"Friedrich Engels: Racist and German nationalist"

[RedWorker]

An article written by a right wing fanatic. http://jonjayray.tripod.com/engels.html

This was discussed in the past, but not all points were addressed. Of course, there are many misinterpretations and out-of-context, but I would still like Engels' specific assertions to be addressed here.

[Rafiq]

Which specific assertions? I do not mean this as a rhetorical question. Looking at all of these, I can find absolutely no traces of what can be called racism or nationalism in any meaningful sense of the word (taking into account the specific circumstances of what constituted racism during the 19th century - it certainly was not a lack of use of political correctness. In case you did not know, it was a particularly nasty time as far as these issues went - Marx and Engels were eons ahead of their time as far as race is concerned solely by merit of the materialist conception of history). But provide me any one of these quotations and I will thoroughly demonstrate how the conclusion drawn (i.e. racism) is wrong. Since there are so many.

[RedWorker]

Is this implying that just because they were ahead of their time, it was okay to say some things? Or just a side-note while asserting that they were not racist or nationalist in any way'?

[Rafiq]

Is this implying that just because they were ahead of their time, it was okay to say some things? Or just a side-note while asserting that they were not racist or nationalist in any way'?

What they were not is politically correct. Nowhere did they imply that any pre-conceived physical characteristics inherent to any "race" were responsible for different multitudes of behavior. Engels spoke of his revulsion toward slavs, only as a politically incorrect means of conveying that he recognized Russia was the ultimate political force of reaction in Europe which saw to its ends through the guise of various national liberation movements in Europe. Russia's reactionary nature was due to its unique class composition.

[RedWorker]

So, any response to this?

[Q]

So, any response to this?
Well...

But provide me any one of these quotations and I will thoroughly demonstrate how the conclusion drawn (i.e. racism) is wrong. Since there are so many.

[Gepetto]

Quote from "On The Jewish Question" = argument automatically lost

[RedKobra]

Karl Marx, "A Contribution to the Critique of Political economy" (Review by Frederick Engels), Das Volk, 30 No. 14, August 6, 1859: "The Germans have long since shown that in all spheres of science they are equal, and in most of them superior, to other civilised nations. Only one branch of science, political economy, had no German name among its foremost scholars."

This seems to me a perfectly reasonable thing to say, for Engels, at that time, in that context. Germany did have a rich tradition in Philosophy, science and the arts. It is not chauvenism. He is merely drawing attention to the political backwardness of Germany by example of its lack of economic and political scholarship.

[RedKobra]

A lot of the German nationalist stuff has to be placed in context. Engels and Marx's germany is not the "Greater Germany" of today. It was a politically backward hodge podge of principalities and fiefdoms. The nationalism of which they speak is toward a modern, civilised, democratic germany, of the people, by the people and for the people. It shouldn't be read as a romantic German nationalism in the mould of J.G.Herder.

[RedWorker]

Ok, what about this for instance?

"Paul, the candidate of the Jardin des Plantes - and the animals" and added: "Being in his quality as a nigger a degree nearer to the rest of the animal kingdom than the rest of us, he is undoubtedly the most appropriate representative of that district." - Marx & Engels Werke vol. 36, 1967, p. 645

[RedKobra]

Its thoroughly unpleasent and ignorant but was it an abnormal opinion of educated people for the time it was written? I'm sure I've read things by Darwin that were beyond the pale by modern standards despite him being fairly racially progressive for his time. Was it Kropotkin or Bakunin who was the msyoginist? Wasn't Proudhon a massive anti-semite? These views, although disgusting to us, had not yet been subjected to true critical analysis. Darwinism for a while after its emergence actually further ingrained notions the well-read had that there was a hierachy to the races, because superficially it comported with their prejudices. The error was uncaught for years.

There can be no defence of such attitudes only for us to say that, sadly, they were not in the least uncommon even amongst those educated enough to know better.

[Creative Destruction]

It's hard to tell what all this means, since they're going off of translations that have proved problematic in other areas and all the quotes are lacking context. But, even if this was all a true 100% representation of what Engels wrote and said, is it really that surprising? Shouldn't your questions, instead, be more about how this affected their overall analysis and critiques?

[Creative Destruction]

But this dude is incredibly dishonest anyway. It's really hard to take any of these quotes seriously.


Engels. "Democratic Pan-Slavism" (NRZ February 16. 1849), Collected Works, Vol. 8 p 378. ". . . hatred of Russia was and still is the primary revolutionary passion among Germans; that since the revolution, hatred of Czechs and Croats has been added, and that only by the most determined use of terror against these Slav peoples can we, jointly with the Poles and Magyars, safeguard the revolution."

(No Marxist seems to have put this online. I can't imagine why!)

I don't know how he gets that Engels "hates" Russians, even with this out-of-context quote. These are mostly straws.

[Q]

I suggest some comrades might worry themselves about how their commitment towards revolutionary politics is perceived by their descendants in the late 22nd century, based on their obvious reactionary language, social behaviour and views they have today.

[RedWorker]

Uhm, I have never suggested that Marxist thought is invalid because of this. This is simply a discussion about the issue.

[Creative Destruction]

it seems like jaqing off.

[RedWorker]

I don't know how he gets that Engels "hates" Russians, even with this out-of-context quote. These are mostly straws.

The title says: "ENGELS SAID GERMANS SHOULD USE TERROR AGAINST THE SLAVS" and the quote seems to say that. What is the original context/meaning?

[Creative Destruction]

The title says: "ENGELS SAID GERMANS SHOULD USE TERROR AGAINST THE SLAVS" and the quote seems to say that. What is the original context/meaning?

He's talking about counter-revolutionary Slav nationalists. Not the Slavic people as a whole. Look up the sources and read them instead of cloaking this in bullshit some "just asking questions" concern-troll:

https://marxists.anu.edu.au/archive/marx/works/1849/02/15.htm

I do not know what is wrong with this considering (pre- and anti-Leninist, anyway) Marxists tend to have a negative -- even violently negative -- view on nationalist movements.

I mean, the idea that Engels is a "German nationalist" is completely obliterated just by this one quote in that article he wrote:


What would be said if the democratic party in Germany commenced its programme with the demand for the return of Alsace, Lorraine, and Belgium, which in every respect belongs to France, on the pretext that the majority there is Germanic? How ridiculous the German democrats would make themselves if they wanted to found a pan-Germanic German-Danish-Swedish-English-Dutch alliance for the “liberation” of all German-speaking countries! German democracy, fortunately, is above such fantasies. German students in 1817 and 1830 were peddling that kind of reactionary fantasies and today throughout Germany are being given their deserts. The German revolution only came into being, and the German nation only began to become something, when people had freed themselves completely from these futilities.

But pan-Slavism, too, is just as childish and reactionary as pan-Germanism. When one reads the history of the pan-Slavist movement of last spring in Prague, one could imagine oneself back in the period of thirty years ago: tricolour sashes, ancient costumes, ancient Slav Masses, complete restoration of the time and customs of the primeval forests; the Svornost — a complete replica of the German Burschenschaft, the Slav Congress — a new edition of the Wartburg Festival,[328] the same phrases, the same fantasies, the same subsequent lamentation: “We had built a stately house”, etc. Anyone who would like to read this famous song translated into Slav prose has only to read Bakunin’s pamphlet.

I mean, christ. The guy who set this webpage up includes links to the "context" of these quotes he's pulling, but I'm thinking he's not counting on the people who swallow his shit to actually follow the links and, much less, actually read them.

[Creative Destruction]

This is especially dishonest:


ENGELS THOUGHT ARYANS WERE SUPERIOR

"The plentiful meat and milk diet among the Aryans and the Semites, and particularly the beneficial effects of these foods on the development of children, may, perhaps, explain the superior development of these two races."

No Marxist has dared to put this online yet so I cannot provide a link for context. The quotation is from Engels, "Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State", Fourth revised edition, 1891, in Marx & Engels, Selected Works In One Volume, Lawrence & Wishart: London, 1980, p 464.

First, whatever "superiority" Engels is talking about here, it doesn't have to do with innateness or even necessarily intellectual development. The guy here is trying to group Engels in with the Nazis saying that Aryans are "superior." Second, without the context it's impossible to say exactly what "Aryan" group he was talking about, or what the historical context he was pointing to, but before Hitler, "Aryan" still meant the Indo-European peoples in the middle east. Not Germanic people, which is obviously the point this guy is trying to reach at here. Given that, Engels was probably referring to the Indo-European civilizations, which grew aside the Semitic peoples; of which there is plenty of evidence to point to their incredibly advanced development. There is nothing factually wrong with this statement.

It's like saying, because the Ancient Romans had plenty of enriching food, that their development was "superior" to that of some backwater civilizations, like the old Germanic civilizations that the Romans conquered. Objectively, ancient Rome was superior, in this regard, to those civilizations.

[John Nada]

Dude's full of shit, Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State is well-known and online.
(b.) MIDDLE STAGE. Begins in the Eastern Hemisphere with domestication of animals; in the Western, with the cultivation, by means of irrigation, of plants for food, and with the use of adobe (sun-dried) bricks and stone for building.

We will begin with the Western Hemisphere, as here this stage was never superseded before the European conquest.

At the time when they were discovered, the Indians at the lower stage of barbarism (comprising all the tribes living east of the Mississippi) were already practicing some horticulture of maize, and possibly also of gourds, melons, and other garden plants, from which they obtained a very considerable part of their food. They lived in wooden houses in villages protected by palisades. The tribes in the northwest, particularly those in the region of the Columbia River, were still at the upper stage of savagery and acquainted neither with pottery nor with any form of horticulture. The so-called Pueblo Indians of New Mexico, however, and the Mexicans, Central Americans, and Peruvians at the time of their conquest were at the middle stage of barbarism. They lived in houses like fortresses, made of adobe brick or of stone, and cultivated maize and other plants, varying according to locality and climate, in artificially irrigated plots of ground, which supplied their main source of food; some animals even had also been domesticated – the turkey and other birds by the Mexicans, the llama by the Peruvians. They could also work metals, but not iron; hence they were still unable to dispense with stone weapons and tools. The Spanish conquest then cut short any further independent development.

In the Eastern Hemisphere the middle stage of barbarism began with the domestication of animals providing milk and meat, but horticulture seems to have remained unknown far into this period.[D] It was, apparently, the domestication and breeding of animals and the formation of herds of considerable size that led to the differentiation of the Aryans and Semites[E] from the mass of barbarians. The European and Asiatic Aryans still have the same names for cattle, but those for most of the cultivated plants are already different.

In suitable localities, the keeping of herds led to a pastoral life: the Semites lived upon the grassy plains of the Euphrates and Tigris [Mesopotamia], and the Aryans upon those of India and of the Oxus and Jaxartes, of the Don and the Dnieper. It must have been on the borders of such pasture lands that animals were first domesticated. To later generations, consequently, the pastoral tribes appear to have come from regions which, so far from being the cradle of mankind, were almost uninhabitable for their savage ancestors and even for man at the lower stages of barbarism. But having once accustomed themselves to pastoral life in the grassy plains of the rivers, these barbarians of the middle period would never have dreamed of returning willingly to the native forests of their ancestors. Even when they were forced further to the north and west, the Semites and Aryans could not move into the forest regions of western Asia and of Europe until by cultivation of grain they had made it possible to pasture and especially to winter their herds on this less favorable land. It is more than probable that among these tribes the cultivation of grain originated from the need for cattle fodder and only later became important as a human food supply.

The plentiful supply of milk and meat and especially the beneficial effect of these foods on the growth of the children account perhaps for the superior development of the Aryan and Semitic races. It is a fact that the Pueblo Indians of New Mexico, who are reduced to an almost entirely vegetarian diet, have a smaller brain than the Indians at the lower stage of barbarism, who eat more meat and fish.[F] In any case, cannibalism now gradually dies out, surviving only as a religious act or as a means of working magic, which is here almost the same thing.Source: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1884/origin-family/ch01.htm

He's clearly talking about a mode of production he called the middle of the "Barbarous" phase of technological development. The "Aryans and Semites" were the Indo-Europeans(Both in Europe and India) and Mesopotamians, not Germans and Jews. He wasn't saying White people were racially superior to Indigenous Americans, just that he thought the meat-rich diet of pastoral lifestyle gave them better nutrition than a grain-based agrarian system. And he thought the Indigenous Americans would've moved up to the higher phase, like the Romans and ancient Greece, on their own without the European invasion. The anthropology(and physiology) might be outdated, but he wasn't put forth a racist theory.
ENGELS ADVOCATES THAT GERMANY DEFEAT FRANCE BY ANY MEANS POSSIBLE
You are right; if it comes to war we must demand the general arming of the people.Source: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1891/letters/91_09_29.htm He calls for arming the people. Don't see what a US conservative has against the "right to bear arms".:rolleyes:
When the French offensive has been rendered innocuous things may get as far as the conquest of Poland up to the Dvina and Dnieper, but hardly before. This must be carried out by revolutionary methods and if necessary by giving up a piece of Prussian Poland and the whole of Galicia to the Poland to be established. If this goes well revolution will doubtless follow in France. At the same time we must press for at least Metz and Lorraine to be offered as a peace offering to France.He supposedly wants to "defeat France by all means", yet he wanted to give back territory France loss during the Franco-Prussian war, for the French people to launch another revolution, and a free Poland(from "his own" country) too!
So much seems certain to me: if we are beaten, every barrier to chauvinism and a war of revenge in Europe will be thrown down for years hence. If we are victorious our Party will come into power. The victory of Germany is therefore the victory of the revolution, and if it comes to war we must not only desire victory but further it by every means.... What should have been categorically stated was that if France formally represents the revolution in relation to Germany, [b]Germany, through its workers' Party, stands materially at the head of the revolution, and this is bound to come to light in the war – in which we, and with us the revolution, will either be crushed or else come to power.He's not talking about helping the Kaiser win. He's likely talking about the SPD overthrowing "their own" government.

A couple of years before this letter was written the Anti-Socialist laws were repealed, though there was a push to bring it back. It's likely that Engels was hiding his desire for revolution under some patriotic phases.
BOTH MARX AND ENGELS THOUGHT THAT THE CHINESE SUFFERED FROM HEREDITARY STUPIDITY

I guess Chairman Mao did not read these bits!
The piratical policy of the British Government has caused this universal outbreak of all Chinese against all foreigners, and marked it as a war of extermination.
What is an army to do against a people resorting to such means of warfare? Where, how far, is it to penetrate into the enemy's country, how to maintain itself there? Civilization-mongers who throw hot shells on a defenceless city and add rape to murder, may call the system cowardly, barbarous, atrocious; but what matters it to the Chinese if it be only successful? Since the British treat them as barbarians, they cannot deny to them the full benefit of their barbarism. If their kidnappings, surprises, midnight massacres are what we call cowardly, the civilization-mongers should not forget that according to their own showing they could not stand against European means of destruction with their ordinary means of warfare.

In short, instead of moralizing on the horrible atrocities of the Chinese, as the chivalrous English press does, we had better recognize that this is a war pro aris et focis, a popular war for the maintenance of Chinese nationality, with all its overbearing prejudice, stupidity, learned ignorance and pedantic barbarism if you like, but yet a popular war. And in a popular war the means used by the insurgent nation cannot be measured by the commonly recognized rules of regular warfare, nor by any other abstract standard, but by the degree of civilization only attained by that insurgent nation.I think Mao did read this! He said the British were the savages, and China will wage a "popular war"(people's war?) against them.
OUR HATE-FILLED ENGELS DESPISED THE IRISH TOO (At least Engels had TWO master races in his thinking: Germans and Hungarians ("Magyars"))His partner Mary Burns (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Burns) was Irish. If I remember correctly, he said the English workers were bourgeofied due to their privileged status over the Irish and subjugated peoples. And Marx thought that the liberation of Ireland and Poland were essentially a prerequisite for a proletarian revolution.

This guy has no clue what the fuck he's talking about at best. How the fuck did he get a PhD?