Paul Blackledge’s “Engels’s Ecologically Indispensable if Incomplete
Dialectics of Nature” in this issue was written in commemoration of the bicentennial of Frederick Engels’s birth (see also the articles by John Bellamy Foster and Kaan Kangal in the November 2020 issue). Blackledge’s review is notable in addressing Engels’s dialectics in the context of the rediscovery of Engels as an ecological thinker.
The ecological character of Engels’s work is evident from his earliest writings. Further, Engels was a major contributor to the development of social epidemiology. The central thesis of his classic work on the
Condition of the Working Class in England, written in 1844–45 while he was still in his early twenties, was that bourgeois society promoted what he called “social murder,” a concept he took from the literature of the Chartist movement. Examining the higher mortality, morbidity, disability, and disease in working-class districts, and the causes of this in the environmental and epidemiological conditions of the working class, Engels observed that when a ruling class knows “that…thousands of victims must perish” due to such dire conditions, “and yet permits these conditions to remain, its deed is murder just as surely as the deed of the single individual; disguised, malicious murder, murder against which none can defend himself, which does not seem what it is, because no man sees the murderer, because the death of the victim seems a natural one, since the offence is more one of omission than commission. But murder it remains.” Engels continued: