Karl Marx: Man and Fighter Boris Nicolaievsky and Otto Maenchen-Helfen

Chapter 08: The Life-long Friend

In the fifteen months of Marx's stay in Paris he had met Proudhon and Louis Blanc, Heine and Herwegh, German Communists and members of French secret societies. Some of them crossed his path again, few encouraged him, he remained friendly with none. His meeting with Friedrich Engels was decisive. From October, 1844, until he closed his eyes for the last time, in victory and defeat, in the storm of revolution and the misery of exile, always struggling and always fighting, he trod by Engels's side and Engels trod by his, along the same path towards the same goal.

Friedrich Engels was born in Barmen on November 28, 1820, the eldest son of Friedrich Engels, senior. His father was a merchant. Engels's great grandfather, Johann Caspar Engels, had, on very slender capital, started a lace factory, connected with a bleaching works and a ribbon manufactory, which had developed by the time of his death into one of the biggest undertakings in the Wuppertal and went on expanding under the energetic management of his sons and grandsons. When the brothers parted in 1837, Friedrich Engels senior established the cotton-spinning firm of Engels and Ermen in Manchester. Later it extended to Barmen. The firm survives to this day.

The environment in which Engels grew up was as different as it could possibly have been from that in which Marx passed his boyhood years. In the Wuppertal bigotry reigned in its most repulsive form--a narrow, gloomy, moping 'fundamentalism' which wanted all the world, like it, to go about in sackcloth and ashes, thinking everlastingly of its sins. No songs other than hymns must be sung, no books other than devotional books must be read. Science and art were considered vanities of the Evil One. When a boy at Engels's school asked one of the masters who Goethe was, the peevish and reproachful answer was that he was 'an atheist.' At the age of eighteen Engels described his native town as the 'Zion of obscurantism.'

Engels's mother had preserved a cheerful disposition from her happy childhood in Berlin, but his father not only adhered to the most rigorous observances of the devout but brought up his children in strict accord with the oppressive spirit of the prevalent bigotry. Engels was fond of his mother but became alienated from his father at an early age and actually hated him.

Trier was a beautiful old town, living on the cultivation of vine, Bonn was a friendly conglomeration of students, landladies and artisans, and even in Berlin Marx saw practically nothing of modern industry. Engels grew up among factories and slums. From his earliest years he was surrounded by poverty and distress, sick children who 'breathed more smoke and dust than oxygen' into their lungs in the squalid rooms in which they lived, men, women and children who worked at the loom for fourteen or sixteen hours a day, half-starved, consumptive, their only friend the brandy-bottle which occasionally allowed them to forget the dreariness of their existence; all the horror of early capitalism, which celebrated its maddest orgies in this part of the Rhineland.

The lively boy rebelled against the grim existence that surrounded him. When his father found the 'otherwise excellent youth' reading chivalrous romances instead of pious books in spite of severe punishments, he reproached him for flippancy and lack of principle. There was a small group of young poets at his school, and young Engels wrote poems entirely in the manner of Ferdinand Freiligrath, who was then a clerk in the counting-house of a Barmen business house, writing his verses 'between the journal and the ledger.' His poems sung of the free life of the sons of the desert, of lion hunts and Moorish kings. Revulsion from Europe and the present was the first feeble, passive sign of revolt against the Europe of the time.

As long as Engels lived in Barmen only faint echoes of the noises of the battle without came to his ears. The bigots of his native town barely knew the names of Börne, Heine, and the poets of Young Germany, and they would have been revolted at the idea of one of their pious community soiling himself by reading such heathenish and sinful stuff. They ignored the movements abroad among the people, and took no interest in politics, literature or philosophy. Engels may have heard older schoolfellows of his talking when they came back to Barmen for their holidays, and this could not have failed to give wings to his longing to escape from his hateful, cramped surroundings. But he did not escape yet.

Engels left school a year early. He was an excellent pupil. He learned easily and quickly, and was particularly good at languages. His father's reason for abandoning the idea of making his son a lawyer and making a merchant of him instead is unknown. He took him first into his own business, and a year later sent him to Bremen for wider experience. He took care that the youth should be preserved from temptation when away from home. The export house young Engels entered was on excellent terms with Engels and Ermen, and the young man lived in the family of a pastor besides. Bremen was another stronghold of bigotry like his native town.

It was also a trade centre, with relations to the outside world that were far different from those of the Wuppertal. In spite of the patriarchal nature of the state that set its imprint upon it, it allowed its subjects incomparably more freedom than was allowed by the timid bureaucracy of Prussia. The censorship was milder, and allowed many things to pass that in Prussia would have been strictly forbidden. A new world was suddenly unfolded before young Engels's eyes. It attracted and repelled him, he sought it and then fled from it, it shook him to the foundations of his being.

The writings of Börne made him a political radical. The step he thus took over the boundaries imposed upon him seems to have been an easy one. His breach with the past was no great wrench. The latently defiant poetry of his school-days had prepared the way. Literature meant a great deal to him, and his schoolboy poems led him straight to the poets of the time, who gave expression to the vague longings for freedom that possessed him. Through them he was guided a step farther. With Börne he reached the stage of development necessary for open-minded young men of the time.

His struggle with religion was infinitely harder. There is no shred of evidence to show that the young Marx had any struggle with religion whatever. But Engels only rid himself of the faith of his youth and childhood after the most harassing and agonising torments. The doctrine of predestination was the corner-stone of the paternal faith. Whom God had chosen would be saved, whom He had damned was damned for all eternity. Man had no power in himself to do good, his fate was predetermined by God, Whose grace was everything. The inhuman rigour of this doctrine repelled Engels early, but its complement, the forbidding of fatalistic resignation, the necessity of faith in one's own salvation, and of everlastingly struggling anew for assurance of it, steeped his acts and thoughts in piety. Though he rejected as fanatical exaggeration a good deal of what he had been taught to believe was essential, he was still deeply religious when he went to Bremen. The first and decisive blow that undermined his faith was Strauss's Life of Jesus. If the Bible contained but one single contradiction--and Strauss laid bare an abundance of contradictions--his faith in it was shattered. The very rigour with which the bigots insisted on the literal verbal inspiration of the Bible threatened the whole structure if but this one column fell. Young Engels fought with all his might against the doubts that assailed him on every side. 'I pray daily,' he wrote to a friend. 'I pray for the truth practically all day long. I began to do so as soon as I began to doubt, and yet I do not return to the faith that you have. ... Tears come into my eyes as I write. I am moved to the depths of my being, yet I feel that I shall not be lost, that I shall come to God, for Whom I yearn with my whole heart. That, surely, bears witness to the Holy Spirit, by which I live and die, even if the opposite is ten thousand times stated in the Bible.'

He did not return to the fold. Schleiermacher kept his religious feelings alive for some time yet. But, once entered upon the path, he trod it with characteristic firmness and unflinching honesty with himself. From religion he went to philosophy. He became an Hegelian at the age of twenty and did not stop at that. In October, 1841, when he went to Berlin to serve a year as volunteer in the Artillery Guards, he was an Hegelian of the extreme Left Wing. A certain tendency to occupy himself with religious historical problems survived from his religious youth, besides, apparently, a spirit of intolerance that he preserved to his old age. Marx has often been reproached for obstinacy, but Engels was worse by far. He once told Eduard Bernstein that though everybody talked of Marx's intolerance when Marx presided at the General Council of the International even the most controversial questions seldom led to open conflict; when he was in the chair things were quite different.

Engels soon entered the group of the 'Freien' in Berlin, with whom he took part in the controversy with Schelling, against whom he wrote two able pamphlets. He wrote for the Rheinische Zeitung and other radical journals. His articles were not worse and most of them were better, wittier and more lucid than those of the other Berlin Young Hegelians. When he returned to Barmen in the autumn of 1842 he could lay claim to occupying quite a respectable position in the world of letters at an age--twenty-two--at which the young Marx had not yet published a line.

Out of regard for his family he had so far written either anonymously or under the pseudonym of Friedrich Oswald. But the mentality of his 'disappointing' son was not unknown to his father, nor did the former make any attempt to conceal it. In a report on Engels's formative years which dates from 1852 an excellently informed Danish police agent states that 'the family council decided to withdraw him from the enlightening atmosphere of Germany and send him to the factory in Manchester. His father told him that either he must go to England and become a decent business man or he would entirely withdraw all paternal support. After the completion of his military service as a Prussian subject Engels found it more prudent to give in and go to Manchester. This was in the late autumn of 1842.'

Engels chose to travel via Cologne, in order to seize the opportunity of meeting the staff of the Rheinische Zeitung. His first meeting with Marx passed off coolly. Marx was just about to break with the Berlin 'Freien' and saw in Engels one of their allies. Engels on his side had been prejudiced against Marx by Bruno Bauer. However, they agreed to the extent that it was arranged that Engels should continue to contribute to the Rheinische Zeitung from England. Engels sent his first dispatch, on the internal crisis in England, on November 30, almost as soon as he arrived in London.

Engels had a special gift for rapidly finding his way about on foreign soil, and in his young years, unlike Marx, he was always quick to form a judgment. But however premature the views that he put forward might seem--a young man in a country for the first time attempting to unravel its innermost structure after two days on its soil--they were less premature than they appeared. Engels had studied English affairs 'on the quiet' in Germany, the outward reason being that he was going to Manchester. But there were other weighty reasons as well.

Engels became a Communist in the autumn of 1842. In this he did not differ from other Left Hegelians, who, proceeding from religious criticism, had come over to Feuerbach and recognised in Communism the only possibility of realising the generic notion of man. Engels had met Moses Hess and been strongly influenced by his conception of world history, according to which the Germans were to carry out the philosophical revolution, the French the political revolution and the English the economic revolution. In a letter Hess wrote Berthold Auerbach in October, 1842, he told him he had been discussing questions of the day with Engels and that Engels had left him a most enthusiastic Communist.

Like Marx, Engels came to Communism by way of contemporary German philosophy. But Engels's Communism was fed from other than philosophical sources. The conclusions of the philosophers could only be put into practice by means of the abolition of private property, and Communism alone could free mankind from barbarism. Marx reached this conclusion as the result of a process of intellectual development. Engels crossed the 't's' and dotted the 'i's' of his theory from the evidence of his senses. Engels knew the state of the proletariat at first hand--'the status which represents the complete loss of humanity.' All he needed for the whole extent of the dehumanisation it involved to become plain to him was to re-tread the way to it, this time by the high road of philosophy. For him the proletariat was not just a philosophical instrument, but meant the proletariat of the Wuppertal, the workers in his father's factory. He only had to look about him to see dehumanisation in its grossest form. He had known for a long time that the spinners in his father's factory in Manchester lived the same brutalised existence as their class-comrades in suffering in Germany. Their brutalisation was the consequence of an economic system in which he lived and which he knew from the inside. Philosophy led him, like Marx, into the field of economics. He had this advantage over Marx, that he could study economic realities while living in their midst.

Engels passed nearly two years in Manchester, and they bore rich fruit. How well he applied himself to the mastery of economics is demonstrated in the Umrisse zur Kritik der Nationalökonomie, his 'brilliant sketches' in the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher. Engels set out to demonstrate all economic categories as aspects of private property and all contradictions of bourgeois economy as necessary consequences of private property. Expressed in philosophical language and often only by implication, the work contains the foundations of scientific Socialism. The much-extolled system of free competition, it argues, leads to an ever more precipitous breach between capitalists and workers. While political economists were working out their theories about the balancing of supply and demand and the impossibility of over-production, reality answered them with trade crises which returned as regularly as comets and brought more suffering and mischief in their wake than the great plagues of old. While the reign of private enterprise lasted, crises would recur; each one more universal, therefore more severe than the last, impoverishing a greater number of small capitalists and increasing in ever greater proportion the multitude of the class living on bare work alone. Thus private property produced the revolution by itself.

The more deeply Engels penetrated the English social and economic scheme, the clearer it became to him that the English were not to be won over by the categories he had relied on up to now. However persistently he tried to drum into the heads of the 'obdurate Britons' what was taken for granted in Germany, namely that 'so-called material interests never appear in history as self-sufficient motives, but that they nevertheless, whether consciously or unconsciously, invariably provide the guiding strings of historical progress,' he did not succeed. He was forced reluctantly to resign himself to the conclusion that in England only the conflict of material interests was recognised. In England interests and not principles would begin and carry out the revolution. But this applied to England only. To Germany it did not apply. 'The Germans,' he tried to explain to his English friends--in English--at the end of 1843, 'are a very disinterested nation; if in Germany principle comes into collision with interest, principle will almost always silence the claims of interest. The same love of abstract principle, the same disregard of reality and self-interest which have brought the Germans to a state of political nonentity, these very same qualities guarantee the success of philosophical Communism in that country.'

But now he was in England, a country which ignored general principles, it became his task to base his Communism on a foundation of material interests. Engels found a great workers' movement, that of the Chartists, in progress. Its aims were purely political, but Engels did not doubt for a moment that it was bound to become Socialist, and that within a short time the Chartists would see that private property was the root of all the evils from which the working classes were suffering. After the abortive attempt at a general strike to enforce universal suffrage, they must confine themselves for the time being to propaganda. Engels was a close observer of the first great independent workers' movement to take place in a European country. It was something for which not even the preliminaries were to hand in Germany. He got into touch with the Chartists through James Leach, a Manchester workman, and in Leeds he established a friendship with George Julian Harney, editor of the Chartist paper, The Northern Star.

He admired the practice of the Chartists, but, as a Communist and an atheist, he was closer in theoretical outlook to Robert Owen. He heartily approved of Owen's struggle against the marriage tie, religion and private property, which Owen regarded as the three irrational, arch-egoistical institutions from which humanity must be freed in order that a new world founded on reason and solidarity might be built. He made contact with the Owenites, and in their paper, The New Moral World, he described to the English, who had scarcely heard of it, the growth and development of Continental Communism.

Engels lived at the heart of the English cotton industry, the most modern industry in the most modern industrial country of Europe. In spite of the 'tremendous advances' made in recent years, his native Wuppertal could not compare with it. He found that just where industrialism was flourishing most exuberantly the proletariat was plunged into the greatest distress. For month after month Engels roamed through the working-class districts of Manchester, which he soon got to know better than most of its inhabitants. Though he was familiar with the plight of the German spinners and weavers, he was profoundly moved by what he saw. His book on the state of the working-classes in England, based on his observations and extended researches and written in the winter of 1844-5, is the most flaming indictment of early capitalism ever written.

At the end of August, 1844, Engels travelled back to Germany by way of Paris, and met Marx for the second time. In the bare ten days they spent together 'they established their agreement in all theoretical fields, and their joint work dates from that time.'

Engels brought Marx more than he received from him. Both had come independently to Communism, both had recognised in the proletariat the class which, product and negation of private property at the same time, was to abolish private property. But Engels had an incomparably deeper insight into the economics of bourgeois society. Living in economically advanced England, he had anticipated Marx in understanding its dialectic, its inherent tendency to produce contradictions and thus its own downfall. He had come face-to-face with a real workers' movement, met the proletariat in its real form. In Manchester 'he had had his nose rubbed into the fact that economic realities, which in history written hitherto had played either no rôle at all, or at best an insignificant one, were, at any rate in the modern world, a decisive historical force; that economic realities provide the foundation from which present-day class-conflicts arose; that in those countries where, thanks to big industry, those conflicts had fully developed, for example in England, they were the foundation on which political parties were built and party struggles fought and thus of the whole of political history. Marx had not only come to the same conclusion but in the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher had arrived at the generalisation that it was not the state that conditioned and regulated civil society but civil society that conditioned and regulated the state; and that therefore politics and their history were to be explained by economic conditions and their development 'and not the reverse.'

When Engels wrote these phrases in 1885 he represented his and Marx's insight into historical reality as more mature than it really was at the end of 1844. It was not till after their meeting and the beginning of their co-operation that these ideas were definitely formulated. Engels helped Marx to make concrete his quite abstract ideas concerning the relations of state and society; and Marx helped Engels to understand that the dependence of politics on material interests, class interests, a dependence the validity of which Engels had hitherto only been willing to admit as applying to England, was in reality valid for all countries alike. But he still maintained, when he once more trod the soil of his native land, that Germany could only be won for Communism by the insight of educated people.

Before the two friends parted they decided to cross swords with Bruno Bauer for the last time. Engels wrote his contribution to the planned pamphlet while still in Paris. It filled about twenty pages. Marx harried and pursued 'critical criticism' into its last lurking-place, put such enthusiasm into his attack on the jugglers with ideas that he almost appeared to be doing it for the sheer exhilaration of the thing, and to the surprise of Engels, who failed to see that their opponents' nullity merited such profusion, filled more than three hundred pages. The book appeared in February, 1845, under the title of The Holy Family (by which was meant the three brothers, Bruno, Edgar and Egbert Bauer) or the Critique of Critical Criticism. It did not attract much attention. Bruno Bauer and his followers had reduced themselves to absurdity and nobody took any more notice of them.

Engels found the Germany he returned to very different from the Germany he had left. Increasing impoverishment of wide masses of artisans and home-workers; the rapid spread of pauperisation, of which hitherto people had only read in sentimental French novels and pamphlets which were not taken very seriously; the rising of the weavers, the first movements among the industrial workers, all entirely new features in the picture that educated society, leading its own life, had formed of Germany, troubled and disturbed the bourgeoisie and forced them to face the problems that had arisen. A wave of strikes passed over Germany in 1844. Workers in the calico factories in Berlin rose in insurrection, railway workers in Westphalia did the same. There were strikes in Saxony, Hamburg and elsewhere. People discovered that there was something rumbling down below, something with a menace. That something was millions of people, of whom at most the police had taken notice of before. What had been discovered was the existence of the proletariat.

Pamphlets appeared giving recipes for overcoming 'the plague of the nineteenth century.' Bettina von Arnim wrote This Book Belongs to the King, in which she ruthlessly exposed the distress in the so-called Vogtland, near Berlin. Philanthropical societies were formed, with the support of Frederick William IV, 'societies for the good of the working classes.' In East Prussia they remained what their founders intended them to be, but in the western provinces Socialist-minded intellectuals soon gained an entry to them. At Elberfeld, Barmen, Cologne, Bielefeld, and elsewhere these societies became Socialist propaganda centres, education centres of and for the workers. It became necessary to dissolve the local Berlin society as early as the autumn of 1844.

The first German Socialist papers appeared at the same time--the Westfälische Dampfboot at Bielefeld, the Gesellschaftsspiegel at Elberfeld, the Sprecher at Hamm and others. The word 'Socialist' should not be understood in the sense in which it is understood to-day. Socialism meant sympathy with the suffering masses, indignation at injustice, appeal to man's nobler instincts, and belief in a better world. The descriptions of the lives of the workers which those newspapers contained are still valuable to-day. They shook the conscience of all whose sensibilities had not grown blunted. A Communist at that time was not much more than a resolute opponent of poverty, hunger and mass-distress.

Former contributors to the Rheinische Zeitung, like Moses Hess and D'Ester, were prominent among these Socialists-by-compassion. Engels flung himself enthusiastically into propaganda work. The way to the workers was closed to him. The authorities would not have allowed him to agitate for Communism among the workers. At the best he could only have spoken to very small groups. But for the time being Engels did not believe that kind of work to be so very necessary. He still pinned all his hopes to principles to which the intellectuals must be won over first.

In the winter of 1844-5 the victory of Communism seemed to him to be only a question of a few years, possibly even months. He wrote to Marx that the propaganda being carried out in Cologne was tremendous; there were marvellous fellows at Düsseldorf, there were Communists at Elberfeld and at Barmen even the commissary of police was a Communist. If they could only get to work directly on the people, they would soon be on top. Everyone, from rich to poor, came to the Communist meetings. Nor were their activities without success. Whichever way you turned you stumbled upon a Communist. 'Communism is the sole subject of conversation, and new adherents come to us every day. In the Wuppertal Communism is a reality, almost actually a power in the land.' The whole unreality of the movement is revealed by the phrase: 'The proletariat is busy, we do not know what with, and we can hardly know.'

Engel's position at Barmen gradually became untenable. The police started taking a very definite interest in his activities, and he had to reckon with the prospect of being arrested, possibly by the Communist commissary of police himself. Life with his family was 'a real dog's life.' All his father's religious fanaticism was re-awakened and Engel's emergence as a Communist stirred him to 'a glowing bourgeois fanaticism' besides. 'You have no idea of the maliciousness of the Christian heresy hunt after my soul,' he wrote to Marx in Brussels. 'My father only needs to discover the existence of the Critical Criticism book to turn me out of the house altogether. ... It is no longer to be borne.'

Marx's insistence on his friend's joining him in Brussels so that they might continue their common labours became more urgent than ever. At the beginning of April, 1845, Engels went to Brussels.