Frederick Engels (1820–1895)

One of the founders of Marxism; great leader and mentor of the world proletariat and the international communist movement.

Engels was born on November 28, 1820, in Barmen, Germany, into a textile mill owner’s family. Located in Wuppertal, Barmen was an important center of the capitalist textile industry in Prussia. The Engels family was rich and a renowned local family, and in 1837, Frederick Engels’ father started the company called Ermen Engels Spinning Mill in Manchester, England. From his youth, Engels was influenced by the progressive liberal ideas, especially French humanism. Engels attended the municipal school in Barmen, the modern secondary school in Elberfeld, but before he graduated from high school, he was apprenticed by his father to a salesman’s office, and then to a clerk in a merchant’s house in Bremen. With a strong desire for knowledge, Engels embarked on a path of self-education, taking every opportunity to study literature, history, poetry, and foreign languages, especially in the light of the political and religious debates at the time, and the philosophies of Kant, Hegel, and the works of the Young Hegelians. He began to be influenced by the literary and artistic current “Junges Deutschland” (Young Germany) and then by the radical ideas of the “Young Hegelians”, and became more and more concerned with the actual political struggle.

Although Engels was born into a wealthy family, he was concerned with and sympathetic to the sufferings of the working people since he was a teenager. Based on his own experience and observation in Wuppertal, Engels saw the suffering of the workers and wrote a Letters from Wuppertal, which was published with an anonymous name in the Telegraph für Deutschland in March 1839. He attacked the religious pietism that was the spiritual pillar of the factory owners, pointing out that factory labor destroyed the human body and caused widespread poverty, while religious pietism killed the human spirit and became the talisman of the factory owners. This article marks the germination of Engels’ revolutionary democratic ideas.

In September 1841, Engels came to Berlin for military service as an artilleryman. Using this opportunity, Engels read a large number of books on philosophy and religion, attended courses on philosophy, literature and religious history at the University of Berlin, and further mastered in Hegelian philosophy. The University of Berlin was an “arena of intellectual battles”, and in the autumn of 1841, Friedrich Schelling attacked Hegelian philosophy in a concentrated manner from his chair in Berlin. Engels held that Schelling’s philosophy was fabricated “for the needs of the Prussian Kingdom”, and he immediately wrote Schelling on Hegel as well as two pamphlets, Schelling and Revelation and Schelling, Philosopher in Christ. The publication of these works aroused the attention and praise of the progressive forces both in Prussia and the world and he was started to be called as “Doctor”. After his military service, Engels went to England to continue his business activities. The characteristics of British social development provided favorable conditions for him to observe and study social and economic problems and class relations, and enabled him to argue for communism economically and politically at an early time. At that time, he made on-the-spot investigations on the social condition and workers’ life in England, read and studied various socialist theories, especially the utopian socialist theories and the works of British classical economists, and wrote two articles, Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy and The Condition of England: Review of Past and Present by Thomas Carlyle, which were published in the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher by Marx and Ruge in early 1844. Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy had an important influence on Marx’s study of political economy. In August 1844, Engels met with Marx in Paris, and the two men came to the common conclusion—the future of mankind is embodied in the working class—and henceforth began their great cause of founding Marxism. In November 1844, Engels co-operated with Marx to complete the first book, The Holy Family, which criticized the idealist conception of history of the Young Hegelians and discussed the part played by material production and the role of the masses. In March 1845, Engels published The Condition of the Working Class in England. Based on Engels’ own direct observations during his residence in England between November 1842 and August 1844, The Condition of the Working Class in England has analyzed the inner contradictions of the capitalist system and the irreconcilability of the contradictions between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, and put forth the idea that the workers’ movement should be combined with scientific socialism. From the autumn of 1845 to the summer of 1846, Engels and Marx co-authored The German Ideology, and revealed the laws of development of human society, expounded the fundamental viewpoint of the materialist conception of history, and accomplished their first great discovery. November 29–December 10, 1847, the Second Congress of the Communist League was held in London, and the Congress entrusted Marx and Engels with the task of drafting The Communist Manifesto. In February 1848, The Communist Manifesto was published in London, which discussed the general laws of class struggle and the development of human society, put forth the ideas of proletarian revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat; discussed the laws of the emergence, development and downfall of capitalism, put forth the scientific conclusion that “the fall of the bourgeoisie and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable”, elucidated the nature, characteristics, basic programme and tactical principles of the Communist Party, laid the foundation of the Marxist doctrine of party building. The Communist Manifesto is the first programmatic document of scientific socialism, marking the official birth of Marxism as a mature theory. Engels and Marx joined in the revolutionary storm of 1848–1849 in Europe and fought against the Prussian reactionary forces using the newspaper Neue Rheinische Zeitung as a weapon. He also personally joined the Baden-Palatine revolutionary army and served as its adjutant, taking part in four fierce battles, leading the insurgent fighters to charge the enemy lines and fight bravely, earning praise from his comrades-in-arms.

After the failure of the Revolutions of 1848, he wrote Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Germany and summarized the experience and lessons of the revolution. In 1850, he returned to Manchester to continue his business, he helped Marx’s family financially and selflessly, carried out his scientific research and wrote for the New-York Daily Tribune. In October 1870, he was elected a member of the of the General Council of the First International. After the outbreak of the Paris Commune Revolution in 1871, he spoke highly of the revolutionary spirit of the working class in the Paris Commune. After the failure of the Paris Commune, he comprehensively summed up its experience and lessons. Between 1872 and 1873, Engels wrote the Housing Question and criticized the Proudhonism within the First International. In 1875, when the Eisenachers and the Lassalleans of the German workers’ movement merged to build a joint party, Engels wrote a letter to Bebel to criticize Lassalle’s opportunism which was demonstrated in the draft programme of the Party. Between 1876 and 1878, Engels wrote Anti-Dühring, criticized and liquidated Dühringism and made a systematic exposition of his ideas on the three component parts of Marxism. After Marx’s death, Engels mainly studied philosophy and socialist theories, and developed the communist world outlook “in all its details and relations”. His main works include Dialectics of Nature, The End of Classical German Philosophy and Ludwig Feuerbach, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, A Critique of the Draft Social-Democratic Programme of 1891, Introduction to The Class Struggles in France, 1848 to 1850 by Karl Marx, as well as the correspondences on historical materialism in his later years. In these works, he systematically studied and elucidated the fundamental principles of Marxist philosophy and scientific socialism, so as to make the scientific ideological system of Marxism more perfect and mature.

After Marx’s death, Engels became the true leader and mentor of the international workers’ movement and guided its development. Under his care, the Second International was founded in 1889. As the centerpiece of his work during this period, Engels, with the assistance of Eleanor Marx, sorted out and studied the voluminous and very content-rich outlines, notebooks, and excerpts of Capital that Marx had left behind, published the volumes 2 and 3 of Capital, and made preparations for the publication of Volume 4 of Capital. By publishing volumes 2 and 3 of Capital, Engels built a solemn and magnificent monument to his gifted friend, on which he inadvertently and indelibly inscribed his own name. In his later years, Engels made a profound criticism of the opportunist tendencies, reformist currents and dogmatic ideas within the workers’ movement, and pointed out the direction for the revolutionary struggle of the working class. in 1894, Engels wrote The Peasant Question in France and Germany, which dealt with the principles, guidelines and policies of the proletarian political parties in fighting for an alliance with the peasants as well as in guiding the peasants towards co-operatives, and other ideas.

On August 5, 1895, Engels’ heart stopped beating. At his funeral service, Wilhelm Liebknecht spoke highly of Engels: There are only a few here, but these few represent millions, represent a world… He was a signpost and a guide, a champion and a fellow campaigner, theory and practice were united in him.