Frock-Coated Communist

by Hunt, Tristram

  Engels's other pursuits were noticeably less savage. ‘Everyone up here is an art lover just now and the talk is all of the pictures at the exhibition,’ he wrote to Marx in the summer of 1857, having visited the celebrated Art Treasures Exhibition at Trafford Park and fallen for Titian's portrait of Ariosto. ‘S'il y a moyen, you and your wife ought to come up this summer and see the thing.’88 As a leading Manchester merchant, his was a sophisticated, high-bourgeois lifestyle of galleries, dinners, clubs, charitable events and networking focused on the respectable German quarter near to his Thorncliffe Grove and Dover Street residences. Manchester had been a Mecca for Prussian merchants since the 1780s and by 1870 there were some 150 German business houses operating in the city. The 1851 census recorded 1,000 persons of German birth as resident and the most elevated of this community congregated nightly at the Schiller Anstalt along Oxford Street.89 Engels himself had attended the original Schiller Festival in 1859 – commemorating the centenary of Friedrich Schiller's birth – with its concert of Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Schiller readings and Mozart directed by Manchester's most celebrated German resident, Charles Hallé, in the Free Trade Hall. The Anstalt, or Institute, was set up after the concert to give the German community a club for socializing and a little bit of cultural comfort from the homeland. By the mid-1860s it boasted 300 members, a 4,000-volume library, a skittle alley and billiard room, a gymnasium, a well-stocked reading room and a prodigiously busy calendar of events from male-voice choir concerts to public lecture series to amateur dramatics productions. Engels joined in 1861 and immediately fell out with the management over a book recall notice from the librarian. ‘When I had read this missive, it was as though I had been suddenly transported home.’ And not for the right reasons. ‘It was as though, instead of a communication from the Librarian of the Schiller Institute, I were holding a peremptory summons from a German inspector of police ordering me, on pain of a heavy penalty, to make amends for some kind of violation “within 24 hours”.’90 For Engels, the victim of any number of police summons, an innocent library fine was altogether too reminiscent of the Prussian state.

  Overdue notices didn't keep him away for long and he soon entered enthusiastically into the Schiller Anstalt circle, was elected on to the governing body and finally made chairman. He proved himself a good committee man, introducing beer into the directors' meetings, chairing numerous subcommittees and successfully overseeing the purchase of 6,000 volumes from the Manchester Subscription Library.91 These negotiations concerned Engels greatly since, ‘to be “done” in business, to get yourself “sold” is naturally here the worst thing that can happen to you. Now it is a great triumph and gives me the opportunity I wanted to withdraw with honour from official participation in the affair…’92 But the following year Engels was out altogether after the Anstalt extended an invitation to the science popularizer Karl Vogt. Unbeknownst to them, Vogt featured prominently on Marx and Engels's extensive blacklist as a suspected Bonapartist spy and Engels immediately resigned.

  Luckily, he had a number of other institutions to patronize. Together with Samuel Moore, he was a member of the Albert Club, ‘christened appropriately after the husband of our most gracious Queen’. Renowned for its smoking room – ‘we believe it to be, without exception, the best room of the kind in Manchester’ – the club housed an equally impressive array of card rooms, private dining rooms and billiard tables. The names of Schaub, Schreider, von Lindelof and Konig pointed to its 50 per cent German membership.93 In 1858 Engels put his clerking colleague from Ermen & Engels Charles Roesgen up for membership. In addition, Engels belonged to the Athenaeum, the Brazenose Club, the Manchester Foreign Library and even the Royal Exchange. ‘So now you're a member of the Exchange, and altogether respectable. My congratulations,’ Marx wrote with a light pasting of sarcasm. ‘Some time I should like to hear you howling amidst that pack of wolves.’94 Despite this busy calendar of lectures, dinners and concerts, Engels always remained pained by the provincialism of Manchester life. ‘For six months past I have not had a single opportunity to make use of my acknowledged gift for mixing a lobster salad – quelle horreur; it makes one quite rusty,’ spoke the original champagne communist.95

  By the mid-1850s the workload combined with Jekyll-and-Hyde double life was beginning to test even Engels's endurance. ‘I now have three lads to keep in control and am forever checking, correcting, telling off and giving orders,’ he complained to Marx in 1856. ‘Add to this the running battle with manufacturers over bad yarn or late delivery, and my own work.’ The mountain of arrears, business queries and competing demands of his father and Gottfried Ermen meant that Engels was having ‘to slave away in the office until 8 o'clock each evening and can't start work till 10 o'clock, after supper’. His journalism was suffering, attempts at learning Russian falling behind and socialist theorizing non-existent. ‘This summer things have got to be re-organized,’ he announced in March 1857.96 Yet that was the very moment Marx decided to pile on the pressure by accepting a ridiculous, if lucrative, contract to contribute to Charles Dana's latest publishing scheme, The New American Cyclopaedia. Engels was, of course, delighted with the money – ‘now everything is going to be alright again’ – but he was the one who would have to do the legwork. By early summer 1857 Engels's body was giving way. ‘I'm sitting at home with linseed poultices on the left-hand side of my face in the hope of getting the better of a nasty abscess… I have had continual trouble with my face for the past month – first toothache, then a swollen cheek, then more toothache and now the whole thing has blossomed out into a furuncle.’ By mid-summer he was suffering from exhaustion and full-blown glandular fever (a worrying development in Victorian England) and being nursed by his sister Marie in London. ‘I'm one of your really miserable figures, stooped, lame and weak and – for example as at present – beside myself with pain.’97 And what was Marx's response to his friend's debilitating illness? ‘As you will understand, nothing could be more distasteful to me than TO PRESS UPON YOU while you are ill,’ but he needed the Cyclopaedia articles and sharpish. It was only when Engels suffered a total collapse that Marx eased up on the demands. ‘The chief thing for you at present is naturally to recover your health. I shall have to see how I can put Dana off again,’ he wrote sheepishly in July 1857.

  It would be wrong to suggest that Marx did not care about Engels's health. Indeed, discussions of illness, medication, therapies and doctors often comprised the most detailed and impassioned section of their correspondence. Like any good hypochondriac, the two of them positively revelled in their ailments. ‘How are things in regard to “coughing”?’ was an early enquiry when Marx learned of Engels's deterioration. After pursuing some ‘meticulous medical studies’ in the British Museum (always keen to put off the writing of Das Kapital if at all possible), he asked him to ‘let me know whether you are taking iron. In cases such as yours, as in many others, iron has proved stronger than the affliction.’98 Engels was unconvinced and replied with a lengthy disquisition on the merits of iron versus cod-liver oil – before revealing a personal preference for the Norwegian variety. But this was the exception: most times it was Marx who demanded the lion's share of medical advice on account of a persistent strain of psychosomatic illnesses (from liver complaints to headaches to insomnia) as well as his all-too-real struggle against the boils that took apart his body like landmines. A small hint of the miseries Marx went through is given in an 1866 letter to Engels when the carbuncles had encircled his crotch: ‘The itching and scratching between my testis and posterior over the past 2½ years and the consequent peeling of the skin have been more aggravating to my constitution than anything else,’ he revealed with just a tad too much information. Marx's preferred remedy was to go at every eruption with a razor until the blood and pus spurted forth. Engels advocated a less invasive strategy involving phosphate of lime – or, at least some arsenic. He even brought in advice from a new friend he had made in Manchester, the paediatrician Edward Gumpert, who ‘has used it
[arsenic] in one case of carbuncles and one of very virulent furunculosis and achieved a complete cure in approximately 3 months’.99

  Engels's own recovery from glandular fever came less from medical alleviation than the economic crash ripping through Manchester in 1857. Seeing Peter Ermen and the other tree-frogs fouling their breeches as cotton prices tumbled was just the tonic. ‘The general appearance of the Exchange here was truly delightful last week. The fellows are utterly infuriated by my sudden and inexplicable onset of high spirits.’100 However, he was still fragile and the death in March 1860 of his father sent him into a relapse. What affected Engels was not so much the loss – his filial affection being notably tepid – but the ensuing family dispute over the Ermen & Engels finances. For Gottreid Ermen wasted no time in trying to lever Engels junior out of the firm. Relations quickly broke down at the Southgate office as Engels tried desperately to negotiate his future and hold on to his job. Up against the wily skills of Ermen, ‘while physically so indisposed that I was incapable of making one single urgent decision in a sound frame of mind and with faculties unimpaired’, he knew he would be unable to secure a decent settlement. Humiliatingly, he called in his brother Emil – ‘clear of eye, firm of resolve and in full command of the situation’ – to do the deal.101

  However, whilst securing his English prospects, his brothers Rudolf and Hermann seized the moment when their mother fell ill with a suspected case of typhoid to carve Engels, the eldest son and heir, out of the more lucrative family business in Engelskirchen. ‘For seven weeks now I've been living in a state of continual tension and excitation which has now reached a climax – never has it been so bad,’ he wrote to Marx in May 1860.102 Outmanoeuvred by his own brothers, Engels agreed to a wholly inequitable settlement – forcing him to cede all rights to the German component of Ermen & Engels – just to please his ailing mother. ‘Mother dear, I have swallowed all this and much more for your sake. Not for anything in this world would I contribute in the smallest way towards embittering the evening of your life with family disputes over inheritance,’ her first-born wrote lovingly. ‘I might acquire a hundred other businesses, but never a second mother.’ But he wanted her to know that ‘it was extremely disagreeable for me to have to withdraw from the family business in this way’.103 What Engels walked away with, in exchange for his brothers placing £10,000 in the Manchester firm, was a commitment to a partnership in Ermen & Engels by 1864. Given his enfeebled state, it was all he could hope for.

  Incredibly, between housing the Burns sisters, clerking at Ermen & Engels and riding to the Cheshire Hounds, Engels did manage to make some significant contributions to the Marxist canon, beginning with ‘historical materialism’. For Engels, this approach to studying the past – in which, as The German Ideology had first outlined, modes of production determined property relations and thence the broader contours of society – was one of Marx's seminal achievements. Marx had discovered, Engels wrote, ‘the great law of motion of history’: ‘that the whole of history hitherto is a history of class struggles, that in all the manifold and complicated political struggles the only thing at issue has been the social and political rule of classes of society’; and consequently that ‘the conception and ideas of each historical period are most simply to be explained from the economic conditions of life and from the social and political relations of the period, which are in turn determined by these economic conditions’.104 Or, as Marx himself put it in his Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, ‘The mode of production in material life determines the social, political and intellectual life processes in general… It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.’105 All of which helped to explain the phenomenon of false consciousness (‘a consciousness that is spurious’) whereby the true, materialist motives behind a political or intellectual shift in history – the Reformation, say, or Romanticism – were wrongly attributed to the autonomous role of ideas or religion rather than the indelible result of socioeconomic forces. Similarly, to analyse political economy without revealing the true nature of exploitation, as Adam Smith and David Ricardo had, amounted to a partial understanding, a false consciousness of the present derived from a failure to delve below the political superstructure of ideas to the materialist base of society.

  In The German Ideology, Marx and Engels had dissected capitalist society through a materialist lens. Now they turned their attentions to the past, arguing that it was a period's economic condition (the base) – its levels of technology, division of labour, means of production, etc. – that moulded its law, ideologies, religion, even art and science (the superstructure). Certainly, historical actors as lone individuals had free will and could still make choices. But what Marx and Engels were concerned with was mass phenomena and social change as the product of numerous individual decisions defined by structural economic conditions. ‘The will is determined by passion or deliberation. But the levers which immediately determine passion or deliberation are of very different kinds.’ Marx, again, had the more vivid phrasing. ‘Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please,’ he wrote in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, ‘they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly found, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.’106 Marx and Engels did away with Carlyle's ‘great man’ view of history for ‘the fact that such and such a man, and he alone, should arise at a particular time in any given country, is, of course, purely fortuitous’.107 In the absence of a Napoleon, someone else would simply have taken his place. Instead, class and class warfare (master/slave, lord/serf, capitalist/worker) – themselves products of historical phases in the development of the modes of production – became the defining prism for Marxist historiography. As Hegel had traced the march of Spirit through the pages of history, now Marx and Engels charted the rise and fall of class struggle within an equally teleological framework. History was a story of both bondage and liberation: progressive immiseration until a final, redemptive ending with the triumph of the proletariat and the end of class warfare. Indeed, the end of history itself.

  Engels was an early practitioner of this discipline – not least because the approach was heavily influenced by the pioneering account of economic history he first provided in The Condition of the Working Class in England. But in his final years, he would worry that the strategy had been debased by lesser minds wanting to boil everything down to narrow economic causes. ‘According to the materialist view of history, the determining factor in history is, in the final analysis, the production and reproduction of actual life,’ he wrote in a letter to the Berlin student Joseph Bloc von Boegnik in 1890. ‘More than that was never maintained by Marx or myself. Now if someone distorts this by declaring the economic moment to be the only determining factor, he changes that proposition into a meaningless, abstract, ridiculous piece of jargon.’ In the same letter, Engels went on to introduce a new variable into the historical materialist template by suggesting that the superstructure – those ephemeral forms of law, philosophy and religion – somehow had a ‘reciprocal influence’ on the economic structure and then, in turn, on historical development: ‘all these factors also have a bearing on the course of the historical struggles of which, in many cases, they largely determine the form. It is in the interaction of all these factors and amidst an unending multitude of fortuities… that the economic trend ultimately asserts itself as something inevitable.’ History, he now suggested in a significant reappraisal of Marxist historiographical thinking, was a lot more fluid than the materialist stereotype first posited. For the dialectical process was not simply a question of cause and effect, but the mutual interaction of opposites: so, while the economic context is ‘ultimately decisive’, he now thought politics, culture, even ‘tradition’, could play a part in shaping man's decisions and h
istory. The past is ‘made in such a way that the ultimate result is invariably produced by the clash of many individual wills of which each in turn has been made what it is by a wide variety of living conditions’. Such were the caveats introduced into the notion of historical materialism that it seemed almost neutered as a credible intellectual, let alone political, tool. By then aged seventy and firmly ensconced as Europe's leading communist seer, Engels was in reflective mode, conceding that the battle against idealist history might have earlier led him and Marx to overemphasize the materialist component. ‘If some younger writers attribute more importance to the economic aspect than is its due, Marx and I are to some extent to blame. We had to stress this leading principle in the face of opponents who denied it, and we did not always have the time, space or opportunity to do justice to the other factors that interacted upon each other,’ he wrote no doubt realizing that his historical theorem was in danger of becoming either a banal truism (in the sense that one should, of course, take some account of the economic context of a period) or an unattractive species of economic reductionism.108