Friedrich Engels: Businessman and Revolutionary

Friedrich Engels was born on November 28, 1820, in Barmen, Germany, into a wealthy family with deep roots in the yarn and cloth industry. His father owned a textile factory in Barmen and was a partner in a cottonspinning factory in Manchester, England. At the age of 17, under pressure from his father, Friedrich began to acquire business experience. But as a spirited and precocious young man, he also published poetry, learned languages fluently, engaged in contemporary philosophical debates, and displayed a marked talent for journalism.

He was soon leading a double life as a businessman by day, and increasingly, a radical at night.1 Affiliating with left-wing intellectuals, he began a career as a political journalist under the pseudonym Friedrich Oswald. Among his more impressive early writings were his Letters From Wuppertal (1839), an eyewitness account of the evils of early industrialization and an attack on provincial bourgeois hypocrisy in the Rhineland district where he had grown up.

In October 1842, Engels moved to Manchester to work in the family business and to continue his career as a radical journalist. He contributed articles to various European publications, including Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy (1844) to an annual publication coedited in Paris by Karl Marx. Marx was deeply impressed by Engels’ work, terming it a “brilliant sketch on the criticism of the economic categories”; the 2 men began a long-term friendship and intellectual partnership that has been called “the most famous intellectual collaboration of all time.”2(p1)

In 1845, Engels published, in German, The Condition of the Working Class in England. Based on his own observations and a mass of contemporary reports, the book described in trenchant prose the multitude of horrors daily suffered by English workers—the unsanitary streets of densely crowded urban slums, the decaying and degrading living quarters, the disrupted and disintegrating families, and, in the passage reproduced here, the unsavory, unsafe, and physically debilitating factories themselves. Engels’ book had an enormous impact and has been called “the best invective ever written . . . against industrial society and its conditions.”3(p66)

Engels now joined Marx on the Continent, initially in Brussels, and worked closely with him over the next several years building the intellectual and political foundations of an international revolutionary movement. They coauthored The Holy Family (1845), The German Ideology (1846), and, most famously, The Communist Manifesto (1848). They joined forces in transforming various workers’ groups, secret socialist societies, and incipient radical political parties into, first, the League of the Just, and then into the International Communist League. When hopes for revolution faded on the Continent in the late 1840s, Engels and Marx moved to England.

Engels returned to the family business in Manchester while Marx lived and wrote in London. Engels supported Marx with money he earned in the textile industry; he also continued his own radical activities. He became Marx’s most effective popularizer and propagandist. Indeed, when Marx published volume 1 of Das Kapital (1859), few could understand it; it was Engels’ reviews of the volume in a variety of journals that presented the “materialist conception of history” and the “dialectical method” of economic and social analysis with the greatest clarity and persuasiveness. Engels consolidated Marx’s influence among competing revolutionary programs in a variety of works, most notably in Anti-Dühring: Herr Eugen Dühring’s Revolution in Science (1878) and Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (1880), which vigorously defended Marx’s commanding position among radical political theorists.

After Marx’s death in 1883, Engels served as the premier international authority on Marx and Marxism. In addition to his own intellectual and political work and other promotional activities on behalf of Marxism, he completed volumes 2 and 3 of Das Kapital (1885 and 1894), working from Marx’s notes and incomplete manuscripts. Late in life, and despite the advance of European parliamentary democracy and, with it, of social reform, Engels still defended the need for continuing the class struggle and revolutionary political tactics. He died in London of cancer in 1895.