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Marx's General: The Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels

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Marx's General: The Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels
The collaborative friendship of Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx is surely among the most remarkable in all of history. Engels is generally perceived as the junior partner and he readily acknowledged that "Marx stood higher, saw further, and took a wider and quicker view than all the rest of us." But the most notable aspect of their relationship might be how much it depended on Engels' personal sacrifices and generosity, both material and intellectual.

As this fine biography of Engels documents, Engels bankrolled Marx; originated certain seminal socialist ideas; co-wrote, edited, and translated various publications issued under Marx's name; acted as Marxism's chief political operative and publicist; fulfilled the role of a close "uncle" to Marx's daughters; and even took on the responsibility for the paternity of Marx's illegitimate son.

Hunt does an especially good job of setting the intellectual context in which the ideas of Engels and Marx developed and matured. He succinctly summarizes Engels' reactions to Hegel, Schleiermacher, Strauss, Hess, Saint-Simon, Fourier, Proudhon, Carlyle, Owen, and the Chartists, for example. He also captures well the continental politics of the 1840s and the roles Engels played in the revolutionary events of 1848-49.

Between 1850 and 1870 Engels was a junior partner in the family textile firm of Ermen & Engels in Manchester, where he lived a life of contradictions. He earned a good income and was an outwardly respectable member of the local merchant establishment, a fox hunter and an attendee of society events, but he also welcomed a business crash in textiles as a boost for socialism, sometimes put his hand in the till to get money to send to Marx, and co-habited with a working-class paramour.

Hunt is able to provide only a little insight into whatever inner tension Engels may have felt regarding his two worlds. He alludes to illness and depression, but gives no details. Engels correspondence with Marx refers to the tedium of his job in "vile commerce," and we know that when he left he finally felt himself a "free man."

Marx's General is helpful in sorting out Engels' intellectual contributions from those of Marx. Engels' own Condition of the Working Class in England (1845), based on an early sojourn to Manchester, is itself something of a classic (though an imperfect one). Through that work and others one can trace to Engels several key themes and ideas that became part of the mainstream of Marxist thought.

Engels was generous and intellectually talented, but we learn that he also had his faults. For instance, apparently he could be something of a bully to his workers and he was often a relentless ad hominem attacker of ideological opponents in the internecine quarrels among activists on the left. He shared in the racism of his times, though he generally opposed racist forces in politics.

Various critics have indicted Engels as the source of certain of the more objectionable rigidities of subsequent communist ideology, but Hunt stresses that Engels was flexible and re-thought his positions over time as conditions changed. He cannot be held responsible for the subsequent terrible deeds of communist regimes, Hunt claims -- Engels was too much a believer in individuality, culture, and the good life to have gone along with Soviet communism .

Intended or not, the overall impression Hunt creates here is that that without Engels there would be no Marxism as we know it, that Engels was an equal partner, not a subordinate one.

Since the 1989 failure of communism, Marxism has fallen into disrepute. And yet harking back to my reading of "The Condition of the Working Class in Manchester in 1843" for a graduate course in field methods I was teaching forty years ago, I can recall the importance of both Marx and Engels' view of the world to my understanding of the inequalities of capitalist industrial society, America's imperialism in Vietnam and Latin America, and the civil rights movement. "The Condition of the Working Class" was indeed the first great work of urban sociology. Although bound by Marx and Engels' emerging blinders of class as the only independent variable, the study really takes one into the world of the industrial jetsam of Manchester. I set it as a model of how my students might learn as they immersed themselves in the multifold settings of Boston in the late 1960s. Available to them was a ghetto whose condition mirrored the oppression of Manchester, a dying factory economy being replaced by hi-tech, intellectual and medical services, an Irish and Italian-American resistance to integration, a working class and liberal rebellion against a war and an emerging counterculture. There abounded many a Mary Burns to take my Engels-like students into the cellars and demonstrations which were sprouting about them. Thank you Engels, no matter how wrong you might have been about the science of history.


As the author of this biography makes clear you can not hold Marx or Engels at fault for Stalinist brutality, Maoist insanity, or Pol Pot's murder of his own people, despite the fact they were done in the name of Marxism. Can we blame Thomas Paine for lynchings, the two million Vietnamese we killed, or the blockade of Cuba, Guatemala's right wing, or the US support of Jonas Savimbi's rape of Angola? And While Marx's political paranoia is sometimes cited as the root of communist sectarianism, that is unfair. Marx, lacking almost any power, was no worse than any backroom politician or bitter intellectual nit-picker who writes in the New York Review of Book. And Engels was quite capable of changing his opinions especially after Marx was no longer around to hold him to account.

Although this volume brings little astonishingly new to our understanding of Engels, it gives a very good picture of what kind of a man Engels was, a real polymath and a likeable person at that. Although during the times they had for carousing where Marx seemed humane and personable, Marx played the misanthrope (except with respect to his family) to Engels' true gentleman. Engels' multilayered household filled with his mistresses and their kin, then Marx's offspring and their families, reminds me a bit of the image of Leonard Euler, mathematician to the Tsar, sitting with his grandkids climbing all over him while he turned out folio after folio of brilliant mathematics. In the midst of all this life Engels kept thinking. Before Engels died he made good Marx's bastard son whose paternity he claimed to save Marx's bourgeois reputation. He nursed his mistresses and house keepers in their last moments. He paid everyone's debts. He supported Marx despite the latter's whining about money and secret contempt for his benefactor. And while doing this he both worked at business which he hated, lived publicly the English gentleman, edited Marx's research, ghost wrote articles under Marx's name, and finally in retirement produced intellectual work that could have been an ordinary geniuses life out put. Not bad. He even came to terms with history. The bitterness of defeat in 1848 (although Engels got distracted by pleasure-seeking during part of it) led to Marx and Engel's taking the temperature of each event to see whether it would precipitate the inevitable revolution. But after Marx died Engels became more of a realist eventually looking to the Social Democratic Party in Germany as a route to democratic take over by workers---although he thought revolution might happen elsewhere. Both Engels and Marx clearly saw that the British working class was bought off by the profits of Imperialism, an insight which would be crucial if Americas current lower half could see and understand it. If Engels had kept a guest list one might find most of the names of the prominent turn of the century socialists on it. Although Lenin was in his twenties and Trotsky and Stalin teenagers when Engels died Engels deeply influenced the generation of socialists who came before them.

For all his flaws, Engels, as they say in Yiddish, was a mench. I am glad that Tristam Hunt brought him back to life for us.

Charlie Fisher emeritus professor and author of Dismantling Discontent: Buddha's Way Through Darwin's World

Tristram Hunt, a lecturer in British history at Queen Mary, University of London, has written a fine biography of Engels. He shows how Engels developed by working through Shelley's poetry, Strauss' Life of Jesus, Hegel's Philosophy of History, Feuerbach's critique of Christianity, and Carlyle's two volumes on Cromwell.

He shows how Engels was both a patriot and an internationalist. Engels reported capitalism human costs, first in Barmen in Prussia, then in Manchester, in the brilliant Condition of the Working Class in England, where, as Engels, wrote, "I accuse the English bourgeoisie before the entire world of murder, robbery and other crimes on a massive scale."

He co-wrote the Communist Manifesto and made a huge contribution to Das Kapital, `the foundation text of scientific socialism and one of the classics of Western political thought'. His work with Marx was `Western philosophy's greatest intellectual partnership'.

Engels was a great enthusiast for science: "Darwin, by the way, whom I'm reading just now, is absolutely splendid." As a materialist and atheist, he knew that matter existed independently of, and before, any consciousness.

Hunt notes, "He always believed in a workers' party led by the working class itself (rather than intellectuals and professional revolutionaries)". He worked in the General Council of the First International and with Britain's trade unions.

He opposed colonialism and supported the Indian and Chinese peoples' wars for independence. Hunt writes, "When it came to the raw politics of race, Engels was always on the right side." He exposed the ruling classes' exploitation of the colonies' raw materials, cheap labour and unprotected markets. In 1882 he forecast, "I would consider a European war to be a disaster; this time it would prove frightfully serious and inflame chauvinism everywhere for years to come."

Hunt concludes, "He remained that restless, inquisitive, productive and passionate architect of scientific socialism who first emerged in the 1840s. ... His critique speaks down the ages" - `the insight that the modern state was merely a front for bourgeois class interests', the growth of finance capital, the instability of capitalism, its inevitable crises and its absolute decline.

Though most Marxist will probably cringe at my title, based on Hunt's thoroughly researched book, that's what he was. While Marx labored (if you can call it that) away on theory and thought, Engels spent his time in the capitalist trenches. How else would you describe a man who spent forty years supporting Marx and his family, going so far as to accept all of the Victorian Age "outrage" by admitting to being the "father" of Marx's illegitimate son? While Marx 'dithered' away and spent years on tangential ideas before finally finishing "Das Kapital Vol.1", Engels worked and ran a family textile mill in Manchester for nineteen years. That is sacrifice.

On the other hand, by spending those years in Manchester, Engels allowed both himself and Marx to lead the comfortable lives of 'edjucated gentlemen'. During the time that Marx wrote "The Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital" he had full time housekeepers (one who gave birth to the son that Engels acknowledged and supported), and servants to help with the children. These were not men who enjoyed living as members of the working class (though Engels did enjoy 'slumming' with them) 'proletariat' and longed for the acceptance by the members of 'society' who shunned them.

Unlike Marx who led the life of an 'intellectual,academic and Victorian gentleman' (he was married and took care to educate his three daughters), Engels spend most of his life in 'unwedded' bliss with three different woman (though he seldom traveled with them as 'wives'). It was very much 'live as we say not as we do'. Though Engels was not Marx's amanuensis, he did do most of the editing of 'The Communist Manifesto and volume one of Das Kapital' and put together volumes two and three from Marx's notes. Based on Hunt, Marx was the machine that constantly put together material in 'fits and starts' whereas Engels put them together is a coherency. After Marx death he became the 'fabled' collaborator who was adored by most of European Socialist 'groupies' who saw him as the fount of all knowledge when it came to Marx's ideology.

All this above is how Hunt has characterized Engels in this biography. Though it's appears biased (Hunt does a lot of apologizing for Marx and Engels lifestyles) most of it seems to be well researched and documented. You can tell from the comments Hunt inserts that he has read extensively both pro- and con- opinions of both of them. At the end he goes a long way trying to explaining why Marxist-Leninism in terms of Stalinism was a misguided (and violent) attempt to implement Marxist-Engelism.

Hunt gives it a yeoman's try at defining 'material dialecticism' or 'dialectic materialism' but I've always felt that (using some one else description) trying to fathom this concept is like 'dancing the polka when you are up to your knees in molasses' or 'explaining the theory of the Holy Trinity'. It's best if you just take it on 'faith' and move on and save yourself the headache. I do appreciate Hunt's discussion of the idea of 'revolution from the top down' as being unworkable whether from the Left (Stalinism) or the Right (Fascism). True revolution (as Marx and Engels would agree) has to come from the bottom up.

Very interesting book, though I did find some parts difficult reading unless your a social theorist.

Zeb Kantrowitz

One of Friedrich Engels' toughest jobs was managing Karl Marx - `do try and finish your political economy book', Engels had implored Marx in 1844 in what was to become a weary refrain before Marx finally finished volume 1 of Das Kapital in 1867. Equally challenging for the co-founder of Marxism was Engels' twenty year stint as a cotton capitalist to financially support Marx.

Engels found his role as mill manager in Manchester `beastly' and detested the bourgeois lifestyle (with the exception of riding with hounds and well-stocked wine cellars), preferring to devote his leisure hours to Manchester's working class.

His 1845 The Condition of the Working Class in England was the young Engels' brilliant documentary polemic on the poverty and wretchedness foisted on working class Manchester by capitalist Manchester. It caught Marx's eye and the two cemented a lifelong emotional and ideological bond.

Engels, however, played `second fiddle' to Marx and only after the publication of Das Kapital was he able to end his `self-loathing existence' as a capitalist and return to his love of politics, becoming, after Marx's death in 1883, the leading adviser for socialists around the globe, maintaining open house and producing a prodigious flood of correspondence, pamphlets and books.

Hunt's biography of Engels reveals a man with a large appetite for life (languages, hiking, laughter, literature, science, dancing, swimming, fencing, carousing and, of course, politics), whose intellectual and political contribution to revolutionary socialism was pioneering and profound.

Unfortunately, this Engels suffers a slow death from a hundred caveats by Hunt. On the basis, often enough, of thin or no evidence, Hunt gives us Engels the cruel mill owner, the sexist, racist, ethnic-cleansing imperialist, and political bully and sectarian.

On some matters, where the evidence is cast-iron, Engels is not beyond reproach. The early Engels did hold ethnocentrist stereotypes but, although Hunt concedes that Engels later renounced these views, the mud sticks. Where the evidence against Engels is unclear, Hunt reverses the principle of guilt beyond reasonable doubt and hangs Engels out to dry morally, claiming that the young Engels in France exploited needy women by paying for sex although this remains an open question.

Hunt also seems much more exercised than Engels by the contradiction between Engels the cotton lord and communist revolutionary. "The original champagne socialist" is berated by Hunt for never daring to question his own place in the "commercial-imperial complex", despite Engels' extra-curricular activities which aimed to undermine that very system.

Hunt also condemns Engels as a sinister political manipulator and enforcer of ideological correctness. The "Grand Inquisitor" is said to have been the ultimate sectarian, rejecting all who would not toe the Marx-Engels line, "stamping out ideological deviation" and fathering, through a case of political genetics, the subsequent history of communist purges and factional war generally on the left. The defence that Engels (and Marx) deployed better, more compelling, ideas is not allowed into Hunt's kangaroo court nor are their political rivals presented as anything but innocent victims when often it was they who were the sectarians who raised their doctrinaire program above what Engels and Marx called the `real movement' of the working class.

Engels' life needs an honest accounting, asking the following questions of him. Were there polemical excesses? Were there political misjudgements? Could Engels be intolerant and dogmatic? Was Engels over-optimistic concerning the timeline of revolution? Did he misread the political and economic climate at times? Was he less than perfect? Was he, in short, all too human and not a secular god on a pedestal?

To which the answer would be `Yes' but an answer which needs to be framed in the context of a man of his time as much as against it, learning and inevitably making mistakes but also making tremendous advances in socialist theory and practice.

Hunt, fundamentally, lacks the political sympathy with his subject that could have turned his biography, although quite useful in parts, into the critically-informed and well-rounded biography that Engels deserves.

While I have read some of Engels' works and many of the Marx-Engels works and, of course, many of Marx' "solo" authored works, I had little information about Friedrich Engels the person. I did know that there was a tension between his role as a socialist thinker and his business role, making money off of the work of proletarians. Of course, the counterargument is that, as much as he was uncomfortable with this, it allowed him to financially support Marx's life work.

I found this a good biography of a major figure in politics and political thought. Whether or not one might agree with Marx and Engels, they are important figures historically. The more that we understand the context in which their work developed, the better off we are in understanding the whys and wherefores of such writing.

Many have viewed Engels as a second rate thinker. This book seems to do a nice job in debunking that. The evidence here (and elsewhere) is that he made genuine contributions to joint works with Marx (such as "The German Ideology"); he also wrote some solid works on his own; he ended up completing "Das Kapital" after Marx's death, using the latter's almost undecipherable notes and fragments for these manuscripts.

The book contributes more than summaries of Marx' and Engels' writings. We learn quite a bit about Marx--and surely a great deal about Engels. They became friends and collaborators while in Germany. They dabbled in revolutionary movements, without accomplishing a great deal by their active work on the parapets. Their family lives diverged greatly, with Marx having a brood of children, doting on them. Engels only formally married once, as his second partner lay near death. His relationship with the Burns sisters is rather nicely told--a tempestuous relationship with the elder sister and a more comfortable relationship with the younger sister, who became Engels' partner upon the death of the elder sister. Engels' relationships with Marx's children and sons-in-law add a nice, sometimes poignant, touch.

Some questions arise for me in the selection of subjects in this book. For instance, I would have thought that at least a few pages should have been devoted to "The Economic and Philosophical" manuscripts, in which Marx began playing with themes that were later elaborated (e.g., alienation).

The story of Engels' life is valuable in its own right. The tension between his business-oriented family and his own youthful radical views. He often found himself on the "outs" with his family. He was pretty wild while young, drinking a great deal and living a reasonably dissolute life. His interest in issues of politics and philosophy saw him attending lectures of major figures and reading the works of key philosophers. His relationship with a group of Young Hegelians ("die Freien") accelerated his radical thinking. It was during that time that he met Marx. Their collaboration (and friendship) began at that point.

The book does a nice job of showing how dedicated Engels was toward Marx, subordinating his own philosophical ambitions to support the work of Marx. At that, the two worked together on some major co-authored works, such as "The Communist Manifesto" and "The German Ideology" and "The Holy Family." Engels wrote a book that generated some visibility early on, "The Condition of the Working Class in England" as well as later in life, such as "The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State."

He was more than just a writer and a collaborator of Marx; He was a political activist (although he and Marx weren't always comfortable working in organizations where people would disagree with them). He played a role in socialist organizations, often in leadership positions. He wrote pamphlets and articles that advocated change.

If you are interested in learning more about Friedrich Engels as a thinker, a political actor, and as a person, this book will be useful reading.

It is no insult to the author to suggest that a fine piece of historical biography deserves a top Amazon rating, but at the same time to urge a more sophisticated take on Marx, Engels, and Marxism. This book is very well researched, organized, and written with an occasionally amused ironic style that will bring back even the drowsiest reader. Hunt's research, again, demonstrates the unity of the work on Marx and Engels and their profound friendship, yet their very different lives. It's a very good history. Sometimes, good gossip too. But it takes more than good history to really grapple with the relationship of Marx and Engels and their legacy. It takes a solid study of dialectical materialism which Hunt the historian apparently does not have the background to address. And it takes a more extended take on the long term results of Marx and Engels theory and practice. For example, what of the remarkable difference between Lenin's early work on dialectical materialism and his later Hegel notes, far more sophisticated (and so far beyond thesis/antithesis/synthesis), or, if we are to deal with the debasement of Marxism in the USSR under Stalin (as our author does), would it not be good to note that he eradicated the key, "negation of the negation," and why? It's no quibble to want more, but it's no disrespect either. I am more than happy I spent the candle and the time. I am urging this on friends and students.

"Marx's General" by Tristram Hunt is a model biography. Engels was a man who lived a life of contradictions. On the one hand he was a great revolutionary who fought in the trenches. On the other hand he was an efficient factory owner and speculator. He was a millionaire communist who cared more about human relations and academics then money.

Two questions emerge for Hunt. Would Marx have been considered a 'great man' without the financial and intellectual support of Engels? And, is Engels responsible for the tragedy of the Soviet Union?

Hunt concludes that it is highly unlikely Marx would have been remembered without the brutal tactics and funding of Friedrich Engels. With friends Engels was willing to discuss serious topics without the prevalence of dogma. He was a gifted and open-minded person. Around outsiders, or those who strayed too far from the tenets of Marx, he was a brutal bulldog. No ad hominem attack was off limits if it meant winning converts to Marxism.

In regards to the second question:

"Neither a Leveler nor a statist, this great lover of the good life, passionate advocate of individuality, and enthusiastic believer in literature, culture, art, and music as an open forum could never have acceded to the Soviet communism of the twentieth century, all the Stalinist claims of his paternity notwithstanding.

Nor could he have accepted our current situation."

Engels nearly lived a life of fulfillment. He witnessed a full range of emotions and experiences in his life. The only thing that escaped him was the culmination of his ideals: A Marxist revolution.

Hunt provides us with a complex portrayal of a really multifaceted man He comes across as one part intellectual and brilliant writer, one part man of action, one part loyal friend, one part "true believer", and one part, cad. There are other parts too, he must have been a talented businessman and his capacity for alcohol, as portrayed by Hunt, seemed amazing.
The book was written with solid but not overwhelming scholarship. I'm no expert but from the bits and pieces of my reading in Marxist history and theory he seems to know his stuff (better than I do at any rate). The book reads well thanks to a nicely fluent style and some healthy doses of irony. It traces Engels from his pious Prussian roots through his apprenticeship in the family textile firm in Manchester, early years at the forefront of revolutionary upheavals throughout Europe and his subsequent return to the family industry to support Marx and his family. Engels is characterized by Hunt as a gregarious yet committed theorist and activist - he actually participated in some of the shooting in 1848 and became a bit of an expert on military strategy - providing considerable, and we suspect essential, financial and intellectual resources to Marx while accepting his own role as "second fiddle" in the joint struggle for socialist ideological dominance. In this sense it seemed that they did as much or probably more fighting with their co-socialists than with the forces of reaction. Hunt is clear with regard to Engels's less savory, sometimes deeply chilling ideas, his divisive manipulations of organizations and party politics, not to mention the lousy way he could treat former friends and mentors was hardly commendable. Still it is hard to not be impressed by his passion for the cause of the oppressed, his writing skills and his approach to learning, no significant area of the human condition escaped his interest..
Engels who outlived his friend and collaborator spent his last years, not only as a international socialist guru but a kind of pater families to the Marx sisters and their less then sterling partners. He had become a no less committed socialist but one more prepared to listen to alternative strategies (to violence) to its establishment. In 1895 he died of esophageal cancer at the age of 74. His doctor at the time wouldn't tell him of the disease or of prognosis. But being a person so interested in science he probably had a pretty good idea of what was wrong and that it wouldn't end well. All the same he seems to have faced it with grace and dignity.
The book makes a strong case for the value of Engels's own writings on working conditions and in a spirited end section acquits him of the charges that aligned him with the rigid orthodoxies of Leninism and Stalinism, etc In the end however Engels emerges as someone with a clear eyed understanding of the evils of unbridled capitalism. Surely we could use some his passion and perceptive analysis in our present circumstances.