Engels vs. Marx? Two Hundred Years of Frederick Engels PAUL BLACKLEDGE At the bicentenary of his birth, Frederick Engels’s reputation as an origi- nal thinker is, among Anglophone academics at least, at its nadir. The main reason for this unfortunate state of affairs is undoubtedly political. Despite the recent global economic crisis and associated increases in inequality that have tended to confirm Karl Marx and Engels’s general critique of capital- ism, Marxism is an optimistic doctrine that has not fared well in a context dominated by working-class retreat and demoralization. 1 But if this context has been unpropitious for Marxism generally, criticisms of Engels’s thought have a second, quite separate, source. Over the course of the twentieth cen- tury, a growing number of commentators have claimed that Engels fun- damentally distorted Marx’s thought, and that “Marxism” and especially Stalinism emerged out of this one-sided caricature of Marx’s ideas. 2 While the claim that Engels distorted Marx’s ideas has roots going back to the nineteenth century, 1956 was a pivotal moment after which it in- creasingly became a dominant theme within the secondary literature. 3 When a New Left emerged in response to Nikita Khrushchev’s Secret Speech, the Russian invasion of Hungary, and the Anglo-French-Israeli invasion of Egypt, it attempted to renew socialism through a critical re- assessment of Marxism. Engels’s contribution to Marxism became a focal point in the ensuing debate. Though a small minority among this milieu attempted to rescue Engels’s and V. I. Lenin’s reputations alongside that of Marx from any association with Joseph Stalin’s counterrevolution, a much larger group concluded that the experience of Stalinism damned the entire Marxist tradition all the way back to Marx. Between these two poles, a third grouping counterposed Marx’s youthful “humanistic” writ- ings to Engels’s “scientific” interpretation of Marxism. 4 Paul Blackledge is a professor of Marxist theory at Shanxi University. He is the au- thor of Marxism and Ethics (SUNY Press, 2012), Reflections on the Marxist Theory of History (Manchester University Press, 2006), and Perry Anderson, Marxism and the New Left (Merlin Press, 2004). He is coeditor of Virtue and Politics (University of Notre Dame Press, 2011), Alasdair MacIntyre’s Engagement with Marxism (Brill, 2008), Revolutionary Aristotelianism (Lu- cius and Lucius, 2008), and Historical Materialism and Social Evolution (Palgrave, 2002). This article is an adaptation of the introduction to Blackledge’s latest book, Friedrich Engels and Modern Social and Political Theory (SUNY Press, 2019). monthlyreviewarchives.org DOI: 10.14452/MR-072-01-2020-05_3 21