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134-400: The series has been described as ground-breaking in terms of its length and subject matter but also in terms of its presentation, with two presenters representing opposing points of view, Williams being a Marxist historian and Vaughan-Thomas a journalist associated with the establishment. Gwyn Alf Williams' presentational style was described as "the most passionate and the most articulate about

268-485: A dialectical analysis. Karl Marx (1818–1883) contributed important works on social and political history, including The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon (1852), The Communist Manifesto (1848), The German Ideology (written in 1845, published in 1932), and those chapters of Das Kapital (1867–1894) dealing with the historical emergence of capitalists and proletarians from pre-industrial English society. The key to understanding Marxist historiography

402-471: A refugee and eventually made it to safety in England. On 6 June 1849 Prussian authorities issued an arrest warrant for him which contained a physical description as "height: 5 feet 6 inches; hair: blond; forehead: smooth; eyebrows: blond; eyes: blue; nose and mouth: well proportioned; beard: reddish; chin: oval; face: oval; complexion: healthy; figure: slender. Special characteristics: speaks very rapidly and

536-637: A Critique of Political Economy . Engels met Marx for a second time at the Café de la Régence on the Place du Palais, on 28 August 1844. The two quickly became close friends and remained so their entire lives. Marx had read and was impressed by Engels's articles on The Condition of the Working Class in England in which he had written that "[a] class which bears all the disadvantages of the social order without enjoying its advantages, [...] Who can demand that such

670-696: A Marxist bias in the interpretation of other historical events, unrelated to the Soviet Union. Thus, for example, they assigned to the rebellions in the Roman Empire the characteristics of the social revolution . Often, the Marxist bias and propaganda demands came into conflict: hence the peasant rebellions against the early Soviet rule, such as the Tambov Rebellion of 1920–21, were simply ignored as inconvenient politically and contradicting

804-631: A broadcast at a later date in Ireland. An attempt to post it online in 2017 was stopped by ITV Wales on copyright grounds, despite initially offering to sell the rights to the footage. In 2021 the Welsh Government was asked to preserve the series for future generations after ITV Wales had claimed that it could not be released in any format due to third-party copyright problems. The title had been previously used by Glyn Jones in 1968 for his study of inter-war Welsh literature . The book emphasised

938-617: A class respect this social order?" Marx adopted Engels's idea that the working class would lead the revolution against the bourgeoisie as society advanced toward socialism, and incorporated this as part of his own philosophy. Engels stayed in Paris to help Marx write The Holy Family . It was an attack on the Young Hegelians and the Bauer brothers and was published in late February 1845. Engels's earliest contribution to Marx's work

1072-404: A considerable estate to Eduard Bernstein and Louise Freyberger (wife of Ludwig Freyberger ), valued for probate at £25,265 0s. 11d, equivalent to £3,686,193 in 2023. Engels's interests included poetry, fox hunting and hosting regular Sunday parties for London's left-wing intelligentsia where, as one regular put it, "no one left before two or three in the morning". His stated personal motto

1206-457: A couple in London and married on 11 September 1878, hours before Lizzie's death. Later in their lives, Marx and Engels came to argue that in some countries workers might be able to achieve their aims through peaceful means . In following this, Engels argued that socialists were evolutionists, although they remained committed to social revolution . Similarly, Tristram Hunt argues that Engels

1340-594: A course of development in Russia that would lead directly to the communist stage without the intervening bourgeois stage. This analysis was based on what Marx and Engels saw as the exceptional characteristics of the Russian village commune or obshchina . While doubt was cast on this theory by Georgi Plekhanov , Plekhanov's reasoning was based on the first edition of Das Kapital (1867) which predated Marx's interest in Russian peasant communes by two years. Later editions of

1474-418: A direction of history, towards an end state of history as classless human society. Marxist historiography within Marxist circles is generally seen as a tool; its aim is to bring those it perceives as oppressed by history to self-consciousness , and to arm them with tactics and strategies from history. For these Marxists, it is both a historical and a liberatory project. However, not all Marxist historiography

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1608-463: A future communist society would allow people to make decisions about their relationships free of economic constraints. Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy saw publication in 1886. On 5 August 1895, Engels died of throat cancer in London, aged 74. Following cremation at Woking Crematorium , his ashes were scattered off Beachy Head , near Eastbourne , as he had requested. He left

1742-595: A gay temperament, being able to "stutter in twenty languages". He had a great enjoyment of wine and other "bourgeois pleasures". Engels favoured forming romantic relationships with women of the proletariat and found a long-term partner in a working-class woman named Mary Burns , although they never married. After her death, Engels was romantically involved with her younger sister Lydia Burns . Historian and former Labour MP Tristram Hunt , author of The Frock-Coated Communist: The Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels , argues that Engels "almost certainly was, in other words,

1876-477: A happy dialectical synthesis that freed him from the fixed oppositions of the pietist ethos of devout longing and estrangement. 'Through Strauss I have now entered on the straight road to Hegelianism... The Hegelian idea of God has already become mine, and thus I am joining the ranks of the "modern pantheists",' Engels wrote in one of his final letters to the soon-to-be-discarded Graebers [Wilhelm and Friedrich, priest trainees and former classmates of Engels]. Engels

2010-757: A leading authority on Marxism . Engels, the son of a wealthy textile manufacturer, met Marx in 1844. They jointly authored works including The Holy Family (1844), The German Ideology (written 1846), and The Communist Manifesto (1848), and worked as political organisers and activists in the Communist League and First International . Engels also supported Marx financially for much of his life, enabling him to continue writing after he moved to London in 1849. After Marx's death in 1883, Engels edited from manuscript and completed Volumes II and III of his Das Kapital (1885 and 1894). Engels wrote several important works of his own, including The Condition of

2144-462: A manner which left the impression that he had become a proponent of a peaceful road to socialism. On 1 April 1895, four months before his death, Engels responded to Kautsky: I was amazed to see today in the Vorwärts an excerpt from my 'Introduction' that had been printed without my knowledge and tricked out in such a way as to present me as a peace-loving proponent of legality [at all costs]. Which

2278-661: A manufacturing centre where industrialisation was on the rise. He was to work in Weaste , Salford , in the offices of Ermen and Engels 's Victoria Mill, which made sewing threads. Engels's father thought that working at the Salford firm might make his son reconsider some of his radical opinions. On his way to Salford and Manchester, Engels visited the office of the Rheinische Zeitung in Cologne and met Karl Marx for

2412-555: A poem entitled "The Bedouin", in the Bremisches Conversationsblatt No. 40. He also engaged in other literary work and began writing newspaper articles critiquing the societal ills of industrialisation . He wrote under the pseudonym "Friedrich Oswald" to avoid connecting his family with his provocative writings. In 1841, Engels performed his military service in the Prussian Army as a member of

2546-522: A profound challenge to the view that the historical process has come to a close and that capitalism is the end of history. Since Marx's time, the theory has been modified and expanded. It now has many Marxist and non-Marxist variants. The main modes of production that Marx identified generally include primitive communism , slave society , feudalism , mercantilism , and capitalism . In each of these social stages, people interacted with nature and production in different ways. Any surplus from that production

2680-797: A regular feature in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung under the heading "From the Theatre of War"; however, the newspaper was suppressed during the June 1849 Prussian coup d'état. After the coup, Marx lost his Prussian citizenship , was deported and fled to Paris, then London. Engels stayed in Prussia and took part in an armed uprising in South Germany as an aide-de-camp in the volunteer corps of August Willich . Engels also took two cases of rifle cartridges with him when he went to join

2814-671: A result of such accidents. Engels continued his involvement with radical journalism and politics. He frequented areas popular among members of the English labour and Chartist movements, whom he met. He also wrote for several journals, including The Northern Star , Robert Owen 's New Moral World , and the Democratic Review newspaper. Engels returned to Germany in 1844. On the way, he stopped in Paris to meet Karl Marx, with whom he had an earlier correspondence. Marx had been living in Paris since late October 1843, after

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2948-459: A revolutionary seizure of power at a time when the historical circumstances favoured a parliamentary road to power that he predicted could bring " social democracy into power as early as 1898". Engels's stance of openly accepting gradualist, evolutionary and parliamentary tactics while claiming that the historical circumstances did not favour revolution caused confusion. Marxist revisionist Eduard Bernstein interpreted this as indicating that Engels

3082-407: A river looks much the same day after day. But actually it is constantly flowing and changing, crumbling its banks, widening and deepening its channel. The water seen one day is never the same as that seen the next. Some of it is constantly being evaporated and drawn up, to return as rain. From year to year these changes may be scarcely perceptible. But one day, when the banks are thoroughly weakened and

3216-470: A series of stages, from hunting and gathering , through pastoralism and cultivation, to commercial society. Historical materialism rests on a foundation of dialectical materialism , in which matter is considered primary and ideas, thought, and consciousness are secondary, i.e. consciousness and human ideas about the universe result from material conditions rather than vice versa. Marxism uses this materialist methodology, referred to by Marx and Engels as

3350-436: A superstructure of legal and political "forms of social consciousness " that derive from the economic base that conditions both the superstructure and the dominant ideology of a society. Conflicts between the development of material productive forces and the relations of production provokes social revolutions , whereby changes to the economic base leads to the social transformation of the superstructure. This relationship

3484-483: A trading house in Bremen . His parents expected that he would follow his father into a career in the family business. Their son's revolutionary activities disappointed them. It would be some years before he joined the family firm. While at Bremen, Engels began reading the philosophy of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel , whose teachings dominated German philosophy at that time. In September 1838 he published his first work,

3618-429: Is reflexive , in that the base initially gives rise to the superstructure and remains the foundation of a form of social organization . Those newly formed social organizations can then act again upon both parts of the base and superstructure so that rather than being static, the relationship is dialectic , expressed and driven by conflicts and contradictions. Engels clarified: "The history of all hitherto existing society

3752-568: Is all the more reason why I should like it to appear in its entirety in the Neue Zeit in order that this disgraceful impression may be erased. I shall leave Liebknecht in no doubt as to what I think about it and the same applies to those who, irrespective of who they may be, gave him this opportunity of perverting my views and, what's more, without so much as a word to me about it. After Marx's death, Engels devoted much of his remaining years to editing Marx's unfinished volumes of Das Kapital . He

3886-532: Is also hugely influential and argues that industrial capitalism fundamentally altered (and accelerated) humans' relationship to time. He opened the gates for a generation of labour historians, such as David Montgomery (1927–2011) and Herbert Gutman (1928–1985), who made similar studies of the American working classes. Perhaps the best known of the Communist historians was E. B. Hobsbawm (1917–2012). He

4020-431: Is an accepted version of this page Friedrich Engels ( / ˈ ɛ ŋ ɡ əl z / ENG -gəlz ; German: [ˈfʁiːdʁɪç ˈʔɛŋl̩s] ; 28 November 1820 – 5 August 1895; in English also spelled as "Frederick Engels" ) was a German philosopher, political theorist, historian, journalist, and revolutionary socialist . He was also a businessman and Karl Marx 's lifelong friend and closest collaborator, serving as

4154-586: Is an influential school of historiography . The chief tenets of Marxist historiography include the centrality of social class , social relations of production in class-divided societies that struggle against each other, and economic constraints in determining historical outcomes ( historical materialism ). Marxist historians follow the tenets of the development of class-divided societies, especially modern capitalist ones. Marxist historiography has developed in varied ways across different regional and political contexts. It has had unique trajectories of development in

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4288-572: Is credited for establishing many of the basic historical arguments of current historiography and synthesizing huge amounts of modern historical data across time and space – most famously in his trilogy: The Age of Revolutions, The Age of Empires, and The Age of Extremes. Hobsbawm's Bandits is another example of this group's work. C. L. R. James (1901–1989) was also a great pioneer of the 'history from below' approach. Living in Britain when he wrote his most notable work The Black Jacobins (1938), he

4422-475: Is credited with preventing the work from being lost due to Marx's "incredibly difficult handwriting". He had to provide it with structure and develop its lines of thought, so that the second and third volumes of Capital are effectively joint in authorship and its content (except for the extensive forewords added by Engels) cannot be attributed exclusively to either author. Some scholars, notably Georges Labica  [ fr ] , thought that Engels had altered

4556-437: Is handed down to each generation from its predecessor..." For further, and much more comprehensive, information on this topic, see historical materialism . Historical materialism is a methodology to understand human societies and their development throughout history. Marx's theory of history locates historical change in the rise of class societies and the way humans labour together to make their livelihoods. Marx argues that

4690-440: Is his view of labour. For Marx "historical reality is none other than objectified labour, and all conditions of labour given by nature, including the organic bodies of people, are merely preconditions and 'disappearing moments' of the labour process." This emphasis on the physical as the determining factor in history represents a break from virtually all previous historians. Until Marx developed his theory of historical materialism ,

4824-547: Is short-sighted". As to his "short-sightedness", Engels admitted as much in a letter written to Joseph Weydemeyer on 19 June 1851 in which he says he was not worried about being selected for the Prussian military because of "my eye trouble, as I have now found out once and for all which renders me completely unfit for active service of any sort". Once he was safe in Switzerland, Engels began to write down all his memories of

4958-471: Is socialist. Methods from Marxist historiography, such as class analysis, can be divorced from the original political intents of Marxism and its deterministic nature; historians who use Marxist methodology, but disagree with the politics of Marxism, often describe themselves as "Marxian" historians, practitioners of this "Marxian historiography" often refer to their techniques as "Marxian". Friedrich Engels ' (1820–1895) most important historical contribution to

5092-462: Is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave , patrician and plebeian , lord and serf , guild -master and journeyman , in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes." Marx considered recurring class conflicts as

5226-619: The Deutsch–Französische Jahrbücher in 1844. Engels observed the slums of Manchester in close detail, and took notes of its horrors, such as child labour , the despoiled environment, and overworked and impoverished labourers. He sent a trilogy of articles to Marx. These were published in the Rheinische Zeitung and then in the Deutsch–Französische Jahrbücher , chronicling the conditions among

5360-512: The Deutsch–Französische Jahrbücher requiring all to leave Paris within 24 hours. Marx was expelled from Paris by French authorities on 3 February 1845 and settled in Brussels with his wife and one daughter. Having left Paris on 6 September 1844, Engels returned to his home in Barmen to work on his The Condition of the Working Class in England , which was published in late May 1845. Even before

5494-544: The French Republican Calendar . Marx later incorporated this comically ironic characterisation of the coup into his essay about it. He called the essay The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte using Engels's suggested characterisation. Marx also borrowed Engels' characterisation of Hegel's notion of the World Spirit that history occurred twice, "once as a tragedy and secondly as a farce" in

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5628-441: The Neue Rheinische Zeitung included Karl Schapper , Wilhelm Wolff , Ernst Dronke , Peter Nothjung , Heinrich Bürgers , Ferdinand Wolff and Carl Cramer. Engels's mother gave unwitting witness to the effect of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung on the revolutionary uprising in Cologne in 1848. Criticising his involvement in the uprising she states in a 5 December 1848 letter to Friedrich that "nobody, ourselves included, doubted that

5762-472: The Rheinische Zeitung was banned in March 1843 by the Prussian government. Prior to meeting Marx, Engels had become established as a fully developed materialist and scientific socialist , independent of Marx's philosophical development. In Paris, Marx and Arnold Ruge were publishing the Deutsch–Französische Jahrbücher , of which only one issue appeared (in 1844), and in which Engels wrote Outlines of

5896-466: The party line and reality as one and the same. As such, if it was a science, it was a science in service of a specific political and ideological agenda, commonly employing historical negationism . In the 1930s, historical archives were closed and original research was severely restricted. Historians were required to pepper their works with references—appropriate or not—to Stalin and other "Marxist–Leninist classics", and to pass judgment—as prescribed by

6030-647: The "obsolete" hand-loom weaver, the "Utopian" artisan, and even the deluded follower of Joanna Southcott , from the enormous condescension of posterity. Their crafts and traditions may have been dying. Their hostility to the new industrialism may have been backward-looking. Their communitarian ideals may have been fantasies. Their insurrectionary conspiracies may have been foolhardy. But they lived through these times of acute social disturbance, and we did not. Their aspirations were valid in terms of their own experience; and, if they were casualties of history, they remain, condemned in their own lives, as casualties. Thompson's work

6164-574: The Communist League was an international society of proletarian revolutionaries with branches in various European cities. The Communist League also had contacts with the underground conspiratorial organisation of Louis Auguste Blanqui . Many of Marx's and Engels's current friends became members of the Communist League. Old friends like Georg Friedrich Herwegh , who had worked with Marx on the Rheinsche Zeitung , Heinrich Heine ,

6298-595: The Communist League. Joachim Lelewel , a prominent Polish historian and participant in the Polish uprising of 1830–1831, was also a frequent associate. The Communist League commissioned Marx and Engels to write a pamphlet explaining the principles of communism. This became the Manifesto of the Communist Party , better known as The Communist Manifesto . It was first published on 21 February 1848 and ends with

6432-421: The Communist League. One of the first was Wilhelm Wolff , who soon became one of Marx's and Engels's closest collaborators. Others were Joseph Weydemeyer and Ferdinand Freiligrath , a famous revolutionary poet. While most of the associates of Marx and Engels were German immigrants living in Brussels, some were Belgians. Phillipe Gigot , a Belgian philosopher and Victor Tedesco , a lawyer from Liège, both joined

6566-831: The English schooner, Cornish Diamond under the command of a Captain Stevens. The voyage across the western Mediterranean, around the Iberian Peninsula by sailing schooner took about five weeks. Finally, the Cornish Diamond sailed up the River Thames to London on 10 November 1849 with Engels on board. Upon his return to Britain, Engels re-entered the Manchester company in which his father held shares to support Marx financially as he worked on Das Kapital . Unlike his first period in England (1843), Engels

6700-608: The Household Artillery (German: Garde-Artillerie-Brigade ). Assigned to Berlin, he attended university lectures at the University of Berlin and began to associate with groups of Young Hegelians . He anonymously published articles in the Rheinische Zeitung , exposing the poor employment and living conditions endured by factory workers. The editor of the Rheinische Zeitung was Karl Marx, but Engels would not meet Marx until late November 1842. Engels acknowledged

6834-551: The League participated in the 1839 rebellion fomented by the French utopian revolutionary socialist, Louis Auguste Blanqui ; as Ruge remained a Young Hegelian in his belief, Marx and Ruge soon split and Ruge left the Deutsch–Französische Jahrbücher . Following the split, Marx remained friendly enough with Ruge that he sent Ruge a warning on 15 January 1845 that the Paris police were going to execute orders against him, Marx and others at

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6968-578: The Party—on pre-revolution historic Russian figures. Nikita Khrushchev commented that "Historians are dangerous and capable of turning everything upside down. They have to be watched." The Soviet interpretation of Marxism predetermined much of the research done by historians. Research by scholars in the USSR was limited to a large extent due to this predetermination. Some Soviet historians could not offer non-Marxist theoretical explanations that did not fit with

7102-462: The Rise of Capitalism (1926), reflected his ethical concerns and preoccupations in economic history. He was profoundly interested in the issue of the enclosure of land in the English countryside in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and Max Weber 's thesis on the connection between the appearance of Protestantism and the rise of capitalism. His belief in the rise of the gentry in the century before

7236-570: The United States, Marxist historiography greatly influenced the history of slavery and labour history. Marxist historiography also greatly influenced French historians , including France's most famous and enduring historian Fernand Braudel (1902–1985), as well as Italian historians, most famously the Autonomous Marxist and micro-history fields. Soviet-era historiography was deeply influenced by Marxism. Marxism maintains that

7370-586: The West, the Soviet Union , and in India , as well as in the pan-Africanist and African-American traditions, adapting to these specific regional and political conditions in different ways. Marxist historiography has made contributions to the history of the working class , and the methodology of a history from below . Marxist historiography is sometimes criticized as deterministic , in that it posits

7504-861: The Working Class in England (1845), Anti-Dühring (1878), Dialectics of Nature (1878–1882), The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884), and Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy (1886). Friedrich Engels was born on 28 November 1820 in Barmen , Jülich-Cleves-Berg , Prussia (now Wuppertal , Germany), as the eldest son of Friedrich Engels Sr. (1796–1860) and of Elisabeth "Elise" Franziska Mauritia van Haar (1797–1873). The wealthy Engels family owned large cotton-textile mills in Barmen and Salford , England, both expanding industrial cities. Friedrich's parents were devout Calvinists and raised their children accordingly—he

7638-585: The autocratic Tsarist government in favour of a constitutional government had been provided by the Decembrist Revolt of 1825. Despite the unsuccessful revolt against the Tsarist government in favour of a constitutional government, both Engels and Marx anticipated a bourgeois revolution in Russia would occur, which would bring about a bourgeois stage in Russian development to precede a communist stage. By 1881, both Marx and Engels began to contemplate

7772-405: The charge, writing in a letter to Marx that Sibylle's "rage with me is unrequited love, pure and simple." While in Manchester between October and November 1843, Engels wrote his first critique of political economy , entitled "Umrisse zu einer Kritik der Nationalökonomie" ( Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy ). Engels sent the article to Paris, where Arnold Ruge en Marx published it in

7906-506: The course of Marx's analysis, but the shift in focus from the exploitation of labourers to the accumulation of capital, and the introduction of the possibility that capitalism could survive the tendency of the rate of profit to fall is argued by van Holthoon to be already Marx's, with the latter notion present in the long unpublished Grundrisse . While the task of editing Capital forced Engels to abandon his unfinished Dialectics of Nature , he still completed two other works of his own in

8040-495: The creation of the Soviet Union was the most important turning event in human history, since the USSR was considered to be the first socialist society. Furthermore, the Communist Party – considered to be the vanguard of the working class – was given the role of permanent leading force in society, rather than a temporary revolutionary organization. As such, it became the protagonist of history, which could not be wrong. Hence

8174-429: The development of Marxist historiography was Der Deutsche Bauernkrieg ( The German Peasants' War , 1850), which analysed social warfare in early Protestant Germany in terms of emerging capitalist classes. Although The German Peasants' War was overdetermined and lacked a rigorous engagement with archival sources, it exemplifies an early Marxist interest in history from below and in class analysis ; it also attempts

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8308-573: The development of the existing forces of production. How production is accomplished depends on the character of society's productive forces , which refers to the means of production such as the tools, instruments, technology, land, raw materials, and human knowledge and abilities in terms of using these means of production. The relations of production are determined by the level and character of these productive forces present at any given time in history. In all societies, Human beings collectively work on nature but, especially in class societies, do not do

8442-464: The domain of social phenomenon, removed two chief defects of earlier historical theories. In the first place, they at best examined only the ideological motives of the historical activity of human beings, without grasping the objective laws governing the development of the system of social relations. ... in the second place, the earlier theories did not cover the activities of the masses of the population, whereas historical materialism made it possible for

8576-483: The driving force of human history as such conflicts have manifested themselves as distinct transitional stages of development in Western Europe . Accordingly, Marx designated human history as encompassing four stages of development in relations of production: While historical materialism has been referred to as a materialist theory of history, Marx did not claim to have produced a master-key to history and that

8710-518: The famous poet, a young physician by the name of Roland Daniels , Heinrich Bürgers and August Herman Ewerbeck , all maintained their contacts with Marx and Engels in Brussels. Georg Weerth , who had become a friend of Engels in England in 1843, now settled in Brussels. Carl Wallau and Stephen Born (real name Simon Buttermilch ) were both German immigrant typesetters who settled in Brussels to help Marx and Engels with their Communist League work. Marx and Engels made many new important contacts through

8844-521: The fight for democracy and freedom. The "great man" and "great women" theory of history and the view that history is primarily shaped by ideas has provoked no end of debate but many historians have believed there are more fundamental patterns at play beneath historical events. Marx asserted that the material conditions of a society's mode of production , or in Marxist terms a society's productive forces and relations of production , fundamentally determine society's organization and development including

8978-464: The first paragraph of his new essay. Meanwhile, Engels started working at the mill owned by his father in Manchester as an office clerk, the same position he held in his teens while in Germany where his father's company was based. Engels worked his way up to become a partner of the firm in 1864. Five years later, Engels retired from the business and could focus more on his studies. At this time, Marx

9112-486: The first time to study with scientific accuracy the social conditions of the life of the masses and the changes in these conditions. — Russian Marxist theoretician and revolutionary Vladimir Lenin , 1913 Society does not consist of individuals, but expresses the sum of interrelations, the relations within which these individuals stand. In the Marxian view, human history is like a river. From any given vantage point,

9246-565: The first time. Initially they were not impressed with each other. Marx mistakenly thought that Engels was still associated with the Young Hegelians of Berlin, with whom Marx had just broken off ties. In Manchester, Engels met Mary Burns , a fierce young Irish woman with radical opinions who worked in the Engels factory. They began a relationship that lasted 20 years until her death in 1863. The two never married, as both were against

9380-436: The first to explain that socialism is not the invention of dreamers, but the final aim and necessary result of the development of the productive forces in modern society. All recorded history hitherto has been a history of class struggle, of the succession of the rule and victory of certain social classes over others." According to Paul Kellogg , there is "some considerable controversy" regarding "the place of Frederick Engels in

9514-491: The following observations: Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels worked in relative isolation together outside the larger mainstream. However, by the turn of the twentieth century, Marxist thought was perhaps the most prominent opposition to the idealist traditions. R. H. Tawney (1880–1962) was an early historian working in this tradition. The Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century (1912) and Religion and

9648-476: The following year. Marx's first London residence was a cramped flat at 28 Dean Street , Soho . From 1856, he lived at 9 Grafton Terrace, Kentish Town , and then in a tenement at 41 Maitland Park Road in Belsize Park from 1875 until his death in March 1883. Mary Burns died suddenly of heart disease in 1863, after which Engels became close with her younger sister Lydia (" Lizzie "). They lived openly as

9782-400: The government required overdetermined historical writing. Soviet historians tended to avoid contemporary history (after 1903) where possible, and effort was predominantly directed at pre-modern history (before 1850). As history was considered to be a politicized academic discipline, historians limited their creative output to avoid prosecution. Since the late 1930s, Soviet historiography treated

9916-584: The group (most notably Christopher Hill [1912–2003] and E. P. Thompson [1924–1993]) left the CPGB after the 1956 Hungarian Revolution , the common points of British Marxist historiography continued in their works. They placed a great emphasis on the subjective determination of history. E. P. Thompson famously engaged Althusser in The Poverty of Theory , arguing that Althusser's theory overdetermined history, and left no space for historical revolt by

10050-522: The historical process. They led to the creation of social classes , and class struggle was the motor of history. The sociocultural evolution of societies was considered to progress inevitably from slavery , through feudalism and capitalism to socialism and finally communism . In addition, Leninism argued that a vanguard party was required to lead the working class in the revolution that would overthrow capitalism and replace it with socialism. Soviet historiography interpreted this theory to mean that

10184-527: The importance of the past in understanding the present and anticipating the future". In his entry on Williams in the Dictionary of Welsh Biography , Geraint H. Jenkins wrote that "the fiery Marxist historian ran rings around his affable Whiggish co-presenter". A copy of the recording is held in the archive of the National Library of Wales but it has not been repeated on UK television, despite

10318-414: The influence of German philosophy on his intellectual development throughout his career. In 1840, he also wrote: "To get the most out of life you must be active, you must live and you must have the courage to taste the thrill of being young." Engels developed atheistic beliefs and his relationship with his parents became strained. In 1842, his parents sent the 22-year-old Engels to Salford , England,

10452-451: The institution of marriage. While Engels regarded stable monogamy as a virtue, he considered the current state and church-regulated marriage as a form of class oppression. Burns guided Engels through Manchester and Salford , showing him the worst districts for his research. Engels was often described as a man with a very strong libido and not much restraint. He had many lovers and despite his condemnation of prostitution as "exploitation of

10586-399: The introduction of new technologies and new ways of doing things to improve production eventually lead to new social classes which in turn result in political crises which can threaten the established order. Marx's view of history is in contrast to the commonplace notion that the rise and fall of kingdoms, empires and states, can broadly be explained by the actions, ambitions and policies of

10720-582: The kind of man Stalin would have had shot". Hunt sums up the disconnect between Engels's personality and the Soviet Union which later utilised his works, stating: This great lover of the good life, passionate advocate of individuality, and enthusiastic believer in literature, culture, art and music as an open forum could never have acceded to the Soviet Communism of the 20th century, all the Stalinist claims of his paternity notwithstanding. As to

10854-434: The material requirements of everyday life. Marx then extended this premise by asserting the importance of the fact that, in order to carry out production and exchange, people have to enter into very definite social relations, or more specifically, "relations of production". However, production does not get carried out in the abstract, or by entering into arbitrary or random relations chosen at will, but instead are determined by

10988-445: The materialist conception of history and later better known as historical materialism, to analyse the underlying causes of societal development and change from the perspective of the collective ways in which humans make their living. Historical materialism springs from a fundamental underlying reality of human existence: that in order for subsequent generations of human beings to survive, it is necessary for them to produce and reproduce

11122-498: The materialist conception of history is not "an historico-philosophic theory of the marche générale , imposed by fate upon every people, whatever the historic circumstances in which it finds itself." In a letter to editor of the Russian newspaper paper Otetchestvennye Zapiskym (1877), he explained that his ideas are based upon a concrete study of the actual conditions in Europe. To summarize, history develops in accordance with

11256-524: The meetings at which you and your friends spoke, and also the language of (Neue) Rh.Z. were largely the cause of these disturbances." Engels's parents hoped that young Engels would "decide to turn to activities other than those which you have been pursuing in recent years and which have caused so much distress". At this point, his parents felt the only hope for their son was to emigrate to America and start his life over. They told him that he should do this or he would "cease to receive money from us"; however,

11390-947: The mill, Engels found time to write a book on Martin Luther , the Protestant Reformation and the 1525 revolutionary war of the peasants , entitled The Peasant War in Germany . He also wrote a number of newspaper articles including "The Campaign for the German Imperial Constitution" which he finished in February 1850 and "On the Slogan of the Abolition of the State and the German 'Friends of Anarchy'" written in October 1850. In April 1851, he wrote

11524-602: The most liberal constitutions in Europe and functioned as refuge for progressives from other countries. From 1845 to 1848, Engels and Marx lived in Brussels , spending much of their time organising the city's German workers. Shortly after their arrival, they contacted and joined the underground German Communist League . The Communist League was the successor organisation to the League of the Just which had been founded in 1837 but had recently disbanded. Influenced by Wilhelm Weitling ,

11658-403: The moving forces of history are determined by material production and the rise of different socioeconomic formations. Applying this perspective to socioeconomic formations such as slavery and feudalism is a major methodological principle of orthodox Marxist historiography. Based on this principle, historiography predicts that there will be an abolition of capitalism by a socialist revolution made by

11792-596: The office in Manchester. In 1849, Engels travelled to Bavaria for the Baden and Palatinate revolutionary uprising , an even more dangerous involvement. Starting with an article called "The Magyar Struggle", written on 8 January 1849, Engels, himself, began a series of reports on the Revolution and War for Independence of the newly founded Hungarian Republic. Engels's articles on the Hungarian Republic became

11926-570: The official interpretation of the Marxist theories. Notable histories include the Short Course History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolshevik) , published in 1938, which was written to justify the nature of Bolshevik party life under Joseph Stalin . This work crystallised the piatichlenka or five acceptable moments of history in terms of vulgar dialectical materialism : primitive-communism, slavery, feudalism, capitalism and socialism. Friedrich Engels This

12060-493: The old style', that is, insurrection: he does not renounce revolution. The reason for Engels' caution is clear: he candidly admits that ultimate victory for any insurrection is rare, simply on military and tactical grounds". In his introduction to the 1895 edition of Marx's The Class Struggles in France , Engels attempted to resolve the division between reformists and revolutionaries in the Marxist movement by declaring that he

12194-560: The oppressed. Christopher Hill's studies on 17th-century English history were widely acknowledged and recognized as representative of Marxist historians and Marxist historiography in general. His books include Puritanism and Revolution (1958), Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution (1965 and revised in 1996), The Century of Revolution (1961), AntiChrist in 17th-century England (1971), The World Turned Upside Down (1972) and many others. E. P. Thompson pioneered

12328-595: The outbreak of the Civil War in England provoked the "Storm over the Gentry" in which his methods were subjected to severe criticisms by Hugh Trevor-Roper and John Cooper. A circle of historians inside the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) was formed in 1946. It became a highly influential cluster of British Marxist historians, who shared a common interest in and contributed to history from below and class structure in early capitalist society. While some members of

12462-405: The overarching determining factor in the direction of history was some sort of divine agency. In Marx's view of history "God became a mere projection of human imagination" and more importantly "a tool of oppression". There was no more sense of divine direction to be seen. History moved by the sheer force of human labour, and all theories of divine nature were a concoction of the ruling powers to keep

12596-494: The pamphlet "Conditions and Prospects of a War of the Holy Alliance against France". Marx and Engels denounced Louis Bonaparte when he carried out a coup against the French government and made himself president for life on 2 December 1851. Engels wrote to Marx on 3 December 1851, characterising the coup as "comical" and referred to it as occurring on "the 18th Brumaire", the date of Napoleon I's coup of 1799 according to

12730-502: The party's official ideology for their interpretation of sources. This was true even when alternate theories had a greater explanatory power in relation to a historian's reading of source material. Marx and Engels' ideas of the importance of class struggle in history, the destiny of the working class, and the role of the dictatorship of the proletariat and the revolutionary party are of major importance in Marxist methodology. Marxist–Leninist historiography has several aspects. It explains

12864-421: The people at the top of society; kings, queens, emperors, generals, or religious leaders. This view of history is summed up by the 19th-century Scottish philosopher Thomas Carlyle who wrote "the history of the world is nothing but the biography of great men". An alternative to the "great man" theory is that history is shaped by the motivating force of "great ideas" – the struggle of reason over superstition or

12998-404: The political commitments, cultural ideas and values that dominate in any society. Marx argues that there is a fundamental conflict between the class of people who create the wealth of society and those who have ownership or control of the means of production, decide how society's wealth and resources are to be used and have a monopoly of political and military power. Historical materialism provides

13132-453: The position of the revisionists. Engels's statements in the French newspaper Le Figaro , in which he wrote that "revolution" and the "so-called socialist society" were not fixed concepts, but rather constantly changing social phenomena, and argued that this made "us socialists all evolutionists", increased the public perception that Engels was gravitating towards evolutionary socialism. Engels also argued that it would be "suicidal" to talk about

13266-418: The problem in the relationship between Engels and his parents was worked out without Engels having to leave England or being cut off from financial assistance from his parents. In July 1851, Engels's father arrived to visit him in Manchester, England. During the visit, his father arranged for Engels to meet Peter Ermen of the office of Ermen & Engels , to move to Liverpool and to take over sole management of

13400-477: The proletariat by the bourgeoisie" he also occasionally paid for sex. In 1846 he wrote to Marx: "If I had an income of 5000 francs I would do nothing but work and amuse myself with women until I went to pieces. If there were no Frenchwomen, life wouldn't be worth living. But so long as there are grisettes , well and good!" At a Workers' Union meeting in Brussels, Engels's friend turned rival Moses Hess accused Engels of raping his wife Sibylle. Engels vehemently denied

13534-614: The publication of his book, Engels moved to Brussels in late April 1845, to collaborate with Marx on another book, German Ideology . While living in Barmen, Engels began making contact with Socialists in the Rhineland to raise money for Marx's publication efforts in Brussels; these contacts became more important as both Marx and Engels began political organising for the Social Democratic Workers' Party of Germany . The nation of Belgium, founded in 1830, had one of

13668-503: The rains long and heavy, the river floods, bursts its banks, and may take a new course. This represents the dialectical part of Marx's famous theory of dialectical (or historical) materialism. — Hubert Kay, Life , 1948 Historical materialism builds upon the idea of historical progress that became popular in philosophy during the Enlightenment , which asserted that the development of human society has progressed through

13802-554: The recent military campaign against the Prussians. This writing eventually became the article published as "The Campaign for the German Imperial Constitution". To help Marx with Neue Rheinische Zeitung Politisch-ökonomische Revue , the new publishing effort in London, Engels sought ways to escape the continent and travel to London. On 5 October 1849, Engels arrived in the Italian port city of Genoa. There, Engels booked passage on

13936-630: The relationship between writers, their community and their language, and was the first academic study of Welsh writing in English . It was updated and re-issued several times and won the New Welsh Readers’ Poll in 2018 as the best essay collection ever published in English . Colin Thomas was asked to produce, write and direct the series by HTV Wales, with Wynford Vaughan-Thomas already committed as sole presenter. Thomas realised when contemplating

14070-420: The religious persuasion attributable to Engels, Hunt writes: In that sense the latent rationality of Christianity comes to permeate the everyday experience of the modern world—its values are now variously incarnated in the family, civil society, and the state. What Engels particularly embraced in all of this was an idea of modern pantheism , or, rather, pandeism , a merging of divinity with progressing humanity,

14204-454: The same work. In such societies, there is a division of labour in which people not only carry out different kinds of labour but occupy different social positions on the basis of those differences. The most important such division is that between manual and intellectual labour whereby one class produces a given society's wealth while another is able to monopolize control of the means of production and so both governs that society and lives off of

14338-542: The series that his view of Welsh history did not align with Vaughan-Thomas's, and inspired by Colin MacArthur's book 'Television and History', he decided to add a second presenter. His first idea was the feminist historian Angela V. John but as Vaughan-Thomas would not accept John at any cost, Colin Thomas suggested Gwyn Williams, whom Vaughan-Thomas reluctantly accepted. Marxist historiography Marxist historiography , or historical materialist historiography ,

14472-435: The social basis of historical knowledge, determines the social functions of historical knowledge and the means by which these functions are carried out, and emphasizes the need to study concepts in connection with the social and political life of the period in which these concepts were developed. It studies the theoretical and methodological features in every school of historical thought. Marxist–Leninist historiography analyses

14606-415: The source-study basis of a historical work, the nature of the use of sources, and specific research methods. It analyses problems of historical research as the most important sign of the progress and historical knowledge and as the expression of the socioeconomic and political needs of a historical period. The Marxist theory of historical materialism identified means of production as chief determinants of

14740-528: The study of history from below in his work, The Making of the English Working Class , published in 1963. It focused on the forgotten history of the first working-class political left in the world in the late-18th and early-19th centuries. In his preface to this book, Thompson set out his approach to writing history from below: I am seeking to rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper,

14874-506: The text demonstrate Marx's sympathy for the argument of Nikolay Chernyshevsky , that it should be possible to establish socialism in Russia without an intermediary bourgeois stage provided that the peasant commune were used as the basis for the transition. In 1870, Engels moved to London where he and Marx lived until Marx's death in 1883. Engels's London home from 1870 to 1894 was at 122 Regent's Park Road . In October 1894 he moved to 41 Regent's Park Road, Primrose Hill , NW1, where he died

15008-488: The totality of social relations by which humans produce and re-produce their social existence. According to Marx, the "sum total of the forces of production accessible to men determines the condition of society" and forms a society's economic base. The base includes the material forces of production such as the labour , means of production and relations of production , i.e. the social and political arrangements that regulate production and distribution. From this base rises

15142-485: The unlimited powers of the Communist Party leaders were claimed to be as infallible and inevitable as the history itself. It also followed that a worldwide victory of communist countries is inevitable. All research had to be based on those assumptions and could not diverge in its findings. In 1956, Soviet academician Anna Pankratova said that "the problems of Soviet historiography are the problems of our Communist ideology." Soviet historians have also been criticized for

15276-603: The uprising in Elberfeld on 10 May 1849. Later when Prussian troops came to Kaiserslautern to suppress an uprising there, Engels joined a group of volunteers under the command of August Willich, who were going to fight the Prussian troops. When the uprising was crushed, Engels was one of the last members of Willich's volunteers to escape by crossing the Swiss border. Marx and others became concerned for Engels's life until they heard from him. Engels travelled through Switzerland as

15410-570: The wealth generated by the labouring classes. Marx's account of the theory is in The German Ideology (1845) and in the preface A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859). All constituent features of a society ( social classes , political pyramid and ideologies ) are assumed to stem from economic activity, forming what is considered as the base and superstructure . The base and superstructure metaphor describes

15544-412: The working class in Manchester. He later collected these articles for his influential first book, The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845). Written between September 1844 and March 1845, the book was published in German in 1845. In the book, Engels described the "grim future of capitalism and the industrial age", noting the details of the squalor in which the working people lived. The book

15678-417: The working class. Soviet historians believed that Marxist–Leninist theory permitted the application of categories of dialectical and historical materialism in the study of historical events. However Soviet historiography was significantly influenced by the strict control by the authorities aimed at propaganda and Soviet power as well, as a result Marxist historiography suffered in the Soviet Union , as

15812-468: The working people in check. For Marx, "The first historical act is... the production of material life itself." As one might expect, Marxist history not only begins with labour, it ends in production: "history does not end by being resolved into "self-consciousness" as "spirit of the spirit," but that in it at each stage there is found a material result: a sum of productive forces, a historically created relation of individuals to nature and to one another, which

15946-537: The world-famous phrase: "Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletariat have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Working Men of All Countries, Unite!" Engels's mother wrote in a letter to him of her concerns, commenting that he had "really gone too far" and "begged" him "to proceed no further". She further stated: You have paid more heed to other people, to strangers, and have taken no account of your mother's pleas. God alone knows what I have felt and suffered of late. I

16080-409: The years following Marx's death. In The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884), he made an argument using anthropological evidence of the time to show that family structures changed over history, and that the concept of monogamous marriage came from the necessity within class society for men to control women to ensure their own children would inherit their property. He argued

16214-548: Was "take it easy" while "jollity" was listed as his favourite virtue. Of Engels's personality and appearance, Robert Heilbroner described him in The Worldly Philosophers as "tall and rather elegant, he had the figure of a man who liked to fence and to ride to hounds and who had once swum the Weser River four times without a break" as well as having been "gifted with a quick wit and facile mind" and of

16348-497: Was a polyglot and was able to write and speak in numerous languages, including Russian, Italian, Portuguese, Irish, Spanish, Polish, French, English, German and the Milanese dialect . In his biography of Engels, Vladimir Lenin wrote: "After his friend Karl Marx (who died in 1883), Engels was the finest scholar and teacher of the modern proletariat in the whole civilised world. [...] In their scientific works, Marx and Engels were

16482-436: Was also significant because of the way he defined "class". He argued that class was not a structure, but a relationship that changed over time. Thompson's work is commonly considered the most influential work of history in the twentieth century and a crucial catalyst for social history and from social history to gender history and other studies of marginalized peoples. His essay, "Time, Work, Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism"

16616-629: Was an anti-Stalinist Marxist and so outside of the CPGB. The Black Jacobins was the first professional historical account of the greatest and only successful slave revolt in colonial American history, the Haitian Revolution . James's history is still touted as a remarkable work of history nearly a century after publication, an immense work of historical investigation, story-telling, and creativity. Other important British Marxist historians included Raphael Samuel (1934–1996), A. L. Morton (1903–1987), and Brian Pearce (1915–2008). In

16750-535: Was baptised in the Calvinist Reformed Evangelical Parish of Elberfeld . At the age of 13, Engels attended secondary school ( Gymnasium ) in the adjacent city of Elberfeld but had to leave at 17 due to pressure from his father, who wanted him to become a businessman and work as a mercantile apprentice in the family firm. After a year in Barmen, the young Engels was, in 1838, sent by his father to undertake an apprenticeship at

16884-430: Was distributed differently as well. To Marx, ancient societies (e.g. Rome and Greece) were based on a ruling class of citizens and a class of slaves; feudalism was based on nobles and serfs ; and capitalism based on the capitalist class ( bourgeoisie ) and the working class ( proletariat ). The discovery of the materialist conception of history, or rather, the consistent continuation and extension of materialism into

17018-404: Was in favour of short-term tactics of electoral politics that included gradualist and evolutionary socialist measures while maintaining his belief that revolutionary seizure of power by the proletariat should remain a goal. In spite of this attempt by Engels to merge gradualism and revolution, his effort only diluted the distinction of gradualism and revolution and had the effect of strengthening

17152-471: Was living in London but they were able to exchange ideas through daily correspondence. One of the ideas that Engels and Marx contemplated was the possibility and character of a potential revolution in Russia. As early as April 1853, Engels and Marx anticipated an "aristocratic-bourgeois revolution in Russia which would begin in "St. Petersburg with a resulting civil war in the interior". The model for this type of aristocratic-bourgeois revolution in Russia against

17286-432: Was moving towards accepting parliamentary reformist and gradualist stances, but he ignored that Engels's stances were tactical as a response to the particular circumstances and that Engels was still committed to revolutionary socialism . Engels was deeply distressed when he discovered that his introduction to a new edition of The Class Struggles in France had been edited by Bernstein and orthodox Marxist Karl Kautsky in

17420-414: Was now under police surveillance. He had "official" homes and "unofficial homes" all over Salford, Weaste and other inner-city Manchester districts where he lived with Mary Burns under false names to confuse the police. Little more is known, as Engels destroyed over 1,500 letters between himself and Marx after the latter's death so as to conceal the details of their secretive lifestyle. Despite his work at

17554-580: Was published in English in 1887. Archival resources contemporary to Engels's stay in Manchester shed light on some of the conditions he describes, including a manuscript (MMM/10/1) held by special collections at the University of Manchester. This recounts cases seen in the Manchester Royal Infirmary, where industrial accidents dominated, and which resonate with Engels's comments on the disfigured persons seen walking round Manchester as

17688-510: Was sceptical of "top-down revolutions" and later in life advocated "a peaceful, democratic road to socialism ". Engels also wrote in his introduction to the 1891 edition of Marx's The Class Struggles in France that "rebellion in the old style, street fighting with barricades, which decided the issue everywhere up to 1848, was to a considerable extent obsolete", although some such as David W. Lowell empashised their cautionary and tactical meaning, arguing that "Engels questions only rebellion 'in

17822-546: Was trembling when I picked up the newspaper and saw therein that a warrant was out for my son's arrest. There was a revolution in France in 1848 that soon spread to other Western European countries . These events caused Engels and Marx to return to Cologne in their homeland of Prussia. While living there, they created and served as editors for a new daily newspaper called the Neue Rheinische Zeitung . Besides Marx and Engels, other frequent contributors to

17956-474: Was writing for the Deutsch–Französische Jahrbücher , edited by both Marx and Arnold Ruge , in Paris in 1844. During this time in Paris, both Marx and Engels began their association with and then joined the secret revolutionary society called the League of the Just . The League of the Just had been formed in 1837 in France to promote an egalitarian society through the overthrow of the existing governments. In 1839,

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