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<ul class="art-meta">
<li>8 Nov 2020</li>
<li>The Observer</li>
<li>Tristram Hunt is director of the Victoria & Albert Museum</li>
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<h1>Engels comes of age Does Marx’s man deserve more than ‘second
fiddle’? </h1>
Two centuries after the socialist émigré’s birth, his biographer
Tristram Hunt argues that he should finally be recognised as a true
visionary
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<p class="art-annotation">This reluctant Mancunian deserves so
much more than just being cast in the role of history’s
supporting man</p>
<p> <a class="from">From page 47</a>
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”. </p>
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<p>
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. </p>
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<p>
This month marks the 200th anniversary of the birth of the
Rhinelander turned reluctant Mancunian turned old Londoner. </p>
<p>
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. </p>
<p>
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. </p>
<p>
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”. </p>
<p> 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). </p>
<p> 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. </p>
<p> 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. </p>
<p> 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. </p>
<p> 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”. </p>
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<p> 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. </p>
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