The Frock-Coated Communist

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The author would like to thank Lawrence & Wishart for their kind permission to quote from Marx Engels Collected Works (London 1975–2004)

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List of Illustrations

Unveiling of a statue of Marx and Engels, Moscow, 1918 (David King Collection, London)

3 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel lecturing, 1828, lithograph by Franz Kugler (AKG, London)

7 John Marshall & Sons cotton design (Bridgeman Art Library, London/Whitworth Gallery, Manchester)

9 Ermen & Engels cotton mill, Weaste, Salford (Working Class Movement Library, Salford)

10 Photographic portrait of Friedrich Engels, aged 20 (People's History Museum, Manchester)

15 Dresden riots, 1848 (Bridgeman Art Library, London/ Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, France)

17 Detail from a painting of the Cheshire Hounds, by Henry Calvert (Tatton Park/Cheshire County Council/The National Trust)

18 Manchester Town Hall vestibule (Manchester City Council (photograph: Mike Pilkington))

23 Photographic portrait of Friedrich Engels, 1891 (David King Collection, London)

25 View over London from Hampstead Heath, by John Ritchie (fl. 1858–75) (Bridgeman Art Library/private collection)

26 Barricades during the Paris Commune, 1871 (Bridgeman Art Library, London/Bibliothèque Nationale Paris)

27 Fires in Paris during the Commune (Bridgeman Art Library, London/Musée de la Ville de Paris, Musée Carnavalet, Archives Charmet)

28 Strikers marching during the London dock strike, 1889 (Bridgeman Art Library, London/private collection)

29 Marchers pose for a photograph during the London dock strike, 1889 (Bridgeman Art Library, London/private collection)

31 Mural in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia (Bridgeman Art Library, London (photograph: Françoise Demulder)/Roger-Viollet, Paris)

p. 27: A letter from Engels to his sister (Marx Engels Collected Works, Volume 2)

p. 59: Engels's sketch of ‘The Free’ (Marx Engels Collected Works, Volume 2)

pp. 82–3: German map of Manchester c. 1845 (Friedrich Engels, Die Lage der arbeitenden Klasse in England)

p. 106: Dustjacket of the The Condition of the Working Class in England (Marx Engels Collected Works, Volume 4)

p. 150: Dustjacket of the Communist Manifesto (Marx Engels Collected Works, Volume 6)

p. 281: Highgate Cemetery Burial and Grave Register recording the death of Karl Marx (London Borough of Camden, Local Studies And Archives Centre)

Acknowledgements

For their generous assistance with the research, writing and production of this book, the author would like to thank Alice Austin, Sara Bershtel, Phillip Birch, Georgina Capel, Michael V. Carlisle, Barney Cokeliss, Bela Cunha, Andrew and Theresa Curtis, Dermot Daly and the Cheshire Hunt, Virginia Davis and the Department of History, Queen Mary, University of London, Thomas Dixon, Orlando Figes, Giles Foden, Tom Graves, Michael Herbert, Eric Hobsbawm, Julian and Marylla Hunt, Stephen Kingston, Nick Mansfield, Ed Mili-band, Seumas Milne, Liudmila Novikova, Alastair Owens, Stuart Proffitt, Caroline Read, Stephen Rigby, Donald Sassoon, Sophie Schlondorff, Bill Smyth, Gareth Stedman Jones, Juliet Thornback, Benjamin and Yulia Wegg-Prosser, Francis Wheen, Bee Wilson, Michael Yehuda. In addition, the staff of the British Library; Engels-Haus, Wuppertal; the International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam; the London Library; the Marx Memorial Library, London; the People's History Museum, Manchester; the Working Class Movement Library, Salford.

Preface

On 30 June 1869 Friedrich Engels, a Manchester mill owner, gave up his job in the family business after nearly twenty years. Ready to greet him, on the path of his small cottage in the Chorlton suburbs, were his lover Lizzy Burns and houseguest Eleanor Marx, daughter of his old friend Karl. ‘I was with Engels when he reached the end of his forced labour and I saw what he must have gone through all those years,’ Eleanor later wrote of Engels's final day at work,

I shall never forget the triumph with which he exclaimed ‘for the last time!’ as he put on his boots in the morning to go to his office. A few hours later we were standing at the gate waiting for him. We saw him coming over the little field opposite the house where he lived. He was swinging his stick in the air and singing, his face beaming. Then we set the table for a celebration and drank champagne and were happy.¹

Friedrich Engels was a textile magnate and fox-hunter, member of the Manchester Royal Exchange and president of the city's Schiller Institute. He was a raffish, high-living, heavy-drinking devotee of the good things in life: lobster salad, Château Margaux, Pilsener beer and expensive women. But for forty years Engels also funded Karl Marx, looked after his children, soothed his furies and provided one half of history's most celebrated ideological partnership: co-author of the Communist Manifesto and co-founder of what would come to be known as Marxism. Over the course of the twentieth century, from Chairman Mao's China to the Stasi state of the GDR, from the anti-imperial struggle in Africa to the Soviet Union itself, various manifestations of this compelling philosophy would cast their shadow over a full third of the human race. And as often as not, the leadership of the socialist world would look first to Engels rather than Marx to explain their policies, justify their excesses and shore up their regimes. Interpreted and misinterpreted, quoted and misquoted, Friedrich Engels – the frock-coated Victorian cotton lord – became one of the central architects of global communism.

Today, a journey to Engels begins at Moscow's Paveletsky rail station. From this shabbily romantic Tsarist-era terminal, the rusting sleeper train heaves off at midnight for the Volga plains hundreds of miles south-east of the capital. A grinding, stop–start fourteen-hour journey, alleviated only by a gurgling samovar in the guard's carriage, eventually lands you in the city of Saratov with its wide, tree-lined streets and attractive air of faded grandeur.

Bolted on to this prosperous, provincial centre is a crumbling, six-lane highway which bridges the mighty river Volga and connects Saratov to its unloved sister city, Engels. Lacking any of Saratov's sophistication, Engels is a grotty, forgotten site dominated by railway loading docks and the rusting detritus of light industry. At its civic centre squats Engels Square: a bleak parade ground encircled by housing estates, a shabby strip-mall dotted with sports bars, casinos and DVD stores, and a roundabout clogged with Ladas, Sputniks and the odd Ford. Here, in all its enervating grime, is the post-communist Russia of hyper-capitalism and bootleg Americana. And amidst this free-market dystopia stands a statue of Friedrich Engels himself – fifteen-foot high atop a marble plinth and with a well-tended municipal flowerbed at his heels, he looks resplendent in his trench coat clutching a curled-up copy of the Communist Manifesto.

Across the former USSR and Eastern bloc, the statues of Marx (together with those of Lenin, Stalin and Beria) have come down. Decapitated and mutilated, their remains are gathered together in monument graveyards for the ironic edification of Cold War cultural tourists. Inexplicably, Engels has been given leave to remain, still holding sway over his eponymous town. As a quick conversation with local residents and early evening promenaders in Engels Square reveals, his presence here is the product neither of affection nor admiration. Certainly, there is little hostility towards the co-founder of communism, but rather a weary apathy and nonchalant ignorance about the adamantine figure whose face they pass by daily. As with the nineteenth-century generals and long-forgotten social reformers on myriad plinths littering the squares of western European capitals, Engels has become an unknown and unremarkable part of the civic wallpaper.

At his birthplace in the Rhineland town of Wuppertal (now a commuter suburb for the nearby finance and fashion city of Düsseldorf), it is a similar story of disinterest. There is a Friedrich Engels Strasse and a Friedrich Engels Allee, but little sense of a town overly anxious to commemorate its most celebrated son. The site of Engels's Geburtshaus, destroyed by a Royal Air Force bombing raid in 1943, remains barren and all that marks the place of his arrival into the world is a dirty granite monument modestly noting his role as the ‘co-founder of scientific socialism’. Covered in holly and ivy, it is edged into the shadowy corner of a run-down park, overlooked by rusting Portakabins and a vandalized phone booth.

In modern Russia and Germany, let alone in Spain, England or America, Engels has slipped the surly bonds of history. Where once his name was on the lips of millions – as Marx's fellow combatant; as the author of Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (the Bible of global communism); as the theoretician of dialectical materialism; as the name so regularly grafted on to city streets and squares by revolutionary insurgents and left-wing councils; as the man whose visionary, bearded features were stamped on to the currency, etched into textbooks, and alongside Marx, Lenin and Stalin stared down from vast flags and Soviet Realist hoardings on to May Day parades – it is now barely registered in either East or West. In 1972 an official GDR biography could naturally claim that ‘nowadays there is hardly a corner of this earth of ours where Engels's name has not been heard of, where the significance of his work is unknown’.² Today, he is so innocuous, his statue isn't even pulled down.

The same cannot be said of his colleague, Karl Marx. Two decades on from the fall of the Berlin Wall and Francis Fukuyama's hubristic declaration of ‘the end of history’, Marx's reputation is enjoying a remarkable renaissance. In recent years he has been transformed from the ogre responsible for the killing fields of Cambodia and labour camps of Siberia to modern capitalism's most perceptive analyst. ‘Marx's Stock Resurges on a 150-Year Tip’ was how the New York Times marked the 150th anniversary of the publication of the Communist Manifesto – a text which, more than any other, ‘recognized the unstoppable wealth-creating power of capitalism, predicted it would conquer the world, and warned that this inevitable globalization of national economies and cultures would have divisive and painful consequences’.³ As Western governments, businesses and banks reaped the bitter harvest of free-market fundamentalism at the turn of the twenty-first century – financial meltdowns in Mexico and Asia, the industrialization of China and India, the decimation of the middle class in Russia and Argentina, mass migration and a worldwide ‘crisis of capitalism’ in 2007–9 – the Cassandra-like voice of Marx started to echo down the decades. The post-1989 neo-liberal settlement, Fukuyama's endpoint of mankind's ideological evolution, all set to be built on the historical wreck of communism, seemed to falter. And there was Marx waiting in the wings. ‘He's back, screamed The Times in the autumn of 2008 as stock markets plunged, banks were summarily nationalized and President Sarkozy of France was photographed leafing through Das Kapital (sales of which surged to the top of the German bestseller lists). Even Pope Benedict XVI was moved to praise Marx's ‘great analytical skill’.⁴ The British economist Meghnad Desai, in a work which formed part of an increasingly effusive literature on Marx, had already labelled the phenomenon, Marx's Revenge: The Resurgence of Capitalism and the Death of Statist Socialism.⁵

For it was now a universal truth that Marx was the first to chart the uncompromising, unrelenting, compulsively iconoclastic nature of capitalism. ‘It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his “natural superiors”, and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interests, than callous “cash-payment”,’ as the Communist Manifesto put it. ‘It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. ’⁶ It was Marx who revealed how capitalism would crush languages, cultures, traditions, even nations, in its wake. ‘In one word, it creates a world after its own image,’ he wrote long before globalization became a by-word for Americanization. In his bestselling 2005 biography, Karl Marx ou l’esprit du monde, the French politician-cum-banker Jacques Attali located Marx as the first great theorist of globalization. For Attali, Marx was ‘an amazingly modern thinker, because when you look at what he has written, it is not a theory of what an organised socialist country should be like, but how capitalism will be in the future… he considered that capitalism would end only when it was a global force… when nations disappeared, when technology was able to transform the life of a country’.⁷ Even the Economist, the great weekly promulgator of neo-liberal dogma, had to give him credit for ‘envisioning the awesome productive power of capitalism’, as the magazine conceded in a 2002 article entitled ‘Marx after Communism’. ‘He saw that capitalism would spur innovation to a hitherto-unimagined degree. He was right that giant corporations would come to dominate the world's industries.’⁸ At the same time, Attali's book, together with Francis Wheen's popular biography of Marx as journalist and rapscallion (Karl Marx, 1999), helped to cast him in a sympathetic light as a struggling writer and loving father shamefully persecuted by the authorities.⁹ Since the 1960s and Louis Althusser's ‘discovery’ of the ‘epistemological break’ between the young and the mature Marx – between the Marx of the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts concerned with alienation and morality and the later, materialist Marx – we had already come to know of Karl Marx's early philosophical humanism. Now we were offered the biographical complement of a rounded, engaging and strikingly contemporary individual.

But where does Friedrich Engels fit within this generous new alignment? In the absence of a similar slew of biographies (with the last truly popular English-language life of Engels being the translation of Gustav Mayer's seminal work of 1934) and perhaps as part of a conscious post-1989 forgetting, Engels has been excised from the popular memory.¹⁰ Or, more worrisomely, in certain ideological circles he has been landed with responsibility for the terrible excesses of twentieth-century Marxism-Leninism. For as Marx's stock has risen, so Engels's has fallen. Increasingly, the trend has been to separate off an ethical, humanist Karl Marx from a mechanical, scientistic Engels and blame the latter for sanctifying the state crimes of communist Russia, China and South-east Asia. Even in the mid-1970s, E. P. Thompson was noting the urge to turn ‘old Engels into a whipping boy, and to impugn to him any sin that one chooses to impugn to subsequent Marxisms… I cannot accept the pleadings which always find Marx and Lenin innocent and leave Engels alone in the dock.’¹¹ Similarly, Richard N. Hunt commented on how ‘It has lately become fashionable in some quarters to treat Engels as the dustbin of Classical Marxism, a convenient receptacle into which can be swept any unsightly oddments of the system, and who can thus also bear the blame for whatever subsequently went awry.’¹² Thus, the attractive Marx of the Paris notebooks is compared and contrasted unfavourably with the dour Engels of Anti-Dühring. The Marxist scholar Norman Levine, for instance, has been in no doubt that ‘Engelism [sic] led directly to the dialectical materialism of the Stalin era… By asserting that a fixed path of development existed in history, by asserting that pre-determined historical development was moving towards socialism, Engelism made Soviet Russia appear as the fulfilment of history since it had already achieved socialism… During the Stalin era, what the world understood as Marxism was really Engelism.’¹³ Suddenly, Engels is left holding the baby of twentieth-century ideological extremism while Marx is rebranded as the acceptable, post-political seer of global capitalism.

Of course it is true that we know about and are interested in Friedrich Engels largely because of his collaboration with Marx; a partnership in which the devoted Engels was always careful to cast himself as ‘second fiddle’. ‘Marx was a genius; we others were at best talented. Without him the theory would not be by far what it is today. It therefore rightly bears his name,’ he announced conclusively after his friend's death.¹⁴ It is equally true that much of the official ideology of Marxism-Leninism in the twentieth century sought its validity, however spurious, in elements of Engels's later codification of Marxism. But just as it is now possible, as the post-1989 polemical dust settles and the socialism of Marx and Engels is no longer automatically obscured by the long, Leninist shadow of the Soviet Union, to take a renewed look at Marx, so we can also begin to approach Engels afresh. ‘Communism defiled and despoiled the radical heritage,’ Tony Judt has written of the ‘dictatorial deviation’ which marked its perverted implementation during the twentieth century. ‘If today we face a world in which there is no grand narrative of social progress, no politically plausible project of social justice, it is in large measure because Lenin and his heirs poisoned the well.’¹⁵ As that historical tide at last begins to ebb, it is now possible and valuable to return to the lives and works of ‘the old Londoners’ to find elements of Marx and Engels's canon which we can examine in a world free for the most part of the state socialist experiments of the twentieth century. They offer not just an insightful critique of global capitalism but new perspectives on the nature of modernity and progress, religion and ideology, colonialism and ‘liberal interventionism’, global financial crises, urban theory, feminism, even Darwinism and reproductive ethics.

To all of which Engels contributed profoundly. Managing a mid-Victorian Manchester cotton business, dealing daily with the economic chain of world trade which stretched from the plantations of the American South to the Lancashire mills to the British Raj, it was his experience of the workings of global capitalism which made its way into the pages of Marx's Das Kapital, just as it was his experience of factory life, slum living, armed insurrection and street-by-street politicking which informed the development of communist doctrine. And, again, it was Friedrich Engels who was far more adventurous when it came to exploring the ramification of his and Marx's thinking in terms of family structure, scientific method, military theory and colonial liberation. As Marx immersed himself ever deeper in the second half of the nineteenth century in economic theory and primitive Russian communism, Engels ranged freely on questions of politics, the environment and democracy, with unexpectedly modern applicability. If Marx's voice is being heard again today, then it is also time we stripped away Engels's modesty and allowed his richly iconoclastic ideas to be explored beyond the memory of Marx.

Yet what makes Engels a fascinating source of biographical enquiry is the personal background to this philosophical prowess; the rich contradiction and limitless sacrifice which marked his long life. It was a life, moreover, set against the great revolutionary epoch of the nineteenth century: Engels was with the Chartists in Manchester, on the barricades in 1848–9, urging on the Paris Communards in 1871 and witness to the uncomfortable birth of the British labour movement in 1890s London. He was a man who believed in praxis, in living his theory of revolutionary communism as practice. Yet the miserable frustration of his life was that he so rarely got the chance, since from his earliest meetings with Marx he decided to relinquish his own ambitions for the sake of his friend's genius and the greater good of the communist cause. Over twenty long years, in the prime of his life, he endured a self-loathing existence as a Manchester millocrat in order to allow Marx the resources and freedom to complete Das Kapital. The notion of individual sacrifice, so central to communist self-definition, was there at the movement's birth.

This extraordinary deference to Marx's mind made great periods of Engels's adult life a time of painful contradiction. Symbolically, at the heart of the Marxist theory of dialectical materialism stood precisely this dynamic of contradiction – how the interpenetration of opposites and the negation of the negation explain the evolution of the natural, physical and social sciences. Right from his initial conversion to communism, Engels, the well-born scion of Prussian Calvinist merchants, lived that tension in a transparently personal way. And so this biography is also the memoir of a fox-hunting man: how a womanizing, champagne-drinking capitalist helped to found an ideology which was both contrary to his class interests and would, over the decades, morph into a dull, puritanical faith utterly at odds with the character of its founders. Engels himself would never admit any contradiction between his gentleman's lifestyle and egalitarian ideals – but his critics did then and certainly do now.

Perhaps any personalized account of an individual Marxist necessarily involves this kind of contradiction since – many Marxist historians would argue – one should focus on the history of the masses, not the biography of a single man. Yet this would be to succumb to a particularly restrictive interpretation of Marxism and neglect the attractively non-doctrinaire thinking of Engels himself. He not only had an abiding interest in biography (especially the lives of British army generals), but was adamant that ‘men make their own history… in that each person follows his own consciously desired end, and it is precisely the result of these many wills operating in different directions and of their manifold effects upon the world outside that constitutes history’. History is therefore in part a question of individual desires.

The will is determined by passion or deliberation. But the levers which immediately determine passion or deliberation are of very different kinds. In part they may be external objects, in part ideal motives… personal hatred, or even purely individual whims of all kinds… the question also arises: What driving forces in turn stand behind these motives? What are the historical causes which transform themselves into these motives in the minds of the actors?¹⁶

It is the ambition of this biography to unpick those passions and desires, personal hatreds and individual whims – as well as the driving forces and historical causes – of a man who made his own history and who continues to shape ours.

Siegfried in Zion

‘Rejoice with me, dearly beloved Karl, that the good Lord has heard our prayer and last Tuesday evening, the 28th, at 9pm presented us with a babe, a healthy well-shapen boy. We thank and praise Him from the fullness of our hearts for this child, and for the merciful assistance and care for mother and child during confinement.’ In late November 1820, after his wife's difficult labour, the Rhineland businessman Friedrich Engels was delighted to announce to his brother-in-law Karl Snethlage the birth of his first son and namesake. Instantly anxious for the child's spiritual state, Engels also wrote of his hopes that the Lord ‘grants us the wisdom to bring it up well and in fear of Him, and to give it the best teaching through our example!’ This prayer would go spectacularly unanswered.¹

The infant Friedrich was ushered into a family and a culture that offered no inkling of his revolutionary future – and soon clamoured to disavow it. There was no broken home, no lost father, no lonely childhood, no school bullying. Instead, there were loving parents, indulgent grandparents, plentiful siblings, steady prosperity and a sense of structured, familial purpose. ‘Probably no son born in such a family ever struck so entirely different a path from it. Friedrich must have been considered by his family as the “ugly duckling”,’ mused Eleanor Marx in 1890, when the wounds of the Engels clan were still raw. ‘Perhaps they still do not understand that the “duckling” was in reality a “swan”.’²

Engels's upbringing in the Rhineland town of Barmen took place within a safe, cloistered neighbourhood that resembled something of a family compound. Across the road from his home stood the detached, four-storey, late-baroque house his own father was born in (now the threadbare Engels-Haus museum); nearby the homes of his uncles, Johann Caspar III and August; and dotted amongst them the steaming, stinking yarn bleacheries that had funded their showy mansions. Factories, workers’ tenements and merchant houses mingled together in what resembled an early industrial model village. For Friedrich Engels was delivered straight into the furnace of the nineteenth century. The historic transformations he would make his life's work – urbanization, industrialization, social class and technology – were there at his birth. ‘The factory and cottages of the esteemed family of Caspar Engels, together with the bleacheries, almost form a small semi-circular city,’ confirmed an 1816 report on the state of Barmen's housing.³ Leading down to the Wupper river, this damp, marshy district was officially called ‘the Red Brook’; in the early 1900s it was still widely known as ‘Engels' Brook’

While the Engels line can be traced back to Rhineland farms of the late sixteenth century, the family's prosperity begins with the arrival of Johann Caspar I (1715–87), Engels's great-grandfather, in the Wupper valley in the latter half of the eighteenth century. Exchanging agriculture for industry, Caspar was drawn to the lime-free waters of the Wupper river – one of the tributaries of the Rhine – and the riches it promised from linen yarn bleaching. With just 25 thalers in his pocket and a pannier on his back (as family legend had it), he chose to settle in the tiny town of Barmen, which clings to the slopes of the high valley lining the Wupper. An assiduous entrepreneur, he built up a highly successful yarn business, complete with a bleachery, and then a workshop for a pioneering form of mechanical lace production. When he handed over the company to his sons, it was one of Barmen's largest enterprises.

Yet the commercial ethos of Caspar Engels und Söhne stood for more than just the cash nexus. In an era when gradations between workers and masters were subtler than full-throttle industrialization would later allow, the Engelses fused paternalism with profits and were widely renowned for the benevolence of their employment and refusal to use child labour. Down the generations, the Engelses provided homes, gardens and even schools for family employees, and a granary co-operative was set up during food shortages. As a result, Engels spent his early years mixing easily with ribbon-makers, joiners and craftsmen, fostering in him a class-free ease which would later serve him well in the Salford slums and communist clubs of Paris.

Johann Caspar's sons continued in the family firm, expanding operations to include the production of silk ribbons. By the time of his death in 1787 the Engelses’ combination of commercial success and high-minded philanthropy had secured them a pre-eminent social position within Wuppertal society: Engels's grandfather, Johann Caspar II, was appointed a municipal councillor in 1808 and became one of the founders of Barmen's United Protestant Church.⁴ But when the business was passed on to the third generation – Engels's father and uncles – the family dynamic crumbled. After repeated fallings out, in 1837 the three brothers drew lots to decide who would inherit the firm. Friedrich Engels senior lost and started up a new business, going into partnership with two Dutch brothers, Gottfried and Peter Ermen. There, he rapidly revealed his greater entrepreneurial gifts and his new company, Ermen & Engels, diversified from linen bleaching into cotton-spinning, setting up a series of sewing thread factories in Manchester and then in Barmen and nearby Engelskirchen in 1841.

This then was the world of the merchant-manufacturer elite (the so-called Fabrikanten) within which Engels grew up: a childhood encircled by industry and commerce, civic duty and family loyalty. Of course, such wealthy families as the Engelses – who lived, as one observer put it, in ‘spacious and sumptuous houses, often faced with fronts of cut stone and in the best architectural styles’ – were protected from the more nefarious effects of industrialization. But they could not avoid them altogether: following the steps of Johann Caspar along the Wupper had trudged tens of thousands of workers equally determined to share in the promises of industry.

Barmen's population grew from 16,000 in 1810 to over 40,000 in 1840. In Barmen and Elberfeld combined the population topped 70,000 – roughly the same size as 1840s Newcastle or Hull. The valley's workforce consisted of 1,100 dyers, 2,000 spinners, 12,500 weavers in various materials and 16,000 ribbon weavers and trimmings makers. The vast majority did their work in modest homes and small workshops, but a new generation of sizeable bleaching grounds and cotton mills was also starting up and by the 1830s there were nearly 200 factories operating along the valley. ‘It is a long, straggling town, skirting both sides of the river Wupper,’ as a visitor described it in the 1840s. ‘Some parts are well-built, and are nicely paved; but the greater part of the town is composed of extremely irregular and very narrow streets… The river itself is a disgusting object, being an open receptacle for all sewers, disguising the various tinctures contributed from the dyeing establishments in one murky impenetrable hue, that makes the stranger shudder on beholding.’⁵

What might once have been compared with the kind of pleasant rural-industrial mix seen in the mill towns of the Pennines or Derbyshire's Derwent Valley – high valleys topped with green fields and forests, bottomed out by clear, fast-running streams providing the initial water power for mills and workshops – soon came to resemble a polluted, overcrowded ‘German Manchester’. ‘The purple waves of the narrow river flow sometimes swiftly, sometimes sluggishly between smoky factory buildings and yarn-strewn bleaching-yards,’ was how Engels would come to describe his birthplace. ‘Its bright red colour, however, is due not to some bloody battle… but simply and solely to the numerous dye-works using Turkey red.’ From his earliest days, amidst the acrid stench of workshops and bleaching yards, Engels was exposed to this witches' brew of industrialization: the eye-watering, nose-bleeding pollution that blanketed the intense poverty and ostentatious wealth. As an impressionable young boy, he soaked it all up.⁶

Beyond the industry, visitors to the Wupper valley noticed something else. ‘Both Barmen and Elberfeld are places where strong religious feelings prevail. The churches are large and well attended, and each place has its own bible, missionary, and tract societies.’⁷ Contemporary sketches reveal a forest of church steeples jostling for space amongst the skyline of factory chimneys. For Engels, the Wupper valley was nothing less than the ‘Zion of the obscurantists’. The spirit that dominated Barmen and Elberfeld was an aggressive form of Pietism, a movement within the German Lutheran (Protestant) Church which had first emerged in the late seventeenth century and stressed ‘a more intense, committed and practical form of Christian observance’.⁸ As the movement developed and diversified it often distanced itself from the formal structures and theology of the Lutheran Church and, along the Wupper valley, allied itself with a Calvinist ethic which presaged sin, personal salvation and a renunciation of the world. On the one hand, this provided a religion of introspection which saw God's hand at work in all the tiny mysteries of life, as the letters which passed between Engels's parents clearly testify. In 1835, as Engels's mother, Elise, tended her dying father, her husband proffered to her the comfort of faith in God's omnipotent mercy. ‘I am happy and thank God that you are coping with the illness of your beloved father in such a composed way,’ he wrote from the family home. ‘We all have good reason to thank the Lord for His guidance so far… He [Elise's father] has enjoyed a generally happy life full of strength and health and now the good Lord seems to want to take the old man to him gently and without any pain. What can mortal man wish for more?’ God's will could also be bathetically revealed in the most trivial occurrences. ‘Things don't look good for your potatoes, my dear Elise,’ Engels senior ominously warned his wife whilst she was on holiday in Ostend, ‘they looked so fine but now have also been infected by this disease that is spreading everywhere… it has never been seen before in this form and is now appearing in almost every country like a plague.’ The lesson was clear. ‘It is almost as if God wanted to show humanity in this godless age how dependent we are on Him and how much our fate rests in His hands.’⁹

In true Protestant fashion, the Wupper pietists subscribed to a priesthood of all believers finding salvation through unmediated, individual prayer alongside the difficult task of scriptural exegesis. The churches fulfilled a useful religious function, but it was through brotherhood and sermonizing, rather than celebration of the Eucharist, that they delivered their mission. The Barmen Fabrikanten displayed a Puritan-like morality (Sittlichkeit) which valued asceticism, studiousness, individual uprightness and personal reserve. Much of the psychological brittleness of Friedrich Engels senior can be traced to this deeply personal, often overweening faith. And, at least to begin with, his eldest son shared it. Engels was baptized at the Elberfeld Reformed Evangelical parish church, which was ‘well known as an exemplary Reformed church, soundly Calvinist in its doctrine, well versed in Scripture, and reverent in worship’.¹⁰ In 1837 Engels marked his Confirmation with a suitably evangelical poem.

Lord Jesus Christ, God's only son,
O step down from Thy heavenly throne
And save my soul for me.
Come down in all thy blessedness,
Light of Thy Father's holiness,
Grant that I may choose Thee.11

In contrast to such evangelical niceties, the other side of Pietism was a ruthless engagement with the material realities of the world drawn from the Calvinist notion of predestination: at the dawn of time, God had marked out the saved and the damned and, while no one could be certain of their status as chosen or condemned, one of the surest signs of election was worldly success. With a nod to Max Weber, the Protestant ethic and spirit of capitalism were hard at work among the churches and factories of the Wupper valley. Industriousness and prosperity were signs of grace and the most ardent pietists were often the most successful merchants – amongst them Johann Caspar II, whose sense of prudence and sobriety dictated both his religious and business ethos. ‘We have to look to our own advantage even in spiritual matters,’ he told his son Friedrich Engels senior in 1813. ‘I think as a merchant in these matters too and seek the best price, as no person with whom I might like to waste an hour on trivial things can give me back a single minute of it.’¹²

If all time was God's time, and wasting a minute was a sin, then life was certainly not meant for enjoyment and socializing. As Engels's first biographer, Gustav Mayer, recorded, in the early nineteenth century the evangelical parishes in Elberfeld-Barmen petitioned the government against the erection of a local theatre, claiming that the allure of the stage could not coexist with industriousness in the Wupper valley. For the pietists, ‘pleasure’ was one of the heathen blasphemies.¹³ The poet Ferdinand Freiligrath condemned Elberfeld as ‘a cursed nest, prosaic, small-townish, sombre and reviled’, and the adult Engels always recalled with a shudder its dour public culture.¹⁴ ‘Why, for us, the philistine Wuppertalers, Dü sseldorf was always a little Paris, where the pious gentlemen of Barmen and Elberfeld kept their mistresses, went to the theatre, and had a right royal time,’ he told the German Social Democrat Theodor Cuno, before adding sourly, ‘But the sky always looks grey where one's own reactionary family lives.’¹⁵ Such Puritan public morals were the product of a close alignment between political power and Church authority. Elberfeld's powerful Church elders, who governed the congregations, also held sway over the municipal institutions with a writ running right through the spiritual and secular realms.

And the Church's power was only growing in influence. In the wake of an agrarian crisis and economic downturn during the 1830s, the pietist message became more doctrinaire, mystical, even chiliastic. A revivalist sensibility gripped the Wupper valley, led by a charismatic preacher, Dr Frederick William Krummacher. ‘He thrashes about in the pulpit, bends over all sides, bangs his fist on the edge, stamps like a cavalry horse and shouts so that the windows resound and the people in the street tremble,’ recorded the young Engels. ‘Then the congregation begins to sob; first the young girls weep, then the old women join in with a heart-rending soprano and the cacophony is completed by the wailing of the enfeebled drunken pietists… through all this uproar Krummacher's powerful voice rings out pronouncing before the whole congregation innumerable sentences of damnation, or describing diabolical scenes.’¹⁶

The Engelses were not such hot Protestants as that. Indeed, so zealous was this godly upswing that many leading Barmen families began to retreat from church activity during the 1840s to focus instead on hearth and home. Just as the evangelical revival in England led the way for the Victorian celebration of patriarchy and domesticity (think of the sentimental poetry of William Cowper, the garden aesthetic of John Claudius Loudon or the novels of Hannah More), so in the picturesque merchant homes of Barmen there was a renewed cultural stress on the value of a tight-knit household. This vehement championing of the family unit expressed itself in an almost suburban ethic: a high-bourgeois desire to draw the curtains tight, seal off the corrupting outside world and seek spiritual renewal in the simple pleasures of domestic ritual – reading, embroidery, pianoforte performances, Christmas celebrations and birthday parties. ‘It is really nice and homely to have a piano!’ Engels's father put it with almost Pooterish delight.¹⁷ In the coming years, this parlour culture would be summed up in the cutting term Biedermeier, which combined the adjective bieder, a condescending designation of plainness, with the common surname, Meier, to describe the middle-class visual style, literature and values of the period.¹⁸

Despite the later sneers, this was a safe and caring if not always joyful environment for Engels, his three brothers and four sisters to grow up in. Best of all, their parents adored each other. ‘You may not believe it but I was thinking about you all day and I could not find contentment in anything in the house,’ Engels senior wrote to Elise, then visiting her parents in Hamm, before signing off with ‘a few tender words for you… Look, I suddenly feel like someone head over heels in love again. In all seriousness I can feel a spot of longing under my waistcoat (the one with the mother of pearl buttons, you know it). I don't think I will be able to last the four weeks.’ Indeed, his correspondence from the early 1820s is replete with the most passionate protestations of love for his wife. ‘Truthfully, dearest Elise, my heart yearns for us to be reunited, because I now feel a constant need to share everything with you.’¹⁹ Engels's mother, descended from a family of intellectual rather than commercial bent (the van Haars counted headmasters and philologists amongst them), owned a far more generous, humorous, even subversive nature than her husband. One Christmas she went so far as to give Engels a book of Goethe's poetry – a writer generally dismissed in Barmen circles as ‘a godless man’, but for Engels ‘the greatest of Germans’.²⁰ Meanwhile, Elise's own father, the pastor Gerhard van Haar, introduced the adolescent Engels to the legends of classical mythology – a subject which found fertile ground in his grandson's energetic imagination. ‘O you dear Grandfather, who always treat us so kindly,’ Engels began one poetic thank you note,

Always helping us when our work isn't going so smoothly,
While you were here, you told me many a beautiful story
Of Cercyon and Theseus, and Argus the hundred-eyed monster,
The Minotaur, Ariadne, and Aegeus drowned in the ocean,
The Golden Fleece, the Argonauts and Jason defiant…21

Within this comfortable setting, Engels's father is traditionally portrayed as an unhappy, rigidly religious, money-hungry philistine thanks in no small part to his son's later bitter characterizations. Philistine, it should be added, was a favoured term of abuse which Engels had co-opted from Goethe: ‘A Philistine is an empty gut filled with fear who hopes that God will take pity on him.’ But a reading of Engels senior's letters to Elise reveals a very different side to the man: commercial-minded, yes, patriotic and God-fearing, but also a loving son, doting father and uxorious husband, who shared numerous business decisions with his wife and frequently sought her advice. For all his puritanical reputation, he was also a keen musician who could play the piano, cello and bassoon and enjoyed few things more than a family concert. Nevertheless, it was his mother to whom Engels remained close long after his acrimonious split from his father. ‘Were it not for my mother, who has a rare fund of humanity… and whom I really love,’ Engels wrote some years later, ‘it would not occur to me for a moment to make even the most paltry concession to my bigoted and despotic old man.’²² If his childhood occasionally seemed to gasp for air under the weight of commerce and piety, there was also a warm foundation of music, laughter and love.

‘Friedrich had a pretty average report last week. As you know, he has become more polite, outwardly, but in spite of the severe chastisements he received earlier, not even the fear of punishment seems to teach him unconditional obedience,’ Engels senior wrote censoriously to Elise in August 1835 while she was back in Hamm caring for her dying father. ‘Thus today I was again distressed to find in his desk a smutty book which he had borrowed from the lending library, a story about knights in the thirteenth century. The careless way he leaves such books about in his desk is remarkable. May God watch over his disposition, I am often fearful for this otherwise excellent boy.’²³

Much to his father's chagrin, from an early age Friedrich started to chafe against the pietist strictures of Barmen life. His initial tutoring was in the local Stadtschule, where intellectual ambition was generally not encouraged. At age fourteen, he was transferred to the municipal Gymnasium in Elberfeld, where he lodged with a Lutheran schoolmaster. Purportedly one of the finest schools in Prussia, the more liberal Gymnasium certainly fostered Engels's gift for languages and, under the tutelage of a Dr Clausen (‘the only one who can arouse a feeling for poetry among the pupils, a feeling which would otherwise be bound to perish miserably among the philistines of Wuppertal’), nurtured his growing interest in the myths and romance of ancient Germania. As his final school report put it, ‘Engels showed commendable interest in the history of German national literature and the reading of the German classics.’²⁴

Indeed, a romanticized patriotism was to be one of the earliest intellectual influences on the young Engels. In later decades he would often come to be unfairly decried as a dull, mechanistic Marxist – indeed, Marxism itself would frequently be described as a reductionist offshoot of Enlightenment thought – but the first seedlings of Engels's philosophical development are to be found in some of the most idealized writings in the Western cultural canon. Across Europe, part of the response to the political excesses of the French Revolution and the universalist rationalism of the Enlightenment was a flourishing of Romanticism. For the guiding principle of Aufklärung – as laid out in the French philosopher Marquis de Condorcet's icily Cartesian Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind, with its prediction of infinite human development – was soon ridiculed as wildly hubristic. While the Enlightenment varied across national contexts, what the writings of Immanuel Kant, David Hume, Jeremy Bentham, Voltaire and the French Encyclopédistes shared was a collective reverence for the power of universal, human reason. Isaac Newton, whose gravitational discoveries had revealed God as a mathematician and the universe as clockwork, was their apostle. And in this new mechanical age, the differences of nations and cultures, along with the value of customary authority, religion and tradition, were put at naught in the face of an unbending scientific calculus. In this new cosmopolitan consensus, man was fundamentally the same in all times and all places and the job of legislators – Frederick the Great in Prussia; Joseph II in Austria; Catherine the Great in Russia – was to allow for the development of human self-expression through the liberation of reason.

The Frock-Coated Communist

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgements

Preface

1

Siegfried in Zion