Frock-Coated Communist

by Hunt, Tristram

  However, there were those within the European communist movement who yearned for an immediate revolution, with its promise of rapturous human fulfilment, and regarded Marx and Engels's strategy as little better than weak-willed gradualism. Their leader was the itinerant tailor Wilhelm Weitling who, following the 1839 Blanquist uprising, had fled France for Switzerland and Austria, where he established League of the Just outposts and nurtured an enthusiastic plebeian following. There wasn't much Adam Smith, David Ricardo or Jeremy Bentham in Weitling's earthy politics. Instead, his doctrine encompassed a highly emotional mix of Babouvist communism, chiliastic Christianity and millenarian populism. Indebted to the work of the Christian radical Félicité de Lamennais, Weitling urged a physical-force adoption of communism on the back of a 40,000-strong army of ex-convicts. What followed would be a pre-lapsarian community of goods and societal harmony ushered in by the Christ-like figure of Weitling himself. While Marx and Engels struggled with the intricacies of industrial capitalism and modern modes of production, Weitling revived the apocalyptic politics of the sixteenth-century Munster Anabaptists and their gory attempts to usher in the Second Coming. It was a communist martyrology he liked emotionally to connect himself with by revealing to his audience the still livid scars he had suffered at the hands of Prussian jailers. His was a giddy, evangelical blend of proto-communist sympathies about the real nature of man which, much to Marx and Engels's fury, attracted thousands of dedicated followers across the continent. And the more Weitling was persecuted by official authorities, the brighter his halo of righteous martyrdom burned. ‘He was now the great man, the prophet, driven from country to country,’ Engels sneered, ‘who carried a prescription for the realization of heaven on earth ready-made in his pocket, and who imagined that everybody was out to steal it from him.’58

  Unsurprisingly, the continental socialist establishment was aghast at Weitling's facile approach. In London, the ‘real men’ of the league gave him short shrift, and so in 1846 he turned up in Brussels hoping to win over the Communist Correspondence Committee. It was to be a bruising encounter since Marx and Engels were always eager to denounce an ideological competitor. ‘The tailor-agitator Weitling was a handsome fair-headed young man in a coat of elegant cut, a coquettishly trimmed small beard, more like a commercial traveller than the stern, embittered worker that I had expected to meet,’ was how Pavel Annenkov, a Russian observer of the Brussels meeting, described Weitling's entrance. Around a ‘small green table’ the ideologues crouched.

  Marx sat at one end of it with a pencil in his hand and his leonine head bent over a sheet of paper, while Engels, his inseparable fellow-worker and comrade in propaganda, tall and erect, as dignified and serious as an Englishman, made the opening speech. He spoke of the necessity for people, who have devoted themselves to transforming labour, of explaining their views to one another and agreeing on a single common doctrine that could be a banner for all their followers who lacked the time and opportunity to study theory.

  But before he could expound any further, the pent-up Marx – furious at the pretensions of Weitling – sprang up and demanded, ‘Tell us, Weitling, you who have made such a noise in Germany with your preaching: on what grounds do you justify your activity and what do you intend to base it on in the future?’ When Weitling, who liked to deal in abstracts and biblical imagery, failed to adopt the appropriate level of scientific rigour, Marx hit the table and screamed, ‘Ignorance never yet helped anybody!’59

  It wasn't enough just to crush Weitling; his acolytes also needed to be exposed. Chief amongst them was Hermann Kriege, who had tried to disseminate Weitling's views to the German community in America through his editorship of the New York-based Der Volks-Tribun. ‘He founded a paper in which, in the name of the League, he preached an effusive communism of starry-eyed love, based on “love” and overflowing with love.’ In the face of such ideological deviation, it was clearly far better to enforce party purity than enjoy broad public support. As a result of Kriege's political depredations, the Brussels Communist Correspondence Committee (at this stage, only eighteen-men strong) decided as one of its first public acts to expel a founding member. The ‘Circular Against Kriege’, signed by Engels, accused their former colleague of ‘childish pomposity’, ‘fantastic emotionalism’, damaging workers' morale and unacceptable deviation from the official communist ‘line’. Kriege's crime, like Weitling's, was a hopeless inability to realize that their ‘revolutionary movement of world-historical importance’ had to be built on more than just vague aspirations about ‘the great spirit of community’. The communism of Marx and Engels was a methodical, increasingly scientific process dependent upon the historical actions of the proletariat. So to silence Kriege, ‘we let fly with a circular that did not fail to have its effect’. Soon after, ‘Kriege vanished from the League scene.’60 What the next 150 years brought in terms of expulsions, denunciations and political purges within left-wing parties is gloriously preordained in this chilling, three-point circular. And, from the outset, Engels was in the vanguard: over the decades, he would express his love and loyalty for Marx by taking delight in enforcing party discipline, pursuing ideological heretics and generally playing the ‘Grand Inquisitor’ when it came to upholding the true communist faith.

  Of equal menace to Weitling's primitive communism was the ‘true’ or ‘philosophical socialism’ which drew much of its inspiration from the French philosopher Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. Initially, Marx like Engels had been highly impressed by Proudhon and his 1840 work, What is Property? What Proudhon taught Marx was that the solution to the iniquity of private property did not lie (as Weitling suggested) in some mystical ‘community of goods’. Instead, he proposed the abolition of any income unjustified by productive work and the establishment of a system of fair exchange in which goods were equitably traded on the basis of the labour embodied in them. Marx was so enamoured of Proudhon's approach that, in May 1846, he invited him to join the Communist Correspondence Committee as its French representative. Engels added a ‘PS’ earnestly hoping that Proudhon, ‘will approve of the scheme we have just put to you and that you will be kind enough not to deny us your cooperation. Assuring you of the deep respect your writings have inspired in me…’ But Marx couldn't resist another little addition and the harmonious, cooperative mask of the committee suddenly dropped. ‘I must now denounce to you Mr Grün of Paris. The man is nothing more than a literary swindler, a species of charlatan, who seeks to traffic in modern ideas.’61

  Unfortunately, the Brussels agitators had overreached themselves as Proudhon was a close ally of the ‘true socialist’ popularizer Karl Grün, and he wrote back clearly judging the measure of Marx and Engels's political absolutism. ‘Let us by all means collaborate in trying to discover the laws of society… but for God's sake, after we have demolished all the dogmatisms a priori, let us not of all things attempt in our turn to instil another kind of doctrine into the people… let us not set ourselves up as the leaders of a new intolerance, let us not pose as the apostles of a new religion.’62 Marx and Engels did not take criticism well and the next few months saw an escalating tide of bile directed at Proudhon. It culminated in Marx's blistering pamphlet The Poverty of Philosophy (a characteristically chiasmatic response to Proudhon's The Philosophy of Poverty), with its attack on what Marx depicted as Proudhon's petit-bourgeois philosophizing, Utopian plans for labour exchanges and crippling inability to appreciate the historic role of the proletariat. This was the trouble with ‘true socialism’: it was a philosophy which wilfully ignored the social reality of working-class life and ‘presupposed the existence of bourgeois society, with its corresponding economic conditions of existence, and the political constitution adapted thereto’.63 Its attempts to preserve a petit-bourgeois quality of life in the face of international competition served only to hinder the final, communist summation of capitalism. It was a philosophy built around the narrow needs of an artisan class, wedded to a romantic notion of pre-industrial cooperation. Yet,
however compelling Marx's philosophical critique, the irony was that Proudhon and Grün followers were well dug in amongst the Parisian and German émigré working class, where their clear programme of co-operation, fairly priced products and universal employment enjoyed popular support. So that was where Engels, the Grand Inquisitor, was forced to take the fight.

  ‘The scent of the great Revolution and of the July Revolution – a column to commemorate which had been erected on the square where the Bastille had stood – was still in the air,’ was how Stephan Born remembered 1840s Paris. ‘Unlike in Germany, where nothing of the sort existed at the time, the workers of Paris already formed a distinct opposition to the ruling bourgeoisie…’64 Engels's posting to Paris in August 1846 came with a clear brief to win these workers over to the League of the Just and prevent any proletarians falling into the hands of Grün's ‘true socialists’ or Weitling's ‘tailor communists’.

  The French metropolis was just as seductive and dangerous as Balzac's Rastignac had described. And like industrializing Manchester, it was increasingly regarded as a divided city. Historically, Paris had always prided itself on the geographical intimacy of differing social classes – ‘a palace opposite a stable and a cathedral next to a chicken-run’, according to one US visitor. But now the rich were separating themselves off from the poor, leaving behind ghettos and no-go areas peopled by a dangerous residuum. Amongst the most notorious was the horribly overcrowded Ile de la Cité – ‘a labyrinth of obscure, crooked, and narrow streets, which extends from the Palais de Justice to Notre Dame’ – which provided the opening scene for Eugène Sue's bestselling potboiler, The Mysteries of Paris (1842).65 While the western enclaves of Paris cocooned themselves in wealth and privilege, the filthy faubourgs of the centre and east housed the city's increasingly restive classes dangereuses. Novelists of the era delighted in describing their capital as a hideous, decaying old harridan in which the heroism of the revolution was progressively tarnished by the awful reality of disease, prostitution, crime and mercantile bourgeois mores. The political economist Victor Considérant described Paris in 1848 as ‘a great manufactory of putrefaction in which poverty, plague… and disease labour in concert and where sunlight barely ever enters. [It is] a foul hole where plants wilt and perish and four out of seven children die within their first years’.66 In an age of empire, the language was one of lost world, monstrous tribes, new lands and unknowable cultures. Sue wrote of ‘the barbarians… in our midst’; Balzac described his city ‘like a forest in the New World where a score of savage tribes, the Illinois, the Hurons, struggle for existence; each group lives on what it can get by hunting throughout society’.67

  Scratching a living just above this lumpenproletariat were the skilled émigré communities to whom Engels directed his attentions. The Industrial Revolution had come late to France but by the 1840s the economy was, at last, starting to pick up. The expansion of the defence sector and railway construction – together with the development of cotton, silk and mineral industries – led to a sustained surge in industrial production and foreign exports. However, within Paris the workshop system of manufacture continued to hold out against the production line of the factory. Skilled workers in firms of fewer than ten people selling into a fashion-oriented market dictated much of the city's employment patterns: in 1848 Paris contained 350,000 workers with one third in clothes and textile trades and much of the remainder divided between construction, the furniture trade, jewellery, metallurgy and domestic service. A large part of this workforce – some 60,000 by the late 1840s – was made up of Germans specializing in the print trade, tailoring and cabinet-making. Engels described them as ‘everywhere’, and such was their strength that in certain Parisian quarters barely a word of French was to be heard.68

  The competition for their political affiliation was keen. As we have seen, France had long been a centre of socialist thought and, after the early years of Fourier and Saint-Simon, radical politics resurfaced in the 1840s on the back of ‘the social question’. First there was Proudhon, but he was joined by Louis Blanc, Etienne Cabet, Pierre Leroux and George Sand – all offering the promise of a new society ranging from Owenite-style co-operation to full-blooded communism. Much of this theorizing found its keenest audience amongst the exploited, impoverished German community – so much so that in 1843 the Prussian government launched an inquiry into just how extensive and dangerous this contamination of expatriate Germans was. One consequence of this was Marx's expulsion from France in 1845. ‘We must purge Paris of German philosophers!’ was King Louis-Philippe's understandable reaction to the subversive pamphleteering infecting his capital.

  Engels entered this tight political market supported only by his own self-confidence (and his parents’ continuing allowance), but gamely set to work trying to rid the Parisian working class of the deviant socialist strains of Grün and Weitling. His target was the so-called Straubingers – the German artisans and journeymen inclined to ‘true socialism’ – gathered in the Faubourg St Antoine manufacturing district. For students of entryism, Engels's tactics at their weekly political meetings were textbook stuff: a brutally successful medley of threats, divide and rule, denunciations and ideological bullying. ‘By dint of a little patience and some terrorism I have emerged victorious with the great majority behind me,’ he boasted to Marx before recounting how he ‘went into action, so intimidating old Eisermann [a joiner and member of the League of the Just] that he no longer turns up’. The one worry he had was the primitive level of ideological understanding amongst the Straubingers – ‘the fellows are horribly ignorant’ – as their relative prosperity was hindering the development of their class consciousness. ‘There is no competition among them, wages remain constantly at the same wretched level; the struggle with the master, far from turning on the question of wages, is concerned with “journeymen's pride”, etc.’ Ideally, Engels would have had them a great deal poorer and more desperate.

  At his next meeting Engels decided to set out the real meaning of communism to these myopically contented workers. In doing so, he embarked on his career as one of the most prolific and intelligible popularizers of Marxist doctrine. Its aims, he explained, were clear:

  to ensure that the interests of the proletariat prevail, as opposed to those of the bourgeoisie;

  to do so by abolishing private property;

  to recognize no means of attaining these aims other than democratic revolution by force.

  He then called a vote so the group could decide whether they were proper, committed communists or some fanciful debating society which he would not waste any more time over. ‘At the beginning I had nearly the whole clique against me and at the end only Eisermann and the three other Grünians.’ Engels denounced the anti-proletarian, petit-bourgeois sentiments of Grün and his disciples in such strident tones that the meeting eventually acceded to his definition of communism by a majority of thirteen to two (which also gives some sense of the intimacy of the gatherings).69

  In Paris as in Elberfeld, his achievements did not go unnoticed by the authorities. Among those taking an interest were the city police, who used the growing number of social disturbances in the St Antoine neighbourhood as an excuse to crack down on the subversive Straubinger cells. Grün's men fingered Engels as the agitator and he soon had a motley collection of spies and informers trailing him across Paris. Perhaps tiring of the nightly debates and votes on procedural motions, Engels used this police harassment as a welcome excuse to exchange socialist study evenings for a high-society plunge into Paris's carnal delights. ‘If the suspicious individuals who have been following me for the past fortnight are really informers, as I am convinced some of them are, the Prefecture must of late have given out a great many entrance tickets to the bals Montesquieu, Valentino, Prado, etc.,’ he boasted to Marx. ‘I am indebted to Mr Delessert [Prefect of the Paris police] for some delicious encounters with grisettes [prostitutes] and for a great deal of pleasure, car j'ai voulu profiter des journées et des nuits qui
pouvaient être mes dernières à Paris [since I wanted to take advantage of the days and nights which might well be my last in Paris].’70

  By his mid-twenties Engels was a well-versed Lothario whose silky good looks and raffish demeanour had earned him a string of lovers. No sooner had he left the earthy embrace of Mary Burns in Manchester than he was writing to Marx of ‘a love affair’ he had ‘to clear up’. By January 1845 it had come ‘to a fearful end. I'll spare you the boring details, nothing more can be done about it, and I've already been through enough over it as it is.’71 In Brussels over the summer he was back with his ‘wife’, Mary, but during the autumn in Paris prudish Stephan Born was aghast at his companion's Bacchanalian urges. ‘Notwithstanding his communist doctrine, Engels, too, was a staunch individualist… He had no appreciation for the fine arts, and for music in particular;… It never occurred to Engels to show me the artistic treasures of Paris; I visited the galleries of the Louvre without him. While he watched the wildest burlesques at the theatre of the Palais Royal, I admired Rachel in the role of Phèdre at the Théâtre francais.’72 Engels took a series of mistresses (apparently his ‘insolent manner’ was found to ‘work well with the female sex’), spent boozy evenings with a louche cadre of artists and, like so many of his class and epoch, had no compunction about paying for sex. Barely one year later he would condemn prostitution as ‘the most tangible exploitation – one directly attacking the physical body – of the proletariat by the bourgeoisie’, but no such reservations concerned him now. ‘It is absolutely essential that you get out of ennuyante [boring] Brussels for once and come to Paris, and I for my part have a great desire to go carousing with you,’ he urged family man Marx. ‘If I had an income of 5000 francs I would do nothing but work and amuse myself with women until I went to pieces. If there were no Frenchwomen, life wouldn't be worth living. Mais tant qu'il y a des grisettes, va!… [But so long as there are prostitutes, well and good!]’73 Happily for Engels, when it came to female relationships the personal and the ideological fused gratifyingly together: he had a strong libido, a love for the company of women, and also an innate, anti-Biedermeier distaste for the bourgeois morality of monogamous marriage. In time this would develop into a coherent theory of socialist feminism, but in his mid-twenties it remained a product of an ongoing reaction to the dowdy philistinism of his Barmen upbringing, along with a young man's obvious enjoyment of Parisian nightlife.