Green Left on Engels
Julio Huato
REVIEW
Finding Engels?
Review by Alex Miller
18 November 2009
The Frock-Coated Communist: The Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels
By Tristram Hunt Penguin, 2009 443 pages, $59.95 (hb)
In this entertaining and well-written biography, Tristram Hunt sets
himself the task of finding out the truth about Friedrich Engels, Karl
Marx’s life-long collaborator and friend.
Such a search is necessary, since, as Hunt explains using words from
E.P. Thompson, Engels has for some time been treated as a kind of
“whipping boy” who gets the blame for “any sin one chooses to impugn
to subsequent Marxisms”.
For example, the fact that Lenin and Stalin and other prominent
figures in the Bolshevik Party relied on the later works of Engels for
their interpretation of Marx has resulted in Engels being blamed for
the eventual ossification of Marxist theory under 20th Century
“actually existing socialism”.
Indeed, some commentators — for example, Norman Levine — appear to
come close to blaming Engels for the gulags, purges and manifold
horrors of Stalinism.
In the course of countering the prevailing view, Hunt provides a
detailed and often illuminating account of Engels’ life, work and
milieu. Starting with his upbringing in the stuffy and cloistered
Protestantism of Barmen, Gemany, Hunt takes us through Engels’ journey
as a young man from romanticism to socialism, the sojourns in
Manchester during which he gathered material for his The Condition of
the Working Class in England, the 1848 revolutions and the
collaboration with Marx on The Communist Manifesto.
He does an especially good job of describing the “self-loathing
existence as a Manchester millocrat” Engels endured for the best part
of two decades to finance Marx’s family while he was writing Capital.
He also writes of the gargantuan labour Engels put into editing the
second and third volumes of Capital after Marx’s death.
At the same time as describing the work, though, Hunt paints a vivid
picture of a larger-than-life character who enjoyed nothing better
than good food, drink and company. Engels comes across as he must have
done to the Marx children, as a generous, loyal and convivial uncle,
and a man it would be a pleasure to share a few bottles of his beloved
pilsner beer with.
Hunt exonerates Engels (and Marx) from the accusation that their
theories laid the groundwork for Stalin’s gulags or Pol Pot’s killing
fields. They are no more to blame for them than Martin Luther is for
modern-day Protestant evangelicalism or the Prophet Muhammad for the
attack on the twin towers.
Nor does the “attractively non-doctrinaire thinking” of Engels bear
any responsibility for the hollowing-out of what passed for Marxist
theorising in Stalin’s Soviet Union.
Indeed, Hunt ends with a ringing declamation of Engels’ contemporary
relevance: “As our post-1989 liberal Utopia of free trade and Western
democracy totters under the strain of both religious orthodoxy and
free-market fundamentalism, his critique speaks down the ages: the
cosy collusion of government and capital; the corporate flight for
cheap labour and low skills; the restructuring of family life around
the proclivities of the market; the inevitable retreat of tradition in
the face of modernity, and the vital interstices of colonialism and
capitalism; the military as a component of the industrial complex; and
even the design of our cities as dictated by the demands of capital.”
More than anything else, the current crisis in the global capitalist
financial and banking sector bears testament to the enduring
importance of Engels and Marx.
I could stop there and simply commend Hunt’s biography as a good piece
of work. But despite its positive qualities, it is marred by a number
of unattractive features, and it’s a reviewer’s job to bring these to
the attention of potential readers. I’ll pick out four.
First, despite his obvious sympathy for Engels, Hunt still succumbs to
the temptation to paint his behaviour at certain points in
unjustifiably negative terms.
For example, in October 1848, as reaction to the revolutions spread
across Europe, Engels was expelled from Brussels by the Belgian
authorities and deported to Paris.
Hunt writes: “And what did Friedrich Engels do to help see in the
promised proletarian dawn? Did he return to the struggle? Propagandise
in Paris? Support a workers’ defence fund? No, he got away from it all
on a walking holiday.”
This is very unfair to Engels. The truth of the matter is that the
Prussian authorities had just issued an arrest warrant for Engels,
based on a charge of high treason.
The Belgians, while unable to extradite him to Germany because of
their 1830 constitution, nonetheless wanted him off their territory
and so dumped him on the French side of their border.
Unable to return to Germany, and finding Paris at that time “a dead
city”, Engels decided that Switzerland was the only place that would
offer him a temporary safe haven, and having no money, set out to get
there on foot.
Sure, he enjoyed himself on the two-week journey and left us some
evocative descriptions of the people he met and the wine he drank on
the way, but that hardly merits Hunt’s crude sarcasm.
This sarcasm and lack of charity comes up at various points in the
book. Marx, for example, is said to be infuriated by “proletarian
authenticity”. Capital is implied to be tainted by the fact that it
was written while Marx subsisted on funds secured from the
exploitation of labour in the Manchester factory managed by Engels.
These are just silly comments that spoil the good work Hunt does
elsewhere.
Second, Hunt quite remarkably says Engels advocated a parliamentary
road to socialism: “In 1891 … 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.”
This is a travesty of Engels’ thinking, and simply equivocates on
having a parliamentary majority (which can indeed be attained via
participation in bourgeois democratic elections) and the establishment
of socialism (which according to Engels requires the destruction — not
the occupation — of the bourgeois state machinery).
Hunt thus pushes on Engels the very distortion exposed to brilliant
effect by Lenin in The State and Revolution.
It also neglects Engels’ rich seam of work on the formation of the
“labour aristocracy” and the limits of parliamentarism, the value of
which was confirmed by the capitulation of the Second International in
August 1914 (see e.g. J. Strauss, “Engels and the Theory of the Labour
Aristocracy”, Links, Number 25 [January 2004]).
Third, Hunt comes across as lacking a basic political education at
various points.
He accepts the description of Lenin as a “power-hungry monster”.
Although there are plenty of negative comments about 20th century and
contemporary socialism, one would think from reading Hunt that they
failed entirely to achieve anything positive.
Hunt speaks of the “brazen inhumanity of Marxism-Leninism”. This may
be apt as a description of Stalin’s regime, but does it apply to
contemporary Cuba?
Fourth, Hunt commits an act of blatant discourtesy when he says, “the
last truly popular English-language life of Engels [was] Gustav
Meyer’s seminal work of 1934”. In fact, an excellent and highly
accessible biography of Engels was published in 2008, the before
Hunt’s own volume (John Green, Engels: A Revolutionary Life).
Although there is much to commend in Hunt’s book, faced with a choice
between the two, I would recommend the book by Green. At any rate, it
is hard to believe Hunt is unaware of Green’s book, and he does
himself and his readers a disservice by pretending not to know of it.
From: Cultural Dissent, Green Left Weekly issue #818 18 November 2009.