Boston Globe: Book review on Engels
Julio Huato
BOOK REVIEW
Understanding Marx’s right-hand man
By Chuck Leddy
November 14, 2009
As second fiddles go, Friedrich Engels was the greatest. His lifetime
collaborator was fellow German Karl Marx, who established the
intellectual framework for communism. Engels worked closely with Marx
on intellectual matters, but his most important role was as Marx’s
financial supporter and most dogged defender.
MARX’S GENERAL: The Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels
By Tristram Hunt
Holt, 430 pp., $32
British historian Tristram Hunt contends that Marx’s seminal critique
of capitalism remains relevant, especially in our era of economic
crisis, while the historical failures of communism have largely been
blamed on Engels’s supposedly rigid misinterpretation of Marxism. Hunt
calls this scapegoating of Engels unfair and utterly without
historical basis, while offering readers a brilliant biography of the
contradictory life of one genius who happily sacrificed for another.
Unlike Marx, Engels was born into money. His father was a rich
industrialist in the textile business, who raised his son to be
thrifty and religious. Engels would reject his father’s traditions and
ideas but, of course, wanted the family money. Hunt grippingly
explores the intellectual journey young Engels took as he moved away
from Christianity, then toward the dialectics of Hegel, and toward his
eventual partnership with Marx.
Hunt’s early chapters entertainingly portray the intellectually hungry
Engels and his group of young friends spending their time drinking
wine, carousing in Berlin cafes, endlessly discussing Hegel, while
denouncing their parents (and spending parental money). After Engels
finished his studies, his father sent him to the family-owned textile
mill in Manchester, England, where he’d work for the next two decades.
In Manchester, Engels moved from a theoretical understanding of
capitalism’s problems to a profoundly visceral one, as he witnessed
the horrid conditions of Manchester’s burgeoning working class.
The favored son of a family that directly profited from the
exploitation of workers, Engels would nonetheless write about the
crowded, filthy slums of industrial Manchester. His 1844 “The
Condition of the Working Class in England’’ remains a classic
description of Manchester’s horrors and a powerful denunciation of
capitalist exploitation of workers. As Hunt makes clear, Engels’s
beliefs would bring him a lifelong friendship with Karl Marx and
lifelong conflict within his own family.
Hunt shows that Engels walked a tightrope with his father and his job
managing a mill. The radical philosopher kept his mouth shut around
his father, trying not to mention religion and politics, seeking to
keep the money rolling in. Hunt sagely observes that “Engels’s
lucrative income was the direct result of his exploitation of the
labor power of the Manchester proletariat. The very evils that he and
Marx had descried funded their lifestyle and philosophy.’’ Engels,
then, took an “ends justify the means’’ stance, believing that the
“dirty’’ money he sent to finance Marx’s life and work would
ultimately lead to the destruction of capitalist exploitation.
Hunt vividly re-creates the Engels-Marx relationship, with Engels
providing the financing and the editorial work on Marx’s writings,
while also mercilessly attacking Marx’s intellectual foes. Marx comes
across as something of a sponge, asking for money without much
sensitivity to the epic difficulties Engels faced. Still, Engels would
push Marx to produce the classic texts of Marxism, such as “Das
Kapital.’’ Hunt shows that even after Marx’s death, Engels would be
the most important disseminator of communist ideas.
Hunt’s biography is a terrific account of the 19th century
intellectual climate that led to Marxism; it’s also a memorable
depiction of Engels-era Manchester, but most of all it’s an
insightful, important portrait of the most historically important
friendship of the 19th century. Second fiddle Engels sacrificed
everything to make Marx’s work possible. Hunt shows that Engels’s
contradictory life is worth a great book in its own right.
Chuck Leddy is a freelance writer who lives in Dorchester.