Product Description
Virtually everything Marx and Engels ever wrote on labor strikes and trade unions has been collected in this volume for the first time. It includes vivid, often eyewitness accounts of many of the greatest strikes and labor struggles of the last century.
This original and valuable collection challenges the prevailing assumption that Marx and Engels cared little for trade unions and their role in the transition to socialism or that they had little practical involvement with unions. Lapides illuminates the immense part personally played by Marx and Engels in helping to establish the modern labor movement. Covering the period 1844-1894, the book features graphic and moving portrayals of contemporary labor stuggles, candid personal views of various labor leaders, biting polemics against socialist rivals, and eloquent passages. Lapides provides an introduction that places the excerpts in historical and theoretical context. ... Read more

Product Description
This important new biography uses newly discovered material and takes a critical approach. Engels's formative years, before he met Marx, were crucial to the development of his thought. Carver is the first to analyse this early material in detail, revealing a surprising continuity in ambition and opinion over Engels's long career. Engels's personal and family relationships occupy centre-stage in this biography, and Engels the man emerges from Marx's shadow as a complex and engaging figure in his own right. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Probably the best English-language work on Engels
In fact, comparable to Gustav Mayer's immense work on biography and theory of the grand man, Friedrich Engels. Hunley wrote this apparently as a "Deputy Command Historian" in the USAF; I have no idea what that is, but his affiliation with the US military has in any case in no way prevented him from writing an excellent and balanced analysis of Engels' works and, of course, his relation to Marx.

Engels has been much maligned by Marxists of all sorts, something eagerly adopted by non-Marxist historians looking for an easy explanation for the degeneration of socialism in the first half of the 20th Century. Even otherwise competent people like Terrell Carver and Shlomo Avineri have gone along with this tendency. Fortunately for those of a more critical mind, in comes J.D. Hunley, according to his own political statement something of a libertarian, to set the record straight. And that he does with excellence in both style and substance.

Hunley starts by giving a rapid but effective overview of Engels' life, dividing it into an early and a mature period. He shows the way Engels abandoned his faith, the influence of the Young Hegelians, and the development of the extreme width and depth of Engels' knowledge and erudition over the years. He succesfully refutes the view of Stedman-Jones that Engels' character was that of a disappointed believer looking for a new faith; on the contrary, Engels is shown as a critical and consistently materialist thinker.

In the middle part of the book, probably the most important and by now unfortunately dreadfully necessary, Hunley refutes all the negative stereotypes attributed to Engels over the decades, particularly those by Marxist analists and biographers. He goes into the "dichotomist" view, which sees the theories of Engels and of Marx as very different, and shows the degree to which this is untenable. Delightful here are the sections where he subtly shows how the authors arguing this dichotomy contradict themselves, for example praising Marx and blaming Engels when saying the exact same thing. One of the authors involved even praises Marx' clearly superior view, not realizing the quote involved was written by Engels!

Hunley also goes into the view of Engels as being more technologically determinist or positivist in the natural sciences than Marx, showing that the former is untenable since every determinist phrase used by Engels can be shown to have been used or agreed to by Marx as well. The latter point is addressed quite extensively by showing how the use of concepts like "laws of nature" is the same with both Marx and Engels.

The final dichotomy Hunley rejects is that of Engels as father of social-democrat reformism. The (in)famous statement where the SPD in Germany is praised for its use of the ballot instead of the barricades is put into the context of military strategy, and is besides shown to have been heavily censored into a reformist view by Liebknecht et al., something Engels got very angry about. Hunley also compares Engels' "Principles of Communism" with the "Communist Manifesto", largely written by Marx, and shows that they say essentially the same things on every significant point. Finally, Engels is established to have been just as 'humanist' as Marx, in asserting the primacy of humans as actors in history in an equal manner (and sometimes stronger) as Marx.

Hunley ends with a chapter on the intellectual partnership between Marx and Engels, and while never saying this, quite correctly leaves no other conclusion possible than to view Marx and Engels as people who worked at an equal level of intellectual competence and who generally agreed on all matters of socialist theory, but at the same time different people with very different characters and temperament. One can go on blaming Engels for everything in a rather silly attempt to 'save' Marx from the errors of his followers, but Hunley shows what they both actually wrote about the controversial issues: and, to paraphrase Harry Truman, the buck stops there. ... Read more

Product Description
One hundred years after the death of Friedrich Engels, the long-time colleague of Karl Marx continues to influence the thought of socialist thinkers. This critical reappraisal of Engels addresses his relevance after both the death of Marx and the decline of Marxism, bringing Engels out from under the shadow of Marx to show the theoretical significance and historical impact of his wide-ranging criticisms for philosophy, science, political economy, history, and socialist politics.This collection of original essays seeks to determine the nature of Engels's role as an independent socialist thinker, showing how his views coincided with or diverged from those of Marx. Leading experts in political theory examine such topics as scientific socialism, Engels's understanding of the relation between internationalism and the "national question," and feminist views on Engels.The contributors offer new readings of Engels's texts, pursuing errors and omissions, uncovering his rhetorical maneuvers, and pointing to insights and conclusions in his thought that appear to have withstood the test of time. Engels after Marx attests both to the legacy of this political philosopher for contemporary left thought and to the legacy of Marxist socialism in the wake of upheavals in international Communism. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Reification of Marxism
Engels' Condition of the Working Class in England is one of the great studies of capitalism, and initiated the early Marx into the study of political economy. These essays tell the tale of the endgame, the fate of the vehicle created by Marx so soon frittered away in the period of Engels, in the ambiguities of Hegelianism, the dialectic as science, and the dangers or blessings of revisionism. Echoes of Norman Levine's The Tragic Deception force the question of Engels betraying the fine edge of the original theoretical Marxism, fair or not, and an egregious issue to those who find the real and deeper flaws in Marx's foundations.This version, however of the seminal Marx and the reifying Engels does not quite match the deeper difficulties, among them the obvious dangers of chaotification in making crypto-Hegelianism into the principles of a mass movement, in age also beset by the worst kind of positivist scientism.
One essay, Engels, Lukacs, and Kant's Thing in Itself, unwittingly and quite poignantly suggests the prophecy of the unstable post-Hegelian philosophic orphan spawning a dialectical tragedy that befell the whole project, in the era of Bernstein,and then Lenin. ... Read more

Product Description
Examines the problematic and divisive attitudes which bourgeois and socialist feminists take to the question of the links between patriarchy and capitalism and the importance of class conflict as a major cause of women's subordination. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

A must Read!!!
A must read!! ... Read more

Product Description
Not himself a Marxist, Dr Churchich has nevertheless won plaudits for this book from those committed to the philosophy. It is, they acknowledge, thoroughly researched, well reasoned, and balanced in its argument - even if that argument is one with which Marxists are bound to disagree, being based on the premise that 'ethical theories must ultimately rest on metaphysical and psychological preconceptions rather than on some imaginary empirical facts.'The declared aim of this work is to present a full exposition of Marx's and Engels' ideas on morality and ethics, and to indicate some of their errors and weaknesses. Unlike other studies of this subject, Churchich analyses all major aspects of morality, dealing not only with the writings of Marx himself but also with the works of most writers who have commented on Marxist morality and ethics.Marx himself intended to produce a work on social morality, but did not manage to do so. This book will therefore, and without doubt, become the standard work on his view of the subject. Superior to anything else on the topic written by non-Marxists, it is clearer on some aspects of Marx's view than the work of some Marxist writers - Churchich makes obvious for instance, how great was Althusser's mistake in arguing that there is 'not a grain of normative ethics in mature Marx'.Yet the author's objectivity allows him also to find values among the ethical arguments of Marx and Engels, making this a book which both Marxists and concerned Anglicans would find useful as a criticism of some current social trends. It also sounds a cautionary note for those who argue that the collapse of bureaucratic socialism in the former Soviet Union means the end of Marxism too - this is by no means Dr Churchich's view. ... Read more