Yet the awkward truth was that Engels's lucrative income was the direct result of his exploitation of the labour power of the Manchester proletariat. The very evils which he and Marx had so meticulously decried funded their lifestyles and philosophy. Engels was always more perturbed by this political contradiction than Marx (often the chief beneficiary of Ermen & Engels's market dominance), but he still cashed the cheque. The defence was that without the money from the mill workers Engels could never have funded Marx and, with it, his seminal advances in the scientific analysis of capitalism. ‘The opponents of the working class would, of course, have preferred Engels to give up his job and renounce his income,’ was the later official communist line on Engels's profiteering. ‘He would have been unable to support Marx in this case, Das Kapital would not have been written, and the process of the working classes becoming politically and theoretically independent would have been delayed.’ But, thankfully, ‘Engels looked on the profits he made as a factory owner and merchant as a contribution toward the working class's fight for emancipation, and used them accordingly all his life.’36
In the first letter we have from Engels in Manchester sent to Marx in London, he is already promising his salary and raiding the expenses’ account. There was never any explicit agreement between Engels and Marx that his toiling in the cotton trade would fund Marx's intellectual exertions, just an implicit recognition that this was how their partnership was set to work. And the profits cascaded south like a spring torrent for the rest of Engels's professional life. There were post office orders, postage stamps, £5 notes, a few pounds snaffled from the Ermen & Engels cash box (when Gottfried Ermen was out of the office), and then far more weighty sums when pay-day arrived. In addition to which there were generous hampers, crates of wine and birthday presents for the girls. ‘Dear Mr Engels,’ as Jenny was apt to address him, was regularly allocating over half his annual income to the Marx family – totalling between £3,000 and £4,000 (£300,000-£400,000 in today's terms) over the twenty-year period he was employed. Yet it was never enough. ‘I assure you that I would rather have had my thumb cut off than write this letter to you. It is truly soul-destroying to be dependent for half one's life,’ begins a typical letter from Marx before pleading for an emergency loan.37 ‘Considering the great efforts – greater, even, than you can manage – that you make on my behalf, I need hardly say how much I detest perpetually boring you with my lamentations,’ starts another. ‘The last money you sent me, plus a borrowed pound, went to pay the school bill – so that there shouldn't be twice the amount owing in January. The butcher and épicier made me give them IOUs, one for £10, the other for £12, due on 9 January…’38 When Marx was in an especially cowardly frame of mind, he had his wife write the begging letter. ‘It is for me a hateful task to have to write to you about money matters. You have already helped us all too often. But this time I have no other recourse, no other way out, Jenny pleaded in April 1853. ‘Can you send us something? The baker warned us that there'd be no more bread after Friday.’39
As numerous biographers have pointed out, Marx was not poor. In the measured judgement of David McLellan, ‘his difficulties resulted less from real poverty than from a desire to preserve appearances, coupled with an inability to husband his financial resources’.40 The subsidy from Engels combined with income from journalism, book deals and the odd inheritance totalled some £200 p.a. which meant that, after the needy Soho years, his financial position was far sounder than that of many middle-class families. But Marx was terrible with money (‘I don't suppose anyone has ever written about “money” when so short of the stuff’) and went from feast to famine in a hopeless cycle of financial gorging and retrenchment. With every windfall, the family moved to a new and larger house – from Soho to Kentish Town to Chalk Farm – with the associated costs adding up for Engels to sort out. ‘It is true my house is beyond my means, and we have, moreover, lived better this year than was the case before,’ Marx wrote to Engels after an upgrade to fashionable Modena Villas. ‘But it is the only way for the children to establish themselves socially with a view to securing their future… even from a merely commercial point of view, to run a purely proletarian house-hold would not be appropriate in the circumstances…’41 Here was the rub: Karl and Jenny Marx were far more concerned about keeping up appearances, marrying their daughters well and holding their place in polite society – in short, being bourgeois – than the bohemian Engels ever was. ‘For the sake of the children,’ Jenny Marx explained defensively (and without acknowledging Engels's generosity), ‘we had already adopted a regular, respectable middle class life. Everything conspired to bring about a bourgeois existence, and to enmesh us in it.’42 Marx, the prophet-philosopher, was never going to sully himself with a profession to support his family – so it was Engels who was chained to the office treadmill to fund their aspirational lifestyle. Which is why it is wrong to paint Marx as a real-life Mr Micawber desperately hoping something would turn up; thanks to Engels he always knew something would turn up. ‘Karl was tremendously pleased when he heard the postman's portentous double KNOCK,’ Jenny wrote to their benefactor in 1854, ‘ “Voila Frederick, £2, we're saved!” He cried.’43 No wonder that behind his back Marx called Engels ‘Mr Chitty’.
Accompanying the cash was a gripping correspondence. While both Marx and Engels, who spent years with each other at close quarters in Paris, Brussels and Cologne, desperately resented the distance between them, posterity has been the beneficiary. The 1850s and 60s provide the golden years of their letter-writing as they exploited the mid-Victorian postal revolution – of penny blacks, post offices and pillar boxes – to the full: a letter posted in Manchester before midnight would reach Marx the following day by 1 p.m.; a letter sent by 9 a.m. would be in his hands by 6 p.m. the same day. And this cache of letters provides an unequalled insight into their individual neuroses, frustrations, disappointments and passions. Stories of royal flatulence, cuckolded émigrés and drinking marathons abound – in the words of Francis Wheen, ‘a gamey stew of history and gossip, political economy and schoolboy smut, high ideals and low intimacies’.44 The letters are also a telling commentary on the depth of affection between the two men as they provide consolation in bereavement, encouragement in work, and criticism over political strategy, as well as a touching exchange of photographs. For Engels at his office and Marx in his study, the post was a highlight of the day. ‘The two friends wrote to each other almost every day,’ Eleanor Marx recalled, ‘and I can remember how often Moor, as we called our father at home, used to talk to the letters as though their writer were there. “No, that's not the way it is”; “You're right there,” etc., etc. But what I remember best is how Moor used sometimes to laugh over Engels's letters until tears ran down his cheeks.’45
It was the drooling prospect of an economic crash which consumed a large chunk of the initial Manchester–London correspondence. Part of the reason behind Marx and Engels's conflict with the Willich-Schapper faction in the Communist League was their conviction, as good materialists, that revolution could occur only given the appropriate economic circumstances. Attempts at insurrections and putsches were all doomed if the socio-economic preconditions were not in place – as the events of 1848–9 had so frustratingly shown. What revolutionary socialism required was advance warning of any looming financial collapse so Marx and Engels could ready themselves for the political consequences. And luckily the movement had a man stationed behind enemy lines: from his seat in the counting houses of Cottonopolis, Engels became the main source of intelligence on the state of international capitalism.
‘Speculation in railways is again reaching dazzling heights – since 1 January most shares have risen by 40%, and the worst ones more than any. Ça promet!’, he reported back to Marx six months into the job. Clearly, capitalism's denouement was just around the corner: the East India market was overstocked while the British cloth industry was being hit hard by a flood of cheap cotton. ‘If the Crash in the market coincides with
such a gigantic crop, things will be cheery indeed. Peter Ermen is already fouling his breaches at the very thought of it, and the little tree-frog's a pretty good barometer,’ Engels wrote in July 1851. Bankruptcies were starting to pick up in London and Liverpool, overproduction glutting the market, and Engels was adamant the crash would arrive by March 1852.46 ‘But all this is guess-work and we could just as well have it in September. It should, though, be a fine how-d'ye-do, for never before has such a mass of goods of all descriptions been pushed onto the market, nor have there ever been such colossal means of production,’ he forecast on 2 March 1852, slightly readjusting predictions for an autumn–winter meltdown. The only possible fly in the ointment was a strike for improved working conditions by the Amalgamated Society of Engineers, which was holding up machine-building. Engels, the champion of the workers, thought such irredeemably selfish behaviour would ‘hold it [the crash] up for at least a month’.47 And yet as April followed March and 1852 bowed to 1853, the day of reckoning was inexplicably averted. Instead, production increased, exports surged, wages rose, standards of living improved and the mid-Victorian boom ground relentlessly on.
By September 1856 the prophet of the Manchester Exchange had rediscovered his voice. ‘This time there'll be a dies irae such as has never been seen before; the whole of Europe's industry in ruins, all markets over-stocked…, all the propertied classes in the soup, complete bankruptcy of the bourgeoisie, war and profligacy to the nth degree.’ At last Engels was partly right: over-production in the textile markets combined with an unexpected hike in raw material costs had led to a collapse of confidence in the cotton industry, followed by a run on the banks and a spate of commercial insolvencies. The mid-Victorian global economy, from America to India via Britain and Germany, was rocked as sugar, coffee, cotton and silk prices plummeted. ‘The American Crash is superb and not yet over by a long chalk,’ Engels wrote rapturously in October 1857. ‘The repercussion in England would appear to have begun with the Liverpool Borough Bank. Tant mieux. That means that for the next 3 or 4 years, commerce will again be in a bad way. Nous avons maintenant de la chance.’ The conditions for revolution were ripe: they had to strike! Despite Ermen & Engels's extensive corporate losses, the veteran of the Baden campaign cared little for commercial difficulties as he sensed insurrection in the air. ‘A period of chronic pressure is needed to get the people's blood up.’ It was now clearer than ever that 1848 had been a false dawn, but this was the real thing – ‘a case of do or die’. But two months into the crash the proletariat was still failing to realize its calling. ‘There are as yet few signs of revolution, for the long period of prosperity has been fearfully demoralizing,’ Engels noted gloomily in December 1857. And by the following spring, business had picked itself up again on the back of developing markets in India and China.48
Engels's last and best hope lay with the American Civil War. In April 1861 Union forces started to blockade the Southern ports, ratcheting up the cost of freight, insurance and, above all, the price of Middling Orleans cotton, with knock-on effects for production and employment in the UK. Imports from the American South fell from 2.6 million bales in 1860 to fewer than 72,000 in 1862. Hundreds of thousands of Lancashire operatives, valiantly supporting the ideals of Abraham Lincoln and the anti-slave North, were placed on short-time and then sacked. Their reduced earnings started to undermine the wider north-west economy as shops closed, savings collapsed and food riots broke out. By November 1862 almost 200,000 workers were receiving support from various relief committees across Lancashire. Modern economic historians now suggest the Lancashire ‘cotton famine’ was as much a product of an over-saturated global market as the direct result of the Civil War embargo – but either way the results were the same. ‘You will readily understand that all the philistines are in a cold sweat,’ Engels reported in April 1865 as the Liverpool import–export industry shuddered and 125,000 unemployed mill-hands wandered the Manchester streets. ‘A lot of people in Scotland are finished as well, and one fine day it's bound to be the turn of the banks, and that'd be the end of the matter.’49 Like many other cotton-based businesses, Ermen & Engels was directly affected as they introduced half-time in the mills, saw profits evaporate on unsold stock and even slashed directors' salaries. For Engels, no matter the personal costs, here was another chance for revolution. ‘The distress up here is gradually becoming acute,’ he noted as cases of typhoid, pneumonia, malnutrition and tuberculosis mounted. ‘I imagine by next month the working people themselves will have had enough of sitting about with a look of passive misery on their faces.’50
In fact, the exact opposite occurred: the Manchester cotton operatives were to become a symbol of the mid-Victorian settlement and patted on the head for the dignified resolve with which they endured their poverty. It was an exemplary display of self-control in the interests of a greater moral calling. ‘The leaders of the operative class are in general strongly favourable to the Northern policy, firm in their hatred of slavery, and firm in their faith in democracy,’ wrote R. Arthur Arnold in his History of the Cotton Famine.51 One government inspector thought that, ‘at no period in the history of manufactures have sufferings so sudden and so severe been borne with so much silent resignation and so much patient self-respect’.52 Rather than rioting, they accepted the vagaries of the global marketplace with unsettling stoicism and it seemed to Victorian official opinion that the respectable, self-helping working class had at last come of age. John Watts, former radical turned bourgeois apologist, thought such endurance revealed the beneficial influence of Sunday schools, improving literature and co-operative sentiments.53 Everything Engels had first feared about the Manchester proletariat's debilitating lack of appetite for class struggle was being proved horribly right.
With revolution postponed, Engels returned to the day job – or rather, jobs, since what the Marx-Engels correspondence also reveals is the full extent to which Marx depended upon his collaborator to carry out the only piece of professional work for which he was personally contracted. In early 1851 Charles Dana, a former Fourierist and now managing director of the progressive, anti-slavery New York Daily Tribune, asked Marx to contribute to the paper on English and European affairs. The problem was Marx's grasp of written English remained so poor that Engels had to translate his copy from German into English – which all too often meant just writing it himself. ‘If you could possibly let me have an article on conditions in Germany by Friday morning, that would make a splendid beginning,’ Marx loftily wrote to his friend on receiving news of his column.54 To which Engels obediently answered, ‘write and tell me soon what sort of thing it should be – whether you wish it to stand on its own or to be one of a series, and 2) what attitudes I should adopt…’55 It was a healthy salary (at £2 per article) for a good newspaper with over 200,000 US readers, but Marx clearly thought it grubby work for a philosopher. ‘The continual newspaper muck annoys me,’ he fumed when actually forced to write his own articles. ‘It takes a lot of time, disperses my efforts and in the final analysis is nothing.’56 But it was all right for his harried comrade slogging away in Manchester. ‘Engels really has too much work, but being a veritable walking encyclopaedia, he's capable, drunk or sober, of working at any hour of the day or night, is a fast writer and devilish quick in the uptake…’, Marx explained majestically to his American friend Adolf Cluss.57
He was not wrong. Engels was a gifted journalist able to turn around articles on most topics to length and time. ‘This evening I shall translate the final part of your article and shall do the article on “Germany” tomorrow or Thursday,’ reads a typically dutiful Engels response.58 But it was banal hack work and very few of the New York Daily Tribune pieces rise to the usual heights of Engels's intellect. Back and forth the letters sped between Manchester and London with translations, suggestions for new articles, pleas for information on unknown subjects, demands for brevity (‘You really must stop making your articles so long. Dana can't possibly want more than 1–1.5 columns’), sty
listic criticisms (‘you must colour your war-articles a little more seeing that you are writing for a general newspaper’) and urgent requests to make sure the copy made the Liverpool steamer.59 But Marx was always happy to take the credit. ‘How do you like my husband creating a stir with your article throughout western, eastern and southern America,’ asked Jenny indelicately after Engels's history of 1848–9, ‘Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Germany’, was well received by the Tribune readership.
But the traffic was not all one way. What the letters also reveal is the degree to which Marx shared the development of his thinking on Das Kapital with Engels. Much of the initial spur for the book had come from Engels himself. As early as 1851 he was already chiding Marx, ‘the main thing is that you should once again make a public debut with a substantial book… it's absolutely essential to break the spell created by your prolonged absence from the German book market…’60 Nine years later and with still no obvious sign of publication, Engels reminded him of the ‘paramount importance’ of the work which he was needlessly holding up with minor intellectual quibbles. ‘The main thing is that it should be written and published; the weaknesses which you think of will never be discovered by those donkeys; and if an unsettled period sets in what will you be left with if the whole thing is interrupted before you get Capital finished as a whole?’61
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