Frock-Coated Communist

by Hunt, Tristram

  Marx was not slow to follow her to the grave. The second half of the 1870s had seen him increasingly disabled by a range of ailments from headaches to carbuncles to insomnia, kidney and liver trouble and, finally, an unshakeable catarrh. Certainly, these were serious physical afflictions, but there might also have been a return of his psychosomatic condition. Marx never finished volumes two and three of Das Kapital and, as with his earlier form, the less he wrote and the more distracted he became by other topics (such as years spent researching the primitive Asian commune), the faster his body deteriorated. Whether it was because the economics of Das Kapital no longer appeared credible or the political possibilities of communism realistic, Marx seemed to be stealthily retreating from his philosophical grand projet. There followed numerous trips to Carlsbad to take the waters for his liver troubles and Ventnor in the Isle of Wight for the mild, ion-rich sea air. After Jenny's death, the search for a healthy resort became all the more urgent as a warm, dry climate was desperately needed to placate his bronchitis. As a sure sign of his illness, he was now for the first time finding Engels uncomfortable company. ‘Engels's excitement in fact has upset me,’ he wrote to his daughter Jenny. ‘I felt I could no longer stand it; hence my impatience to get from London away on any condition whatever!’67 He trudged from Algiers to Monte Carlo to France to Switzerland – and, at every location, he brought the bad weather with him. The bronchitis became chronic and then, in January 1883, another hammer blow fell, with the death of his daughter Jenny Longuet from cancer of the bladder. Marx returned home to die.

  In the miserable winter of early 1883, every afternoon saw Engels take a brief walk from Regent's Park Road to Maitland Park Road to visit his lifelong companion. At 2.30 p.m. on the 14 March 1883 he ‘arrived to find the house in tears’.

  It seemed that the end was near. I asked what had happened, tried to get to the bottom of the matter, to offer comfort. There had been only a slight haemorrhage but suddenly he had begun to sink rapidly. Our good old Lenchen, who had looked after him better than a mother cares for her child, went upstairs to him and then came down. He was half asleep, she said, I might come in. When we entered the room he lay there asleep, but never to wake again. His pulse and breathing had stopped. In those two minutes he had passed away, peacefully and without pain.68

  With Marx went Western philosophy's greatest intellectual partnership and Engels's dearest friend. ‘Yours is not an ordinary, or a family, loss,’ Engels's old Chartist ally Julian Harney wrote to him. ‘Your friendship and devotion, his affection and trust, made the fraternal connection of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels something beyond anything I have known of other men. That there was between you a tie “passing the love of woman,” is but the truth. I seek in vain in words to express my sense of your bereavement; and my profound sympathy for and with your sorrow.’69

  Shattered by the loss, Engels nonetheless thought Marx's end had been a becoming death for such a great man. In a bullish letter to their mutual American friend Friedrich Sorge, he paid tribute to Marx's personal bravery, ‘Medical skill might have been able to give him a few more years of vegetative existence, the life of a helpless being, dying – to the triumph of the doctors' art – not suddenly, but inch by inch. But our Marx could never have borne that.’70 And now, only hours after he had seen his friend's final features ‘rigid in death’, Engels looked to cement the magnitude of his genius. ‘We all of us are what we are because of him; and the movement is what it is today because of his theoretical and practical activities; but for him we should still be in a welter of confusion,’ he told Liebknecht, generous to the end.71 In Marx's absence, the challenge now was to see it through. ‘What else are we here for?’ Having given so many years of his own life to their philosophical struggle, Engels would not let Marx's ideas die with him.

  8

  Marx's Bulldog

  ‘An immeasurable loss has been sustained both by the militant proletariat of Europe and America, and by historical science, in the death of this man,’ was Engels's sombre judgement over the cold body of Karl Marx on the morning of 17 March 1883. There were only eleven mourners present in Highgate's steep eastern cemetery when Marx was laid to rest alongside his wife, Jenny. Today, the Gothic catacombs and meandering wooded paths of this sprawling ‘Victorian Valhalla’ enjoy a steady traffic of tourists and ideologues drawn to Marx's bombastic 1950s shrine. Overlooked by unbecoming hospital accommodation, the cemetery's edge has blossomed into a communist redoubt with Iraqi, South African and Jewish socialists all buried in the shadow of their first prophet. In 1883 it was a much lonelier affair as Tussy, sons-in-law Paul Lafargue and Charles Longuet, alongside scientists E. Ray Lankester and Carl Schorlemmer, as well as old communist hands Wilhelm Liebknecht and Friedrich Lessner, huddled together by the graveside. Telegrams came from France, Spain and Russia together with wreaths from Der Sozialdemokrat and the Communist Workers' Education Society. But it was Engels's short, secular eulogy which dominated the proceedings.

  Wasting little time on Marx's marriage, children, or even their forty-year friendship, Engels moved quickly to codify exactly what Marxism meant. It was a speech intended more for the European communist diaspora than his fellow mourners and sentiment had no place when it came to laying down an ideological legend. ‘Just as Darwin discovered the law of development of organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of development of human history… But that is not all. Marx also discovered the special law of motion governing the present-day capitalist mode of production and the bourgeois society that this mode of production has created.’ ‘Such was the man of science,’ Engels declaimed. He would miss him terribly. ‘And he died beloved, revered and mourned by millions of revolutionary fellow-workers – from the mines of Siberia to California, in all parts of Europe and America – and I make bold to say that though he may have had many opponents he had hardly one personal enemy. His name will endure through the ages, and so also will his work!’1

  This posthumous sanctification of Marx's legacy didn't end on the paths of Highgate cemetery. A few weeks later Engels could be found denouncing in the most strident terms an Italian communist, Achille Loria, for daring to misinterpret Marx's work and traduce his reputation. ‘What you are not entitled to do, and what I shall never permit anyone to do, is slander the character of my departed friend,’ Engels declared before signing off to Loria ‘with all the sentiments you deserve’.2 ‘When Marx died nothing concerned him [Engels] so much as the defence of his memory,’ as Harold Laski put it; ‘few men have ever been so eager to prove the greatness of a colleague at the expense of his own eminence’.3

  In death as in life, Engels embraced his role as Marx's bulldog driven at all costs to guard his friend's political bequest. And yet, during the twentieth century, a crucial question mark emerged over the years following the funeral with suggestions that Engels consciously reworked the meaning of his collaborator's oeuvre. The graveside comparison with Darwin's evolutionary biology and Newton's laws of motion hints at the scientistic turn within which Engels tried to enfold Marx. As a result, Engels has been accused of falsely remoulding Marxism: of letting his scientific enthusiasms anaesthetize the humanistic impulse of the authentic, original Marx and replace it, in his friend's absence, with a mechanistic politics devoid of the inspiring, fulfilling promise of socialism.

  In turn, it is intimated, Engels was responsible for the official ideology of Stalin's Soviet Union and the horrors of Marxism-Leninism. It is a convenient charge to make – helpfully exculpating Marx from the ‘crimes’ of Marxism – but one which misreads the nature of the Marx-Engels collaboration. What is certainly true is that Engels, one of the most voracious intellects of his day, was mesmerized by the

  Cemetery record of Karl Marx's burial, with Friedrich Engels as the officiating minister.

  scientific advances of the nineteenth century and sought, alongside Marx, to position their socialism within this scientific epoch of change. As such, he helped to systematize his friend's ide
ological canon into a popular and codified doctrine which would help shift European social democracy in a fundamentally Marxist direction. Marxism as a mass political movement begins not with Das Kapital or the ill-fated First International, but with Engels's voluminous pamphlets and propaganda of the 1880s. His great gift to his departed comrade was to transform Marxism into one of the most persuasive and influential political philosophies in human history. He did so in Marx's name and with Marx's blessing, remaining true to the ideology they had developed together.

  ‘A great city, whose image dwells in the memory of man, is the type of some great idea,’ Benjamin Disraeli wrote in his 1844 novel Coningsby. ‘Rome represents Conquest; Faith hovers over the towers of Jerusalem; and Athens embodies the pre-eminent quality of the antique world – Art.’ But the world was changing, Disraeli thought, and a new civilization approaching. ‘What Art was to the ancient world, Science is to the modern; the distinctive faculty. In the minds of men the useful has succeeded to the beautiful. Instead of the city of the Violet Crown, a Lancashire village has expanded into a mighty region of factories and warehouses. Yet rightly understood, Manchester is as great a human exploit as Athens.’4

  Engels's early years were spent in the emotional grip of the romantics; his middle age was given over to science, technology and useful knowledge. There were few better places to pursue such studies than Manchester, the city where science stood out as Disraeli's ‘distinctive faculty’. In fact, across northern Europe the nineteenth century had witnessed a series of paradigm shifts in the natural and physical sciences. In chemistry, the French aristocrat Antoine Laurent Lavoisier had opened up the field of quantitative chemistry which Justus von Liebig then took into the realm of organic compounds. In biology, the German botanist Matthias Schleiden made a series of advances in cellular theory which his friend the physiologist Theodor Schwann extended to encompass the animal world. In physics, William Robert Grove was carrying out pioneering work with the first fuel cell and anticipating the conservation of energy theory, while James Clerk Maxwell was taking Faraday's work on electricity towards a unified theory of electromagnetism.

  Manchester was the setting for much of this scientific revolution. It was the chemist John Dalton, a lecturer at Manchester New College and stalwart of the city's Literary and Philosophical Society (where many of his experiments were carried out), who developed Lavoisier's quantitative work to establish modern atomic theory and the framework for the periodic table. He was a civic hero whose body lay in state at the town hall on his death in 1844 as 40,000 Mancunians turned up to pay their respects in a single day. His pupil James Joule was almost as remarkable. The wealthy scion of a brewing family, through his painstaking experiments he investigated the controversial question – which Grove had been struggling with – as to whether energy could be conserved. Drawing on trials with his beer-making technology, he demonstrated how the total amount of ‘energy’ can remain the same whilst being transferred from one source to another, in his case the mechanical energy of stirring transferred into heat (i.e. measuring how heat is created by work). William Thomson, the future Lord Kelvin, and the German scientist Rudolf Clausius took Joule's results to establish the two laws of thermodynamics, defining the idea of energy and describing how energy and ultimately information evolves. Manchester's municipal leaders were understandably proud of Joule's scientific contribution and connected his life to the identity of the city by placing a meditative statue of him, opposite that of Dalton, in the town hall's tessellated portico. The meaning could not have been clearer: in Manchester, science and commerce marched hand in hand.

  The democracy of science, its pursuit by everyday technicians and businessmen, was an essential part of Manchester's provincial, dissenting self-image. In the city's Literary and Philosophical Society, Geological Society and Natural History Society, it was revered as a purposefully meritocratic discipline in which Manchester's unfashionable middling sort could succeed just as much as the elites of London and Oxbridge. Indeed, more so: the city's combination of technology, industry and commercial practicality endowed it with an intellectual advantage absent from ivory tower university towns. As a result, a rich intellectual exchange in scientific and technological expertise existed between the industrializing communities of north-west England and Rhenish Germany – with German chemists being in particular demand (thereby establishing Lancashire and Cheshire's regional excellence in industrial chemistry which much later led ICI to create its major plant at Northwich). Scientific debate and discovery were alive in the mills, workshops and laboratories as well as the city's athenaeums, lyceums and debating societies. In her novel Mary Barton (1848), Elizabeth Gaskell elegiacally described how, ‘in the neighbourhood of Oldham there are weavers, common hand-loom weavers, who throw the shuttle with unceasing sound, though Newton's “Principia” lies open on the loom, to be snatched at in work hours, but revelled over in meal times, or at night’. And she went on to characterize Manchester's factory-hand botanists – ‘equally familiar with either the Linnaean or the Natural system’ – and entomologists, ‘who may be seen with a rude looking net, ready to catch any winged insect’.5 To cater for the expanding scientific interest, the mid-1860s saw the inauguration of Penny Science Lectures with thousands of Manchester mechanics and artisans crammed into Hulme Town Hall or Free Trade Hall to hear the likes of T. H. Huxley on ‘The Circulation of the Blood’, W. B. Carpenter on ‘The Unconscious Action of the Brain’, John Tyndall on ‘Crystalline Molecular Forces’ and William Spottiswoode on ‘The Polarisation of Light’.

  From his earliest days in Salford attending public experiments at the Owenite Hall of Science, Engels embraced this scientifically minded milieu. ‘I must now go to the Schiller Institute to chair the Comite,’ he wrote to Marx in 1865. ‘By the by, one of the fellows there, a chemist, has recently explained [John] Tyndall's experiment with sunlight to me. It is really capital.’6 His most obvious entrée to the world of science was through his friend the chemistry professor and socialist Carl Schorlemmer – rechristened ‘Jollymeier’ in the Marx-Engels vernacular – who tutored him in the fundamentals of chemistry and scientific method. Author of The Rise and Development of Organic Chemistry (1879), Schorlemmer was an expert on hydrocarbons and alcohol radicals. For thirty years he worked in the Owens College laboratories as private assistant to the self-promoting scientist and politician Sir Henry Roscoe – who thought Schorlemmer's knowledge ‘of both branches of chemistry was wide and accurate, whilst his sustained power of work, whether literary or experimental, was truly Teutonic’.7 Others within Engels's scientific circle included the English geologist John Roche Dakyns and another German chemist, Philipp Pauli, who worked for an alkali company in St Helens and later housed Pumps during her time at finishing school in Rheinau. As another intellectual balm to the boredom of Ermen & Engels office life, Engels immersed himself in the scientific controversies of the day. He read the geologist Charles Lyell and evolutionary theorist T. H. Huxley (‘both very interesting and pretty good’); Grove on physics and von Liebig's pupil August Wilhelm von Hofmann on chemistry (‘for all its faults, the latest chemical theory does represent a great advance on the old atomistic theory’); and was an early advocate of the French practice of vivisection as a means of understanding nerve functions.8 Ever the rationalist, Engels also developed a macabre scientific interest in the terminal ailments of his friends. ‘Anyone who has but once examined the lung tissue under the microscope, realises how great is the danger of a blood vessel being broken if the lung is purulent,’ he wrote to Adolph Sorge of Marx's condition two days before his friend died.9 He was equally clinical in a letter to Carl Schorlemmer's brother during Jollymeier's final hours, ‘… in the past week or so he has been found beyond doubt to have developed a carcinogenic tumour of the right lung extending pretty much over the whole of the upper third of the organ’.10

  Like so many Victorians, Engels was fascinated by Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species (1859) and the theory of e
volution by natural selection. ‘Darwin, by the way, whom I'm reading just now, is absolutely splendid,’ Engels wrote to Marx in December 1859. ‘Never before has so grandiose an attempt been made to demonstrate historical evolution in Nature, and certainly never to such good effect. One does, of course, have to put up with the crude English method.’11 Marx, who thought the work a telling reflection of mid-Victorian capitalist savagery and identified with Darwin's notion of evolutionary progress based on conflict and struggle, needed no encouragement. ‘It is remarkable how Darwin rediscovers, among the beasts and plants, the society of England with its division of labour, competition, opening up of new markets, “inventions” and Malthusian “struggle for existence”,’ Marx wrote back some years later whilst going over the work of Ricardo and Darwin in preparation for Das Kapital.12 Indeed, Marx was so enamoured of Darwin's work that he later sent an edition of Das Kapital to the great evolutionist at Downe House – where, sadly for Marx, its pages remained for the most part uncut. Darwin himself thought the Germanic notion of a connection ‘between Socialism and Evolution through the natural sciences’ quite simply ‘a foolish idea’.13

  By then Engels himself was having doubts about Darwin. Or, rather, he was less convinced by the school of ‘social Darwinism’ which was forming around the work of the philosopher Herbert Spencer. In contrast to Marx, he was far more sceptical of any simplistic parallel between the evolutionary theory of the animal world and human society. Stretching back to The Condition of the Working Class – with its harrowing accounts of the bestiality of Manchester's proletariat – it had always been Engels's contention that capitalism's great crime was to reduce man to the state of animality. ‘All that the Darwinian theory of the struggle for existence boils down to is an extrapolation from society to animate nature of Hobbes' theory of bellum omnium contra omnes and of the bourgeois-economic doctrine of competition together with Malthus's theory of population.’ For Engels, what the social Darwinists didn't realize was that the outcome of the struggle for existence in human society was not an individual ‘survival of the fittest’, but rather the natural dominance of an entire class: ‘the producing class [the proletariat] takes over the management of production and distribution from the class that was hitherto entrusted with it [the bourgeoisie] but has now become incompetent to handle it, and there you have the socialist revolution’.14 However, Engels's most significant scientific contribution went beyond this vulgar communist take on Darwinist theory. Instead, it was to connect the extraordinary scientific advances of the mid-nineteenth century – in atomic theory, cell biology and physical energy – with the philosophy of the man who had first ushered Marx and Engels towards communist enlightenment.