From: jeffreydanielrubard@gmail.com   
      
   Preface   
      
   On 30 June 1869, Friedrich Engels, a Manchester mill owner, gave up his job in   
   the family business after nearly twenty years. Ready to greet him on his   
   return to his small cottage in the Chorlton suburbs were his lover Lizzy Burns   
   and houseguest Eleanor    
   Marx, daughter of his old friend Karl. "I was with Engels when he reached the   
   end of his forced labour and I saw what he must have gone through all those   
   years," Eleanor later wrote of Engels's final day at work. "I shall never   
   forget the triumph with    
   which he exclaimed 'for the last time!' as he put on his boots in the morning   
   to go to his office. A few hours later we were standing at the gate waiting   
   for him. We saw him coming over the little field opposite the house where he   
   lived. He was swinging    
   his stick in the air and singing, his face beaming. Then we set the table for   
   a celebration and drank champagne and were happy."1   
      
   Friedrich Engels was a textile magnate and foxhunter, a member of the   
   Manchester Royal Exchange, and president of the city's Schiller Institute. He   
   was a raffish, high-living, heavy-drinking devotee of the good things in life:   
   lobster salad, Château    
   Margaux, Pilsener beer, and expensive women. But Engels also for forty years   
   funded Karl Marx, looked after his children, soothed his furies, and provided   
   one half of history's most celebrated ideological partnership as coauthor of   
   The Communist    
   Manifesto and cofounder of what would come to be known as Marxism. Over the   
   course of the twentieth century, from Chairman Mao's China to the Stasi state   
   of the GDR, from the anti-imperial struggle in Africa to the Soviet Union   
   itself, various    
   manifestations of this compelling philosophy would cast their shadow over a   
   full third of the human race. And as often as not, the leaders of the   
   socialist world would look first to Engels rather than Marx to explain their   
   policies, justify their    
   excesses, and shore up their regimes. Interpreted and misinterpreted, quoted   
   and misquoted, Friedrich Engels—the frock-coated Victorian cotton   
   lord—became one of the central architects of global communism.   
      
   Today, a journey to Engels begins at Moscow's Paveletsky rail station. From   
   this shabbily romantic tsarist-era terminal, the rusting sleeper train heaves   
   off at midnight for the Volga plains hundreds of miles southeast of the   
   capital. A grinding, stop-   
   start fourteen-hour journey, alleviated only by a gurgling samovar in the   
   guard's carriage, eventually lands you in the city of Saratov with its wide,   
   tree-lined streets and attractive air of lost grandeur.   
      
   Bolted onto this prosperous provincial center is a crumbling six-lane highway   
   that bridges the mighty Volga and connects Saratov to its unloved sister city,   
   Engels. Lacking any of Saratov's sophistication, Engels is a seedy, forgotten   
   site dominated by    
   railway loading docks and the rusting detritus of light industry. At its civic   
   center squats Engels Square, a bleak parade ground encircled by housing   
   projects, a shabby strip mall dotted with sports bars, casinos, and DVD   
   stores, and a roundabout    
   clogged with Ladas, Sputniks, and the odd Ford. Here, in all its enervating   
   grime, is the postcommunist Russia of hypercapitalism and bootleg Americana.   
   And amid this free market dystopia stands a statue of Friedrich Engels   
   himself. Fifteen feet high,    
   atop a marble plinth and with a well-tended municipal flower bed at his feet,   
   he looks resplendent in his trench coat, clutching a curling copy of The   
   Communist Manifesto.   
      
   Across the former USSR and Eastern bloc, the statues of Marx (together with   
   those of Lenin, Stalin, and Beria) have come down. Decapitated and mutilated,   
   their remains are gathered together in monument graveyards for the ironic   
   edification of Cold War    
   cultural tourists. Inexplicably, Engels has been given leave to remain, still   
   holding sway over his eponymous town. As a quick conversation with local   
   residents and early-evening promenaders in Engels Square reveals, his presence   
   here is the product    
   neither of affection nor of admiration. Certainly, there is little hostility   
   toward the cofounder of communism but rather a nonchalant indifference and   
   weary apathy. Like the myriad plinths laden with nineteenth-century generals   
   and long-forgotten social    
   reformers that litter the squares of Western European capitals, Engels has   
   become an unknown and unremarkable part of the civic wallpaper.   
      
   In his birthplace, in the Rhineland town of Wuppertal (now a commuter suburb   
   for the nearby finance and fashion city of Düsseldorf), a similar disinterest   
   is evident. There is a Friedrich Engels Strasse and a Friedrich Engels Allee   
   but little sense of a    
   town overly eager to commemorate its most celebrated son. The site of Engels's   
   Geburtshaus, destroyed by a Royal Air Force bombing raid in 1943, remains   
   barren and all that marks the place of his arrival into the world is a dirty   
   granite monument    
   modestly noting his role as the "cofounder of scientific socialism." Covered   
   in holly and ivy, it is edged into the shadowy corner of a run-down park,   
   overlooked by aging portable toilets and a vandalized phone booth.   
      
   In modern Russia and Germany, let alone in Spain, England, or America, Engels   
   has slipped the bonds of history. Where once his name was on the lips of   
   millions—as Marx's fellow combatant, as the author of Socialism: Utopian and   
   Scientific (the bible of    
   global communism), as the theoretician of dialectical materialism, as the name   
   regularly grafted onto city streets and squares by revolutionary insurgents   
   and left-wing councils, as the man whose visionary, bearded features appeared   
   on the currency and    
   in textbooks and, alongside Marx, Lenin, and Stalin, stared down from vast   
   flags and Soviet Realist billboards onto May Day parades—it is now barely   
   registered in either East or West. In 1972, an official GDR biography could   
   claim that "nowadays there    
   is hardly a corner of this earth of ours where Engels's name has not been   
   heard of, where the significance of his work is unknown."2 Today, he is so   
   innocuous his statue isn't even pulled down.   
      
      
   [continued in next message]   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)