Communicating Friedrich Engels's return to Manchester: Arts and cultural event, history lesson, or call to action?

Abstract

There is increasing interest by academics and mainstream media in the relevance of Friedrich Engels's writings for understanding contemporary economic and political issues. Still, Engels's writing about the adverse effects of the capitalist economic system on the health and well-being of workers, the environment, and society in general remains marginalized. Two recent art projects which saw the installation of statues of Engels in Manchester, the city in which he lived and wrote The Condition of the Working Class in England, have created avenues by which Engels and his writings can be communicated to a larger audience. In this paper, we explore how filmmaker Phil Collins's finding and placement of a Soviet-era statue of Engels in Manchester has been communicated as an arts and cultural event, a history lesson, and a call to action to right the injustices generated by the capitalist economic system. The greatest number of communications were reviews and notices of the installation or documentary as arts and cultural events. The arts and cultural and historical aspects of Engels's return to Manchester were dominant across all communications while calls for action were common in the mainstream news reports and blogs. References to capitalism and its effects were seen in mainstream news reports and reviews and arts notices. We conclude that the involvement of the arts and cultural community in political work may be an important means of promoting responses to increasingly intolerable economic, political, and social environments.