Friedrich Engels

Friedrich Engels
Friedrich Engels
Born	28 November 1820; Barmen, Jülich-Cleves-Berg, Prussia
Died	5 August 1895 (aged 74); London, England, United Kingdom

Friedrich Engels (28 November 1820 – 5 August 1895) was a German philosopher, theorist, political economist, and communist revolutionary who is considered the co-founder of Marxism. Engels made stupendous contributions to socialist theory. Being a friend of Karl Marx, he often directed his work towards areas such as philosophy while Marx was more dedicated to political economy. For his contributions to Marxism, he is considered to be among its foundational theorists.

Biography

Early life

Engels’ father was a textile manufacturer who advocated pietism and strove to give his children a religious upbringing. Engels attended a municipal school until the age of 14, and in 1834 he enrolled in the Gymnasium. In his formative years he benefited from the influence of his mother, Elise van Haar, who imbued him with love for literature and art.

In the Gymnasium, Engels was an eager student of history, foreign languages, and German literature; his first attempts to write poetry date back to this period. In 1837, at his father’s insistence, Engels was compelled to leave the Gymnasium without completing his studies in order to devote himself to business. In 1838, his father sent him to Bremen to work in a business firm. A stranger to commerce, Engels spent most of his time studying philosophy, history, and literature; he also wrote poetry, studied music, and engaged in sports.

In Bremen, Engels became a regular reader of foreign books and periodicals; he read the opposition literature, which he disseminated among his friends, and adhered to Junges Deutschland (Young Germany), the literary movement of the radical opposition. In 1839, Engels became a regular contributor to the movement’s publication Telegraf für Deutschland, in whose pages he pronounced himself a revolutionary democrat. As early as 1839, in his Letters From the Wuppertal, Engels declared his opposition to pietism and religious fanaticism, as well as to the exploitation, poverty, and spiritual backwardness of his native city’s working people. ^[1]

Move to socialism and meeting with Marx

In October 1842, Engels completed his military service and returned to Barmen. His father, in an effort to detach Engels from his radically inclined friends, sent him to Manchester (Great Britain), where the senior Engels was joint owner of the Ermen and Engels factory. On his way to Great Britain, Engels stopped in Cologne to visit the editorial offices of the Rheinische Zeitung, a newspaper to which he contributed for half a year. It was here that Engels first met Marx, the paper’s editor in chief, who agreed to take on Engels as the paper’s English correspondent.

The move to Great Britain was an important milestone in Engels’ life. As early as November-December 1842, in his first English articles in the Rheinische Zeitung, he emphasized that Great Britain was faced with social revolution, and that the proletariat would be the revolution’s decisive force. It was in England that Engels finally became a socialist. Having met the leaders of the Chartist movement, Engels contributed to the Chartist publication The Northern Star, attended various workers’ assemblies and meetings, and joined the Chartist party. At the same time he studied the writings of Robert Owen and his followers and attended meetings of their socialist clubs.

In Manchester, Engels became acquainted with the world of the English workers and with their day-to-day life. Here, too, he met his future wife, the Irish working girl Mary Burns. While Engels’ final shift from idealism to materialism took place in Great Britain, the major influences that shaped his views were the works of Feuerbach and of the 18th-century French materialists.^[1]

Intellectual work

The study of political economy proved particularly fruitful for Engels; its first result was the article “Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy” (1844), in which, as Vladimir Lenin pointed out, Engels “examined the principal phenomena of the contemporary economic order from a socialist standpoint, regarding them as necessary consequences of the rule of private property”. Through his masterful use of dialectics, Engels revealed the profoundly contradictory nature of capitalist society and the apologetic character of bourgeois economics.

Marx was delighted with Engels’ work, describing it as a brilliant critique of economic categories. Engels’ article was one of the stimuli that moved Marx to study political economy in depth. From this time on, the two men corresponded regularly. On his way back to Germany in 1844, Engels stopped in Paris and spent ten days there with Marx. This new meeting marked the beginning of their friendship and close collaboration. Marx and Engels found themselves in complete agreement on theoretical questions. They were both, by that time, materialists and communists. They decided to join forces against the young Hegelians, who had not relinquished their idealism and bourgeois radicalism and were opposed to democratic and communist ideas. Marx’s and Engels’ collaboration on this project resulted in their first joint work, The Holy Family, or Critique of Critical Criticism: Against Bruno Bauer and Company (published in February 1845), which was a milestone in the development of the Marxist world view.

Returning to his homeland in September 1844, Engels established ties with the German socialists and contributed to socialist periodicals; his correspondence from Germany was published in The Northern Star. In Barmen he wrote The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844 (1845), a book based on material gathered by him in Great Britain. In it, Engels set forth a number of profound ideas about strikes as a means of struggle, the trade unions, the party, the need to build a mass labor movement (that is, Chartism) in close conjunction with socialist thought, and the historic mission of the proletariat. Engels was now well on his way toward the materialist concept of history. His book evoked widespread reactions in the German press as well as in other countries. It facilitated the transition to the socialist point of view on the part of the progressive members of the German intelligentsia, and it proved accessible to progressive workers.

From November 1845 until the summer of 1846, Marx and Engels worked on a new book, The German Ideology. In it they contrasted their own dialectical materialist views to the inconsistent and contemplative anthropological materialism of Feuerbach, to the idealism of the young Hegelians, especially as exemplified by Max Stirner, and to “true socialism,” which was then spreading among sections of the German workers and intelligentsia. The German Ideology contained the first full-scale exposition of the materialist interpretation of history as an integral conception; it set forth the underlying principles of a new and revolutionary world view—that of scientific communism—and the theoretical bases of the historically inevitable establishment of the communist system.^[1]

Revolutionary organizing

In early 1847, influenced by Marx’s and Engels’ propaganda speeches and writings, the League of the Just invited them to join the organization. Marx and Engels played the leading role in the radical reorganization of the League and in the elaboration of its scientific program. In June 1847, Engels participated in the League’s first congress, held in London. As a result of his efforts, the League’s newly adopted charter affirmed the organizational principles of democratism and centralism. The congress approved the substance of the “Draft of a Communist Confession of Faith,” as it was then called—a programmatic document of which Engels was the principal author. The draft was transmitted to the League’s local organizations for further discussion, so that the final draft of the program could be drawn up by the time of the League’s second congress. As proposed by Marx and Engels, the League of the Just was renamed the Communist League, and its previous Utopian slogan “All men are brothers” was replaced by a new one—“Workers of the world, unite!”

After the congress, Marx and Engels engaged in extensive organizational work. In Brussels they set up a League district committee headed by Marx and organized the German Workers’ Society. Under Marx’s and Engels’ influence’, the newspaper Deutsche Brusseler Zeitung in mid-1847 became the leading organ of communist propaganda; from the fall of that year, those of its articles that dealt with matters of principle were written by Marx and Engels. The two were the guiding spirit in the formation of the Brussels Democratic Association, in which democrats of various nationalities were brought together.

In mid-October of 1847, Engels returned to Paris and directed his efforts toward strengthening the local communities of the Communist League. He took an active part in the preparations for the League’s second congress and in discussions of its programmatic documents. He expanded and corrected the League’s draft program, which he called “The Principles of Communism.” In his letter to Marx on the eve of the congress, Engels proposed changing the format of the program, which he had written as a catechism, and calling it the Communist Manifesto.^[1]

Later life and death

Engels’ health, however, was already undermined by disease—cancer of the esophagus. His condition worsened greatly in 1894; he died on Aug. 5, 1895. In accordance with his wishes, Engels’ body was cremated, and the urn containing his ashes was cast into the sea at Eastbourne (Great Britain)—Engels’ favorite vacation spot.^[1]

Legacy

The course of Engels’ life and his intellectual development provide convincing evidence of his outstanding contribution to Marxism. Engels, as much as Marx, was one of the founders of the materialist interpretation of history. Together with Marx, Engels undertook the dialectical materialist transformation of bourgeois political economy. Engels performed his greatest service in completing, publishing, and promulgating Das Kapital—the product of Marx’ lifelong labor. Having created, together with Marx, dialectical materialism, the materialist interpretation of history, and scientific communism, Engels in his own works proceeded to set forth Marxism as an integral world view in a rigorously systematic fashion, showing its constituent elements and its theoretical sources. He thereby contributed to an enormous extent to the victory of Marxism in the international workers’ movement during the 1890s.

Joining Marx in working out the doctrine of socioeconomic formations, Engels revealed the specific objective laws governing the primitive communal order, slave, and feudal societies, the emergence of private ownership and classes, and the development of the state. During the last years of his life Engels devoted special attention to the interrelationship of the economic base and the political and ideological superstructure. He emphasized the need to disclose in concrete terms the enormous influence exercised on society by the policies of specific classes, by the latter’s struggle for political dominance, and by their legal relationships and ideology.^[1]