Engels at 200 with Michael Roberts & Camilla Royle (11-7-20)

Marx is often accused of what has been called a Promethean vision of human social organisation, namely that human beings, using their superior brains, knowledge and technical prowess, can and should impose their will on the rest of the planet or what is called ‘nature’ – for better or worse. On the 200th anniversary of his birth, Engels too must be saved from the same charge.Actually, Engels was well ahead of Marx (yet again) in connecting the destruction and damage to the environment that industrialisation was causing. Engels’ major work (written with Marx’s help), The Dialectics of Nature, written in the years up to 1883, just after Marx’s death, is often subject to attack as extending Marx’s materialist conception of history as applied to humans, into nature in a non-Marxist way. And yet, in his book, Engels could not be clearer on the dialectical relation between humans and nature. it's time to revise the revisionists. Engels and Ecology The Urban Political Ecology of Friedrich Engels - Camilla Royle This paper takes the 200th anniversary of Engels’s birth in November 1820 to rethink his contribution to what we might today call urban political ecology. Marxist thinkers within critical environmental geography, have long argued for a focus on the natural processes that constitute the urban environment, demonstrating how the urban is shaped by both social and ecological processes. Their approach is rooted in a dialectical rather than a mechanistic materialism. While some have cited Engels as an early advocate of these views, others – such as Neil Smith in Uneven Development – have been more critical of his views on nature, seeing them as representing a dualist approach alien to Marx’s understanding. This paper will address these debates by highlighting Engels’s work on housing conditions, air and water pollution as well as his writings on infectious disease pandemics of the time such as typhus and cholera. It will show how Engels’s approach to public health and his accusations of “social murder” perpetuated by the ruling class predates the analysis of structural violence developed by critical theorists of global health over a century later. It will suggest that Engels’s understanding of how capitalist social relations produced an urban environment detrimental to workers aligns with Marx’s views. PLEASE NOTE: All events for HM Online are free to register, however we would ask comrades who are able to please consider supporting the Historical Materialism project. Please consider subscribing to the Historical Materialism journal, published by BRILL, who are currently offering a 25% discount on individual subscriptions, valid until the end of the year. To use the offer, quote the discount code 70997 when subscribing at: www.brill.com/hima Also, please consider subscribing to the Historical Materialism book series through Haymarket Books. For $25 per month, this subscription gets you every new title from the Historical Materialism series when it is released (as long as your subscription remains active) plus a 50% discount on *all* Haymarket books titles via our website. Non-US subscribers will be charged an extra $20/month for international shipping. https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/894-haymarket-book-club-historical-materialism-series Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/EbGrV9UzYo4 Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks