Abstract
The aim of this chapter is to rethink Engels’s theory of class struggle, focusing on Engels’s early writing, especially German Peasants’ War written in 1850. It explores his theory of class struggle from three perspectives. First—comparing his early writings with later writings—it will be shown that his early descriptions of class struggle are not class reductionism. Rather, they indicate that he tried to regard so-called non-class elements as what forms class. Second, by comparing his early works with Marx’s early works, including The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, this paper examines the significance and limitation of Engels’s early writings in related to the theory of the state. Finally, I consider the flaws of Engels’s theory of class from the perspective of Marx’s critique of political economy. His argument could lead to a problematic understanding of class struggle that emphasizes only economic relations in a narrow sense.
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Notes
- 1.
The English text was edited by Liz Suessenbach. I am grateful to her help. All the remaining errors are mine.
- 2.
Friedrich Engels, Anti-Dühring, in MECW, Vol. 25, 8.
- 3.
Michael Heinrich, An Introduction to the Three Volumes of Karl Marx’s Capital (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2012), 24.
- 4.
Friedrich Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy, in MECW, Vol. 26, 383.
- 5.
Friedrich Engels, Dialectics of Nature, in MECW, Vol. 25, 356.
- 6.
See Heinrich, An Introduction to the Three Volumes of Karl Marx’s Capital, chap. 2.
- 7.
See Ryuji Sasaki, A New Introduction to Karl Marx: New Materialism, Critique of Political Economy, and the Thought of Metabolism (London: Palgrave, 2020); Teinosuke Otani, A Guide to Marxian Economy: What Kind of Social System Is Capitalism? (Berlin: Springer, 2018).
- 8.
Friedrich Engels, “Preface to the Second Edition of The Peasant War in Germany,” in MECW, Vol. 21, 94.
- 9.
See Terrell Carver, Marx and Engels: The Intellectual Relationship (Brighton: Wheatsheaf Books, 1983); Ellen Meiksins Wood, Democracy against Capitalism: Renewing Historical Materialism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
- 10.
For details, see Sasaki, A New Introduction to Karl Marx, chap. 1.
- 11.
“Owing to the fact that Feuerbach showed the religious world as an illusion of the earthly world—a world which in his writing appears merely as a phrase—German theory too was confronted with the question which he left unanswered: how did it come about that people ‘got’ these illusions ‘into their heads’? Even for the German theoreticians this question paved the way to the materialistic view of the world, a view which is not without premises, but which empirically observes the actual material premises as such and for that reason is, for the first time, actually a critical view of the world” (Karl Marx, The German Ideology, in MECW, Vol. 5, 236).
- 12.
“It is, in reality, much easier to discover by analysis the earthly kernel of the misty creations of religion than to do the opposite, i.e. to develop from the actual, given relations of life the forms in which these have been apotheosized. The latter method is the only materialist, and therefore the only scientific one.” See Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. 1 (London: Penguin Books, 1976), 494.
- 13.
K. Marx, “These on Feuerbach,” in MECW, Vol. 5, 5.
- 14.
Friedrich Engels, The Peasant War in Germany, in MECW, Vol. 10, 412.
- 15.
Ibid., 412–413.
- 16.
Karl Marx, “Contribution to the Critique or Hegel’s Philosophy of Law”, in MECW, Vol. 3, 175.
- 17.
Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, 718.
- 18.
For details, see Sasaki, New Introduction to Karl Marx.
- 19.
Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation (New York: Autonomedia, 2004).
- 20.
Friedrich Engels, “Preface to the Third German Edition of the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte by Marx”, in MECW, Vol. 26, 303.
- 21.
See Jeffery Mehlman, Revolution and Repetition: Marx/Hugo/Balzac (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1977); Dominick LaCapra, Rethinking Intellectual History: Text, Contexts, Language (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1983); Kojin Karatani, History and Repetition (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011).
- 22.
Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, in MECW, Vol. 11, 130–131.
- 23.
Ibid., 170.
- 24.
Engels, The Peasant War in German, 469–70.
- 25.
Various theoretical currents have theorized about the difficulties that the political left faces after taking power. For example, Ernest Mandel sought its cause in the conservatization for the defense of a partial victory (Power and Money: A Marxist Theory of Bureaucracy [London: Verso, 1992]), while Immanuel Wallerstein based it on the constraint by the interstate system. See The Decline of American Power: The U.S. in a Chaotic World (New York: The New Press, 2003). However, the fundamental problem is that political power itself cannot abolish the capitalist mode of production. This point has been largely developed by theoretical currents that inherit the outcomes of the state derivation debate. See John Holloway and Sol Picciotto (eds.), State and Capital: A Marxist Debate (London: Edward Arnold, 1978); Joachim Hirsch, Materialistische Staatstheorie: Transformationsprozesse des kapitalistischen Staatensystems (Hamburg: VSA, 2005).
- 26.
Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, 185–186.
- 27.
Karl Marx, “On the Jewish Question”, in MECW, Vol. 3, 166.
- 28.
Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, 185.
- 29.
Karl Marx, “Marx to Ludwig Kugelmann in Hanover: London, 12 April 1871,” in MECW, Vol. 44, 131.
- 30.
Karl Marx, The Civil War in France, in MECW, Vol. 22, 329.
- 31.
Ibid., 486.
- 32.
Ibid., 487.
- 33.
Ibid., 490–491.
- 34.
Ibid., 491.
- 35.
See Andrew Kliman, Reclaiming Marx’s “Capital”: A Refutation of the Myth of Inconsistency (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2007); F. Moseley, Money and Totality: A Macro-Monetary Interpretation of Marx’s Logic in Capital and the End of the ‘Transformation Problem (Leiden: Brill, 2015).
- 36.
For details, see Sasaki, New Introduction to Karl Marx, chap. 2.
- 37.
Friedrich Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, in MECW, Vol. 26, 173.
- 38.
See Kohei Saito, Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism: Capital, Nature and the Unfinished Critique of Political Economy (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2017).
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Sasaki, R. (2021). The Theory of Class Struggle in the Peasant War in Germany. In: Saito, K. (eds) Reexamining Engels’s Legacy in the 21st Century. Marx, Engels, and Marxisms. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55211-4_2
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