09.22.09

Marx and Engels, a bio of Engels.

Posted in Booknotes at 5:45 pm by nemo

Marx’s General: The Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels (Hardcover)
by Tristram Hunt

Just finished reading/skimming this new biography of Engels, which is a good short history of the relationship of two of the most unusual men of the nineteenth century.
By a quirk of fate the reputation of Engels has fallen down, and he is seen as some kind of junior partner to Marx.
How did this happen? The answer is that Marx exudes an ambiance of very high intelligence beside Engels who agreed very generously to be his ‘manager’ and to support him for many years, to the detriment of his own creative potential.

That surely was a mistake, made inevitable by circumstance, and has put a jink on subsequent leftism by promoting an image of Smart Marx The Jew and Stupid Engels the Gentile, which has been a calamity for the left and passed into the unconscious of all parties as a debilitating psychology veering on antisemitism by Gentiles and chauvinism by leftist Jews who have made a cult of Marx the genius which has to be controlled by a Jewish left, all of which is false, and which has stunted the growth of a socialist understanding. The worst of it is that second rate Jewish intellectuals have made closed cult of Marxist theory, or mythology, doing that on a high enough level to make the confusions of Marxism indecipherable.
We fail to note the facts, which show Engels to be a highly intelligent person indeed, and fully the equal of Marx. I don’t take sides here, but do appreciate the effort in this book, which is too timid, often retreating from its clear aim, to set the record straight.

Reading between the lines we can suddenly see the facts of the case which show Engels in some ways to be much more intelligent than Marx who was a prima donna of the German Hegelian generation but whose life work ended up as a dud. It was one of the mysteries of this relationship that Marx never produced the result intended, to the frustration of Engels, who finally ended up doing the job himself, with his (equally problematical) late works.
And it was Engels who picked up the pieces and stitched together the work that Marx quietly abandoned, for reasons that are not clear. The great promise and expectation about the brilliant Marx of the thirties/forties never fully materialized. We got the monumental blast of the first volume of Capital, which made its point, but failed to create a science of socialism.
This should not be misunderstood: both men embarked on the impossible, and accomplished a basic result against great odds, whatever the calamitous outcome in the next century.

If we examine the record we see that Engels did fully as much as Marx, from the brilliant Condition of the Working Class in Manchester, which set the whole tone for what followed, to the German Ideology, to the brilliant late texts, after Engels had passed his prime and been liberated from his slavery to support Marx/
His Socialism, Utopian or Scientific jumpstarted the modern left, where the first volume of Capital lingered a while in the background, and finally imposed its false eminence on those who didn’t understand it and were set up for a fall by the glaring lacunae of theory lurking behind the great blast at capital in that strange and incomplete text. (I should hasten to add that I find problems with Engels’ late works, as much as with Marx)
The text left the followers of Marx in the lurch and subject to the easy refutations of reactionary critics who learned early how to explode Marx’s theoretical pretensions.
How many fallen comrades have been quijoted into oblivion by the bad analysis of Marx of the labor theory of value, to the chuckles and sneering private derision of rightist economics hucksters, who soon learned how to use calculus to fool the public with marginal economics, leaving Marx in the dust. It may be that Marx in fact saw the handwriting on the wall and quietly ditched the game.
And we have to wonder if the famous Communist Manifesto wasn’t far more the work of the journalistically nimble Engels than Marx.
Whatever the case, and I find both men to be entirely fascinating in their own way, and two men of exceptional intelligence attempting to ratchet social consciousness to a new self-consciousness, but who also discombobulated the future left by their often inept thinking, most notably their mesmerized confusion over the dangerously muddling Hegel. Both Marx and Engels, for all their smarts, could not master the riddle of Hegel, no doubt because they were too immersed in it, and never saw its beginnings or larger dimension in the rise of Kantianism. The result was the confusion over dialectic by both men who produced what in the end can only be called bad social theory, which has burdened the legacy of socialism ever since.

In any case, this bio of Engels is worth reading and shows Engels at this best. This morbid relationship of Engels supporting Marx served nonetheless its purpose, but it deprived Engels of a lifetime in his prime of creative work which might have better served the left than the obscure and nearly incomprehensible Capital. Engels saw the game early after the forty-eight revolutions, and impatiently urged Marx on to produce his book, but in the end it took seventeen years, and in reality never came off, a strange enigma. Engels might have produced a slew of classics in that space.
We will never know.
But it is vulgar Marx cultishness to depreciate Engels who consciously made a sacrifice to assist Marx, who didn’t live in any garrett but in a fashionable upper middle class life style, complete with class snobbery, and not a little chicanery in his exploitations of Engels.
Whatever the case, the left needs to move on and properly evaluate the legacy of both of these men, whose brilliance and equal limitations now constrain the left, condemning to sterile cultic repitions of the past.

The point here is not the lives of these men in a romantic image, but the complete absence of a left at a moment of capitalist outrageousness, as the followers of Marxism are caught in an ideology they cannot modify or revise with creative research.
The absence of a real left has clearly left the masters of modern economy emboldened to simply rewrite the crisis according to their own wishes, unlike the era of the thirties where a vigorous left made the achievements of social democracy a possibility. Smart Marx (and Engels) did an unsmart thing which is to have locked the brains of his followers in a box where the theory pastiche of his later phase is taken as some kind of science beyond examination.

Permalink