A Century of Change by Sheila Rowbotham

In advance of Phil Collins’ Ceremony, MIF has asked several leading British writers for a personal take on Friedrich Engels and his legacy. Today, Sheila Rowbotham traces Engels’ influence from the Manchester of the 1840s to the Russian Revolution and the First World War – which each changed the world exactly a century ago.

Friedrich Engels, the man who was to become Karl Marx’s closest collaborator and loyal friend, arrived in Manchester for the first time in 1842, aged 22. The son of a wealthy German textile manufacturer could well have been oblivious to the brutal consequences of rapid industrialism. Instead, he set about documenting the careless brutality of the newly concentrated form of capitalism that surrounded him. He based his case on a thorough study of working and living conditions. Drawing on doctors’ statements, he revealed not just accidents in the cotton factories but the slow maiming of child labourers. Noting the broader consequences of mechanisation in the factories, he traced their impact on unregulated outworking. Dry reports on health and sanitation revealed two families living in two rooms, while statistics on common lodging houses showed that damp cellars were the homes of many thousands. Using his own eyes, he noted the cotton goods drying on Manchester washing lines and the men’s shoddy Sunday best overcoats, neither of which kept out the damp cold.

Helped by Mary Burns, a working-class Mancunian who became his guide and his lover, he learned by interviewing the workers themselves. He heard how some starved slowly, some killed themselves swiftly, while others stole. But he was also told how, amid devastated lives and the most ruthless forms of exploitation, some resisted, through trade unions, through envisioning an alternative in socialism or drawing up a Charter of political and social demands for immediate changes. The resulting book, The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845) pioneered a new kind of documentary polemic about class and sex inequalities. Admired by Marx, it helped to forge the long personal and political comradeship between the two men.

Both men were primarily preoccupied with how the changes in production brought a new class into being. However, both were also aware how men and women were affected by society in differing ways, and in 1884, Engels explored the causes of women’s inequality in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. Engels’ 19th-century anthropological theories about evolutionary stages in human societies have dated, but his insights into the significance of the social consequences of reproduction, both economically and biologically have stood the test of time, becoming a central tenet in socialist feminist thinking.

Personally, Engels, the sensuous man of action, was a somewhat contradictory exponent of women’s liberation. Capable of offering support to thoughtful rebellious women like Marx’s daughter Eleanor, his correspondence is splattered with crude caricatures of women he did not favour. Nicknamed ‘the General’ because of his enthusiasm for military strategy, after Marx’s death he proceeded to order his friend’s thought into schemas and denounce deviancy. Unwittingly, Engels became the first ‘Marxist’.

However, by an irony of history, it was to be Engels’ writing on women that provided a much-needed ballast for socialist women such as Clara Zetkin in Germany, who sought recognition for working-class women’s specific subordination. During the early 20th century, as a mass socialist movement began to emerge as a political force, women on the left began meeting internationally. This new left optimistically envisaged changes for women and for men at work and in the home, in the public political sphere and in personal relations. Campaigns were mounted for basic human rights, for labour laws and for welfare reforms.

But workers divided tragically when war broke out in Europe in 1914. National identity trumped international solidarity. The majority acquiesced. To oppose the First World War took considerable courage because it meant being branded as a traitor.

Neither Marx or Engels lived to see workers from the belligerent countries murdering one another in their thousands on those muddy battlefields of wasted human blood. Technology enabled this slaughter to reach an unprecedented scale of efficiency.

Before the war, Clara Zetkin, along with other socialist women, had supported a peace initiative from the British Independent Labour Party. By 1915, there was talk of a ‘Women’s War Against War’ in Britain. Early that year, 28 delegates from eight countries made the difficult journey to Berne in Switzerland. This was followed by the broader women’s peace conference at The Hague in Holland. Despite the war, women contrived to meet internationally, and the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, an organisation which still exists today, was to be formed. A strong branch was set up in Manchester by supporters of women’s suffrage.

The war and the Russian Revolution in 1917 meant that the authorities in Britain were as worried about feminist and socialist supporters of peace as they were of potential German spies. During the 1970s, when I interviewed two members of the Independent Labour Party, Florence and Maurice Hann, they remarked wryly that during the war they kept the membership list of their local London No Conscription Fellowship branch buried in the garden. Assuming it was safe when peace was declared in 1918, they dug up the tin, only to be raided by the police, who seized it.

The triumph of the Bolsheviks did not occur in conditions that either Marx or Engels had envisaged. Nonetheless, the formation of the Soviet Union resulted in the two founders of Communism reaching people in many lands. Unfortunately, it exported their thinking as doctrinal certainties embodied in great leaders. Soviet iconography transposed Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin into bewhiskered granite blocks.

Chipped and smashed since the 1980s, Engels has survived in a street name in his home town Wuppertal and city bearing his name in modern Russia. A statue known as ‘Engels’ beard’ bristles in Salford, and now another statue of him is being brought all the way from the Ukraine to Manchester.

Even though the man described by the former Chartist George Julian Harney as ‘the Prince of Optimists’ got it wrong and Manchester did not erupt in revolution, the inequalities he outlined are still with us today. Friedrich Engels, the great critic of capitalism, deserves to be honoured in a city with a proud tradition of radical defiance.

Sheila Rowbotham is a socialist feminist historian. Her latest book is Rebel Crossings: New Women, Free Lovers and Radicals in Britain and the United States (Verso, 2016). This piece is part of a short series of personal blog entries commissioned by MIF to mark Phil Collins’ Ceremony, which closes MIF17 on Sunday 16 July 2017.