Book Reviews
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Following is a discussion on the page titled: Book Reviews.
Below is the discussion so far. Feel free to add your own comments!This may not be of great importance, but can Engels be called a proper Socialist even if he had sexist, racist, and homophobic views(as the review claims)?
Define a 'proper socialist'? To err is to be human, to be perfect ,divine. The only plaster saints I have encountered are precisely that, plaster saints, not flesh and blood human beings. I think there is a danger of falling for the cult of personality, the great man theory of history. To quote Oliver Cromwell, it is important to take a measured view of personalities 'warts and all.' We are all a complex mass of contradictions. The important thing is to be awre of it.
I don't think Engels can be accused of "sexism" on the basis of not being "sympathetic to the women’s movement" of his day. In his day, this was a movement of bourgeois women demanding the same voting and property rights as men. If implemented this would have enfranchised bourgeois women leaving most other women and a third of male workers without the vote. Which is why we denounced the suffragettes as demanding "Votes for Rich Women".Also, Tristam Hunt (now a blairite Labour MP) was a hostile biographer. Even so, he records that in the 1876 elections to the London Scool Board (for which women could stand and propertied ones had the vote) Engels gave all his seven votes to a woman candidate. In view of her politics it can't have been for that that he voted for her, but just because she was a woman. As a comrade who did some research on this wrote:
Quote:Just did a bit of research and Engels definitely would have been in Marylebone Ward for the LSB elections (Regents Park Road was St Pancras but became part of Marylebone for the purposes). They had female representation from 1870 through 1891 (ie. when Engels was there). Interestingly the main rep, Alice Westlake (1876-88), opposed a ban on corporal punishment for girls as some "were of a very rough class and were insubordinate"), was married to the Board's solicitor (nepotism) and instigated a motion to remove married women teachers with children from their posts. She was a Liberal.In any event, his pamphlet of the Origin of Family, etc shows he was all in favour of equality of the sexes. Agreed he wasn't perfect. Nobody is.
I'm not saying that Engels didn't contribute to the cause of Socialism, but I think he was kind of bigoted(as was probably Marx). Does the SPGB for example not care if a possible member is a homophobe or a racist? If I say something like "I wish to establish a classless, stateless society. As long as there aren't any black people there!" am I really a Socialist? But yes I agree nobody is perfect. Engels, a "true Socialist" or not(my argument might suffer from No True Scotsman) still wrote things relevant to the cause of Socialism.
I'm glad Marx and Engels have feet of clay, it helps discourage hero worship. That Engels and Marx has useful things to say has been true for as long as all Yorkshiremen are liars.
Sympo wrote:If I say something like "I wish to establish a classless, stateless society. As long as there aren't any black people there!" am I really a Socialist?No, but Engels never said that or anything like that.
ALB wrote:No, but Engels never said that or anything like that.According to the article Engels calls for "the dissappearance of 'entire reactionary peoples'". Isn't this a pretty racist thing to call for?
I don't know about "calls for" (that suggests that he always did). It was something he wrote in 1849 in the context of the failure of the European revolutions of 1848 when certain language groups supported the reactionary Austrian government against the Hungarian democrats. And he didn't envisage their physical extermination but rather their assimilation into Hungarian-speaking or German-speaking "nations".The background is explained here:https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/revhist/backiss/vol3/no2/rosdolsk.htmlNo really an acceptable position but it wasn't his permanent position, just a passing reaction to what had happened in 1848. He didn't support later discrimination inside the Austro-Hungarian Empire by German-speakers against Czech-speakers nor by Hungarian-speakers against Slovak-speakers. He was of course opposed to Panslavism. But saying that amounts to being against Slavs is like saying that being opposed to Zionism is anti-semitic.If we are going to criticise Engels (and why not?) let's do it on the basis of what he meant.
I believe that this stuff originates in Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Germany, which I have just reread. Some of the statements in there do come across as pretty bad, temporary and explicable or not. The sort of 'assimilation' that Engels was boosting was the same as that practiced in Wales by the English. A whack on the knuckles and a dunce's cap for the little welshie and a spell in the cells for his dad. Speak English or suffer.Rather than get into one of those textual analysis debates, I'd like to turn the question to Sympo's question about whether a racist or homophobe can be a socialist.Surely there can be no doubt about William Morris's claim to be a socialist but in News From Nowhere the attitudes to women strike me as being very patriarchal.I think the answer lies with the way that socialists necessarily work within the context of their societies. One cannot expect the social attitudes of a socialist within a severely patriarchal or ultra-religious society (eg. in the Middle East) to be the same as those of a ''modern', 'advanced' society such as ours.Does that mean that we should tolerate the sort of offhand racist, sexist, homophobic shit that I have heard repeatedly in Party circles? Hell no.
Another book review here, that brings out our difference with and criticism of the position Marx and Engels took towards nationalism and where it led them:http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/1990s/1991/no-1046-october-1991/book-review-marxism-and-nationalism
KAZ wrote:Does that mean that we should tolerate the sort of offhand racist, sexist, homophobic shit that I have heard repeatedly in Party circles? Hell no.Maybe a member of the SPGB could write an article about it in the party magazine addressing the issue? Perhaps the article can convince members that it's not very good to have racist, sexist or homophobic opinions? Or maybe I'm being too naive to think that people can change their views about these things by reading an article.
Sympo wrote:Maybe a member of the SPGB could write an article about it in the party magazine addressing the issue? Perhaps the article can convince members that it's not very good to have racist, sexist or homophobic opinions?Or maybe I'm being too naive to think that people can change their views about these things by reading an article.If it's true, you can't stop someone from having an opinion, only persuade them from voicing it. If you persuade someone that their opinion is wrong, then it ceases to be an opinion, but becomes an evaluation or assessment of a situation.
Sympo wrote:KAZ wrote:Does that mean that we should tolerate the sort of offhand racist, sexist, homophobic shit that I have heard repeatedly in Party circles? Hell no.Maybe a member of the SPGB could write an article about it in the party magazine addressing the issue? Perhaps the article can convince members that it's not very good to have racist, sexist or homophobic opinions? Or maybe I'm being too naive to think that people can change their views about these things by reading an article.
I think this is important. This item was raised at conference 2016 in March 'Is a complacency about actively tackling casual homophobia and related LGBT issues damaging to the party?'
jondwhite wrote:think this is important. This item was raised at conference 2016 in March 'Is a complacency about actively tackling casual homophobia and related LGBT issues damaging to the party?'I do not fully understand what you have written(English is not my first language). Can you clarify what you are saying?
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