Friedrich Engels

Friedrich Engels in 1856

Friedrich Engels (November 28, 1820–August 5, 1895) was a 19th-century German political philosopher. With his partner, the better known Karl Marx, Engels developed communist theory, co-authoring The Communist Manifesto (1848). Engels also edited several volumes of Das Kapital after Marx's death.

Biography

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, he began writing an account which was published in 1845 as The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844 ([1]).

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, they discovered that they both shared the same views on capitalism, and decided to work more closely together. After Marx was deported from France in January 1845, they decided to move to Belgium, which permitted greater freedom of expression than other countries in Europe.

In July 1845, Engels took Marx to England. There he met an Irish working-class woman named Mary Burns, with whom he lived until her death. Later, 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 organization 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 communism 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 Neue Rheinische Zeitung.

Engels was an active participant 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 was leader of a Free Corps in the Baden-Palatinate uprising. [2]

By 1849, both Engels and Marx 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 Prime Minister Lord John Russell refused. With only the money that Engels could raise, the Marx family lived in extreme poverty.

Statue (1986) of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Part of the former Marx-Engels-Forum in Berlin-Mitte.The statues acquired the unofficial nickname "the Pensioners", and were also said to be sitting on their suitcases waiting for permission to emigrate to the West.

In his work, Engels echoed the distaste towards homosexuals which was almost universal in his day. This can bee seen from his private letters,[3] as well as from his Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, in which he denounced the ancient Greeks for "the abominable practice of pederasty" and for degrading "their gods and themselves with the myth of Ganymede."

In order to help supply 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 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 women have been dominated by men just as workers have been by the capitalist class. Engels died in London in 1895, childless.

Statue of Marx and Engels in the Statue Park, Budapest.

Works

• Cola di Rienzi 1840?/1974
• Letters from Wuppertal [4]
• The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844
• Anti-Dühring [5]
• Dialectics of Nature [6]
• Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy [7]
• Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State [8]
• Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Germany [9]
• The German Ideology (with Marx) [10]
• The Holy Family (with Marx) [11]
• The Peasant War in Germany [12]

See also

• Karl Marx
• Marxism
• Das Kapital

External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to:

Friedrich Engels

Wikisource has original works written by or about:

Friedrich Engels

• The Marx & Engels Internet Archive at Marxists.org.
  • Marx/Engels Biographical Archive
• Friedrich Engels - A Biography
• Marx & Engels in their native German language
• Works by Friedrich Engels at Project Gutenberg
• Libcom.org/library Frederick Engels archive
• The Legend of Marx, or “Engels the founder” by Maximilien Rubel

The content of this page is retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Engels under GFDL