Despite the warm words, Engels's sermonizing brought him to the unwelcome attention of the authorities. The mayor of Elberfeld threatened to withdraw the licence of any hotel-keeper who provided a further meeting venue, and immediately despatched a letter to the Rhineland president, Freiherr von Spiegel-Borlinghausen, recounting the subversive communist debates and pinpointing Hess and Engels as the ringleaders. The mayor noted Engels's trips to England and France, which had provided the foundations of his communism, and described him as ‘the eldest son of the highly esteemed father, the businessman Friedrich Engels senior’.32 The security services were also on to him.
‘Friedrich Engels of Barmen is a quite reliable man, but he has a son who is a rabid communist and wanders about as a man of letters; it is possible that his name is Frederick,’ noted a police report to the Ministry of Interior.33 On the basis of such intelligence the Prussian interior minister, von Arnin-Boytzenburg, issued a decree from Berlin banning all future communist meetings in Elberfeld-Barmen.
The unfortunate travails of Engels senior and his disreputable son were soon the talk of polite Barmen society. One Wuppertal notable, Georg Gottfried Gervinus, remarked on the looming perils of communist indoctrination in a letter to his friend Otto Freiherr von Ruten-berg. He used Engels as stark evidence ‘of how they are reeling in a young merchant over to philosophy, a young merchant who is independent and wealthy and completely fanatical, the son of a family from Barmen. I know him and… the father is very unhappy about his experience with his son; he told me: “You can't imagine how much this grieves a father: first my father endowed the Protestant parish in Barmen, then I built a church and now my son is tearing it down.” – I replied: “That's the story of our times.” ’34
Engels's father was indeed furious with his son's political activities – ‘my public appearance as a communist has fostered in him bourgeois fanaticism of truly splendid proportions’ – and his avowed intention not to continue in the family firm. In response, he curtailed Engels's allowance, leaving the aspirant revolutionary ‘leading a real dog's life’ moping around the house.35 ‘He is now at terrible variance with his family,’ Engels's Bradford friend George Weerth reported to his mother, ‘he is considered godless and impious, and the rich father will not give his son another pfennig for his keep.’36 So Engels retreated to his study to work on The Condition of the Working Class in England during the autumn of 1844. Even that aroused suspicion. ‘If I sit in my room and work – communism, of course, as they know – the same expression.’ But such was his devotion to Marx – then scrabbling together an exile's living in Brussels, having been deported from Paris as a political undesirable – he promised his new friend the book's fee. Catching wind of police plans to have him arrested and keen not to embarrass his parents any further in the eyes of the Barmen bourgeoisie, Engels decided to join Marx. It was a symbolic rupturing of family ties: by the time he stepped across the Belgian border in spring 1845, it was clear he would not easily be allowed back into Prussia – even for Marie's wedding to Emil. ‘As you know, of all my brothers and sisters, I loved you the best and you were the one in whom I always had most confidence,’ he wrote to his disappointed ‘goose’ in May 1845.37 It was to be the first of many future instances placing the communist cause above the call of family and friends.
No sooner had he met up with Marx than the two of them left Belgium for a study trip to England. Engels reacquainted himself with Mary Burns (who would return with them to the continent), while Marx continued his studies in political economy. When the two young communists were not touring the industrial sores of Manchester, they spent their days boning up on the works of various liberal economists and official government publications. Their favoured reading spot was a bay window seat in Manchester's seventeenth-century Chetham's Library, whose 100,000 volumes they plundered for political and social data. ‘In the last few days I have often been sitting at the quadrilateral desk in the small bow window where we sat 24 years ago,’ Engels wrote to Marx in 1870. ‘I like this place very much; because of its coloured window the weather is always fine there.’38 The thick oak desk and stained-glass window are still there as they were in the 1840s, now encircled by the youthful bustle of the Chetham School of Music and overlooked by the skyscrapers, hotels and cranes of corporate Manchester. Today, the library acts as a popular shrine for communist pilgrims seeking some kind of direct, physical connection to the founding fathers. According to one tour guide, ‘Whenever I bring people from the Chinese consulate here and get out the old books that Marx and Engels touched, they weep.’39
This time Marx and Engels didn't stay long in Britain and were back in Belgium by late summer 1845. The following months proved amongst the happiest the two spent together: living side by side in neighbouring Brussels apartments with their respective partners, they debated, laughed and drank long into the night. ‘When I informed my wife of your very philosophical system of writing in couples till 3 or 4 o'clock in the morning, she protested that such philosophy would not suit her,’ the Chartist Julian Harney joked to Engels in March 1846, ‘and that if she was in Brussels she would get up a “pronunciamento” amongst your wives…’40 Brussels offered Engels the opportunity to devote himself entirely to socialism. There was no prospect of huckstering in Belgium – instead, intoxicating evenings were spent in the bars with Marx, Moses Hess, George Weerth (who was delighted to exchange Bradford for Brussels), Stephan Born, the poet Ferdinand Freiligrath and the journalist Karl Heinzen. Firmly left out of the circle was the Russian aristocrat and future anarchist, Michael Bakunin, who described to his friend Georg Herwegh how ‘The Germans, those craftsmen Bornstedt, Marx, and Engels – especially Marx – are plotting their usual mischief here. Vanity, malice, squabbles, theoretical intolerance and practical cowardice, endless theorizing about life, activity, and simplicity, and in practice a total absence of life, action, or simplicity… The single word bourgeois has become an epithet which they repeat ad nauseam, though they themselves are ingrained bourgeois from head to foot.’41
There was one minor social difficulty in this otherwise gregarious émigré scene: ‘the small English woman from Manchester’, in George Weerth's words. Described in correspondence of the period as either Engels's ‘mistress’ or ‘wife’, Mary Burns was clearly not to everyone's taste. Some socialists harboured an ideological objection to her relationship with Engels and resented the wealthy mill owner's son parading his proletarian lover through the salons of Brussels. According to Stephan Born, it was ‘over confident of Engels to bring his mistress into this circle, which was frequented primarily by workers, thus invoking the accusation often made against rich sons of factory owners: namely, that they know how to draw the daughters of the common people into the service of their friends. Noblesse oblige.’42 But it wasn't just Mary. Engels had a habit of introducing his other lovers – good-time girls amongst whom a ‘Mademoiselle Josephine’ and ‘Mademoiselle Felicie’ featured prominently – into the socialist circle. It was not a practice that Jenny Marx, daughter of the high-ranking Baron Ludwig von Westphalen and herself something of a blue-stocking, ever felt comfortable with. The Marxes, in the words of Max Beer, ‘never in their heart of hearts regarded Engels and his female companions as their equals… Marx, one of the greatest revolutionists that ever lived, was in point of moral rectitude as conservative and punctilious as his Rabbinic forebears’.43 This Puritanism or snobbery or moral rectitude came to a head during one of the numerous gala evenings the socialists put on in Brussels, at which Engels arrived with his current paramour. Stephan Born was there.
Among those present were Marx and his wife and Engels and his… lady friend. The two couples were separated by a large room. When I approached Marx to greet him and his wife, he gave me a look and a meaningful smile that let me know that his wife strictly refused all contact with this… lady friend. The noble woman was intransigent when it came to honouring mores. If anyone had had the impertinence to demand of her that she make a concession
in this regard, she would have refused indignantly.44
Born recounted this scene many decades after the event and long after he had fallen out with both Marx and Engels, while Eleanor Marx, who was not there, always disputed what she called ‘the idiotic Brussels story’. ‘To begin with a person must have known my parents very little to ascribe to them the sleek-headed “morality” of the petit-bourgeois,’ she wrote in a long letter to Karl Kautsky after the death of Engels. ‘I know that occasionally the General [Engels] did turn up with queer acquaintances of the other sex, but, so far as I could ever learn, this only amused my mother, who had a rare sense of humour, and absolutely no middle-class hypocritical “propriety”.’45
Out of this tight-knit, sometimes tense social maelstrom something very great emerged: The German Ideology. This joint manuscript by Marx and Engels was another commercial flop – never published in their lifetimes and famously abandoned ‘to the gnawing criticism of the mice’ (eventually gaining a readership only in 1932) – but it did achieve its purpose of intellectual self-clarification. The book was a further step along the road from idealism to materialism and, with it, another conscious act of distancing themselves from their Young Hegelian heritage. Characteristically, this literary path was pursued through a tedious bludgeoning of ideological rivals – the thinker in their sights this time being the philosopher of egoism, Max Stirner. And, equally typically, the level of abuse he sustained was precisely commensurate with the intellectual debt which Marx and Engels owed him.
An influential member of Berlin's Young Hegelian fraternity, Stirner had been unconvinced by Ludwig Feuerbach's critique of Hegelianism. Feuerbach had suggested that idealistic philosophy, namely Hegelianism, was little better than Christian theology when it came to impoverishing man's spiritual state. Both demanded that man worship something outside of himself – be it the Hegelian Geist or the Christian God. The solution, according to Feuerbach, was for man to worship humanity: anthropology not theology was the answer. But Stirner thought Feuerbach had fallen into the same trap of which he had earlier accused Hegel. In fact, Feuerbach had simply joined Hegel in elevating another enslaving theophany in place of the Christian deity: in Hegel's case it was Spirit and in Feuerbach's, ‘Man with a capital M’. ‘The HUMAN religion is only the last metamorphosis of the Christian religion,’ in Stirner's judgement. By contrast, Stirner's 1845 book The Ego and Its Own advocated an absolute, self-conscious egoism completely free of any of the alienating effects of devotion to God, Man, Spirit or State. It was a supremely solipsistic, atheistic and ultimately nihilistic ethos in which the egoist ‘does not look upon himself as a tool of the idea or a vessel of God, he recognizes no calling, he does not fancy that he exists for the further development of mankind and that he must contribute his mite to it, but he lives himself out, careless of how well or ill humanity may fare thereby’.46 While Marx and Engels had no time for Stirner's advocacy of personal rebellion or the ahistoric nature of his individual man, their materialist inclinations were bolstered by his critique of Feuerbach's humanistic philosophy as little better than updated religion. As Engels explained in a rather strained letter to Marx, ‘We must take our departure from the Ego, the empirical, flesh-and-blood individual, if we are not, like Stirner, to remain stuck at this point but rather proceed to raise ourselves to “man”… In short we must take our departure from empiricism and materialism if our concepts, and notably our “man”, are to be something real; we must deduce the general from the particular, not from itself or, à la Hegel, from thin air.’47
This materialist ambition underpinned The German Ideology, which spelled out for the first time how Marx and Engels regarded social structures as the product of economic and technological forces. Each stage of production, from the primitive communism of early man to classical slavery to medieval feudalism to the industrial capitalism of the nineteenth century, was revealed in different ‘forms of intercourse’ in society – most notably, the property system, and in its wake social class, political forms, religion, even cultural movements. As Marx later put it, ‘Social relations are closely bound up with productive forces. In acquiring new productive forces men change their mode of production; and in changing their mode of production, in changing the way of earning their living, they change all their social relations. The hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill society with the industrial capitalist.’48
And nowhere more so than when it came to the state which was simply ‘the form in which the individuals of a ruling class assert their common interests, and in which the whole civil society of an epoch is epitomized’. This materialist interpretation of history suggested that each civilization was ultimately an expression of the modes of production which moulded it: the political and ideological superstructure was determined by the economic base as mediated through property forms, so-called ‘relations of production’. ‘The production of ideas, of conceptions, of consciousness, is at first directly interwoven with the material activity and the material intercourse of men… It is not consciousness that determines life, but life that determines consciousness.’49 However, at a certain stage of development (e.g., the rising bourgeoisie during the English Civil War clashing with the medieval monarchy of King Charles I), the material forces of production come into conflict with existing property relations and their accompanying political, social and ideological superstructure – and then the moment is ripe for revolution. When the political systems were out of kilter with the economic fundamentals, then the former would have to readjust themselves to the latter in a series of often painful transformations. None of which meant that political change was either spontaneous or automatic. Given the opposition of the ruling elite, progress had to be fought for through political organizations, mass movements and practical agitation. Neither the 1650s English Commonwealth nor the 1790s Paris Commune was handed over willingly. ‘A revolution is necessary, therefore, not only because the ruling class cannot be overthrown in any other way,’ Marx and Engels explained, ‘but also because the class overthrowing it can succeed only by revolution in getting rid of all the traditional muck and become capable of establishing society anew.’50
For the first time, The German Ideology made plain that the historic driver of such epochal shifts was class struggle and, in the context of the industrialized 1840s, it fell to the new proletarian class to instigate the coming revolution and usher in a communist future which promised not only their liberation, but a change in the entire human condition. As competition and private property gave way to communism ‘the alienation between men and their products’ would dissolve as men regained ‘control of exchange, production and the mode of their mutual relationships’. In contrast to capitalist society, where the division of labour forces each man into ‘a particular, exclusive sphere of activity’, in the promised communist future ‘where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have a mind without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, cowboy or critic’.51 But somehow this enviable future needed to be ushered in.
‘The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it,’ Marx had declared in his 1845 Theses on Feuerbach, and the vehicle which he and Engels alighted on for delivering this change was the League of the Just (Bund der Gerechten). Founded in Paris in the 1830s, the league was part of an underground communist society run by émigré German tailors whose political inspiration could be traced back to the radical egalitarianism of ‘Gracchus’ Baboeuf during the French Revolution. In 1839 they collaborated with Louis-Auguste Blanqui in a doomed uprising which saw Blanqui jailed while other leaders of the league crossed the English Channel in search of political asylum. ‘I came to know all three of them in London in 1843,’ Engels later recalled of t
he exiled leadership in his history of the Communist League. The most impressive was Karl Schapper – ‘of gigantic stature, resolute and energetic, always ready to risk civil existence and life, he was a model of the professional revolutionary’.52 Schapper, the shoemaker Heinrich Bauer and the watchmaker Joseph Moll – ‘these three real men’ – established the German Workers’ Educational Society in February 1840 in Great Windmill Street, Soho, as a front organization for the league. Most likely because of their continuing link to the Blanquists – and, with it, a futile belief in plots, conspiracies and putsches – Engels declined to join the league in 1843, but he and Marx did hold a series of meetings with them during their 1845 trip to England as part of an attempt to develop an international society of socialists or ‘Fraternal Democrats’. Back in Brussels, this work was pursued with the establishment of a German Workers’ Association and a Communist Correspondence Committee to co-ordinate socialist agitation and worker education across Europe. The league was to act as the recognized English arm of the movement.
Politically, the immediate aim of the Communist Correspondence Committee was the furtherance of democracy and, with it, the dissolution of ancien régime monarchies. ‘Democracy nowadays is communism: democracy has become the proletarian principle, the principle of the masses,’ Engels explained.53 Democracy would ultimately and inevitably lead to the political rule of the proletariat and thence to communism. Indeed, the winning of suffrage rights would itself constitute a revolutionary event. ‘Communism and communists were not binding words,’ recalled Stephan Born (one of the founding members of the Committee), ‘indeed, people hardly talked about them. Much more pertinent was the increasingly significant movement to reform electoral law in France.’54 To destroy feudalism and head towards a democratic state, an alliance with the middle class was an uncomfortable necessity. ‘To overthrow the nobility, another class is required, with wider interests, greater property and more determined courage: the bourgeoisie.’55 From 1845 to the revolutions of 1848, Marx and Engels were unshakeable in their support for the establishment (by force if necessary) of bourgeois power and liberal democracy as a way stage to communism. There could be no overnight dictatorship of the proletariat – instead, a long process of political engagement which would see socialist commitment to a bourgeois-democratic revolution as a stepping stone towards communism. ‘In a party one must support everything which helps towards progress, and have no truck with any tedious moral scruples,’ the party leaders declared in almost Stalinist terms.56 However, the bourgeoisie need not get too comfortable with this alliance. As Engels warned on the eve of 1848, ‘So just fight bravely on, most gracious masters of capital! We need you for the present; here and there we even need you as rulers. You have to clear the vestiges of the middle ages and of absolute monarchy out of our path… In recompense whereof you shall be allowed to rule for a short time… – but do not forget that “The hangman stands at the door!” ’57
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