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Marx & Engels: Basic Writings on Politics and Philosophy
Engels' & Marx's writing are represented here in full variety, also including little-known letters & essays.
Manifesto of the Communist Party/Marx & Engels
Parts: A contribution to the critique of political economy/Marx
On historical materialism/Engels
Socialism: Utopian & scientific/Engels
Critique of the Gotha Program/Marx
Parts: Capital: A critique of political economy/Marx
On the history of early Christianity/Engels
L. Feuerbach & the end of classical German philosophy/Engels
Theses on Feuerbach/Marx
Parts: The German ideology/Marx & Engels
Parts: The Communism of the paper Rheinischer beobachter/Marx Parts: Toward the critique of Hegel's Philosophy of right/Marx
Parts: Herr Eugen Duhring's Revolution in science/Engels
Parts: The class struggles in France 1848-50/Marx
Parts: The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte/Marx
Parts: The Civil War in France/Marx
Part: Origin of the family, private property & the state/Engels
Letters on historical materialism/Engels
Parts: The peasant war in Germany/Engels
Letters & essays on political sociology/Marx & Engels
Letters: Russia's pattern of development. The Russian Marxists & Marxist texts. Anarchism & conspiratorial ethics. English Fabian socialism. Auguste Comte. Socialist imperialism in Java. Defence of progressive imperialism in Algeria. Socialist colonial policy. Sociology of the Bible. Oriental cities. Social classes in America. Why there is no large Socialist party in America
Essays: History of the Communist League. Excerpt from On social conditions in Russia. The British rule in India. On authority. Capital punishment. The labor movement in the US
Manifesto of the Communist Party/Marx & Engels
Parts: A contribution to the critique of political economy/Marx
On historical materialism/Engels
Socialism: Utopian & scientific/Engels
Critique of the Gotha Program/Marx
Parts: Capital: A critique of political economy/Marx
On the history of early Christianity/Engels
L. Feuerbach & the end of classical German philosophy/Engels
Theses on Feuerbach/Marx
Parts: The German ideology/Marx & Engels
Parts: The Communism of the paper Rheinischer beobachter/Marx Parts: Toward the critique of Hegel's Philosophy of right/Marx
Parts: Herr Eugen Duhring's Revolution in science/Engels
Parts: The class struggles in France 1848-50/Marx
Parts: The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte/Marx
Parts: The Civil War in France/Marx
Part: Origin of the family, private property & the state/Engels
Letters on historical materialism/Engels
Parts: The peasant war in Germany/Engels
Letters & essays on political sociology/Marx & Engels
Letters: Russia's pattern of development. The Russian Marxists & Marxist texts. Anarchism & conspiratorial ethics. English Fabian socialism. Auguste Comte. Socialist imperialism in Java. Defence of progressive imperialism in Algeria. Socialist colonial policy. Sociology of the Bible. Oriental cities. Social classes in America. Why there is no large Socialist party in America
Essays: History of the Communist League. Excerpt from On social conditions in Russia. The British rule in India. On authority. Capital punishment. The labor movement in the US
497 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1959
About the author
Karl Marx
3,353 books6,846 followersWith the help of Friedrich Engels, German philosopher and revolutionary Karl Marx wrote
The Communist Manifesto
(1848) and
Das Kapital
(1867-1894), works, which explain historical development in terms of the interaction of contradictory economic forces, form many regimes, and profoundly influenced the social sciences.
German social theorist Friedrich Engels collaborated with Karl Marx on The Communist Manifesto in 1848 and on numerous other works.
Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakunin in London opposed Communism of Karl Marx with his antithetical anarchy.
Works of Jacques Martin Barzun include Darwin, Marx, Wagner (1941).
The Prussian kingdom introduced a prohibition on Jews, practicing law; in response, a man converted to Protestantism and shortly afterward fathered Karl Marx.
Marx began co-operating with Bruno Bauer on editing Philosophy of Religion of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (see Democritus and Epicurus), doctoral thesis, also engaged Marx, who completed it in 1841. People described the controversial essay as "a daring and original piece... in which Marx set out to show that theology must yield to the superior wisdom." Marx decided to submit his thesis not to the particularly conservative professors at the University of Berlin but instead to the more liberal faculty of University of Jena, which for his contributed key theory awarded his Philosophiae Doctor in April 1841. Marx and Bauer, both atheists, in March 1841 began plans for a journal, entitled Archiv des Atheismus (Atheistic Archives), which never came to fruition.
Marx edited the newspaper Vorwärts! in 1844 in Paris. The urging of the Prussian government from France banished and expelled Marx in absentia; he then studied in Brussels. He joined the league in 1847 and published.
Marx participated the failure of 1848 and afterward eventually wound in London. Marx, a foreigner, corresponded for several publications of United States.
He came in three volumes. Marx organized the International and the social democratic party.
Marx in a letter to C. Schmidt once quipped, "All I know is that I am not a Marxist," as Warren Allen Smith related in Who's Who in Hell .
People describe Marx, who most figured among humans. They typically cite Marx with Émile Durkheim and Max Weber, the principal modern architects.
Bertrand Russell later remarked of non-religious Marx, "His belief that there is a cosmic ... called dialectical materialism, which governs ... independently of human volitions, is mere mythology" ( Portraits from Memory , 1956).
More: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Marx
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/marx/
http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/bi...
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/...
http://www.historyguide.org/intellect...
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic...
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/...
http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/t...
German social theorist Friedrich Engels collaborated with Karl Marx on The Communist Manifesto in 1848 and on numerous other works.
Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakunin in London opposed Communism of Karl Marx with his antithetical anarchy.
Works of Jacques Martin Barzun include Darwin, Marx, Wagner (1941).
The Prussian kingdom introduced a prohibition on Jews, practicing law; in response, a man converted to Protestantism and shortly afterward fathered Karl Marx.
Marx began co-operating with Bruno Bauer on editing Philosophy of Religion of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (see Democritus and Epicurus), doctoral thesis, also engaged Marx, who completed it in 1841. People described the controversial essay as "a daring and original piece... in which Marx set out to show that theology must yield to the superior wisdom." Marx decided to submit his thesis not to the particularly conservative professors at the University of Berlin but instead to the more liberal faculty of University of Jena, which for his contributed key theory awarded his Philosophiae Doctor in April 1841. Marx and Bauer, both atheists, in March 1841 began plans for a journal, entitled Archiv des Atheismus (Atheistic Archives), which never came to fruition.
Marx edited the newspaper Vorwärts! in 1844 in Paris. The urging of the Prussian government from France banished and expelled Marx in absentia; he then studied in Brussels. He joined the league in 1847 and published.
Marx participated the failure of 1848 and afterward eventually wound in London. Marx, a foreigner, corresponded for several publications of United States.
He came in three volumes. Marx organized the International and the social democratic party.
Marx in a letter to C. Schmidt once quipped, "All I know is that I am not a Marxist," as Warren Allen Smith related in Who's Who in Hell .
People describe Marx, who most figured among humans. They typically cite Marx with Émile Durkheim and Max Weber, the principal modern architects.
Bertrand Russell later remarked of non-religious Marx, "His belief that there is a cosmic ... called dialectical materialism, which governs ... independently of human volitions, is mere mythology" ( Portraits from Memory , 1956).
More: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Marx
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/marx/
http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/bi...
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/...
http://www.historyguide.org/intellect...
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic...
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/...
http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/t...
Ratings & Reviews
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Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
January 27, 2019
I've held onto this book for ten years or so but had never read it cover to cover. I can't even remember what portions of it I read when I bought it or whether I read said portions for a class or in my free time. There are sloppy margin notes I assume are mine, usually drawing forced connections between some paragraph and Foucault or Durkheim or whatever I happened to be studying at the time. Point being, as familiar as I may be with the generalities of Marxist theory and this or that specific piece of writing (some of which are not included in this book which consciously focuses mainly on Marxist political philosophy), much of this collection is either new to me or as good as new to me.
And you know what? I was missing out. It turns out that supplementing blurry memories of the Manifesto, The 18th Brumaire et al. with occasional wikipedia deep dives is no substitute for reading Marx and Engels in their own words. Even if their arguments and observations weren't so disappointingly relevant today, they offer a treasure trove of ideas and insights.
Despite the focus on the political, as opposed to the more economical or sociological, side of Marx and Engels, the scope of this book is still quite wide. It spans Marx's early, ungainly Left Hegelianism of the 1840s to Engels remarkably clear, straightforward correspondences concerning historical materialism in the 1890s. There are dense, painfully acute writings on political organization and purpose (Critique of the Gotha Program) but also lively journalistic accounts of European turmoils (The Civil War in France) and fascinating re-interpretations of historical moments and movements (The Peasant War in Germany). On the whole I find that Engels' contributions are more enjoyable -his writing style being the more fluid and concise of the two- but the book as a whole is a worthwhile read.
I'm sure there are conservatives who would find this book upsetting on every level, but I'd say this is a book for just about anyone else. One needn't be communist to recognize Marx and Engels as vital thinkers and important writers.
And you know what? I was missing out. It turns out that supplementing blurry memories of the Manifesto, The 18th Brumaire et al. with occasional wikipedia deep dives is no substitute for reading Marx and Engels in their own words. Even if their arguments and observations weren't so disappointingly relevant today, they offer a treasure trove of ideas and insights.
Despite the focus on the political, as opposed to the more economical or sociological, side of Marx and Engels, the scope of this book is still quite wide. It spans Marx's early, ungainly Left Hegelianism of the 1840s to Engels remarkably clear, straightforward correspondences concerning historical materialism in the 1890s. There are dense, painfully acute writings on political organization and purpose (Critique of the Gotha Program) but also lively journalistic accounts of European turmoils (The Civil War in France) and fascinating re-interpretations of historical moments and movements (The Peasant War in Germany). On the whole I find that Engels' contributions are more enjoyable -his writing style being the more fluid and concise of the two- but the book as a whole is a worthwhile read.
I'm sure there are conservatives who would find this book upsetting on every level, but I'd say this is a book for just about anyone else. One needn't be communist to recognize Marx and Engels as vital thinkers and important writers.
March 1, 2026
really excellent survey of the complete topography of Marxian thought. I really appreciated the editing, which situated the individual essays in the scope and development of both Marx and Engels, as well as the variety of subjects covered. The middle section on French history (culminating in the 18th Brumaire) was particularly strong, and the Engels essays on early and medieval Christianity were highlights for me. I had to really chug away at this book to finish it (often rereading, going back to previous essays, making notes, etc) but I’m leaving it with a much better understanding of the intellectual headwaters and immortal analysis of Marxism. I’m still trying to wrap my head around Hegel and the critique of German idealism. But that’s ok!
April 15, 2026
Chapter I. Manifesto of the Communist Party (Marx & Engels)
As countries have internal division between town and country, north and south, so too, the inequality of nations causes war, as class divisions are a civil war. Wars are caused by the uneven development of capitalism (31). The capitalist structure has overdetermining conditions, as opposed to pure conditions, economic or otherwise.
Marx and Engels compare communists to early communities of the first Christians (pages 31, 168, and 183). Adopting the name of communists, Marx and Engels agree upon their critique of the Christian socialism of Robert Owen, whom they deem a "utopian" socialist. In contrast, the communist hypothesis is scientific (37).
Chapter II. A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (Marx)
Chapter III. On Historical Materialism (Engels)
In his Marxist statement on epistemology (51) Engels traces the British origins of modern materialism in Thomas Hobbes, who systematized Bacon. British empiricism has its apogee where Locke proves the source of all knowledge is our senses (48-49). The English have their influence felt most of all in France, with the radical materialists of the French-Revolution type, and the critique of all existing conditions (59). For a universal form of critique, Engels settles on the infallible test of action (51) culminating in Marx's thesis (page 245) on practice as the measure of truth.
In the development from Kant to Hegel (52) the Kantian thing-in-itself dissolves into its qualities. Hegel finds qualities exhausting existence, leaving behind nothing.
For the sake of historical background, Engels makes interesting remarks on the reformation (55) and English revolution (57).
Chapter IV. Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (Engels)
Engels refers to "anarchy' as a pejorative for capitalist planning, (68, 97)
"the anarchy existing in production." (68)
Engels associates the utopians with one common mistake of lacking the proletariat:
"One thing is common to all three. [...] Like the French philosophers, they do not claim to emancipate a particular class to begin with, but all humanity at once." (71)
However critical of "utopian" versus scientific socialism, Engels does not deny the social sense of equality of Robert Owen: "He was the first to declare that in any given society the degree of woman's emancipation is the natural measure of the general emancipation." (76)
Engels apprehends in Owen a cycle of bourgeois society under capitalism, in which:
"civilization moves in "a vicious circle," in contradictions which it constantly reproduces without being able to solve them; hence it constantly arrives at the very opposite to that which it wants to attain, or pretends to want to attain, so that, e.g., "under civilization poverty is born of superabundance itself."" (77)
Bourgeois politics has no history because it continually repeats its political changes.
Robert Owen's communism (80)
Robert Owen's business model for his cotton factory (78-79)
Hegel's system as a high point of philosophy (86-87)
Early class struggles (88)
Engels indicates what is new to capitalism since the industrial revolution, when ownership becomes less important than production.
"Now the owner of the instruments of labor always appropriated to himself the product, although it was no longer his product, but exclusively the product of the labor of others. [...] The means of production, and production itself, had become in essence socialized. But they were subjected to a form of appropriation which presupposes the private production of individuals, under which, therefore, everyone owns his own product and brings it to market. The mode of production is subjected to this form of appropriation, although it abolishes the conditions upon which the latter rests." (94)
The contradiction stands between the social form of capitalism, and the very unsocial appropriation of the private profit. From that social production, the distribution is unequal, by the system of private ownership of that product of society. From the social labor, the social production confronts the limits of capitalism.
"But all this changed as soon as the means of production became socialized and concentrated in the hands of capitalists." (95)
The performance of wage labor contrasts with agricultural labor, when wage labor was far less common. Engels apprehends a turn in capitalism when the temporary exception, "became the rule and the basis of all production" (95). Wage labor for life was far from the universal norm of today. Since the transition to capitalism, agricultural workers turned to wage labor.
"The wage worker for a time became a wage worker for life. The number of these permanent wage workers was further enormously increased by the breaking up of the feudal system that occurred at the same time, by the dispanding of the retainers of the feudal lords, the eviction of the peasants from their homesteads, etc. The separation was made complete between the means of production, concentrated in the hands of the capitalists, on the one side, and the producers, possessing nothing but their labor power, on the other. The contradiction between socialized production and capitalistic appropriation manifested itself as the antagonism of proletariat and bourgeoisie."(95)
The division of labor in capitalist production causes the division between town and country:
"that the production of society at large was ruled by absence of plan, by accident, by anarchy; [...] By this the old, peaceful, stable condition of things was ended. [...] The field of labor became a battleground. The great geographical discoveries, and the colonization following upon them, multiplied markets and quickened the transformation of handicraft into manufacture. The war did not break out simply between the individual producers of particular localities. The local struggles begot in their turn national conflicts, the commercial wars of the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries. Finally, modern industry and the opening of the world market made the struggle universal, and at the same time gave it an unheard-of virulence." (97).
For Engels, the contradiction of capitalism is that the social character of production enlists broad swathes of cooperation, despite appropriating social wealth into private coffers. The contradiction is not of a logical type, but the cycle between two opposing tendencies, the vicious circle of Fourier:
”The capitalistic mode of production moves in these two forms of the antagonism immanent to it from its very origin. It is never able to get out of that "vicious circle" which Fourier had already discovered." (98)
"It is the compelling force of anarchy in the production of society at large that more and more completely turns the great majority of men into proletarians, and it is the masses of the proletariat again who will finally put an end to anarchy in production." (98)
"that the very product of the worker is turned into an instrument for his subjugation." (pages 98-99)
"The product governs the producers." (96)
"Thus it comes about that the overwork of some becomes the preliminary condition for the idleness of others, and that modern industry, which hunts after new consumers over the whole world, forces the consumption of the masses at home down to a starvation minimum, and in doing thus destroys its own home market." (99)
Anarchy in production (68, 96, 98). Engels is conscious of the difference from political anarchism as something separate from this more ubiquitous experience of the planless tyranny of capitalism.
Transition to capitalism (96-97)
Overwork of some, idleness of others (99)
The Crisis (100)
State property (103)
Gambling (103)
Nationalizing industries as necessary, yet insufficient (103)
State ownership does not do away with the capitalistic nature of the productive forces (104)
Modern state is capitalist machine (104)
Abolishing the state (106)
Possible not by will, but by new conditions (107)
Origins of classes in division of labor (107)
Abolishing classes (107)
Abundance of production (108)
No more commodities (108)
Capitalist revolution and proletarian revolution (110-111)
Chapter V. Critique of the Gotha Programme (Marx)
The outdated dogma of Lassalle (119-120)
Chapter VI. Capital (Marx)
Old evils with the new ones (135)
Capitalism (159)
The truth about so-called "free labor" (162)
Chapter VII. On the History of Early Christianity (Engels)
Gullible types (174)
Engels on early Christianity (180)
168
178-179
174
Nicene council (180)
First Christians (183, 31)
Engels casts Rome as a tragic farce, self satire (184)
Self-repetition of wars (186)
Chapter VIII. Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy (Engels)
Nature as bare repetition (204, 212),
Two grand camps of philosophy (207) the Young Hegelians as a lens for viewing philosophy as split.
Consciousness as reflection (215)
Refuting the philistine assumptions attached to "materialism" (215).
Summing up the idealism of Feuerbach (216)
Religion and atheism (217)
God as fantasy, man as abstraction (219)
Theses on Feuerbach (Marx)
Skepticism of Hume and sense-impressions (245)
Chapter IX. The German Ideology (Marx & Engels)
Chapter X. Toward the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right (Marx)
Chapter XI. The Communism of the Paper Rheinischer Beobachter (Marx)
Marx's critique of Christianity (268)
Chapter XII. Anti-Duhring
Freedom in Hegel (278-279)
Chapter XIII. The Class Struggles in France, 1848 to 1850 (Marx)
Chapter XIV. The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (Marx)
Modern revolution has a "confused nature" because
"every party construed it ..." (326)
Mass support for the old powers (327)
Bourgeois republic (327, 329)
Napoleon the despot (336) well grubbed old mole!
The French nation, peasant class, and mode of production (338)
Representation (339)
Executive over society (339)
Enlightenment and superstition (339-340)
Napoleonic illusion (340)
The allure of strong and unlimited government (342)
Chapter XV. The Civil War in France (Marx)
The Paris Commune (354)
Revenge of the bourgeoisie (352)
Decisions by workers (356)
USA and the two-party system (361)
The state (362)
State power (365)
Commune form (367)
Marx on Christianity (268)
Bourgeois justice (383)
Vandalism (385-386)
Successor (388)
Chapter XVI. The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (Engels)
Engels: "The state is an organization of the possessing class for its protection" (393)
Chapter XVII. Letters on Historical Materialism (Engels)
Chapter XVIII. The Peasant War in Germany (Engels)
Critique of Luther (423-424)
Engels' work of 1850, The Peasant War in Germany apprehends Thomas Munzer as a revolutionary from the church clergy (425).
"He did not, however, preach quiet debate and peaceful progress, as Luther had begun at that same time, but continued Luther's earlier violent sermons, calling upon the princes of Saxony and the people to rise in arms against the Roman priests. "Does not Christ say, 'I came not to send peace, but a sword'?" (424-425)
"Under the cloak of Christian forms he preached a kind of pantheism, which curiously resembles modern speculative contemplation, and at times even approaches atheism. He repudiated the Bible both as the only and the infallible revelation. The real and living revelation, he said, was reason, a revelation which existed, and still exists, among all peoples at all times. To hold up the Bible against reason, he maintained, was to kill the spirit by the letter, for the Holy Spirit of which the Bible speaks is not something that exists outside us; the Holy Spirit is our reason. Faith is nothing else but reason come alive in man, and pagans could therefore also have faith. Through this faith, through reason come to life, man became godlike and blessed. Heaven is, therefore, nothing of another world, and is to be sought in this life, and it is the tasks of believers to establish this heaven, the kingdom of God, here on earth. Just as there is no heaven in the beyond, there is also no hell, and no damnation." (425-426)
"Just as Munzer's religious philosophy approached atheism, so his political program approached communism [...]" (426)
Engels credits Munzer with a communism far ahead of any other of the sixteenth century:
"By the kingdom of God, Munzer understood a society without class differences, private property, and a state authority independent of, and foreign to, the members of society. All the existing authorities, in so far as they refused to submit and join the revolution, were to be overthrown, all work and all property shared in common, and complete equality introduced. A union was to be established to realize all this, not only throughout Germany, but throughout all Christendom." (426-427)
"His sermons became still more militant and revolutionary. He thundered forth against the princes, the nobility, and the patricians with a passion that equaled the fervor of his attacks upon the clergy." (427)
Engels praises Munzer for denouncing the ordinary thievery of ruling princes:
"The princes and lords are the prime movers of usury, thievery, and robbery; they take all creatures into their private possession--the fish in the water, the birds in the air, and the plants in the soil--and still preach the poor the commandment, "Thou shall not steal," while they themselves take everything they find, rob and oppress The peasant and the artisan; but when one of the latter commits the slightest transgression he has to hang" (Quoted by Engels, page 427)
The world needs a "jolt," like an apocalyptic event of divine justice, when "the downtrodden will rise" (quoting Munzer, page 428).
"Do not flatter your princes, or you may perish with them." (quoting Munzer, 428)
The workers movement is no more ascetic than popular movements in general.
Acetic ideals are universal to every mass movement in the beginning. The workers movement is populist and ascetic only as a temporary time of transition.
"Already among these precursors of the movement we find an asceticism typical of all medieval uprisings tinged with religion, and, in modern times, of the early stages of every proletarian movement." (433)
"This ascetic austerity of morals, this demand to forsake all joys of life and entertainment, opposes the ruling classes with the principle of Spartan equality, on the one hand, and is, on the other, a necessary transitional stage, without which the lowest stratum of society can never set itself into motion. " (433)
Engels characterizes Spartan a necessary source of "revolutionary energy,"
"to concentrate themselves as a class, the lower strata of society must begin by stripping themselves of everything that could reconcile them to the existing social system; they must renounce them to the existing social system; they must renounce the few pleasures that make their grievous position in the least tolerable for the moment, and of which even the severest oppression could not deprive them. This plebeian and proletarian asceticism differs both in its wild fanatical form and its essence from the bourgeois asceticism of the Lutheran burgher morality and of the English Puritans [...]" (433)
"It stands to reason that this plebeian-proletarian asceticism gradually sheds its revolutionary nature as the development of modern productive forces infinitely multiplies the luxuries, thus rendering Spartan equality superfluous [...] This asceticism disappears gradually from among the masses [...] Besides, the renunciation of pleasures need hardly be preached to the proletariat for the simple reason that it has nothing more to renounce. " (433)
Engels refers to another revolutionary clergyman whom was burned, named Hans the Piper:
"he preached, that henceforth there should be neither king nor prince, neither pope nor any other ecclesiastic or lay authority. Each should be a brother to the other, and win his bread by the toil of his own hands, and that none should have more than his neighbor. All tributes, ground rents, services, tolls, taxes, and other payments and duties should be forever abolished, and forest, water, and pasture should everywhere be free. The people received this new gospel with joy." (433)
Concluding of Munzer and Hans the piper as revolutionaries, Engels gives his judgment of them as early socialists.
"Munzer himself seems to have sensed the abyss between his theories and the surrounding realities, an abyss that he must have felt all the more keenly, the more distortedly his visionary views were mirrored in the crude minds of his mass of followers." (436)
"The social changes that he fancied in his imagination were little grounded in the then existing economic conditions, which even paved the way to a social system that was a direct opposite of what he aspired to. Nevertheless, he was bound to his preachings of Christian equality and evangelical community of possessions. He was at least compelled to make an attempt at their realisation. Community of all possessions, universal and equal labour duty, and the abolition of all authority were proclaimed. In reality, Muehlhausen remained a republican imperial city with a somewhat democratic constitution, with a senate elected by universal suffrage and under the control of a forum, and with the hastily improvised feeding of the poor. The social change, which so horrified the Protestant middle-class contemporaries, in reality never went beyond a feeble and unconscious attempt prematurely to establish the bourgeois society of a later period." (436)
The position of power has a moderating effect on a ruling party, lowering its expectations. From chapter VI of The Peasant War in Germany:
"The worst thing that can befall a leader of an extreme party is to be compelled to take over a government in an epoch when the movement is not yet ripe for the domination of the class which he represents and for the realisation of the measures which that domination would imply. What he can do depends not upon his will but upon the sharpness of the clash of interests between the various classes, and upon the degree of development of the material means of existence, the relations of production and means of communication upon which the clash of interests of the classes is based every time." (435 in Feuer's edition of Basic Writings).
As countries have internal division between town and country, north and south, so too, the inequality of nations causes war, as class divisions are a civil war. Wars are caused by the uneven development of capitalism (31). The capitalist structure has overdetermining conditions, as opposed to pure conditions, economic or otherwise.
Marx and Engels compare communists to early communities of the first Christians (pages 31, 168, and 183). Adopting the name of communists, Marx and Engels agree upon their critique of the Christian socialism of Robert Owen, whom they deem a "utopian" socialist. In contrast, the communist hypothesis is scientific (37).
Chapter II. A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (Marx)
Chapter III. On Historical Materialism (Engels)
In his Marxist statement on epistemology (51) Engels traces the British origins of modern materialism in Thomas Hobbes, who systematized Bacon. British empiricism has its apogee where Locke proves the source of all knowledge is our senses (48-49). The English have their influence felt most of all in France, with the radical materialists of the French-Revolution type, and the critique of all existing conditions (59). For a universal form of critique, Engels settles on the infallible test of action (51) culminating in Marx's thesis (page 245) on practice as the measure of truth.
In the development from Kant to Hegel (52) the Kantian thing-in-itself dissolves into its qualities. Hegel finds qualities exhausting existence, leaving behind nothing.
For the sake of historical background, Engels makes interesting remarks on the reformation (55) and English revolution (57).
Chapter IV. Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (Engels)
Engels refers to "anarchy' as a pejorative for capitalist planning, (68, 97)
"the anarchy existing in production." (68)
Engels associates the utopians with one common mistake of lacking the proletariat:
"One thing is common to all three. [...] Like the French philosophers, they do not claim to emancipate a particular class to begin with, but all humanity at once." (71)
However critical of "utopian" versus scientific socialism, Engels does not deny the social sense of equality of Robert Owen: "He was the first to declare that in any given society the degree of woman's emancipation is the natural measure of the general emancipation." (76)
Engels apprehends in Owen a cycle of bourgeois society under capitalism, in which:
"civilization moves in "a vicious circle," in contradictions which it constantly reproduces without being able to solve them; hence it constantly arrives at the very opposite to that which it wants to attain, or pretends to want to attain, so that, e.g., "under civilization poverty is born of superabundance itself."" (77)
Bourgeois politics has no history because it continually repeats its political changes.
Robert Owen's communism (80)
Robert Owen's business model for his cotton factory (78-79)
Hegel's system as a high point of philosophy (86-87)
Early class struggles (88)
Engels indicates what is new to capitalism since the industrial revolution, when ownership becomes less important than production.
"Now the owner of the instruments of labor always appropriated to himself the product, although it was no longer his product, but exclusively the product of the labor of others. [...] The means of production, and production itself, had become in essence socialized. But they were subjected to a form of appropriation which presupposes the private production of individuals, under which, therefore, everyone owns his own product and brings it to market. The mode of production is subjected to this form of appropriation, although it abolishes the conditions upon which the latter rests." (94)
The contradiction stands between the social form of capitalism, and the very unsocial appropriation of the private profit. From that social production, the distribution is unequal, by the system of private ownership of that product of society. From the social labor, the social production confronts the limits of capitalism.
"But all this changed as soon as the means of production became socialized and concentrated in the hands of capitalists." (95)
The performance of wage labor contrasts with agricultural labor, when wage labor was far less common. Engels apprehends a turn in capitalism when the temporary exception, "became the rule and the basis of all production" (95). Wage labor for life was far from the universal norm of today. Since the transition to capitalism, agricultural workers turned to wage labor.
"The wage worker for a time became a wage worker for life. The number of these permanent wage workers was further enormously increased by the breaking up of the feudal system that occurred at the same time, by the dispanding of the retainers of the feudal lords, the eviction of the peasants from their homesteads, etc. The separation was made complete between the means of production, concentrated in the hands of the capitalists, on the one side, and the producers, possessing nothing but their labor power, on the other. The contradiction between socialized production and capitalistic appropriation manifested itself as the antagonism of proletariat and bourgeoisie."(95)
The division of labor in capitalist production causes the division between town and country:
"that the production of society at large was ruled by absence of plan, by accident, by anarchy; [...] By this the old, peaceful, stable condition of things was ended. [...] The field of labor became a battleground. The great geographical discoveries, and the colonization following upon them, multiplied markets and quickened the transformation of handicraft into manufacture. The war did not break out simply between the individual producers of particular localities. The local struggles begot in their turn national conflicts, the commercial wars of the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries. Finally, modern industry and the opening of the world market made the struggle universal, and at the same time gave it an unheard-of virulence." (97).
For Engels, the contradiction of capitalism is that the social character of production enlists broad swathes of cooperation, despite appropriating social wealth into private coffers. The contradiction is not of a logical type, but the cycle between two opposing tendencies, the vicious circle of Fourier:
”The capitalistic mode of production moves in these two forms of the antagonism immanent to it from its very origin. It is never able to get out of that "vicious circle" which Fourier had already discovered." (98)
"It is the compelling force of anarchy in the production of society at large that more and more completely turns the great majority of men into proletarians, and it is the masses of the proletariat again who will finally put an end to anarchy in production." (98)
"that the very product of the worker is turned into an instrument for his subjugation." (pages 98-99)
"The product governs the producers." (96)
"Thus it comes about that the overwork of some becomes the preliminary condition for the idleness of others, and that modern industry, which hunts after new consumers over the whole world, forces the consumption of the masses at home down to a starvation minimum, and in doing thus destroys its own home market." (99)
Anarchy in production (68, 96, 98). Engels is conscious of the difference from political anarchism as something separate from this more ubiquitous experience of the planless tyranny of capitalism.
Transition to capitalism (96-97)
Overwork of some, idleness of others (99)
The Crisis (100)
State property (103)
Gambling (103)
Nationalizing industries as necessary, yet insufficient (103)
State ownership does not do away with the capitalistic nature of the productive forces (104)
Modern state is capitalist machine (104)
Abolishing the state (106)
Possible not by will, but by new conditions (107)
Origins of classes in division of labor (107)
Abolishing classes (107)
Abundance of production (108)
No more commodities (108)
Capitalist revolution and proletarian revolution (110-111)
Chapter V. Critique of the Gotha Programme (Marx)
The outdated dogma of Lassalle (119-120)
Chapter VI. Capital (Marx)
Old evils with the new ones (135)
Capitalism (159)
The truth about so-called "free labor" (162)
Chapter VII. On the History of Early Christianity (Engels)
Gullible types (174)
Engels on early Christianity (180)
168
178-179
174
Nicene council (180)
First Christians (183, 31)
Engels casts Rome as a tragic farce, self satire (184)
Self-repetition of wars (186)
Chapter VIII. Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy (Engels)
Nature as bare repetition (204, 212),
Two grand camps of philosophy (207) the Young Hegelians as a lens for viewing philosophy as split.
Consciousness as reflection (215)
Refuting the philistine assumptions attached to "materialism" (215).
Summing up the idealism of Feuerbach (216)
Religion and atheism (217)
God as fantasy, man as abstraction (219)
Theses on Feuerbach (Marx)
Skepticism of Hume and sense-impressions (245)
Chapter IX. The German Ideology (Marx & Engels)
Chapter X. Toward the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right (Marx)
Chapter XI. The Communism of the Paper Rheinischer Beobachter (Marx)
Marx's critique of Christianity (268)
Chapter XII. Anti-Duhring
Freedom in Hegel (278-279)
Chapter XIII. The Class Struggles in France, 1848 to 1850 (Marx)
Chapter XIV. The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (Marx)
Modern revolution has a "confused nature" because
"every party construed it ..." (326)
Mass support for the old powers (327)
Bourgeois republic (327, 329)
Napoleon the despot (336) well grubbed old mole!
The French nation, peasant class, and mode of production (338)
Representation (339)
Executive over society (339)
Enlightenment and superstition (339-340)
Napoleonic illusion (340)
The allure of strong and unlimited government (342)
Chapter XV. The Civil War in France (Marx)
The Paris Commune (354)
Revenge of the bourgeoisie (352)
Decisions by workers (356)
USA and the two-party system (361)
The state (362)
State power (365)
Commune form (367)
Marx on Christianity (268)
Bourgeois justice (383)
Vandalism (385-386)
Successor (388)
Chapter XVI. The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (Engels)
Engels: "The state is an organization of the possessing class for its protection" (393)
Chapter XVII. Letters on Historical Materialism (Engels)
Chapter XVIII. The Peasant War in Germany (Engels)
Critique of Luther (423-424)
Engels' work of 1850, The Peasant War in Germany apprehends Thomas Munzer as a revolutionary from the church clergy (425).
"He did not, however, preach quiet debate and peaceful progress, as Luther had begun at that same time, but continued Luther's earlier violent sermons, calling upon the princes of Saxony and the people to rise in arms against the Roman priests. "Does not Christ say, 'I came not to send peace, but a sword'?" (424-425)
"Under the cloak of Christian forms he preached a kind of pantheism, which curiously resembles modern speculative contemplation, and at times even approaches atheism. He repudiated the Bible both as the only and the infallible revelation. The real and living revelation, he said, was reason, a revelation which existed, and still exists, among all peoples at all times. To hold up the Bible against reason, he maintained, was to kill the spirit by the letter, for the Holy Spirit of which the Bible speaks is not something that exists outside us; the Holy Spirit is our reason. Faith is nothing else but reason come alive in man, and pagans could therefore also have faith. Through this faith, through reason come to life, man became godlike and blessed. Heaven is, therefore, nothing of another world, and is to be sought in this life, and it is the tasks of believers to establish this heaven, the kingdom of God, here on earth. Just as there is no heaven in the beyond, there is also no hell, and no damnation." (425-426)
"Just as Munzer's religious philosophy approached atheism, so his political program approached communism [...]" (426)
Engels credits Munzer with a communism far ahead of any other of the sixteenth century:
"By the kingdom of God, Munzer understood a society without class differences, private property, and a state authority independent of, and foreign to, the members of society. All the existing authorities, in so far as they refused to submit and join the revolution, were to be overthrown, all work and all property shared in common, and complete equality introduced. A union was to be established to realize all this, not only throughout Germany, but throughout all Christendom." (426-427)
"His sermons became still more militant and revolutionary. He thundered forth against the princes, the nobility, and the patricians with a passion that equaled the fervor of his attacks upon the clergy." (427)
Engels praises Munzer for denouncing the ordinary thievery of ruling princes:
"The princes and lords are the prime movers of usury, thievery, and robbery; they take all creatures into their private possession--the fish in the water, the birds in the air, and the plants in the soil--and still preach the poor the commandment, "Thou shall not steal," while they themselves take everything they find, rob and oppress The peasant and the artisan; but when one of the latter commits the slightest transgression he has to hang" (Quoted by Engels, page 427)
The world needs a "jolt," like an apocalyptic event of divine justice, when "the downtrodden will rise" (quoting Munzer, page 428).
"Do not flatter your princes, or you may perish with them." (quoting Munzer, 428)
The workers movement is no more ascetic than popular movements in general.
Acetic ideals are universal to every mass movement in the beginning. The workers movement is populist and ascetic only as a temporary time of transition.
"Already among these precursors of the movement we find an asceticism typical of all medieval uprisings tinged with religion, and, in modern times, of the early stages of every proletarian movement." (433)
"This ascetic austerity of morals, this demand to forsake all joys of life and entertainment, opposes the ruling classes with the principle of Spartan equality, on the one hand, and is, on the other, a necessary transitional stage, without which the lowest stratum of society can never set itself into motion. " (433)
Engels characterizes Spartan a necessary source of "revolutionary energy,"
"to concentrate themselves as a class, the lower strata of society must begin by stripping themselves of everything that could reconcile them to the existing social system; they must renounce them to the existing social system; they must renounce the few pleasures that make their grievous position in the least tolerable for the moment, and of which even the severest oppression could not deprive them. This plebeian and proletarian asceticism differs both in its wild fanatical form and its essence from the bourgeois asceticism of the Lutheran burgher morality and of the English Puritans [...]" (433)
"It stands to reason that this plebeian-proletarian asceticism gradually sheds its revolutionary nature as the development of modern productive forces infinitely multiplies the luxuries, thus rendering Spartan equality superfluous [...] This asceticism disappears gradually from among the masses [...] Besides, the renunciation of pleasures need hardly be preached to the proletariat for the simple reason that it has nothing more to renounce. " (433)
Engels refers to another revolutionary clergyman whom was burned, named Hans the Piper:
"he preached, that henceforth there should be neither king nor prince, neither pope nor any other ecclesiastic or lay authority. Each should be a brother to the other, and win his bread by the toil of his own hands, and that none should have more than his neighbor. All tributes, ground rents, services, tolls, taxes, and other payments and duties should be forever abolished, and forest, water, and pasture should everywhere be free. The people received this new gospel with joy." (433)
Concluding of Munzer and Hans the piper as revolutionaries, Engels gives his judgment of them as early socialists.
"Munzer himself seems to have sensed the abyss between his theories and the surrounding realities, an abyss that he must have felt all the more keenly, the more distortedly his visionary views were mirrored in the crude minds of his mass of followers." (436)
"The social changes that he fancied in his imagination were little grounded in the then existing economic conditions, which even paved the way to a social system that was a direct opposite of what he aspired to. Nevertheless, he was bound to his preachings of Christian equality and evangelical community of possessions. He was at least compelled to make an attempt at their realisation. Community of all possessions, universal and equal labour duty, and the abolition of all authority were proclaimed. In reality, Muehlhausen remained a republican imperial city with a somewhat democratic constitution, with a senate elected by universal suffrage and under the control of a forum, and with the hastily improvised feeding of the poor. The social change, which so horrified the Protestant middle-class contemporaries, in reality never went beyond a feeble and unconscious attempt prematurely to establish the bourgeois society of a later period." (436)
The position of power has a moderating effect on a ruling party, lowering its expectations. From chapter VI of The Peasant War in Germany:
"The worst thing that can befall a leader of an extreme party is to be compelled to take over a government in an epoch when the movement is not yet ripe for the domination of the class which he represents and for the realisation of the measures which that domination would imply. What he can do depends not upon his will but upon the sharpness of the clash of interests between the various classes, and upon the degree of development of the material means of existence, the relations of production and means of communication upon which the clash of interests of the classes is based every time." (435 in Feuer's edition of Basic Writings).
August 23, 2022
A wonderful collection of M & E's most important writings. I would especially recommend Engels' Letters on Historical Materialism (especially the letter to J. Bloch), as they are some of the most clear explanations on HM anywhere, and very short.
I'm not sure if they've appeared anywhere else in print aside from the MECW and MEGA.
I'm not sure if they've appeared anywhere else in print aside from the MECW and MEGA.
July 12, 2022
A very helpful collection. I particularly enjoyed the selected letters and essays, most of which I had never seen or read before.
February 27, 2025
A good collection and included some letters I had never seen before
May 6, 2024
A good collection of iconic political philosophy writings!
December 19, 2014
An excellent selection of work from Marx and Engels. This edited work focuses on the philosophical basis of Marxism and the political analysis done by Marx and Engels with the unifying theme being historical materialism.
While I normally concentrate on Marx the economist and ignore Engels based on his own self-deprecation, I found these readings profoundly interesting and, especially, as a student of history I found Marx' contemporary analysis of 19th century revolutionary events in France fascinating, accurate, and standing up to the test of time - which is a rare event for most of his earlier work. I also found Engels' material on the revolutionary nature of early Christianity and the pre-Reformation movements of Greater Germany an interesting perspective on the nature of the mind, faith, and the human condition. Engels clearly shows that while he was not of the stature of Marx he was a critical thinker of a very high standard.
This book is an important read for those interested in Marx and Engels as serious observers of history, rather than, prophets of Utopianism.
While I normally concentrate on Marx the economist and ignore Engels based on his own self-deprecation, I found these readings profoundly interesting and, especially, as a student of history I found Marx' contemporary analysis of 19th century revolutionary events in France fascinating, accurate, and standing up to the test of time - which is a rare event for most of his earlier work. I also found Engels' material on the revolutionary nature of early Christianity and the pre-Reformation movements of Greater Germany an interesting perspective on the nature of the mind, faith, and the human condition. Engels clearly shows that while he was not of the stature of Marx he was a critical thinker of a very high standard.
This book is an important read for those interested in Marx and Engels as serious observers of history, rather than, prophets of Utopianism.
August 30, 2011
This book was recommended to me by older friends from high school. Over the years I've read most of the material within it again--primarily in The Collected Works of Marx and Engels published by International Publishers (NYC) in fifty volumes. Most notable is the sociological perspective of this collection's editor, Lewis Samuel Feuer (1912-2002).
November 5, 2012
This copy underlined by myself, and marked PAID UCONN bookstore, 1971!
November 3, 2013
My most useful book in college. Open to random page, read those two pages, find quote to take out of context for essay. Good times.
November 12, 2015
Re-Read
June 9, 2023
The collection of writings from Marx and Engles here is astonishing and well put together.
The intro however from Feuer was completely terrible.
The intro however from Feuer was completely terrible.
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