Frock-Coated Communist

by Hunt, Tristram

  When it came to the continental socialist movement, Engels faced a different set of problems. ‘I have to follow the movement in 5 large and a lot of small European countries and the U.S. America,’ he grumbled to Laura Lafargue in 1894. ‘For that purpose I receive 3 German, 2 English, 1 Italian dailies and from January 1 the Vienna daily, 7 in all. Of weeklies I receive 2 from Germany, 7 Austria, 1 France, 3 America (2 English, 1 German), 2 Italian, and 1 each in Polish, Bulgarian, Spanish and Bohemian, 3 of which in languages I am still gradually acquiring.’42 In addition, there was an endless postbag of international correspondence and ‘calls of the most varied sorts of people’. Well into the 1890s Regent's Park Road remained the Mecca of international socialism with a growing intake of exiles, Russian disciples and, in 1893, the hosting of an Anglo-Franco-German socialist summit of August Bebel, Paul Lafargue and John Burns. The Primrose Hill comings and goings had accelerated from mid-1888 when the editorial team of Der Sozialdemokrat – Eduard Bernstein, Julius Motteller, Leonard Tauscher and Herman Schluter – moved en masse from Zurich to London and settled on the other side of the tracks in Kentish Town and Tufnell Park. Naturally, every Sunday they trekked across north London to join Engels for an afternoon of Pilsener, political scandal and scientific socialism. Presiding over it all was Marx's old housemaid, Nim, who ordered Engels's life with a loving decorum: hiring and firing staff, sitting at the head of the Sunday table and giving Engels the domestic freedom to pursue his political and philosophical projects. A lovely insight into Engels's world at the tail end of the 1880s is given by his account of New Year's Eve 1888. ‘We got into it in a very queer way,’ he recounted to Laura Lafargue,

  we went as usual to Pumps' in a cab, the fog was thickening… after a full hour's drive in the dark and cold we arrived at Pumps' where we found Sam Moore, Tussy and the Schluters (Edward never turned up) and also Tauscher… Well, it got blacker and blacker, and when the New Year came, the air was as thick as pea-soup. No chance of getting away; our cabman, ordered for one o'clock, never arrived, and so the whole lot had to stop where they were. So we went on drinking, singing, card-playing and laughing till half-past five, when Sam and Tussy were escorted by Percy to the station and caught the first train; about 7 the others left, and it cleared up a little; Nim slept with Pumps, Schorlemmer and I in the spare bed, Percy in the nursery (it was after seven when we went to sleep) and got up again at about 12 or 1 to return to Pilsener etc…. The others drank coffee about half past four, but I stuck to claret till seven.43

  Sadly, this happy cohabitation between Engels and Nim – with its nostalgic mix of Marx memories, mid-morning sharpeners and shared weakness for Party gossip – came to an abrupt end in 1890 when Nim collapsed with a suspected uterine tumour. As with the end of Lizzy, Engels provided an excellent hospice for the dying Helene, caring for her as his own kith and kin. ‘My good, dear, loyal Lenchen fell peacefully asleep yesterday afternoon after a short and for the most part painless illness,’ Engels wrote sadly to Sorge on 5 November 1890. ‘We had spent seven happy years together in this house. We were the only two left of the old guard of the days before 1848. Now here I am, once again on my own.’44 He followed this letter with a note to Adolf Riefer, one of Nim's few known relatives, announcing the death of his aunt, Helene Demuth, and plans for her estate. For there still remained one living, breathing lie – Nim and Marx's illegitimate son, Freddy Demuth – which the discreet, loyal Engels had to tidy up. ‘The deceased made a will in which she named as her sole heir Frederick Lewis, the son of a deceased friend, whom she had adopted when he was still quite small and whom she gradually brought up to be a good and industrious mechanic.’ Dissembling still further, Engels explained to Riefer how Freddy, ‘out of gratitude and with her permission’, had decided to assume the name Demuth and, as such, was named in the will.45 Thus was one of the last pieces of subterfuge on Engels's part enacted: another posthumous defence of Marx's reputation, covering up once more his ignominious philandering. The ill-treated Freddy Demuth, of 25 Gransden Avenue, Hackney, East London, rightly received Helene's entire estate valued at £40. To the disinherited Riefer, this extraordinary act of generosity to the adult son of an old friend might just have seemed a little bit odd.

  Engels sank into a deep depression after burying Helene alongside Karl and Jenny Marx at the family plot in Highgate. With her death, another intimate connection to the Marxes, to his generation and their lifetimes’ struggle, was lost, as well as the kind of doting, jokey, female company he relished. In his low funk, he replied to a condolence telegram from Louise Kautsky, Karl Kautsky's former wife, whom he had defended so chivalrously during her divorce. ‘What I have been through these many days, how terribly bleak and desolate life has seemed and still seems to me, I need not tell you,’ he moaned. ‘And then came the question – what now? Whereupon, my dear Louise, an image, alive and comforting, appeared before my eyes, to remain there night and day, and that image was you.’46 Engels's unexpected solution to his lonely state was for Louise, a struggling Viennese midwife, to take up Nim's former position in Regent's Park Road: there would, of course, be no ‘manual services’, just a supervisory role of the household staff and a total freedom to pursue other interests.

  Louise jumped at the chance to move to London and the delighted Engels soon had a new woman in his life and with her, as he put it, ‘a little sunshine has returned’. In Engels's final years the two of them enjoyed a highly productive, supportive and affectionate relationship, with the younger Louise acting, far more than Nim, as a secretarial assistant taking care of correspondence, organizing papers, monitoring the international press and even proofreading his articles. Engels's letters to his global circle of correspondents became inundated with mentions of her; soon she started adding her own notes to the letters, signing herself as ‘The Witch’. Did Engels the ageing Lothario take more than just a professional interest in the witty, pretty, thirty-year-old Louise? Most probably, but ‘the difference in our ages precludes marital no less than extra-marital relations, so that nothing remains but that self-same housewifeliness’.47 Over time, these sentiments developed into paternal affection as Engels grew to regard Louise ‘as I do Pumps, Tussy or Laura, just as though she were my own child’.48

  But there was a jealous child in this loving brood: the dreaded, drunken Pumps was far from happy with Louise's arrival. Whereas she had coexisted easily enough with the unthreatening Nim, playing the flirtish, doltish girl to Nim's staid matron, she rightly sensed the entrance of stylish, attractive Louise into Regent's Park Road would undermine her lucrative relationship with Engels. Ever her father's daughter, Tussy Marx watched the unfolding family dynamic with unrestrained glee. ‘Finally Louise arrived,’ she reported back to Laura. ‘Meantime the General had screwed his courage to the sticking point and Pumps had been informed that on my (!!) invitation Louise was coming over, and must be properly treated…’ But the threats didn't work: Pumps repeatedly humiliated Louise with all sorts of petty etiquette tricks and drunken behaviour until it all came to a head at Engels's seventieth. ‘On the General's birthday Pumps getting more drunk than usual confided to Louise that she “knew she had to behave to her, or she'd get cut out of the Will”!’49 In the end, Engels had to give Pumps a proper talking to – ‘my lecture and a few hints’ – so she clearly understood ‘that her position in my house depends very much upon her own behaviour’.50 Revealing something of her true mettle, Louise held her nerve against the shameless niece and Pumps was forced to accept that the days of her Primrose Hill primacy were firmly over.

  In comparison to such highly strung domestic diplomacy, dealing with the factional infighting of European socialism was relatively straightforward. Most of Engels's time in 1888–9 was taken up by preparations for the Paris Congress scheduled for July 1889, the hundredth anniversary of the storming of the Bastille. The problem was there were two competing events: one organized by the renegade French Possibilists in conjunction with Hyndman's SDF and various English t
rade unions (The International Workers’ Congress); the other the official Marxist jamboree co-ordinated by Lafargue, Guesde and their French Workers’ Party (The International Socialist Labour Congress). Engels's task was to ensure the latter eclipsed the former by securing the involvement of the German and Austrian Marxist parties, who had a rather tetchy relationship with Lafargue and the French socialists. In the early months of 1889 an increasingly ill-tempered correspondence bounced back and forth from Primrose Hill to Berlin, Vienna and Paris. ‘One thing I do know,’ Engels exploded to Wilhelm Liebknecht after one sulky impasse too many, ‘you can arrange the next congress yourselves; I shall wash my hands of it.’51 Yet the reality was that Engels was the only figure capable of bringing the European communist parties together; he alone, as acting ‘first fiddle’, enjoyed the stature and authority to coalesce the inherently fissiparous movement. In the event, the congress just about worked, with nearly 400 delegates representing the worker and socialist parties of twenty nations converging on the French capital. ‘You can congratulate yourself on having saved the congress,’ Lafargue wrote to Engels (who personally declined to join the throng), ‘but for you and Bernstein, the Germans would have left us and deserted to the Possibilists.’52 Held under the shadow of the ‘hideous’ Eiffel Tower and amidst the vulgar commercial-imperial bustle of the 1889 World's Fair, the congress witnessed the launch of what became the Second Socialist International. ‘The capitalists have invited the rich and powerful to the Exposition universelle to observe and admire the product of the toil of workers forced to live in poverty in the midst of the greatest wealth human society has ever produced,’ as Paul Lafargue put it, in language so redolent of his late father-in-law. ‘We, socialists, have invited the producers to join us in Paris on 14 July. Our aim is the emancipation of the workers, the abolition of wage-labour and the creation of a society in which all women and men irrespective of sex or nationality will enjoy the wealth produced by the work of all workers.’53 Despite an often reformist and compromising tone prevalent in some of the debates, Engels was delighted with the outcome. ‘Our Congress is in session and proving a brilliant success,’ he reported back to Sorge.54 After the ignominious end of the First International, Engels felt Paris showed the global socialist struggle gaining a far more secure footing with an end to anarchist influence, a welcome settlement between socialist theory and workers’ activism as well as clear policy commitments on political engagement, sexual equality, trade union rights and the establishment of May Day as International Labour Day.

  While Paris might have been the venue for the founding of the Second International, the driving force behind late nineteenth-century socialism was located firmly in Berlin and Vienna. To his incredulity, Bismarck's anti-socialist law had served only to swell the left-wing ranks of what became in 1890 the Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (SPD). Alarmed, the German chancellor changed tack, seeking to neutralize the socialist challenge through a programme of progressive welfare reforms. But despite the introduction of health insurance, accident insurance and old age and disability pensions the SPD vote jumped from 7.5 per cent in 1878 to 19.7 per cent in 1890. ‘Since last Thursday evening when the telegrams announcing victory came raining in here thick and fast, we are in a constant intoxication of triumph,’ was Engels's response from Regent's Park Road to the astonishing million and a half votes for the socialists translating to thirty-five deputies in the 1890 Reichstag poll. ‘The old stability is gone forever.’55

  With an expanded franchise, the prospect of real political power was now in the offing and Engels felt it was more important than ever that the SPD adopted a correct ideological line devoid of any remaining Lassallean traits. In the wake of their electoral success, a congress was set for Erfurt in October 1891, and in the run-up to it Engels deployed all his political cunning to ensure Marx's posthumous influence over the direction of German socialism. He mischievously reprinted Marx's ‘Marginal Notes’ on the reviled 1875 Gotha programme, in which he had so heavily castigated Liebknecht and Bebel for succumbing to Lassallean socialism, and reissued Marx's Civil War in France, with its defence of the Commune's dictatorship of the proletariat. Engels then heavily edited the first draft of the Erfurt social-democratic programme, urging the SPD not to avoid a confrontation with the feudal, semi-absolutist German state even as he revived his conviction in the need for a democratic way-stage to communism. ‘If one thing is certain it is that our party and the working class can only come to power under the form of a democratic republic.’56

  As it turned out, his fears of ideological back-sliding were unwarranted. Although in terms of party positioning Erfurt adopted a series of highly practical, reformist policies (universal suffrage, free schooling, progressive income tax, medical care and legal aid), to the European socialist movement as a whole the SPD Congress signalled the ideological triumph of Marxism with a philosophical programme slavishly echoing Das Kapital. ‘We have had the satisfaction of seeing Marx's critique win all along the line,’ Engels wrote to Sorge with the intense personal satisfaction of having honoured Marx's legacy in the country of his birth. ‘Even the last traces of Lassalleanism have been eliminated.’57 After Erfurt and the SPD's official conversion, Marxism took comprehensive control of the Second International. As Leszek Kolakowski has described it, ‘Marxism seemed to be at the height of its intellectual impetus. It was not the religion of an isolated sect, but the ideology of a powerful political movement.’58

  However, the SPD's commitment to suffrage, municipal socialism, even the proportional representation voting system, highlighted a broader political shift which the trimming, older and wiser Engels was coming to terms with. The hero of the '48 revolution, the stalwart of the Barmen barricades who wanted to deliver the socialist revolution by bloody force, was tapering his political strategy to an age of mass democracy. With Europe's economies somehow managing the transition from industrial revolution to monopoly capitalism – with its underpinnings of state cartels, colonial exploitation and high finance – the strength and mutability of capitalism was shown to be far sturdier than previously imagined. If the capitalist system was not likely to be brought to a juddering halt by an immediate economic crisis, then the way to proletarian triumph had to involve the sort of democratic party politics which Marx and Engels had first supported in 1848. But the stark difference in 1891 was that Engels thought democratic socialist parties could now move straight to power, via the ballot box, without having to endure the intermission of radical-bourgeois rule which had seemed necessary in the reactionary, feudal days of 1848.59 There was the real possibility, Engels concluded, of a direct transition to socialism under a proletarian government which had been voted into power by the newly enfranchised working class – as the SPD seemed likely to be in Germany. For given the growing working-class vote, ‘the possibility of our coming to power is merely a calculation of probability in accordance with mathematical laws’.60 It was a prospect of ultimate, inevitable, peaceable socialist triumph which Engels relished. ‘This very lack of undue haste, this measured but nonetheless inexorable advance, has about it something tremendously impressive which cannot but arouse in the rulers the same sense of dread as was experienced by the prisoners of the state inquisition in that room in Venice where the walls moved inwards an inch each day…’ he mused to August Bebel's wife, Julie.61

  Of course, democracy was slower and less romantic than the call to revolution, but Engels now regarded universal suffrage as a respectable weapon in the socialist armoury. Like a democratic ingénue, Engels described how elections allowed socialists to reveal their strength every three years, enable the party leadership to stay in touch with the workers, and offer either a platform for socialist advocacy in Parliament or even the opportunity of power. Never afraid to adopt a new political strategy in the face of changing circumstances, Engels, the self-styled Montagnard who once caricatured himself nursing a guillotine, now announced that ‘the time of surprise attacks, of revolutions carried through by smal
l conscious minorities at the head of the masses lacking consciousness is past’.62 What was more, thanks to the overwhelming force which state armies could mobilize, rebellion in the 1848 style, ‘the era of barricades and street fighting has gone for good’.63 Contrary to Lenin's later assertions, Engels was no van-guardist. He even opposed plans for a general strike in response to the potential outbreak of a European war as unnecessarily provocative to bourgeois authorities itching to impose a military clampdown. ‘We, the “revolutionaries”, the “overthrowers” – we are thriving far better on legal methods than on illegal methods and overthrow. The parties of order, as they call themselves, are perishing under the legal conditions created by themselves…’64