This was certainly their view in regard to south Asia. ‘Indian society has no history at all, at least no known history,’ Marx wrote in an article which drew on the thinking of the political economists James Mill and Jean-Baptiste Say, as well as Hegel, to classify the people of the subcontinent as stationary, non-historic and in need of forcible liberation. ‘What we call its history, is but the history of the successive intruders who founded their empires on the passive basis of that unresisting and unchanging society.’ As such, the British Empire had to fulfil a double mission in India: ‘one destructive, the other regenerating – the annihilation of old Asiatic society, and the laying of the material foundations of Western society in Asia’.134 Similarly, Engels the mill owner spoke with positive relish of India's ‘native handicrafts… finally being crushed by English competition’.135 When it came to the Indian Mutiny (or first war of independence) of 1857, Marx was quick to place the account of atrocities in the context of decades of imperial abuse. ‘However infamous the conduct of the Sepoys, it is only the reflex, in a concentrated form, of England's own conduct in India…’136 But neither Marx nor Engels felt able to support fully the struggle for independence since the demands of economic progress and imperial modernity superseded any narrow Indian rights to self-governance.
By way of contradiction, for over a decade Marx and Engels had condemned the oppression of Poland by Germany and Russia as both a denial of democratic self-determination and an ugly chauvinism which undermined proletarian sensibility in the aggressor nations. ‘A people that oppresses others cannot emancipate itself. The power it needs to oppress others is ultimately always turned against itself.’137 The cause of Poland was the cause of the German working class, they declared; Poland would never shake off the shackles of feudalism until the German workers shed their colonial mindset and realized their common cause with the Polish people. At some point during the late 1850s, this belief in the shared fortunes of working-class solidarity and national liberation was generously extended from the ‘old, cultured nations' of the West to non-European peoples . At the same time, Marx and Engels reinterpreted the economics of colonialism: no longer an aid to primitive capitalist accumulation, it was now seen as an iniquitous component of global capitalism whereby raw material and unprotected markets shored up the ruling classes of the metropole. Rather than a force of modernization, it was a tool of bourgeois hegemony. It was, after all, the push by British commerce into virgin colonial markets which had prevented the great crash of 1857 from spiralling into revolution.
As Engels abandoned his notion of non-historic peoples, he began to endorse the principle of colonial resistance. Whereas once he would have championed the advance of European civilization, by 1860 he supported the Chinese in their struggle against the British during the second opium war. Equally, he was shocked at the brutality of Governor Eyre's troops during the Morant Bay rebellion (‘Every post brings news of worse atrocities in Jamaica. The letters from the English officers about their heroic deeds against unarmed niggers are beyond words’) and sarcastically praised the grotesque atrocities of ‘Belgium's humane, civilizing Association Internationale’ in the African Congo.138 In a total about turn, he even celebrated the resistance of ‘Arab and Kabyle tribes’ in Algeria (surely, the backward Bedouin of old?) whilst condemning France's ‘barbarous system of warfare… against all the dictates of humanity, civilization, and Christianity’.139 In countries which are ‘inhabited by a native population, which are simply subjugated, India, Algiers, the Dutch, Portuguese, and Spanish possessions’, Engels now advocated a programme of revolutionary working-class insurgency which would lead ‘as rapidly as possible towards independence’. The U-turn complete, here was the pioneer Marxist vision of proletarian-led colonial resistance which would prove so inspirational in the twentieth century.140
But however assiduously Engels tried to cordon off his professional from his political life, there was a glaring contradiction in this newly radical colonial stance since his livelihood from Ermen & Engels made him a knowing accomplice in the commercial-imperial complex. The mid-Victorian boom in the Manchester cotton trade, which so enriched Engels personally, was fuelled by a foreign export market oriented around the colonies. Cheap, raw cotton came in from the slave plantations of the Southern United States and was re-exported as finished goods to the ends of Empire. By 1858–9, India was the destination of 25.8 per cent of British cotton exports (followed by America, Turkey and China) boosting profits and helping to act as a vital counterweight to the usual cyclical depression. Meanwhile, Indian calico remained banned from European nations by penal tariffs, while Asian markets were forced to accept English imports. In the aftermath of the 1857 Indian Mutiny, the final remnants of the subcontinent's cotton autonomy were crushed. ‘The astounding growth of trade with India compelled the cotton industry to reject the anti-imperialism of [Richard] Cobden and to support the expensive military budget of India as well as the opium trade with China,’ according to the cotton historian D. A. Farnie.141 The mills and merchant world which Engels inhabited were a part of this political settlement. Inevitably, he blamed the misguided English proletariat for pocketing the imperial lucre – ‘the workers gaily share the feast of England's monopoly of the world market and colonies’ – but never quite dared question his own place within the colonial nexus.142
Such hypocrisies were of little matter for Engels in the grisly winter of 1863.
Dear Moor,
Mary is dead. Last night she went to bed early and, when Lizzy wanted to go to bed shortly before midnight, she found she had already died. Quite suddenly. Heart failure or an apoplectic stroke. I wasn't told this morning; on Monday evening she was still quite well. I simply can't convey what I feel. The poor girl loved me with all her heart.
Still weakened from his 1860 depression, the sudden death of Mary was a terrible blow. For all his womanizing and raffish exterior, he was a devoted partner to Mary. They had been together – off and on – for twenty years ever since the fresh-faced Young Hegelian first turned up in Manchester to work at the Salford mill. It was she who had provided his entrée into the Cottonopolis underworld and it was with her and her sort that Engels had felt most relaxed. For Engels, her death felt as though ‘I was burying the last vestige of my youth’. But what was just as unsettling was Marx's response to Mary's passing. He began his commiseration letter appropriately enough by announcing how ‘the news of Mary's death surprised no less than it dismayed me. She was so good-natured, witty and closely attached to you.’ And, having cleared his throat, he then launched into an extraordinarily selfish tirade about his own bad luck – expensive school fees, rent demands – in a wholly misjudged jokey-cum-morose tone. ‘It is dreadfully selfish of me to tell you about these horreurs at this time. But it's a homeopathic remedy. One calamity is a distraction from the other…’ he wrote before signing off with a cheery ‘Salut!’ Perhaps because the Marx family had never accepted Mary as a social equal or worthy companion for the General, he thought her death was of little instance. Engels was staggered by his callous disregard and it resulted in the greatest breach of their friendship. ‘You will find it quite in order that, this time, my own misfortune and the frosty view you took of it should have made it positively impossible for me to reply to you any sooner,’ he replied after a five-day hiatus. Even Engels's ‘philistine acquaintances’ – the ones he had spent years hiding Mary from – had displayed greater sympathy and affection than his dearest friend. ‘You thought it a fit moment to assert the superiority of your “dispassionate turn of mind”. Soit!’
Marx was suitably shamed. ‘It was very wrong of me to write you that letter, and I regretted it as soon as it had gone off. However, what happened was in no sense due to heartlessness,’ he responded a week later before explaining the letter's genesis and the wretched state of his household. However couched and contextualized, this constituted a rare apology from Marx and the bruised Engels accepted it with alacrity. ‘Thank you for being so candid,�
�� he wrote back. ‘One can't live with a woman for years on end without being fearfully affected by her death… When your letter arrived she had not been buried… Your last letter made up for it and I'm glad that, in losing Mary, I didn't also lose my oldest and best friend.’ The row passed and to reaffirm their friendship Engels pilfered £100 from the accounts to bail Marx out.143
Engels was not one to dwell on the past: he forgave Marx and slowly got over Mary. By the autumn of 1864 there were a growing number of enquiries from Marx as to the health and happiness of ‘Madame Lizzy’. It was a common enough Victorian practice for a man to move on from a deceased wife to her spinster sister and, at some point over those eighteen months, Engels did precisely that by upgrading Lizzy Burns from housekeeper to lover. We know much more about Lizzy than Mary mainly thanks to the ‘staunch friendship’ she struck up with Tussy. ‘She was quite illiterate and could not read or write,’ was how Tussy described her in a letter to Karl Kautsky, ‘but she was as true, as honest, and in some ways as fine-souled a woman as you could meet… It is true she and Mary in later years both drank to excess: but my parents always said this was as much the fault of Engels as of the two women.’144 Engels, meanwhile, chose to emphasize her Marxist qualities, describing her as of ‘genuine Irish proletarian blood’ and, in a touchy acknowledgement of her illiteracy, recounting how ‘her passionate feelings for her class, a feeling that was inborn, was of immeasurably greater value to me… than anything of which the priggishness and sophistry of the “heddicated” and “sensitive” daughters of the bourgeoisie might have been capable’.145 Both of these descriptions hint at the calming and enriching influence Lizzy had on Engels's life from the mid-1860s.
The first notable consequence of Lizzy succeeding the more prickly Mary was much improved relations between the Marx and Engels households. Whereas Marx himself had generally ignored the existence of Mary, his letters were now replete with ‘my best compliments to Mrs Burns’ and other such fripperies. Engels, in turn, was far more open about his companionship with Lizzy, calling her ‘my dear spouse’ and forwarding her best regards – and the odd shamrock – to Mrs Marx and the daughters. The Marx sisters – Laura, Jenny and Tussy – were the key to this blossoming friendship. From an early age Tussy had adored her ‘uncle Angel’: ‘She looked upon him as a second father: the giver of good things. From him had flowed wine and stamps and jolly letters all her childhood.’146 And now she included ‘Auntie’ Lizzy within her embrace. In the summer of 1869 she spent a very jolly few weeks with Engels and Lizzy shopping, visiting the theatre and strolling around Manchester. ‘I walk about a good deal with Tussy and as many of the family, human and canine, as I can induce to go with us,’ as Engels described it to Jenny Marx. ‘Tussy, Lizzy, Mary Ellen [or “Pumps”, Lizzy's niece], myself and two dogs, and I am specially instructed to inform you that these two amiable ladies had two glasses of beer a-piece.’147 For despite her later disparaging comments about Lizzy's alcoholism, Tussy was not averse to a drop herself and enjoyed a freedom of conduct in the Engels-Haus unknown in the more straitlaced Marx residence. On one summer's day it was so hot that, according to Tussy, the ladies of the house ‘laid down on the floor the whole day, drinking beer, claret, etc.’, which was how Engels found them when he came home: ‘Auntie [Lizzy Burns], Sarah [Parker, a servant], me and Ellen [Pumps]… all lying our full length on the floor with no stays, no boots and one petticoat and a cotton dress on and that was all.148 Engels adored this louche, bohemian, female-dominated environment and often felt at his happiest around the various Marx daughters: officiating at their weddings, encouraging their journalism, revelling in their philosophical-intellectual wordplay, and giving their portraits pride of place on his ‘chimney-piece’. Only this affection can explain Jenny Marx's ability to wheedle out of Engels his inner secrets in the form of the highly popular, mid-Victorian parlour game ‘Confessions’. For a biographer, the result offers an invaluable mind-map:
Favourite virtue: jollity;
in a man
to mind his own business;
in a woman:
not to mislay things;
Chief characteristic: knowing everything by half;
Idea of happiness: Chateau Margaux 1848;
Idea of misery: going to a dentist;
The vice you excuse: excess of all sort;
The vice you detest: cant;
Your aversion: stuck-up, affected women;
The characters you most dislike: [Charles Haddon] Spurgeon
[influential Baptist preacher];
Favourite occupation: chaffing and being chaffed;
Favourite hero: ‘none’;
Favourite heroine: too many to name one;
Favourite poets: Renard the Fox, Shakespeare, Ariosto;
Favourite prose: Goethe; Lessing, Dr Samuelson;
Favourite flower: bluebell;
Favourite colours: any one not Aniline [cotton dye];
Favourite dishes: ‘cold: salad; hot: Irish stew’;
Favourite maxim: not to have any;
Motto: take it easy.149
As with Engels, part of the attraction of Lizzy for the Marx girls was her Irish proletarian blood. Tussy and Lizzy, according to Engels, liked to spend their Manchester evenings ‘getting their tea ready… and after that there will be a reading of Irish novels which is likely to last until bedtime or nearly so, unless relieved by a bit of talk about the “convicted nation”.’150 Engels might mock this melancholy Emerald Isle aligorning, but with his love of Irish stew he was as susceptible to talk of ‘the benighted isle’ as any of the Marx sorority. For the two decades he had spent with the Burns sisters had turned his thinking on the Irish question in a far more sophisticated direction. The crass, racial caricature he had once offered of the Irish in The Condition of the Working Class in England – much of it drawn from Thomas Carlyle – gave way to a far more materialist reading of Anglo-Irish relations heavily enriched by his colonial theorizing.
Most importantly of all, Engels visited the island, travelling, in 1856, with Mary Burns from Dublin to Galway and, in 1869, returning with Lizzy and Tussy to tour the Wicklow mountains, Killarney and Cork. Always the scholar, Engels planned to write a history of Ireland and mugged up on his Gaelic before filling fifteen notebooks with jottings on the country's law, geography, geology, economics and folksongs. It was to be an epic account of the topographical, cultural and economic struggle of a nation and a people for whom he had developed an unexpected empathy. ‘The weather, like the inhabitants, has a more acute character, it moves in sharper, more sudden contrasts; the sky is like an Irish woman's face: here also rain and sunshine succeed each other suddenly and unexpectedly and there is none of the grey English boredom,’ was one of the more purple passages of Engels's aborted history.151
Perhaps because they had yet to let him down, he felt far more passionately about the condition of the exploited Irish peasantry than about the English working class. ‘I had never imagined famine could be so tangibly real,’ he wrote during his 1856 trip. ‘Whole villages are deserted; in between the splendid parks of the smaller landlords, virtually the only people still living there, lawyers mostly. Famine, emigration and clearances between them have brought this about.’ The Westminster-induced potato famine followed by the ‘clearances’ – ‘the mass eviction of the Irish from house and home’ – had produced a pasturage economy which decimated the agricultural proletariat. For unexplained reasons, Engels did not regard this as a progressive, modernizing intervention of a greater nation upon a backward, non-historic people (à la Mexico and America, Algeria and France), but rather unwarranted subjection. Indeed, Engels argued that Ireland had been reduced to the state ‘of a completely wretched nation’ by systematic English plundering stretching back to the Norman Conquest.152 And whereas previously such aggression had been sanctioned when it came to the Magyars and the Slavs or the Americans and Mexicans, in the case of the Gaels it was somehow different. Indeed, what made the Irish people he
roic was their continued, if faltering, resistance to this English imperialism.
Long before Marx came to codify his thinking on Ireland and English radicalism, Engels connected the British class structure with its imperial suzerainty across the Irish Sea. ‘Ireland may be regarded as the earliest English colony,’ whereby ‘the English citizen's so-called freedom is based on the oppression of the colonies’.153 The riches and power Ireland offered, from the plantations of Queen Elizabeth I to the vast estates of the Victorian landowners, immeasurably strengthened the hand of the imperial ruling classes. It enriched England's leading nobility and provided a vital kick-start towards industrialization. ‘Ireland is the bulwark of the English landed aristocracy,’ as Marx later put it. ‘The exploitation of this country is not simply one of the main sources of their material wealth; it is their greatest moral power. Ireland is, thus, the grand moyen by which the English aristocracy maintains its domination in England itself.’ In addition, the gutting of the Irish economy led hundreds of thousands of immigrants to flood Britain's industrial cities where they undercut wages, impoverished the working class and diverted the revolutionary spirit of the proletariat down chauvinist blind alleys. ‘In relation to the Irish worker, he [the English worker] feels himself to be a member of the ruling nation and therefore, makes himself a tool of the aristocrats and capitalists against Ireland, thus strengthening their domination over himself.’154 Just as the progress of the German working class depended upon the liberation of Poland, so revolution in Britain depended upon Irish independence. Ireland was England's weakest point, the loss of which would start the unravelling of the British Empire and the unleashing of class war in England.
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