Jürgen Herres. Marx und Engels

Jürgen Herres opens his excellent book Marx und Engels: Porträt einer intellektuellen Freundschaft with an indisputable claim: the friendship and collaboration of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels is perhaps without parallel in modern European history. From the time of their first meeting in Paris in 1844 until Marx’s death in 1883, the two were close friends. They authored works together. Each considered the other to be his most valued and trusted interlocutor. In the heated and highly fractional politics of the emerging socialist movement, they almost always thought and acted in unison. Whenever possible, they lived within walking distance of each other, and when circumstances forced them apart, they exchanged vast numbers of letters. After their deaths, official communist ideology spliced these men into a kind of hybrid creature, Marx-Engels. But in the broader scholarly community, there have been long-standing disputes about the nature of their relationship. Was Engels a second-rate thinker who dedicated himself mainly to fostering his friend’s creative work? Certainly Engels himself contributed to this image by describing himself as a mere talent beside Marx’s overwhelming genius. The external facts of Engels’s life might point in that direction as well. Engels was, after all, the increasingly prosperous director of a family-owned textile mill in Manchester. He gave substantial financial support to Marx and his family, who lived precariously in London since the collapse of the German revolutions of 1848. He continued grudgingly in Manchester for almost twenty years and left the business and moved to London in 1870 only when he was sure that his investments would provide a decent living for himself and the Marx family. And even when Marx secured a more stable income as a correspondent for the New-York Tribune, Engels assisted by writing at least 170 of more than 500 Tribune articles published under Marx’s name. After Marx’s death Engels dedicated much of his energies to curating the legacy of his friend, including the strenuous task of cobbling together volumes 2 and 3 of Das Kapital from the incomplete manuscripts left by Marx. Engels’s role as guardian and interpreter has spawned the second area of dispute. For years many defenders of Marx have insisted that Marx’s thought was far more supple and nondogmatic than the ideological construct bearing his name. If the hallmark of twentieth-century communism is belief in ironclad dialectical laws at work in history and nature, it is not Marx who is held responsible but Engels, who played a kind of Saint Paul to the socialist Christ by reducing and hardening Marx’s teachings in works like Anti-Dühring (1878), Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (1880), and Dialectics of Nature (1883).

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