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Brian Wells, Esquire, reviews "Collected Works" Vol. 4
This is Volume 4 of the historic 50 volume set of everything ever written by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels.The mammoth undertaking was initiated by International Publishers of New York City in 1975 and continued until all 50 volumes were published.

Volume 4 covers the years 1844 thru 1845 and contains "The Holy Family" written by Marx and Engels jointly and "The Condition of the Working Class in England" written by Engels alone andwhich was drawn from his series of articles called "The Condition in England" published in Volume 3 of this edition. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Pedestrian
Tristam Hunt is evidently a professional popular historian. He has read the standard bibliography and a bit more.He brings to bear his ability to write a coherant, balanced and easy-to-read narrative - a not inconsiderable skiill.

His idéal is almost certainly Francis Wheen's breezy but measured biiography of Marx. Wheen is name checked in the acknowledgements - along with British Labour politician Ed Milliband ! More significantly thanked is Simon Rigby, a careful academic scholar on Marxism whose positions clearly influence the author and pull him back from some of his more flipant inclinations.

Such flipancy motivates the only variants from safe and unchallening narrative taken mostly from the footnotes of Marx and Engels' collected works (`MECW'). To take an example, in September 1848 in the course of widespread political unrest in Germany, Engels was expelled from Cologne and sent by train to Paris. Penniless, he travelled from there on foot to Geneva, leaving Paris some time after the 5th October and arriving in Geneva around the 28th of October, and then on to Berne where he arrived sometime early in November. There he waited for the all-clear from Marx to return to Germany. On his way, he drafted a journalistic piece mixing political commentary on rural France with a travelogue-style description of the countryside : not an unusual style of writing for the period. Hunt leverages off the upbeat style of this unfinished and unpublished piece to build a picture of Engels having abandoned the revolution for a `walking holiday' (P.166), an `Arcadian walking tour' (P.171) or what he later sloppily calls the `1849 walking tour' (P.318) . The suggestion is clear that Engels was only a rich boy playing politics as a hobby..

Every aspect of Hunt's extended depiction of this minor event is slightly mis-presented in order to place Engels in the worst possible light. Fundamentally , what Hunt misses is that this was one of the few times in his life when Engels was without money - Marx, temporarlily enriched by his inheritance, was actually sending Engels money ! Walking to the safe haven of Switzerland was an entirely rational response to being penniless and dumped in a dangerously counter revolutionary Paris, no longer safe for radicals like Engels. Switzerland was the smart place to be. Walking was the safe and cheapest way to travel.Hunt also misses the simple fact that Engels actually covered around 550 km in about 23 days, quite a vigorours pace which belies the pastoral stylistic devices of his journalistic piece. Hunt takes the style for the fact, because it suits his purpose.. It is a tiny example. But there are quite a few.

For example, he observes of Marx `nothing infuriated him more than authentic, revolutionary credentials' (P. 185) . The comment is assinine. Hunt superficially condemns Engels for `hypocrisies for making his living off the textile trade which did so much damage to the Indian economy' (P.228).He feels no need to consider with any care whether there really are moral contradictions and not merely material contradictions in this situation.

To prove his claim - probably true - that Engels visited prostitutes, he takes the French term `grisette' as indicating prostitutes. Another biographer, John Green, has pointed out in The Guardian in 2009 that this is incorrect. But Hunt could have seen this himself from MECW 50 P.182 (particularly when compared to P. 190) where Engels uses the term grissette to mean simply young French working class women and to refer to delegates at a socialist conference. Nor is going to see prostitutes morally inconsistent with the view of prostitution set out for example, at P. 66-67 of MECW 50 where Engels' argument is that prostitutes should be freed from State persecution - as he explains elsewhere, until economic development makes prostitution redundant.

He charges Engels with supporting the British state against a possible invasion by Louis Napoleon because Engels designated the bonapartist regime as `reactionary' (P.222) and cites a source (MECW 11 P.204)where Engels did not make that argument.He suggests a conflict between The Communist Manifesto and the duo's programmatic document for the German Revolution of 1848, when there is no conflict. (P.157). He states that Engels `revered' Wellington (P.219). He quotes a passage whose ironic tone he misunderstands, gives the wrong référence (MECW 10 P.332) for its source and entirely misses Engels' actual assessment of Wellington as `overestimated' and ` a small and narrow mind' (MECW13 P.196).

When describing the Paris Commune, he acknowledges the existence of the `Communes conscious proletarin élément (P.253) but describes these as `Jacobins and Blanquists rather than Marxists (P.253). This ignores the internationalists like Eugene Varlin, final military commander and Elizabeth Dimitrieff, Marx's personal agent, who formed part of an increasingly influential minority tendency withiin the Commune.

Hunt describes Engels as `dismissive of the campaign for female suffrage' (P.317). But it is not female suffrage of which Engels was dismissive, rather it was the bourgeois-led suffrage movement. Engels voiced no concerns about the SPD campaign in 1893 and 1894 for female suffrage in Germany. Hunt fails to mention Marx and Engels consistent campaign in the First International for women to be allowed to organise separately - to mention that woud ruin the effect Hunt is aiming for.

Not all of his misjudgements are negative. Of Engels's rôle in the composition of Volume One of Kapital, he claims Engels `had provided many of the book's core insights into the actual workings of capital and labour (....) as well as its essential philosophy.' (P.237) Hunt is surely the first to think that Engels' influence extended quite that far !

To the modern eye the most fascinating part of Engels life is the period 1882-95 when the old revolutionary had an almost svengali-like status for the German SPD.. One would expect a modern biography to pour over this fascinating period in great détail, bringing together Engels' large correspondence,now available, with the many studies and much primary source material also available about many others from that period. But the treatment of this extraordinary period in Engels' life is paedestrian,.

Engels was certainly not a `great' man, whatever that means. But few have ever expended wealth and talent with such panache as this 19th century, challengingly masculine, Orson Wells of revolutionary politics.

Wheen's similar biography of Marx will probably just about survive as a substitute for Isaiah Berlin's better and similar effort. Hunts' will not.
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Product Description
According to Nimtz, no two people contributed more to the struggle for democracy in the nineteenth century than Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. Presenting the first major study of the two thinkers in the past twenty years and the first since the collapse of the Soviet Union, this book challenges many widely held views about their democratic credentials and their attitudes and policies on the peasantry, the importance of national self-determination, the struggle for women's equality, their so-called Eurocentric bias, political and party organizing, and the possibility for socialist revolution in an overwhelmingly peasant and underdeveloped country like late-nineteenth-century Russia. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Self-organization of the working class
In the endless denunciations of totalitarianism even as neo-liberalism demolishes the achievements of a century of labor, we forget that it was the self-organization of the working class that spearheaded the real emergence of democracy and universal suffrage. This book attempts to demonstrate that Marx and Engels were the leading protagonists in that process. The book surveys the whole drama from the 1840's to the final period of Engels and German Social democracy, stressing the activist political role of Marx, whose passive British museum life as an uninvolved philosopher is exposed as the myth it is. Curiously mordant is the comparison of the reactions of Marx and Engels compared to that of Tocqueville to the period of revolution in 1848 and the coming of Napoleon. Tocqueville is seen for who he was then, not the author of his famous book, and now the democrat, Marx the svengalian. It seems hopeless to ever set any of this straight.This book presents a clear snapshot of the full sequence of events.
This reviewer has also reviewed "The Myth of the Proletariat". This commentary is a useful response to the thesis of that work. ... Read more