Friedrich Engels (1820 - 1895) |
Friedrich Engels (28. November 1820 - 5. August 1895) was a German Socialist
philosopher and the co-founder of modern Communist theory with
Karl Marx. In 1848, they published
The Communist Manifesto together. Engels edited several volumes of Das Kapital
(Capital: A Critique of Political Economy) after Marx's death.
Engels was born in Barmen-Elberfeld (now Wuppertal), the eldest son of a successful
German textile industrialist. As a young man, his father sent him to England to
help manage his cotton-factory in Manchester. Shocked by the widespread poverty
in the city, he began writing an account which was published in 1845 as 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 was edited and published by Karl Marx in Paris. After their first
meeting in person, it turned out that both shared the same views on capitalism
and hence they decided to work more closely together. After Marx was deported
from France in January of 1845, they decided to move to Belgium, which permitted
a greater freedom of expression than other countries in Europe.
In July 1845 Engels took Karl Marx to England. There he met an Irish working-class
woman named Mary Burns with whom he lived until her death; then he lived with her
sister Lizzie. 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.
The plan was to unite socialist leaders living in different parts of Europe.
Influenced by Marx's ideas, socialists in England held a conference in London
where they formed a new organisation called 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. It was based on Engels'
The Principles of Communism. The 12,000-word pamphlet was finished in six weeks,
written in such a manner as to make communist theory understandable to a wide audience.
It was named The Communist Manifesto and was published in February 1848. In March both
Engels and Marx were expelled from Belgium. They moved to Cologne where they began to
publish a radical newspaper, the New Rhenish Gazette.
By 1849 both were forced to leave the country and moved to London. The Prussian
authorities applied pressure on the British government to expel the two men but
the Prime Minister, Lord John Russell, held liberal views on freedom of expression
and refused. With only the money that Engels could raise, the Marx family lived in
extreme poverty.
In order to help supply Karl Marx with an income, Engels returned to work for his
father in Manchester, before moving to London in 1870. After Marx's death in 1883,
Engels devoted the rest of his life to editing and translating Marx's writings. He
died in London on 5. August 1895.
Banknote displaying Friedrich Engels
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