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Tristram Hunt, “Marx’s General: The Revolutionary
Life of Friedrich Engels,” (Metropolitan
Books: New York, 2009), 430 pp., $32.
Economic
hard times, the current financial crisis of capitalism with rising and
sustained unemployment and increasing social anxiety, has led to
renewed interest in the critical theories of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. A harbinger of this trend was a laudatory
and widely read New Yorker article, “The Return of Karl Marx”
(Oct. 20 & 27, 1997), which attempted to recast Marx not as a
revolutionary but as “a student of capitalism.” A year later the 150th
anniversary edition of “The Communist Manifesto” was a surprise
best-seller for its publisher, Verso.
Since
then, Marx’s stern visage, like a specter haunting Europe, has frequently appeared on
the covers of news magazines and new editions of his books, including “Das Kapital.” The
critical studies and popular biographies of Marx that have been
published on both sides of the Atlantic have sold well.
In
fact, the circumstance today is much like what Engels
described in an 1892 preface to his book “The Condition of the Working
Class in England.” “[V]erily,”
Engels noted, “that abomination of
abominations, Socialism,” has “become respectable.” Naturally, though, Engels scorned “this momentary fashion among
bourgeois circles of affecting a mild dilution of Socialism,” the sort of
flirtation with radicalism that recently led Newsweek to
announce provocatively, “We Are All Socialists Now.”
That
fashion trend has brought Marx’s closest friend, collaborator,
co-thinker, and patron a popular biography of his own. As a socialist
journalist and historian, as the author of the highly influential
booklet, “Socialism, Utopian and Scientific,” to say nothing of his
role in assisting Marx with the first volume of “Capital” and his work
in preparing volumes two and three for publication, Engels
certainly merits a major biography.
These
aspects of Engels’ life, as well as the
decades spent managing the family business in Manchester, all receive due notice in
“Marx’s General” (“General” was a nickname for Engels,
deriving from his interest in military affairs). Nonetheless, as with
Marx, it is Engels the “student of
capitalism” that most excites the interest of his biographer.
This
biography, the first to appear in decades, is highly readable and
generally informative though often inadequate in its specific political
judgments. The author has made himself quite
familiar with the primary and secondary sources and recounts these
ably. The chapters on the political and intellectual ferment of 1840s Germany, the cauldron from which
the young communists Marx and Engels emerged,
are especially well explained.
As
would be expected, the biography is not based on original research. No
new manuscripts, letters, etc. have come to light in many decades.
Instead, the author visits a Russian city named after Engels, beginning and ending his book there. This
is the kind of hook a journalist would use to hang an article; it is
not the starting point for scholarly investigation. To his credit,
though, the author indulges in few of these ploys. He limits his suppositions
and does not attempt to recreate dialogue, confining himself to
quotations from letters and previously published accounts.
In
this biography much is made of the fact that Engels
could as easily be found on the barricades as well as in a bank or a
bar, that he was a capitalist oppressor of the working class who wrote
tracts arguing for the liberation of the workers against the oppression
of capital.
None
of this information is new, and the conclusions to be drawn from it
are, by now, trite: People do not create the private circumstances or
the social world into which they are born. Engels
used his favorable position in life to further his communist ideas. As
the biographer himself admits, “for much of his adulthood he lived
according to his beliefs” (p. 310).
A
more telling flaw in the book is that the author is weakest regarding
revolutionary politics and program; on these topics, the substance of Engels’ life, the biographer cares little and
understands even less. The idea, for instance, that a workers’ party
requires a coherent program is treated by this author as a joke or as a
purely personal matter.
According
to the author, Engels “would express his love
and loyalty to Marx by gleefully enforcing party discipline, pursuing
ideological heretics, and generally playing the Grand Inquisitor when
it came to upholding the true communist faith” (p. 134). Further on,
readers are told that Engels would “indulge
in his and Marx’s favorite pastime: ideological knockabout” (p. 289).
This kind of commentary is simply light-minded.
A
more cogent argument has been made by Ernest Mandel: “In reality, all
history confirms that theories and organizations can only advance
through the clash of ideas and groupings that differentiate when faced
with new events and problems … it is obvious that tendencies and group
struggles are inevitable in politics in general, and in workers’
politics in particular” (“The Place of Marxism in History,” p. 66).
The
author’s political failings are most apparent in the “Epilogue.”
Determined to refute the familiar but false theory that the
totalitarian regime of Stalin originated in the pages of Marx and Engels, the biographer advances an argument that is
neither original nor convincing. Engels,
according to this theory, cannot be held accountable in any way for the
Bolshevik revolution because Engels
essentially would have favored Menshevism—that
is, Engels would have supported the
development of a strong capitalist state that would create a
proletariat which, in some unspecified future, would rise against its
capitalist oppressors. A socialist party would then base itself
on a struggle for reforms via the ballet box.
In
support of this position, the author cites a quote from Engels in 1891: “The time of surprise attacks, of
revolutions carried through by small conscious minorities at the head
of the masses lacking consciousness is past” (p. 339). Indeed, that
time was past, if it had ever had a present. But Engels was in fact criticizing, as he and Marx had
done repeatedly, the conspiratorial revolutionary organizations
proposed by earlier socialists like Babeuf
and Blanqui who believed that a revolution
could be carried out successfully behind the back of the working
class. These words in no way condemn the revolutionary strategy
followed by the Bolsheviks in October 1917.
The
views of Marx and Engels on the need to
overthrow the bourgeois state by revolutionary means can be seen in
their writings on the 1871 Paris Commune: i.e., “the working class
cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made machinery of the state and
wield it for its own purposes.” And Engels in
an 1872 critique of the followers of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon:
“Would the Paris Commune have lasted a single day if it had not relied
on the authority of the armed people against the bourgeoisie?”
The
issues raised by the biographer’s erroneous criticism go well beyond
the scope of a review, but interested readers will discover that the
socialist revolution in Russia was based on the radical actions of
politically conscious workers, peasants, and soldiers by reading
Alexander Rabinowitch’s “The Bolsheviks Come
to Power” (a non-Marxist but thoroughly researched work) and Leon
Trotsky’s “History of the Russian Revolution.” The theoretical disputes
that divided Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, and, later, Stalinists, are taken
up in Trotsky’s work “The Permanent Revolution” and his essay “Three
Concepts of the Russian Revolution.”
As
with recent books on Marx, this biography of Engels
blunts his revolutionary edge to make him more respectable and thereby
gain a wider audience. The make-over does not ring true. Leon Trotsky’s
assessment, written nearly 75 years ago, more accurately defines Engels: “The man of commerce, the possessor of a
mill, a hunter’s horse and a wine cellar was a revolutionary communist
to the marrow of his bones.”
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