Frock-Coated Communist Read online

  Of course it is true that we know about and are interested in Friedrich Engels largely because of his collaboration with Marx; a partnership in which the devoted Engels was always careful to cast himself as ‘second fiddle’. ‘Marx was a genius; we others were at best talented. Without him the theory would not be by far what it is today. It therefore rightly bears his name,’ he announced conclusively after his friend's death.14 It is equally true that much of the official ideology of Marxism-Leninism in the twentieth century sought its validity, however spurious, in elements of Engels's later codification of Marxism. But just as it is now possible, as the post-1989 polemical dust settles and the socialism of Marx and Engels is no longer automatically obscured by the long, Leninist shadow of the Soviet Union, to take a renewed look at Marx, so we can also begin to approach Engels afresh. ‘Communism defiled and despoiled the radical heritage,’ Tony Judt has written of the ‘dictatorial deviation’ which marked its perverted implementation during the twentieth century. ‘If today we face a world in which there is no grand narrative of social progress, no politically plausible project of social justice, it is in large measure because Lenin and his heirs poisoned the well.’15 As that historical tide at last begins to ebb, it is now possible and valuable to return to the lives and works of ‘the old Londoners’ to find elements of Marx and Engels's canon which we can examine in a world free for the most part of the state socialist experiments of the twentieth century. They offer not just an insightful critique of global capitalism but new perspectives on the nature of modernity and progress, religion and ideology, colonialism and ‘liberal interventionism’, global financial crises, urban theory, feminism, even Darwinism and reproductive ethics.

  To all of which Engels contributed profoundly. Managing a mid-Victorian Manchester cotton business, dealing daily with the economic chain of world trade which stretched from the plantations of the American South to the Lancashire mills to the British Raj, it was his experience of the workings of global capitalism which made its way into the pages of Marx's Das Kapital, just as it was his experience of factory life, slum living, armed insurrection and street-by-street politicking which informed the development of communist doctrine. And, again, it was Friedrich Engels who was far more adventurous when it came to exploring the ramification of his and Marx's thinking in terms of family structure, scientific method, military theory and colonial liberation. As Marx immersed himself ever deeper in the second half of the nineteenth century in economic theory and primitive Russian communism, Engels ranged freely on questions of politics, the environment and democracy, with unexpectedly modern applicability. If Marx's voice is being heard again today, then it is also time we stripped away Engels's modesty and allowed his richly iconoclastic ideas to be explored beyond the memory of Marx.

  Yet what makes Engels a fascinating source of biographical enquiry is the personal background to this philosophical prowess; the rich contradiction and limitless sacrifice which marked his long life. It was a life, moreover, set against the great revolutionary epoch of the nineteenth century: Engels was with the Chartists in Manchester, on the barricades in 1848–9, urging on the Paris Communards in 1871 and witness to the uncomfortable birth of the British labour movement in 1890s London. He was a man who believed in praxis, in living his theory of revolutionary communism as practice. Yet the miserable frustration of his life was that he so rarely got the chance, since from his earliest meetings with Marx he decided to relinquish his own ambitions for the sake of his friend's genius and the greater good of the communist cause. Over twenty long years, in the prime of his life, he endured a self-loathing existence as a Manchester millocrat in order to allow Marx the resources and freedom to complete Das Kapital. The notion of individual sacrifice, so central to communist self-definition, was there at the movement's birth.

  This extraordinary deference to Marx's mind made great periods of Engels's adult life a time of painful contradiction. Symbolically, at the heart of the Marxist theory of dialectical materialism stood precisely this dynamic of contradiction – how the interpenetration of opposites and the negation of the negation explain the evolution of the natural, physical and social sciences. Right from his initial conversion to communism, Engels, the well-born scion of Prussian Calvinist merchants, lived that tension in a transparently personal way. And so this biography is also the memoir of a fox-hunting man: how a womanizing, champagne-drinking capitalist helped to found an ideology which was both contrary to his class interests and would, over the decades, morph into a dull, puritanical faith utterly at odds with the character of its founders. Engels himself would never admit any contradiction between his gentleman's lifestyle and egalitarian ideals – but his critics did then and certainly do now.

  Perhaps any personalized account of an individual Marxist necessarily involves this kind of contradiction since – many Marxist historians would argue – one should focus on the history of the masses, not the biography of a single man. Yet this would be to succumb to a particularly restrictive interpretation of Marxism and neglect the attractively non-doctrinaire thinking of Engels himself. He not only had an abiding interest in biography (especially the lives of British army generals), but was adamant that ‘men make their own history… in that each person follows his own consciously desired end, and it is precisely the result of these many wills operating in different directions and of their manifold effects upon the world outside that constitutes history’. History is therefore in part a question of individual desires.

  The will is determined by passion or deliberation. But the levers which immediately determine passion or deliberation are of very different kinds. In part they may be external objects, in part ideal motives… personal hatred, or even purely individual whims of all kinds… the question also arises: What driving forces in turn stand behind these motives? What are the historical causes which transform themselves into these motives in the minds of the actors?16

  It is the ambition of this biography to unpick those passions and desires, personal hatreds and individual whims – as well as the driving forces and historical causes – of a man who made his own history and who continues to shape ours.

  1

  Siegfried in Zion

  ‘Rejoice with me, dearly beloved Karl, that the good Lord has heard our prayer and last Tuesday evening, the 28th, at 9pm presented us with a babe, a healthy well-shapen boy. We thank and praise Him from the fullness of our hearts for this child, and for the merciful assistance and care for mother and child during confinement.’ In late November 1820, after his wife's difficult labour, the Rhineland businessman Friedrich Engels was delighted to announce to his brother-in-law Karl Snethlage the birth of his first son and namesake. Instantly anxious for the child's spiritual state, Engels also wrote of his hopes that the Lord ‘grants us the wisdom to bring it up well and in fear of Him, and to give it the best teaching through our example!’ This prayer would go spectacularly unanswered.1

  The infant Friedrich was ushered into a family and a culture that offered no inkling of his revolutionary future – and soon clamoured to disavow it. There was no broken home, no lost father, no lonely childhood, no school bullying. Instead, there were loving parents, indulgent grandparents, plentiful siblings, steady prosperity and a sense of structured, familial purpose. ‘Probably no son born in such a family ever struck so entirely different a path from it. Friedrich must have been considered by his family as the “ugly duckling”,’ mused Eleanor Marx in 1890, when the wounds of the Engels clan were still raw. ‘Perhaps they still do not understand that the “duckling” was in reality a “swan”.’2

  Engels's upbringing in the Rhineland town of Barmen took place within a safe, cloistered neighbourhood that resembled something of a family compound. Across the road from his home stood the detached, four-storey, late-baroque house his own father was born in (now the threadbare Engels-Haus museum); nearby the homes of his uncles, Johann Caspar III and August; and dotted amongst them the steaming, stinking yarn bleacheries that had funded
their showy mansions. Factories, workers’ tenements and merchant houses mingled together in what resembled an early industrial model village. For Friedrich Engels was delivered straight into the furnace of the nineteenth century. The historic transformations he would make his life's work – urbanization, industrialization, social class and technology – were there at his birth. ‘The factory and cottages of the esteemed family of Caspar Engels, together with the bleacheries, almost form a small semi-circular city,’ confirmed an 1816 report on the state of Barmen's housing.3 Leading down to the Wupper river, this damp, marshy district was officially called ‘the Red Brook’; in the early 1900s it was still widely known as ‘Engels' Brook’

  While the Engels line can be traced back to Rhineland farms of the late sixteenth century, the family's prosperity begins with the arrival of Johann Caspar I (1715–87), Engels's great-grandfather, in the Wupper valley in the latter half of the eighteenth century. Exchanging agriculture for industry, Caspar was drawn to the lime-free waters of the Wupper river – one of the tributaries of the Rhine – and the riches it promised from linen yarn bleaching. With just 25 thalers in his pocket and a pannier on his back (as family legend had it), he chose to settle in the tiny town of Barmen, which clings to the slopes of the high valley lining the Wupper. An assiduous entrepreneur, he built up a highly successful yarn business, complete with a bleachery, and then a workshop for a pioneering form of mechanical lace production. When he handed over the company to his sons, it was one of Barmen's largest enterprises.

  Yet the commercial ethos of Caspar Engels und Söhne stood for more than just the cash nexus. In an era when gradations between workers and masters were subtler than full-throttle industrialization would later allow, the Engelses fused paternalism with profits and were widely renowned for the benevolence of their employment and refusal to use child labour. Down the generations, the Engelses provided homes, gardens and even schools for family employees, and a granary co-operative was set up during food shortages. As a result, Engels spent his early years mixing easily with ribbon-makers, joiners and craftsmen, fostering in him a class-free ease which would later serve him well in the Salford slums and communist clubs of Paris.

  Johann Caspar's sons continued in the family firm, expanding operations to include the production of silk ribbons. By the time of his death in 1787 the Engelses’ combination of commercial success and high-minded philanthropy had secured them a pre-eminent social position within Wuppertal society: Engels's grandfather, Johann Caspar II, was appointed a municipal councillor in 1808 and became one of the founders of Barmen's United Protestant Church.4 But when the business was passed on to the third generation – Engels's father and uncles – the family dynamic crumbled. After repeated fallings out, in 1837 the three brothers drew lots to decide who would inherit the firm. Friedrich Engels senior lost and started up a new business, going into partnership with two Dutch brothers, Gottfried and Peter Ermen. There, he rapidly revealed his greater entrepreneurial gifts and his new company, Ermen & Engels, diversified from linen bleaching into cotton-spinning, setting up a series of sewing thread factories in Manchester and then in Barmen and nearby Engelskirchen in 1841.

  This then was the world of the merchant-manufacturer elite (the so-called Fabrikanten) within which Engels grew up: a childhood encircled by industry and commerce, civic duty and family loyalty. Of course, such wealthy families as the Engelses – who lived, as one observer put it, in ‘spacious and sumptuous houses, often faced with fronts of cut stone and in the best architectural styles’ – were protected from the more nefarious effects of industrialization. But they could not avoid them altogether: following the steps of Johann Caspar along the Wupper had trudged tens of thousands of workers equally determined to share in the promises of industry.

  Barmen's population grew from 16,000 in 1810 to over 40,000 in 1840. In Barmen and Elberfeld combined the population topped 70,000 – roughly the same size as 1840s Newcastle or Hull. The valley's workforce consisted of 1,100 dyers, 2,000 spinners, 12,500 weavers in various materials and 16,000 ribbon weavers and trimmings makers. The vast majority did their work in modest homes and small workshops, but a new generation of sizeable bleaching grounds and cotton mills was also starting up and by the 1830s there were nearly 200 factories operating along the valley. ‘It is a long, straggling town, skirting both sides of the river Wupper,’ as a visitor described it in the 1840s. ‘Some parts are well-built, and are nicely paved; but the greater part of the town is composed of extremely irregular and very narrow streets… The river itself is a disgusting object, being an open receptacle for all sewers, disguising the various tinctures contributed from the dyeing establishments in one murky impenetrable hue, that makes the stranger shudder on beholding.’5

  What might once have been compared with the kind of pleasant rural-industrial mix seen in the mill towns of the Pennines or Derbyshire's Derwent Valley – high valleys topped with green fields and forests, bottomed out by clear, fast-running streams providing the initial water power for mills and workshops – soon came to resemble a polluted, overcrowded ‘German Manchester’. ‘The purple waves of the narrow river flow sometimes swiftly, sometimes sluggishly between smoky factory buildings and yarn-strewn bleaching-yards,’ was how Engels would come to describe his birthplace. ‘Its bright red colour, however, is due not to some bloody battle… but simply and solely to the numerous dye-works using Turkey red.’ From his earliest days, amidst the acrid stench of workshops and bleaching yards, Engels was exposed to this witches' brew of industrialization: the eye-watering, nose-bleeding pollution that blanketed the intense poverty and ostentatious wealth. As an impressionable young boy, he soaked it all up.6

  Beyond the industry, visitors to the Wupper valley noticed something else. ‘Both Barmen and Elberfeld are places where strong religious feelings prevail. The churches are large and well attended, and each place has its own bible, missionary, and tract societies.’7 Contemporary sketches reveal a forest of church steeples jostling for space amongst the skyline of factory chimneys. For Engels, the Wupper valley was nothing less than the ‘Zion of the obscurantists’. The spirit that dominated Barmen and Elberfeld was an aggressive form of Pietism, a movement within the German Lutheran (Protestant) Church which had first emerged in the late seventeenth century and stressed ‘a more intense, committed and practical form of Christian observance’.8 As the movement developed and diversified it often distanced itself from the formal structures and theology of the Lutheran Church and, along the Wupper valley, allied itself with a Calvinist ethic which presaged sin, personal salvation and a renunciation of the world. On the one hand, this provided a religion of introspection which saw God's hand at work in all the tiny mysteries of life, as the letters which passed between Engels's parents clearly testify. In 1835, as Engels's mother, Elise, tended her dying father, her husband proffered to her the comfort of faith in God's omnipotent mercy. ‘I am happy and thank God that you are coping with the illness of your beloved father in such a composed way,’ he wrote from the family home. ‘We all have good reason to thank the Lord for His guidance so far… He [Elise's father] has enjoyed a generally happy life full of strength and health and now the good Lord seems to want to take the old man to him gently and without any pain. What can mortal man wish for more?’ God's will could also be bathetically revealed in the most trivial occurrences. ‘Things don't look good for your potatoes, my dear Elise,’ Engels senior ominously warned his wife whilst she was on holiday in Ostend, ‘they looked so fine but now have also been infected by this disease that is spreading everywhere… it has never been seen before in this form and is now appearing in almost every country like a plague.’ The lesson was clear. ‘It is almost as if God wanted to show humanity in this godless age how dependent we are on Him and how much our fate rests in His hands.’9

  In true Protestant fashion, the Wupper pietists subscribed to a priesthood of all believers finding salvation through unmediated, individual prayer alongside the difficult task of scri
ptural exegesis. The churches fulfilled a useful religious function, but it was through brotherhood and sermonizing, rather than celebration of the Eucharist, that they delivered their mission. The Barmen Fabrikanten displayed a Puritan-like morality (Sittlichkeit) which valued asceticism, studiousness, individual uprightness and personal reserve. Much of the psychological brittleness of Friedrich Engels senior can be traced to this deeply personal, often overweening faith. And, at least to begin with, his eldest son shared it. Engels was baptized at the Elberfeld Reformed Evangelical parish church, which was ‘well known as an exemplary Reformed church, soundly Calvinist in its doctrine, well versed in Scripture, and reverent in worship’.10 In 1837 Engels marked his Confirmation with a suitably evangelical poem.