SOURCE: “Engels' Alleged Reformism,” in his The Life and Thought of Friedrich Engels, Yale University Press, 1991, pp. 96-111.

In the following essay, Hunley studies the idea that Engels favored reform over revolution as the road to the rule of the proletariat and argues that Engels, like Marx, never rejected the necessity of revolution but that both Marx and Engels, after 1848, began to “redefine the conditions under which it [revolution would take place.”]

It has become common for scholars to consider Engels as the first revisionist of Marx's ideas. Most of them have meant this in the generic sense that he changed some of Marx's conceptions, but a few of them have also accused him of being a revisionist in the narrower sense that he foreshadowed the reformist sort of revisionism espoused by Eduard Bernstein in the years immediately following Engels' death. (Bernstein had argued that the working class...