As ever, the question was what one did with the profits after tax (and ‘we poor rentiers are made to bleed’ he once complained of the Treasury take). Engels remained faultlessly generous to party causes and personal cases alike. In addition to the minimum annual subsidy to Marx of £350, Engels paid for the education of the children of Eugene Dupont, a Manchester factory foreman he knew; the funeral expenses for various impoverished Soho socialists; and regularly supported party newspapers and émigré charities. Sadly, Engels's philanthropic spirit was ritually abused by those he loved best. His weak spot had always been the Marx daughters and their various renegade partners knew it all too well. By far the worst offender was Laura Marx's husband, the doctor turned Proudhonist turned member of the International General Council, Paul Lafargue. Having assisted Engels in the struggle against Bakuninism in Spain, he returned to London and, as future author of the idler tract ‘The Right to Be Lazy’, practised what he preached. A half-hearted attempt to establish a photolithography workshop soon collapsed due to lack of investors and so Lafargue naturally turned to Uncle Engels. ‘I am ashamed of pestering you again when you have just advanced me several large amounts; but to settle my debts and be able to back my invention, it is imperative for me to have the sum of £60,’ he wrote peremptorily to Engels in June 1875. Luckily for him, Engels had a decent admiration for Lafargue's intellect and advocacy skills as well as a growing affection for this wilful, sensuous, cocky young man. In turn, Lafargue enjoyed the company of the more risqué Engels as an avuncular counterweight to his censorious father-in-law. ‘To the great beheader of champagne bottles, fathomless swallower of ale and other adulterated trash, secretary to the Spaniards: Greetings and may the god of good carousals watch over you,’ opened a typically banterish letter from Lafargue, before going on to ask, ‘Does Mrs Burns take baths in the “baignoire” [bath-tub] I brought you from Bordeaux that you might extinguish the fire residing in your bowels?’
More often than not, these letters would then end, ‘I shall need another £50 to pay my landlord.’ And so it went on with demands for rent, rates, utility expenses and even underwear. ‘Your bank-note arrived like manna in the midst of the desert,’ Lafargue wrote (in a vein very similar to Karl Marx) from Paris in 1882 where he had returned to socialist politics, ‘unfortunately we have not been able to make it last forever; I would beg you to send me some money, as I need to buy some underclothes for Laura.’ But he was certainly pushing his luck in 1888 when he ‘forgot to tell you [Engels] to send me a cheque for £15 to fill the gap left by the wine’.48 Yet Engels could rarely say no to the Marx filles: he even went to watch Tussy's ill-fated adventures on the stage. ‘The girl showed a great deal of self possession and looked quite charming,’ he reported proudly back to Marx. ‘If she really wants to make her mark in public she must unquestionably strike out a line of her own, and she'll do that all right’.49 However, what Engels really enjoyed doing with his money was paying for family holidays with himself, Lizzy and the Marx clan heading out to the English seaside. Renting a summer house stocked with plenty of Pilsener at Ramsgate, Eastbourne, New Brighton, Bridlington Quay, Great Yarmouth, Worthing or the Isle of Wight was Engels's idea of heaven. ‘After being fortified by me at the station with a glass of port,’ Engels reported to the absent Marx in the summer of 1876 of goings-on at Ramsgate, ‘she [Jenny Marx] and Lizzy are loafing about on the sands and rejoicing at not having to write any letters.’50
Taking the sea air was as much for medicinal purposes as holiday relaxation. Lizzy had a frail constitution at the best of times, and by the late 1870s her fifty-year-old frame was suffering badly from asthma, sciatica and an aggressive tumour of the bladder. In the summer of 1878 Engels feared he wouldn't even be able to get her down to the seaside. ‘Last week she scarcely ever left her bed. The thing is exceedingly grave and might turn out very badly.’51 During these darkening declining years, Engels the legendary Lothario proved himself a surprisingly attentive carer, seeing to Lizzy's modest needs and helping out with household chores. But he was fighting the inevitable and by the evening of 11 September 1878 Lizzy was entering her wolf hours. At which point something unexpected and rather touching occurs – a quintessentially Victorian moment of death-bed melodrama. Engels the great materialist, atheist and scourge of bourgeois family values rushes round the corner to St Mark's Church, Regent's Park, to collect the Reverend W. B. Galloway. Despite years of being popularly acknowledged as ‘Mrs Engels’, Lizzy the Irish Catholic wanted as her final wish to have her fifteen-year relationship sanctified in the eyes of God before she met her maker. As she lay dying in her bed upstairs at Regent's Park Road, she and Engels were married by special licence according to the rites of the Church of England. It was a very rare, very loving moment as Engels placed the needs of Lizzy before ideological purity. His dearly beloved wife then died at 1.30 a.m. and was buried as ‘Lydia’ – complete with a Celtic cross on the gravestone – at the Roman Catholic cemetery of St Mary's, next door to Kensal Green in north-west London. Her death was altogether less sudden than Mary's collapse and Engels appeared far more stoical about the loss. And perhaps because they had, finally, officially married and perhaps because his own, censorious mother was no longer around, he felt able to send out the official bereavement notice he had omitted to do after Mary's death. ‘I herewith notify my friends in Germany that in the course of last night death deprived me of my wife, Lydia, nee Burns.’52
This time, in public at least, Marx behaved himself when it came to his friend's grief. But, in private, he was snidely poking fun at Engels and his illiterate Irish love in a letter sent to Jenny just a couple of days after Lizzy's death.
When Tussy, Mrs Renshaw and Pumps… were sorting out the dead woman's odds and ends, Mrs Renshaw [Lizzy and Engels's friend] found, amongst other things, a small packet of letters and made as if to hand them to Mr Chitty [Engels], who was present at the operation. ‘No,’ said he, ‘burn them! I need not see her letters. I know she was unable to deceive me.’ Could Figaro (I mean the real one of Beaumarchais) have trouve cela? As Mrs Renshaw remarked later to Tussy: ‘Of course, as he had to write her letters, and to read to her the letters she received, he might feel quite sure that these letters contained no secrets for him – but they might do so, for her.’53
However, the real object of Marx's mirth was Pumps. Mary Ellen Burns enters stage left into Engels's life like some Shakespearean jester – Macbeth's porter or Hamlet's gravediggers – ostensibly providing light relief but, in reality, a source of intense annoyance to all around. Everything Engels thought Hegel had proffered about history as tragedy and farce is embodied in the character of ‘the drunken enchanter’ ‘the amiable tippler’ Pumps. The eldest of ten poor children, this niece of the Burnses was originally taken on by Lizzy to help with the household sometime during the mid-1860s. A pretty, flirtatious, temperamental creature, she accompanied them in the move south before being sent to Heidelberg in 1875 (at Engels's expense) to attend finishing school. The arrangement worked well until a very much more self-aware Pumps returned to London in 1877, refused to assist the ailing Lizzy in running the household and harrumphed back to her parents in Manchester. The sweaty, smelly reality of work in her brother's fish shop soon led her to re-examine her options and she slunk back south in the spring of 1878.54
For a girl on the make, the death of Lizzy gave Pumps the chance to seize control of Regent's Park Road. She ‘has already put on quite the air, not to say behaviour, of a “princesse regnante”, along with the five guinea mourning gown’, Marx noted waspishly four days after Lizzy's demise; ‘this last, however, has only served to increase her ill-conceived “glee” ’.55 Now in situ as housekeeper, she was for Marx a perennial, irksome presence. However, he was at least grateful to her for a steady stream of gossip since it seemed few of the socialists passing through No. 122 could escape her buxom charms. ‘There is little going on in “our circle”,’ Marx wrote to his daughter Jenny Longuet in 1881, ‘Pumps still awai
ts “news” from [Friedrich] Beust [of the Cologne Workers Association]; has in the meanwhile thrown an eye upon [Karl] “Kautsky” who, however, did not yet “declare”; and she will always feel grateful to [Carl] Hirsch for having not only virtually “declared”, but, after a refusal, renewed his “declaration”, just before his trip to Paris.’ Two months later a new suitor was sniffing around. ‘Hartmann [a socialist émigré] has on Friday last left for New York and I am glad that he is out of harm's way,’ Marx updated Jenny. ‘But foolishly, a few days before his departure, he asked the hand of Pumps from Engels – and this was by writing, telling him at the same time that he believed he committed no mistake in doing so, alias, he (Hartmann) believed in his (Hartmann's) acceptance on the part of Pumps – the which girl had indeed rather flirted with him, but only to stir Kautsky.’56
For all the tiresome marriage proposals and histrionics, Pumps was a pretty young girl and her feminine attractions probably outweighed the nonsense which Engels otherwise had to put up with. Through her there was a living connection with the Burns sisters and his Manchester past. Unfortunately, she was also a little too giving with her love and allowed herself to be seduced by a City spiv named Percy Rosher. Despite his much vaunted ideological distaste for the bourgeois hypocrisy of marriage, Engels the pragmatist made Rosher do the decent thing and marry the girl, but over the coming years he was the one who had to foot the bill. Rosher, a failing chartered accountant, was a wretched case who gained a strong conviction, like the other hapless sons-in-law who surrounded Marx and Engels, that he was owed a living by his elders. In 1881 he took Pumps off Engels's hands but the quarrelling couple remained a regular Sunday presence, perennial holiday companions (which, at least, allowed a delighted Engels to play the role of grandfather to her growing brood) and were frequently to be found back in Regent's Park Road on extended stays. Nonetheless, Pumps's boisterous, girlish behaviour helped ease Engels out of his post-Lizzy depression. By the summer of 1879 the raffish Engels was back on form suggestively asking Marx whether he thought it a good idea if they were, ‘to shake-off the Eternal-Feminine for once and go at being BACHELORS somewhere or other for a week or two?’57
Engels's return to rude health thrust him back into his position as communist comptroller – unearthing the last redoubts of Bakuninist and Lassallean heresy, overseeing the activities of Liebknecht and Bebel – as well as turning his mind to one of the more practical dilemmas of Marxist politics. From their pioneering days together in 1840s Paris, Marx and Engels had regarded the proletarian revolution as contingent upon a certain level of industrial and economic progress bringing in its train class consciousness, class struggle and all the other precursors of change. Yet, as every writer on Marxism has pointed out, it was in markedly underdeveloped Tsarist Russia – that reactionary, feudal autarky towards which Marx and Engels were so personally and perennially hostile – that a proletarian revolution of sorts first achieved regime change.58 That is not to suggest that Marx and Engels would have been surprised by the events of 1917. Ever the optimist, in 1874 Engels regarded the Russian revolution as ‘far closer than it would appear on the surface’, ‘in the offing’ a year later, and ‘bound to break out some time or other; it may break out any day’ by 1885.59 The question which bedevilled them and the entire Russian Marxist movement was what form the revolution would take. In the later decades of the nineteenth century there were two schools of thought: the first, under the Emancipation of Labour Group headed by Georgi Plekhanov, argued along orthodox Marxist lines that Russia would have to follow the western European course of progressive industrialization, working-class immiseration and the development of class consciousness before a proletarian revolution could occur (which would, in the event, be assisted by the mass of Russian peasantry). The second approach was adopted by the narodniki or ‘Populists’ who, inspired by the writings of Nikolai Chernyshevski, suggested that Russia's unique heritage of primitive village communes meant that it could follow a different road to socialism. Rather than enduring the horrors of Western capitalist transition, it could – following a few terrorist outrages – take an accelerated path to a communist future based on its heritage of joint land ownership (obschina), communal relations of production and primitive agrarian socialism. Alexander Herzen and Peter Tkachov went so far as to suggest that the Russian peasants were, in fact, the chosen people of socialism, born communists, destined to take the mantle from the slovenly Europeans.
Previously, Marx and Engels had been highly dismissive of primitive forms of communal life. In their writings on India, Asia and even Ireland, they had condemned the village commune as the backward adjunct of ‘oriental despotism’ and an anachronistic drag on the global march towards socialism. In the 1870s, though, as the prospect of revolution in western Europe receded, and as both men became more and more interested in early human history (the era of gens, tribes and communal living they read about in Lewis H. Morgan's influential study of 1877, Ancient Society or Researches in the Lines of Human Progress from Savagery, Through Barbarism to Civilization), they looked again at the political possibilities of primitive communism. Dropping his innate anti-Slav prejudice, Engels suddenly thought the Russian model should no longer be dismissed: ‘the possibility undeniably exists of raising this form of society to a higher one,’ he wrote in his 1875 essay ‘On Social Relations in Russia’, ‘… without it being necessary for the Russian peasants to go through the intermediate stages of bourgeois small holdings’. There was one coda. ‘This, however, can only happen if, before the complete break-up of communal ownership, a proletarian revolution is successfully carried out in Western Europe, creating for the Russian peasant the precondition requisite for such a transition.’60 Marx and Engels further revised this sequence in their 1882 preface to the second Russian edition of the Communist Manifesto – ‘if the Russian Revolution becomes a signal for a proletarian revolution in the West, so that both complement each other, the present Russian common ownership of land may serve as the starting point for a communist development.’ Marx made the point again in an endlessly rewritten and suspiciously unsent letter to the Russian socialist Vera Zasulich.
Theoretically speaking, then, the Russian ‘rural commune’ can preserve itself by developing its basis, the common ownership of land, and by eliminating the principle of private property which it also implies; it can become a direct point of departure for the economic system towards which modern society tends; it can turn over a new leaf without beginning by committing suicide; it can gain possession of the fruits with which capitalist production has enriched mankind, without passing through the capitalist regime, a regime which, considered solely from the point of view of its possible duration hardly counts in the life of society.61
From this it is clear that towards the end of his days Marx had started to relent on the issue of a uniform process of socio-economic capitalist advance applicable to all nations: with the help of the European proletariat, he now intimated that Russia could pursue its own primitive path to socialism.
Engels, however, was regretting this rethinking and, in one of the few clear examples of philosophical divergence between the two men, reverted to the original Marxist paradigm. Against his better judgement, he had once been attracted by the charisma of the narodniki and regarded Tsarist Russia as such a reactionary despotism that even Blanquist terrorism might be justified to get the revolution going. But by the 1890s his disagreements with Marx were obvious: the now steadily industrializing Russian society was no different, he suggested, from England, Germany or America and would have to undergo exactly the same wretched process of economic development. ‘I am afraid we shall have to treat the [Commune] as a dream of the past, and reckon, in future, with a capitalist Russia,’ he gloomily told Nikolai Danielson, the Russian translator of Das Kapital.62 The truth was that the Russian commune had existed for hundreds of years, was showing little sign of positive development and now, in fact, acted as a ‘fetter’ on the progress of the peasantry. What was more
, he now dismissed as ‘childish’ the suggestion that the communist revolution might ‘spring not from the struggles of the west European proletariat but from the innermost interior of the Russian peasant’. The Marxist schema was such that it was ‘an historical impossibility that a lower stage of economic development should solve the enigmas and conflicts which did not arise, and could not arise, until a far higher stage’.63
To help the Russian Marxists understand their historical conundrum, he drew a parallel with the experience of the early Utopian socialist Robert Owen. The workmen Owen employed in his factory at New Lanark in the 1820s had, like the Russian peasantry of the obschina, been ‘raised on the institutions and customs of a decaying communistic gentile society, the Celtic-Scottish clan’, but they showed absolutely no understanding of socialist principles.64 The uncomfortable reality was that Russia would just have to accept there was no short-cut to socialism via the Commune and buckle under to the slow, painful march of history. In one of Engels's horribly prescient predictions he forecast that, in Russia, ‘the process of replacing some 500,000 landowners and some 80 million peasants by a new class of bourgeois landed proprietors cannot be carried out but under fearful sufferings and convulsions. But history is about the most cruel of all goddesses, and she leads her triumphal car over heaps of corpses, not only in war, but also in “peaceful” economic development.’65
Neither Marx nor Engels lived long enough to witness Russia's savage convulsions of 1917 and beyond. As they entered their seventh decade, death stalked the old Londoners. By the summer of 1881 Jenny Marx was visibly weakening under the weight of her cancer and on 2 December she succumbed. The last three weeks of her life were spent cruelly separated from her ‘wild black boar’, her ‘wicked knave’, her ‘Moor’, as Marx's racking bronchitis and pleurisy kept him cordoned off from her. He couldn't even attend her funeral, in an unconsecrated corner of Highgate cemetery, north London. It was left up to Engels to give a generous eulogy celebrating her ‘full conviction’ in ‘atheist Materialism’ and declaring that ‘we shall often miss her bold and prudent counsels, bold without brag, prudent without sacrifice of honour’.66
Frock-Coated Communist Page 33