On 28 November 1820, in Baden, then Prussia, one of the greatest theorists, founder of scientific communism, Friedrich Engels was born. Engels studied at the College of Baden and then at the Elberfeld High School. Despite his own desire to continue his studies at university, Engels dropped out of high school in his final year after his father insisted that he work in the family business. Engels worked from 1838 to 1841 for a large trading house in Bremen.
Engels then enters a circle of radical intellectuals – the “New Germany”, studying German philosophy and the works of Hegel. In 1841, Engels goes to Berlin for his military service while attending classes at the University. After his military service, Engels went to England, to Manchester, which was a major industrial centre at the time, to work in the factory owned by his father and one of his partners, and came into contact with the labour movement of the time and the socialist ideas expressed by the Chartist movement and the utopian socialism of Robert Owen. In England, due to the objective conditions (industrial revolution, great development of capitalism), he comes into contact with the living conditions of the working class in the country.
His family was very conservative and religious. From the beginning, as in the years that followed, Engels’ family was deeply dissatisfied with the course Friedrich chose. As Eleanor Marx writes in her memoirs, “Never was a son born into such a family who was so out of his mind,” while his friend and poet Georg Wehrt, writing to his parents to justify his own choice to join the struggle, states: “My very dear friend, Friedrich Engels, from Barmen is such a shining example. He wrote a book in favour of the English workers, in which he rightly scourges the factory owners terribly. His own father has factories in Germany and England. Well, he is in terrible disagreement with his family. They consider him an atheist and a scoundrel, and his rich father no longer gives the son a penny.”
At that time he carried out two very important studies. These were his “Outline of a Critique of Political Economy” and “The Condition of the Working Class in England”. The ‘Outline’ in particular is a work that has a special place in the overall course of Marxism, since – as is shown through the texts in the collection – it triggered the beginning of the close friendship between Marx and Engels, but it also had a great influence on Marx, turning his interest to political economy, which he had not studied in detail until then.
In 1844, Engels wrote in the ‘French-German Chronicle’, which Marx directed, the pamphlet ‘Critical Study on Political Economy’, which Marx described as a masterly outline of a new Political Economy.
Lenin, stressing the importance of this work, points out. His contact with Engels undoubtedly contributed to Marx’s decision to take up political economy, a discipline in which his works have caused a revolution. Then Engels, on his way to Germany, met Marx in Paris. From there on, their common path began. Together they wrote the “Holy Family”, turning against the Neo-Hegelians and thus laying the foundations of dialectical materialism.
Marx and Engels came into contact with the “Union of Righteous Men”, of which, however, they did not become members until 1847, when they succeeded by their theoretical and practical activity in convincing the leaders of the “Union” of the correctness of their theory. In 1847 the ‘Union of Righteous’ was reorganised and renamed the ‘Union of Communists’. Marx and Engels were commissioned to write the program of the “Union”, the well-known “Manifesto of the Communist Party”.
After the defeat of the 1848-49 revolution in Germany, Engels (who fought bravely in the battles of Baden and Palatinate) settled back in Manchester, while Marx fled to London with his family.
Fr. Engels, in 1849, at the barricades
Engels stood firmly by his friend’s side, supporting him wholeheartedly, given that Marx had lost most of his fortune in the throes of the revolution and had been forced into repeated deportations.
Engels had understood the importance for the proletariat’s cause of completing Marx’s economic studies. Without the material, moral support, the contribution with the knowledge and individual studies made by division of labour, but also without Engels’ constant “urgings” to Marx to speed up the completion of his work, it is by no means certain that Marx would have been able to work on his studies and that he would have succeeded in delivering to the revolutionary proletariat one of its most important weapons, “Capital”.
For Engels, the completion of “Capital” was a matter of the utmost importance for the revolutionary movement, but also of practical tribute to his good friend and comrade. As he wrote declaring his determination to complete his endeavour: “However, I will continue to work on the book, which will be a monument to him, created by him, greater than any other [monument] other people could erect for ‘Black’.”
After Marx’s death, Engels shouldered an enormous amount of work. He devoted all his energies to what he saw as a binding obligation, the completion of his friend’s manuscripts and intellectual legacy, while he managed to advance his own studies in various fields and also worked intensively in support of the growing international labour and socialist movement.
Some of Friedrich Engels’ most important works are “The Peasants’ War” (1850) and “Revolution and Counterrevolution in Germany” (1851-1852), which bring together the experience of the revolutionary period 1847-1848 in France and Germany.
Also in “Anti-Dyring” (1877-78) Marxism is aptly outlined in its three parts – a) Philosophy, b) Political Economy, c) Scientific Communism. Engels then goes on to deal with the natural sciences and Mathematics. This is where his work “Dialectic of Nature” emerges from.
Engels publishes the 2nd and 3rd volumes of KALAS in 1885 and 1894 respectively. In the same period he writes “The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State”, as well as “Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of German Classical Philosophy” which sets out a comprehensive conception of Dialectical and Historical Materialism.
Among the most important theses of Engels’ contribution to Marxist scholarship are:
(a) the identification of the place of Marxism in the history of human thought and its relation to theoretical sources such as history, philosophy, political economy, its predecessor socialism and communism,
(b) the definition of Marx’s main discoveries – the dialectical-materialist method, the materialist conception of history and the theory of surplus value, thanks to which socialism was transformed from utopia to science,
(c) the elaboration of the materialist conception of war questions,
(d) the broadening of the concept of “working class” and the introduction of the concept of “spiritual proletariat” (the proletarians of spiritual labour),
(e) his contribution as co-author of the “Manifesto of the Communist Party” to the theory of the party and the theory of democracy, as well as to the methodology of scientific forecasting and the dialectical treatment of scientific communism, and a number of other issues.
On August 5, 1895, the heart of Friedrich Engels, the man who, together with Karl Marx, co-formulated and founded the scientific worldview of the working class, stopped beating, proving the lawful passage of society from capitalism to socialism-communism and giving the working class the weapons to become an order for itself, in order to accomplish its historical mission, the construction of a classless society.
The monument to Marx and Engels in Berlin
References:
- Β. B. I. Lenin, “Friedrich Engels”, All, vol. 2, p. 10.
- Β. I. Lenin, “Friedrich Engels”, All, vol. 2, p. 12.
- “C. Marx – Fr. Engels, Correspondence on Capital”, vol. B, “Synchronic Era”, Athens, 2020, p. 374
- Short video by ERT on the 194th anniversary of Engels’ birth
“Frederick Engels: the factory owner who defected for the workers”
- Film “When Marx Met Engels” – “Le jeune Karl Marx” (2017)