11. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, p. 160
12. Leszek Kolakowski, Main Currents of Marxism (London, 2005), p. 61
13. J. E. Toews, Hegelianism: The Path Toward Dialectical Humanism, 1805–1841 (Cambridge, 1980), p. 60
14. Christopher Clark, Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600–1947 (London, 2006), p. 434
15. MECW, Vol. 26, p. 363
16. Ibid., Vol. 6, pp. 162–3
17. Ibid., Vol. 6, pp. 359–60
18. Ibid., Vol. 2, p. 197
19. Ibid., Vol. 26, p. 364
20. William J. Brazill, The Young Hegelians (London, 1970), p. 146; MECW, Vol. 3, pp. 462–3; quoted in David McLellan, The Young Hegelians and Karl Marx (London, 1969), p. 88
21. Ludwig Feuerbach, Provisional Theses for the Reformation of Philosophy, quoted in Lawrence S. Stepelevich (ed.), The Young Hegelians (Cambridge, 1983), p. 156
22. Ibid., p. 167
23. MECW, Vol. 2, p. 537
24. Ibid., p. 550
25. Ibid., Vol. 48, pp. 393–4
26. See Brazill, The Young Hegelians; Hellman, Berlin
27. Stephan Born, Erinnerungen eines Achtundvierzigers (Leipzig, 1898), pp. 26–7
28. See Engels's essay, ‘Alexander Jung: Lectures on Modern German Literature’, in the Rheinische Zeitung, No. 160, 7 July 1842 for evidence of his clear break with Young Germany.
29. Quoted in Hellman, Berlin, p. 73
30. For those who are unfamiliar: I'm very well acquainted, too, with matters mathematical
I understand equations, both the simple and quadratical
About binomial theorem I'm teeming with a lot o' news
With many cheerful facts about the square of the hypotenuse
I'm very good at integral and differential calculus
I know the scientific names of beings animalculous
In short, in matters vegetable, animal, and mineral
I am the very model of a modern Major-General.
31. MECW, Vol. 2, pp. 321, 322, 335, 336
32. Much of the following account of Marx's early life is drawn from David McLellan, Karl Marx: His Life and Thought (London, 1983), pp. 1–104; Francis Wheen, Karl Marx (London, 1999), pp. 7–59; and Eric Hobsbawm's essay in the Dictionary of National Biography
33. Born, Erinnerungen, p. 68
34. ‘Ink in his blood’, Times Literary Supplement, 23 March 2007, p. 14
35. MECW, Vol. 50, p. 503
36. Marx-Engels Archives, International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam, M4 (M2/1)
37. MECW, Vol. 2, p. 586
38. See Eric Hobsbawm, ‘Marx, Engels and Pre-Marxian Socialism’, in Eric Hobsbawm (ed.), The History of Marxism, I (Brighton, 1982). Or, as Kolakowski puts it, ‘At the time when Marx came into the field as a theoretician of the proletariat revolution, socialist ideas already had a long life behind them.’ L. Kolakowski, Main Currents of Marxism, p. 150
39. For a good example of this tradition, see Tony Benn, Arguments for Socialism (London, 1979), pp. 21–44
40. Henri de Saint-Simon, Letters from an Inhabitant of Geneva, in Ghita Ionescu (ed.), The Political Thought of Saint-Simon (Oxford, 1976), p. 78
41. Ibid., p. 10
42. Quoted in F. A. von Hayek, The Counter-Revolution of Science (Illinois, 1952), p. 121
43. Henri de Saint-Simon, The New Christianity in Ionescu (ed.), The Political Thought of Saint-Simon, p. 210
44. Œuvres complètes de Charles Fourier (Paris, 1966–8), Vol. VI, p. 397, quoted in J. Beecher and R. Bienvenu, The Utopian Vision of Charles Fourier (London, 1975), p. 119
45. See Gareth Stedman Jones, ‘Introduction’ in Charles Fourier, The Theory of the Four Movements (Cambridge, 1996)
46. Quoted in Beecher and Bienvenu, Fourier, pp. 116–17
47. Frank Manuel implies that the frigid banality of Fourier's own life inspired some of his loftier visions. ‘Fourier the bachelor lived alone in a garret and ate table d'hote in the poorer Lyons restaurants, disliked children and spiders, loved flowers and cats… From all accounts he was a queer duck… One sometimes wonders whether this inventor of the system of passionate attraction ever experienced one.’ Frank E. Manuel, The Prophets of Paris (Harvard, 1962), p. 198
48. MECW, Vol. 24, p. 290
49. Ibid., Vol. 4, p. 643
50. Ibid., Vol. 24, p. 290. Engels's view of the Utopian socialists waxed and waned over the years. By 1875 he was notably more generous about their contribution to communism and suggested that ‘German theoretical socialism will never forget that it rests on the shoulders of Saint-Simon, Fourier and Owen – three men who, in spite of all their fantastic notions and all their utopianism, stand among the most eminent thinkers of all time and whose genius anticipated innumerable things the correctness of which is now being scientifically proved by us…’ MECW, Vol. 23, pp. 630–31
51. Isaiah Berlin, ‘The Life and Opinions of Moses Hess’, in Against the Current (London, 1997), p. 214
52. Moses Hess, Rom und Jerusalem (Leipzig, 1899), p. 16
53. Quoted in Shlomo Avineri, Moses Hess (London, 1968), p. 11
54. Berlin, Against the Current, p. 219
55. See Andre Liebich (ed.), Selected Writings of August Cieszkowski (Cambridge, 1979)
56. Quoted in McLellan, The Young Hegelians, p. 10
57. ‘Über die sozialistische Bewegung in Deutschland,’ in Moses Hess, Philosophische und sozialistische Schriften 1837–1850 (Liechtenstein, 1980), p. 293
58. See Gareth Stedman Jones, ‘Introduction’, The Communist Manifesto (London, 2002)
59. Quoted in Avineri, Moses Hess, p. 61
60. Ibid., p. 84
61. MECW, Vol. 3, p. 406
62. ‘Die Europaische Triarchie’, in Hess, Philosophische und sozialistische Schriften, ed. Cornu and Mönke, p. 117
63. Moses Hess, Briefwechsel (Amsterdam, 1959), p. 103
Chapter 3: Manchester in Black and White
1. Manchester Guardian, 27 August 1842
2. Manchester Times, 7 July 1842
3. Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England (Harmondsworth, 1987), p. 239
4. See Alan Kidd, Manchester (Keele, 1996)
5. Thomas Cooper, The Life of Thomas Cooper, written by Himself (London, 1873), p. 207
6. Engels, Condition of the Working Class, pp. 82, 156
7. MECW, Vol. 3, p. 392
8. Ibid., Vol. 26, p. 317
9. Reasoner, V, p. 92
10. See Kidd, Manchester; W. D. Rubinstein, ‘The Victorian Middle Classes: Wealth, Occupation, and Geography’, The Economic History Review, 30, 4 (1977)
11. Alexis de Tocqueville, Journeys to England and Ireland (1835) (London, 1958), pp. 94, 107
12. Quoted in L. D. Bradshaw, Visitors to Manchester (Manchester, 1987), p. 25
13. Léon Faucher, Manchester in 1844 (Manchester, 1844), p. 16
14. Thomas Carlyle, ‘Chartism’, in Selected Writings (Harmondsworth, 1986), p. 211
15. Robert Southey, Letters from England by Don Manuel Alvarez Espriella (London, 1808), p. 83
16. Quoted in Bradshaw, Visitors to Manchester, p. 54
17. Hippolyte Taine, Notes on England (1872) (London, 1957), p. 219
18. J. P. Kay, The Moral and Physical Condition of the Working Classes Employed in the Cotton Manufacture in Manchester (1832) (Manchester, 1969), p. 8
19. E. Chadwick, Report on the Sanitary Conditions of the Labouring Population of Great Britain (1842) (Edinburgh, 1965), p. 78
20. Ibid., p. 111
21. Wilmot Henry Jones (Geoffrey Gimcrack), Gimcrackiana, or Fugitive Pieces on Manchester Men and Manners (Manchester, 1833), pp. 156–7
22. Manchester Guardian, 6 May 1857
23. Quoted in Bradshaw, Visitors to Manchester, p. 28
24. R. Parkinson, On the Present Condition of the Labouring Poor in Manchester (Manchester, 1841), p. 85
25. Faucher, Manchester, p. 69
26. Benjamin Disraeli
, Sybil, or the Two Nations (London, 1981), p. 66
27. MECW, Vol. 2, p. 370
28. Engels, Condition of the Working Class, p. 68
29. MECW, Vol. 2, pp. 370, 373, 378
30. Engels, Condition of the Working Class, p. 182
31. F. R. Johnston, Eccles (Eccles, 1967), p. 88
32. In November 2007 the Salford Star went to interview the residents of Engels House to ask their thoughts on the man who gave his name to their tower block. Resident Gordon Langlands was having terrible problems with the damp. ‘The Council just seem to be deafing me on it, they're just a bunch of comedians. But it's getting beyond a joke now. Someone told me to move out but I've built this place up. This Engels, he would have sorted it.’ See the Salford Star, 6 November 2007
33. My thanks to Colin Farlow for this information. More broadly on Ermen and Engels see J. B. Smethhurst, ‘Ermen and Engels’, Marx Memorial Library Quarterly Bulletin, No. 41 (1967); Roy Whitfield, Frederick Engels in Manchester: The Search for a Shadow (Salford, 1988); W. O. Henderson, The Life of Friedrich Engels (London, 1976)
34. MECW, Vol. 38, p. 20. The factory referred to in this letter is actually the Engelskirchen one. The sentiment remains the same.
35. Engels, Condition of the Working Class, p. 27
36. MECW, Vol. 4, p. 226
37. Faucher, Manchester, p. 25
38. Engels, Condition of the Working Class, p. 245
39. MECW, Vol. 3, pp. 387, 380
40. Ibid., Vol. 3, pp. 380, 387, 388
41. Ibid., Vol. 25, pp. 346–7
42. John Watts, The Facts and Fictions of Political Economists (Manchester, 1842), pp. 28, 35, 36, 13
43. Manchester Guardian, 26 September 1838
44. Engels, Condition of the Working Class, p. 241; MECW, Vol. 2, p. 375
45. See G. D. H. Cole, ‘George Julian Harney’, in Chartist Portraits (London, 1941)
46. Reminiscences of Marx and Engels (Moscow, 1958), p. 192
47. F. G. Black and R. M. Black (eds.), The Harney Papers (Assen, 1969), p. 260
48. Engels, Condition of the Working Class, p. 160
49. Anon., Stubborn Facts from the Factories by a Manchester Operative (London, 1844), p. 40
50. MECW, Vol. 6, p. 486
51. Engels, Condition of the Working Class, p. 242; MECW Vol. 3, p. 450
52. Thomas Carlyle, ‘Sign of the Times’, in Selected Writings, p. 77
53. Thomas Carlyle, Past and Present (1843), (New York, 1965), p. 148
54. MECW, Vol. 3, p. 463
55. Ibid., Vol. 10, p. 302
56. Engels, Condition of the Working Class, p. 276
57. George Weerth, Sämmtliche Werke (Berlin, 1957), Vol. 5, pp. 111, 128. This is, perhaps, a little unfair. The more civic-minded J. B. Priestley would later describe pre-war Bradford as ‘at once one of the most provincial and yet one of the most cosmopolitan of English provincial cities’ celebrated for its foreign residents. ‘I can remember when one of the best-known clubs in Bradford was the Schillerverein. And in those days a Londoner was a stranger sight than a German… A dash of the Rhine and the Oder found its way into our grim runnel – “t’ mucky beck”.’ See J. B. Priestley, English Journey (London, 1933; 1993), pp. 123–4
58. Eleanor Marx-Aveling to Karl Kautsky, 15 March 1898, Karl Kautsky Papers (Amsterdam), DXVI, 489
59. See Whitfield, Engels in Manchester, p. 70
60. Edmund Wilson, To the Finland Station (London, 1991), p. 159. W. O. Henderson concurs. He describes Mary as ‘an Irish millhand who lived in Ancoats at 18 Cotton Street, off George Leigh Street, in the factory district’. See W. O. Henderson, Marx and Engels and the English Workers (London, 1989), p. 45
61. Max Beer, Fifty Years of International Socialism (London, 1935), p. 77
62. Heinrich Gemkow, ‘Fünf Frauen an Engels' Seite’, Beiträge zur Geschichte der Arbeiterbewegung, 37, 4 (1995), p. 48
63. Engels, Condition of the Working Class, p. 182
64. Edmund and Ruth Frow, The New Moral World: Robert Owen and Owenism in Manchester and Salford (Salford, 1986)
65. Weerth, Sämmtliche Werke, Vol. I, p. 208
66. Engels, Condition of the Working Class, p. 170
67. Whitfield, Engels in Manchester, p. 21
68. Ibid., p. 30
69. MECW, Vol. 3, pp. 418, 423, 441
70. Ibid., Vol. 3, p. 440
71. Ibid., Vol. 3, p. 399
72. MECW, Vol. 4, p. 32
73. Ibid., pp. 431, 424. See also, Gregory Claeys, ‘Engels’ Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy (1843) and the Origins of the Marxist Critique of Capitalism’, History of Political Economy, 16, 2 (1984)
74. Many of the ideas within Engels's ‘Outlines’ would reappear in Marx's Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, where, along with Hess, it is described as ‘the only original German work[s] of any interest in this field’. See Karl Marx, Early Writings (Harmondsworth, 1992), p. 281. Crucially, Marx then extended the notion of alienation to the activity of labour itself.
75. Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, 9 April 1863, MECW, Vol. 41, p. 466
76. MECW, Vol. 38, p. 10
77. Engels, Condition of the Working Class, p. 31
78. Reminiscences, p. 137
79. MECW, Vol. 38, p. 13
80. Engels, Condition of the Working Class, p. 31
81. MECW, Vol. 38, pp. 10–11
82. Engels, Condition of the Working Class, p. 30
83. Ibid., pp. 89, 92
84. Ibid., p. 98
85. MECW, Vol. 3, p. 390
86. Engels, Condition of the Working Class, p. 125
87. Ibid., pp. 193–4
88. Ibid., p. 184
89. Ibid., pp. 31, 174, 216, 69
90. Ibid., p. 275
91. Ibid., p. 86
92. Ibid., p. 87
93. MECW, Vol. 23, p. 365
94. See Ira Katznelson, Marxism and the City (Oxford, 1992); Aruna Krishnamurthy, ‘ “More Than Abstract Knowledge”: Friedrich Engels in Industrial Manchester’, Victorian Literature and Culture (2000), 28, 2, pp. 427–48. Today, one of the finest practitioners of this fashionable academic trope is the Californian-based writer Mike Davis, whose 2006 essay, Planet of Slums, is a similarly Engelsian, ‘black and white’ approach to the class structure of the twenty-first century, global city. In a searing update of the Condition, Davis recounts with equal vituperation the sanitary state of the modern mass conurbations (‘Today's poor megacities – Nairobi, Lagos, Bombay, Dhaka, and so on – are stinking mountains of shit that would appal even the most hardened Victorians’), but also points to the power relationships underpinning the spatial inequality of the city. A chapter entitled ‘Haussmann in the Tropics’, investigating squatter and working-class clearances in contemporary Africa, China and Central America, is pure Engels. ‘Urban segregation is not a frozen status quo, but rather a ceaseless social war in which the state intervenes regularly in the name of “progress,” “beautification”, and even “social justice for the poor” to redraw spatial boundaries to the advantage of landowners, foreign investors, elite homeowners, and middle-class commuters. As in 1860s Paris under the fanatical reign of Baron Haussmann, urban redevelopment still strives to simultaneously maximize private profit and social control.’
95. Steven Marcus, Engels, Manchester and the Working Class (London, 1974), p. 145
96. Simon Gunn, The Public Culture of the Victorian Middle Class (Manchester, 2000), p. 36. See also Marc Eli Blanchard, In Search of the City (Stanford, 1985), p. 21
97. Guardian, 4 February 2006. See also Asa Briggs's comment that, ‘If Engels had lived not in Manchester but in Birmingham his conception of “class” and his theories of the role of class history might have been very different,’ in Asa Briggs, Victorian Cities (London, 1990), p. 116. By contrast, W. O. Henderson described Engels's motives as follows: ‘he was a young man in a bad temper who vented his spleen in a passionate denunciation of the factory system… the unrestrain
ed violence of his language and his complete failure to understand any point of view different from his own… may be explained by the fact… Engels was suffering from an overwhelming sense of frustration’. See W. O. Henderson and W. H. Chaloner (eds.), The Condition of the Working Class in England (Oxford, 1958), p. xxx
98. Engels, Condition of the Working Class, p. 61
99. Ibid., pp. 143–4. For Lenin, this was the book's signal achievement: it revealed that the proletariat was not just ‘a suffering class’ but that, ‘in fact, the disgraceful economic condition of the proletariat was driving it irresistibly forward and compelling it to fight for its ultimate emancipation’. See Reminiscences of Marx and Engels, pp. 61–2
100. Ibid., p. 52
101. Gareth Stedman Jones, ‘The First Industrial City? Engels’ Account of Manchester in 1844’, unpublished paper, p. 7. See also Gareth Stedman Jones, ‘Engels and the Industrial Revolution’, in Douglas Moggach (ed.), The New Hegelians: Politics and Philosophy in the Hegelian School (Cambridge, 2006)
102. Engels, Condition of the Working Class, p. 100
103. Alexis de Tocqueville, Journeys to England and Ireland (1835) (London, 1958), p. 108
104. Engels, Condition of the Working Class, p. 64
105. Ibid., p. 243
106. Ibid., p. 291
107. MECW, Vol. 23, p. 347
108. Friedrich Engels, Anti-Dühring (Peking, 1976), pp. 385–6
109. MECW, Vol. 23, p. 389
110. Der Bund der Kommunisten, documents and materials, Vol. 1, Berlin (GDR), p. 343, quoted in Michael Knierim (ed.), Über Friedrich Engels: Privates, Offentliches und Amtliches Aussagen und Zeugnisse von Zeitgenossen (Wuppertal, 1986), p. 27
111. Jurgen Kuczynski, Die Geschichte der Lage der Arbeiter unter dem Kapitalismus (Berlin, 1960), Band 8, pp. 168–9
112. Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. I (Harmondsworth, 1990), p. 349
113. For a proper appreciation of the work's significance see S. H. Rigby, Engels and the Formation of Marxism (Manchester, 1992), p. 63
Chapter 4: ‘A Little Patience and Some Terrorism’
1. Honoré de Balzac, Old Goriot (1834) (Harmondsworth, 1951), pp. 304, 37–8. Engels, like Marx, was a great fan of Balzac preferring him even over Zola. ‘La Comédie humaine gives us a most wonderfully realistic history of French “Society”, especially of le monde parisien, describing, chronicle-fashion, almost year by year from 1816–1848 the progressive inroads of the rising bourgeois upon the society of nobles, that reconstituted itself after 1815 and set up again, as far as it could, the standard of la vieille politesse française. He describes how the last remnants of this, to him, model society gradually succumbed before the intrusion of the vulgar moneyed upstart, or were corrupted by him,’ Engels wrote to his correspondent Margaret Harkness in 1888. MECW, Vol. 48, p. 168
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