BIOGRAPHY:IN 1841, AGED 21, Friedrich Engels was in Berlin, having enlisted voluntarily in the Prussian army, as an escape route from his family textile firm in Barmen in the Rhineland. Instead of drilling and learning how to shoot and fence, Engels spent his time at the university, listening to the philosophical debates which raged there at the time.
Among his classmates were Michael Bakunin, the future anarchist, the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, and Jacob Burckhardt, the future Renaissance scholar.
The subject under discussion was Hegel, the philosophical giant whose ideas about dialectical human progress Engels greatly admired, but which were disputed by some of his own pupils as well as by the university authorities.
When not listening to lectures and reading in the university library, Engels was swanning around the cafes of Berlin in his very elaborate uniform, which he loved wearing (“blue, with a black collar adorned with two broad yellow stripes, and black, yellow-striped facings together with red piping round the coat-tails”). He liked drinking, womanising, and above all, engaging in heated political and philosophical discussions with his “Young Hegelian” friends. He had a dog called Namenloser (Nameless) who accompanied him everywhere and also liked to drink, and who could perform only one trick: when Engels said “Namenloser, there’s an aristocrat”, the dog would become furious and growl fiercely at the designated individual.
ENGELS WAS HIGHLYprecocious intellectually, and managed to absorb vast quantities of philosophy and political science, such as it was, in a very short time, without having to go to the trouble of acquiring a degree. This was because the profits from the family firm, which operated textile factories in Prussia and in England, enabled his father, who never agreed with his political ideas, to give him a generous allowance during the years he spent travelling around Europe, collaborating with Karl Marx to establish and provide the philosophical framework for the Communist Party.
The beginning of this was his arrival in Manchester in 1842, to work in his father's cotton-thread factory. Manchester was then one of the most industrialised towns in the world, with vast fortunes being made on the backs of poorly paid, appallingly treated workers. Engels decided to make a study, first-hand, of this situation, and The Condition of the Working Class in England, written in 1844, remains one of the most arresting, vividly written accounts of exploitation, its causes and results ever published. It also contains many of the ideas that underlay classic Marxism as it later developed – class division, reserve labour, overproduction and the unstable nature of modern industrial capitalism, the evils of private property, the inevitability of socialist revolution.
IN MANCHESTER, Engels met Mary Burns, a second-generation-Irish, working-class woman who became his lover, and also his guide to the working-class ghettoes of the city. Mary was either a millworker or a domestic servant, possibly both. We know tantalisingly little about her, since she left no correspondence of her own, and have to rely on Marx's daughter's memories of her. She and her sister Lizzie were Engels's constant companions from about 1850 until Mary died, aged 41, in 1863. Engels then began a relationship with Lizzie, and married her on her deathbed in 1878. He maintained separate lodgings for many years in Manchester, to try, largely successfully, to avoid gossip, but spent most of his time with the Burns sisters. While this arrangement could imply exploitation, the evidence is that both sisters were happy with it. Marx could be snobbish about these relationships, and wrote Engels a selfish, uncaring letter when Mary died, but after reproval by Engels, harmony was restored.
His close connection with Mary did not prevent his espousing the classic Victorian stereotype of the Irish: “The southern facile character of the Irishman, his crudity, which places him but little above the savage, his contempt for all humane enjoyments, his filth and poverty, all favour drunkenness.” Later visits to Ireland in the 1850s and 1860s, with Mary, Lizzie and Marx’s daughter Tussy, changed his perspective, and his Irish notebooks are full of interesting information about post-famine Ireland.
A 10-day drinking binge in Paris in 1844 led to the friendship and collaboration between Engels and Marx, which had, arguably, the most profound ideological influence on the world of the 20th century. For 40 years, after he had earned his revolutionary stripes on the Prussian barricades in 1848, Engels financially supported Marx and his growing family through returning to work at his father’s factory in Manchester, a pretty serious sacrifice. He always referred to Marx as “first fiddle” and regarded him as a genius, but this biography reinstates him as an original thinker and contributor of some of the basic precepts underlying what is now universally known as Marxism.
Manchester historian Jonathan Schofield stresses how Manchester transformed Engels's thinking, and with it the nature of communism: "Without Manchester, there would have been no Soviet Union." Marx himself regarded The Condition of the Working Class in Englandas an indispensable source for Das Kapital, and their voluminous correspondence reveals how useful Engels was to Marx as both sounding board and first-hand supplier of evidence and ideas. And he continued to write himself; The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, published in 1884, tied the development of family forms and structures to the rise of private property, and demonstrated a refreshingly egalitarian attitude towards women.
Tristram Hunt has written an immensely readable, well-researched biography of Engels, who was also the subject of an interesting book by John Green in 2008. It can be argued that Marx’s and Engels’s insistence on the creation of a deeply suffering proletariat in order to bring about revolution was hard-hearted, wrong-minded and wrong. Certainly, those who espoused their ideas in Russia and China in the 20th century created two of the most monstrous social systems imaginable, very far removed from the romantic version of the dictatorship of the proletariat presented in their various works. But they were dead right about the insanity and cruelty of modern capitalism.
The Frock-Coated Communist: The Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels,By Tristram Hunt, Allen Lane, 443pp. £25
Catriona Crowe is an archivist and vice-president of the Irish Labour History Society