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Friedrich Engels in 1856 |
Friedrich Engels (November 28, 1820, Wuppertal – August 5, 1895, London), a 19th-century German political philosopher, developed communist theory alongside his better-known collaborator, Karl Marx, co-authoring The Communist Manifesto (1848). Engels also edited several volumes of Das Kapital after Marx's death.
Biography
Born in Barmen-Elberfeld (now Wuppertal in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany) as the eldest son of a successful German textile industrialist, Engels became involved in radical journalism as a teenager (Carver 2003:3). His father sent the young Engels to England in 1842 to help manage his cotton factory in Manchester. Shocked by the widespread poverty, Engels began writing an account which he published in 1845 as The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844).
In the same year Engels began contributing to a journal called the Franco-German Annals which Karl Marx edited and published in Paris. After their first meeting in person they discovered that they both shared the same views on capitalism, and decided to work more closely together. After the French authorities deported Marx from France in January 1845, they decided to move to Belgium, which then permitted greater freedom of expression than some other countries in Europe.
In July 1845 Engels took Marx to England. There he met an Irish working-class woman named Mary Burns (Crosby), with whom he lived until her death in 1863 (Carver 2003:19). Later he lived with her sister, Lizzie. marrying her the day before she died in 1877 (Carver 2003:42). These women may have introduced him to the Chartist movement, of whose leaders he met several, including George Harney.
Engels and Marx returned to Brussels in January 1846, where they set up the Communist Correspondence Committee. They planned to unite socialist leaders living in different parts of Europe. Influenced by Marx's ideas, socialists in England held a conference in London in June 1847 and formed a new organization: the Communist League. Engels attended as a delegate and had a great impact on the developed strategy of action.
In 1847 Engels and Marx began writing a pamphlet together, based on Engels' The Principles of Communism. They completed the 12,000-word pamphlet in six weeks, writing it in such a manner as to make communism understandable to a wide audience, and published it as The Communist Manifesto in February 1848. In March, Belgium expelled both Engels and Marx. They moved to Cologne, where they began to publish a radical newspaper, the Neue Rheinische Zeitung.
Engels actively participated in the Revolution of 1848, taking part in the uprising at Elberfeld. Engels fought in the Baden campaign against the Prussians (June/July 1849) as the aide-de-camp of August Willich, who commanded a Free Corps in the Baden-Palatinate uprising.
By 1849 both Engels and Marx had to leave Germany and moved to London. The Prussian authorities applied pressure on the British government to expel the two men, but Prime Minister Lord John Russell refused. With only the money that Engels could raise, the Marx family lived in extreme poverty.
In remembrance of the historical democratic and socialist movements in Germany in 1848/1849, the German social psychologist Richard Albrecht read a public lecture in Cologne (Rhineland), 150 years later in 1988, on the specific role Frederick Engels played as an anti-Prussian partisan and counterpart of the Prussian police agent Dr Wilhelm Stieber (alias Schmidt). This scholarly piece first appeared in print in 2000 (Almanach der Varnhagen-Gesellschaft, ed. Dr. Nikolaus Gatter, vol. 1 (2000), 197-208, Berlin: Verlag Arno Spitz ISBN 3-8305-0025-4; but it became available online free of charge in 2004. It gives insights into the personality of Frederick Engels (nicknamed "the general") before, during and after his émigration (first to Basel in Switzerland, then to Manchester): see "Gegenspieler - Der General und sein Schatten: Engels, Stieber & die preußische Reaktion 1851/52. Historischer Bericht zum ersten Kommunistenprozeß zu Köln" [Counterparts - The General and His Shadow: Engels, Stieber & the Prussian Reactionary Forces, 1851/52. Another look at the first "Colonial Communist Trial"]
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In order to help provide Marx with an income, Engels returned to work for his father in Manchester, before moving back to London in 1870. After Marx's death in 1883, Engels devoted much of the rest of his life to editing and translating Marx's writings. However, he also contributed significantly to feminist theory, seeing for instance the concept of monogamous marriage as having arisen because of the domination of man over women. In this sense, he ties communist theory to the family, arguing that men have dominated women just as the capitalist class has dominated workers. Engels died in London in 1895, childless. He was cremated at Woking. His ashes were scattered off Beachy Head, as he had requested.
Engels had a reputation as an avid bird-breeder.
Works
- Cola di Rienzi 1840?/1974
- Letters from Wuppertal
- The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844
- Anti-Dühring
- Dialectics of Nature
- Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy
- Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State
- Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Germany
- The German Ideology (with Marx)
- The Holy Family (with Marx)
- The Peasant War in Germany
- Socialism: Utopian and Scientific
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