ONE OF the memories of my left-wing youth is of going to a demonstration in Manchester, in charge of a confident Marxist who led the coachload of eager protesters on a guided tour.
‘And this,’ he declared, ‘is housing condemned by Engels in 1845 and STILL INHABITED!’
No one thought to consider the possibility that filthy capitalist Victorian oppressors might actually have put up quite robust buildings. That was because Friedrich Engels was one of the two founding fathers of communism and the 1845 text that exposed the horrors of life for the Manchester poor, The Condition of the Working Class in England, was and remains Marxist gospel.
It formed the foundations of the Communist Manifesto three years later. The Manifesto featured spectres haunting Europe, man everywhere in chains, and the central declaration of Marx and Engels’s scientific discovery: ‘The history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class struggles.’
Through all the decades of global-scale murder and starvation inflicted in the name of Marx since the 1840s, the shining example of Engels’s reporting on the misery of Manchester has remained a beacon to the faithful. Succeeding generations of Marxists have relied on it to sustain the vision of a perfect society launched inevitably from class war.
But now it seems there may be a small flaw. A Cambridge historian has done some work among the census records and discovered that in describing class relations in Manchester, ‘Engels exaggerated and took creative liberties’.
Engels reported that the ‘money aristocracy’ of the city, concerned with nothing but profit, lived on the ‘breezy heights’ of the suburbs, ‘without ever seeing that they are in the midst of the grimy misery that lurks to the right and the left’.
The Guardian summed it up in a gushing piece on Engels’s work a few years ago: ‘Engels understood that the city’s spatial dynamics – its streets, houses, factories, and warehouses – were expressions of social and political power. The struggle between bourgeois and proletariat was tangible in street design, transport system and planning process.’
Historian Emily Chung has now come to a different conclusion. According to the Guardian this week, ‘more than 60 per cent of buildings housing the wealthiest classes also housed unskilled labourers. In Manchester’s “slums”, more than 10 per cent of the population was from the better-off, employed classes’.
Ms Chung told the paper: ‘Manchester’s wealthier classes did not confine themselves to townhouses in the city centre and suburban villas, as we’ve been led to believe.’ She said that doctors, engineers, architects, surveyors, teachers, managers and shop owners were living alongside low-paid weavers and spinners.
She added: ‘I wouldn’t go as far to as to say Engels was wrong.’ Well, nor would I if, like Miss Chung, I was a PhD student labouring to get original work recognised and speaking to the Guardian. She is based among academics who have spent their lives trying to demonstrate the truth of Marx and Engels’s scientific analysis of class struggle.
What I would say is that Engels lied. The youthful radical who maintained that the bourgeois and the workers lived separate lives cannot have failed to have noticed the reality now betrayed in the census data. His claim just wasn’t true.
Since the Russian Revolution, communists have maintained that it is necessary to lie to serve the cause. Capitalists never tell the truth, the dogma runs, so communists must fight with the same weapons.
This doesn’t apply only to the Stalins and the Maos and their modern-day successors like that fat bloke busily starving the population of North Korea. The British Communist Party used to bat away allegations that it ever took Moscow gold, dear me, no. The Morning Star newspaper survived because of the miraculous generosity of its dedicated readers.
Until 1989, when it turned out the British CP had relied on Soviet subsidy throughout its history.
Or, one of my own favourites, Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie and the US communists in 1940 condemning in song the evil British warmongers making hostilities for profit against Hitler.
We now discover that the empire of lies that was communism wasn’t generated solely as a means to fight capitalism. The whole outrageous rackety pseudo-scientific nonsense was based on a lie to begin with.
It is too late to help the many millions of victims of communist dictators. Since 1989 most Marxists have moved on to what they think are more plausible variations of the doctrines, specialising in new lies about colonialism, race and gender.
But Engels’s ‘creative liberties’ do leave us one permanent lesson. When anyone makes some sweeping claim about the looming future and claims it’s all inevitable and scientific, count your spoons.
