But Engels wanted to see it for himself. On 8 August 1888 he set sail for New York aboard the City of Berlin, together with Carl Schorlemmer, Eleanor Marx and her lover, Edward Aveling. Tussy recalled the 68-year-old Engels in high spirits on the steamer, ‘always ready in any weather to go for a walk on deck and have a glass of lager. It seemed to be one of his unshakeable principles never to go round an obstacle but always to jump or climb over it.’119 Yet when they reached America, Engels had no desire to address socialist congresses, rally the proletarian troops, tour Pittsburgh railroads or visit Pennsylvanian steel mills. Instead, in an echo of his 1849 walking tour, Engels opted to act the tourist, incognito, with a month-long itinerary which took him from New York to Boston, on to Niagara Falls and then to Canada and Lake Ontario.
In his journal of the trip there is the familiar European refrain about the speed and bustle of US life – ‘an American cannot bear the idea of anyone walking in front of him in the street, he must push and brush past him’ – but also a rather surprised tone at the aesthetics of late nineteenth-century America. ‘Don't you believe that America is a new country – it is the most old-fashioned place in the world,’ he reported back to Laura Lafargue.120 The cabs and carriages they endured along the eastern seaboard were worthy of the seventeenth century, while the decor of the houses and hotel rooms they stayed in was remarkable for its faux Old World vogue – ‘everywhere, the chairs, tables and cupboards mostly look like the heirlooms of past generations’.121
The people were a different matter. Maybe because of his own background in trade, maybe because he had spent so much of his life in thrusting, bartering, entrepreneurial Manchester, Engels could not help but admire the unapologetic vitality and social mobility of the US immigrant ethos. And no one better embodied this aspiration than his nephew, Pumps's brother Willie Burns, starting out on a new life in Boston after emigrating from Lancashire. In contrast to the hopeless Percy, Burns was ‘a wonderful fellow, bright, energetic and with his heart and soul in the movement. He is doing well, works for the Boston & Providence Railroad (now the Old Colony), gets $12 a week, has a nice wife (whom he brought with him from Manchester) and three children.’ In the land of the free, unencumbered by class prejudice and feudal remnants, ‘nothing would induce him to return to England; he's just the lad for a country like America’, predicted Engels the unlikely apostle of the American dream.122
For Engels the urbanist, the high point of his tour was not ‘very pretty’ Cambridge, MA, or ‘beautiful, elegant’ Concord (where he enjoyed a prison visit), but the ‘grandest site for the capital of Capitalist Production you can see’, New York City. As so many Marxists who would follow his lead in the twentieth century, Engels found in America the ne plus ultra, the hyper-reality, of the late capitalist form. While Horkheimer, Adorno and Marcuse would discover it along the inter-war freeways of Los Angeles and campuses of southern California, in the 1880s it was the East Coast which represented the crystal ball of capitalism's future.123 ‘We got into New York after dark and I thought I got into a chapter of Dante's Inferno,’ Engels began his account to Laura Lafargue somewhat predictably before describing his wonderment at the ‘elevated railways thundering over your head, tram-cars by the hundred with rattling bells, awful noises on all sides’. In 1840s Manchester, it was the mills, manufactories and Oxford Road slums which testified to the capitalist urban form; in 1880s New York, it was the manipulated mass culture and son et lumière, technological spectacle of the modern city. Manhattan was, in the later idiom of Walter Benjamin, a fairground or dream-world of high-bourgeois consumer commodification. ‘Naked electric arc-lights over every ship,’ Engels noted, ‘not to light you but to attract you as an advertisement, and consequently blinding you and confusing everything before you.’ New York was, in short, ‘a town worthy to be inhabited by the most vile-looking crowd in the world, they all look like discharged croupiers from Monte Carlo’.124
Despite these revealingly English reservations about the vulgarity of the New Yorkers, Engels enormously enjoyed his trip across the Atlantic. The high altitude, the go-ahead Yankees, the first-rate food and the widespread availability of German beer convinced him he would return. ‘The voyage has done me a tremendous amount of good,’ he wrote to his brother Herman on the steamer back as he cracked into his supply of California Riesling; ‘I feel at least five years younger, all my little infirmities have faded into the background, even my eyes have improved…’125 He returned to London physically invigorated and politically exhilarated about the prospects of proletarian revolution. Back with Nim in Regent's Park Road, he was now ready to put aside the science and philosophy of the last decade and embrace the dirty business of politics and making Marx's ideas matter on the street. In 1890 the seventy-year-old Engels returned full time to the workers’ struggle – which, to his great joy, now finally encompassed the British proletariat. Some fifty years after crossing the Channel to sniff out the scent of revolution, he sensed England was at last ready to rise.
9
First Fiddle
‘On 4 May, 1890, the English proletariat, rousing itself from forty years of hibernation, rejoined the movement of its class.’1 On its inaugural May Day march, an event later to be subsumed into the Soviet calendar of military parades and Red Square hardware, London witnessed a bravura display of socialist prowess with workers and activists gathering from first light along the Victoria Embankment. Leading the procession were the dock labourers and gas workers of the East End, followed by the ranks of the Women's Trade Union League, the Bloomsbury Socialist Society, the North Camberwell Progressive Club, the East Finsbury Radical Club, the West Newington Reform Club and myriad trade unions. Accompanying them on their progression through the streets of commercial London – along Holborn and Oxford Street to Marble Arch – were councillors, parliamentarians, school board members and such stars of the socialist firmament as Fabian playwright George Bernard Shaw, the socialist MP Robert Cunninghame Graham, the gas workers' leader Will Thorne, the Marx sons-in-law Paul Lafargue and Edward Aveling, a young George Lansbury and Engels himself. For a brief, delirious day the heart of Empire fell under the sway of the radical Left.
By the time the procession entered Hyde Park – the once fashionable parade ground of London high society transformed during the nineteenth century into ‘the Park of the People’ – numbers had swelled to over 200,000 with radical banners and placards dotting the horizon. ‘I was on platform 4 (a heavy goods wagon),’ Engels recalled, ‘and could only see part – a fifth, say, or an eighth – of the crowd, but it was one vast sea of faces, as far as the eye could reach.’ Inevitably, there were the usual personal rivalries, factional disputes and precious little fraternal feeling within the socialist hierarchy. But for Engels the rally heralded a symbolic shedding of liberal confusion from the English working classes who, after the collapse of the mid-Victorian boom, had finally rediscovered their Chartist, socialist inheritance. ‘What wouldn't I give for Marx to have witnessed this awakening, he who, on this self-same English soil, was alive to the minutest symptom!’ he wrote wistfully to August Bebel. For the first time in almost half a century, Engels the resident Anglophile had heard the voice of the British proletariat ring out once more – and it did him a power of good. ‘I carried my head a couple of inches higher as I climbed down from the old goods wagon.’2
Just as remarkable as the crowds was Engels's presence at Hyde Park. The steely operator who had functioned so long in the shadows of Marx, who had not really adopted a public profile since 1840s Paris, was re-emerging in his own right. ‘Only now did he, who so far, to use his own words, had been second fiddle, show all he was capable of,’ recalled Wilhelm Liebknecht. As an adviser, exhorter and mentor in the struggles of the international working-class movement, ‘he showed that he could play first fiddle too’. ‘At every difficulty that we who work in the vineyard of our master, the people, come across, we go to Engels,’ wrote his devoted Tussy in 1890. ‘And never do we appeal to him in
vain. The work this single man has done in recent years would have been too much for a dozen ordinary men.’3 As May Days were commemorated across the continent and Marxism was adopted as the official ideology of an ever greater swathe of socialist parties – from Austria to Spain, Russia to America and now, gratifyingly, England – Engels's decrees could prove decisive. Often muttering the lament ‘if only Marx was alive today’, the Grand Lama of the Regent's Park Road spent his final, energetic years mulling over the emerging intellectual and organizational issues confronting socialism: from the continued vitality of capitalism to the political challenge of welfarist social democracy to the suffrage strategy of mass workers' parties. In the face of rapidly shifting political terrain, Engels the great doctrinaire revealed himself a surprisingly supple tactician rarely ashamed to rethink strategy or question sacred tenets.
From the practical to the philosophical, in his ebbing days ‘the General’ always stood ready to assist the cause. What kept him steadfast was his unrelenting love for life and a preternatural conviction that history was on his side, that the forward march of socialism was more realizable than ever before. With it came a gut determination to last just a few years longer, to ‘take a peek into the new century’ and witness the Marxist triumph he had made his life's work.
‘We are all socialists now,’ was the insouciant response of liberal statesman Sir William Harcourt to the changing political weather of late 1880s Britain. The once unshakeable ideological tenets of the mid-Victorian era – individualism, laissez-faire, self-help, evangelical certitude – were starting to crumble in the face of a growing desire for ameliorative state action. In Birmingham, Glasgow and London local councils were experimenting with radical programmes of municipal socialism; in Oxford, the English Idealist philosopher T. H. Green was reviving Hegel to offer a new philosophy of progressive state intervention and, with it, the intellectual foundations of New Liberalism; Henry George's seminal text, Progress and Poverty (1879), with its powerful demand for land reform, was making waves across England and Ireland; and in Bloomsbury drawing rooms, Sheffield Halls of Science and East End radical clubs, socialist ideas of humanity, equity and class consciousness were being debated with enthusiasm for the first time in forty years. For Engels, these stirrings in the nation that had given birth to the Industrial Revolution and suckled the first proletariat were long overdue.
Ten years earlier, at the start of the 1880s, he had optimistically thought socialism was on the verge of revival and agreed to contribute to the trade unionist paper the Labour Standard. Through the summer of 1881 Engels slogged away encouraging the trade unions to mobilize their members, drop their parochial, guild-like mentality and confront en masse the exploitative capitalist class. ‘There are plenty of symptoms that the working class of this country is awakening to the consciousness that it has for some time been moving in the wrong groove,’ he wrote, urging the union barons to forgo demands for higher wages and shorter hours and concentrate on ‘the wages systems itself’.4 But it did no good: ‘I do not see any progress,’ he complained in a resignation letter to the paper's editor George Shipton in August 1881.5 To Engels's frustration, the ingrained pusillanimity of the English proletariat was proving more intractable than ever. ‘For five whole months I tried, through The Labour Standard, for which I wrote leading articles, to pick up the threads of the old Chartist movement and disseminate our ideas so as to see whether this might evoke some response,’ he explained to his '48 comrade Johann Phillip Becker. The result? ‘Absolutely nothing.’6 The unfortunate truth, Engels concluded, was that as long as the English working class continued to share in the fruits of the British Empire's industrial monopoly there was no hope of socialism. They were getting rich off colonial hegemony and, seeing little reason to upset such a profitable arrangement, had auctioned themselves off to the Liberal Party. Only the demise of Britain's commercial advantage in the face of American competition and a sustained period of impoverishment could possibly spur the workers to action. ‘On no account whatever allow yourself to be bamboozled into believing that a real proletarian movement is afoot here,’ Engels complained to Bebel in 1883. ‘Participation in the domination of the world market was and is the economic basis of the English workers' political nullity.’7
So, the annoyance was all the greater for the avidly proletarian Engels that when English socialism did revive it was not the result of a grand socio-economic climacteric – on the contrary, it was highly intellectual, even spiritual in origin and led by annoyingly middle-class penseurs. ‘Needless to say that today there is indeed “Socialism again in England”, and plenty of it,’ Engels wrote in 1892 in a new introduction to The Condition of the Working Class in England. ‘Socialism of all shades; Socialism conscious and unconscious, Socialism prosaic and poetic, Socialism of the working class and of the middle class, for, verily, that abomination of abominations, Socialism, has not only become respectable, but has actually donned evening dress and lounges lazily on drawing-room causeuses.’8 Henry Hyndman's account of a day of socialist action makes clear just how apt such criticisms were. ‘It was a curious scene, Morris in his soft hat and blue suit, Champion, Frost and Joynes in the morning garments of the well-to-do, several working-men comrades, and I myself wearing the frock-coat in which Shaw said I was born, with a tall hat and good gloves, all earnestly engaged in selling a penny Socialist paper during the busiest time of the day in London's busiest thoroughfare.’9 For the pioneers of English socialism were a class apart from those they hoped to emancipate: there was the Christian or ‘Sacramental Socialist’ grouping centred around Stewart Headlam's Guild of St Matthew; Edward Carpenter's Millthorpe commune of New Lifers, manly comradeship and Eastern mysticism; Thomas Davidson's vaguely Owenite Fellowship of the New Life (which would, in turn, sprout the Fabian Society); and an eclectic range of other societies from the East End-based Labour Emancipation League to the Land Reform Union to the National Secular Society. What drew these bohemian radicals and angst-ridden bourgeois towards socialism was, according to the Fabian ideologue Beatrice Webb, ‘a consciousness of sin… a growing uneasiness, amounting to conviction, that the industrial organisation, which had yielded rent, interest, and profits on a stupendous scale, had failed to provide a decent livelihood and tolerable conditions for a majority of the inhabitants of Great Britain’.10 For numerous other English socialists, it was a spiritual conveyor belt from Nonconformity to secularism and then to a religion of humanity built upon an ethical notion of socialism and fellowship. Few had read Das Kapital, their political connections with continental communism were minimal and their grasp of dialectical materialism abysmal. There was only one amongst the English socialists who could honestly count himself a conviction Marxist: the top-hatted Hyndman, founder of the most influential socialist sect in 1880s London, the Social Democratic Federation (SDF). The only problem was Engels couldn't stand him.
Henry Mayers Hyndman, the son of a West India merchant, trained for the Bar, tried his hand at journalism and, in the end, married well. His epiphany came in 1880 when he read Das Kapital in French and introduced himself to Karl Marx, ‘the Aristotle of the nineteenth century’, becoming in the process a persistent and tiresome presence at Maitland Park Road. Hyndman always claimed it was his intimate friendship with Marx which antagonized the resentful Engels, driving him ‘to break down what he thought might be a rival influence to his own’. As was so often the case with the upper reaches of socialist politics, an awful lot of it came down to personalities. Hyndman dismissed the Marx-Engels relationship as built around the financial dependence of the former on the latter with the ‘exacting, suspicious, jealous’ Engels demanding (with a well-turned play on Das Kapital) ‘the exchange value of his ready cash’ in friendship. ‘Mrs Marx could not bear to think of it,’ wrote Hyndman in his autobiography. ‘She spoke of him [Engels] to my wife more than once as Karl Marx's “evil genius” and wished that she could relieve her husband from any dependence upon this able and loyal but scarcely sympat
hetic coadjutor.’11 And Hyndman didn't reserve these views for posterity. He repeatedly used his SDF paper, Justice, to attack the lofty, detached Engels and his ‘Marxist clique’ for failing to support him, the SDF and a unified socialist party in Britain. ‘Engels has a perfect genius for overthrowing good understanding and for setting men by the ears,’ he railed. ‘If there were nobody else to intrigue and plot against, he would intrigue and plot against himself.’12
While Engels did guard his friendships rather proprietarily, what infuriated both him and Marx was Hyndman's shameless plagiarism of Das Kapital for his communist credo, England for All (1881), with no acknowledgement of the author. More than that, Engels thought that behind Hyndman's socialist veneer there lurked an old-fashioned Tory chauvinist (an accurate analysis given Hyndman's later acceptance of ‘Tory Gold’ to fund his election campaigns). ‘Hyndman is shrewd and a good business man, but superficial and STOCK-JOHN-BULL,’ Engels confided to Kautsky. ‘Moreover his ambition far outruns his talents and achievements.’13 Never entirely at one with the working class, Hyndman ran the SDF with a combination of highhanded imperiousness and rigid Marxist orthodoxy. Indeed, the philosophical strictures he imposed were too much even for Engels. ‘The SDF is in fact a sect pure and simple,’ the increasingly pluralist Engels told Kautsky. ‘It has ossified Marxism into a hard and fast dogma’ and was in danger of repelling prospective supporters.14 Worse than all that was Hyndman's demagogic vanity – which Engels thought dangerously on display in February 1886 when Hyndman, John Burns and his wealthy backer H. H. Champion led a rally through Pall Mall and Piccadilly which sparked an afternoon of rioting by 8,000 unemployed East Enders happy to tear up the West End for the day. ‘What has been achieved is to equate socialism with looting in the minds of the bourgeois public and, while this may not have made matters much worse, it has certainly got us no further,’ was Engels's sour judgement on ‘Bloody Monday’.15 It all pointed to the fundamental problem with the SDF and its executive of socialist charlatans who were ‘determined to conjure up overnight a movement which, here as elsewhere, necessarily calls for years of work’.16 No one seemed capable in Britain of the kind of steady organizational and ideological slog which Liebknecht and Kautsky were undertaking in Germany or Lafargue and Guesde in France.
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