7-23-08, 9:19 am
Engels: A Revolutionary Life, by John Green Artery Publications
Original source: Morning Star
This is a lively, comprehensive and very human account of the long life of Frederick Engels, the closest collaborator and comrade of Karl Marx.
Human, because it recounts episodes and relationships omitted from other biographies, including the otherwise authoritative one produced by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union Institute of Marxism-Leninism in 1974.
Engels spent much of his adult life in a difficult relationship with his father, whose ambitions for his eldest son as an industrial entrepreneur ruled out any involvement in radical politics or any prospect of marriage to a working-class woman, for that matter.
One can imagine Engels senior's dismay when stumbling upon his 28-year-old heir at the barricades in Barmen during the May 1849 revolt in Germany.
When working in the office of Ermen and Engels in Manchester during the 1850s and '60s, Engels junior had to pay for two or three homes at a time – his own, that of his partner Mary Burns and his 'official,' respectable residence where he could receive family visitors from Germany and his despised fellow mill owners.
Burns dances across the occasional page as the fiery, Fenian daughter of an Irish dyer who helped Engels scout the proletarian districts of Manchester in 1844 for his first classic work The Condition of the Working Class in England.
Green's own depiction of the city's conditions is fittingly evocative. Burns accompanied Engels on a tour of Ireland in 1856 which deepened his interest in the Irish nationalist movement, Irish history and Gaelic culture.
Unlike other biographers of Engels, Green discusses Marx's strangely callous response to Burn's death seven years later, which angered his devastated friend.
Her qualities clearly ran in the family, because Engels formed a close, loving relationship with her vivacious sister Lizzie a short time later, which lasted until 1878.
As Lizzie was dying, Engels put aside his objection to bourgeois marriage for a civil ceremony at their London home, administered by the vicar of St Mark's Church.
Green also does not avoid the awkward fact that Marx fathered a child with his own family's housekeeper Helen Demuth. But Engels never denied rumors that young Freddy was his own, thereby saving the reputation of the intellectual leader of the international revolutionary movement from savage attack. Only on his own death-bed in 1895 did Engels reveal this selfless deception.
This was typical of the generous spirit that Engels usually displayed towards friends and comrades. He was incontinent with the wealth derived from family business interests, funding fellow exiles, the Burns family, revolutionary organizations and, not least, Marx and his dependents over three decades.
His intellectual contribution to the working class and socialist movement is better known. Nevertheless, Green brings new emphasis and insight to some of Engels's works.
He points to the significance of Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy (1844), which inspired Marx to undertake the study that led to Das Kapital.
Here, Engels could have been writing for the present day when he answers the claim that Britain and other advanced nation-states have spread civilization across the world through trade and production.
'You have destroyed the small monopolies so that one great basic monopoly, property, may function the more freely and unrestrictedly. You have civilized the ends of the earth to win new terrain for the deployment of your vile avarice. You have brought about the fraternity of peoples – but the fraternity is the fraternity of thieves.'
Even more spectacular was what Lenin called Engels's 'scientific prediction' in 1887 that the European capitalist powers were creating the conditions which made world war inevitable.
'Eight to 10 million soldiers will murder each other,' Engels wrote, anticipating the great imperialist slaughter of 1914-18.
After three or four years of destruction, 'crowns will roll into the gutters by the dozen' and the victory of the proletariat will either be achieved or made inevitable.
Although Marx is often credited with composing most of the Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848), the author reminds us that Engels drew the manifesto's 'preliminary sketch' in his earlier Principles of Communism.
Often forgotten too is the impact which Anti-Duhring (1876) had in winning a significant section of the German working-class movement to a Marxist understanding of class, the process of historical change and political revolution.
Green always strives to evaluate Engels's strengths, weaknesses, achievements and failings, objectively yet sympathetically.
Therefore, it is surprising that he makes no assessment of the latter's theory of revolutionary and historic nationalities and reactionary, non-historic ones.
Developed during the bourgeois revolutionary upsurge of 1848 and maintained at least until 1866, it laid bare the motives of bourgeois and landowning classes in nations big and small but underestimated the persistence of national characteristics and loyalties and, in some cases, the energy of the petty bourgeoisie and intelligentsia.
Green interjects his own views at some points, not unreasonably or too intrusively. These are colored by the record of ruling Communist parties and socialism in the 20th century and disproportionately so by their negative aspects.
Yet by far the biggest problem with his book, in my opinion, is the author's decision to relate most of its events in the present tense. Artistic experimentation is often to be applauded and the results may be a matter of personal taste.
But history told incessantly, as if it is happening now, accumulates a breathless urgency which becomes intensely irritating. It is an approach best left to History Channel and Radio Four historians who imagine that it gives their dull, bourgeois orthodoxy a racy, popular appeal. The revolutionary life of Frederick Engels needs no such artifice.
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