Friedrich Engels, (born Nov. 28, 1820, Barmen,
Rhine province, Prussia [Germany]—died Aug. 5, 1895, London,
Eng.), German socialist philosopher, the closest collaborator
of Karl Marx in the foundation of modern communism. They coauthored The Communist Manifesto (1848), and Engels
edited the second and third volumes of Das
Kapital after Marx’s death.
Early
life
Engels grew up in the environment of
a family marked by moderately liberal political
views, a steadfast loyalty to Prussia, and a pronounced Protestant
faith. His father was the owner of a textile factory in Barmen and also a
partner in the Ermen & Engels cotton plant in Manchester, Eng. Even after Engels openly pursued
the revolutionary goals that threatened the traditional values of the family,
he usually could count on financial aid from home. The influence of his mother,
to whom he was devoted, may have been a factor in preserving the tie between
father and son.
Aside from such disciplinary actions
as the father considered necessary in rearing a gifted but somewhat rebellious
son, the only instance in which his father forced his will on Engels was in
deciding upon a career for him. Engels did attend a Gymnasium (secondary
school), but he dropped out a year before graduation, probably because his
father felt that his plans for the future were too undefined. Engels showed
some skill in writing poetry, but his father insisted that he go to
work in the expanding business. Engels, accordingly, spent the next three years
(1838–41) in Bremen acquiring practical business experience in the offices of
an export firm.
In Bremen, Engels began to show the
capacity for living the double life that characterized his middle years. During
regular hours, he operated effectively as a business apprentice. An outgoing
person, he joined a choral society, frequented the famed Ratskeller tavern,
became an expert swimmer, and practiced fencing and riding (he outrode most
Englishmen in the fox hunts). Engels also cultivated his capacity for learning
languages; he boasted to his sister that he knew 24. In private, however, he
developed an interest in liberal and revolutionary works, notably the banned
writings of “Young German” authors such as Ludwig Börne, Karl Gutzkow, and Heinrich Heine. But he soon rejected them as
undisciplined and inconclusive in favour of the more systematic and all
embracing philosophy of G.W.F. Hegel as expounded by the “Young Hegelians,” a group of leftist
intellectuals, including the theologian and historian Bruno Bauer and the
anarchist Max Stirner. They accepted the Hegelian dialectic—basically that rational progress and
historical change result from the conflict of opposing views, ending in a new synthesis. The Young Hegelians were bent on
accelerating the process by criticizing all that they considered irrational,
outmoded, and repressive. As their first assault was directed against the
foundations of Christianity, they helped convert an agnostic
Engels into a militant atheist, a relatively easy task since by this
time Engels’s revolutionary convictions made him ready to strike out in almost
any direction.
In Bremen, Engels also demonstrated
his talent for journalism by publishing articles under the pseudonym of
Friedrich Oswald, perhaps to spare the feelings of his family. He possessed
pungent critical abilities and a clear style, qualities that were utilized
later by Marx in articulating their revolutionary goals.
After returning to Barmen in 1841,
the question of a future career was shelved temporarily when Engels enlisted as
a one-year volunteer in an artillery regiment in Berlin. No antimilitarist
disposition prevented him from serving commendably as a recruit; in fact,
military matters later became one of his specialties. In the future, friends
would often address him as “the general.” Military service allowed Engels time
for more compelling interests in Berlin. Though he lacked the formal
requirements, he attended lectures at the university. His Friedrich Oswald
articles gained him entrée into the Young Hegelian circle of The Free, formerly
the Doctors Club frequented by Karl
Marx. There he gained recognition as a formidable protagonist in
philosophical battles, mainly directed against religion.
Conversion
to communism
After his discharge in 1842, Engels
met Moses Hess, the man who converted him to
communism. Hess, the son of wealthy Jewish parents and a promoter of radical
causes and publications, demonstrated to Engels that the logical consequence of
the Hegelian philosophy and dialectic was communism. Hess also stressed the
role that England, with its advanced industry, burgeoning proletariat,
and portents of class conflict, was destined to play in future
upheavals. Engels eagerly seized the opportunity to go to England, ostensibly
to continue his business training in the family firm in Manchester.
In England (1842–44), Engels again
functioned successfully as a businessman. After business hours, however, he
pursued his real interests: writing articles on communism for continental and English
journals, reading books and parliamentary reports on economic and political
conditions in England, mingling with workers, meeting radical leaders, and
gathering materials for a projected history of England that would stress the
rise of industry and the wretched position of the workers.
In Manchester, Engels established an
enduring attachment to Mary Burns, an uneducated Irish working girl, and,
though he rejected the institution of marriage, they lived together as husband
and wife. In fact, the one serious strain in the Marx-Engels friendship
occurred when Mary died in 1863 and Engels thought that Marx responded a little
too casually to the news of her death. In the future, however, Marx made a
point of being more considerate, and, when Engels later lived with Mary’s
sister Lizzy, on similar terms, Marx always carefully closed his letters with
greetings to “Mrs. Lizzy” or “Mrs. Burns.” Engels finally married Lizzy, but
only as a deathbed concession to her.
In 1844 Engels contributed two
articles to the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher
(“German-French Yearbooks”), which were edited by Marx in Paris. In them Engels
put forth an early version of the principles of scientific socialism.
He revealed what he regarded as the contradictions in liberal economic doctrine
and set out to prove that the existing system based on private property was leading to a world made up of
“millionaires and paupers.” The revolution that would follow would lead to the
elimination of private property and to a “reconciliation of humanity with
nature and itself.”
Partnership
with Marx
On his way to Barmen, Engels went to
Paris for a 10-day visit with Marx, whom he had earlier met in Cologne.
This visit resulted in a permanent partnership to promote the socialist movement.
Back in Barmen, Engels published Die Lage der arbeitenden Klasse in England
(1845; The Condition of the Working Class in England),
a classic in a field that later became Marx’s specialty. Their first major
joint work was Die deutsche Ideologie (1845; The German Ideology), which, however, was not
published until more than 80 years later. It was a highly polemical critique
that denounced and ridiculed certain of their earlier Young Hegelian associates
and then proceeded to attack various German socialists who rejected the need
for revolution. Marx’s and Engels’s own constructive
ideas were inserted here and there, always in a fragmentary manner and only as
corrective responses to the views they were condemning.
Upon rejoining Marx in Brussels in
1845, Engels endorsed his newly formulated economic, or materialistic,
interpretation of history, which assumed an eventual communist triumph. That
summer he escorted Marx on a tour of England. Thereafter he spent much time in
Paris, where his social engagements did not interfere significantly with his
major purpose, that of attempting to convert various émigré German worker
groups—among them a socialist secret society, the League of the Just—as well as leading French socialists
to his and Marx’s views. When the league held its first congress in London in
June 1847, Engels helped bring about its transformation into the Communist League.
Marx and he together persuaded a
second Communist Congress in London to adopt their views. The two men were
authorized to draft a statement of communist principles and policies, which
appeared in 1848 as the Manifest der kommunistischen Partei (commonly
called the Communist Manifesto). It included much of the
preliminary definition of views prepared earlier by Engels in the Grundsätze
des Kommunismus (1847; Principles of Communism)
but was primarily the work of Marx.
The Revolutions of 1848, which were precipitated by
the attempt of the German states to throw off an authoritarian, almost feudal,
political system and replace it with a
constitutional, representative form of government,
was a momentous event in the lives of Marx and Engels. It was their only
opportunity to participate directly in a revolution and to demonstrate their
flexibility as revolutionary tacticians with the aim of turning the revolution
into a communist victory. Their major tool was the newspaper Neue Rheinische Zeitung, which Marx edited in
Cologne with the able assistance of Engels. Such a party organ, then appearing
in a democratic guise, was of prime importance for their purposes; with it they
could furnish daily guidelines and incitement in the face of shifting events,
together with a sustained criticism of governments, parties, policies, and
politicians.
After the failure of the revolution,
Engels and Marx were reunited in London, where they reorganized the Communist
League and drafted tactical directives for the communists in the belief that
another revolution would soon take place. But how to replace his depleted
income soon became Engels’s main problem. To support both himself and Marx, he
accepted a subordinate position in the offices of Ermen & Engels in Manchester,
eventually becoming a full-fledged partner in the concern. He again functioned
successfully as a businessman, never allowing his communist principles and
criticism of capitalist ways to interfere with the profitable
operations of his firm. Hence he was able to send money to Marx constantly,
often in the form of £5 notes, but later in far higher figures. When Engels
sold his partnership in the business in 1869, he received enough to live
comfortably until his death in 1895 and to provide Marx with an annual grant of
£350, with the promise of more to cover all contingencies.
Engels, who was forced to live in
Manchester, corresponded constantly with Marx in London and frequently wrote
newspaper articles for him; he wrote the articles that appeared in the New
York Tribune (1851–52) under Marx’s name and that were later published
under Engels’s name as Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Germany
in 1848 (1896). In the informal division of labour that the two
protagonists of communism had established, Engels was the specialist in
nationality questions, military matters, to some extent in international
affairs, and in the sciences. Marx also turned to him repeatedly for
clarification of economic questions, notably for information on business
practices and industrial operations.
Marx’s Das
Kapital (Capital), his most important work, bears in part
a made-in-Manchester stamp. Marx similarly called on Engels’s writing facility
to help “popularize” their joint views. While Marx was the brilliant
theoretician of the pair, it was Engels, as the apt salesman of Marxism
directing attention to Das Kapital through his reviews of the book, who
implanted the thought that it was their “bible.” Engels almost alone wrote Herrn
Eugen Dührings Umwälzung der Wissenschaft (1878; Herr Eugen Dühring’s
Revolution in Science, better known as Anti-Dühring), the book that probably did
most to promote Marxian thought. It destroyed the influence of Karl Eugen
Dühring, a Berlin professor who threatened to supplant Marx’s position among
German social democrats.
Last
years
After Marx’s death (1883), Engels
served as the foremost authority on Marx and Marxism.
Aside from occasional writings on a variety of subjects and introductions to
new editions of Marx’s works, Engels completed volumes 2 and 3 of Das
Kapital (1885 and 1894) on the basis of Marx’s uncompleted manuscripts and
rough notes. Engels’s other two late publications were the books Der
Ursprung der Familie, des Privateigenthums und des Staats (1884; The
Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State) and Ludwig Feuerbach und der Ausgang der klassischen
deutschen Philosophie (1888; Ludwig Feuerbach and the Outcome of
Classical German Philosophy). All the while he corresponded extensively
with German social democrats and followers everywhere, so as to perpetuate the
image of Marx and to foster some degree of conformity among the “faithful.” His
work was interrupted when he was stricken with cancer; he died of the disease
not long after.
During his lifetime, Engels
experienced, in a milder form, the same attacks and veneration that fell upon
Marx. An urbane individual with the demeanour of an English gentleman, Engels
customarily was a gay and witty associate with a great zest for living. He had
a code of honour that responded quickly to an insult, even to the point of
violence. As the hatchetman of the “partnership,” he could be most offensive
and ruthless, so much so that in 1848 various friends attempted unsuccessfully
to persuade Marx to disavow him.
Except in the Soviet
Union and other communist countries, where Engels received due
recognition, posterity has generally lumped him together with Marx without
adequately clarifying Engels’s significant role. The attention Engels does
receive is likely to be in the form of a close scrutiny of his works to
discover what differences existed between him and Marx. As a result, some
scholars have concluded that Engels’s writings and influence are responsible
for certain deviations from, or distortions of, “true Marxism” as they see it.
Yet scholars in general acknowledge that Marx himself apparently was unaware of
any essential divergence of ideas and opinions. The Marx-Engels correspondence,
which reveals a close cooperation in formulating Marxist policies, bears out
that view.
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