A few months before the end of his life, Engels told the German political economist Werner Sombart in very clear terms how ‘Marx's whole way of thinking is not so much a doctrine as a method. It provides, not so much ready-made dogmas, as aids to further investigation and the method for such investigation.’30 This is not the language of a closed, totalizing political philosopher yearning to construct a new Leviathan. What is more, Engels directly and repeatedly criticized those Marxist parties – like Hyndman's SDF, the Jungen faction of the SPD or the German Socialist Labor Party in the US – who attempted hermetically to seal off Marxism from further debate, ‘turning our theory into the rigid dogma of an orthodox sect’.31 Engels, like Marx, only rarely thought himself a Marxist in a narrow, partisan sense. Instead, he approached Marxism as an altogether grander truth that did not require the kind of paranoiac, protective genuflection which some party apparatchiks were already beginning to practise.
But the most crucial difference between Engels and his illegitimate acolytes in the Soviet Union and elsewhere was their respective starting points. He and Marx came to a scientific appreciation of their political philosophy during the 1860s and 70s as part of an attempt to redefine historical materialism in light of Darwinism and other advances in the natural and physical sciences. Much of their intellectual framework, stretching back to their earliest readings of Hegel, was fully formed by the time they sought to connect their ideas with the emergent, scientific vogue. By contrast, the next generation of socialists came to their Marxism along a very different ideological trajectory: in the words of Kautsky, ‘they had started from Hegel, I started from Darwin’.32 The likes of Kautsky, Bernstein, Adler, Aveling, Plekhanov, Lenin and the political leadership of the Second International – whose ideological awakening began with an immersion in the works of Charles Darwin, Herbert Spencer and the positivist Auguste Comte – read Marx and Engels from a more obviously organic, evolutionary perspective.33 The Italian communist Enrico Ferri's Socialism and Positive Science (1894), Ludwig Woltmann's Darwinian Theory and Socialism (1899), Karl Kautsky's highly influential Ethics and Historical Materialism (1906) and the above extract from Lenin (who thought ‘the idea of development, of evolution, has almost completely penetrated social consciousness’) were just a few of the contributions to a burgeoning communist literature explicitly linking Darwinism and Marxism. This was the vital intellectual bridge, constructed after Engels's death, from late nineteenth-century Marxism to the dialectical materialism of Soviet orthodoxy. How Engels was read by a different generation nurtured on a different set of philosophical and scientific premises is a separate issue from the author's original intent and one for which he cannot be held responsible.
Just as importantly, the essential characteristics of Engels the man – which surface only fitfully in his texts – were sharply at odds with the brazen inhumanity of Marxism-Leninism. He was more than just good to his dogs. For all his scientific enthusiasms, belief in rational progress and fervour for technological advance, Engels retained elements of both the Utopian socialist tradition (against which he had so self-consciously defined his and Marx's approach) and the Protestant eschatological inheritance he had abjured as a teenager. His telos was a dialectical culmination of the global class struggle: the withering away of the state, the liberation of mankind and a workers’ paradise of human fulfilment and sexual possibility – in sum, a leap from the kingdom of necessity to the kingdom of freedom. Neither a Leveller nor a statist, this great lover of the good life, passionate advocate of individuality and believer in the open battle of ideas in literature, culture, art and music could never have acceded to the Soviet communism of the twentieth century despite all the Stalinist claims of his paternity.
But neither could he have accepted the current settlement. If we can now strip away the accretions of twentieth-century Marxism-Leninism, the ‘dictatorial deviation’ which so poisoned the well of social justice, and return to the authentic Engels of nineteenth-century Europe, then a very different, strikingly contemporary voice re-emerges. From his eyrie in the Manchester cotton industry, Engels understood as few other socialists did the true face of rampant capitalism. And as our post-1989 liberal Utopia of free trade and Western democracy totters under the strain of both religious orthodoxy and free-market fundamentalism, his critique speaks down the ages: the cosy collusion of government and capital; the corporate flight for cheap labour and low skills; the restructuring of family life around the proclivities of the market; the inevitable retreat of tradition in the face of modernity, and the vital interstices of colonialism and capitalism; the military as a component of the industrial complex; and even the design of our cities as dictated by the demands of capital. But it is recent events in the world's stock markets and banking sector which bring Engels's criticisms so readily to the fore. ‘The present world financial crisis… dramatises the failure of the theology of the uncontrolled global free market, and forces even the United States government to consider taking public actions forgotten since the 1930s,’ commented Eric Hobsbawm in 2008. It seemed that Engels's emphasis on the dangers of monopoly capitalism and concentrated finance, as well as judicious editing of Volume III of Das Kapital, with his stress on the tendency towards ‘collapse’, might at last have borne fruit. In Hobsbawm's verdict, a revival of Marxist thought in the current climate means a return to an ‘analysis of the central instability of capitalist development, which proceeds through self-generated periodic economic crises, with political and social dimensions’.34
Engels's relentless denunciation of the devastating processes of capitalism is particularly apposite when it comes to the unregulated global market. ‘The cheap prices of its commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls,’ explained the Communist Manifesto. ‘It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilization into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves.’ While Marx and Engels would have regarded today's opposition to globalization per se as being illogical, Engels's critique of the human costs of capitalism is at its most resonant in those countries at the sharp end of the world economy – most notably, the emerging ‘BRIC’ markets of Brazil, Russia, India and China. For here all the horrors of break-neck industrialization – of capitalism red in tooth and claw transforming social relations, destroying old customs and habits, turning villages into cities and workshops into factories – are on show with the same savagery previously displayed in nineteenth-century Europe. With China now claiming the mantle of ‘Workshop of the World’, the pollution, ill-health, political resistance and social unrest prevalent in the Special Economic Zones of Guangdong Province and Shanghai appear eerily reminiscent of Engels's accounts of Manchester and Glasgow. Compare and contrast, as the scholar Ching Kwan Lee has done, Engels's description of employment conditions in an 1840s cotton mill
In the cotton and flax spinning mills there are many rooms in which the air is filled with fluff and dust… The operative of course had no choice in the matter… The usual consequences of inhaling factory dust are the spitting of blood, heavy, noisy breathing, pains in the chest, coughing and sleeplessness… Accidents occur to operatives who work in rooms crammed full of machinery… The most common injury is the loss of a joint of the finger… In Manchester one sees not only numerous cripples, but also plenty of workers who have lost the whole or part of an arm, leg or foot.
with the testimony of a Chinese migrant worker in Shenzhen in 2000:
There is no fixed work schedule. A twelve-hour workday is minimum. With rush orders, we have to work continuously for thirty hours or more. Day and night… the longest shift we had worked non-stop lasted for forty hours… It's very exhausting because we have to stand all the time, to straighten the denim cloth by pulling. Our legs are always hurting. There is no place to sit on the shop floor. The machines do not stop during our lunch breaks. Three workers in a group will just take turns eating, one at a time�
�� The shop floor is filled with thick dust. Our bodies become black working day and night indoors. When I get off from work and spit, it's all black.35
The awful added irony is that such unleavened exploitation is actively sanctioned by the Communist Party of China.
This was never Engels's vision of society. From his teenage years amidst the riches and poverty, the misery and degradation of the Barmen bleacheries, he was convinced there was a more dignified place for humanity in the modern age. For him and Marx, the welcome abundance offered by capitalism deserved to be distributed through a more equitable system. For millions of people around the world that hope still holds. Today, some two decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the global collapse of state communism, Friedrich Engels, that eminent Victorian of sacrifice and contradiction, would once more be predicting the negation of the negation and the fulfilment of his good friend Karl Marx's promise.
Notes
Preface
1. Reminiscences of Marx and Engels (Moscow, 1958), p. 185
2. Heinrich Gemkow et al., Frederick Engels: A Biography (Dresden, 1972), p. 9
3. Paul Lewis, ‘Marx's Stock Resurges on a 150-Year Tip’, New York Times, 27 June 1998
4. The Times, 20 October 2008
5. Meghnad Desai, Marx's Revenge: The Resurgence of Capitalism and the Death of Statist Socialism (London, 2002)
6. Karl Marx, Frederick Engels: Collected Works (New York, 1976), Vol. 6, pp. 486–7 [henceforth, MECW]
7. Jacques Attali, Karl Marx ou l'esprit du monde (Paris, 2005)
8. ‘Marx after Communism’, The Economist, Vol. 265, No. 8304, 21 December 2002
9. Francis Wheen, Karl Marx (London, 1999)
10. See Gustav Mayer, Friedrich Engels: Eine Biographie (The Hague, 1934) and Friedrich Engels (London, 1936); Grace Carlton, Friedrich Engels: The Shadow Prophet (London, 1965); Gemkow et al., Engels: A Biography; W. O. Henderson, The Life of Friedrich Engels (London, 1976); David McLellan, Engels (Sussex, 1977); Terrell Carver, Engels (Oxford, 1981) and Friedrich Engels: His Life and Thought (London, 1991); J. D. Hunley, The Life and Thought of Friedrich Engels (London, 1991).
11. E. P. Thompson, The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays (London, 1978), p. 261
12. Richard N. Hunt, The Political Ideas of Marx and Engels (Pennsylvania, 1974), p. 93
13. Norman Levine, ‘Marxism and Engelsism’, Journal of the History of the Behavioural Sciences, 11, 3 (1973), p. 239
14. MECW, Vol. 26, p. 382
15. Tony Judt, Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century (London, 2008), p. 125
16. MECW, Vol. 26, p. 387
Chapter 1: Siegfried in Zion
1. MECW, Vol. 2, pp. 578–9
2. Reminiscences of Marx and Engels (Moscow, 1958), p. 183
3. Quoted in M. Knieriem, Die Herkunft des Friedrich Engels: Briefe aus der Verwandtschaft (Trier, 1991), pp. 39–40
4. See Heinrich Gemkow et al., Frederick Engels: A Biography (Dresden, 1972), p. 16
5. T. C. Banfield, Industry of the Rhine (1846), (New York, 1969), pp. 122–3
6. MECW, Vol. 2, p. 8
7. Banfield, Industry of the Rhine, p. 142
8. Christopher Clark, Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600–1947 (London, 2006), p. 125
9. Die Herkunft des Friedrich Engels, pp. 555, 600
10. Hughes Oliphant Old, The Reading and Preaching of the Scriptures in the Worship of the Christian Church (Cambridge, 1998), Vol. 5, p. 104
11. MECW, Vol. 2, p. 555
12. Knieriem, Die Herkunft des Friedrich Engels, p. 21
13. See Gustav Mayer, Friedrich Engels: Eine Biographie (The Hague, 1934), Vol. I, p. 7
14. Quoted in Manfred Kliem, Friedrich Engels: Dokumente seines Lebens (Leipzig, 1977), p. 37
15. MECW, Vol. 44, p. 394
16. Ibid., Vol. 2, p. 14
17. Knieriem, Die Herkunft des Friedrich Engels, p. 463
18. See James J. Sheehan, German History, 1770–1866 (Oxford, 1989)
19. Knieriem, Die Herkunft des Friedrich Engels, pp. 463, 464, 470
20. MECW, Vol. 6, p. 259
21. Ibid., Vol. 2, p. 553
22. Ibid., Vol. 38, p. 30
23. Ibid., Vol. 2, p. 582
24. Ibid., pp. 20, 585. See also Volkmar Wittmütz, ‘Friedrich Engels in der Barmer Stadtschule 1829–1834’, in Nachrichten aus dem Engels-Haus, 3 (1980)
25. See Isaiah Berlin, ‘The Counter-Enlightenment’, in Against the Current (London, 1997)
26. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (Harmondsworth, 1986), p. 170
27. Hugh Trevor-Roper, The Romantic Movement and the Study of History (London, 1969), p. 2
28. See Celia Applegate, ‘Culture and the Arts’, in Jonathan Sperber (ed.), Germany 1800–1870 (Oxford, 2004)
29. M. de Stäel, Germany (London, 1813), p. 8
30. See ‘The Growth of Participatory Politics’ in Sheehan, German History
31. Jack Zipes, The Brothers Grimm (London, 2002), p. 26
32. See Clark, Iron Kingdom, p. 385
33. MECW, Vol. 2, p. 33
34. Ibid., p. 95
35. Ibid., p. 585
36. Ibid., p. 399
37. Quoted in Reminiscences, p. 193
38. MECW, Vol. 2, p. 117
39. Ibid., pp. 499, 503
40. Ibid., p. 528
41. Quoted in Reminiscences, pp. 192, 174
42. Ibid., p. 94
43. MECW, Vol. 2, p. 511
44. Ibid., p. 530
45. Quoted in Sheehan, German History, p. 573
46. MECW, Vol. 2, p. 421
47. Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England (Harmondsworth, 1987), p. 245
48. See Richard Holmes, Shelley: The Pursuit (London, 1987)
49. See James M. Brophy, ‘The Public Sphere’, in Jonathan Sperber (ed.), Germany 1800–1870 (Oxford, 2004)
50. MECW, Vol. 2, p. 558
51. Quoted in Paul Foot, Red Shelley (London, 1984), p. 228. Eleanor Marx would later take up the Shelley baton, together with her lover Edward Aveling, in their joint work Shelley and Socialism (1888)
52. Heinrich Heine, Sämmtliche Werke (Hamburg, 1867), XII, p. 83
53. MECW, Vol. 2, p. 422
54. Mayer, Eine Biographie, I, p. 17
55. MECW, Vol. 2, p. 392
56. Ibid., p. 135
57. See Sheehan, German History, pp. 646–7
58. MECW, Vol. 2, p. 9
59. Ibid., Vol. 24, p. 114
60. Gemkow et al., Frederick Engels. A Biography, p. 30
61. MECW, Vol. 2, p. 25
62. Ibid., p. 426
63. Ibid., p. 454
64. Quoted in David McLellan, The Young Hegelians and Karl Marx (London, 1969), p. 3
65. MECW, Vol. 2, pp. 426, 454, 461–2
66. Ibid., p. 471
67. Ibid., p. 528
68. Ibid., p. 486
69. See William J. Brazill, The Young Hegelians (London, 1970)
70. MECW, Vol. 16, p. 474
71. See J. E. Toews, Hegelianism: The Path Toward Dialectical Humanism, 1805–1841 (Cambridge, 1980), pp. 65–6
72. MECW, Vol. 2, p. 489
73. See Gareth Stedman Jones, ‘Engels and the History of Marxism’, in Eric Hobsbawm (ed.), The History of Marxism (Brighton, 1982), I, p. 301
74. MECW, Vol. 2, pp. 99, 169
Chapter 2: The Dragon's Seed
1. MECW, Vol. 2, p. 181
2. E. H. Carr, Michael Bakunin (London, 1975), p. 95; Alastair Hannay, Kierkegaard: A Biography (Cambridge, 2001), pp. 162–3
3. MECW, Vol. 2, p. 187
4. Ibid., Vol. 26, p. 123
5. See Anthony Read and David Fisher, Berlin (London, 1994); Robert J. Hellman, Berlin: The Red Room and White Beer (Washington, DC, 1990); Alexandra Richie, Faust's Metropolis (London, 1999)
6. Heinrich Heine, Sämmtliche Werke (Hamburg, 1867), I, p. 240
7. MECW, Vol. 3, p. 51
5
8. Ibid., Vol. 26, p. 357
9. G. W. F. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, translated with notes by T. M. Knox (Oxford, 1942), p. 10
10. Quoted in Peter Singer, Hegel (Oxford, 1983), p. 32
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