Frock-Coated Communist

by Hunt, Tristram

  In 1850s Manchester Engels was as yet untroubled by such nuances. Instead, he penned a positively bludgeoning work of historical materialism, The Peasant War in Germany (1850), which attempted to demonstrate, as he put it, ‘the political structure of Germany at that time, the revolts against it, and the contemporary political and religious theories not as causes but as results of the stage of development of agriculture, industry, roads and waterways, commerce in commodities and money then obtaining in Germany’.109 His aim, in fact, was an old-fashioned plundering of history (as well as the recent work of historian Wilhelm Zimmerman) to assist in current political battles – in this case, framing the 1520s peasant wars as inspiration for the German radicals discouraged by the 1848–9 setbacks. ‘In the face of the slackening that has now ensued almost everywhere after two years of struggle, it is high time to remind the German people of the clumsy yet powerful and tenacious figures of the Great Peasant War.’110 He did so with all the crassness of a first-grade materialist.

  Ironically, the hero of Engels's history was a Carlylian ‘great man’, the ‘magnificent figure’ of the Protestant radical Thomas Müntzer. An itinerant mystic in the German chiliastic tradition, in the early 1520s Müntzer attempted to combine the radical wing of the Reformation with a traditional peasants' revolt to form a Christian League of the godly against the godless. His emphasis on the suffering of God, his stress on social equality alongside spiritual equality and his attack on the ‘burgher reformation’ of Martin Luther galvanized an impoverished peasantry angry at high clerical tithes and unpopular land reforms. Müntzer was trained in the priesthood, student at Wittenberg, many years a preacher in Allstedt, Prague and Zwickau, and his politics and vision of social reform were inextricably informed by his Protestant theology. But Engels was having none of that. Of course, ‘the class struggles of those days were clothed in religious shibboleths’, he conceded, but that was to forget the materialist underpinnings.111 And Engels went on to recount in fastidious detail the economic fundamentals of early sixteenth-century German society and how class divisions – between the feudal nobility, the bourgeois Protestant reformers and the peasantry – dictated this revolutionary epoch. Yet only Müntzer was able to bring the plebeian elements to an understanding of their class consciousness. Properly understood, he was an embryonic Marxist agitator successfully marshalling the most advanced section of the peasantry towards class conflict. ‘As Müntzer's religious philosophy approached atheism, so his political programme approached communism… By the kingdom of God, Müntzer meant a society with no class differences, no private property and no state authority independent of, and foreign to, the members of society.’112 But, sadly, he had got ahead of the modes of production: ‘the worst thing that can befall the leader of an extreme party is to be compelled to assume power at a time when the movement is not yet ripe’.113 Despite his heroic oratory and political organization, neither the feudal social system nor the agricultural economy were ready in early sixteenth-century Germany for revolutionary communism. And on the fields of Frankenhausen in eastern Germany in 1525, his ragbag peasant army was put to the sword by Luther's allies – in this case, Engels's familiar refrain of the bourgeois ‘stab in the back’ being all too real.

  The failures of 1525 and 1848–9 were not just a question of economic base and political superstructure being out of kilter, they were also the product of extensive military blunders. Thus the study of warfare became a second area of academic interest for Engels. Within months of moving to Manchester, he was writing to Joseph Weydemeyer in Frankfurt asking for some books on military history (which he later secured by buying up the library of a retired Prussian military officer) so that he could ‘take it [military science] at least far enough to be able to join in theoretical discussion without making too much of a fool of myself’.114 Warfare became Engels's ‘special subject’ and with typical rigour he immersed himself in studying the function of leadership, the nature of strategy and the role of topography, technology and army morale. And despite his theoretical aversion towards ‘great men’, Engels couldn't help himself when it came to the great generals. He admired Garibaldi and Napier with schoolboy ardour, but it was the Manichean clash between Napoleon and Wellington which truly bewitched him. Against every one of his materialist inclinations, Engels revered the hero of Waterloo - ‘he would be a genius if common sense were not incapable of rising to the heights of genius’ - and publicly lamented the passing of Britain's most reactionary general-politician in 1852.115

  The years spent studying military history reaped dividends in the mid-1850s when the Crimean Peninsula became a miserable quagmire for Russian, British and French troops and Engels began a successful second career as one of England's leading armchair generals. He even hoped his military punditry might offer a route out of Manchester. When war broke out in 1854, Engels immediately fired off a job application to the editor of the Daily News. ‘Perhaps I am not mistaken in supposing that at the present moment an offer to contribute to the military department of your paper may meet with some favour…’ He went on to provide a short military résumé beginning with his service in the Prussian artillery before outlining his ‘active service during the insurrectionary war in South Germany’. While he hoped the Russians would get a sound beating, he promised to mix his politics up ‘as little as possible with military criticism’. But despite such assurances, the job never materialized. ‘It's all off with the The Daily News,’ he wrote angrily to Marx as he saw another lifeline out of Ermen & Engels slipping away. Everything seemed settled – the fee, the proofs, the terms – and then, ‘today, the answer finally arrives saying that the articles are too professional’ and he should approach a specialized, military journal. In a rare burst of pure fury, Engels blamed émigré gossip in London for belittling his military experience and queering his pitch; ‘nothing was easier than to represent Engels, the MILITARY MAN, as no more than a former one-year volunteer, a communist and a clerk by trade, thus putting a stop to everything’.116 All the horrible, huckstering indignity of his position flooded back to taunt him. But whilst there is little proof of any whispering campaign against him, there is abundant evidence (in the Daily Tribune ghostwriting he was forced to return to) of the dry, fact-heavy, over-analytical tone of his military journalism. His account of the charge of the Light Brigade, one of the most gory and dramatic moments in the entire campaign, is a case in point. After describing how ‘the Earl of Cardigan led his light brigade up a valley opposite his position’, Engels then very matter-of-factly recounts their obliteration. ‘Of the 700 men that advanced, not 200 came back in a fighting condition. The light cavalry brigade may be considered destroyed, until reformed by fresh arrivals.’117 It was small wonder the Daily News passed on such leaden copy.

  Mercifully, Engels's style matured well and, in the late 1850s, the growing tension between Prussia, Austria and France over the issue of Italian unification allowed him to reenter the field with an anonymous pamphlet entitled Po and Rhine. With a deft overview of political intelligence, Alpine geography and war readiness, Engels outlined what Prussia's stance should be in the face of various military scenarios resulting from a Franco-Austrian war. ‘Have read it all,’ Marx wrote on receiving the paper, ‘exceedingly clever; the political side is also splendidly done and that was damned difficult. The pamphlet will have a great success.’118 And so it did, garnering adulatory coverage in the German and Austrian press and, it was rumoured, bought in bulk by General Giuseppe Garibaldi. Indeed, Po and Rhine was so well informed that the anonymous author was the object of numerous army headquarters’ guessing games. ‘Your pamphlet is considered in high, if not the highest, military circles (including, inter alia, that of Prince Charles Frederick) to be the product of an anonymous Prussian general,’ a delighted Marx reported back to Engels.119 But, frustratingly, the Manchester clerk remained unknown.

  The looming hostilities between France and Austria were just one element of the dramatic diplomatic consequences of Bonapar
te's rise to power. From the outset of his reign, Napoleon III was keen to extend the dominion of imperial France and, by the late 1850s (after a botched assassination attempt with tenuous British connections), some in the military staff thought Bonaparte's ambition might entail an English invasion. Following a highly jingoistic press campaign, on 12 May 1859 Britain's local volunteer corps – last called up to beat off uncle Napoleon I in 1804 – were re-formed to counter the new French threat. The tens of thousands of volunteers who signed up constituted a remarkable example of spontaneous, military association on behalf of the British people with ‘Irish Corps’, ‘Artisans Corps’, ‘Borough Guards’ and even a ‘Press Guard’ springing into action.120 As Lord Palmerston erected a series of forts along the Solent (his so-called ‘Follies’) to prevent an invasionary fleet, Britain's parade grounds and parks resounded to the ill-disciplined step of the volunteer corps and their rousing anti-French songs. Engels had always been confident of the martial spirit of the British people – ‘nowhere are there more hunters and poachers, i.e. semi-trained light infantry and sharpshooters’ – and he enthusiastically endorsed this grassroots resistance movement against the reactionary Bonapartist regime.121 He was especially supportive of the training the volunteers went through. For one thing the veteran of Baden had learned was the importance of logistical support, a proper chain of command and basic military skills. ‘Experience teaches us that no matter how intense the patriotism of the masses may be, the fact that they, as a general thing, have no arms, and do not know how to use them if they had, renders their disposition in an emergency of very little value,’ he wrote in an article for the Daily Tribune melodramatically entitled ‘Could the French Sack London?’122 But the authorities were well on their way to countering such a prospect with a highly effective inspection and drilling programme. ‘All in all, the experiment is to be regarded, after three years, as completely successful,’ Engels surmised in 1862. ‘Almost without any expense to the Government, England has created an organized army of 163,000 men for the country's defence.’123 This enthusiasm was tempered only when, on a railway journey from London back to Manchester, he ‘had the added pleasure of a rifle-bullet shattering the window and flying through the carriage not 12 inches from my chest: some volunteer probably wished to demonstrate yet again that he ought not to be entrusted with a firearm’.124

  However, Engels's support for the volunteers was another example of his occasional class confusion as an obsessive anti-Bonapartism got the better of his communist ideology. While the corps were indeed the first line of resistance against a French invasion, they were also an inherently reactionary force. For it was not the workers who signed up en masse; rather, only those persons who could furnish their own arms, ‘defray all expenses’ and be available for up to twenty-four days’ training per year. This was a rich man's army led by local aristocrats and industrialists which working-class radicals in Rochdale and Oldham branded a ‘Tory device’ for diverting attention from political reform. The Preston Volunteer Corps was notable for its ‘total absence of the working-class element’, while the 40th (Manchester) Lancashire Rifle Volunteers was overwhelmingly dominated by ‘gentlemen’, tradesmen, clerks and artisans.125 The volunteer corps were, in fact, another component of the bourgeois hegemony of mid-Victorian Britain: a middle-class voluntarist association subtly helping to embed a stratified class structure. Engels, who instinctively took the view of the officers' mess, was entirely deaf to this subaltern voice as his focus remained on military preparedness against the Bonapartist enemy.126

  No doubt to the intense disappointment of the volunteers, Bonaparte's game-plan never involved crossing the Channel. Instead, he set himself on a collision course with continental Europe's other expansive power, Bismarck's Prussia. The Chancellor of the North German Confederation had already gone to war against Austria in 1866 over the convoluted question of Schleswig-Holstein and, by the end of the decade, a clash with France looked unavoidable. Engels had horribly misread Bismarck's character at the start of the Iron Chancellor's rise to power and, in a notable misjudgement, even thought Austria would win the 1866 tussle. But by July 1870 he no longer harboured any misapprehensions as to the bellicosity and strategic prowess of Bismarck. As it turned out, the Franco-Prussian war would prove the high point of Engels's career as a military pundit as, again and again, he called it right and so earned his Marx family nickname, ‘General Staff’ – or just ‘The General’.

  This time, he had a proper outlet for his views thanks to Marx setting him up as military commentator on the Pall Mall Gazette. ‘I suppose I would like to write two articles weekly on the war for the Pall Mall Gazette for good cash payment,’ was how Engels responded to the offer of work, still obviously smarting from the Daily News débâcle. So he began filing his copy from Manchester, charting the steady routing of Bonaparte's forces by the Prussians, based on reports from the front and a cross-section of European papers. But at the end of July Engels got a scoop on German troop manoeuvres thanks to the deployment of a cousin of his friend Edward Gumpert, ‘a company commander in the 77th regiment’, which led him accurately to predict that one of the first major engagements between French and Prussian forces would take place near Saarbrucken. ‘Enclosed you will find the plan of the Prussian campaign. Please get a CAB immediately and take it round to the Pall Mall Gazette, so that it can come out on Monday evening. It will make me and the Pall Mall Gazette tremendously famous,’ Engels the freelance hack, desperate for his exclusive, commanded Marx. ‘Delay is now fatal for articles of this sort.’ He was proved right when all the London papers – from The Times to the Spectator – followed up the story. ‘If the war lasts a certain time, you will soon be acknowledged as the foremost military authority in London,’ Marx replied with pride.127 In fact, Engels's authority grew further when in August 1870 he forecast the defeat of the French troops at Sedan and the capture of Bonaparte.

  There was more to Engels's analysis than an audit of firepower and strategy. Thanks to Lenin's later reprints of some New York Daily Tribune articles on insurrection, Engels is often regarded as a pioneer theorist of guerrilla warfare. He did, indeed, describe insurrection as ‘an art quite as much as war’ which had various, vague rules: once you enter upon it, ‘act with the greatest determination, and on the offensive. The defensive is the death of every armed rising… surprise your antagonists while their forces are scattering, prepare new successes, however small but daily… force your enemies to a retreat before they can collect their strength against you; in the words of Danton, the greatest master of revolution policy yet known: de l'audace, de l'audace, encore de l'audace!’128 But Engels remained at root deeply sceptical of guerrilla combat in part because of his unhappy Baden experience but largely because he favoured a materialist approach to military science.

  The reason the British had bungled in the Crimea and why Bonaparte was being smashed by Bismarck was that their military edifices reflected their antiquated socio-economic fundamentals. To the materialist-minded Engels, warfare was another component of the superstructure – like religion, politics or culture – and, as such, it was determined by the economic base. ‘Armaments, social composition, organization, tactics and strategy are above all dependent on the level of production and communications that has been reached.’ It achieved its modern form in the years following the French Revolution when, he suggested, the rising bourgeoisie and the emancipated peasantry produced the money and men for the colossal war machines of the nineteenth century. As such, the development of various European armies constituted a history of those nations' socio-economic development – their class systems, technological capacity, property relations – in which ‘the influence of commanders of genius is at most restricted to adapting the methods of fighting to the new weapons and fighters’.129 An obvious example was the modern battleship which was ‘not only a product, but at the same time a specimen, of modern large-scale industry, a floating factory…’130

  However, in the case of the B
ritish army, the state of its troops also exposed an outdated political system in all its hideous finery. ‘Like old England herself, a mass of rampant abuses, the organization of the English army is rotten to the core,’ he wrote of the Crimean forces before going on to list the selling of commissions, absence of professionalism, officer and soldier class divisions and unnatural enthusiasm for corporal punishment as all-too-prevalent in Her Majesty's regiments.131 In materialist terms, the charge of the Light Brigade was less about Cardigan's individual failures in the field, and more the consequence of structural failings within the British elite as they failed to adjust to the modern industrial era. The incompetence, the needless casualties, ‘the miserable leadership of the British army is the inevitable result of rule by an antiquated oligarchy’.132

  That so much of the warfare Engels reported on in the mid-nineteenth century was imperial in origin naturally led him into thinking more broadly about the nature of colonialism. In the twentieth century this topic would prove amongst Marx and Engels's most dramatic political legacies as ‘freedom fighters’ from Mao to Ho Chi Minh to Castro embraced Marxism as an essential component of colonial liberation. However, just as with their conversion to communism, Marx and Engels came late to these ideas. While a critique of the brutality and jobbery of imperialism had been a staple part of British radicalism since Thomas Paine and William Cobbett, Engels had been more noteworthy for his high-handed dismissal of those ‘non-historic’ peoples – those ethnic rumps fighting the tide of history, as the Slavs had during the 1848 revolutions – who had been resisting colonial aggression. ‘The conquest of Algeria is an important and fortunate fact for the progress of civilization,’ he had written of the French push into Africa in 1848. ‘And if we may regret that the liberty of the Bedouins of the desert has been destroyed, we must not forget that these same Bedouins were a nation of robbers.’ We should remember, he went on, that ‘the modern bourgeois, with civilization, industry, order and at least relative enlightenment following him, is preferable to the feudal lord or to the marauding robber’.133 The benefits of capitalist imperialism – the forcible induction of backward peoples into the slipstream of history and thus setting them on their way to class consciousness, class struggle and all the rest – outweighed the unfortunate acts of invasionary forces. As Marx and Engels put it in the Communist Manifesto, ‘The cheap prices of its [capitalism's] commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians' intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate.’