The double return of Friedrich Engels: Towards a dialectics of the trace

Abstract

Two sculptures of Friedrich Engels have recently been installed in Greater Manchester, the city where the social philosopher spent most of his working life and was the focus of his proto-ethnographic account of the early industrial city. The first sculpture is a fibreglass ‘fabricated ruin’ set within a newly rebuilt section of the University of Salford campus. The second is a former Soviet monument that was transported from eastern Ukraine to Tony Wilson Place, a new arts, business and entertainment space in central Manchester. While the appropriation of the city’s radical figures and movements is very much part of Manchester’s narrative of post-industrial regeneration, the ‘homecoming’ of Engels in the decade following the 2008 financial crash and amid the unfolding Brexit crisis raises certain methodological concerns for us. Engels is a figure who has returned and can be returned to. Here, his ‘double return’ can be read in very particular ways. In this paper, we bring Engels back to Manchester as a figure who will immediately re-signify against the contemporary political, economic and cultural landscape. In doing so, we advocate a dialectics of geographical traces that can grasp the social contradictions and fractures of the present in a way that works both within and beyond the writing and practice of Engels. As we move on from the 2019 UK General Election in which the Conservative party formed a substantial majority government into the fractured British landscapes of 2021 and beyond, this practice becomes increasingly necessary.