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