This volume has no preface. Where the companion Moscow anthologies open with a Publishers' Note that tells the reader what the texts are meant to prove, Articles on Britain offers only the texts themselves — sixty-seven pieces of journalism and occasional writing, from Engels's youthful essays for the Paris Vorwärts in 1844 to his last articles of the early 1890s — followed by the Institute of Marxism-Leninism's two hundred and twenty-two notes and its indexes. The absence is itself an editorial act. With no argument stated on its behalf, the selection is the argument; the case is made by what has been gathered and set in order. And what has been gathered, running quietly through the reportage on Chartism, the New-York Daily Tribune despatches on India and the clearances, the Fenian articles and the pieces on the trade unions, is a single dangerous idea — the one that would matter most to the state that reprinted the book.
Taken as journalism, the collection is Marxism at its most concrete and least systematic, and it is superb. This is Marx as a working reporter, filing to deadline: on the Sutherland clearances, where he lets the fact do the indicting — "The enemy of British Wages-Slavery has a right to condemn Negro-Slavery; a Duchess of Sutherland, a Duke of Atholl, a Manchester Cotton-lord — never!"; on the East India Company; on capital punishment; on the "model government" that, in Marx's savage phrase, could jail Irish Fenians in "a country of bourgeois freedom" and chain O'Donovan Rossa to a cart of stones. Nothing here is deduced from a system; everything is observed. The method is empirical craft, and it holds up where the grander prophecies do not — for the weakness of these pages is the recurrent over-prediction, the English crisis forever about to break, the "heel of Achilles" of capitalist production always one bad harvest from collapse. Written to the week, the articles contradict and correct one another; the reader must weigh them, not simply inherit them. But at their centre stands one piece that is neither reportage nor prophecy but a genuine discovery, and it is the reason this book earns an introduction.
In "England in 1845 and in 1885" Engels asks why, after four decades of the world's most advanced capitalism, England has no socialist movement. His answer is unflinching. During "the period of England's industrial monopoly," he writes, "the English working class have to a certain extent shared in the benefits of the monopoly"; "the privileged minority pocketed most, but even the great mass had at least a temporary share." A layer of skilled workers — the great trade unions of the engineers and carpenters and bricklayers — had "succeeded in enforcing for themselves a relatively comfortable position," and, crucially, "they accept it as final." "They form an aristocracy among the working class." And "that is the reason why since the dying-out of Owenism there has been no Socialism in England." Here, decades before the word was coined, is the theory of the labour aristocracy: reformism explained not as a betrayal of ideas but as a material formation, a stratum bought a stake in the empire it should have opposed.
Was the state that canonised this insight faithful to it? The theory itself passed straight into the Bolshevik canon. Lenin built Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916) and Imperialism and the Split in Socialism on exactly Engels's paragraph, generalising the English case into a law: monopoly super-profits allow the bourgeoisie of every great power to bribe an upper stratum of workers, and from that stratum come the reformist leaders, the labour lieutenants of the capitalist class. So far, an application. But in Moscow's hands the discovery curdled into an alibi. The labour aristocracy became the all-purpose explanation for every defeat the Communist International's own line had helped to produce: when British workers did not follow Moscow, when the 1926 General Strike was sold out, when the German and French parties were led into catastrophe by the ultra-left "Third Period" and then the Popular Front, the fault lay always with the bought-off stratum and its "social-chauvinist" leaders — never with the strategy handed down from the Soviet capital. A theory that Engels forged to make reformism thinkable was turned into a device for making the Comintern's failures unexaminable.
And the concept has a sharper edge still, one the editors cannot have wished the reader to feel. Engels's labour aristocracy is a group set materially above its fellows by a monopoly it does not own but shares in; comfortable, protective of its position, no longer revolutionary because it has too much to lose. Turn that description a few degrees and it is the most exact available portrait of the Soviet bureaucracy itself — the privileged caste, lifted above the working class by its command of a state monopoly, defending its rations and its dachas, that Trotsky anatomised in The Revolution Betrayed. The book's governing idea, printed in Moscow in 1971, turns homeward on its publisher: the analysis of a stratum bribed into quiescence indicts the very apparatus that put the volume into print. The same reflex works on the Irish articles the collection so carefully includes — Marx and Engels for Fenian Ireland, against a "model government" that tortured national prisoners — reprinted by a state administering its own subject nations from Central Asia to the Baltic.
Read back from Moscow's use of it, this Marxism is very much alive. Its method — concrete analysis of concrete conditions, the refusal to read a class's politics off its economics by moral reflex, the insistence that reformism has roots that must be dug out rather than merely denounced — is a working tool, not a relic. The theory of the labour aristocracy, recovered from its Stalinist career as an excuse, is a summons: to name and fight the material bribes that still buy sections of the metropolitan working class out of solidarity, and to see, in the same mirror, how a privileged apparatus in a workers' state can turn against the workers in whose name it rules. This is where the Fourth International takes up the book. Marx and Engels on Ireland were the first to argue that the workers of an oppressor nation can never be free while they help hold another nation down — the germ of the theory of permanent revolution and of the colonial revolution that Trotsky and Ernest Mandel carried forward against both imperialism and its Stalinist mirror. The journalism collected here is not a monument to be admired at a safe distance. It is the living tissue of a method that cuts every great power, the publisher's included — and its central discovery, the aristocracy of labour, is at once the sharpest thing the nineteenth century learned about why revolutions stall, and, read honestly, a description of the caste that buried the revolution while claiming its name.