A very special business angel  

   商贾“天使”恩格斯

Aug 13th 2009
From The Economist print edition

The self-effacing friend who enabled “Das Kapital” to be written
这名谦卑的马氏伙伴为《资本论》的问世铺平了道路

Marx’s General: The Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels. By Tristram Hunt. Metropolitan Books; 448 pages; $32. Published in Britain as “The Frock-Coated Communist: The Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels”. Allen Lane; £25. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk
《马克思之将：恩格斯的革命人生》，著者Tristram Hunt，出版商Metropolitan Books；英国版书名为《穿长礼服的共产主义者：弗里德里希·恩格斯的红色人生》，Allen Lane出版

WHEN the financial crisis took off last autumn, Karl Marx’s “Das Kapital”, originally published in 1867, whooshed up bestseller lists. The first book to describe the relentless, all-consuming and global nature of capitalism had suddenly gained new meaning. But Marx had never really gone away, whereas Friedrich Engels—the man who worked hand in glove with him for most of his life and made a huge contribution to “Das Kapital”—is almost forgotten. A new biography by a British historian, Tristram Hunt, makes a good case for giving him greater credit.

去年秋天金融危机爆发之际，卡尔·马克思的《资本论》（1867年初版）一度蹿升至畅销书榜单。仿佛突然之间，这部最先描述资本主义冷酷无情、吞噬一切及全球扩张之本性的巨作再度重获新生。其实，马克思从未真正离开。而弗里德里希·恩格斯———这个伴随他大半生且对《资本论》诞生贡献巨大的挚友———却几乎已被世人所淡忘。英国史学家Tristram Hunt的恩格斯传还原了一个更值得尊重的恩格斯。

The two men became friends in Paris in 1844 when both were in their mid-20s, and remained extremely close until Marx died in 1883. Both were Rhinelanders (our picture shows Engels standing behind Marx in the press room of Rheinische Zeitung which they edited jointly) but came from very different backgrounds: Marx’s father was a Jewish lawyer turned Christian; Engels’s a prosperous Protestant cotton-mill owner. Marx studied law, then philosophy; Engels, the black sheep of his family, was sent to work in the family business at 17. While doing his military service in 1841 in Berlin, he was exposed to the ferment of ideas swirling around the Prussian capital.

他们于1844年在巴黎成为至交，两人彼时年龄相仿，均为二十四、五岁。他们的亲密友谊一直延续到马克思辞世时的1883年。虽然马恩都是莱茵人（图片为马恩任联合主编的《莱茵报》的印刷室，恩格斯就站在马克思身后），但他们的家庭背景却并不一样：马克思的父亲是一名犹太人律师，后来改宗，成为基督徒；恩格斯的父亲则是一位信奉新教的成功的纺织厂工厂主。马研习法律，随后是哲学；恩则作为一名“败家子”，17岁时就被迫去打理家族生意。1841年在伯林服兵役期间，他经受了这个普鲁士首都天空之上的各种激荡思潮的洗礼和冲击。

Next, he went to work for the Manchester branch of the family business, Ermen & Engels. Manchester’s “cottonopolis” in the mid-19th century was a manufacturer’s heaven and a working man’s hell, and it provided an invaluable lesson for Engels: that economic factors were the basic cause of the clash between different classes of society. By 1845, when he was just 24, he had not only learnt how to be a successful capitalist; he had also written a coruscatingly anti-capitalist work, “The Condition of the Working Class in England”, which charted the inhumanity of modern methods of production in minute detail.

随后，他动身前往家族企业“欧文&恩格斯”的曼彻斯特分厂上班。19世纪中叶的曼彻斯特号称全球“棉都”，被视为厂商的天堂，工人的地狱。正是在这里，恩格斯发现了一条颠扑不破的铁律：经济因素可谓导致社会各阶级之间发生冲突的基本动因。至1845年他刚满24岁时，恩格斯已不仅学会如何成为一名成功的资本家，而且还写就了一部熠熠生辉的反资本主义作品———《英国工人阶级状况》。此书揭露了现代生产方法中所暗含的残暴和冷酷，笔法极为细腻。

Engels left Manchester to work with Marx on the “Communist Manifesto” and the two of them spent the late 1840s criss-crossing Europe to chase the continental revolutions of the time, ending up in England. Marx had started work on “Das Kapital”, but there was a problem. He had by then acquired an aristocratic German wife, a clutch of small children and aspirations for a comfortable bourgeois lifestyle, but no means of support.

恩格斯后来离开曼彻斯特，与马克思共同着手写作《共产党宣言》。19世纪40年代晚期，他们马不停蹄地在欧洲来回穿梭，以便近距离考察正在这块大陆之上展开的如火如荼的革命运动。两人最终在英国落脚。马克思开始创作《资本论》，却无法全身心投入其中。彼时的他拖家带口，除了一个有着贵族血统的德国太太，身边还跟着一群小孩。他渴望过上安稳舒适的中产阶级生活，却又力不从心。

Engels (whose name resembles the word for “angel” in German) offered an astoundingly big-hearted solution: he would go back to Manchester to resume life in the detested family cotton business and provide Marx with the money he needed to write his world-changing treatise. For the next 20 years Engels worked grumpily away, handing over half his generous income to an ever more demanding Marx. He also collaborated intensively on the great work, contributing many ideas, practical examples from business and much-needed editorial attention. When at last volume I of “Das Kapital” was finished, he extricated himself from the business and moved to London to be near the Marx family, enjoying life as an Economist-reading rentier and intellectual.

恩格斯（其姓类似于德语中的“天使”一词）遂提出一个完全叫人动容的解决办法：他愿意重返曼彻斯特，继续从事可恨的家族棉纺生意，为马克思完成他未来的划时代巨著提供经济援助。接下来的20年，恩格斯一边脾气暴躁地苦闷从商，一边将他过半的收入交给一个总是嗷嗷待哺且时而甚为苛求的卡尔·马克思。对于这部伟大作品的问世，恩格斯功不可没，他不单贡献了许多灵感、思想，还能为马克思提供实用的商业案例。另外，之前的文本编辑经验也一直在发挥着余热。当《资本论》第一卷终于呱呱坠地时，他得以从生意场上抽身而出，并迁居伦敦，伴随马克思家人左右。他很享受这样的时光，作为这部经济学家必读书目的权威解读人，他既可从书稿版税中维持生计，也能收获一名知识分子该有的智力欢愉。

Engels was an enigma. Gifted, energetic and fascinated by political ideas, he was nevertheless ready to play second fiddle to Marx. “Marx was a genius; we others were at best talented,” he declared after his friend’s death. Mr Hunt does a brilliant job of setting the two men’s endeavours in the context of the political, social and philosophical currents at the time. It makes for a complex story that can be hard to follow but is well worth persevering with.

恩格斯简直是个谜。天资聪慧、精力过人，为诸多政治思想而目眩神迷，但他却甘于充当那片“绿叶”。“马克思是个天才，他人充其量不过略具才情而已”，挚友死后，他这般解释。亨特先生的新书非常出色地将马恩艰苦卓绝的思想探索置于当时那个各种政治、社会与哲学洪流交相辉映的时代背景下来加以考察。这种写作手法虽易造成传记故事的驳杂纷乱，让读者难以厘清头绪，但它还是很值得坚持下去的。

Tall and handsome, Engels had a taste not just for ideas but for the good life—wine, women, riding with the Cheshire hunt—and seems to have felt little sense of irony that all these things were paid for by the proletariat’s back-breaking labour. His domestic life was much more unconventional than Marx’s. He lived, on and off, with a semi-literate Irish working-class girl, Mary Burns; then, when she died, with her sister, Lizzy, whom he married only on her deathbed. He had no children, though he chivalrously took responsibility for a boy whom Marx had fathered with a housekeeper.

外形体长、仪表俊美的恩格斯不仅对思想观念感知敏锐，还兼具良好的生活品味。他酷爱美酒、擅于欣赏女人，也曾跑到英国柴郡骑马游猎。但他似乎不觉得这一切充满着反讽，所有这些浪漫的情调都是要花费代价的，都是那些卖苦力的无产阶级兄弟挥洒血汗供起来的。他的家庭生活要比马克思来得更叛逆。一位名叫玛丽·伯恩斯的爱尔兰半文盲工人阶级女子曾与他断断续续同居过，玛丽死后，他又与其妹丽茨住在一起，直到后者临终之际，他才松口说要娶她。他没有小孩，尽管他很体贴入微地为马克思与一名主妇所生下的男童尽到了养父的责任。

Engels’s sacrifices continued after Marx’s death. He not only carried on funding the Marx family and their various hangers-on, but also spent years pulling together the chaotic notes Marx left behind for volumes II and III of “Das Kapital”. Inevitably there were lots of loose ends which Engels tied up as he saw fit, and sometimes the results were more revolutionary than the author may have intended. In volume III, where Marx discussed the tendency of companies’ profitability to fall and noted that this might lead to the “shaking” of capitalist production, Engels substituted the word “collapse”, opening up the text to much more radical interpretations by 20th-century Marxists.

马克思离开后，他的奉献一如既往。他不仅继续供养马氏一家以及围在她们身边驱之不去的众多食客，还花费数年时间殚精竭力地整理马克思未竟的《资本论》第2、3卷的凌乱书稿。这些手稿不可避免会有大量疏漏或尚未交待清楚之处，他一旦发现，若觉得合适，就会动手修改、补充。有时这种编辑的结果使得书中的某些论断要比作者可能的本意更趋激进。如在卷3中马克思探讨公司利润率下降趋势时，他提到这股趋势或将导致资本主义生产的“颤动”。恩格斯将这个词替换为“崩溃”。实际上，这也为20世纪的马克思主义者所采纳的更加激进化的释经之举埋下伏笔。

When Engels died in 1895, he eschewed London’s Highgate cemetery where his friend was laid to rest. Self-effacing to the last, he had his ashes scattered off England’s coast at Eastbourne—the scene of happy holidays with the Marxes.

1895年，恩格斯病逝前夕，他有意避开挚友长眠于此处的伦敦海格特公墓。他的谦卑善始善终，他要他的骨灰洒向英国伊斯勃恩海湾———那个昔日他与马克思一家愉快度假的地方。