[D66] Engels comes of age

[R.O.]

  * 8 Nov 2020
  * The Observer
  * Tristram Hunt is director of the Victoria & Albert Museum


  Engels comes of age Does Marx’s man deserve more than ‘second fiddle’?

Two centuries after the socialist émigré’s birth, his biographer 
Tristram Hunt argues that he should finally be recognised as a true 
visionary

This reluctant Mancunian deserves so much more than just being cast in 
the role of history’s supporting man

 From page 47 While most radical artists have spent the last few years 
demanding that statues of imperial heroes be pulled down, in Manchester 
they have gone the other way. In 2017, the film-maker Phil Collins 
transported a statue of Friedrich Engels on a flat-bed truck from 
eastern Ukraine, a former colony of the Soviet empire, to the heart of 
the “northern powerhouse”.

It was a superb, counter-intuitive gesture: placing the man who hated 
“Cottonopolis” in the heart of its commercial nexus. For with the 
exception of a polite blue plaque in north London’s Primrose Hill and a 
sign that once stood on Eastbourne beach (where his ashes were 
scattered), the statue is one of the hopelessly few reminders we have of 
one of Britain’s greatest émigrés.

This month marks the 200th anniversary of the birth of the Rhinelander 
turned reluctant Mancunian turned old Londoner.

Always happy to play “second fiddle to so splendid a first violin” as 
Karl Marx (“How can anyone be envious of genius; it’s something so very 
special that we, who have not got it, know it to be unattainable right 
from the start?”), he deserves so much more than just being cast as 
history’s supporting man.

Not only was he instrumental in shaping 20th-century Marxism, but his 
own vision of socialism feels more relevant to our contemporary concerns 
than does the pure political economy of Karl Marx.

Born on 28 November 1820 in Barmen, along the Wupper Valley, in Prussia, 
Engels grew up as the scion of a strictly Calvinist, capitalist, and 
suffocatingly bourgeois family of textile merchants. His was a loving 
childhood in what was termed “the German Manchester”. But from an early 
age Engels found the human costs of his family’s prosperity hard to 
bear. Aged only 19, he wrote of the plight of factory workers “in low 
rooms where people breathe in more coal fumes and dust than oxygen”, and 
lamented the creation of “totally demoralised people, with no fixed 
abode or definite employment”.

After falling under the spell of the Young Hegelians at Berlin 
University, it was 1840s Manchester that turned him towards socialism. 
Sent to work at the family mill in Salford in the epicentre of the 
industrial revolution, he saw how unregulated capitalism entailed 
sustained dehumanisation: “Women made unfit for childbearing, children 
deformed, men enfeebled, limbs crushed, whole generations wrecked, 
afflicted with disease and infirmity, purely to fill the purses of the 
bourgeoisie,” as he put it in his masterwork, The Condition of the 
Working Class in England (1845).

What Engels also brilliantly revealed in this book was how urban 
planning and regeneration were arenas for class conflict. He is the 
father of modern urban sociology, explaining how city space is always 
socially and economically constructed.

After the failure of the 1848 continental revolutions, Engels was forced 
to return to Manchester as a cotton lord in order to fund Marx’s 
philosophy. He hated it. “Huckstering is too beastly, most beastly of 
all is the fact of being not only a bourgeois … but one who actively 
takes sides against the proletariat.” That painful personal sacrifice 
ensured the publication of Marx’s Das Kapital in 1867. Unfortunately, 
Marx’s life work soon looked in danger of falling victim to “the 
bourgeois conspiracy of silence”, until Engels started organising 
much-needed publicity. It was Engels’s popularisation of Marx’s central 
insights in his pamphlets Anti-Dühring and Socialism: Utopian and 
Scientific , that launched Marxism as a global creed.

After Marx’s death in 1883, Engels enjoyed the freedom of expanding 
Marx’s thinking in new directions. In his study of the history of family 
life, Engels laid the foundations for socialist feminism with his 
connection of capitalist exploitation to gender inequality. Similarly, 
Engels pioneered the Marxist vision of colonial liberation with his 
early analysis of imperialism as a core component of Western capitalism. 
>From Vietnam to Ethiopia, China to Venezuela, Engels’s theory of 
emancipation was adopted by antiimperial freedom fighters, even as the 
Soviet empire deployed him to expand across eastern Europe.

Engels was a figure of profound historical and philosophical 
significance. Yet what I discovered, as his biographer, was that his 
vision of socialism could also be richly uplifting: the grisly, corrupt, 
anti-intellectual egalitarian Marxism of the 20th century would have 
horrified him. “The concept of a socialist society as a realm of 
equality is a one-sided French concept,” he said. Instead, Engels 
believed in cascading the pleasures of life – food, sex, drink, culture, 
travel, even fox-hunting – across all classes. Socialism should not be a 
never-ending Labour party meeting, but a life of enjoyment. The real 
challenge of living in Manchester was that he could find no “single 
opportunity to make use of my acknowledged gift for mixing a lobster 
salad”.

It is entirely appropriate then that his statue now commands Tony Wilson 
Place, named in honour of the fast-living co-founder of Factory Records 
and the Hacienda nightclub, who also believed in the good things in 
life. Finally, 200 years after his birth, and a long way from his 
birthplace, we have a proper memory of Engels in his rightful place.

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