Friedrich Engels Essay ⋆ Sociology Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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Without Karl Marx, of course, few people today would know the name of Friedrich Engels; but without Engels we might have heard much less from Karl Marx.

Engels was born into a wealthy, devout, Protestant family in the industrial town of Barmen (now Wuppertal), in the Rhineland region of what is now Germany. The industrialist father wished his eldest son to follow in his footsteps, and so in 1838, before he could even finish high school, Engels was sent to clerk for a business in Bremen. Critically, neither his privileged family background nor his own eventual success as a capitalist prevented him from devoting his life to destroying capitalism. He also had a natural talent with languages – a skill he would put to good use in his later years as an international political figure and organizer.

In 1842, after completing his military service, Engels traveled to Cologne where he met with Karl Marx and Moses Hess, both of whom were editors at the Rheinische Zeitung, a radical newspaper for which Engels had written. Hess saw England as the country most likely to produce his hoped-for communist revolution. As it happened, Engels’s father had significant financial interests in a large textile factory in Manchester, and so Engels, now a communist himself, went for two years to Manchester to work in the factory as a clerk. In 1845 he would publish a book entitled The Condition of the Working-Class in England, 1844 based on his fieldwork in Manchester, and his work on the English political economists would point Marx toward the material for Capital.

On his way home to Barmen, Engels made a brief stop in Paris and again met with Marx. As Engels later wrote, ”When I visited Marx in Paris in the summer of 1844 we found ourselves in complete agreement on questions of theory and our collaboration began at that time.” He and Marx would collaborate on several manuscripts, including The Holy Family, and The German Ideology in which they would make some attempt to flesh out their philosophical and political positions and distinguish themselves from a number of rivals. And it was out of this collaboration, and at the request of the London-based League of the Just, that perhaps the world’s most famous political pamphlet, The Communist Manifesto, was written.

After Marx’s death in 1883 Engels devoted the rest of his life to Marx and Marxism, largely at the expense of his own work. Although he did manage to publish The Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State in 1884, his Dialectics of Nature was published long after his death in 1925. His first priority was to see to it that the remaining volumes of Capital were published. No simple task given the disorganized state in which Marx left his papers; volume 2 was published in 1885 and volume 3 appeared nine years later in 1894. His second priority was leading the international socialist movement, which he did by continuing his worldwide correspondence, writing articles for and advising the leaders of the Second International, and meeting with visiting intellectuals and revolutionaries, such as Georgi Plekhanov, one of Russia’s first Marxists. Vigorous until the end, Engels died of throat cancer in 1895.

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