Engels and Defencism

Further to my earlier post, Frederick Engels in the 1890s argued - according to W. B. Gallie - that German Social Democrats (i.e. socialists) in the Reichstag 'should not vote against defence credits so long as Russia continued to disarm' [my emphasis]. He argued (in a series of articles from 1893, 'Can Europe Disarm?'), that socialists should demand immediate military reform to convert the army to a militia model on Swiss lines, capable of defending the country, but ill-adapted to attack. Such reform was possible before socialist revolution. [See W. B. Gallie, Philosophers of Peace and War: Kant, Clausewitz, Marx, Engels and Tolstoy (Cambridge, 1978), P. 94.]

So Engels certainly believed in national self-defence (at least for Germany).