Frock-Coated Communist
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By ‘Haussmann’ I mean the practice which has now become general of making breaches in the working class quarters of our big towns, and particularly in those which are centrally situated, quite apart from whether this is done from considerations of public health and for beautifying the town, or owing to the demand for big centrally situated business premises, or owing to traffic requirements, such as the laying down of railways, streets, etc. No matter how different the reasons may be, the result is everywhere the same: the scandalous alleys and lanes disappear to the accompaniment of lavish self-praise from the bourgeoisie on account of this tremendous success, but they appear again immediately somewhere else and often in the immediate neighborhood.93
Ever since the publication of The Condition of the Working Class, Engels's civic gaze has helped to shape the way sociologists, journalists and activists approach the built environment. One can read clear echoes of his work in the 1920s Chicago School of urban theorists, with their concentric zone theory, or in any number of modern university courses on cultural criticism and social geography, with their derivative Henri Lefèbvre focus on the production or archaeology of space.94 Such continuing relevance points to the role of ideology rather than reportage in Engels's account. Critics and biographers have often suggested that Engels simply walked the streets of 1840s Manchester, notebook in hand, writing down what he saw, with little premeditated sensibility. According to Steven Marcus, ‘He [Engels] was choosing to write about his own experience: to contend with it, to exploit it, to clarify it, and in some literal sense to create it and thereby himself. For in transforming his experiences into language he was at once both generating and discovering their structure.’95 Similarly, historian Simon Gunn has described how ‘Engels developed a style of grimly detailed reportage in order to extract meaning from the profusion of sense impressions.’96 Manchester historian Jonathan Schofield has gone even further in stressing how Lancashire transformed Engels's thinking and, with it, the nature of communism. ‘Without Manchester there would have been no Soviet Union,’ he declares. ‘And the history of the 20th century would have been very different.’97
Much of this approach falls into a broader conception of Engels as the philosophically naive but socially acute reporter: the Marx collaborator whose only real achievement was to provide the data on capitalist conditions. Yet, following his ‘conversion’ to communism, Engels came to Manchester with a clear idea of the political significance of industrial society. He was so drawn to this city – ‘where the modern art of manufacture has reached its perfection’ – precisely because it promised to validate the communism he had taken from Moses Hess with its prediction of social revolution. Manchester's role was to confirm not create, the theory. Which meant that despite the book's dark vividness, what marked it out from contemporary urban travel literature was its polemical power rather than descriptive resonance.
This accounts for the Condition's curious opening with its epic account of Britain's pre-history of industrialization – ‘a history which has no counter-part in the annals of humanity’. It is a sweeping economic narrative taking in the spinning jenny, the steam engine, the digging of canals and the arrival of the railway. In true Moses Hess fashion, Engels declares, ‘the industrial revolution [is] of the same importance for England as the political revolution for France, and the philosophical revolution for Germany’.98 Slowly, inexorably, the old economy of guilds and apprenticeships with its thick social hierarchy was dismantled in favour of class division, of ‘great capitalists and working men who had no prospect of rising above their class’. For the great crime of the British Industrial Revolution was that, thanks to the iniquity of private property, the technological and economic progress of the nineteenth century had not brought about the equitable enrichment of man. The end of the Malthusian spectre of famine and promise of abundance which had been offered by industrial capitalism was denied to the people by outmoded forms of property ownership. Instead, the final product of industrialization, the greatest iron hammered on the anvil, was the proletariat. Engels then outlines what would become the fundamental Marxist proposition that class was economically determined: ‘The proletarian, who has nothing but his two hands, who consumes today what he earned yesterday, who is subject to every possible chance, and has not the slightest guarantee for being able to earn the barest necessities of life, whom every crisis, every whim of his employer may deprive of bread, this proletarian is placed in the most revolting, inhuman position conceivable for a human being.’99 These desperate, miserable creatures, born of Britain's breakneck industrialization, are the callow heroes of the Condition. And their home is in the city.
So, despite all the bucolic ‘idyllic simplicity’ of pre-industrial peasant life – of farmers and fields, maypoles and harvesting – ‘intellectually, they were dead’, according to Engels. ‘They were comfortable in their silent vegetation, and but for the industrial revolution they would never have emerged from this existence, which, cosily romantic as it was, was nevertheless not worthy of human beings.’100 It is only once the working classes have been ripped from their villages and the idiocy of rural life and herded into factories that they come to appreciate their purpose as a proletariat. And here Engels provides one of the earliest accounts of the historic function of the proletariat as the harbingers of the communist revolution. Crucial to that was the state of their existence within the city, and Engels's breakthrough in ‘Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy’, that man was alienated from his human essence by capitalism, provided the essential ideological preamble. Engels's trawl through the slums of Salford and Little Ireland was an attempt, as Gareth Stedman Jones puts it, ‘to validate, both metaphorically and literally, the Feuerbachian conception of the ontological loss of humanity associated with religious alienation and – in the radical communist gloss added by Young Hegelians – with the establishment of money and private property’.101 In the industrial city, man was precisely the alienated, de-humanized beast of burden which Hess and Engels regarded as the end product of capitalism – all of which helps to explain the ubiquitous animalistic imagery, the endless swine and cattle, that suffuses his text. As Engels says of Manchester's working-class accommodation, ‘in such dwellings only a physically degenerate race, robbed of all humanity, degraded, reduced morally and physically to bestiality, could feel comfortable and at home’.102 The city provides the raw, human evidence of capitalist alienation.
Such suffering was, however, necessary, since it was only once the impoverished masses reached their lowest ebb, once their very humanity had been taken from them, that they began to realize their class consciousness. ‘Here humanity attains its most complete development and its most brutish; here civilization works its miracles, and civilized man is turned back almost into a savage,’ as de Tocqueville described it.103 As the birthplace of the labour movement, the city was thus the scene of immense sacrifice but also of redemption: through exploitation came ultimate liberation. ‘Only the proletariat created by modern large-scale industry, liberated from all inherited fetters including those which chained it to the land, and herded together in the big cities, is in a position to accomplish the great social transformation which put an end to all class exploitation and all class rule,’ as Engels later wrote in The Housing Question.
Through their delicate planning of the city, the middle classes hoped to have placed the working classes out of sight and out of mind. But the spatial configuration of the city – the creation of proletarian ghettos – only accelerated the nurturing of class consciousness. Thus Manchester was the scene of middle-class triumph but also doom. Every factory, slum and workhouse was a bourgeois memento mori: their glistening cities, tombs of the living dead. ‘Hence the absurd freedom from anxiety, with which the middle class dwells upon a soil that is honeycombed, and may any day collapse.’ From Glasgow to London, revolution was inevitable, ‘a revolution in comparison with which the French Revolution, and the year 1794, will prove to have been child's play’.104
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br /> This sense of the city's purpose dictates Engels's seemingly rambling descriptions of 1840s Manchester. This was not simply a feuilleton or piece of journalistic slum tourism; it was also a politically persuasive work of supple communist propaganda. As such, everything had an ideological role to play: the landscape, people and industry. Hence, we never hear the working class speak in Engels's account, nor is there any sense of the multiple divisions within Manchester's labouring masses – street cleaners as distinct from cotton spinners, conservatives from liberals, Catholics from Protestants. The nuances of Manchester's multiple economies – distribution, services, construction, retail, as well as the cotton mills – are subtly elided for an overarching urban confrontation between solidified labour and capital. Similarly, the city's rich working-class civil society of Mechanics' Institutes, Friendly Societies and working men's clubs, of political parties and chapels, is absent. Instead, Engels offers one codified proletariat anxious to fulfil its historic destiny.
This focus on the historic role of the proletariat significantly marks out Engels's thinking from the Owenites and Chartists, who had little sense of the broader socio-economic forces that had given rise to the working class. Nor did their schemes for new harmonies, phalansteries or charters take account of the social revolution required. ‘They acknowledge no historical development, and wish to place the nation in a state of Communism at once, overnight, instead of continuing political action until the goal is won and the movement can dissolve… They preach instead a philanthropy and universal love far more unfruitful for the present state of England… they are too abstract, too metaphysical, and accomplish little.’105 What was needed was practicable action, the union of Chartism and socialism and, with it, the march of history. ‘The revolution must come; it is already too late to bring about a peaceful solution,’ Engels the Montagnard declared. The one hope was to lessen the accompanying violence by converting as much of the proletariat to communism as possible. ‘In proportion as the proletariat absorbs socialistic and communistic elements, will the revolution diminish in bloodshed, revenge, and savagery.’ For even if the working class had the specific task of delivering the communist future, the new society would embrace every class as old antagonisms melted away. ‘Communism is a question of humanity and not of the workers alone.’106
With the clash between bourgeois and proletariat resolved in the communist future, the site of its struggle, the modern big cities, would similarly be rendered obsolete ‘by the abolition of the capitalist mode of production’.107 While the city might have witnessed the birth of the labour movement, the latter's triumph signalled the dissolution of the old antithesis between town and country. In future works Engels predicted that modern industrial techniques and a planned economy meant that commercial concentrations in urban areas would prove unnecessary. In turn, the poor sanitation and environment – ‘the present poisoning of the air, water and land’ – would be alleviated by the fusion of town and country. And so we have the irony that Engels, the great apostle of urban radicalism, ended his days advocating a hideously technocratic communist future devoid of civic life. ‘Abolition of the antithesis between town and country is not merely possible. It has become a direct necessity of industrial production itself, just as it has become a necessity of agricultural production and, besides, of public health… It is true that in the huge towns civilisation has bequeathed us a heritage which it will take much time and trouble to get rid of. But it must and will be got rid of, however protracted a process it may be.’108
The impact of The Condition of the Working Class was immediately apparent within German radical circles. ‘As far as I know, I was the first to describe in German… the social conditions created by modern large-scale industry,’ Engels later recalled proudly, ‘to provide an actual basis for German socialism, which was then arising and was expending itself in empty phrases.’109 According to one Elberfeld communist, ‘Friedrich Engels's book “The Condition of the Working Class in England”, which abases all sacrosanct nonsense and iniquity, lies openly in taverns.’110 Most bourgeois reviews, including that in the local Barmen Zeitung, were scathing, but the Prussian statistician Friedrich Ludwig von Reden was one exception, thinking it deserved ‘particular attention both for its subject and its thoroughness and accuracy’. He was especially impressed by Engels's ‘visibly truthful representation of the English bourgeoisie's attitude towards the proletariat: the despotism it practised in all important social issues, on the one hand, and the rage and frustrated bitterness of the propertyless on the other’.111 Marx, as we have seen, was bewitched by the book and its helpful accumulation of data – from the mill owners’ manipulation of factory clocks to the physical incapacity of operatives to the economic history of the cotton industry – to which he turned again and again for evidence of capitalism's inhumanity. ‘As far as concerns the period from the beginning of large-scale industry in England down to the year 1845 I shall only touch upon this here and there, referring the reader for fuller details to Friedrich Engels's The Condition of the Working Class,’ he wrote in an early note to the first volume of Das Kapital. ‘The fullness of Engels's insight into the nature of the capitalist method of production has been shown by the factory reports, the reports on mines etc. that have appeared since the publication of his book.’112
But Engels contributed more than just facts. While Marxist scholars rarely give it full credit, The Condition of the Working Class, together with ‘Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy’, comprised a pioneering text of communist theory. Engels had, in the words of Wilhelm Liebknecht, ‘deHegeled’ himself: the human injustices he witnessed at first hand in industrializing Manchester took him beyond the ‘mere abstract knowledge’ of his Berlin days. With astonishing intellectual maturity, the 24-year-old Engels applied the Young Hegelian notion of alienation to the material realities of Victorian Britain and, in the process, crafted the ideological architecture of scientific socialism. The thin crust of theoretical communism he took from Moses Hess had been profoundly enriched by his Manchester days. So much of what would later be regarded as mainstream Marxist thought – class division, the unstable nature of modern industrial capitalism, the bourgeois creation of their own gravediggers, the inevitability of socialist revolution – was all first embedded in Engels's brilliant polemic.113 Yet the Condition also proved one of his last substantive works of socialist ideology for thirty years. By the summer of 1844 Engels's apprenticeship in Manchester had come to an end and the son and heir to Ermen & Engels returned home to Barmen. On his way back, he stopped off in Paris for an altogether warmer meeting with Karl Marx. And, from then on, Engels's life's work was given over to managing ‘Moor’
4
‘A Little Patience and Some Terrorism’
In the final moments of Honoré de Balzac's acid chronicle of bourgeois Paris, Old Goriot, the young hero Rastignac steps forward to confront the French capital. ‘Lights were beginning to twinkle here and there. His gaze fixed almost avidly upon the space that lay between the column of the Place Vendôme and the dome of the Invalides; there lay the splendid world that he had wished to gain. He eyed that humming hive with a look that foretold its despoliation, as if he already felt on his lips the sweetness of its honey, and said with superb defiance, “It's war between us now!” ’
Paris provided the glittering stage for the next phase of Engels's life. It was a city, he thought, whose ‘population combines a passion for pleasure with a passion for historical action like no other people’. Like Rastignac, the ambitious, intellectually voracious and libidinous Engels wanted to taste all the city's delights. After the philistinism of Barmen and smoggy drizzle of Manchester, Paris promised countless opportunities for a young man of means. As Balzac marvelled: ‘Paris is an ocean. Throw in the plummet, you will never reach bottom. Survey it; describe it. However conscientious your survey and careful your chart, however numerous and concerned to learn the truth the explorers of this sea may be, there will always be a virgin realm
, an unknown cavern, flowers, pearls, monsters, things undreamed of, overlooked by the literary divers.’1
He wasn't alone in wanting to master this metropolis. For radicals, intellectuals, artists and philosophers, Paris was, in the words of Walter Benjamin, ‘the capital of the nineteenth century’. The Young Hegelian Arnold Ruge called it ‘the great laboratory where world history is formed and has its ever fresh source. It is in Paris that we shall live our victories and our defeats. Even our philosophy, the field where we are in advance of our time, will only be able to triumph when proclaimed in Paris and impregnated with the French spirit’.2 True to Moses Hess's European triarchy, Paris's role was to draw on its revolutionary lifeblood and provide the vital spark in the struggle for communism. To the material injustices of England and the philosophical advances of Germany, France added the political dynamite – ‘the crowing of the Gallic cock’, as Marx excitedly called it.
The French metropolis provided the backdrop not just for a raffish display of Engels's carnal appetite, but for the formation of the modern Communist League. It was here that Engels learned the dark arts of machine politics: amidst the capital's boarding houses and workshops he started to craft the movement that one day would culminate in the worldwide Communist Party. Accompanying the politics – the vote-rigging and procedural gerrymandering – came Engels's collaboration with Marx on the nineteenth-century's most celebrated polemic, the Communist Manifesto. It all began over drinks at the Café de la Régence on 28 August 1844, when the bar which had once served Benjamin Franklin, Louis Napoleon and Voltaire himself, now played host to an increasingly dissolute pair of young Prussian philosophers.