“Whole streets, unpaved and without drains or main sewers, are worn into deep ruts and holes in which water constantly stagnates, and are so covered with refuse and excrementious matter as to be almost impassable from depth of mud and intolerable from stench.”
Manchester has barely changed since Friedrich Engels was obliged to spend the best part of twenty years working in the family firm as this quote from Tristram Hunt’s new biography illustrates (The Frock-Coated Communist: The Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels – Publisher: Allen Lane).
On the face of things Irish people are pretty unchanged too. Here is Engels writing on the subject:
“Drink is the only thing which makes the Irishman’s life worth having, drink and his cheery care-free temperament; so he revels in drink to the point of the most bestial drunkenness. The southern facile character of the Irishman, his crudity, which places him but little above the savage, his contempt for all humane enjoyments, in which his very crudeness makes him incapable of sharing, his filth and poverty, all favour drunkenness.”
I’ve always found the Irish attitude to pigs that Engels described hugely entertaining and subsequently found out that several of my ancestors were sent to Australia in the nineteenth century for stealing the animals.
The Irishman loves his pig as the Arab his horse, with the difference that he sells it when it is fat enough to kill. Otherwise, he eats and sleeps with it, his children play with it, ride upon it, roll in the dirt with it, as any one may see a thousand times repeated in all the great towns of England.
The first question you want any review to answer is: “is this book worth buying?”. In this case the answer is a clamorous “yes”. Hunt ends the book an affirmation of the the continuing relevance of the ideas of Marx and Engels by giving an account of the work regime in a modern Chinese factory. He sets it alongside Engels’ account of conditions in a Manchester cotton mill in the 1840s and there is virtually no difference. An enormous new working class has been created and is being subjected to inhuman living conditions to create goods for the world market. Hunt has a firmer grasp of the emancipatory force of the ideas that Engels helped develop and popularise than the Chinese and Soviet bureaucrats who erected statues to him and gutted him of everything that makes him a symbol of freedom and rebellion.
Hunt’s book does three things well and one thing very badly. He is not able to offer a persuasive explanation of how “official” Communism from Stalin onwards so thoroughly negated everything that Marx and Engels represented. He sets out how Stalin made a hideous orthodoxy out of the Marxist method in The History of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) – Short Course but fails to follow this up by exploring the much more important question of why this happened. Anyone seeking a starting point for this particular discussion can usefully start with Trotsky’s book The Revolution Betrayed. Or maybe he just did not fancy opening that can of worms.
Now for the good bits.
Engels the man comes out of this book pretty well. He was unapologetic in his appreciation of the finer things that the life of an affluent Victorian gentlemen could afford. He had a lifelong for champagne, oysters and decent holidays. In his younger days he was an unabashed philanderer and a particular devotee of French prostitutes though by the 1880s he was sympathetic to attempts to ban it, identifying the women as “victims of the present social order.
His capacity for work was matched only by his apparent appetite for beer and wine. At the end of a full day in a senior post working at the factory he would churn out articles on behalf of Marx, study, teach himself languages and play a prominent part in the social life of the city as well as intervening in every intellectual dispute that was happening in European socialism. It was only after Marx’s death that he became the dominant figure in the socialist movement internationally and micro-managed the affairs of the German SPD to an extent that seems unrealistic at this distance.
And that is the second thing that Hunt does effectively. He manages to convey some sense of the fractious nature of the relations between the socialist currents at the time (there’s another constant) and give an image of Engels as activist. He was always willing to get his gloves off and have the arguments and sit through the meetings. If anything he had too much relish for factional manoeuvre. His activity spanned the thwarted revolutions of 1848 in Germany and Paris, support for the Fenians – Al-Qaeda figures of their day – and the dockers’ strikes in London. As well as being a first rate intellectual he was adamant in his commitment to praxis.
The third thing that Hunt does well is to give a sense of how Engels and Marx developed philosophically and politically starting with their upturning of Hegelian thought. It’s a fair bet that the general reader will be unfamiliar with German philosophy of the period but here it is rendered accessible. More significantly he proves convincingly that dogmatism and set truths were utterly alien to Marxism’s founders. They embraced the science of the day and insisted that politics had to be based on understanding what was happening in the real world and not on wishful thinking or yesterday’s truths.
Marxism’s rehabilitation as a way of understanding the work has been happening for a while now. This biography is a welcome addition to the literature which helps set the historical record straight.
Liam redux 
Leave a reply to Liam Cancel reply