All: come on you guys, this is an interesting historical article full of fascinating detail. Please respond out of curiosity (if you have such a response) and keep the rote ideological sniping somewhere else. If you're responding generically to the word "communism", you're not functioning in the intended spirit of this site.
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.
> Of course, Engels is far from the only example of the leftist firebrand whose inherited wealth insulated him from the struggles of ordinary working people
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.
> That’s not the same as living in excess while preaching solidarity.
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.
Currently reading his biography (he's the most famous person of my hometown :), good timing to see an article about him on HN!
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.
> "It is unpractical, and it goes against human nature. That is why it is worth carrying out."
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.
Wilde (who lived 500m from where I stand) was a nuanced user of absurdity. I think what made him stand out in his day actually was that fact.
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.
This entire article focuses on the upbringing and bourgeoise conditions of Engels and Marx without making an actual point - I believe the goal is to expose some form of contradiction in these men thinking of the workers class struggles?
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”.
> The same formula has been known to apply to those on the demotic right of the spectrum, too: the reader may have his or her own list of candidates for inclusion among the ranks of what could be called champagne populism.
False equivalence, since rightwing populists don't advocate wealth redistribution and preach egalitarianism.
When Tom Morello (RATM & Audioslave guitarist) is interviewed the tension between rich rockstar and firebrand anarchist usually provokes some sort of political exchange that ends in "if you're such a communist, why do you X?" To which, he normally responds "I live in capitalist... when the revolution comes..., I'll take part in however music works then."
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.
You can look at it as hypocrisy but in the end I have found this concept not so useful. It's more interesting to look at it as contradictions, complexity, and so on.
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.
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.
Mind experiment: In the last paragraph of dang's top post replace "communism" witch "nazism" and "Engels" and "Marx" with "Hitler" and "Mussolini". How would you feel about it?
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.
On the other hand, there are 40+ million U.S. citizens, of African origin, each with at least one ancestor at the bottom of the Atlantic due to the capitalist trans-Atlantic slave trade. Enslaved for four centuries, building capitalist America literally with their bodies as some of the first U.S. millionaires earned their millions from intercontinental human trafficking. There are roughly 5 million Indigenous U.S. citizens who were subjected to the continued oppression unleashed by an exploitive capitalist system. Can we talk about the 627,000 Vietnamese citizens brutally killed by the U.S. military during the Vietnam war? They didn't make it out alive.
What do you mean by: on the other hand? Are you saying that by not supporting communism one supports imperialism, slave trade and wars? And every time I write communism is bad, do I also have to put a disclaimer that a bunch of other ideologies are also bad? All the things you have enumerated have nothing to do with capitalism. Norway (or almost any other capitalistic country) is capitalistic and as far as I know it hasn't invaded or enslaved anyone for instance. You should also remember that the capitalistic north has defeated the feudalistic south (slave owners) in the civil war.
> Mind experiment: In the last paragraph of dang's top post replace "communism" witch "nazism" and "Engels" and "Marx" with "Hitler" and "Mussolini". How would you feel about it?
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?
Communism and nazism (national socialism) are two sides of the same coin. Both rooted in the same collectivist ideology where life on an individual is meaningless, always ready to be sacrificed for the "greater good". Both have a class of people who are undesirable (nacism: inferior people, communism: rich and educated) and need to be exterminated. Nazism left behind millions of dead people and communism tens of millions of dead people. I have no idea how you can compare economic liberalism to either communism or nazism.
Best explanation about popularity of communism among American elites that I have come across read is extremely banal, under communism everything is about status and nothing is about value. People who create no value are naturally going after status.
> under communism everything is about status and nothing is about value
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'.
Readit News
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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.
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Owen
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Lanark
Dead Comment
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-...
Deleted Comment
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.
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.
Deleted Comment
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.
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.
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?
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'.