Frock-Coated Communist
Page 29
But, as ever, the political conditions were not yet quite right. Founded in March 1858, the Irish Republican Brotherhood or ‘Fenians’ (a reference to the Fianna army in the medieval saga of Fionn Mac Cumhaill) were an Irish-American secret society committed to the violent overthrow of British rule and the establishment of a democratic and independent Irish republic. The Fenians were led by the sons of middle-income farmers, shopkeepers and the small-town petits-bourgeois, and their ‘central motivation revolved round the view of England as a satanic power upon earth, a mystic commitment to Ireland, and a belief that an independent Irish republic, “virtually” established in the hearts of men, possessed a superior moral authority’.155 What this led to in practice was a series of doomed ‘risings’ easily quelled by the British authorities, followed by a campaign of terrorist attacks, arson and sabotage on the mainland. The most notorious were the blowing up of Clerkenwell Prison – with the death of twelve innocent people – and the daring rescue of Fenian activists Thomas Kelly and Timothy Deasy from a Manchester police van in September 1867. Unfortunately, Sergeant Charles Brett was killed in the struggle and, in the following days, police swooped on five suspected Fenians who were then swiftly convicted of his murder.
All other things being equal, this was exactly the kind of self-defeating terrorism which Marx and Engels abhorred: an insurrectionary vanguard getting ahead of the material conditions and consequently endangering the broader social revolution. But that was to ignore the influence of Lizzy, who had already shifted Engels's thinking on the non-historic question. She was, as Engels later described her, ‘a revolutionary Irishwoman’ and active partisan of the Fenian movement. Marx's son-in-law, Paul Lafargue, described her being ‘in continual touch with the many Irishmen in Manchester and always well informed of their conspiracies’. He even suggested that ‘more than one Fenian found hospitality in Engels's house and it was thanks to his wife that the leader in the attempt to free the condemned Sinn Feiners [Kelly and Deasy] on their way to the scaffold was able to evade the police’.156 It was a story repeated by Max Beer, who described Engels's house ‘as the safest refuge of the Fenian fugitives from justice; the police had no inkling of their hiding-place’.157 There is little supporting evidence to suggest Lizzy was involved in the 1867 prison-van break, but their house on Hyde Road was tantilizingly close to the railway arch where, as Engels had it, ‘the great Fenian liberation battle was enacted’. Maybe, just maybe, Lizzy and Engels helped some of the forty-strong Fenian mob slip away.
As a hapless terrorist outfit built around romantic nationalism, what the Irish Republican Brotherhood needed above all was a martyrology, and the subsequent execution of three of the five convicted Fenians – William Allen, Michael Larkin and Michael O'Brien – provided just that. Engels correctly predicted it would ‘transform the liberation of Kelly and Deasy into an act of heroism, such as will now be sung at the cradle of every Irish child in Ireland, England and America. The Irish women will see to that as surely as did the Polish womenfolk.’158 Despite the much needed self-righteous halo it promised, the hanging of the three ‘Manchester martyrs’ sent Lizzy, Tussy and Jenny into collective mourning. ‘Jenny goes in black since the Manchester execution, and wears her Polish cross on a green ribbon,’ Marx reported. ‘I need hardly tell you that black and green are the prevailing colours in my house, too,’ Engels slightly wearily replied.159
The response of the Manchester working class to the cause of Irish liberation was very different from that of the emotional Marx daughters. Rather than uniting with the IRB and realizing their common cause against an exploitative ruling class, the Manchester proletariat responded to the Fenian ‘atrocities’ with a wave of anti-Irish sentiment which had been building since Irish immigration into Lancashire had peaked in the early 1860s. When this combined with a broader distaste for the city's liberal millocracy in the wake of their parsimonious response to the cotton famine, it delivered an extraordinary Tory revival just in time for the newly enfranchised urban working class to cast their vote in the 1868 elections. For Engels, this was the final indignity: the promise of Manchester – the citadel of proletarian revolution – had vanished for ever. ‘What do you say about these elections in the factory districts?’ he asked Marx indignantly. ‘The proletariat has once again made an awful fool of itself. Manchester and Salford return 3 Tories against 2 Liberals… Everywhere the proletariat are the rag, tag and bobtail of the official parties, and if any party has gained strength from the new voters, it is the Tories…’ The raw psephology of the situation was appalling: ‘it cannot be denied that the increase in working-class votes has brought the Tories more than their simple percentage, and has improved their relative position’. Ireland, and the Irish question, had emboldened not eviscerated the English class structure.160
In 1868 such setbacks could be swallowed since the years of storm, stress and accursed commerce had finally revealed their fruit. ‘The day that manuscript is sent off, I shall drink myself to kingdom come,’ Engels had promised Marx in 1865.161 Inevitably, it would take another couple of years before the first volume of Das Kapital – ‘this economy shit’ – was ready for the printers. But when it appeared, the relief was tangible. The sacrifice, the boredom, the barren frustration of the Manchester years had been worth it. ‘I am exceedingly gratified by this whole turn of events, firstly, for its own sake, secondly, for your sake in particular and your wife's, and thirdly, because it really is time things looked up,’ Engels wrote in a heartfelt letter to Marx. ‘There is nothing I long for so much as for release from this vile commerce, which is completely demoralizing me with all the time it is wasting. For as long as I am in it, I am good for nothing else…’ ‘Without you, I would never have been able to bring the work to a conclusion,’ Marx wrote back with a guilty air to his steadfast funder in May 1867, ‘and I can assure you it always weighed like a nightmare on my conscience that you were allowing your fine energies to be squandered and to rust in commerce, chiefly for my sake, and into the bargain, you had to share all my petites misères as well.’162 But he chose not to dedicate the work to Engels. Instead, Marx gave that honour to Wilhelm Wolff, who had died in 1864 and left him a very welcome £843.
Engels's contribution to Marx's masterwork had been above and beyond the monetary. He had provided many of the book's core insights into the actual workings of capital and labour (to which Marx added a generous plundering of Blue Book material and official reports) as well as its essential philosophy. And now Engels set to work with his blue pencil on the gargantuan German manuscript which arrived in the summer of 1867. He suggested a barrage of edits, clarifications and rewrites. ‘The train of thought is continually interrupted by illustrations and the illustrated point never resumes at the end of the illustration, so that one always leaps from the illustration of one point straight into the exposition of another point. That is dreadfully tiring and even confusing if one is not very attentive,’ he rightly noted of Marx's often inchoate style.163 At times it felt too rushed – ‘the piece you have inserted on Ireland was done in the most fearful haste, and the material is not properly knocked into shape at all’164 – and in other passages too angry, ‘Sheet two in particular has the marks of your carbuncles rather firmly stamped upon it…’165 Luckily, Engels was one of the very few people from whom Marx was willing to accept criticism.
The result though was a triumph: the foundation text of scientific socialism and one of the classics of Western political thought. Marx combined in Das Kapital, in the apposite summary of Robert Skidelsky,
a dialectical theory of historical stages, a materialist theory of history (in which the struggle of classes replaces Hegel's struggle of ideas in humanity's ascent), an economic and moral critique of capitalist civilization (embodied in the exploitation and alienation theses), an economic demonstration that capitalism was bound to collapse (because of its contradictions), a call to revolutionary action, and a prediction (perhaps more an assurance) that communism would be the next—an
d final—historical stage.166
At the intellectual crux of Das Kapital was the theory of surplus value (which Engels regarded as Marx's second monumental discovery after historical materialism) which was the alchemist's equation for explaining precisely how class exploitation occurs in a capitalist economy. For Marx, the enforced sale of the worker's labour-power for less than the exchange-value of the commodities produced by his labour-power was the ratchet by which the bourgeoisie were progressively enriched and the proletariat steadily alienated from its own labour and humanity. In essence, Marx argued that, if in six hours the worker was producing enough output that could be exchanged to cover his subsistence needs, then the remaining six hours' output, of a twelve-hour day, was being expropriated by the capitalist for his profit. This exploitative mode of production – the necessary result of systems of private property – was unnatural, historically transient and violently inequitable. The great hope of liberation promised by Das Kapital was that this form of capitalist iniquity would be destroyed by a class-conscious proletariat.
Along with the constant diminishing number of the magnates of capital, who usurp and monopolize all advantages of this process of transformation grows the mass of misery, oppression, slavery, degradation, exploitation; but with this too grows the revolt of the working class, a class always increasing in numbers and disciplined, united, organized by the very mechanism of the process of capitalist production itself. The monopoly of capital becomes a fetter upon the mode of production, which has sprung up and flourished along with and under it. Centralization of the means of production and socialization of labour at last reach a point where they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. This integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated.
But the dry theory of surplus value was never going to be enough to popularize the communist cause, so Marx embellished the book with all the hellish detail of Victorian factory life which Engels had provided. ‘They mutilate the labourer into a fragment of man, degrade him to the level of an appendage of a machine, destroy every remnant of charm in his work and turn it into a hated toil,’ was how he described the industrial process of ‘Capitalist Accumulation’; ‘… they transform his life-time into working-time, and drag his wife and child beneath the wheels of the Juggernaut of capital’.167 And yet one always had to remember that the funds which kept Marx afloat through Das Kapital's long literary gestation, the money that powered this excoriating prose, came ultimately from the very same exploited labour-power – the mill-hands of Ermen & Engels, that juggernaut of capital.
Since its first appearance, this vast tome has been subject to numerous different readings by different audiences – as a work of economics, political science, satire, literary Gothic, sociology and all or none of the above. That tradition of multiple interpretations begins with Engels. Having sacrificed seventeen years of his life for this opus he was determined to ensure it did not succumb to the usual conspiracy of silence. ‘I am convinced that the book will create a real stir from the moment it appears,’ he wrote to Marx in 1867, ‘but it will be very necessary to help the enthusiasm of the scientifically-inclined burghers and officials on to its feet and not to despise petty stratagems…’ Engels was always keen on petty stratagems and, with all the cunning of a seasoned PR, he opened up his contact book to generate some decent coverage. ‘I hope you will be able to bring Karl Marx's book to the attention of the German-American press and of the workers,’ he wrote to his fellow 1848 veteran Hermann Meyer then involved in the American communist movement. ‘The German press is still observing complete silence in respect of Capital, and it really is of the greatest importance that something should be said,’ he complained to Ludwig Kugelmann in Hanover. ‘We have a moral obligation to damned well get these articles into the papers, and as near simultaneously as possible, especially the European ones, and that includes the reactionary ones.’168
In the end, he realized he would have to do it himself. ‘Do you think I should attack the thing from the bourgeois point of view, to get things under way?’ he asked Marx.169 Both men agreed that the best thing to attract attention was ‘to get the book denounced’ and create a journalistic firestorm. All the modern panoply of media manipulation and literary salesmanship was put to work by Marx's most gifted publicist as Engels churned out review after review for the English, American and European press. For Die Zukunft, he assumed a lofty academic tone – ‘we acknowledge that we regard the new introduced category of surplus-value as an advance’; for the Staats-Anzeiger fur Wurttemberg, a more commercial slant – ‘German businessmen… will here find a copious source of instruction and will thank us for having directed their attention to it’; for the Beobachter, a suitably patriotic interpretation – ‘we may say that it is one of those achievements which do honour to the German spirit’; and for the Demokratisches Wochenblatt, his own true voice – ‘As long as there have been capitalists and workers on earth no book has appeared which is of as much importance for the workers as the one before us. The relation between capital and labour, the axis on which our entire present system of society turns, is here treated scientifically for the first time.’170
Engels's contract with Gottfried Ermen was due to expire in June 1869. Both men wanted this uncomfortable partnership to end. The question was, at what price? Characteristically, Engels's first thoughts were for Marx's family finances and the current state of his debts. ‘Can you manage with £350 for your usual regular needs for a year,’ he asked his friend as he opened severance negotiations with Ermen. The aim was to reach a settlement which would secure himself a suitable rentier income and the Marx family a healthy annual subsidy. As usual, it was a stressful, ‘murky business’ trying to pin down shifty Gottfried Ermen, and Engels was forced to walk away with a less than optimal settlement. ‘If I had wished to drive things with G. Ermen to extremes, that is, risk a breach, and had then had to start something else, I think I could have squeezed out about £750 more,’ he explained to his brother Hermann. ‘But I had absolutely no interest in being tied to jolly old commerce for about another ten years.’171 Ermen knew his reluctant business partner was never going to set up a competitor firm and so drove a miserly bargain, leaving Engels, in the end, with a lump sum of £12,500 (something approaching £1.2 million in today's terms). For a partnership in such a successful, multinational business it was not a large amount. But, as Gottfried predicted, Engels would take any price. ‘I was with Engels when he reached the end of his forced labour and I saw what he must have gone through all those years,’ Tussy wrote of Engels's last day at work,
I shall never forget the triumph with which he exclaimed ‘for the last time!’ as he put on his boots in the morning to go to his office. A few hours later we were standing at the gate waiting for him. We saw him coming over the little field opposite the house where he lived. He was swinging his stick in the air and singing, his face beaming. Then we set the table for a celebration and drank champagne and were happy.172
Engels was indeed delighted. ‘Hurrah! Today doux commerce is at an end, and I am a free man… Tussy and I celebrated my first free day this morning with a long walk in the fields.’173
Shedding the misery of commercial life – with all the personal and ideological compromises it had entailed – saw Engels reborn at the age of forty-nine. ‘Today is the first day of my freedom,’ the still dutiful son wrote to his mother. ‘This morning, instead of going into the gloomy city, I walked in this wonderful weather for a few hours in the fields; and at my desk, in a comfortably furnished room in which you can open the windows without the smoke making black stains everywhere, with flowers on the windowsills and trees in front of the house one can work quite differently than in my gloomy room in the warehouse, looking out on to the courtyard of an ale-house.’174 With his newly recovered liberty, Engels was even starting to enjoy his Manchester life as he worked in his study, perused the newspapers at his club, and walked the Cheshi
re countryside with Lizzy and the dogs. However, if Gottfried Ermen was not sorry to see the back of his troublesome partner, there were some colleagues disappointed at the departure. A little note in the Amsterdam archives from Henry Bayley, an Ermen & Engels clerk, reveals that Engels was not always the bullying ogre of office lore. ‘I sincerely regret the loss of your kindness amongst us and my inability to show you my appreciation of the same,’ Mr Bayley wrote to his erstwhile employer. ‘I cannot help trespassing further to say how much I feel indebted to you for the many acts of kindness shown to me while working under you.’175
The leisured pursuits of a retired mill owner in the Manchester suburbs were never going to sustain Engels for long. After Lizzy had one too many rows with what remained of her family, the couple decided to move to London in late summer 1870. ‘In the last eighteen years, I have been able to do as good as nothing directly for our cause, and have had to devote myself to bourgeois activities,’ Engels had earlier apologized to his fellow 48 veteran Friedrich Lessner. All that was now set to change. Having endured the political abstinence of his wilderness years, Engels was hungry to return to Marx's side on the ideological barricades. ‘It will always be a pleasure for me to bash the same enemy on the same battlefield together with an old comrade like you,’ he promised Lessner.176 Engels the political street-brawler was once again ready for action.