Frock-Coated Communist Read online

  TRISTRAM HUNT

  The Frock-Coated Communist

  The Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels

  ALLEN LANE

  an imprint of

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  ALLEN LANE

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

  Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen's Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd)

  Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)

  Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi – 110 017, India

  Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)

  Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, LondonWC2R 0RL, England

  www.penguin.com

  First published 2009

  1

  Copyright © Tristram Hunt, 2009

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  The author would like to thank Lawrence & Wishart for their kind permission to quote from Marx Engels Collected Works (London 1975–2004)

  All rights reserved

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book

  ISBN: 978-0-14-192686-5

  To D. W. H. H.

  Contents

  List of Illustrations

  Acknowledgements

  Map: Central Europe, 1815–66

  Preface

  1 Siegfried in Zion

  2 The Dragon's Seed

  3 Manchester in Black and White

  4 ‘A Little Patience and Some Terrorism’

  5 The Infinitely Rich ’48 Harvest

  6 Manchester in Shades of Grey

  7 ‘The Grand Lama of the Regent's Park Road’

  8 Marx's Bulldog

  9 First Fiddle

  Epilogue

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Index

  List of Illustrations

  Endpapers

  Unveiling of a statue of Marx and Engels, Moscow, 1918 (David King Collection, London)

  Plates

  1 Portrait of Friedrich and Elise Engels (Engels Haus Museum, Wuppertal)

  2 Panorama of Barmen (Engels Haus Museum, Wuppertal)

  3 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel lecturing, 1828, lithograph by Franz Kugler (AKG, London)

  4 Ludwig Feuerbach (AKG, London)

  5 Karl Marx as a student (RIA, Novosti)

  6 Friedrich Engels self-portrait, 1839 (Topfoto)

  7 John Marshall & Sons cotton design (Bridgeman Art Library, London/Whitworth Gallery, Manchester)

  8 Ermen & Engels cotton reels (People's History Museum, Manchester)

  9 Ermen & Engels cotton mill, Weaste, Salford (Working Class Movement Library, Salford)

  10 Photographic portrait of Friedrich Engels, aged 20 (People's History Museum, Manchester)

  11 Boy cleaning cotton mill (Art Archive, London)

  12 Manchester Piccadilly postcard (Mary Evans Picture Library, London)

  13 Dover House/Albert Club (Working Class Movement Library, Salford)

  14 Chetham's Library desk (Chetham's Library, Manchester)

  15 Dresden riots, 1848 (Bridgeman Art Library, London/ Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, France)

  16 Berlin riots, 1848 (Bridgeman Art Library, London/Archives Charmet)

  17 Detail from a painting of the Cheshire Hounds, by Henry Calvert (Tatton Park/Cheshire County Council/The National Trust)

  18 Manchester Town Hall vestibule (Manchester City Council (photograph: Mike Pilkington))

  19 Marx, Engels and Marx's daughters group portrait, 1864 (Topfoto)

  20 Laura Marx (Bridgeman Art Library, London/Roger-Viollet, Paris)

  21 Lizzy Burns (Working Class Movement Library, Salford)

  22 Eleanor Marx (Jewish Chronicle Archive London/HIP/Topfoto)

  23 Photographic portrait of Friedrich Engels, 1891 (David King Collection, London)

  24 The study at 122 Regent's Park Road (photograph: Barney Cokeliss)

  25 View over London from Hampstead Heath, by John Ritchie (fl. 1858–75) (Bridgeman Art Library/private collection)

  26 Barricades during the Paris Commune, 1871 (Bridgeman Art Library, London/Bibliothèque Nationale Paris)

  27 Fires in Paris during the Commune (Bridgeman Art Library, London/Musée de la Ville de Paris, Musée Carnavalet, Archives Charmet)

  28 Strikers marching during the London dock strike, 1889 (Bridgeman Art Library, London/private collection)

  29 Marchers pose for a photograph during the London dock strike, 1889 (Bridgeman Art Library, London/private collection)

  30 Poster in Havana, Cuba (Bridgeman Art Library, London/ Roger-Viollet, Paris)

  31 Mural in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia (Bridgeman Art Library, London (photograph: Françoise Demulder)/Roger-Viollet, Paris)

  Integrated illustrations

  p. 27: A letter from Engels to his sister (Marx Engels Collected Works, Volume 2)

  p. 29: Two sketches by Engels (Marx Engels Collected Works, Volume 2)

  p. 59: Engels's sketch of ‘The Free’ (Marx Engels Collected Works, Volume 2)

  pp. 82–3: German map of Manchester c. 1845 (Friedrich Engels, Die Lage der arbeitenden Klasse in England)

  p. 106: Dustjacket of the The Condition of the Working Class in England (Marx Engels Collected Works, Volume 4)

  p. 150: Dustjacket of the Communist Manifesto (Marx Engels Collected Works, Volume 6)

  pp. 246–7 Map of London from an A–Z of 1888

  p. 281: Highgate Cemetery Burial and Grave Register recording the death of Karl Marx (London Borough of Camden, Local Studies And Archives Centre)

  p. 354: Engels's death notice as it appeared in the Manchester Guardian.

  Acknowledgements

  For their generous assistance with the research, writing and production of this book, the author would like to thank Alice Austin, Sara Bershtel, Phillip Birch, Georgina Capel, Michael V. Carlisle, Barney Cokeliss, Bela Cunha, Andrew and Theresa Curtis, Dermot Daly and the Cheshire Hunt, Virginia Davis and the Department of History, Queen Mary, University of London, Thomas Dixon, Orlando Figes, Giles Foden, Tom Graves, Michael Herbert, Eric Hobsbawm, Julian and Marylla Hunt, Stephen Kingston, Nick Mansfield, Ed Mili-band, Seumas Milne, Liudmila Novikova, Alastair Owens, Stuart Proffitt, Caroline Read, Stephen Rigby, Donald Sassoon, Sophie Schlondorff, Bill Smyth, Gareth Stedman Jones, Juliet Thornback, Benjamin and Yulia Wegg-Prosser, Francis Wheen, Bee Wilson, Michael Yehuda. In addition, the staff of the British Library; Engels-Haus, Wuppertal; the International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam; the London Library; the Marx Memorial Library, London; the People's History Museum, Manchester; the Working Class Movement Library, Salford.

  Central Europe, 1815 – 66

  Preface

  On 30 June 1869 Friedrich Engels, a Manchester mill owner, gave up his job in the family business after nearly twenty years. Ready to greet him, on the path of his small cottage in the Chorlton suburbs, were his
lover Lizzy Burns and houseguest Eleanor Marx, daughter of his old friend Karl. ‘I was with Engels when he reached the end of his forced labour and I saw what he must have gone through all those years,’ Eleanor later wrote of Engels's final day at work,

  I shall never forget the triumph with which he exclaimed ‘for the last time!’ as he put on his boots in the morning to go to his office. A few hours later we were standing at the gate waiting for him. We saw him coming over the little field opposite the house where he lived. He was swinging his stick in the air and singing, his face beaming. Then we set the table for a celebration and drank champagne and were happy.1

  Friedrich Engels was a textile magnate and fox-hunter, member of the Manchester Royal Exchange and president of the city's Schiller Institute. He was a raffish, high-living, heavy-drinking devotee of the good things in life: lobster salad, Château Margaux, Pilsener beer and expensive women. But for forty years Engels also funded Karl Marx, looked after his children, soothed his furies and provided one half of history's most celebrated ideological partnership: co-author of the Communist Manifesto and co-founder of what would come to be known as Marxism. Over the course of the twentieth century, from Chairman Mao's China to the Stasi state of the GDR, from the anti-imperial struggle in Africa to the Soviet Union itself, various manifestations of this compelling philosophy would cast their shadow over a full third of the human race. And as often as not, the leadership of the socialist world would look first to Engels rather than Marx to explain their policies, justify their excesses and shore up their regimes. Interpreted and misinterpreted, quoted and misquoted, Friedrich Engels – the frock-coated Victorian cotton lord – became one of the central architects of global communism.

  Today, a journey to Engels begins at Moscow's Paveletsky rail station. From this shabbily romantic Tsarist-era terminal, the rusting sleeper train heaves off at midnight for the Volga plains hundreds of miles south-east of the capital. A grinding, stop–start fourteen-hour journey, alleviated only by a gurgling samovar in the guard's carriage, eventually lands you in the city of Saratov with its wide, tree-lined streets and attractive air of faded grandeur.

  Bolted on to this prosperous, provincial centre is a crumbling, six-lane highway which bridges the mighty river Volga and connects Saratov to its unloved sister city, Engels. Lacking any of Saratov's sophistication, Engels is a grotty, forgotten site dominated by railway loading docks and the rusting detritus of light industry. At its civic centre squats Engels Square: a bleak parade ground encircled by housing estates, a shabby strip-mall dotted with sports bars, casinos and DVD stores, and a roundabout clogged with Ladas, Sputniks and the odd Ford. Here, in all its enervating grime, is the post-communist Russia of hyper-capitalism and bootleg Americana. And amidst this free-market dystopia stands a statue of Friedrich Engels himself – fifteen-foot high atop a marble plinth and with a well-tended municipal flowerbed at his heels, he looks resplendent in his trench coat clutching a curled-up copy of the Communist Manifesto.

  Across the former USSR and Eastern bloc, the statues of Marx (together with those of Lenin, Stalin and Beria) have come down. Decapitated and mutilated, their remains are gathered together in monument graveyards for the ironic edification of Cold War cultural tourists. Inexplicably, Engels has been given leave to remain, still holding sway over his eponymous town. As a quick conversation with local residents and early evening promenaders in Engels Square reveals, his presence here is the product neither of affection nor admiration. Certainly, there is little hostility towards the co-founder of communism, but rather a weary apathy and nonchalant ignorance about the adamantine figure whose face they pass by daily. As with the nineteenth-century generals and long-forgotten social reformers on myriad plinths littering the squares of western European capitals, Engels has become an unknown and unremarkable part of the civic wallpaper.

  At his birthplace in the Rhineland town of Wuppertal (now a commuter suburb for the nearby finance and fashion city of Düsseldorf), it is a similar story of disinterest. There is a Friedrich Engels Strasse and a Friedrich Engels Allee, but little sense of a town overly anxious to commemorate its most celebrated son. The site of Engels's Geburtshaus, destroyed by a Royal Air Force bombing raid in 1943, remains barren and all that marks the place of his arrival into the world is a dirty granite monument modestly noting his role as the ‘co-founder of scientific socialism’. Covered in holly and ivy, it is edged into the shadowy corner of a run-down park, overlooked by rusting Portakabins and a vandalized phone booth.

  In modern Russia and Germany, let alone in Spain, England or America, Engels has slipped the surly bonds of history. Where once his name was on the lips of millions – as Marx's fellow combatant; as the author of Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (the Bible of global communism); as the theoretician of dialectical materialism; as the name so regularly grafted on to city streets and squares by revolutionary insurgents and left-wing councils; as the man whose visionary, bearded features were stamped on to the currency, etched into textbooks, and alongside Marx, Lenin and Stalin stared down from vast flags and Soviet Realist hoardings on to May Day parades – it is now barely registered in either East or West. In 1972 an official GDR biography could naturally claim that ‘nowadays there is hardly a corner of this earth of ours where Engels's name has not been heard of, where the significance of his work is unknown’.2 Today, he is so innocuous, his statue isn't even pulled down.

  The same cannot be said of his colleague, Karl Marx. Two decades on from the fall of the Berlin Wall and Francis Fukuyama's hubristic declaration of ‘the end of history’, Marx's reputation is enjoying a remarkable renaissance. In recent years he has been transformed from the ogre responsible for the killing fields of Cambodia and labour camps of Siberia to modern capitalism's most perceptive analyst. ‘Marx's Stock Resurges on a 150-Year Tip’ was how the New York Times marked the 150th anniversary of the publication of the Communist Manifesto – a text which, more than any other, ‘recognized the unstoppable wealth-creating power of capitalism, predicted it would conquer the world, and warned that this inevitable globalization of national economies and cultures would have divisive and painful consequences’.3 As Western governments, businesses and banks reaped the bitter harvest of free-market fundamentalism at the turn of the twenty-first century – financial meltdowns in Mexico and Asia, the industrialization of China and India, the decimation of the middle class in Russia and Argentina, mass migration and a worldwide ‘crisis of capitalism’ in 2007–9 – the Cassandra-like voice of Marx started to echo down the decades. The post-1989 neo-liberal settlement, Fukuyama's endpoint of mankind's ideological evolution, all set to be built on the historical wreck of communism, seemed to falter. And there was Marx waiting in the wings. ‘He's back, screamed The Times in the autumn of 2008 as stock markets plunged, banks were summarily nationalized and President Sarkozy of France was photographed leafing through Das Kapital (sales of which surged to the top of the German bestseller lists). Even Pope Benedict XVI was moved to praise Marx's ‘great analytical skill’.4 The British economist Meghnad Desai, in a work which formed part of an increasingly effusive literature on Marx, had already labelled the phenomenon, Marx's Revenge: The Resurgence of Capitalism and the Death of Statist Socialism.5

  For it was now a universal truth that Marx was the first to chart the uncompromising, unrelenting, compulsively iconoclastic nature of capitalism. ‘It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his “natural superiors”, and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interests, than callous “cash-payment”,’ as the Communist Manifesto put it. ‘It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. ’6 It was Marx who revealed how capitalism would crush languages, cultures, traditions, even nations, in its wake. ‘In one word, it creates a world after its own image,’ he wrote long before globalization became a by-word for Americanization. In his best
selling 2005 biography, Karl Marx ou l’esprit du monde, the French politician-cum-banker Jacques Attali located Marx as the first great theorist of globalization. For Attali, Marx was ‘an amazingly modern thinker, because when you look at what he has written, it is not a theory of what an organised socialist country should be like, but how capitalism will be in the future… he considered that capitalism would end only when it was a global force… when nations disappeared, when technology was able to transform the life of a country’.7 Even the Economist, the great weekly promulgator of neo-liberal dogma, had to give him credit for ‘envisioning the awesome productive power of capitalism’, as the magazine conceded in a 2002 article entitled ‘Marx after Communism’. ‘He saw that capitalism would spur innovation to a hitherto-unimagined degree. He was right that giant corporations would come to dominate the world's industries.’8 At the same time, Attali's book, together with Francis Wheen's popular biography of Marx as journalist and rapscallion (Karl Marx, 1999), helped to cast him in a sympathetic light as a struggling writer and loving father shamefully persecuted by the authorities.9 Since the 1960s and Louis Althusser's ‘discovery’ of the ‘epistemological break’ between the young and the mature Marx – between the Marx of the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts concerned with alienation and morality and the later, materialist Marx – we had already come to know of Karl Marx's early philosophical humanism. Now we were offered the biographical complement of a rounded, engaging and strikingly contemporary individual.

  But where does Friedrich Engels fit within this generous new alignment? In the absence of a similar slew of biographies (with the last truly popular English-language life of Engels being the translation of Gustav Mayer's seminal work of 1934) and perhaps as part of a conscious post-1989 forgetting, Engels has been excised from the popular memory.10 Or, more worrisomely, in certain ideological circles he has been landed with responsibility for the terrible excesses of twentieth-century Marxism-Leninism. For as Marx's stock has risen, so Engels's has fallen. Increasingly, the trend has been to separate off an ethical, humanist Karl Marx from a mechanical, scientistic Engels and blame the latter for sanctifying the state crimes of communist Russia, China and South-east Asia. Even in the mid-1970s, E. P. Thompson was noting the urge to turn ‘old Engels into a whipping boy, and to impugn to him any sin that one chooses to impugn to subsequent Marxisms… I cannot accept the pleadings which always find Marx and Lenin innocent and leave Engels alone in the dock.’11 Similarly, Richard N. Hunt commented on how ‘It has lately become fashionable in some quarters to treat Engels as the dustbin of Classical Marxism, a convenient receptacle into which can be swept any unsightly oddments of the system, and who can thus also bear the blame for whatever subsequently went awry.’12 Thus, the attractive Marx of the Paris notebooks is compared and contrasted unfavourably with the dour Engels of Anti-Dühring. The Marxist scholar Norman Levine, for instance, has been in no doubt that ‘Engelism [sic] led directly to the dialectical materialism of the Stalin era… By asserting that a fixed path of development existed in history, by asserting that pre-determined historical development was moving towards socialism, Engelism made Soviet Russia appear as the fulfilment of history since it had already achieved socialism… During the Stalin era, what the world understood as Marxism was really Engelism.’13 Suddenly, Engels is left holding the baby of twentieth-century ideological extremism while Marx is rebranded as the acceptable, post-political seer of global capitalism.