Frock-Coated Communist

by Hunt, Tristram

  There lurked, in the ill-conceived medical terminology of the day, moral miasmas as well as sanitary ones. While Manchester's working classes were notorious for their irreligion (or, worse, Catholicism amongst the Irish), sexual promiscuity, drunkenness and general depravity, the city's middle classes were equally infamous for their vulgar materialism. ‘The all-absorbing feeling of the bulk of the inhabitants is a desire to acquire wealth; and everything is deemed worthless in their estimation, that has not the accomplishment of this object for its end.’ The Manchester man, it was said, ‘hears more music in the everlasting motion of the loom than he would in the songs of the lark or the nightingale. For him philosophy has no attraction, poetry no enchantment; mountains, rocks, vales and streams excite not his delight or admiration; genius shrinks at his approach.’21 As even the usually loyal Manchester Guardian was forced to admit, ‘If the English are held to be a nation entirely of shopkeepers, Manchester is supposed to be always behind the counter, and to view men and measures through an atmosphere of cotton.’22 The German visitors concurred: ‘Work, profit and greed seem to be the only thoughts here… One reads figures, nothing but figures on all the faces here.’23

  The raw monetary divide between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie signified an unbridgeable social chasm. Canon Richard Parkinson could claim of Manchester that there was ‘no town in the world where the distance between the rich and the poor is so great’. In fact, there was ‘far less personal communication between the master cotton spinner and his workmen’ than between ‘the Duke of Wellington and the humblest labourer on his estate’.24 This close-quartered urban division – physical proximity but yawning social disparity – forcibly struck Leon Faucher, who described how in Manchester there are ‘two towns in one: in the one portion, there is space, fresh air, and provision for health; and in the other, every thing which poisons and abridges existence’.25 Benjamin Disraeli placed this sense of class separation at the heart of his manifesto-cum-novel, Sybil, or the Two Nations (1845). There could now exist, he lamented, within one city two entirely different nations, ‘between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy; who are as ignorant of each other's habits, thoughts and feelings, as if they were dwellers in different zones, or inhabitants of different planets’. These two nations were ‘formed by different breeding’, fed by different food, and governed by different laws. They were ‘THE RICH AND THE POOR’.26 It was a prediction of imminent class conflict from the most fastidiously Tory of voices.

  Of course, Manchester was not the only city to undergo such critical inspection. Similar accounts could be told of Glasgow, Liverpool, Birmingham and Bradford. Equally, there existed a well-developed European literature of urban discovery bringing to light the shantytowns, hidden tribes and underbelly amorality of Lyons, Paris, Berlin and Hamburg. But Manchester was something else: it symbolized the ne plus ultra of industrialization and, thanks to the exponential growth of the cotton industry, the scene of the starkest social divides and sanitary horrors Europe had to offer. It was an extraordinary urban phenomenon – akin to the Chinese boom cities or vast African megalopolises of today – which attracted intellectuals, activists, philosophers, even artists. They all wanted to experience this terrifying future. But it was Friedrich Engels's gift to paint the city's social crisis upon an altogether grander historical canvas.

  ‘Is a revolution in England possible or even probable? This is the question on which the future of England depends.’27 Fuelled by Moses Hess's predictions of an English social crisis, from the moment Engels disembarked his ship on to the London docks in 1842 – ‘the masses of buildings, the wharves on both sides… the countless ships along both shores… all this is so vast, so impressive, that a man cannot collect himself, but is lost in the marvel of England's greatness…’ – he was on the lookout for any sign of the impending catastrophe.28 And he instantly alighted upon that class of proletarians – accounts of whom were highly familiar to Engels from the German social debates of the 1830s - who had to pay the price for such commercial greatness and, as such, were the only class capable of transcending its injustices. ‘For although industry makes a country rich, it also creates a class of unpropertied, absolutely poor people,’ he wrote back in a series of articles for Marx's Rheinische Zeitung (indicating that their relationship was slowly progressing from the early chill), ‘a class which lives from hand to mouth, which multiplies rapidly, and which cannot afterwards be abolished.’ Faced by the awful reality of industrialization, Engels was shifting away from Young Hegelian notions of Geist, consciousness and freedom to the earthy language of political economy. ‘The slightest fluctuation in trade leaves thousands of workers destitute; their modest savings are soon used up and then they are in danger of starving to death. And a crisis of this kind is bound to occur again in a few years’ time.’29

  But before the revolution, there was work to be done. The firm of Ermen & Engels had been established in 1837 when Friedrich Engels senior transferred the money he received from being bought out of the family firm into the Ermen brothers’ enterprise. The guiding force behind the company, Dutch-born Peter Ermen, had come to Manchester in the mid-1820s and worked his way up from being a doubler in a small factory to establishing a multinational cotton thread business run with the help of his two brothers Anthony and Gottfried. Investment by Engels senior allowed the company to open a new mill in the Eccles district of Salford – a neighbourhood renowned for its fine count mercerized cotton along with the weaving of bookcloths, canvas fire hose and waterproof garments – for the production of cotton thread bearing their trademark of three red towers, the arms reportedly granted to the Ermenses’ sixteenth-century ancestors. The mill was located next to Weaste station, alongside the Manchester and Liverpool railway line, and ideally situated both for cotton imports from the Mersey docks and for drawing water from the nearby river Irwell for bleaching and dyeing. Patriotically christened Victoria Mill in honour of the young queen then ascending the throne, this was where Engels joined a 400-strong workforce by starting off ‘in the throstle-room’.30 Though we don't know exactly, it seems that he lived close by in the Eccles neighbourhood where – ‘during my residence there’ – he once witnessed a battle between the brick makers of Pauling & Henfrey and the police. Local legend also has it that he was a regular at the Crescent public house, while F. R. Johnston, the Eccles historian, has even suggested Engels tried to form ‘a Communist cell based on the Grapes Hotel’.31 The Weaste mill, later reincarnated as the Winterbottom Bookcloth Company, lasted until the 1960s, when the construction of the M602 from Salford into Manchester necessitated the demolition of what was by then an industrio-socialist footnote. Yet the legacy has not altogether vanished: the left-leaning Eccles Metropolitan Borough Council was rather prouder of its association with a socialist hero than Wuppertal and named a block of council flats Engels House (none of which now meets the government's Decent Housing Standard).32 The Church of England, however, chose to stick with the more respectable side of the partnership by christening a local school Godfrey Ermen Memorial Church of England Primary.33

  Working for the family firm whilst living within a community exploited and perpetuated by cotton capitalism, Engels readily felt the contradictions of his calling. As he put it in a heartfelt letter to Marx some years later, ‘huckstering is too beastly… most beastly of all is the fact of being, not only a bourgeois, but actually a manufacturer, a bourgeois who actively takes side against the proletariat. A few days in my old man's factory have sufficed to bring me face to face with this beastliness, which I had rather overlooked.’34 But even if he worked for the bourgeoisie, Engels didn't have to socialize with them. ‘I forsook the company and the dinner-parties, the port-wine and champagne of the middle classes, and devoted my leisure-hours almost exclusively to the intercourse with plain working men.’35 His first call was to the plain working men of the Owenite Hall of Science.

  Robert Owen was the final member of Engels's ‘Utopian socialist’ triumvirate, jo
ining Charles Fourier and Saint-Simon in the pantheon of dreamers marred, as he would later see it, by an inadequate appreciation of the historical rigours of scientific socialism. Yet Owen himself could lay claim to a far more practical understanding of social justice than either Marx or Engels ever could. A textile manufacturer by trade and marriage, he had attempted to turn his New Lanark factories in Scotland into a model of equitable employment and community cohesion. Owen's starting point was that conditioning, not character, was the key to man, who ‘is a compound being, whose character is formed of his constitution, or organisation at birth, and of the effects of external circumstances upon it, from birth to death’. Original sin was a fallacy and what was instead required was an educational and social ethos designed to draw out the co-operative best in mankind. At New Lanark he operated a beneficent commercial dictatorship, cutting working hours, eliminating underage employment, restricting alcohol sales, improving conditions and introducing free primary education. In A New View of Society, or Essays on the Principle of the Formation of the Human Character (1813–14), he detailed how his experiment could be magnified for society at large and, in so doing, helped to drive through the 1819 Factory Act limiting working hours in the textile industry.

  Yet no matter how many ameliorative acts of Parliament were passed, politics as usual could never provide the answer to the structural poverty which afflicted Britain in the years following the Napoleonic wars. The underlying fault lay with organized Christianity (for keeping man in a backward state of superstition) and the competitive ethos of society – of which private property was an economic manifestation – which corrupted the nature of man. Straying a long way from his industrial reform roots, Owen now advocated a wholesale moral revolution in order to regenerate society: this meant retreating from the evils of the ‘old immoral world’ and, as with Fourier, creating new communities, built around agriculture and industry, where education and co-operation would kick-start the regenerative process. ‘The children are not tormented with religious and theological controversies, nor with Greek and Latin,’ Engels wrote admiringly of the early Owenite settlement at Queen farm in Hampshire, ‘instead they become the better acquainted with nature, their own bodies and their intellectual capacities… Their moral education is restricted to the application of the one principle: Do not do to others what you would not have them do to you, in other words, the practice of complete equality and brotherly love.’36 However, just as with Fourier's phalansteries and the Saint-Simonian sects, planned Owenite communities proved disastrously and expensively shortlived both in England and America.

  More productive was his following of Owenite socialists, with their particularist criticisms of modern competition, who grouped together under the aegis of the British Association for the Promotion of Cooperative Knowledge. ‘The selfish feeling in man may fairly be called the competitive principle,’ announced the leading Owenite William Lovett, ‘since it causes him to compete with others, for the gratification of his wants and propensities. Whereas the co-operative may be said to be the social feeling that prompts him to acts of benevolence and brotherly affection.’ An economy based on the competitive system was condemned as inherently inequitable and unstable: wealth was concentrated, trade cycles became more extreme and poverty deepened. While Robert Owen himself increasingly focused his efforts on reforming religion and ending ‘the unnatural and artificial union of the sexes’ in marriage, the Owenites during the 1830s built a political programme around co-operation and a moral sense of value based on labour-time and just transfer rather than ‘the doctrine of wages’. This led to the establishment of a series of co-operative shops in London and Brighton, ‘labour exchanges’ for the direct marketing of goods, trade unions to advance the cause of labour, and a network of Halls of Science (under the banner of the Association of All Classes of All Nations) to nurture all men in the ways of socialism, fellowship and reason. One of the largest and most active branches, with 440 members and a purpose-built Hall of Science, was first of all in Salford and then, as interest in socialism surged across the north-west, relocated in 1840 to grander premises in Manchester's Campfield. The French critic Léon Faucher remembered it as

  an immense building, raised exclusively by the savings of the mechanics and artisans, at a cost of £7,000, and which contains a lecture-hall – the finest and most spacious in the town. It is tenanted by the disciples of Mr Owen. In addition to Sunday lectures upon the doctrines of Socialism, they possess a day and Sunday-school, and increase the number of their adherents by oratorios and festivals – by rural excursions, and by providing cheap and innocent recreation for the working classes… The large sums of money they raise, prove that they belong to the wealthier portion of the working classes. Their audiences on Sunday evenings are generally crowded.37

  Generous estimates put Manchester's ‘socialist community’ at 8–10,000 during the 1840s with an impressive 3,000 filling the hall on Sunday evenings – Friedrich Engels amongst them. Seated huggermugger with the respectable working classes, what struck this Fabrikant heir most forcefully was the British operatives’ articulacy in contrast to the drunken Barmen artisans. ‘At first one cannot get over one's surprise on hearing in the Hall of Science the most ordinary workers speaking with a clear understanding on political, religious and social affairs.’38 Indeed, he had often heard ‘working men, whose fustian jackets scarcely held together, speak upon geological, astronomical and other subjects, with more knowledge than most “cultivated” bourgeois in Germany possess’. This was, he thought, the product of their avaricious literary culture with Rousseau, Voltaire and Paine all firm favourites amongst Manchester's working but not middle classes. ‘Byron and Shelley are read almost exclusively by the lower classes; no “respectable” person could have the works of the latter on his desk without his coming into the most terrible disrepute.’39

  As with so many variants of socialism, this new religion of humanity subsumed into its practices – often abetted by former Methodists – the rites and rituals of Christian worship. ‘In their form, these meetings partly resemble church gatherings; in the gallery a choir accompanied by an orchestra sings social hymns,’ noted Engels admiringly. ‘These consist of semi-religious or wholly religious melodies with communist words, during which the audience stands.’ However, the sermons were of an altogether higher quality than the rantings of Krummacher. ‘Then, quite nonchalantly, without removing his hat, a lecturer comes on to the platform… and then sits down and delivers his address, which usually gives much occasion for laughter, for in those speeches the English intellect expresses itself in superabundant humour.’ At other times the Owenite gatherings seemed to resemble simple forums for working- and lower-middle-class socializing with Sunday evening parties ‘of the usual supper of tea and sandwiches; on working days dances and concerts are often held in the hall, where people have a very jolly time’.40 All of which sounds refreshingly like an old-fashioned Labour Party social.

  Once in a while a crowd-puller would be booked. In late 1843 it was the celebrated mesmerist Spencer Hall who, to a sceptical audience of materialist Owenites, ‘undertook magnetico-phrenological performances with a young woman in order to prove thereby the existence of God, the immortality of the soul, and the incorrectness of materialism, which was being preached at that time by the Owenites in all big towns’. Engels was clearly gripped by the demonstration and, on returning from the hall, attempted to conduct a similar experiment in this pseudo-science for himself. ‘A wide-awake young boy twelve years old offered himself as subject. Gently gazing into his eyes, or stroking, sent him without difficulty into the hypnotic condition… Apart from muscular rigidity and loss of sensation, which were easy to produce, we found also a state of complete passivity of the will bound up with a peculiar hypersensitivity of sensation.’ However, the co-founder of dialectical materialism was not easily fooled by such hocus-pocus. ‘… we discovered in the great toe an organ of drunkenness which only had to be touched in order to cause the fi
nest drunken comedy to be enacted. But it must be well understood, no organ showed a trace of action until the patient was given to understand what was expected of him; the boy soon perfected himself by practice to such an extent that the merest indication sufficed.’41

  Of greater intellectual value was the Owenite lecturer John Watts. A ribbon weaver and former assistant secretary of the Coventry Mechanics' Institute, Watts was an Owenite missionary and fierce critic of political economy. Engels would learn much from this ‘outstanding man’ and his moral critique of competition. ‘The nature of trade is evil,’ Watts wrote in his influential tract, The Facts and Fictions of Political Economists (1842), ‘and to it more than to aught else, we owe what we have of natural depravity.’ The capitalist system of values and money wages – themselves based on the force and fraud, the appropriation and accumulation of the marketplace – was the root cause of the economic crisis gripping industrial Britain. It sought to deny the truth that ‘labour is the source of all wealth’. Watts's solution was to return to a form of pre-industrial, co-operative system of exchange – ‘i.e., a fixed return for labour, a return in kind, a certain and invariable proportion of the produce’. At the same time, contra Adam Smith, he railed against the deadening effects of the division of labour (‘it cannot admit of long question, whether the clipping of the wire, or the pointing or heading of a pin, be fit employment for the life of a rational being’) and the hideous state of factory life – ‘Is this condition so much better than that of the negroes, that it deserves no exhibition of philanthropy, that it demands no sympathy? Yet the tendency of our Political Economy in the doctrine of wages, is to perpetuate this state of things.’42