Despite their undoubted strength within Manchester, by the late 1830s the Owenites were a waning force in national working-class politics. Their place had been taken by the Chartists with their easily understood, six-point demand: universal manhood suffrage, secret ballots, annual elections, equally populated constituencies, payment of MPs and the abolition of the minimum property requirement for MPs. In contrast to the Utopian ambitions of the Owenites, the Charter was a practical attempt to find a political solution to the working-class condition and found its warmest reception in Lancashire, where the Manchester Political Union organized torchlight marches and ‘monster rallies’ on Kersal Moor – the so-called ‘Mons Sacer’ of Chartism. In September 1838 some 30,000 turned out under their trade union banners to hear the Chartist leader Feargus O'Connor declaim that ‘universal franchise’ is ‘the only principle which can stop the flowing of human blood… You will never be represented until every man is entrusted with that which nature has imprinted in the breast of every man, namely, the power of self-defence as implied in the vote of every individual.’43 But such popular shows of force served only to heighten Establishment trepidation towards Chartism and in 1839 and again in 1842 their petitions were rejected by the House of Commons. In turn, such obvious contempt radicalized Chartist opinion, sparked a move away from middle-class alliances and a vociferous internal debate as to the merits of moral versus physical force. The 1842 Plug Plot riots were, in one sense, a wilful expression of this political impotence.
Nevertheless, Engels had few doubts as to Chartism's significance. Whilst modern interpretations tend to place weight on Chartism as an outgrowth of radical eighteenth-century politics which presaged demands for political transparency and a moral economy, to Engels's eyes it was ‘a class movement’ pure and simple which encapsulated the working-class ‘collective consciousness’.44 And he wanted to learn as much from it as possible. He gained two introductions to the movement: the first through Chartism's enfant terrible, George Julian Harney, who stood firmly on the physical force wing of the party and enjoyed riling his conservative comrades by flaunting the red cap of liberty at public meetings. In and out of jail, endlessly feuding with fellow Chartists and ultimately expelled from the party, the Robespierre-admiring Harney remained convinced that insurrection was the surest route to the Charter.45 Decades later he remembered how Engels – ‘a tall, handsome young man, with a countenance of almost boyish youthfulness’ – had sought him out at his Leeds office; ‘He told me he was a constant reader of The Northern Star [the Chartist paper] and took a keen interest in the Chartist movement. Thus began our friendship…’46 As ever with Marx and Engels, the friendship would prove rocky, but it lasted - through an intermittent correspondence - for half a century, during which Harney provided one of the more damning responses to the condition of Manchester: ‘I am not surprised to find you expressing your disgust at Manchester,’ he wrote to Engels in 1850. ‘It is a damned dirty den of muckworms. I would rather be hanged in London than die a natural death in Manchester.’47
Engels's other main contact was the Manchester hand-loom weaver turned Chartist activist, James Leach. Before being elected as South Lancashire's delegate to the National Charter Association, Leach, according to Engels, ‘worked for years in various branches of industry, in mills and coal-mines, and is known to me personally as an honest, trustworthy, and capable man’.48 He was also regarded as a ‘terror, not only to the cotton lords, but every other humbug’ – a reputation ably justified with his anonymous 1844 polemic, Stubborn Facts from the Factories. Dedicated to ‘the working classes’, it was a first-hand indictment of the nefarious practices deployed by mill owners, from wage robbery to fining pregnant women for sitting down to manipulating clocks to enforced prostitution. Much of this evidence would find its way into Engels's book – as well as the insight that the modern state was merely a front for bourgeois class interests. ‘The working classes will ever look upon this [the state] as no better than a brigand system, that thus allows the employers to assume a power over the Law, and by their nefarious plotting, first create what they are pleased to term offences, and then punish them. They are both law makers, judges, and jurors.’49 As Marx and Engels would later put it in the Communist Manifesto, ‘The executive of the modern State is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.’50
Despite these close friendships and his own personal enthusiasm for working-class Chartism, Engels did not think the solution to Britain's crisis lay with the six points. First of all their socialism, in contrast to the advanced ideas on the continent (amongst the Fourierists, Saint-Simonians or Hess and his circle) was ‘very little developed’, but more importantly, ‘social evils cannot be cured by People's Charters’.51 Something altogether more fundamental than democratic tinkering was required. It was a sentiment majestically enunciated by another British mentor to the young Engels, Thomas Carlyle.
Sage, polemicist and reactionary, Carlyle was the only British intellectual whom Engels really admired. Perhaps it was his Germano-philia. His earliest work, as a critic for the Edinburgh Review, had been a translation of Johann Paul Richter, and from there he went on to immerse himself in the work of Goethe (with whom he corresponded regularly), Schiller and Herder, acting as a kind of cultural bridge bringing German Romanticism to a British audience. In doing so, Carlyle was drawn to contrast the miserable state of industrial England with its romantic and medieval forebears before mournfully concluding that ‘This is not a Religious age. Only the material, the immediately practical, not the divine and spiritual, is important to us.’52 The nineteenth century was ‘the mechanical age’ in which the social bonds which traditionally connected man to man had fallen apart in the quest for material riches. ‘We call it a Society; and go about professing openly the totalest separation, isolation. Our life is not a mutual helpfulness; but rather, cloaked under due laws-of-war, named “fair competition” and so forth, it is a mutual hostility. We have profoundly forgotten everywhere that Cash-payment is not the sole relation of human beings.’53 Which was why demands for the Charter and other political quick fixes – which Carlyle dismissed as ‘Morrison's Pills’ after a voguish quack doctor of the day – would make no real difference to the so-called ‘condition of England’ question (as to the social effects of industrialization). The solution, for Carlyle, was a combination of renewed religiosity and heroic, dictatorial leadership: on the walls of his Cheyne Row drawing room, he gave pride of place to portraits of Oliver Cromwell and Martin Luther's parents.
‘We too are concerned with combating the lack of principle, the inner emptiness, the spiritual deadness, the untruthfulness of the age,’ responded Engels (still then aligning himself with the radical wing of the Young Hegelians) in a review of Carlyle's contrast of medieval and modern Britain, Past and Present. However, religion, the opium of the people, was certainly not the answer. ‘We want to put an end to atheism, as Carlyle portrays it, by giving back to man the substance he has lost through religion; not as divine but as human substance, and this whole process of giving back is no more than simply the awakening of self-consciousness.’54 Carlyle's defining weakness, according to Engels, was that he had read German literature but not philosophy; Goethe without Feuerbach got you only so far. Yet what Engels did admire about Carlyle was both his extraordinary prose style – ‘Carlyle treated the English language as though it were completely raw material which he had to cast utterly afresh’ – and his Olympian denunciation of the misery wrought by capitalist society.55
In The Condition of the Working Class, Engels used the same historical metaphors as Carlyle (contrasting the position of a factory hand unfavourably with that of a Saxon serf under the lash of a Norman baron; highlighting the hypocrisy of liberal ‘freedom’ which meant little more than liberty to die by starvation), the same official sources, and quoted ‘the sage of Chelsea’ generously. ‘The relation of the manufacturer to his operatives has nothing human in it; it is purely economic,’ Engel
s wrote in a chapter on industrial relations taken straight from the pages of Carlyle's epic denunciation of mechanical, industrial England, Signs of the Times. ‘The manufacturer is capital, the operative labour… he insists, as Carlyle says, that “cash payment is the only nexus between man and man”.’56
Carlyle's denunciations of ‘the mechanical age’, the Owenites’ call for moral renewal, the six points of the Charter, and Watts and Leach's attacks on competition were all instrumental to Engels's ideological evolution, but he was not in Manchester to read books. He was there to confront the reality of working-class life, to forsake ‘the company and the dinner-parties, the port-wine and champagne’ for the fellowship of ‘plain working men’. But who was to be the guide of this boyish German ingénu to the proletarian netherworld? One streetwalking companion was fellow socialist émigré George Weerth, then unhappily clerking in Bradford – ‘the most disgusting manufacturing town in England’. To his horror, Weerth had discovered that this woollen boom town had ‘no theatre, no social life, no decent hotel, no reading room, and no civilized human beings – only Yorkshire-men in torn frock coats, shabby hats and gloomy faces’. To escape the Yorkshire philistinism, he would set out across the Pennines to visit his ideological ally in Lancashire, where ‘during the days, I wandered about with my friend Engels, investigating the sprawling Manchester’.57 In addition, Engels had the personal attentions of a native of the city. Her name was Mary Burns – a vital consort to Manchester's undiscovered people and places and the first great love of Engels's life.
‘She was a very pretty, witty, and altogether charming girl… Of course, as she was a Manchester (Irish) factory girl, quite uneducated, though she could read, and write a little, but my parents… were very fond of her, and always spoke of her with the greatest affection.’58 Eleanor Marx's sketchy, second-hand, childhood memories are sadly some of the fullest accounts we have of Engels's Mary. Born sometime between April 1822 and January 1823 (perhaps in Eltoft Street, off Deansgate), Mary was the daughter of the Irish dyer and factory-hand Michael Burns, who came to Manchester in the 1820s and took Mary Conroy as his first wife. At the time of the 1841 census, Michael surfaces as the husband of his second wife, Mary Tuomey, and living in grim conditions just off Deansgate – but without his daughters Mary and Lydia (known as Lizzy) Burns. A decade on, Michael and the second Mrs Burns had been lost to the workhouse on New Bridge Street, after which he became just another Manchester mortality statistic for 1858.59 Mary, however, was prospering.
We know Engels met her in the early months of 1843, but there is much debate as to the exact nature of the encounter. With no obvious evidence, Edmund Wilson has asserted that Mary operated a ‘self-actor’ in the Ermen & Engels mill.60 Similarly, the socialist Max Beer, who met Engels in the 1890s, described how ‘he [Engels] lived, in free union, with an Irish girl of the people, Mary Burns, who had worked in his father's factory’.61 Heinrich Gemkow has more vaguely described Mary Burns ‘work[ing] in one of the city's many cotton factories’.62 However, Engels himself was never particularly complimentary about the quality of his father's female employees, ‘I do not remember to have seen one single tall, well-built girl; they were all short, dumpy, and badly-formed, decidedly ugly in the whole development of the figure.63 More probable, according to Roy Whitfield, is that Mary and Lizzy worked in a Manchester mill before then becoming domestic servants where they might have caught Engels's roving eye. Edmund and Ruth Frow, by contrast, have provided an altogether more romantic legend with Engels meeting Mary at a reception in the Owenite Hall of Science, where she was selling oranges.64 This certainly helps to explain (but just a little too easily) the nature of George Weerth's idiosyncratic poem ‘Mary’, which recounts in deliciously laboured verse the life of a vivacious young Fenian girl selling oranges on the Liverpool docks.
From Ireland with the tide she came,
She came from Tipperary;
Warm, impetuous blood in her vein,
The young lass, Mary.
And when she boldly sprang ashore,
A cry from the sailors arose:
‘The lass Mary, thank the Lord,
Is just like a wild rose!’65
The conjecture surrounding Mary is so varied because of the paucity of sources. She herself was illiterate and Engels later burned much of the correspondence from this period of his life. In addition, Engels was never especially keen to publicize his relationship with Mary – no missives to his ‘goose’ Marie about her namesake – as he had to retain both his own social position within Manchester and good relations with his censorious parents. Living in ‘free union’ with an illiterate Irish factory-hand could not be expected to further either objective. But there might also have been some sense of political embarrassment as to his own class status vis-á-vis Mary. For one of the many socialist charges laid against the cotton lords was their almost feudal exploitation of female workers. Engels himself touched upon it in the Condition. ‘It is, besides, a matter of course that factory servitude, like any other, and to an even higher degree, confers the ius primae noctis upon the master… his mill is also his harem.’66 Even if Mary was never or no longer an employee of Ermen & Engels, in socialist circles this kind of sexualized power relationship of proletariat with bourgeois, mill-hand with mill owner, was widely frowned upon.
Whatever the social niceties, Engels and Mary were in each other's arms over 1843–4. And while there was, as later letters testify, deep affection between them there was also, for Engels, a very helpful entrée into the dark continent of industrial Manchester. Taking him by the hand, Mary Burns acted as his underworld Persephone, profoundly enriching Engels's appreciation of capitalist society. ‘She introduced him to the life of the immigrant Irish community in Manchester,’ according to Roy Whitfield, ‘she escorted him on excursions through districts which would otherwise have been unsafe for any stranger to enter; she was a source of information about factory and domestic conditions endured by working people.67 Mary helped to provide Engels with the material reality for his communist theory.
Friedrich Engels's two worlds – of the mill owner and Mary Burns – profoundly influenced his journey from philosophy to political economy and, in turn, had a marked effect on the emergent shape of Marxism. Uniquely, Engels was able to fuse his real experience of industrial capitalism and working-class Chartist politics with the Young Hegelian tradition. ‘German Socialism and Communism have grown, more than any other, from theoretical premises,’ he noted censoriously. ‘We German theoreticians still knew much too little of the real world to be driven directly by the real conditions to reforms of this “bad reality”.’68 In a seminal 1843 article for the Deutsche-Franzosische Jahrbücher (Marx's latest newspaper), ‘Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy’, he showed the fruits of his Manchester experience by dropping the Berlin theorizing for a hard-headed empirical analysis of the economic contradictions and social crises coming Europe's way. His work first of all betrayed the impact of John Watts's lectures by its critique, in tellingly biblical terms, of competition and exchange value. ‘This political economy or science of enrichment born of the merchants' mutual envy and greed, bears on its brow the mark of the most detestable selfishness.’ However, capitalism was an all-consuming beast (‘all that is solid melts into air…’) which necessitated the continuing, unending expansion of the British economy or the prospect of a terrible fiscal crisis. This explained Britain's unquenchable thirst for colonies – ‘You have civilized the ends of the earth to win new terrain for the deployment of your vile avarice’ – and the by-product of accelerating domestic concentrations of wealth: ‘The middle classes must increasingly disappear until the world is divided into millionaires and paupers, into large landowners and poor farm labourers.’ All of which at some point had to come to a bloody, climactic contradiction.69
However, Engels's most remarkable ideological advance came when he applied the Young Hegelian notion of alienation – which Feuerbach had discussed solely in terms of r
eligious sentiments (‘Man… projects his essence into objectivity and then makes himself an object of this projected image of himself that is thus converted into a subject…’) – to the realm of political economy. For it wasn't just Christianity that demanded a denial of man's nature: competitive capitalism, through its systems of property, money and exchange, involved an equally disfiguring process of alienation from the authentic human essence. Under the aegis of political economy, man was divorced from himself and became the slave of things. ‘Through this theory we have come to know the deepest degradation of mankind, their dependence on the conditions of competition. It has shown us how in the last instance private property has turned man into a commodity whose production and destruction also depend solely on demand…’70 This was an insight garnered not only from Feuerbach and Hess, but from watching the thousands hunting for work outside the mill gates of Ancoats, condemned to poverty by the slightest fluctuation in world markets.
Frock-Coated Communist Page 12
