state, legal matters, art, science, etc. – the concomitant existence of a special class freed from actual labour to manage these affairs was always necessary;……” (ibid)

He retrospectively applies a modern bourgeois economic term of distinction (necessary labour) to a period long before the existence of hierarchical mass societies, let alone ones dominated by the capitalist mode of production. During the period that Engels lived and studied, sufficient accumulated evidence already existed within Europe to contradict that kind of biggoted received ‘opinion’. Evidence accumulated by the many voyages of discovery to the east, west, north and south of the planet had established the fact that native peoples around the globe, practised many different modes of production, which indicated the opposite. For multiple thousands of years, most human groups had plenty of time available after securing enough daily nutrition to engage in any other activities they deemed interesting or worthwhile. Art, music, story telling, craft work and even domesticating pets and modifying their behaviour had existed along with regular decisions of when and where to move their location, when resources became scarce.

Engels provides no evidence for the above asserted state of human society which implies that humans existed like ruminant animals and are assumed to spend most of their non sleeping time in grubbing around for low grade vegetable nourishment from low lying grasses. However, this perspective does not fit into any known historical or pre-historical modes of production such as hunter-gatherer bands, coastal and lake-side fishing villages, goat, sheep or reindeer herders or seasonal pastoralists, etc. His insertion of such an imaginary  fabricated scenario therefore can only be assumed to be part of a polemical construction used to provide a logical ‘progression’ to his following sentence – which encapsulates his own particular view of a hoped for socialist revolution. Thus;

“Only the immense increase of the productive forces attained by large-scale industry has made it possible to distribute labour among all members of society without exception, and this to limit the labour-time of each member to such an extent that all have enough free time left to take part in the general affairs of society, whether theoretical or practical. It is only now, therefore that every ruling and exploiting classes become superfluous and indeed a hinderance to social development… ” (ibid)

Elsewhere I have provided evidence that Engels often mis-understood, the revolutionary-humanist perspectives of his friend and colleague Karl Marx, particularly with regard to Marx’s forensic analysis of the capitalist mode of production, (in the three volumes of Das Capital, the extensive notes known as the Grundrisse or in the three volumes of notes on Surplus Value.) Indeed, the existence of large-scale industry is now demonstrably not the ‘progressive’ good or necessary stage for human emancipation as it was imagined to be, in the 19th and 20th centuries by all Bourgeois intellectuals, of conservative, liberal or even revolutionary persuasions.

Unsurprisingly, such context specific anthropocentric assumptions to varying degrees, were also made by Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin and Mao. How could they not be? These individuals were also – only human and their understanding limited by their experiences and the knowledge available to them at the time! Therefore, whilst recognising the many contributions to anti-capitalist and anti-patriarchal perspectives made by a number of the above noted individuals we should not abandon our own critical and self-critical research and we should avoid leaning too heavily upon the level of understanding achieved by all individuals living during earlier centuries.

The reminder to ‘Whenever you are sure of something; maintain it with doubt’, provided by Bertrand Russel to his students could be usefully followed by every one of us. We should research as diligently and critically as we can, but always remain open to new information and new perspectives, because these new facts and perspectives once proven  reliable may prompt us to refine, modify or even refute our previous conclusions. Reminding ourselves that we too are only human and as such are products of the limited social and economic circumstances that we are immersed in during our own lifetimes, is not a fatal weakness for us individually nor for humanity as a whole.

Indeed, I suggest this modesty represents a form of evolutionary development for our species. Knowing how little we still know or understand should create humility and caution rather than arrogance and impatience. Consequently, we should develop and retain a healthy suspicion of those who fail to recognise their own limitations and arrogantly assume they have gone beyond making mistakes or beyond arriving at ill informed conclusions.

Roy Ratcliffe (August 2024.)