The young Engels and the critique of capitalism: his influence on the young Marx

This chapter shows that the young Engels was actually the progenitor of the original theoretical framework of Kapitalismuskritik, the Hegelian socialist critique of political economy. This framework is built from a materialist reinterpretation of the Hegelian teleology of history, in which the fundamental opposition between capital and labour will lead to a polarization between a very large and starving proletariat and a small class of capitalists. The chapter shows that these arguments were directly linked to the historical condition of England in the middle of the nineteenth century; these were conditions that Engels and Marx “projected forward” into the future of capitalist development. I argue that Kapitalismuskritik can still shed light on contemporary neoliberal capitalism by beginning with the opposition between capital and labour.