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Friedrich Engels

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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.

Contents

1 Biography

2 Works

3 See also

4 References

5 External links

[edit]

Biography

Friedrich Engels in 1856

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 1843 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 ([1]).

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. [2]

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"] [[3]]

Statue (1986) of Karl Marx and Friedrich
Engels

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.

Engels had a reputation as an avid bird-breeder.

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

[edit]

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]

Socialism:
Utopian and Scientific

[edit]

See also

Karl
Marx

Marxism

Das Kapital

[edit]

References

Carver, Terrell: Engels: a very short introduction. Oxford: Oxford
Univarity Press, 2003.

Crosby, Danny: "Engels in Manchester" on the BBC
website; retrieved on 17 June 2006.

[edit]

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 and 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 works of Karl
Marx and Friedrich Engels

Marx: Critique
of Hegel's Philosophy of Right (1843), On the Jewish
Question (1843), Notes
on James Mill (1844), Economic
and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 (1844), Theses on
Feuerbach (1845), The Poverty
of Philosophy (1845), Wage-Labor
and Capital (1847), The
Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852), Grundrisse (1857), Preface
to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859), Theories
of Surplus Value, 3 volumes (1862), Value,
Price and Profit (1865), Capital vol. 1 (1867), The
Civil War in France (1871), Critique
of the Gotha Program (1875), Notes
on Wagner (1883)

Marx and Engels: The German
Ideology (1845), The Holy
Family (1845), Manifesto of the
Communist Party (1848), Writings
on the U.S. Civil War (1861), Capital, vol. 2
[posthumously, published by Engels] (1893), Capital, vol. 3
[posthumously, published by Engels] (1894)

Engels: The
Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844 (1844), The Peasant
War in Germany (1850), Revolution
and Counter-Revolution in Germany (1852), Socialism:
Utopian and Scientific (1880), Dialectics of
Nature (1883), The
Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State (1884), Ludwig
Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy (1886)

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Engels"

Categories:
Marxist
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communists | German
philosophers | 19th
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of the Revolutions of 1848 | German
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| 1820 births
| 1895
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This page was last modified 01:47, 17 June 2006.

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