200 years since the birth of Friedrich Engels

Friedrich Engels was born 200 years ago today on Nov. 28, 1820. Together with his friend Karl Marx, who was two-and-a-half years his senior, Engels co-founded scientific socialism. Two hundred years later, their life’s work is of burning contemporary relevance. They were much more farsighted than the countless academics who have filled entire libraries with their attempted refutations of Marxism.

[wsws.org]

{The democratic petty-bourgeois, far from wanting to transform the whole society in the interests of the revolutionary proletarians, only aspire to a change in social conditions which will make the existing society as tolerable and comfortable for themselves as possible… [the workers must] contribute most to their [own] final victory, by informing themselves of their own class interests, by taking up their independent political position as soon as possible, by not allowing themselves to be misled by the hypocritical phrases of the democratic petty-bourgeoisie into doubting for one minute the necessity of an independently organised party of the proletariat. Their battle-cry must be: The Permanent Revolution.}

For anyone truly tuned in to the group narrative and goal, surely one can relate that to today. Especially what I put in bold.

{Engels’ masterful command of language, his ability to present complex material in an understandable way, his encyclopedic knowledge, and his humour, which shone through even in connection with the most serious topics, make the reading of his works a pleasure to this day. This applies not only to the Marxist classics, but also to his contemporary articles and contributions. In these he demonstrated a degree of political acuteness and farsightedness that, apart from Marx, perhaps only Leon Trotsky possessed.

For example, in December 1887, when the capitalist economy was seemingly on an unstoppable upward trajectory and the first reformist illusions made themselves felt in Social Democracy, Engels predicted with remarkable precision the outbreak of a world war. In the foreword to an anti-militarist pamphlet, he warned:

No war is any longer possible for Prussia-Germany except a world war and a world war indeed of an extent and violence hitherto undreamt of. Eight to ten millions of soldiers will massacre one another and in doing so devour the whole of Europe until they have stripped it barer than any swarm of locusts has ever done. The devastations of the Thirty Years’ War compressed into three or four years, and spread over the whole Continent; famine, pestilence, general demoralisation both of the armies and of the mass of the people produced by acute distress; hopeless confusion of our artificial machinery in trade, industry and credit, ending in general bankruptcy; collapse of the old states and their traditional state wisdom to such an extent that crowns will roll by dozens on the pavement and there will be nobody to pick them up; absolute impossibility of foreseeing how it will all end and who will come out of the struggle as victor; only one result is absolutely certain: general exhaustion and the establishment of the conditions for the ultimate victory of the working class.}

{Common to all of these attempts is the accusation that Engels is guilty of a “positivist vulgarisation” of Marx. Through his identification of Marxism with materialism, he turned against the philosophical humanism that Marx had propounded in his early writings, it was claimed. Moreover, while for Marx the dialectic was manifest only in the interplay between social practice and human thought, Engels falsely rooted the dialectic in matter and nature.

These claims can be easily refuted. Marx and Engels’ lifelong collaboration, as well as the fact that Engels developed his understanding of the dialectic of nature and materialism, as we have shown, in close consultation with Marx, disprove them. However, Engels’ opponents are not concerned with historical facts. The attack on Engels and materialism is an attempt to separate “Marxism” from the working class and the building of a revolutionary party for the overthrow of capitalism.}

Deception comes and often wins when we are confronted with the an agenda driven changing of history and or parts of it being left out in order to control a current narrative from our politicians and their MSM. This is staunchly being used against us especially today as a new administration cabinet is being developed. [mintpressnews.com] If you think we will be getting a democrat party power structure in DC shortly, you're mistaken. We will be getting a number of republican people who have managed to weave in and out of both establishment parties administrations who have no loyalty to a party or the democrats they might work next to, us or the country. Their loyalty is to a system that enriches them. We are separate of them, we're not in that club.