Frock-Coated Communist

by Hunt, Tristram

  Karl and a pregnant Jenny Marx had arrived in Paris in October 1843 following the rapid demise of his newspaper, the Rheinische Zeitung. No less a reader than Tsar Nicholas I had complained of the paper's anti-Russian tone and forced the Prussian authorities to revoke its printing licence. Marx's fellow editor, Arnold Ruge, suggested they leave Prussia to pursue their journalistic careers in France on the newly formed Deutsche-Franzosische Jahrbicher. Within weeks, though, Ruge was already regretting his continued co-operation with Marx as his colleague's editorial indiscipline quickly became apparent – ‘he finishes nothing, breaks off everything and plunges ever afresh into an endless sea of books’.3 But their divisions were more than just temperamental. After an intense period of research from autumn 1843 to spring 1844, Marx had distanced himself from Ruge's politics by defining himself as a communist and embracing the more activist elements of the Parisian working class. ‘You should be present at one of the meetings of French workers so that you could believe the youthful freshness and nobility prevailing amongst these toil-worn people,’ he wrote to Feuerbach in August 1844. ‘It is among these “barbarians” of our civilized society that history is preparing the practical element for the emancipation of man.’4 In addition, his study of the French Revolution as well as detailed reading of the classic works of political economy (notably, Adam Smith and David Ricardo alongside Engels's ‘Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy’) moved Marx on from a concern with religious alienation to the material realities of capitalist society. ‘The years 1843–45 are the most decisive in his life,’ declared Isaiah Berlin. ‘In Paris he underwent his final intellectual transformation.’5

  Less concerned with a critique of Hegelianism, he was now drawn to the effects which the division of labour and Carlyle's cash-nexus had on the nature of man. Like Engels's Manchester operatives, Marx regarded modern man as progressively alienated from himself by the nature of class-based capitalism. And, like Engels, he regarded the solution to this crisis of alienation as lying in the property-less hands of the very class created by capitalism, the proletariat. It was their historic function to return man to himself (‘human emancipation’) by transcending the poisonous iniquity which underlay political economy, the system of private property. ‘Communism is the positive abolition of private property and thus of human self-alienation and therefore the real reappropriation of the human essence by and for man,’ he wrote.6 This obvious philosophical sympathy with Engels meant that by the time the two men downed their aperitifs at the Café de la Régence the memory of their chilly meeting at the Rheinische Zeitung offices had faded. Now, over ten beer-soaked days, they formed the emotional and ideological bond which would last a lifetime. ‘When I visited Marx in Paris in the summer of 1844, our complete agreement in all theoretical fields became evident and our joint work dates from that time,’ Engels definitively recalled.7

  What was the nature of this meeting of minds, this companionship which in the words of Lenin ‘surpassed the most moving stories of human friendship among the ancients’?8 Unpersuasively, Edmund Wilson has written of Marx providing ‘the paternal authority’ which Engels had rejected in his own father. Alternatively, Francis Wheen has described Engels serving Marx ‘as a kind of substitute mother’. Less Freudianly, their relationship in familial terms is perhaps best approached as one of affectionate first cousins. Whilst sharing a background heritage of Rhenish, Prussian descent, each man brought markedly different but mutually supportive characteristics to it. ‘Engels had a brighter, less contorted, and more harmonious disposition: physically and intellectually he was more elastic and resilient,’ was how Gustav Mayer judged it.9 Certainly, there was less of the ‘dragon’ about Engels: less ‘Moorish’ impetuosity, intellectual self-absorption and personal indignation at the human cost of capitalism. Engels was both more aloof and more rigorously empirical than his distracted, tortured collaborator. Marx's son-in-law Paul Lafargue called Engels ‘methodical as an old maid’.10 Physically, Engels was far more robust than the blister- and boil-ridden Marx, whose financial and personal stresses could be read like angry Braille across his body. Much has been made of how these differing characteristics revealed themselves in their handwriting, with Engels's studious, symmetrical script (elevated here and there by a neat, humorous illustration) contrasted by the furious, blotch-marked prose of Marx. Yet, in a neat metaphor for their friendship, it was often only Engels who could decipher Marx's meaning.

  For the next forty years their relationship barely faltered, even amidst the most wretched of circumstances. ‘Money, knowledge – everything was in common between them… Engels extended his friendship to the whole of Marx's family: Marx's daughters were as children to him, they called him their second father. This friendship lasted beyond the grave,’ was how Lafargue described it.11 Fundamental to their friendship was a division of responsibility as, from the Paris meeting onward, Engels came to recognize Marx's superior ability to provide the ideological grounding of ‘our outlook’. He accepted this intellectual demotion in a typically candid, matter-of-fact manner. ‘I cannot deny that both before and during my forty years' collaboration with Marx I had a certain independent share in laying the foundations of the theory,’ Engels wrote after his friend's death. ‘But the greater part of its leading basic principles… belongs to Marx… Marx was a genius; we others were at best talented. Without him the theory would not be by far what it is today. It therefore rightly bears his name.’12 This faith in Marx's genius was what convinced Engels to step back, sacrifice his own ideological development and play ‘second fiddle’ to ‘so splendid a first fiddle as Marx’.13 And the devoted Engels could never understand how anyone would have acted differently, ‘how anyone can be envious of genius; it's something so very special that we, who have not got it, know it to be unattainable right from the start; but to be envious of anything like that one must have to be frightfully small-minded’.14 But, crucially, Engels never needed to be converted to Marx's thinking. He had, according to Marx, ‘arrived by another road… at the same result as I’ and was thus equally committed to exploring the theoretical and political implications of their philosophical stance. The difference was that ‘Marx stood higher, saw further, and took a wider and quicker view than all the rest of us.’15

  The first fruit of their relationship was a pamphlet entitled A Critique of Critical Criticism: against Bruno Bauer and Co. (1845) which revealed their shared impatience, in the wake of their Manchester and Paris experiences, with the idealistic remnants of the Young Hegelian school, along with a wish to announce publicly their newly held materialism. In intellectual terms, this materialism entailed a concentration on the lived reality of Man's natural, corporeal, ‘immediate’ existence and, with it, a primary focus on human economic activity and the social relations which result from that. In the face of the Bauer brothers' endless, futile philosophizing on religion and ethics – ‘formulae, nothing but formulae’ – the Berlin circle was now denounced as a self-indulgent impediment to progressive social change. ‘A war has been declared against those of the German philosophers, who refuse to draw from their mere theories practical inferences, and who contend that man has nothing to do but to speculate upon metaphysical questions,’ as Engels later put it in his increasingly strident tones.16 In contrast to the ‘beer literati’, Marx and Engels wanted to focus on social and economic conditions and not chase the Hegelian shadow of Idea and Spirit: ‘Real humanism has no more dangerous enemy in Germany than spiritualism or speculative idealism, which substitutes “self-consciousness” or the “spirit” for the real individual man.’17 Marx's reading of political economy and Engels's time in the cotton mills of Manchester had revealed to both men the definitive role of private property in shaping modern society. It was material reality, not ‘faded, widowed, Hegelian philosophy’, which determined social structures and, if evidence were needed, one had only to consult the past. In an early, tentative exploration of the materialist interpretation of history, Engels countered the role of
the Hegelian Idea in history by stressing the real contribution of flesh and blood humanity. ‘History does nothing, has no “enormous wealth”, wages no battles,’ he wrote in criticism of Bruno Bauer. ‘It is not “history” but live human beings who own possessions, perform actions and fight battles. There is no independent entity called “history”, using mankind to attain its ends: history is simply the purposeful activity of human beings.’18

  Despite its grandiose theme, the Critique was initially concocted as a short squib against Bauer et al. and Engels quickly churned out his copy before leaving Paris for Barmen in September 1844. ‘Good-bye for the present, dear Karl,’ Engels wrote on his departure, ‘I have not been able to recapture the mood of cheerfulness and goodwill I experienced during the ten days I spent with you.’19 Foolishly, he left the manuscript behind with dear Karl, where it quickly accumulated the tell-tale signs of Marx's stylistic incontinence. First of all, there was the length. ‘The fact that you enlarged the Critical Criticism to 20 sheets surprised me not a little… if you have retained my name on the title page it will look odd since I wrote barely 1½ sheets,’ Engels noted. And, then, there was the disproportionate space given to denouncing political foes. ‘The supreme contempt we two evince towards the Literatur-Zeitung is in glaring contrast to the 22 sheets we devote to it.’ Evident also from the book's growth was Marx's crippling weakness for diverting himself from more substantive projects. ‘Do try and finish your political economy book, even if there's much in it that you yourself are still dissatisfied with, it doesn't really matter; minds are ripe and we must strike while the iron is hot,’ Engels pleaded in what would, over the following decades, become a wearily familiar refrain. ‘Do as I do, set yourself a date by which you will definitely have finished, and make sure it gets into print quickly.’ Finally, there was the journalistic knack of a catchy title: this time, Marx had crassly rechristened the pamphlet The Holy Family: A Critique of Critical Criticism in mock reference to the Bauer circle. ‘Its new title… will probably get me into hot water with my pious and already highly incensed parent, though you could not have known that.’20

  Even prior to the publication of The Holy Family, the situation at home was hardly harmonious. Despite Engels's two-year absence and agreement to return to ‘huckstering’ (schachern) in the family firm, his relations with his father were increasingly tetchy as both found that atheistic communism and evangelical Protestantism did not rub along well. ‘I can't eat, drink, sleep, let out a fart, without being confronted by this same accursed lamb-of-God expression,’ he complained to Marx. ‘… today the whole tribe went toddling off to Communion… this morning the doleful expressions surpassed themselves. To make matters worse I spent yesterday evening with [Moses] Hess in Elberfeld, where we held forth about communism until two in the morning. Today, of course, long faces over my late return, hints that I might have been in jail.’ The situation was not helped by his sister Marie's engagement to another communist, Emil Blank. ‘Of course, the house is now in a hellish state of turmoil.’21 Those good pietists Friedrich and Elise were probably asking themselves where it had all gone wrong.

  None of these domestic ructions diverted Engels from his missionary work. On his return journey from Paris through the Rhineland, he had been highly encouraged by the advanced state of socialist sentiment. ‘I spent three days in Cologne and marvelled at the tremendous propaganda we had put out there.’ Even along the Wupper valley, that Zion of obscurantists, there were signs of progress. ‘This promises to be first-rate soil for our principles… In Barmen the police inspector is a communist. The day before yesterday I was called on by a former schoolfellow, a grammar school teacher, who's been thoroughly bitten although he's had no contact whatever with communists.’22 In an article for the Owenite journal, The New Moral World, Engels reported back on ‘the rapidity with which Socialism has progressed in this country’. Gilding the lily somewhat, Engels announced that ‘Socialism is the question of the day in Germany… you cannot go on board a steamer, or into a railway carriage, or mail-coach, without meeting somebody who has imbibed at least some Social idea, and who agrees with you, that something must be done to reorganize society.’ He went so far as to suggest that, ‘among my own family – and it is a very pious and loyal one – I count six or more, each of which has been converted without being influenced by the remainder’.23 And, as a result of such successes, ‘the clerical gentry have been preaching against us… for the present they confine themselves to the atheism of the young, but I hope this will soon be followed by a philippic against communism’.24

  Of particular excitement to Engels was the growing number of agricultural uprisings and industrial strikes across the German states, the most celebrated of which was the revolt of Silesian weavers in Peterswaldau in June 1844. After years of intensifying impoverishment in the face of international and technological competition, these once wealthy and independent artisans stormed the local cotton mills in desperation. Across Silesia and Bohemia similar riots erupted as ‘the social question’ – the defining issue of poverty and exploitation in the face of accelerating industrialization – started to dominate public discourse. The Silesian weavers gained particular notoriety thanks to Heinrich Heine's sorrowful poem, Song of the Silesian Weavers. As the workers chant a lament for the ‘old Germany’ they weave a shroud for their vanishing society.

  The crack of the loom and the shuttle's flight;

  We weave all day and we weave all night.

  Germany, we're weaving your coffin-sheet;

  Still weaving, ever weaving!

  Engels translated the verses into English before proudly announcing that ‘Heinrich Heine, the most eminent of all living German poets, has joined our ranks.’25

  Engels's political strategy was to channel this growing public concern about pauperism and class division in a consciously communist direction through a series of lectures he organized with his old mentor Moses Hess. The first, in February 1845, was to the liberal elite of Elberfeld at the popular Zweibrücker Hof. With an audience swelling to 200, the directors of local manufacturing and commercial firms, members of the court of law, and even the attorney general were invited to debate the nature of communism. Only the working class – the handmaidens of the communist future but not yet allowed into Elberfeld's best inns – was absent from discussing its predicament. Engels thought the evening, which began with a reading of Shelley, an astounding success. ‘All Elberfeld and Barmen, from the financial aristocracy to the épicerie, was represented, only the proletariat being excluded… The ensuing discussion lasted until one o'clock. The subject is a tremendous draw. All the talk is of communism and every day brings us new supporters.’26 One Elberfeld resident remembered the evening slightly differently:

  In order to make the thing look harmless, some harpists had been engaged. At the beginning of the meeting, poems based on social themes were read. Then Hess and ‘Friedrich Oswald’ began their speeches. In the audience were manufacturers who had come for a thrill; they expressed their annoyance by laughter and jeers. The defence of capitalist society was left to the director of the local theatre. The more violently he attacked the possibility of communism, the more enthusiastically the notables drank his health.27

  Engels enjoyed the rough and tumble of public speaking. ‘Standing up in front of real, live people and holding forth to them directly and straightforwardly, so that they see and hear you is something quite different from engaging in this devilishly abstract quill-pushing with an abstract audience in one's “mind's eye”.’ In his speeches, Engels spelled out the iniquitous, competitive nature of capitalist society and its inevitable descent into class conflict as the divide between rich and poor widened and the middling classes were squeezed out of existence. ‘The ruin of the small middle class, that estate which constituted the main foundation of states during the last century, is the first result of this struggle. Daily we see how this class in society is crushed by the power of capital…’28 As the waste, bankruptcies
and unemployment inherent in the capitalist mode of production mount up – on the back of cyclical trade crises and market failures – society would come to demand its reorganization along more rational principles of distribution and exchange. That future would necessitate a form of communism where competition was eliminated, capital and labour were efficiently allocated through a central authority, and crime disappeared alongside the tension between man and society. Moreover, productivity would rocket as industrial advances of the day were marshalled for the good of all rather than the profits of the few. ‘The greatest saving of labour power lies in the fusing of the individual powers into social collective power and in the kind of organization which is based on this concentration of powers hitherto opposed to one another.’29 In softly-softly tones, Engels explained the series of practical policies which would lead to this communist future - beginning with universal childhood education, followed by reorganization of the poor relief system and a progressive tax on capital. ‘So you see, gentlemen, that it is not intended to introduce common ownership [Gütergemeinschaft] overnight and against the will of the nation, but that it is only a matter of establishing the aim and the ways and means of advancing towards it,’ he reassured the conservative-minded Elberfeld elite.30 Indeed, it was almost a question of old-fashioned paternalism. ‘We must make it our business to contribute our share towards humanizing the condition of the modern helots,’ suggested the young manufacturing heir.31