No Karl Marx without Friedrich Engels

It is a truth now universally acknowledged that capitalism’s most insightful philosopher is Karl Marx. The one time ideological ogre ‘responsible’ for the killing fields of Cambodia and excesses of the Soviet Union has been lauded as the first thinker to chart the true nature of the free market. ‘Marx’s Stock Resurges on a 150-Year Tip’ was how the New York Times marked the 150th anniversary of the publication of The Communist Manifesto – a text which, more than any other, ‘recognised the unstoppable wealth-creating power of capitalism, predicted it would conquer the world, and warned that this inevitable globalisation of national economies and cultures would have divisive and painful consequences.’ In 2005, the French politician-cum-banker Jacques Attali went further, to pinpoint Marx as the first great theorist of globalisation. Today, in the midst of a once-a-century crisis of capitalism, Das Kapital has raced to the top of the German bestseller lists and even President Sarkozy has been caught leafing through its pages.

But as with so much of the Karl Marx myth, the role of his lifelong friend and ideological ally Friedrich Engels has been airbrushed from history. The co-author of The Communist Manifesto, co-founder of Marxism and architect of much of modern socialism, is nowhere to be seen in this shower of admiration. Yet when it comes to the Marxian analysis of capitalism, any credible account must have Engels alongside Marx. For Marx only gained his unique appreciation of the functioning of capitalism thanks to Engels’ first-hand experiences. Moreover, it was Engels who went on to edit the crucial passages of Das Kapital which dealt with the inherent instability of the capitalist model. If we are to look for the origins of one of the most salient criticisms of the market system, we should start with Engels.

Friedrich Engels was delivered straight into the furnace of the 19th century. The historic transformations he would make his life’s work – in urbanisation, industrialisation, social class, and technology – were there at his infancy. Born in 1820, he grew up in the polluted, overcrowded manufacturing district of Barmen-Elberfeld (modern day Wuppertal, western Germany), known at the time as the ‘German Manchester’. ‘The purple waves of the narrow river flow sometimes swiftly, sometimes sluggishly between smoky factory buildings and yarn-strewn bleaching-yards,’ was how Engels described his birthplace. ‘Its bright red colour, however, is due not to some bloody battle … but simply and solely to the numerous dye-works using Turkey red.’ From his earliest days, amid the acrid stench of workshops and bleaching yards, Engels was exposed to a witches’ brew of industrialisation: the eye-watering pollution which blanketed his home town’s mixture of intense poverty and ostentatious wealth.

Contributing to the town’s prosperity was the firm of Caspar Engels und Söhne, a successful yarn business and bleachery. Established by Engels’ great-grandfather Johann Caspar in the mid-18th century, by the 1830s it was a major Barmen business renowned as much for its philanthropy as profitability. Down the generations, the Engelses provided homes, gardens and even schools for family employees.

As a result, Engels spent his early years mixing easily with ribbon-makers, joiners and craftsmen, fostering in him a class-free ease which would later serve him well. But none of this could disguise the human cost of the cash-nexus that Caspar Engels und Söhne were engaged in: the factory workers, as a youthful Engels put it, ‘in low rooms where people breathe in more coal fumes and dust than oxygen’; the ‘totally demoralised people, with no fixed abode or definite employment, who crawl out of their refuges, haystacks, stables at dawn.’

Engels’ career path was always meant to entail the family firm and, in 1837, he was withdrawn from school and dispatched to Bremen to be taught the mysteries of spinning and weaving as a clerk to linen exporter, Heinrich Leupold. Engels’ work in Bremen mainly involved handling international correspondence: there were packages to Havana, letters to Baltimore, hams to the West Indies, beans from Haiti. In this free-trading, former Hanseatic city, he came to know the ins and outs of the export business, currency deals and import duties. But Engels, a romantic young man given to the poetry of Shelley, Heine and Goethe, found it numbing stuff and sought refuge in what became a lifetime’s passion: bottled beer. ‘We now have a complete stock of beer in the office; under the table, behind the stove, behind the cupboard, everywhere are beer bottles’, he boasted to his sister Marie.

After a year’s military service in Berlin and time spent among the radical circle of so-called ‘Young Hegelians’, who offered reinterpretations of the work of the Prussian philosopher, Engels was then sent to Manchester to complete his training. His employer, Ermen and Engels, had been established in 1837 when Engels’ father sold his share of the family firm and invested it with the Ermen brothers. The guiding force behind the company, Dutch-born Peter Ermen, had come to Manchester in the mid-1820s and worked his way up from being a worker in a small factory to establishing a multinational cotton-thread business run with the help of his brothers Anthony and Gottfried. Investment by Engels senior allowed the company to open a new mill in Salford for the production of cotton thread. This district to the west of Manchester was renowned for its fine-count mercerised cotton and its weaving, and the mill ¬– next to Weaste station, alongside the Manchester and Liverpool railway line – was ideally situated both for bringing raw cotton from the Mersey docks and drawing water from the nearby river Irwell for bleaching and dyeing. It was here that the privileged, intellectual Engels mucked in with a 400-strong Mancunian workforce, starting off among the cotton-spinning machines ‘in the throstle-room’.

Working for the family firm while living within a community exploited by cotton capitalism quickly made the contradictions of Engels’ position painfully apparent. As he put it in a heartfelt letter to Marx some years later, ‘huckstering is too beastly … most beastly of all is the fact of being, not only a bourgeois, but actually a manufacturer, a bourgeois who actively takes sides against the proletariat. A few days in my old man’s factory have sufficed to bring me face to face with this beastliness, which I had rather overlooked.’ But even if he worked for the bourgeoisie, Engels didn’t have to socialise with them. ‘I forsook the company and the dinner-parties, the port-wine and champagne of the middle classes, and devoted my leisure-hours almost exclusively to the intercourse with plain working men.’

The result of such intercourse was Engels’ astonishing book, The Condition of the Working Class in England (Leipzig, 1845). Here was a far richer, more detailed, more coruscating indictment of the brutalities of capitalism than his youthful Barmen critique. With almost vicarious pleasure, Engels listed the maiming and physical disfigurements that accompanied life on the factory floor: ‘The knees are bent inward and backwards, the ankles deformed and thick, and the spinal column often bent forwards or to one side,’ he wrote of the effects of the long hours spent in the cotton mill. In the mining industry, the labour of transporting coal and iron-stone was so punishing that children’s puberty was unnaturally delayed.

Marx was entranced by the work (‘what power, what incisiveness and what passion’) and its remarkable accumulation of evidence. It was a source to which he turned again and again for concrete evidence of capitalism’s inhumanity. ‘As far as concerns the period from the beginning of large-scale industry in England down to the year 1845 I shall only touch upon this here and there, referring the reader for fuller details to Friedrich Engels’ The Condition of the Working Class,’ he wrote in an early note to Volume I of Das Kapital. ‘The fullness of Engels’ insight into the nature of the capitalist method of production has been shown by the factory reports, the reports on mines, etc, that have appeared since the publication of his book.’

But The Condition was more than just a catalogue of atrocities. With astonishing intellectual maturity, the 24-year-old Engels applied the (religious) notion of human alienation which he had absorbed from the Young Hegelians to the material realities he witnessed in Victorian Britain and thereby crafted the ideological outlines of scientific socialism. So much of what would later be regarded as mainstream Marxist thought – the nature of class division, the inherent instability of modern industrial capitalism, the creation by the bourgeois of their own gravediggers, the inevitability of socialist revolution – were all first embedded in Engels’ brilliant polemic.

When Engels completed his Manchester tutorial in 1844, he did not expect to see Lancashire again so soon. But in 1850 he was back in Cottonopolis. After the failure of the 1848-49 continental revolutions, both Marx and Engels had sought refuge in England and, with no other obvious source of income, the Ermen and Engels heir reluctantly returned to the fold. His sister Marie smoothed his return with tact. ‘The thought has come to us that you may perhaps wish to enter business seriously for the time being, in order to ensure yourself an income; you might drop it as soon as your party has a reasonable chance of success and resume your work for the party,’ she wrote in an elegantly crafted letter sent with the blessing of her parents.

So while Marx busied himself at the British Museum writing Das Kapital, Engels was forced back into ‘accursed commerce’. But he did so at a most propitious time as the mid-Victorian boom catapulted the Manchester cotton industry toward unprecedented prosperity. Ermen and Engels did especially well thanks to the invention of the sewing machine and, with it, increased demand for just their type of thread. With surging orders, the company moved offices to 7 Southgate (into a warehouse overlooking the courtyard of the Golden Lion public house) and purchased another mill – the Bencliffe Mill in Little Bolton, Eccles – in addition to their Victoria Mill at Salford.

It was a dull, tedious but certainly lucrative existence. In 1860, Engels’ cut of the company profits stood at £978, taking his annual income to over £1,000 which is not far off £100,000 in today’s money. Most of these riches cascaded south, from Manchester to London, to fund Marx’s determinedly middle-class lifestyle. There were post office orders, postage stamps, £5 notes, a few pounds snaffled from the Ermen and Engels cash box, and then far more weighty sums when pay-day arrived. ‘Dear Mr Engels’, as Jenny Marx was apt to address him, was regularly allocating over half his annual income to the Marx family – totalling between £3-4,000 over the 20-year period he was employed. Yet it was never enough. ‘I assure that I would rather have had my thumb cut off than write this letter to you. It is truly soul-destroying to be dependent for half one’s life,’ begins a typical letter from Marx before pleading for an emergency loan. 

But Ermen and Engels yielded more than just a living allowance. It also provided the essential data for Marx’s analysis of capitalism: ‘I have now reached a point in my work on economics where I need some practical advice from you, since I cannot find anything relevant in the theoretical writings,’ Marx wrote to Engels in January 1858. ‘It concerns the circulation of capital – its various forms in the various businesses; its effects on profit and prices. If you could give me some information on this, then it will be very welcome.’ There followed a series of questions on machinery costs and depreciation rates, the allocation of capital within the firm and calculation of turnover in the company book-keeping. Over the next five years, the requests for information kept coming as Engels’ years of grafting in the Manchester cotton trade helped to construct the empirical foundations of Das Kapital. ‘Could you inform me of all the different types of workers employed, e.g. at your mill and in what proportion to each other?’ Marx inquired in 1862. ‘For in my book I need an example showing that, in mechanical workshops, the division of labour, as forming the basis of manufacture and as described by Adam Smith, does not exist … All that is needed is an example of some kind.’ ‘Since practice is better than all theory, I would ask you to describe to me very precisely (with examples) how you run your business,’ began another round of queries.

Engels’ contribution went beyond the statistical as he became Marx’s sounding-board for his emerging economic philosophy. ‘Let me say a word or two about what will, in the text, be a lengthy and complex affair, so that you may LET ME HAVE YOUR OPINION on it,’ Marx began a letter of August 2nd, 1862. He then launched into an explanation of the difference between constant capital (machinery) and variable capital (labour) offering an early draft of the ‘surplus value’ theory of employee exploitation which was at the core of Das Kapital. Engels responded in kind, raising a number of methodological objections to the way in which Marx was calculating the value of a factory worker’s labour and its relative compensation in labour-wage rates. But Marx rarely enjoyed too close a questioning and breezily replied that any such criticisms could not properly be treated ‘prior to the 3rd book … if I wished to refute all such objections in advance, I should spoil the whole dialectical method of exposition.’

But after Marx’s death in 1883, Engels was left in charge of editing Volume III and the problem still wasn’t solved. However, what Engels did do was to change Marx’s intent on a number of crucial passages with significant ideological repercussions. This was most obviously the case in the much debated Part III, ‘The Law of the Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall’, in which Marx had outlined how profits tend to decline under capitalism as labour-saving technology progressively reduces the scope for extracting surplus value from living labour. Marx connected this falling profitability to the vulnerability of capitalism itself. But whereas the original manuscript referred to the ‘shaking’ of capitalist production, Engels spoke far more definitively of the ‘collapse’ of capitalism. A small change, but one with far-reaching consequences for later Marxists who repeatedly looked for a systemic ‘crisis’ or ‘breakdown’ of capitalism to usher in the communist dawn. It is a theme that has recently resurfaced in commentary on the credit crisis.

Yet all such attributions of originality on Engels’ behalf would have been anathema to the man himself. He always regarded Marx as the ‘first fiddle’, the genius who ‘stood higher, saw further, and took a wider and quicker view than all the rest of us.’ However, it is fair to say that Marx would not have been able to achieve half his intellectual legacy without the legwork of Engels. More than that, Engels had a deep feel for the true human costs of capitalism; despite his own exploitation of the Ermen and Engels proletariat, he offered a moral critique of political economy that Marx found hard to rival. And today it is his voice that resonates most powerfully in those countries at the sharp end of global capitalism – most notably the emerging markets of Brazil, Russia, India and China. For here all the horrors of breakneck industrialisation – capitalism transforming social relations, destroying old customs and habits, turning villages into cities, and workshops into factories – display the same savagery which Engels recounted in 19th-century Europe. With China now claiming the mantle of ‘Workshop of the World’, the pollution, ill health, political resistance and social unrest prevalent, for example, in the Special Economic Zones of Guangdong Province and Shanghai appear eerily reminiscent of Engels’ accounts of Manchester and Glasgow. Compare and contrast, as the scholar Ching Kwan Lee has done, Engels’ description of employment conditions in an 1840s’ cotton mill –

‘In the cotton and flax spinning mills there are many rooms in which the air is filled with fluff and dust … The operative of course had no choice in the matter … The usual consequences of inhaling factory dust are the spitting of blood, heavy, noisy breathing, pains in the chest, coughing and sleeplessness … Accidents occur to operatives who work in rooms crammed full of machinery … The most common injury is the loss of a joint of the finger … In Manchester one sees not only numerous cripples, but also plenty of workers who have lost the whole or part of an arm, leg or foot.'

– with the testimony of a Chinese migrant worker in Shenzhen in 2000:

‘There is no fixed work schedule. A 12-hour workday is minimum. With rush orders, we have to work continuously for 30 hours or more. Day and night … the longest shift we had worked non-stop lasted for 40 hours … It’s very exhausting because we have to stand all the time, to straighten the denim cloth by pulling. Our legs are always hurting. There is no place to sit on the shopfloor. The machines do not stop during our lunch breaks. Three workers in a group will just take turns eating, one at a time … The shopfloor is filled with thick dust. Our bodies become black working day and night indoors. When I get off from work and spit, it’s all black.'

Friedrich Engels, a child of the Industrial Revolution, speaks now with remarkable authority and insight to our own global age of exploitation and immiseration. It is his impassioned criticisms of the market model in action which should echo down the decades. Engels is an essential part of our newly acknowledged truth.

Tristram Hunt’s biography of Friedrich Engels, The Frock-Coated Communist, is published by Penguin.