For sixty years this book was read as Marx's. The nineteen articles collected here appeared in the New-York Daily Tribune across 1851 and 1852 over Marx's signature — he was the paper's contracted correspondent — and only in 1913, when the Marx–Engels correspondence was published, did it emerge that Engels had written every word. Marx, this edition's own note records, "at that time was engaged in economic research"; Engels, who had the German events at his fingertips and wrote quick, muscular English, supplied the copy. It is a small fact with a long shadow, and it is the right place to begin, because Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Germany became one of the founding documents of what the Soviet century would call "the Marxist teaching on armed insurrection" — and the teaching was built for two generations on a text whose author the movement had wrong.
The present text is the Progress Publishers edition carried in the Moscow Selected Works, the standard English version. Its chapters carry titles — "The Prussian State," "Panslavism. The Schleswig-Holstein War," "Insurrection" — but those titles are not Engels's either: the Tribune printed the articles without subheadings, and the divisions here were supplied by Marx's daughter Eleanor Marx-Aveling for the first separate English edition of 1896. What the reader holds, then, is a work shaped by three hands after the fact — the author unnamed, the editor uncredited on the page, the apparatus Soviet — and it repays keeping that in mind.
Take first what the book does supremely well. It is the materialist method turned on a defeat, and its opening is a manifesto against the whole idea that history is made by wire-pullers. "The times of that superstition which attributed revolutions to the ill-will of a few agitators, have long passed away," Engels writes; "wherever there is a revolutionary convulsion, there must be some social want in the background, which is prevented by outworn institutions from satisfying itself." The upheavals of 1848 "were not the work of single individuals, but spontaneous, irresistible manifestations of national wants and necessities." From that footing he dissects the classes of Germany with the confidence of a man who had watched them at close range: the big bourgeoisie too timid and too tied to the old order to make its own revolution, the petty bourgeoisie forever "vacillating," the peasantry inert, the young working class advanced in a few centres and absent elsewhere. His verdict on the German liberals — that they wanted the fruits of a revolution without the revolution, and so betrayed it at every turn — is the seed of a thesis Marxists would carry into the twentieth century: that in a belated bourgeois society the bourgeoisie cannot be trusted to complete even its own revolution, and the task falls to the classes below it.
And then there is the passage that made the book immortal, the pages on insurrection at the end. "Now, insurrection is an art quite as much as war," Engels writes, "and subject to certain rules of proceeding, which, when neglected, will produce the ruin of the party neglecting them." He sets down the rules like a soldier: "never play with insurrection unless you are fully prepared to face the consequences of your play"; once begun, "act with the greatest determination, and on the offensive," for "the defensive is the death of every armed rising"; keep the initiative, "force your enemies to a retreat before they can collect their strength against you"; and, in the phrase he borrows from Danton, "de l'audace, de l'audace, encore de l'audace!" — boldness, boldness, always boldness. In September 1917, on the eve of October, Lenin copied that argument almost verbatim into "Marxism and Insurrection," insisting that insurrection be treated "as an art." The most consequential revolution of the century took its operating manual, in part, from these paragraphs. That is not a small thing to have written.
Not everything has worn as well, and the book carries one real disfigurement that honesty requires naming. In the chapters on the nationalities — above all "Panslavism" — Engels turns his analysis of the small Slav peoples into contempt. The Czechs, Croats, and the rest he calls "dying nationalities," "scattered remnants of numerous nations, whose nationality and political vitality had long been extinguished," peoples destined to be absorbed by the more "energetic" Germans and Magyars as the Welsh were absorbed in England. There is a sharp insight tangled in the prejudice: he saw that Panslavism was less a movement of liberation than an instrument of tsarist reach, that behind the "ludicrous theory" of Slav brotherhood "stood the terrible reality of the Russian Empire… that empire which, for the last 150 years, has never lost, but always gained territory by every war it has commenced." As a warning about the uses to which pan-nationalism could be put, it was prescient. But the doctrine of peoples without history, of small nations rightfully dissolved into big ones, is indefensible, and the tradition knew it: Lenin's whole insistence on the right of nations to self-determination, worked out against exactly this current, is the correction. A serious edition would set the two Engelses of these pages side by side — the diagnostician of empire and the German who wrote off the Slavs — and let the reader weigh them. This one does not.
Which brings us to the question the edition, for all its scholarship, never puts to itself: was the state that canonised this book faithful to it? On insurrection, the note before us is proud — the work "lays the foundations for the Marxist teaching on armed insurrection." True enough for 1917. But a teaching about seizing power from below became, in the hands of the power that resulted, a relic to be recited rather than a thing anyone was permitted to practise. The rules Engels drew for insurgents — surprise, audacity, the offensive against a state's armed force — were precisely what the Soviet state suppressed when they were turned against it, at Kronstadt in 1921, in the German and Hungarian risings its diplomacy strangled, in Budapest in 1956. The doctrine was embalmed and the deed forbidden; "armed insurrection" survived as a chapter heading and a Party-school topic, safely pointed at other people's governments.
The inversion is sharper still on Panslavism. Engels wrote his polemic against the Russian Empire's claim "of considering all Europe as the domain of the Slavonic race" — against tsarist expansion dressed as Slav solidarity. Yet the state that reprinted these words was the heir of that same empire, and in the 1940s it revived Panslavism itself, convening an All-Slav Committee and preaching "Slav brotherhood" while it gathered exactly the territory and the satellites Engels had described the Tsars gathering. The IML note treats Panslavism as a dead nineteenth-century reaction; it never turns Engels's lens on the Great-Russian chauvinism that Lenin, in his last struggle over Georgia, had begged the Party to resist. The apparatus could quote Engels against the Romanovs' expansionism and stay perfectly silent about its own. Reflexivity stops, here as everywhere in this literature, at the door of the ruling power.
What, then, is Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Germany worth today, beyond its place in the history of a slogan? Its value is the value of a method held to honestly. It reads a crushing defeat not as bad luck or betrayal by a few, but for its class causes, and it insists — against the reformism that treats revolution as an anachronism and against the fatalism that waits for history to do the work — that revolutionary action is a serious art with rules, neither adventure nor prophecy. Read whole, with Eleanor Marx-Aveling's subheadings recognised as hers and the authorship set right, it is Engels thinking aloud about how a revolution is lost and how, next time, it might not be. Even its worst pages instruct, if the reader is trusted with them: the "dying nationalities" passage is the tradition's own founder caught in the developmental arrogance of his century, and the fact that later Marxists could name it as an error — could correct Engels on the nations as Lenin did — is a measure of a living current's health. That capacity for self-correction is exactly what the canonising state destroyed when it turned these articles into scripture and their author into a bust. The book is better than its shrine. It asks to be read as what it was written to be: a reckoning, not a relic.