Engels did this by unpicking the materialist foundations of Morgan's chronology: the progression from a promiscuous, tribal system of living common amongst the Iroquois (sharing sexual partners and property) to the modern form of the ‘pairing family’ was intimately connected to the advances in the mode of production. Bluntly, the modern family and all its failings were the product of private property. However, what made Engels's interpretation especially noteworthy was how his account of family life was explored through the gaze of women and, with it, their history of social emasculation as society moved from matrilineal to patrilineal kinship patterns. ‘The more the old traditional sexual relations lost their naive, primeval character, as a result of the development of the economic conditions of life… the more degrading and oppressive they must have appeared to the women…’93 For, as Morgan had outlined, the early consanguineous system of group marriage and polygamy was far more egalitarian and autonomous than the ‘brothel-tainted imagination’ of modern philistine prejudice might suggest. ‘Woman occupied not only a free but also a highly respected position among all the savages and all barbarians of the lower and middle stages and partly even of the upper stage.’94 In the savage tribe, women were far freer than under liberal-bourgeois society.
The fall from grace came with the introduction of individual family property rights (as distinct from broader clan or tribe rights) and, accompanying them, the practice of inheritance through the male line. Individual ownership and private property signalled the overthrow of the mother right and ‘the world historic defeat of the female sex’. From that point on, the patriarchal family form was unstoppable as the husband seized the reins and the woman was ‘degraded, enthralled, became the slave of the man's lust, a mere instrument for breeding children’.95 Just as private property instigated the modern class system, so gender relations became another element of the social divide: women now joined the ranks of those oppressed by the capitalist mode of production. ‘The first class opposition that appears in history coincides with the development of the antagonism between man and woman in monogamous marriage, and the first class oppression coincides with that of the female sex by the male,’ Engels declared.96 In the family, the husband was the bourgeois and the wife the proletariat, with predictably brutal and often murderous outcomes.
It was the high-bourgeois, mid-Victorian family Engels had particularly in mind: behind that veneer of evangelical virtue festered hypocrisy, prostitution and abuse. ‘This Protestant monogamy leads merely, if we take the average of the best cases, to a wedded life of leaden boredom, which is described as domestic bliss,’ he wrote with the authority of one who had lived for two decades amongst the Dissenting elites of northern England; ‘… the wife… differs from the ordinary courtesan only in that she does not hire out her body, like a wage worker, on a piecework, but sells it into slavery once and for all’.97 The inevitable accompaniment of monogamy – in dialectical terms, the inherent contradiction in the form – was prostitution and hetaerism. For whereas in primitive communities sexual licence was unashamedly enjoyed by both genders, in the private property family ‘the right of conjugal infidelity’ is solely the prerogative of the male. Sex love, as Engels clumsily put it, was possible only amongst a proletariat devoid of both private property and Christian bourgeois norms. As such, he romantically if mistakenly believed, proletarian marriages lacked the abusive practices of their bourgeois counterparts.
Having set out the transience of various family forms over the preceding stages of human society, Engels now advocated a further revolution in sexual relations. It was a theme he had first touched upon in The Condition of the Working Class in England when he charted the effects on the family unit of female employment in Manchester's mills and factories. The new industrial reality of working women and unemployed men had served only to desex both parties: ‘The wife supports the family, the husband sits at home, tends the children, sweeps the room and cooks.’ Engels reported the experience of a friend of his visiting a former workmate in St Helen's, Lancashire, who ‘sat and mended his wife's stocking with his bodkin’. ‘ No, I know this is not my work, but my poor missus is i' th' factory… so I have to do everything for her what I can, for I have no work, nor had any for more nor three years, and I shall never have any more work while I live”; and then he wept a big tear.98 Yet the conclusion which the precocious 24-year-old Engels drew from this was not that women should be prevented from working (indeed, industrialization promised them a new era of liberation free from domestic servitude), but rather, ‘if the reign of the wife over the husband, as inevitably brought about by the factory system, is inhuman, the pristine rule of the husband over the wife must have been inhuman too’.99 The domestic upset produced by mass female employment graphically exposed how it was only private interests rather than human affection which was holding the modern family together and that was no basis for a fulfilling equality of the sexes. Industrialization had ripped away the veneer of ‘natural’ patriarchy and he optimistically believed that with the spread of female wage earners, ‘no basis for any kind of male supremacy is left in the proletarian household, except, perhaps, for something of the brutality toward women that has spread since the introduction of monogamy’.100
On the surface it might well seem that capitalism and its demands for female labour offered the surest route to sexual equality, but the exploitation of modern family life could be fully solved only by the transition to communism. Once inheritable wealth was turned back into a shared pool of social property then the narrow, economic foundations of the ‘pairing’ family would disintegrate. As Engels put it in a letter of 1885, ‘True equality between men and women can, or so I am convinced, become a reality only when the exploitation of both by capital has been abolished, and private work in the home been transformed into a public industry.101 Women could emerge from under the patriarchal cosh only once the family ceased to exist as an economic unit, private housekeeping became a socialized event, and – most radically of all – ‘the care and upbringing of children becomes a public affair’.102 Private property, wealth and even children all had to be passed over as shared goods to the wider community. With almost Fourierist verve, Engels then laid out the Utopian promise offered by this sexual revolution: women marrying for love rather than money (which would lead to ‘a gradual rise of more unrestrained sexual intercourse’ and, with it, ‘a laxer public opinion regarding virginal honour and female shame’); wives no longer having to tolerate their husband's infidelities for fear of losing their property; and marriages built on mutual affection and respect together with people being spared ‘the useless mire of divorce proceedings’.103 Not quite Fourier's free-love phalanstery, but not far off.
One sexual freedom which Engels was not willing to sanction was homosexuality. In 1869 Karl Marx had sent him a copy of the German lawyer Karl Ulrich's book Argonauticus, which argued that same-sex desire was inborn, that masculinity and femininity should be regarded as a continuum, and coined the term ‘Urning’ to describe homosexual and lesbian attraction. Engels, revealing all of his Prussian Calvinist upbringing, was appalled by such ‘unnatural revelations’. ‘The paeder-asts are beginning to count themselves, and discover that they are a power in the state,’ he wrote back to Marx in a hyperbolic, homophobic rant. ‘Guerre aux cons, paix aux trous-de-cul [“War on the cunts, peace to the arse-holes”] will now be the slogan. It is a bit of luck that we, personally, are too old to have to fear that, when this party wins, we shall have to pay physical tribute to the victors… just wait until the new North German Penal Code recognizes the droits du cul [rights of the arse-hole]; then he will operate quite differently. Then things will go badly enough for poor frontside people like us, with our childish penchant for females.’104 By way of contrast, the English socialist Edward Carpenter, in his privately circulated essay Homogenic Love (1893), took Engels's critique of the bourgeois family to a different conclusion by arguing for the virtue of non-procreative sex and, with it, the cultural and legal ac
ceptance of homosexuality as part of a broader process of socialist emancipation.105 Carpenter's Platonic vision of ‘Comradeship’ offered an altogether different socialism from Engels's fecund Utopia of free-love and communal child-rearing.
Never as pervasive a theory as dialectical materialism, Engels's writings on the family nonetheless proved a significant contribution to socialist theory in the twentieth century. Indeed, an entire generation of Marxist feminists was brought up on his work. The feminist and activist Kate Millett recorded in her 1970 book, Sexual Politics, how Engels's treatment of marriage and the family as historical institutions, ‘subject to the same processes of evolution as other social phenomena… laid the sacred open to serious criticism, analysis, even to possible drastic reorganization’.106 Similarly, Shulamith Firestone's The Dialectic of Sex: A Case for Feminist Revolution (1970) drew on Engels's writings to make the case for a post-patriarchal settlement and communal living. What many feminists admired about Engels's approach was his treatment of gender differences as economically produced rather than biologically determined: patriarchy was another function of bourgeois class society and both needed to be undone.107
More recently Engels's work has been criticized, principally by anthropologists, for its failure to acknowledge male domination in primitive societies (even, at one point, seeming to sanction the tribal habits of ius primae noctis) and by his vision of the division of labour as innate rather than socially constructed. In addition, a new wave of feminists has criticized Engels for failing to appreciate female sexual desires as distinct from the reproductive process, for depicting women as naturally yearning for permanent marriage and, more significantly, a reductive failure to ‘attend seriously to questions of sexuality, ideology, domesticity or the division of labour and power between women and men generally’.108 Leaving aside these often anachronistic criticisms, what is surely of greater interest is how on earth these feminist ideas came from Engels – the great Lothario, slave to Paris's finest grisettes, and rough seducer of Mrs Moses Hess. The truth was that the views of Engels in his sixties had profoundly matured from his raffish days in the boudoirs and brothels of the 1840s. Engels even endorsed plans in the German Reichstag for outlawing prostitution – whilst warning of the repercussions which could hit sex workers if the experience of England's Contagious Diseases Act was anything to go by. ‘It is my belief that, in dealing with this matter, we should above all consider the interests of the girls themselves as victims of the present social order, and protect them as far as possible from ending up in the gutter,’ the reformed one-time client told August Bebel.109
There is also a powerful case for suggesting that for much of his adult life Engels lived out his beliefs. Although contradictions of Hegelian proportions enveloped much of Engels's professional existence, when it came to his personal affairs he refused to submit to bourgeois norms; it was only on Lizzy's death-bed that he finally wed his partner to soothe her religious qualms. Cynics might suggest that this had more to do with inheritance rights and shares in Ermen & Engels, but to my mind it was a principled objection to what he regarded as the hypocrisy of marriage. Engels was also acutely aware of the fragile social position of women in the bourgeois family system when it came to the collapse of relationships. Sentiments he expressed not only when it came to enforcing the Roshers' marriage, but also in typically forthright manner in October 1888 when Karl Kautsky announced he was leaving his wife, Louise, for a girl he had met in Salzburg (who, in turn, swiftly exchanged him for his brother, Hans). Engels, who always admired Louise Kautsky, upbraided Karl for having dealt ‘the most terrible blow a woman can possibly receive’. At great length, he spelt out the consequences of divorce in contemporary society: while no social stigma attached itself to the husband, ‘the wife loses her status altogether; she has got to begin all over again and do so under more difficult circumstances’. Engels urged him to reflect very carefully on the matter and then, if there was no other option, proceed ‘only in the most considerate manner possible’.110
Such admirable appreciation of the difficulties faced by divorcees in nineteenth-century Europe are all alas overshadowed by Engels's personal response to the women's movement of the day. As we have seen, part of the reason he fell for Mary and then Lizzy was their earthy, illiterate contrast to the ‘priggishness and sophistry of the “heddicated” and “sensitive” daughters of the bourgeoisie’ and there are numerous references in Engels's letters extolling his innate abhorrence for ‘affected, “eddicated” Berlin ladies’.111 In fact, purposeful, intelligent women who were neither pretty nor named Marx were the subject of instinctive misogynistic abuse by Engels. He particularly disliked middle-aged female intellectuals: so, the secularist feminist and theosophist Annie Besant was ‘Mother Besant’; the journalist and war correspondent Emily Crawford, ‘Mother Crawford’; the activist and sexual health campaigner Gertrud Guillaume-Schack, ‘Mother Schack’. Needless to say, he was highly dismissive of the campaign for female suffrage – ‘these little madams, who clamour for women's rights’ – and regarded their cause as a distraction behind which class rule would flourish.112 ‘Those Englishwomen who championed a women's formal right to allow themselves to be as thoroughly exploited by capitalists as men are, have, for the most part, a direct or indirect interest in the capitalist exploitation of both sexes,’ he wrote to ‘Mother Schack’, explaining how he was more focused on the coming generation than on formal equality amongst the existing one.113 Yet when, in 1876, a female candidate bounced up the steps of No. 122 Regent's Park Road seeking Engels's vote for the London School Board elections (for which women were eligible to stand following the 1870 Education Act), he couldn't help but give her all his seven votes – as a result, ‘she had more votes than any of the other seven candidates for election. Incidentally, the ladies who sit on school boards here are notable for the fact that they do very little talking and a great deal of working – as much on average as three men.’114
Finally, after his arduous years of dialectical materialism and hand-to-hand combat with Marx's manuscripts, with his eyes fading and his rheumatic legs going, Engels rewarded himself with a holiday. Even as an ageing man, he always enjoyed the prospect of travel: new people, ideas and places were the secret to Engels's preternatural youthfulness. In 1888 the United States of America promised all three. What was more, an American edition of The Condition of the Working Class in England had appeared in 1886 and, after decades of egregious exploitation, the US working class seemed to be evolving towards class consciousness. ‘At this very moment I am receiving the American papers with accounts of the great strike of 12,000 Pennsylvanian coal-miners in the Connellsville district,’ Engels wrote in the appendix to the American edition of the Condition, ‘and I seem but to read my own description of the North of England colliers’ strike of 1844.’115
Mark Twain famously christened this period of unfathomable prosperity and poverty ‘The Gilded Age’: an epoch of robber barons and intensifying inequality; the industrial might of the Vanderbilts, Morgans, Dukes and Carnegies (who would become such champions of Herbert Spencer's ‘social Darwinism’) alongside workplace unrest and the first red shoots of socialism. In 1886, the year of the ‘great upheaval’, over 700,000 workers either went out on strike or faced employer lockouts as disputes over wage cuts, mechanization and de-skilling intensified.116 In Chicago, some 90,000 workers marched through the streets on the first May Day rally called by the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions – a show of strength which spiralled tragically out of control three days later with the Haymarket Square massacre (in which police opened fire on demonstrators after an anarchist bomb was thrown). Engels was highly encouraged by the ‘American vigour’ of the US labour movement, in contrast to Britain's still quiescent working class, eking out the last embers of the mid-Victorian boom. ‘The last Bourgeois Paradise on earth is fast changing into a Purgatory, and can only be prevented from becoming, like Europe, an Inferno by the go-ahead pace at which the development o
f the newly fledged proletariat of America will take place,’ he wrote to his US translator, Florence Kelley-Wischnewetzky (who, in time, inevitably metamorphosed into ‘Mother Wischnewetzky’), ‘I only wish Marx could have lived to see it!’117
Of course, there were problems with the US situation – not least an unfortunate lack of ideological rigour. ‘Theoretical ignorance is an attribute of all young nations,’ Engels sagely observed. However, with youth also came a welcome absence of the cultural and intellectual detritus which made European socialism so sclerotic. America was notable for its ‘purely bourgeois institutions unleavened by feudal remnants or monarchical traditions, and without a permanent and hereditary proletariat’.118 As such, it offered a clean sheet in which bourgeois hegemony could quickly be followed by a fast-track proletarian revolution. On this ‘more favoured soil’, the organized working class was achieving in months the sort of political and electoral advances their European counterparts took years to master. Frustratingly, such progress risked being undone by the all-too-familiar party split within the progressive movement. After the May Day riots, the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions retreated towards ‘business’ unionism, narrowly guarding the interests of its members rather than opposing the Gilded Age capitalist settlement. Those workers who were politically active were divided between a Socialist Labor Party, controlled for the most part by German émigrés, and the Noble and Holy Order of the Knights of Labor. Founded in 1869 by Philadelphia garment workers, it was a guild-like fraternal order open to all ‘producers’ (excluding barmen and lawyers) from trade unionists to socialists to unskilled labourers. In an earlier period of his life, Engels would have dismissed the Knights as dreamy, Proudhonist and petit-bourgeois – with their plans for co-operatives, working-class mutuals and an emotional sanctification of labour as against the Darwinian evils of capitalism – but the politically astute communist elder now thought them ‘the unavoidable starting point’ for US proletarian politics. By contrast, the Socialist Labor Party, though highly orthodox in its Marxian philosophy, displayed all the classic faults of an over-intellectualized émigré circle: too much idealist philosophy and not enough practical politics.
Frock-Coated Communist Page 38