In the late 1970s, there seemed to be communists everywhere. There were Stalinists and Leninists, Trotskyites and Marxists and all manner of combinations in between. I do believe I once even met a Maoist at the Calcutta Club. For the most part, they were worthy if dreary souls who earnestly debated obscure polemics and fought endless internecine battles over lumpy (if not lumpen) chili con carne. It was only post-1989 that the game was effectively up for the Left. The Market Reformers moved in to the Kremlin; in England, the Labour Party had its Clause 24 moment. In India, Narasimha Rao took the first tentative steps towards a market economy.
Communism is, however, now rather back in fashion. With the financial markets going into free fall last year, the UK and US effectively nationalising their banks and millions of jobs in jeopardy, the very foundations of capitalism suddenly appear fragile. The comrades are back too, saying they were right all along. Das Capital is on the German bestseller lists.
Communism was an idea born in an age not unlike our own. 21st-century China and India are, like Victorian England, nations of extremes. Then as now, there were rich pickings to be had and the rich grew very conspicuously rich (and insufferably smug). The working classes, for the most part, toiled in conditions of almost unbelievable squalor.
The mid 1800s saw more than one cycle of economic boom and bust. It was the bust that Marx and Engels, communism’s two founders, were most interested in. Both men believed that capitalism was fundamentally unstable and so bound to collapse. Communism’s great opportunity lay in the chaos that would inevitably follow. “...the whole of Europe’s industry in ruins, all markets overstocked ... all the propertied classes in the soup, complete bankruptcy of the bourgeoisie, war and profligacy to the nth degree,” Engels wrote hopefully in 1856 (only to lament a few months later, “There are as yet few signs of revolution...”).
Marx may be back on the bestselling charts, but Friedrich Engels, long seen as merely his sidekick, has been largely forgotten. In this splendidly written and timely biography, Tristram Hunt reminds us that Engels was an important philosopher in his own right and a talented writer whose passionate indictment of Victorian England still resonates. In his seminal book, The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844, Engels writes of “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”. Echoing down the generations, it could be a denunciation of the modern slums of Mumbai, Shanghai and Rio de Janeiro.
Like my Maoist friends in the Calcutta Club, Engels was a man of contradictions. He was a member of the haute bourgeoisie, a rich émigré industrialist who made his fortune off the back of the downtrodden proletariat. As Tristram Hunt writes, Engels was “a raffish, high-living, heavy-drinking devotee of the good things in life: lobster salad, Château Margaux, Pilsener beer and expensive women.” Unsurprisingly, he was accused of hypocrisy. “I don’t give a damn” was his cheerful response. If he had a social conscience, he kept it well hidden. Indeed, both Marx and he seemed to have believed that the leisure afforded them by Engels’ money enabled them to perfect their theory of communism. Therefore, their wealth, in fact, served humanity.
Engels believed in the “progression” of history, writing “...all successive historical states are only transitory stages in the endless course of development from the lower to the higher...” If there were causalities along the way to the great communist utopia (such as his own wretched workforce), he was utterly indifferent to their plight.
Also Read
Hunt absolves Engels of the hideous misdeeds perpetrated by Soviet communism. Perhaps; but many of Engels’ theories provided the building blocks of the communist state.
In the end, the communist experiment failed because it stifles man’s instinctive need for individuality. In practice too, wherever there has been a communist state, there has been in greater or lesser degree, repression, poverty, disease and ignorance. Far from the state “withering away”, as Engels confidently predicted, all communist regimes have been absolutist at best, monstrous tyrannies at worst.
Tristram Hunt’s knowledge of 19th-century ideas is masterly and this is an immensely engaging biography. The trouble is, try as Hunt does to make him sympathetic, Engels was a most unattractive personality; the ideology he promoted was noxious and its influence has been baleful.
THE FROCK-COATED COMMUNIST
THE REVOLUTIONARY LIFE OF FRIEDRICH ENGELS
Tristram Hunt
Allen Lane
416pp; £25