1.
A biography of Friedrich Engels
A VERY SPECIAL BUSINESS ANGEL
Economist
August 13, 2009
http://www.economist.com/books/displaystory.cfm?story_id=14209490
[Review of Marx’s General: The Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels. By Tristram Hunt. Metropolitan Books; 448 pages; $32. Published in Britain as The Frock-Coated Communist: The Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels. Allen Lane; £25.]
When the financial crisis took off last autumn, Karl Marx’s Das Kapital, originally published in 1867, whooshed up bestseller lists. The first book to describe the relentless, all-consuming, and global nature of capitalism had suddenly gained new meaning. But Marx had never really gone away, whereas Friedrich Engels -- the man who worked hand in glove with him for most of his life and made a huge contribution to Das Kapital -- is almost forgotten. A new biography by a British historian, Tristram Hunt, makes a good case for giving him greater credit.
The two men became friends in Paris in 1844 when both were in their mid-20s, and remained extremely close until Marx died in 1883. Both were Rhinelanders (our picture shows Engels standing behind Marx in the press room of Rheinische Zeitung which they edited jointly) but came from very different backgrounds: Marx’s father was a Jewish lawyer turned Christian; Engels’s a prosperous Protestant cotton-mill owner. Marx studied law, then philosophy; Engels, the black sheep of his family, was sent to work in the family business at 17. While doing his military service in 1841 in Berlin, he was exposed to the ferment of ideas swirling around the Prussian capital.
Next, he went to work for the Manchester branch of the family business, Ermen & Engels. Manchester’s “cottonopolis” in the mid-19th century was a manufacturer’s heaven and a working man’s hell, and it provided an invaluable lesson for Engels: that economic factors were the basic cause of the clash between different classes of society. By 1845, when he was just 24, he had not only learnt how to be a successful capitalist; he had also written a coruscatingly anti-capitalist work, The Condition of the Working Class in England, which charted the inhumanity of modern methods of production in minute detail.
Engels left Manchester to work with Marx on the Communist Manifesto and the two of them spent the late 1840s criss-crossing Europe to chase the continental revolutions of the time, ending up in England. Marx had started work on Das Kapital, but there was a problem. He had by then acquired an aristocratic German wife, a clutch of small children, and aspirations for a comfortable bourgeois lifestyle, but no means of support.
Engels (whose name resembles the word for “angel” in German) offered an astoundingly big-hearted solution: he would go back to Manchester to resume life in the detested family cotton business and provide Marx with the money he needed to write his world-changing treatise. For the next 20 years Engels worked grumpily away, handing over half his generous income to an ever more demanding Marx. He also collaborated intensively on the great work, contributing many ideas, practical examples from business, and much-needed editorial attention. When at last volume I of Das Kapital was finished, he extricated himself from the business and moved to London to be near the Marx family, enjoying life as an Economist-reading rentier and intellectual.
Engels was an enigma. Gifted, energetic, and fascinated by political ideas, he was nevertheless ready to play second fiddle to Marx. “Marx was a genius; we others were at best talented,” he declared after his friend’s death. Mr. Hunt does a brilliant job of setting the two men’s endeavours in the context of the political, social, and philosophical currents at the time. It makes for a complex story that can be hard to follow but is well worth persevering with.
Tall and handsome, Engels had a taste not just for ideas but for the good life -- wine, women, riding with the Cheshire hunt -- and seems to have felt little sense of irony that all these things were paid for by the proletariat’s back-breaking labor. His domestic life was much more unconventional than Marx’s. He lived, on and off, with a semi-literate Irish working-class girl, Mary Burns; then, when she died, with her sister, Lizzy, whom he married only on her deathbed. He had no children, though he chivalrously took responsibility for a boy whom Marx had fathered with a housekeeper.
Engels’s sacrifices continued after Marx’s death. He not only carried on funding the Marx family and their various hangers-on, but also spent years pulling together the chaotic notes Marx left behind for volumes II and III of Das Kapital. Inevitably there were lots of loose ends which Engels tied up as he saw fit, and sometimes the results were more revolutionary than the author may have intended. In volume III, where Marx discussed the tendency of companies’ profitability to fall and noted that this might lead to the “shaking” of capitalist production, Engels substituted the word “collapse,” opening up the text to much more radical interpretations by 20th-century Marxists.
When Engels died in 1895, he eschewed London’s Highgate cemetery where his friend was laid to rest. Self-effacing to the last, he had his ashes scattered off England’s coast at Eastbourne -- the scene of happy holidays with the Marxes.
2.
Life & style
Women
FEMINIST FRIEND OR FOE?
By Tristram Hunt
** Friedrich Engels condemned prostitution but enjoyed it himself; called for equality but dismissed female suffrage. A strangely enlightened sexist **
Guardian
April 29, 2009
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2009/apr/29/friedrich-engels-prostitution-suffrage
"It is absolutely essential that you get out of boring Brussels for once and come to Paris, and I for my part have a great desire to go carousing with you," Friedrich Engels wrote to Karl Marx in 1846. "If I had an income of 5000 francs I would do nothing but work and amuse myself with women until I went to pieces. If there were no Frenchwomen, life wouldn't be worth living. But so long as there are grisettes [prostitutes], well and good!"
The life of Friedrich Engels, the mill-owning Marxist, was one of supreme self-contradiction -- particularly when it came to feminism. He was a socialist who condemned the use of prostitutes as "the most tangible exploitation -- one directly attacking the physical body -- of the proletariat by the bourgeoisie," but then regularly enjoyed their services. He demanded female equality, but couldn't bear the company of high-minded women. Engels was the intellectual architect of socialist feminism, and an old-fashioned sexist.
In today's public culture, when the personal is forever political, we seem to find it impossible to disassociate such personal exposés from the philosophical legacy. But in doing so, we risk dismissing in Engels one of the most creative modern thinkers on gender and the family.
Engels' relevance rests on a now little-read tract from the 1880s, *The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State*. Its controversial starting point was that the female act of reproduction should be regarded as of equal worth as the production of the means of existence, of which there were few higher human callings in Marx and Engels' materialist template. With that stroke, the role and function of women in Marxist society was understood as something more profound.
This elevation of womanhood formed, in turn, part of a broader attempt by Engels to trace the rise and fall of female power within Western society. Following years of immersion in anthropology and ancient history, Engels concluded that in primeval societies the habits of kinship, common marriage, and promiscuity meant that a child's lineage could only be established with any certainty along the matrilineal line. As a result, women were treated with a high degree of respect and enjoyed much greater social authority.
But the family structure changed dramatically down the centuries. As the stages of production evolved from savagery to barbarism to civilization, so the family developed from extended, "consanguine" forms down to the husband, wife, and two kids model. In the 19th century, what underpinned the family was the capitalist mode of production that, in turn, signalled the death knell for women's rights.
With the arrival of private property came systems of inheritance. To pass property on to their biological offspring, fathers now demanded that paternity be established beyond doubt and, as a result, imposed strict limitations on female autonomy. Capitalism ushered in "the world historical defeat of the female sex. The man took command in the home also, the woman was degraded and reduced to servitude; she became the slave of his lust and a mere instrument for breeding children."
All of which meant sexism was a historical and sociological construct. In primitive communist societies, Engels suggested, women were "free and honorable." But following the disintegration of such societies, women started to become more oppressed. What this history of discrimination proved was that there was nothing immutable about male chauvinism: inequality was the product of specific economic systems, rather than biological fact.
And Engels witnessed the effects of such inequality all around him. Mid-Victorian culture had made a fetish of the nuclear family form -- symbolized most readily in the irredeemably middle-class monarchy of Victoria and Albert. "On what foundation is the present family, the bourgeois family, based?" Marx and Engels had first asked in The Communist Manifesto. "On capital, on private gain. In its completely developed form, this family exists only among the bourgeoisie. But this state of things finds its complement in the practical absence of the family among the proletarians, and in public prostitution."
For beneath the covered table legs, there festered hypocrisy. "All that this Protestant monogamy achieves is a conjugal partnership of leaden boredom, known as 'domestic bliss.'" The bourgeois wife "differs from the ordinary courtesan in that she does not let out her body on a piecework as a wage worker, but sells it once and for all into slavery."
But come the revolution, things would be different. Once inheritable wealth was turned back into a shared pool of social property then the narrow, economic foundations of the restrictive "pairing" family would disintegrate. "True equality between men and women can become a reality only when the exploitation of both by capital has been abolished," Engels explained. With the elimination of private property, men and women could marry for "mutual affection," not money; people could change partners at will and avoid "the useless mire of divorce proceedings"; and communal systems of child-rearing would indoctrinate the next generation. The "family" would evolve to a post-capitalist state of sexual and familial communism remarkably like its primitive forebears.
In the 1920s, Anatoli Lunacharski, the Soviet commissar of education, attempted to put a vulgarized version of Engels' thinking into practice. "Our problem now is to do away with the household and to free women from the care of children," he expounded. And there was a concerted attempt by many communist states during the 20th century to confront the economic underpinnings of inequality by bringing women into the labor force, socializing the family unit and ensuring equal access to education. Nowhere more so than in China, where "the face of Engels," as one sociologist in the 1980s put it, "is familiar to every Chinese citizen." From its inception, the People's Republic of China theoretically committed itself to improving the economic rights of women.
In the West, Engels has inspired numerous feminist socialists. Kate Millett recorded in her 1970 book, Sexual Politics, how Engels' treatment of marriage and the family as historical institutions, "subject to the same processes of evolution as other social phenomena . . . laid the sacred open to serious criticism, analysis, even to possible drastic reorganization . . . The radical outcome of Engels' analysis is that the family, as that term is presently understood, must go."
If truth be told, Engels would have found the company of Millett hard to bear.
He had no time for the views of "affected, 'eddicated'" ladies, be they the theosophist Annie Besant or the women's rights campaigner Gertrud Guillaume-Schack.
And as for "these little madams, who clamor for women's rights," Engels regarded the campaign for female suffrage as a distinctly middle-class distraction.
His lifetime partners were two illiterate sisters -- first Mary, then Lizzy Burns -- of "genuine Irish proletarian blood," who he might have picked up from his father's mill. Engels had once condemned the tendency of mill owners to take advantage of female hands; here, he did just that. And alongside the Burns sisters were a series of French mistresses, affairs, and even an allegation of rape (furiously denied by Engels).
He cared for both Mary and Lizzy in their dying days -- even marrying the latter on her deathbed, granting an Irish Catholic's last wish despite his ideological aversion to the "bourgeois hypocrisy of marriage." He supported female friends going through divorce proceedings and even voted for female candidates in school board elections as "the ladies here are notable for the fact that they do very little talking and a great deal of working -- as much on average as three men."
Few great thinkers are able to live out their ideals, and Engels was more contradictory than most. But the personal is not always political; philosophy exists beyond the person. And if much of Engels' life no longer appears very enlightened, in an era when part-time male workers earn some 36% more than their female equivalents and one third of British women in work take home less than £100 per week, his insights into the economic foundations of sexual inequality seem as relevant as ever.
--The Frock-Coated Communist: The Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels by Tristram Hunt is published by Allen Lane, priced £25.
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