THE FROCK-COATED COMMUNIST: The Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels
By TRISTRAM HUNT
Allen Lane, 2009, 443 pp, $59.95 (hb)
Review by Phil Shannon
One of Friedrich Engels’ toughest jobs was managing Karl Marx - ‘do try and finish your political economy book’, Engels had implored Marx in 1844 in what was to become a weary refrain before Marx finally finished volume 1 of Das Kapital in 1867. Volumes 2 and 3 also had to be deciphered and edited by Engels after Marx’s death, a task which took a further 27 years. Equally challenging for the co-founder of Marxism, as Tristram Hunt’s biography of Engels shows, was Engels’ twenty year stint as a cotton capitalist to financially support Marx.
Born in 1820 in Prussia, Engels faced the prospect of a numbing life of money-grubbing commerce in the family cotton business. He always threatened to slip the leash, however, springboarding from radical philosophy to radical politics which Engels’ father attempted to head off by sending him to the family’s cotton mill in Manchester in 1842.
Engels found his role as factory manager ‘beastly’ and detested the bourgeois lifestyle (with the exception of riding with hounds and well-stocked wine cellars), preferring to devote his leisure hours to Manchester’s workers and their political movements whilst living in a free union with the simple but proud working class Irish woman, Mary Burns, and, later, her sister, Lizzie.
His 1845 The Condition of the Working Class in England was the young Engels’ brilliant documentary polemic on the poverty and wretchedness foisted on working class Manchester by capitalist Manchester. It caught Marx’s eye and the two cemented a lifelong emotional and ideological bond. Their first joint publication, The Communist Manifesto in 1848, portrayed Marx’s grand style but drew on Engels’ earlier theoretical labours in Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy.
Engels was soon in the thick of the 1848 bourgeois-democratic revolutions in continental Europe as a member of a worker-student militia in the battle against the forces of royal counter-revolution. This earnt Engels an arrest warrant and a forty year exile back in England with Marx where Engels resumed his hated ‘huckstering’ as cotton lord.
This came at the price of, as Hunt observes, Engels’ “intellectual demotion”, or, as the overly-modest Engels himself put it, of playing ‘second fiddle’ to Marx. Only after the publication of Das Kapital was Engels able to end his ‘self-loathing existence’ and return to his love of politics, becoming, after Marx’s death in 1883, the leading adviser for socialists around the globe, maintaining open house and producing a prodigious flood of correspondence, pamphlets and books.
Engels excelled as a populariser of Marx but also applied Marxism to virgin areas such as gender relationships, producing the foundation text of modern socialist-feminism (The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State) with his analysis of the family under capitalism and its in-built oppression of women.
Engels was primarily responsible, as Hunt notes, for turning European social democracy in a fundamentally Marxist direction, although, after Engels’ death in 1895, some revisionist followers took his views on the limited possibility of a parliamentary road to socialism (a tactic Engels considered ‘only for the Germany of today and even then with many reservations’) as a blanket prescription for ditching revolution.
Hunt’s biography of Engels reveals a man with a large appetite for life (languages, hiking, laughter, literature, science, dancing, swimming, fencing, carousing and, of course, politics), whose intellectual and political contribution to revolutionary socialism was pioneering and profound.
Unfortunately, this Engels suffers a slow death from a hundred caveats. On the basis, often enough, of thin or no evidence, Hunt gives us Engels the cruel mill owner, the sexist, racist, ethnic-cleansing imperialist, and political bully and sectarian.
On some matters, where the evidence is cast-iron, Engels is not beyond reproach. The early Engels did hold racist stereotypes of the Irish and his unsympathetic views of European Slavs and ‘lazy Mexicans’ are crude. Although Hunt concedes that Engels converted to anti-colonialism, he does not revise the ‘ethnic-cleanser’ label and the mud sticks.
Where the evidence against Engels is unclear, Hunt reverses the principle of guilt beyond reasonable doubt and hangs Engels morally, claiming that the young Engels in France consorted with “good-time girls” or “grisettes”. Engels certainly enjoyed the company of these grisettes but these were flirtatious, sexually free, independent young working class women who frequented bohemian artistic and cultural circles, not all of them engaging in part-time prostitution. Whether Engels crossed the line into exploiting needy women by paying for sex remains an open question.
Hunt also seems much more exercised than Engels by the contradiction between Engels the cotton lord and communist revolutionary. “The original champagne socialist” is berated for never daring to question his own place in the “commercial-imperial complex”, despite Engels’ extra-curricular activities which aimed to undermine that very complex. For Engels to renounce his Marx-supporting capitalist income stream, however, would have been an empty moral gesture.
Almost everything that Engels touches loses some political lustre in Hunt’s re-telling. Engels’ time on the barricades in 1848, risking his life for his ideals, is acknowledged to have merit but was, condescendingly, also a “boys own adventure”. Engels’ passion for military science and the art of insurrection (he was nicknamed ‘The General’ by Marx) is said to be flawed by an un-socialist “hero worship” of generals whilst Engels the gentleman is asserted to “instinctively” take the “view of the officers’ mess”.
With sneering scorn for Marxism, Engels’ predictions that the next economic crisis would see capitalism overthrown is derided by Hunt as the “proletariat failing in its historic calling” rather than another case (far from predictable) that increased suffering and austerity would be endured with resignation rather than revolution.
Hunt also condemns Engels as a sinister political manipulator and enforcer of ideological correctness. The “Grand Inquisitor” is said to have been the ultimate sectarian, rejecting all who would not toe the Marx-Engels line, “stamping out ideological deviation” and fathering, through a case of political genetics, the subsequent history of communist purges and factional war generally on the left. The defence that Engels (and Marx) may have deployed better, more compelling, ideas is not allowed into Hunt’s kangaroo court nor are their political rivals presented as anything but innocent victims when often it was they who were the sectarians who raised their doctrinaire program above what Engels and Marx called the ‘real movement’ of the working class in struggle.
Engels’ life needs an honest accounting, asking the following questions of him. Were there polemical excesses? Were there political misjudgements? Could Engels be intolerant and dogmatic? Was Engels over-optimistic concerning the timeline of revolution? Did he misread the political and economic climate at times? Was he less than perfect? Was he, in short, all too human and not a secular god on a pedestal?
To which the answer would be ‘Yes’ but an answer which needs to be framed in the context of a man of his time (Engels regarded homosexuality as unnatural, for example) as much as against it, learning and inevitably making mistakes but also making tremendous advances in socialist theory and practice. Engels would not have exempted himself from his and Marx’s belief that only in making a revolution can people rid themselves of “the muck of ages and become fit to found society anew”.
Hunt, fundamentally, lacks the political sympathy with his subject that could have turned his biography, although quite useful in parts, into the critically-informed and well-rounded biography that Engels deserves.