Engels: The Communist as Hedonist
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If you want to get into the intended groove, the way to do that is to relax a bit out of your habitual identification (pro-communist, anti-communist, whatever) and take pleasure in stuff you didn't know before. People, including Engels, Marx, you, and me, are complicated. They have interesting contradictions.
Yeah, it's kind of to be expected: theorists (firebrand or not) are for obvious reasons disproportionately of the intelligentsia, and under capitalism (or the modern mixed economy) even the proletarian intelligentsia (much less the petit and, even moreso, haut bourgeois intelligentsia) tend to be quite well off compared to the mass of the proletariat.
People who are expending all their energy dealing with the immediate struggle that capitalism imposes on the proletariat aren't developing models of the long-term problems and solutions.
Remember: he chose to assign himself an annual allowance for “entertainment” the size of 10 of his workers’ wages.
Could he have went with just 9 wages and bump the salary of his workers a bit? Probably. Could he have contributed it to the communist cause more to drive systemic change? Probably.
But he chose not to.
You cannot adhere to the labor theory of value and make such choices without either knowing that what you do is theft, or knowing that LTV is wrong.
Engels living in excess while preaching solidarity, you will note, is not the point I said was to be expected. Engels being one of many examples of the pattern “leftist firebrand whose inherited wealth insulated him from the struggles of ordinary working people”, was.
OTOH, Engels preached revolution against capitalism not financial solidarity within capitalism, and that the harm of capitalism was inherent its fundamental structure, not something that could be meaningfully mitigated or remediated by “good behavior” within the privileged classes while capitalism continued.
It's not surprising that opponents of his philosophy want to attack him with the ad hominem that he is a hypocrite; it's odd, though, to accuse him of being a hypocrite to a position that he and Marx condemned as a retrograde one which served to reinforce the capitalist order.
You are justifying Engel's being exploitative to his own workers, while he himself knew it was essentially theft, according to their own theories. What could justify such theft? Well, "entertainment". He didn't choose to send that money to the International to promote systemic change. Nonono, he willingly chose to spend it on his own pleasures to the detriment of the people working for him. At least according to his own theories. So either Engels himself was immoral, or communism doesn't have any moral superiority over capitalism. See, you can choose whether that argument is ad hominem or generally applicable. :D
This is the whole reason they needed a revolution. If communism was truly a superior form of economic organization, then it wouldn't matter if it was applied to whole societies or smaller groups. In other words, a company organized by communist principles would be more competitive than a company organized purely by naked capitalism. You can't get people on board in evolutionary manner, if you yourself can't get organized by these principles. If your own company can't be communist and survive, why would it work on a scale of a whole country or the whole world? This is why they needed it to be violent and irreversible. It's a massive swindle to get power and it was thought out.
It boggles my mind, that people devalue legitimate left thought by staning charlatans. But people also voted for Trump because he is "a man of the people", so I guess I shouldn't be surprised.
Since Engels always was "the second Violine" (behind Marx), he could get away with a hedonistic lifestyle without endangering the communistic movement too much. While many may describe him as a typical "Champagnersozialist", IMO in Manchester he realised that the right action of an individual is not enough to introduce a widespread change: The owenism he experienced in Manchester was the proof (a socialist working class movement in England whose founder tried to establish good working conditions in his factories).
With this in mind, it was simply more effective for the movement to let Engels finance Marx even by running one of those capitalistic cotton factories they criticized & being financed by his family. (Instead of directly rejecting any participation in the capitalistic lifestyle (including its hedonistic pleasures) and thus having no food on the table, which means that Marx could not have just worked on "Das Kapital").
TL;DR; by doing effective altruism benefitting the communist movement, he meant to help many more workers than by living by example.
This citation of Oscar Wilde made me curious. It's from his essay The Soul of Man under Communism[1], which turns out to be a really good counterview to the article itself.
[1] https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/wilde-oscar/soul-...
He casually reflects on absurdities, contradiction, and their prerequisites rather than burying them. What Wilde is doing in this essay is giving credence to counterarguments, either between socialism and individualism or between socialism and his own, famously hedonistic character.
The tendency in his period was to argue for hermetically sealed worldviews. Marx's famously, and later Ayn Rand's are like type examples. These worldviews internally saw themselves as a complete and absolute understanding of history, sociology, economics... the Truth about people and society. They conceded nothing and admitted no external influences.
Wilde's essay is still read because it's one of the few which actually captures the real political/philosophical debate of his era. The ideals behind the ideology, the dangers of these going wrong.
He was a mighty intellectual, and if you want to understand why 19th socialism was what it was I think he's indispensable.
In the case of Marx this is inaccurate. Indeed, in Das Kapital he develops the Labor theory of value [0] from earlier works of David Ricardo and ... Adam Smith.
I think it's telling how most of the Smith and Ricardo followers celebrate how prescient they were, excluding the labor theory of value when they embrace marginalism [1] instead. I guess it must be more convenient for them.
[0] https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch01.htm
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoclassical_economics#Margina...
Truth is, there is none. It’s just that most of the thinking is done by people who are relatively well-off in life, everyone else is too busy “making a living”.
False equivalence, since rightwing populists don't advocate wealth redistribution and preach egalitarianism.
In their view.
I've seen him have this dialogue several times. My guess is that he's done it hundreds of times. That's the definition of the word "trite." The obvious champagne socialist firebrand dialogue has been had, in the same way, for generations now. Oscar Wilde. etc.
This article does mention "champagne populists" as a type example from the political right. The other obvious comparison is "champagne religion," preaching chaste poverty while indulging like epicurean hedonism.
Despite being trite, I think there genuinely is something to "if the shoe fits." Engels like other socialists & epicurean hedonists (eg chris hitchens) "get away" with church marriages or baptisms. It's hypocritical in theory but no one cares. Priests get away with greed, but not with hedonism. Hedonistic hypocrisy sticks to religion in a way that religious hypocrisy does not stick to epicureans & socialists. Neither wealth nor hedonism generally sticks to the "populist," but failure does.
Anyway... I do think that champagne shaped socialism in a negative way, personally. The position of Engels, Wilde and others pushed the ideas in certain directions. They tended to see communism as an indivisible. A slice of communism had no value... otherwise why not use their resources to create a slice of it themselves. Total revolution, or none at all. Seemingly unresolveable conflict at every turn breeds "singularity" thinking.
Hypocrisy is an interesting concept because of the self-contradiction in it. It's a word that is only ever applied to others, yet there is not one of us who isn't a hypocrite. Therefore the word is an instance of itself. The day I realized this, indignation about hypocrisy vanished for me—and it used to bug me a lot.
[0] https://www.lexico.com/en/definition/hypocrisy (Lexico powered by Oxford)
[1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/hypocrisy
If you mean to say there are no people that consider themselves to be hypocrites, then I would have to disagree: there are plenty of people who try, fail, and continue to keep trying to not be hypocritical. However, if you mean to say that hypocrisy is something that we almost always hear about when someone applies it to another, then I understand what you are trying to say.
I think I also understand what you mean by choosing to look at things using the lens / identifying a person’s action as a contradiction as opposed to hypocritical in that the former is an observation and the latter is an observation and a judgment/conclusion that may or may not have the full context/complexity taken into account.
Another way of making this point about self-contradiction is to say that anger at others for being hypocritical is itself hypocritical.
There are probably millions of people in the USA who barely escaped with their lives from vile communist regimes and yet the idea of communism is still entertained as some misunderstood noble thing. Until there will be "Nuremberg trials" equivalent for communism such ideas will unfortunately continue to propagate.
that is not quite correct: in socialist countries the elite had their own closed shops, a much higher salary and access to lots of material goods that mere workers just didn't have. These goodies were kept from the public eye, but most people knew about their existence, it was somewhat of an 'open secret'.
Similarly to how I react to replacing "communism" with "[economic] liberalism" and "Marx" with "Rand" and "Engels" with "the Chicago boys". Unsurprisingly, changing the words in a text changes its meaning.
> There are probably millions of people in the USA who barely escaped with their lives from vile communist regimes and yet the idea of communism is still entertained as some misunderstood noble thing. Until there will be "Nuremberg trials" equivalent for communism such ideas will unfortunately continue to propagate.
What do you think are the ideas of communism and of Marx and Engels in general?
1. If you benefit from the system, you are accused of being an idiot and/or hypocrite to support changing the system.
2. If you do not benefit from the system, you are accused of sour grapes or an outsider who doesn't know what they are talking about.
The first is the criticism of various socialists such as millionaire Bernie Sanders, millionaire and model Emily Ratajkowski (who supports more egalitarian economic systems as well as various gender issues surrounding modelling and taking female intellectuals seriously), and various other actors and musicians.
It then comes to no surprise that the essay is hosted on a site devoted to right wing^W^Wconvervative views.
In the case of religion (whether or not I believe it is positive or negative) I know that there are many many dark corners that the "it is all about love" person is not talking about.
Same thing with comunism, I have known in my life people I would be slightly afraid to see holding power flying that banner and we all know what happened many times in history, and while this can be said of many ideology in my opinion the comunism cluster looks like it is trying to sweep the dust under the rug.
I am sure that there are a lot of people that are trying their best to rehabilitate comunism from the curse that Stalin and many many others have cast and I wish them the best of luck, but I do not think that their job is close to being done.
Having spent much of my early twenties embedded with some of today's more prominent socialist activists in the US, I can tell you that behind closed doors the only subject that ever crossed their lips was "power".
It was enough to terrify me off of such thoughts and ideals. All these years later and I still wake up in a cold sweat at night having nightmares about the people I knew getting what they wanted.
Also, would you mind to be a bit more specific about who these people are? In my experience Americans aren't particularly good at identifying what constitutes a socialist to the rest of the world.
For example for all the criticism that you can point against religion most religious communities openly and clearly oppose and denounce terrorism.
In my view comunism was never able to separate itselft from a revolutionary mindset, and so agitators and extremists were always (since Marx, at least) considered a planned and likely step.
So you talked to politicians?
I live in France and many old classic 'marxianists' I know have come to despise the unread and uncultured new generation. Tell a young "marxist" what Das Kapital says of e.g. immigration and watch them decompose before your eyes... Anyway, no judgement here, just a personal observation.
Marx's view on immigration was largely that capitalists use it to pit the working class against itself, and that the nation state was a construct of capitalism. I'm curious why you think a Marxist would take an issue with that.
The problem with comunism is not that it is a faulty ideology, but that even if you tried to start a reasonable organization about it you will be overrun by mindless ideologues.
Pretending to be non-ideological is disingenuous.
I think this is terrible for society and the younger generations.
If I was offered the option of becoming a landlord or the like and making good bank that way of this whole shitfest I'd gladly and quickly accept and on the other side donate some of the money to campaigning for a party against this mess. Nobody would to come around and call me a hypocrite for that and expect me to think highly of them.
So I'm not sure where the presumption that a socialist must give away his wealth or live modestly comes from. Marx and Engels saw the first step of revolutionary activity being to understand and investigate, bit they were also part of various practical organisations such as the IWA, and the Manifesto was itself an on-the-nose propaganda document.
Why doesn't the Queen give away her throne for the good of her country? Because the boost to the economy from the tourism generated around it helps even more. As it turns out, we can imagine that the world would have been very different and the pair of theorists much less consequential had they spent their energies on philanthropy rather than burning the midnight oil at the British Library.
Systems change over personal change.
Engels was born into a rich capitalist family. Him giving it all away does nothing to change the underlying systems.
What draws me to HN are the thoughtful, genuine discussions about topics around technology, science, and business. While not perfect, it often seems to dodge the political divisiveness and focus on common interest. I hope we can find a way to keep that spirit of camaraderie and shared interest.
> “The middle orders must increasingly disappear until the world is divided into millionaires and paupers, into large landowners and poor farm labourers,” Engels wrote, in terms that might well have been appropriated by a Democratic presidential hopeful in 2020.
edit I looked up the quote, and it is Engels describing what he sees as the natural conclusion of the Industrial Revolution unless a total change of societal conditions occurred. Not something he was hoping happened or criticism of Britain enriching merchants as the article suggests.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intercollegiate_Studies_Instit...
Seriously.
As far as biased sources go, this one offers an interesting view and brings up the point made elsewhere, that the people who struggle daily to put food on the table may not have the bandwidth to think about global solutions to systemic problems.
Also, it prompts me to remind people that neither Engels nor Marx told anyone they should sell all their material possessions and give to the poor. That would be Jesus and it's surprising that they are so often confused.
Yep, that's a good point.
But ... the thing about this, the article raises things to think about in the reader. But the fact selection and the approach is essentially a standard hit piece. I'm pretty sure the OP doesn't know precisely the point you raise, that Marx and Engels didn't pretend to be Jesus. And the author is writing to other assuming that showing Engels as Hedonist will sink his appeal.
But yes, the actual facts are more interesting than OP intends. But, as someone who other contexts moderates discussion, I think this has the problem of setting a bad example. People start to ask: "If this 100% bad faith article results in good discussion, why can't we do more of it? Why can't I do it? Now everything from Turning Point USA and such is OK to post" etc.
Which is to say, you've gotten some benefits and you've paid some costs. The benefits are some OK but not extraordinary discussions of Marx and Engels, the costs are confusing your moderation policy. Even though I'm sympathetic to generally positive discussion of Engels, I don't think this is worth the cost. Just my rough calculation.
That's a very good point.
It's not the article that is good. It's left-leaning HNers that are an amazing bunch that won't allow themselves to be baited by this.
Yeah... That was a bit self-serving.
> Filling the Void Left by Modern Higher Education. Too many college students feel isolated or attacked for questioning progressive orthodoxy and the ever-narrowing range of debate on campus.
Love to see anti intellectualism spread around HN, and again not surprised.
Edit: oh, I see, this publication is basically https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_Age_(periodical), which was founded by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell_Kirk. This is a well-known strain of highbrow paleoconservative intellectualism in the US. It's fine not to like it, of course, but anti-intellectual it definitely is not.
From an HN point of view, we care about article quality, not site quality: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so... That's unavoidable on the internet, where the good stuff has to be picked out of rivers of bad and mediocre stuff. And actually if a good article comes from a bad source, that kind of makes it more interesting.