Engels: Do we need communism conscioussness?

[Sympo]

Engels wrote in 1895 that

“According to Marx’s views all history up to now, in the case of big events, has come about unconsciously, that is, the events and their further consequences have not been intended; the ordinary actors in history have either wanted to achieve something different, or else what they achieved has led to quite different unforeseeable consequences.”

It sounds to me that Engels is saying that every major event is independent of any idea that is in anyone’s head. That would mean that communism could be established without communists.

Is my interpretation of Engels correct or not?

[robbo203]

Hi Sympo

No I think that interpretation would be incorrect. You missed the all important qualifier “up to now” in his statement “According to Marx’s views all history up to now, in the case of big events, has come about unconsciously, that is, the events and their further consequences have not been intended”

Marx and Engels saw the communist revolution as signifying something qualitatively different compared with the past – a conscious mass movement. This is clear from this passage in the Communist Manifesto

All previous historical movements were movements of minorities, or in the interest of minorities. The proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interest of the immense majority

There is also that famous passage from The German Ideology:

Both for the production on a mass scale of this communist consciousness, and for the success of the cause itself, the alteration of men on a mass scale is, necessary, an alteration which can only take place in a practical movement, a revolution; this revolution is necessary, therefore, not only because the ruling class cannot be overthrown in any other way, but also because the class overthrowing it can only in a revolution succeed in ridding itself of all the muck of ages and become fitted to found society anew.

So the success of the communist cause is here dependent on the existence of mass communist consciousness. However, this passage also remind us of what might be called the double meaning of the term “revolution” as both a process and an event. Here the term suggests a process but we tend to think of it as an event – the democratic capture of political to abolish capitalism along with the state.

Both ways of looking at this term are legitimate and, in a way, complementary. Both imply the need for communist consciousness as the precondition for establishing communism

[robbo203]

There is also this passage from Engels’ introduction to Marx’s “Class Struggles in France” which leaves us in no doubt as to the importance he attached to communist consciousness as a precondition of communist revolution:

When it gets to be a matter of the complete transformation of the social organization, the masses themselves must participate, must understand what is at stake and why they are to act. That much the history of the last fifty years has taught us. But so that the masses may understand what is to be done, long and persistent work is required, and it is this work that we are now performing with results that drive our enemies to despair.

[ALB]

”It sounds to me that Engels is saying that every major event is independent of any idea that is in anyone’s head.”

No, I don’t think that is what Engels meant. He is not saying that past revolutions are independent of the ideas of those who carried out and supported them. He is saying that you shouldn’t judge them by what the participants say or think they are doing but by what they actually do. Their ideas, however, won’t be completed arbitrary but arise from and can be related to the material circumstances that have made a revolutionary change necessary.

As Marx put it in his summary of the materialist conception of history in his Preface in 1859 to his A Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy:

“The changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure.
In studying such transformations it is always necessary to distinguish between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, artistic or philosophic – in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out. Just as one does not judge an individual by what he thinks about himself, so one cannot judge such a period of transformation by its consciousness, but, on the contrary, this consciousness must be explained from the contradictions of material life, from the conflict existing between the social forces of production and the relations of production.”

Of course, as Robbo has pointed out, Engels expected those who established socialism would be fully aware of what they were doing. Engels is talking about past “major events”.

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