DRAFT: Enlarging the Bounds of Human Empire: 10.3: The Kingdom of Friedrich Engels's Utopian Dreams that Did Not Come, 1900-1945
Friedrich Engels saw socialized production clearly—but missed the ethnonational maps that would colonize the workers’ heads. Ernst Gellner’s theory of nationalism and Charlie Maier’s theory of applied-science economy zero-sum interest-group distributional war explain to us why Engels’s Kingdom did not come in the years 1900-1945…
It was Friedrich Engels’s doubling down on dialectical materialism and historical materialism as master knowledges that put his successors on the road where they prayed “Thy Kingdom Come” and “thy will be done” as fervently as any human ever has. Only their prayers were, as Edmund Wilson wrote in his To the Finland Station: A Study in the Writing & Acting of History, directed not to any god but to History herself.
This is a piece of the manuscript of my in-the-process-of-writing book, Enlarging the Bounds of Human Empire: The Human Economy & Society Since the Year -700,000.
These words are, of course, very heavily adapted and transformed from my lecture notes. The principal books I am reacting to here—the principal giants on whose shoulders dwarfish me is trying to stand—are, in addition to Edmund Wilson, To the Finland Station: A Study in the Writing & Acting of History: Friedrich Engels, Socialisn: Utopian & Scientific; Ernst Gellner, Nations & Nationalism; and Charles Maier, Recasting Bourgeois Europe.
This book subchapter is in memory of my friend the late Robert James Waldmann, whom I promised, exactly a year ago, that I would get this section to him soon.
10.3.1. What Friedrich Engels Saw. Without a doubt, Friedrich Engels catastrophically failed to see that the major enemies of humanity in the two generations after his death would not be the bourgeoisie and the petit bourgeoisie fettering society to an outmoded system that blocked productivity and happiness. He would have been wiser to see that the big threats came elsewhere: from the anti-cosmopolitans, the nationalists, the believers in blood and soil, the believers in leaders, and his own Leninist followers impatient with the politics of really-existing democracy which remains today, in the words of Winston Churchill, by far the worst form of government government in the world except for all others that have been tried from time to time
That catastrophic failure had terrible destructive world-historical consequences. Were he brought forward to our time, or even to 1945, he would find it profoundly embarrassing to someone who claimed to have the keys to unlock the riddles of history. Yet can he blame him? Even as late as the moment of his death, his diagnosis of the ills of human soiety was a keen one. His predictions about the direction of history were not crazy. It was only what the future path—and above all what the decisive agent that would make history agent—would be was wrong.
Let us take the perspective of the elderly Engels, of the man who wrote Socialism: Utopian & Scientific as a more mass-circulation version of the by then sprawling, undisciplined, unfinished, and complex arguments of what Engels, above all, called “Marxism”, in 1880. He was looking back at an England that had gone from a country of scattered workshops, hand-looms, and village blacksmiths to the industrial workshop of the world. It has become a place of enormous mills and blast furnaces, where hundreds of workers assembled under one roof to produce goods at a scale and speed that was sorcery to his grandfather’s generation. The steam engine had changed everything. Not gradually. Within the span of a human life, the entire material basis of civilization had been overturned.
10.3.2. Engels’s Theses. And from this transformation Engels derived a set of observations that were, taken individually, more or less correct:
The first: Production had become social. This was not a slogan. It was a description of how factories actually worked. No single worker produced a pin, a yard of cloth, a locomotive. The production of any of these things required the coordinated effort of dozens, hundreds, sometimes thousands. Production had become irreducibly collective. This social character of production was not an aspiration but an obvious echnical fact about how the steampower economy actually operated.
The second, following directly: Appropriation remained stubbornly private. The cotton mill was owned by a single man, or perhaps a small partnership. The hundreds of workers who jointly produced the output received wages—a share of the product set by the relative bargaining power of labor and capital, which had been low and falling in the years of what Robert Allen calls “Engels’s pause” in real wage growth up until the later 1850s. The surplus above near-subsistence was appropriated by the owners and the top managers.
The third: This was a contradiction: The gulf between the social character of production and the private character of appropriation was real, and it generated real antagonisms that did not disappear through moralizing about how the wealthy’s contribution of their “abstinence” from orgies of consumption today was as real a contribution to production as was the toil and sweat of the workers.
If If I were willing to let this out into the wide green world, I would have already finished my book, Enlarging the Bounds of Human Empire: The Human Economy since -700,000, wouldn’t I? in case it is news to you: I haven’t.
So this is for paid subscribers only, until the manuscript is in shape, where I am proud of it. But at that point the publisher will probably have views of their own on what belongs on the SubStack.