[Marxism] A communist and a gentleman

[Pat Costello]

A reveiw of a new biography of Friedrich Engels

Marx's right-hand man was an industrialist who liked hunting, drinking and women. Roy Hattersley savours the irony
  
My boast that I am among the small number of people who have started to read Friedrich Engels' Anti-Dühring has to be qualified by the admission that I am also among the even smaller number of people who have not finished reading it. So I was distressed to discover, from Tristram Hunt's new biography of Engels, that what I found to be an unintelligible book is a "pacey, engaging and comprehensible explanation of the science of Marxism". Happily, Hunt's biography of Engels is clear and concise; indeed, he possesses a remarkable talent for explaining what is usually incomprehensible. That certainly includes dialectical materialism - "the critical tool for reading society's endless shifting contradictions and readiness for revolution which was Marx's definitive contribution to western thought".

In The Frock-Coated Communist, Hunt is helped to make the obscure plain by the assiduous use of quotations from Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, a rewrite of Anti-Dühring that is very nearly what we now call "a popular version". In it, Engels wrote that when the means of production become state property, "the proletariat abolishes itself as a proletariat, abolishes all class distinction and class antagonism, abolishes also the State as a State". I am still not sure how the thought-process that concludes with this fantasy can be called scientific rather than utopian, but, thanks to Hunt, my greater understanding of the general theory leaves me with one firm conviction: I am pro-Dühring.

History has made Engels appear the back end of the pantomime horse that produced The Communist Manifesto, with Marx at the front determining direction and speed. We learn from Hunt that although the seductive, heroic prose was pure Marx, "much of the hard intellectual grind... had been carried out by Engels". Without him, the call that "working men of all countries unite" would have been just more windy polemic. Industry and thought are what were to be expected from the author of The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844, a survey that does far more than just report how the poor lived. When Engels, describing the Manchester slums, concludes that "only a physically degenerate race, robbed of all humanity, degraded, reduced morally and physically to bestiality, could feel comfortable and at home" in them, he clearly lacks the sympathy that, in later generations, motivated Charles Booth and Benjamin Seebohm Rowntree.

But unlike the earlier social scientists, he offered a comprehensive, if unattractive, method of righting the wrongs and, more important, an intellectually compelling analysis of how they came about. The Frock-Coated Communist brings Engels out from under Marx's shadow. That is the book's importance. Its attraction, as whoever chose the title realised, lies in the description of his origins and lifestyle. 

full text:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/apr/26/frock-coated-communist-tristram-hunt