New books reveal Friedrich Engels’ revolutionary life

From: http://marxistupdate.blogspot.com/2009/10/tristram-hunts-engels-biograp…

Tuesday, October 13, 2009
Tristram Hunt's Engels Biography: "A deliberate hatchet job"

Frock-Coated New Labour Historian Tristram Hunt's life of Engels

Two reviews below - coming from different directions within the labor movement - take on Tristram Hunt's biography of Frederick Engels. The defense of Engels I have most appreciated is excerpted here: http://www.themilitant.com/1995/5943/5943_24.html. JR

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A scurrilous ‘biography’ of Engels by a New Labour ‘historian’.

The ‘historian’ Tristram Hunt is a clean-cut, good-looking bloke with a host of imposing academic qualifications (Trinity, Cambridge; University of Chicago). He now teaches at Queen Mary College, University of London, writes for the broadsheets and regularly turns up as a TV personality-pundit. To add even more bourgeois lustre to this persona, his father was made a life peer by Tony Blair in 2000; and in 2007, Tristram Hunt stood for selection in a safe Labour seat in Derby, only to be pipped at the post by the even more oleaginous Stephen Twigg.

Disappointed as he was, the ambitious Tristram Hunt remains a new Labour man, hostile not only to Marxism, but even to the labour movement. During the current world catastrophe, he is to be found in the pages of the Guardian pontificating against ‘Islamo-fascism’ and in favour of the zionist state, while playing to the softest of the soft and confused left by showing an interest in radical martyrs of the past and some mild concern for the present-day victims of a market economy he refuses to see beyond.

So what is this hodge-podge of a Blairite ‘thinker’ doing writing a biography of Frederick Engels? Easy-peasy. He is making a mockery of Engels’ life and work, that’s what; and he is doing it with a will and a purpose.

The lackey-historians of the bourgeoisie have long attacked Lenin, Stalin and the achievements of the Soviet Union, and recently (July 2009) the representatives of the bourgeoisie sitting in the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) have felt its propaganda strong enough to actually pass a resolution equating Stalinism with Nazism.

After such an outrage, a further bourgeois attack on the actual founders of socialism was inevitable. Make no mistake, Tristram Hunt’s nasty little book is but another in the series of onslaughts on Engels and Marx, not to mention Lenin, Stalin and Mao, masquerading as honest bourgeois scholarship.

Tristram uses the snake-like technique of attacking Engels by purporting to make him ‘more human’, to give him an honest ‘warts and all’ profile. Superficially, that sounds fair enough, and when it comes to saying that Engels liked a drink, went fox hunting and earned a good living managing one of his father’s factories, it is in truth fair enough. However, when it comes to (for example) accusing Engels of actually raping Alicia Hess (wife of Moses Hess), we have to question Tristram’s sources as well as his motives. (Incidentally for the ‘rape’ of Alicia Hess, Tristram Hunt has no sources!)

Throughout the book, Hunt works with innuendo and confabulation, from the very first page where he tells us that Engels had a taste for “expensive women”, and just a little later where Hunt implies through the technique of ‘guilt by association’ that Engels had the same interest in pornography as Edgar Bauer, Hunt impressionistically, but effectively (to those who do not know much – if anything – about Engels) paints a picture of Engels as a self-indulgent Lothario, or, to use Hunt’s exact words, “Engels was a sexual predator”.

The book contains a constant character assassination that pervades each and every statement made about Engels’ actual work. There is not time and space here to ‘toothcomb’ the whole of Hunt’s magnum opus, but a look at his ‘discussion’ around The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State reveals the full putrid nature of his agenda.

Hunt tells us apropos of The Origin that, far from being interested in women’s equality, Engels was actually a deep misogynist. A pretty startling accusation, and one you would think a historian might like to support with evidence. Yet what evidence of Engels’ misogyny does Hunt give us? Well, he tells us in passing (and without any explanation) that Engels used to call Annie Besant, Marion Crawford and Gertrude Guillaume Schack, “Mother Besant”, “Mother Crawford” and “Mother Schack” respectively.

What Hunt does not tell his readers is that Engels had very good reasons for disdaining the Malthusian anti-socialist Annie Besant, (ii) the bourgeois-patriotic journalist Marian Crawford, and even the Contagious Diseases Acts-obsessed Gertrude Guillaume Schack.

Without giving any details of Engels’ ideological differences with these three women, Hunt just tells us that Engels’ dislike of them was pure misogyny. Hunt then goes on to give the coup de grace and tell us that Engels was opposed to the women’s suffrage movement. What he carefully omits is that Engels’ position was the same as every other Marxist, or even socialist, at the time. Engels was a supporter of adult suffrage for all men and women, but he was certainly opposed to the demands of the bourgeois women’s suffrage movement, since Millicent Fawcett and her followers were only demanding women’s suffrage on the same property qualification basis then in operation for male voters.

Hunt, however, is well aware that he is not addressing a historically knowledgeable readership. His book is aimed at a liberal lefty, well-intentioned but relatively historically ignorant audience, who will be confused by Hunt’s description of Engels as a misogynist, opposed to women’s suffrage, and who will therefore have their previous or potential respect for one of the founding fathers of socialism undermined by such accusations.

And that, in a nutshell, is actually the aim of Hunt’s book. It is a deliberate hatchet job and it is relentless. Hunt even mentions some passing remarks Engels made against the legalisation of prostitution, since he knows this is an issue which befuddles lefty-liberal thinking now. To further put the boot in, Hunt also tells us he finds Engels’ remarks particularly ironic seeing as Engels spent so much of his youth in brothels!

A double whammy for the modern progressive audience Hunt is addressing, which is firmly against brothel frequenting, but confusingly quite often in favour of legalising prostitution. Nowhere, of course, does Hunt explain why Engels thought prostitution should be criminalised, just as nowhere does he give any evidence for Engels’ alleged brothel creeping.

It might be argued that Tristram Hunt does give some respect to Engels, as he has no truck with the idea that after Marx’s death, when Engels set to editing Marx’s papers into volumes II and III of Kapital, he deviated from Marx’s thinking, but Tristram Hunt’s game here is not to give credit to Engels but to besmirch Marx by association. Unable (at the moment) to reinvent Marx and Engels as baby-eating mass murderers (in the manner of Simon Sebag Montefiore’s recent infamous attack on Stalin in The Red Tsar), our bourgeois historian reinvents not just Engels, but Marx too, as a constant drunk and “shameless philanderer” (no less).

Oh, certainly (Tristram assures us), Engels did make the odd maybe even semi-original observation – Engels’ argument about the Role of Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man, for example, and there is something to be said for the work Engels put into his 1844 Condition of the Working Class in England! Hunt even concedes that Marx and Engels’ dissolute hearts might even have been in the right place (sometimes) and that they even made some very fair comment about globalisation.

Hunt further concedes (so magnanimously) that it would be unfair to blame either Marx or Engels for the doings of their “illegitimate acolytes in the Soviet Union and elsewhere”, but the over-riding message of Tristram Hunt’s oeuvre is that both Marx and Engels were a couple of psychological misfits, while their ideology is a product of its time and now only amounts to a historical curiosity – interesting, but irrelevant to the twenty-first century; a bit like John Wesley and Methodism, just (especially in Engels’ case) much sexier.

No wonder the book has been greeted with such a fanfare: it is an opening shot in bourgeois history’s latest drive to make Marxism, not threatening like Lenin, Stalin and the Soviet Union, but merely ridiculous.

And it is very easy to imagine The Frock-Coated Communist being made into a TV serial on similar lines to the recent Desperate Romantics about the pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, with a young Marx and Engels leaping around full frontal.(iii)

Make no mistake about it, The Frock Coated Communist is not just a bad book, it is a deliberate, carefully thought out piece of anti-socialist propaganda; its agenda is to undermine hope, to present Marx and Engels as buffoons, and to convince its readers that socialism and communism are at best a pipe dream, and at worst a nightmare.

Remember the name Tristram Hunt; there is a great future for him as a hired scribe, and we will be hearing more from him.
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* The Frock-Coated Communist, the Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels by Tristram Hunt, pub Allen Lane. (In USA, Marx’s General, the Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels, pub Metropolitan Books.)

(ii) Annie Besant associated herself with the socialist and trade-union movements during a four-year period, 1885-9. Before 1885, she was hyper-Malthusian and anti-socialist; after 1889, she was a Theosophist and just hyper.

(iii) Tristram Hunt repeats the canard that Marx fathered a baby with Helene Demuth (the Marxes’ maid-housekeeper, and later Engels’ maid-housekeeper). This unsubstantiated rumour was put in motion by Louise Freyberger (first wife of Karl Kautsky) in 1898 once everyone concerned (Engels, Marx and Helen) was safely dead and unable to refute it. The rumour gained a purchase with some bourgeois historians who wanted to reinvent the hen-pecked Marx as something more akin to Che Guevera. Tristram Hunt uses it to blacken Marx as a Deadbeat Dad (not a good 21st century image).

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An Engels for the bourgeoisie

Katherine Connelly

Tristram Hunt, The Frock-Coated Communist: The Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels (Allen Lane, 2009), £25.00

Ten years ago Paul Foot wrote a review of Francis Wheen’s engaging and jovial, if somewhat lightweight, biography of Karl Marx. In the review he commented that while most dead left wingers are patronised and rehabilitated by the establishment, “detestation of Karl Marx…has persisted for over a hundred years”. Not so now. A systemic and global crisis of capitalism is so profound that previously smug free-marketeers are looking desperately for answers in the writings of two 19th century communists who said that capitalism is inherently unstable, that crisis is inevitable. The spectre of Marx, which for so long faced an academic wall of silence, is haunting the press, the universities, financial institutions and booklists. For one reviewer of Hunt’s book “the faddish return to Marx visible in sales of some of his books is mostly just a sign of loss of nerve”—embarrassing evidence of his class failing to keep a stiff upper lip.

Just as governments have turned to state intervention (albeit to bail out the rich) after years of the mantra “there is no alternative” to laissez-faire capitalism, so we face an ideological somersault from establishment figures who are now writing about Marxism.

Tristram Hunt is a product of this contradiction, and perhaps this is why the “contradictions of Hegelian proportions” in the public and private lives of Frederick Engels appeal to him and lie at the heart of his biography. “This was where the eye of the storm and stress really lay,” writes Hunt, “in squaring his two diametrically opposed public and private lives as exploitative cotton lord and revolutionary socialist, as frock-coated member of the upper middle class and ardent disciple of the low life”.

Engels was the gentleman in the club and the communist in the beer hall; the fine living wealthy manufacturer who lived in secret with his love, an Irish factory worker; the adrenaline-fuelled young man hunting foxes and, just a few years before, shooting from the barricades. This provides Hunt with the perfect medium to explore one of his own passions—the socio-geography of the 19th century city. Engels had unique equality of access to the two nations contained within entirely segregated cities. Hunt emphasises the influence of Engels’s lover, Mary Burns, “his underworld Persephone” who was his guide into the realm of the Mancunian working class. This allows Hunt to demonstrate that the pioneering work The Condition of the Working Class in England was not just the product of one brilliant man. Engels’s insight at the age of 24—that the working class was the class with the potential power to transform society—was a product of his real experience:

"Friedrich Engels’s two worlds—of the mill owner and Mary Burns—profoundly influenced his journey from philosophy to political economy and, in turn, had a marked effect on the emergent shape of Marxism. Uniquely, Engels was able to fuse his real experience of industrial capitalism and working class Chartist politics with the Young Hegelian tradition."

This skilful exploration of the origins of Engels’s work avoids a “great man” narrative by emphasising his intellectual debts—both to acknowledged political thinkers (Georg Hegel, Thomas Carlyle, etc) and to working class agitators including Mary Burns and the Chartists. This allows us to see what was truly creative and original in the works of Marx and Engels. By the same treatment, Hunt is able to show the immense debt that Marx owed to Engels. It is evident not just in the works that they formally co-authored. Hunt quotes Marx asking Engels the manufacturer about the practical dynamics of capitalism: “Engels’s grafting at Ermen & Engels helped to construct the empirical foundations of Das Kapital.”

Also refreshing is Hunt’s refusal to write hagiography. Engels’s sexist and racist assumptions, and his homophobia, are discussed frankly. In fact this effectively vindicates the Marxist idea that “being creates consciousness”, and also that it is engagement with class struggle that enables people to throw off the “muck of ages”—Hunt acknowledges that Engels rejected most of his racist ideas and revised his earlier contradictory attitudes to women. Indeed he subjected women’s oppression to the same method with which he explored class society and not only railed in fury against it but argued that this oppression emerged in particular historical conditions, concluding that it could also, like class society, be swept away.

All this is valuable, but there are serious flaws in Hunt’s book that impoverish his analysis. While Engels overcame his early prejudices about Irish people, Hunt continues throughout the book to apply the adjective “earthy” to the Burns sisters or, as he sometimes calls them, the “earthy Irish sisters”. More disturbing is his use of the poor journalistic trick of deciding for his readers what the best story is, rather than presenting the more uncertain but human narrative.

He has made extensive use of Yvonne Kapp’s superb biography of Eleanor Marx (1) and he references this book when he describes the fate of Frederick Demuth, the illegitimate son of Karl Marx and the family servant Helene Demuth. Frederick was fostered but Engels allowed everyone to assume he was the father. Hunt describes the “impoverished life” Frederick Demuth lived, which, reflecting the author’s own social prejudices, includes “his professional life as a skilled fitter and turner and member of the Associated Society of Engineers”.

Hunt adds that “Freddy [Demuth] and his son Harry used the tradesman’s entrance to visit… Engels, however, was always careful to absent himself on such occasions.” Kapp also tells this story but there is an important difference. She conducted the interview with Harry Demuth and she wrote that he and his father went on a Sunday to have dinner with Eleanor Marx in Engels’s house where Helene Demuth “reigned”. The “tradesman entrance” story has an entirely different genesis (unacknowledged by Hunt), which Kapp explores in a footnote. It originates in a letter by Louise Kautsky, who had a turbulent relationship with the Marx family and who was writing of an event that took place before her arrival in the Engels household. Kapp’s extensive research concludes:

"There is but a single occasion when he [Frederick Demuth] can be known for certain to have been there: on 1 July 1894 he was one of 13 signatories to a postcard sent from the Engels’s address to Mrs Liebknecht saying they were all drinking German beer while they awaited the telegram announcing the Reichstag election results.
To reference another author and deliberately distort their meaning is dishonest and lazy history. Furthermore, at times, the cost of the good yarn is a superficial analysis. However, where Hunt is weakest is in conveying the experience of workers’ struggle. This is not merely stylistic; it is ideological. In the vivid, intimate portraits in Kapp’s work lies the same sense of excitement and attention to detail that her subject, Eleanor Marx, infused her life with during her deep involvement with the New Unionism strikes in the East End of London."

Hunt, by contrast, fails to take working class subjects seriously and it produces a poor historical analysis. He dismisses the demise of Chartism as the product of “public inertia, government repression and rain”. The growth of reformism, the European context and the change in the economic climate were all apparently unimportant—or perhaps just less amusing. The 1871 Paris Commune provided Marx and Engels with some of their most concrete ideas about workers’ power and the role of the state. The Commune was, in Marx’s words, “a harbinger” but it remained isolated and the cost was horrific—a counter-revolution slaughtered tens of thousands of ordinary Parisians in just seven days.

Marx and Engels’s writings on the Commune, their contact with the survivors who fled and their celebrations of the anniversary of the birth of the Commune are dismissed by Hunt who writes that the diverse strands of socialism and anarchism in the Commune “proved a relief for Marx and Engels: when it all went wrong, there was someone else to blame”. This is cheap and dishonest. The point of analysis was, for Marx and Engels, not simply to interpret the world but to change it. Their analysis therefore reflected the actual experience of working class struggle. The Paris Commune enabled them to argue for practical aspects of proletarian dictatorship, for example the right to recall elected representatives. To insist, then, that they were interested in preserving an analysis at the expense of working class struggle is to devalue the entire point of their live’s work.

And it is precisely this, removing the element of revolution, that is distinctive in the popular resort to Marx that is taking place now. What Hunt fails to understand is that the contradictions in Engels’s life, which he finds so attractive, were created by the absence of proletarian revolution. Engels knew there was no bourgeois answer to resolve the contradictions of capitalism. He returned to business after the defeat of the 1848 revolutions and he hated it. Such contradictions were forced on Engels. They were not an integrated part of his character and certainly were not celebrated by him.

This surely is why Hunt is so bitter about the Russian Revolution and again there is dishonesty in his analysis here. Hunt effectively refutes the charge from both bourgeois critics and Stalinist apologists that Engels was the architect of Stalinist determinism. He writes, “There lies an unconscionable philosophical chasm between Engelism and Stalinism.” This is an analysis developed in this journal specifically in regard to Engels. (2) While borrowing from this strand of Marxism, Hunt refuses even to engage with its analysis of October 1917, which he contends represents the distortion of Marxism into “an irreproachable dogma” and was led by “power-hungry” Lenin.

This is a biography for a bourgeoisie in crisis. “It is recent events in the world’s stock markets and banking sector which bring Engels’s criticisms so readily to the fore,” writes Hunt. But as such it is the biography of only half of Engels’s life. Ten years ago Marxism was frozen out of the mainstream. Now they are attempting to rehabilitate Marx and Engels while removing the driving force behind their ideas. It is material circumstances—the crisis of capitalism—that has caused this. It will be working class resistance to the crisis that will bring the practical application of Marxism to serious attention. It is time to listen to the gravediggers.

Notes
1: Published in two volumes as Eleanor Marx: Family Life, 1855-83 and Eleanor Marx: The Crowded Years, 1884-98.

2: See for instance, International Socialism 65-a special collection on Engels’s Marxism.