Frock-Coated Communist
Page 18
There was, however, an altogether less attractive aspect to Engels's womanizing. Since the start of his friendship with Marx, Engels's attitude to Moses Hess had been hardening. The ‘communist rabbi’ who had first brought him into the socialist current was increasingly disparaged as an ideologically confused ditherer whose sympathy for Grün's ‘true socialism’ provided clear evidence of his suspect philosophical tendencies. But, like a pair of playground bullies, Marx and Engels decided to make the political personal by directing their attention towards Hess's wife. Sibylle Hess, née Pesch, was, according to Cologne police reports, a former prostitute turned seamstress whom Hess rescued from the gutter as much out of political conviction as emotional attachment – ‘he wished to perform an act expressive of the need for love among men and for equality between them’, according to Isaiah Berlin. However, Sibylle had a wandering eye.74
In July 1846 Engels agreed to help Hess by smuggling the passport-less Mrs Hess across the border from Brussels into France. No sooner had the two arrived in Paris than Engels was taking her name in vain in a series of unchivalrous letters to Marx. ‘Mrs Hess is on the look-out for a husband. She doesn't give a fig for Hess. If there should happen to be someone suitable, apply to Madame Gsell, Faubourg St Antoine. There's no hurry since the competition isn't keen.’ By September it seemed Engels had taken upon himself the conjugal role after he boasted to Marx of consigning Mrs Hess ‘cursing and swearing’ back to the ‘furthest end of the Faubourg St Antoine’. What gave him especial pleasure were the steps which the unknowingly cuckolded Hess (now little more than a Falstaff figure to Engels's Prince Hal) was at the same time taking to renew their friendship. When Hess eventually turned up in Paris in January 1847, ‘my treatment of him was so cold and scornful that he will have no desire to return. All I did for him was to give him some advice about the clap he had brought with him from Germany.’ Unsurprisingly, the friendship broke down terminally when Hess discovered Engels's seduction of his wife and he returned to Brussels to rubbish his one-time protégé. Engels adopted an air of lofty nonchalance. ‘Moses brandishing his pistols, parading his horns before the whole of Brussels… must have been exquisite,’ he wrote to Marx. However, what certainly did unsettle Engels was Hess's ‘preposterous lie about rape [Notzucht]’. This was, he assured his friend, utter nonsense. ‘I can provide him with enough earlier, concurrent, and later details to send him reeling. For only last July here in Paris this Balaam's she-ass [Sibylle] made me, in optima forma [in due form], a declaration of love mingled with resignation, and confided to me the most intimate nocturnal secrets of her ménage! Her rage with me is unrequited love, pure and simple.’ Boorishly, he went on to suggest that ‘the horned Siegfried’ was ‘perfectly at liberty… to avenge himself on all my present, past and future mistresses’, which he helpfully listed. But if Hess wanted to take this matter of honour further, then Engels, who learned his duelling amongst the wealthy of Bremen, ‘will give him fair play’.75
Did Engels really rape Moses Hess's wife? With his self-styled ‘insolent manner’, Engels was certainly something of a sexual predator during his time in Paris, but it seems unlikely to have carried itself over into violence. Most probably, it was an affair – elements of which were bound up with Engels wanting to humiliate Moses Hess – which went wrong. Nonetheless, there does exist a rather curious passage in Eleanor Marx's 1898 letter to Karl Kautsky in which she writes of a Paris incident unusually hushed up within the otherwise open-minded Marx household. ‘That there was a woman in the case I did most certainly know, and from some words I heard, apparently a rather disreputable one at that. But what it all was – except that it was an episode to be passed over and covered up – I don't know.’ It was, she assured herself and Kautsky, ‘some silly young fellow's nonsense’.76
Impressively, Engels managed to get some politics done between his skirt chasing. In June 1847 the League of the Just held a congress in London to which Marx and Engels (as newly signed-up members) were invited. Its purpose was for Schapper, Bauer and Mill to join forces with the Brussels Committee and drop the old secret society mentality for a more open political programme. With Marx's finances at another characteristic low, the Brussels contingent was represented by Wilhelm Wolff, whilst Engels had to battle through a meeting of the Paris branch to ensure his selection as their representative. ‘I realised that it would be very difficult to get Engels nominated, though he hoped to be,’ recalled Stephan Born; ‘there was strong opposition against him. I only succeeded in getting him elected by asking – against the rules – that those who were against, not for, the candidate raise their hands. This trick strikes me as loathsome today. “Well done,” Engels said to me as we went home.’77
The congress represented a seminal moment in the development of the Communist Party: the name was changed from League of the Just to the Communist League; and the mission statement from ‘All Men Are Brothers’ to the altogether more bombastic, ‘Working Men of All Countries, Unite!’ Engels was tasked by the congress with drawing up a ‘revolutionary catechism’ for the league, outlining their politico-philosophical stance. The result was the ‘Draft of a Communist Confession of Faith’ which, in its very title, revealed that blend of religious zealotry and underground paranoia which still marked out the early communist movement.
Question 1: Are you a Communist?
Answer: Yes.
Question 2: What is the aim of the Communists?
Answer: To organise society in such a way that every member of it can develop and use all his capabilities and powers in complete freedom and without thereby infringing the basic conditions of this society.
Question 3: How do you wish to achieve this?
Answer: By the elimination of private property and its replacement by community of property.78
The draft confession, continuing to Question 22, was a compromise document including much of the sort of ‘true’ or Utopian socialism Marx and Engels abhorred. But it also contained inklings of the very brilliant, popularizing touch that would culminate in the Communist Manifesto. The coming of the proletariat and their historic function in ushering in the socialist revolution was at the core of the catechism. Equally, Engels's text was replete with the materialist interpretation of history and society which he and Marx had been developing over the previous five years. Political revolution, the document declared, was contingent upon a disjuncture between property relations and the mode of production (whether the political and social superstructure was in accordance with the economic base) – but that did not mean change could not be worked for. ‘If, in the end, the oppressed proletariat is thus driven into a revolution, then we will defend the cause of the proletariat just as well by our deeds as now by our words.’ However, the first step along the path to ‘the political liberation of the proletariat’ was the securing of ‘a democratic constitution’. Following that would come the limiting of private property, creation of national workshops, universal state education and some potential reforms to the marriage system.79
With the congress concluded, Engels threw himself into an intensive round of shuttle diplomacy from which Marx was barred by a number of official travel bans. He returned from London to Brussels to shore up the Marxist position in the face of attempts by rival German factions to usurp the communist network, then back to Paris to sell the ‘Confession of Faith’ to the local Communist League branches. ‘I at once set up a propaganda community and I rush round speechifying,’ he reported to Marx. ‘I was immediately elected to the district [district Committee of the Communist League] and have been entrusted with the correspondence.’ To get the ‘Confession’ through the committees he needed to outmanoeuvre Moses Hess, who was hawking around an alternative version. Once again, his wily political skills came to the fore as he played ‘an infernal trick on Mosi’. ‘Last Friday at the district I dealt with this [Hess's version], point by point, and was not yet halfway through when the lads declared themselves satisfaits. Completely unopposed, I got them to entr
ust me with the task of drafting a new one which will be discussed next Friday by the district and will be sent to London behind the backs of the committees. Naturally not a soul must know about this, otherwise we shall all be unseated and there'll be the deuce of a row.’80
The next draft, composed by Engels in October 1847, was entitled ‘Principles of Communism’ in preparation for the second Communist League congress scheduled back in London for 28 November. While much of the ‘Principles’ is similar in tone and content to the ‘Confession’, there is a perceptible ratcheting up of the materialism and downplaying of the earlier Utopian socialism. The necessity of a thorough proletarian revolution is more openly advocated and a new emphasis on the unstoppable, global character of capitalism leads to a call for international worker solidarity. ‘So if now in England or France the workers liberate themselves, this must lead to revolutions in all other countries, which sooner or later will also bring about the liberation of the workers in those countries.’ Socialism in one country was not an option. Yet the destructive processes of globalized capitalism were in the meantime to be embraced: ‘precisely that quality of large-scale industry which in present society produces all misery and all trade crises is the very quality which under a different social organization will destroy that same misery and these disastrous fluctuations’.
Engels retained the earlier commitment to the abolition of private property and the inauguration of a democratic constitution, but now offered an expanded list of transitional steps towards socialism. One of these, in something of a throwback to the Fourierist and Owenite tradition, was a pledge to erect ‘large palaces on national estates as common dwellings for communities of citizens engaged in industry as well as agriculture, and combining the advantages of both urban and rural life without the one-sidedness and disadvantage of either’. Equally radical was Engels's suggestion that the coming communist order would transform relations between the sexes, since ‘it abolished private property and educates children communally, thus destroying the twin foundation of hitherto existing marriage – the dependence through private property of the wife upon the husband and of the children upon the parents’.81
Unpublished until 1914, ‘Principles of Communism’ was the draft document with which Engels returned to London and the basis of the Communist Manifesto. ‘This congress must be a decisive one,’ Engels urged Marx before meeting him in Ostend and travelling together across the Channel. ‘Give a little thought to the Confession of Faith. I think we would do best to abandon the catechetical form and call the thing Communist Manifesto.’ Holed up inside the headquarters of the German Workers' Education Association, above the Red Lion pub in Great Windmill Street, the second congress picked apart the ‘Principles’ over the course of an exhausting ten days in November 1847. But Marx carried the meeting. ‘His speech was brief, convincing and compelling in its logic. He never said a superfluous word; every sentence contained an idea and every idea was an essential link in the chain of his argument.’82 By the end, ‘All contradiction and doubt were finally over and done with, the new basic principles were adopted unanimously, and Marx and I were commissioned to draw up the manifesto. This was done immediately afterwards.’ ‘Since then,’ Engels proudly noted looking back from the 1880s, ‘it [the Manifesto] has travelled round the world, has been translated into almost all languages and still today serves in numerous countries as a guide for the proletarian movement.’83
From the rough, sometimes leaden drafts of the ‘Confession of Faith’ and ‘Principles of Communism’ emerged the seamless prose of the Communist Manifesto. ‘This irresistible combination of utopian confidence, moral passion, hard-edged analysis, and – not least – a dark literary eloquence was eventually to become perhaps the best-known and certainly the most widely translated pamphlet of the nineteenth century,’ in the fine words of Eric Hobsbawm. Marx and Engels began working together on the Manifesto in London and then Brussels. But it was Marx who delivered the final edition and it is this gratifying absence of a committee consensus which makes the Manifesto read so well. From its epic opening lines – ‘A spectre is haunting Europe – the spectre of Communism’ – to its challenging finale – ‘The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. WORKING MEN OF ALL COUNTRIES, UNITE!’ – it is a polemic written out in one heroic breath. Yet much of the hard intellectual grind, in league meetings and drafting sessions, had been carried out by Engels. The German SPD leader Wilhelm Liebknecht had it right: ‘What was supplied by one, what by the other? An idle question! It is of one mould, and Marx and Engels are one soul – as inseparable in The Communist Manifesto as they remained to their death in all their working and planning…’84
Perhaps the most obvious debt to Engels's work was the Manifesto's account of the emergence of the proletariat, ‘a class of labourers, who live only so long as they find work, and who find work only so long as their labour increases capital’. This socio-economic narrative, premised heavily on the accelerating function of the Industrial Revolution, could have come straight from the pages of The Condition of the Working Class in England. The unique history of the English
Cover of the first German 23-page edition of the Manifesto of the Communist Party.
proletariat suddenly became a universal template of working-class development.85 At the same time Marx and Engels's Young Hegelian heritage was slyly jettisoned as they outlined a highly materialist schema – ‘the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles’ – inexorably culminating in the abolition of private property and the instigation of a proletarian revolution.86
Within the body of the Manifesto was much that Engels had already outlined, beginning with the immoral nature of bourgeois society – ‘It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his “natural superiors”, and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous “cash-payment” ’ – to the class fig-leaf of bourgeois government – ‘The executive of the modern State is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie’ – to the deadly irony of the bourgeois producing, above all, ‘its own grave-diggers’. Whilst the core demand of the communists could be ‘summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property’. However, Marx did drop some of Engels's hobbyhorses, including plans for agrico-industrial communes and the dissolution of marriage (an open goal for communist critics). In their place, he scaled the kind of rhetorical heights which Engels could never master. Echoing his celebration of the potential abundance promised by the Industrial Revolution, Marx's genius was on full show as he recounted the stunning achievements which the bourgeoisie had wrought as they unleashed capitalism and accelerated history.
It [the bourgeoisie] has been the first to show what man's activity can bring about. It has accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals; it has conducted expeditions that put in the shade all former Exoduses of nations and crusades.
The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society… All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.87
Despite such giddy predictions, on its publication the Manifesto made no impact at all. It came off the London presses of the German Workers' Educational Society in February 1848 to a ‘conspiracy of silence’. Some few hundred members of the Communist League read it and an English edition (translated by Helen Macfarlane) was serialized in Harney's Red Republican in 1850, but it was neither widely on sale nor obviously influential at the time. Not least, because history was already overtaking it. Marx's bourgeoisie, w
ho had already achieved so much, were about to add another string to their bow: the extinguishing of the monarchy of King Louis-Philippe of France. On the morning of 24 February 1848 Alexis de Tocqueville walked out of his Parisian townhouse, turned his face to the chill wind and declared he could ‘scent revolution in the air’. By the afternoon, with the Boulevard des Capucines caked in blood and trees along the Champs-Élysées being felled for barricades, the July monarchy of 1830 had melted into air. ‘Our age, the age of democracy, is breaking. The flames of the Tuileries and the Palais Royal are the dawn of the proletariat,’ Engels exclaimed.88 The Gallic cock was crowing; Paris was fulfilling its destiny: revolution had arrived.