The opposition of theory and practice sounds Marxist; but in fact this
call to arms is quoted from an editorial in The Times. Likewise, many of
Engels's lurid details and damning statistics come from official reports
like Edwin Chadwick's Report on the Sanitary Conditions of the Labouring
Population of Great Britain, which was commissioned by a Whig government
and published under a Tory one, in 1842. Indeed, while Engels insists
that the workers cannot hope for redress from a bourgeois-aristocratic
Parliament, he can't help but note that "although the middle classes at
the moment are the main—indeed the only—power in Parliament,
nevertheless the last session (1844) was in effect a continuous debate
on working-class conditions."
All this suggests that far from being obdurate, England's ruling classes
were taking action—slowly and as yet inadequately—to solve the problems
caused by the industrial revolution. These problems were, it is useful
to remember, totally unprecedented, not just in English but in human
history. The sudden eruption of vast polluted slums in the North of
England baffled both the institutions of government and the prevailing
theories of economics and society. Engels was writing at perhaps the
worst period in Manchester's history, before the introduction of free
trade, the expansion of the franchise, unionization, and regulation of
factory work and child labor helped to improve the lives of the workers.
Yet he insisted that what he witnessed in Manchester were "working class
conditions in their 'classical' form," and that things could not get
better without getting worse.
The Condition of the Working Classin England was the first expression of
Engels's lifelong belief that revolution was just around the corner. The
cycle of boom and bust, he wrote in the book's conclusion, meant that
the next [economic] crisis should (on the analogy of previous
crises) occur in 1852 or 1853.... But before that crisis arrives the
English workers will surely have reached the limits of their
endurance.... Popular fury will reach an intensity far greater than that
which animated the French workers in 1793.
The year 1853 came and went, and Engels postponed the reckoning: "This
time there'll be a day of wrath such as has never been seen before...all
the propertied classes in the soup, complete ruin of the bourgeoisie....
I, too, believe that it will all come to pass in 1857," he wrote to
Marx. In 1865, when the American Civil War had cut off cotton exports to
England and devastated Manchester, Engels was sanguine again: "I imagine
by next month the working people themselves will have had enough of
sitting about with a look of passive misery on their faces."
It is impossible, reading such prophecies, not to be reminded of the
disappointed members of some chiliastic cult, constantly recalculating
the date of the apocalypse. And here lies the most significant aspect of
Engels's story. There was only one Marx; but there have been many
millions of Marxists, and Engels was the first of these. His dilemma was
the same one faced by generations of committed revolutionaries since:
How should one live in a dying world that is on the verge of transformation?
For Engels, this was an even more difficult problem than it was for,
say, the Seventh-Day Adventists (whose prophet, William Miller,
initially predicted that 1843 would be the end of days). For, like Marx,
Engels inherited from Hegel the paradox that history at once requires
and negates the freedom of individual men. In the influential 1878
polemic known as Anti-Dühring, in which Engels offered an accessible
restatement of Marxist principles (and, less happily, tried to use the
theory of dialectical materialism to explain nature and mathematics), he
attempted to heal this paradox by redefining freedom: "Freedom does not
consist in the dream of independence of natural laws, but in the
knowledge of those laws and in the possibility thus afforded of making
them work systematically towards definite ends." But this only sharpens
the dilemma, for what could be more absurd than "working systematically"
to implement a natural law, like gravity?
The implications of this question for Engels's work on behalf of Marx
and Marxism were, of course, profound. Engels had nothing but contempt
for the idea that socialism could be the gift of an inspired prophet, as
the followers of Fourier and Saint-Simon seemed to believe. He was
careful to praise Marx not as a lawgiver, but as the discoverer of laws
that had always been in operation. "Just as Darwin discovered the law of
development of organic nature," he said in his eulogy, "so Marx
discovered the law of development of human history." Yet the analogy is
crucially flawed, for while The Origin of Species did nothing to
accelerate or divert the course of evolution, TheCommunist Manifesto was
an intervention into the very class conflict it diagnosed. As Engels
went on to say:
Marx was before all else a revolutionist. His real mission in life
was to contribute, in one way or another, to the overthrow of capitalist
society and of the state institutions which it had brought into being,
to contribute to the liberation of the modern proletariat.
It was only because Marx was uniquely capable of advancing that cause
that Engels willingly devoted his life to him.
To Hunt, as to most writers on the subject, Engels's decision to spend
the prime of his life doing work he disliked in order to support Marx's
labors inspires admiration and pity. "In truth, the middle decades of
Engels's life were a wretched time...an era of nervous, sapping
sacrifice," Hunt writes. Edmund Wilson said the same thing in To the
Finland Station, likening Marx and Engels to the positive and negative
poles of a battery: "Marx was to play the part of the metal of the
positive electrode, which gives out hydrogen and remains unchanged,
while Engels was to be the negative electrode, which gradually gets used
up."
Reading Marx's General, however, makes one wonder whether Engels really
was stuck at the negative pole of the partnership. For surely it was
Marx who piled up the "misery" and "agony of toil," at his desk in
London, and Engels who enjoyed the "accumulation of wealth." The
difference between them was brought out most starkly in the autumn of
1848, the year of revolutions, when Marx and Engels thought they might
actually be seeing their dreams come true. Marx had started a new
radical newspaper, the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, in Cologne, with Engels
and other comrades. After Engels gave a fiery speech to an open-air
workers' meeting, he was threatened with arrest and forced to flee the
city, while Marx stayed behind, agitating for democratic revolution even
as the reaction gathered force.
But instead of going to Paris, or Venice, or one of the other
battlefields of the continent, Engels set out on a long walking tour of
the French countryside. He drank wine ("What a diversity, from Bordeaux
to Burgundy,...from Petit Macon or Chablis to Chambertin"), slept with
country girls, and admired the trees. When he got to Auxerre, he joked
that the town looked like a "red republic with all its horrors," when in
fact it was simply streaming with the juice of the wine harvest. This
sudden holiday, in the middle of the revolution for which he had been
waiting his whole life, led Wilson to remark on the "Jekyll-and-Hyde
personality" that Engels displayed: ferocious and acerbic with Marx,
amiable and pleasure-loving when on his own.
This was, perhaps, Engels's solution to the problem of waiting out a
dying world. He would not live in the agony of historical expectation,
like Marx, but savor the fallen present, deferring the rigors of
salvation into the ever-receding future, where other people would have
to endure them. Kierkegaard, Engels's old classmate at the University of
Berlin, summarized his objection to Hegel by comparing him to a man who,
having constructed a grand palace, decides to live in a shed next door;
the palace was the absolute future, the shed the existential present.
Engels, one might say, did just the reverse. The Communist future would
be an enormous shed; but till it came, he would enjoy the little palace
of the present. Appropriately enough, this tension appears even in
Engels's last will and testament. After making a large bequest to
Germany's Social Democratic Party, to advance the proletarian
revolution, he went on to instruct the party leader August Bebel: "Drink
a bottle of good wine on it. Do this in memory of me."
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