What Significance Does Comrade Frederick Engels Have for the Moroccan Marxist-Leninists?

The Marxist-Leninist movement all over the world, and in Morocco in particular, celebrates the 200^th birthday of the revolutionary communist thinker Frederick Engels, who was born on 28 November 1820 in the German city of Barmen. What is the significance of this great revolutionary thinker for the Moroccan Marxists? Especially seeing as die Moroccan Marxist-Leninist movement has continued in existence since its emergence in the 1930s and in particular since the qualitative admissions of Marxist-Leninist youth in the framework of the Marxist-Leninist organization “Ila Al Amam”. That organization was founded on 30 August 1970. From it, further organizations with different names have emerged, especially at Moroccan universities. For them, Frederick Engels, alongside Karl Marx and Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov-Lenin, is one of the most important representatives of their Marxist-Leninist ideology.

The various contributions of the Moroccan Marxist-Leninists were inspired by the works of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, a solid basis of the Marxism of the 19^th century. They viewed the works of the two comrades together as a dialectical unity, integrated in the structure of the philosophical, political and grassroots democratic foundations of struggle which brought forth the Marxist system as a whole. While many revisionists tried to separate the works of the two men and underestimated the role of Frederick Engels, like the petty-bourgeois Jacques Attali in his book, Karl Marx ou la pensée du monde [Karl Marx or the Thought of the World], these attempts met with the cohesiveness of the interwoven contribution of the two comrades.

The central importance of the working class and the proletariat as essential component of the Marxist theory originally was developed by Frederick Engels in his first writings in 1842 in Manchester, England. His material experience in the course of the growth of capitalist industrialization in this city, his close contact with the working class, his eyewitness reports of their misery, caused him to write his book on the condition of the working class in England in 1845.

As for the philosophical questions, in particular the foundations of historical and dialectical materialism and the Marxist world outlook, they have received great attention from the Moroccan Marxist-Leninists, above all the main writings of Frederick Engels in this field, which established the Marxist-Leninist philosophy, especially his works: Anti-Dühring, Dialectics of Nature; The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State; Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy.

Also, the practical involvement of the young people in the Moroccan Marxist-Leninist movement in the class struggle since the 1970s was deeply influenced by the theory and practice of Frederick Engels. This influence can be seen in many mass struggles, in the elaboration of their criticisms of the policies of the ruling political regime. Engels left these young activists a rich legacy of practice that bears witness to his participation in many revolutionary conflicts in the mid-19^th century.

Engels' experience during the first historical workers' strike in 1842 in England and his ability to precisely investigate and show what was new in the workers' struggles are still a yardstick for workers' struggles even today.

Frederick Engels got to know a great variety of ideas and practices in dialectical interaction with the ideas and practices of his comrade-in-arms Karl Marx in the process of development of the concrete reality of capitalism in England in the course of the 19^th century. They influenced the ideological-political and practical building work of Comrade Lenin within the Russian Social-Democratic Party and its concretization by the Bolsheviks during the revolution of 1905 and later during the revolution of 1917 as the first victorious proletarian revolution in history.

This whole rich revolutionary heritage left by Comrade Frederick Engels together with his Comrade Karl Marx has been an important orientation for the practice of the Marxist-Leninists in the entire world, in general, and for the practice of the young Moroccan Marxist-Leninists, in particular, especially for the martyrs of the Moroccan Marxist-Leninist movement, Abdellatif Zeroual and Saïda Lemnabhi.

Mouvement Marxiste-Léniniste Prolétariat Line (MMLPL)

Rabat – Morocco, 22.01.2021