Engels, Friedrich

views updated

ENGELS, FRIEDRICH

early years
in partnership with marx
exile and marxism
later years
bibliography

ENGELS, FRIEDRICH (1820–1895), German political theorist.

Friedrich Engels is chiefly known as the sometime collaborator, political associate, lifelong friend, and literary executor of Karl Marx (1818–1883). However, by the time that he and Marx agreed to work together in late 1844, Engels was already a widely published journalist, pamphleteer, and social critic. Before joining Marx in Brussels the following spring, Engels completed work on The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845), a notable and still widely read exposé of the bad housing, poor sanitation, and appalling nutrition to which industrial workers were subjected. His career then took a turn, and for the rest of his life he supported Marx as best he could, not least financially. This included a vast output of reviews, introductions, and popularizing pamphlets, extending to posthumous editions of Marx's works and manuscripts.

early years

Engels was born not far from what is now Wuppertal in the Ruhr district of Prussia. For some generations his family had been mill-owning entrepreneurs, eventually running textile enterprises as far afield as Manchester. They were staunch fundamentalist Protestants, rather hostile to undue learning. After an unremarkable education, Engels was put into the family firm at sixteen. Finding commercial life rather undemanding, he was by seventeen a published poet and at eighteen the author of the scandalous, and fortunately pseudonymous, "Letters from Wuppertal" (1839), which appeared in the Hamburg press. Drawing on his own eyes and ears, he wrote of industrial pollution, moralizing hypocrisy, and wretched working conditions in his twin hometowns, Elberfeld and Barmen. While working in Bremen he also read the radically skeptical Life of Jesus (1835–1836) by D. F. Strauss (1808–1874) and embraced the liberal nationalism of "Young Germany."

In Berlin in 1841–1842, ostensibly to do military service, Engels attended lectures at the university and became a "Young Hegelian" pamphleteer, championing the atheism implicit in Ludwig Feuerbach's (1804–1872) Essence of Christianity (1841). In the repressive climate of the time agitation for liberalizing and democratizing measures necessarily took place in a somewhat coded, philosophical form. This was an argument that the vast works of G. W. F. Hegel (1770–1831) could be read as a call for further historical change in order to realize human freedom more adequately.

In late 1842 Engels visited the offices of the liberal paper Rheinische Zeitung in Cologne, where he encountered Moses Hess (1812–1875), and swiftly declared himself a communist. At that time socialism and communism were used somewhat interchangeably, and these largely French ideas looked beyond the formal institutions of representative democracy to a classless society where poverty and exploitation would be resolved. Engels was on his way to work in Manchester, where in that more liberal political climate he embraced the cause of Chartism, a mass movement for liberal reform within which many socialists participated.

Writing for both English and German-language papers, Engels promoted the cause of democratization, working-class political participation, shorter working hours in industry, and protection from poverty and unemployment. During 1843 he wrote a long article, Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy (1844), and sent it for publication in a German émigré periodical edited in Brussels (by Marx, among others). This tightly argued piece, imbued with both a knowledge of political economy (the economic theory of the day) and a businessman's knowledge of the trade and employment cycles, greatly impressed Marx and was undoubtedly the reason why Engels was warmly received by him in Paris in August 1844. Engels's conclusions were just what he wanted to hear: capitalism was a system based on wild swings in supply and demand that brought misery and ruin to the very people who produced the wealth.

in partnership with marx

Engels and Marx then embarked on various schemes of joint publication, beginning with The Holy Family (1845), a little-read polemic against certain German socialists whom the two considered too intellectual and too remote from working-class politics. While Engels had some misgivings about Marx's polemical efforts against further German (and eventually French) socialists of the time, he acted as collaborator and amanuensis on The German Ideology (written 1845–1846), a large, occasionally undecipherable manuscript soon abandoned by the authors, and first published only in the 1930s. While Part One of this work is considered today to be of profound philosophical importance, there are insoluble problems with the ordering of the text, who-wrote-what, and exactly what arguments it makes.

Nonetheless The German Ideology clearly outlines a new conception of human history. This is rooted in the practical activities of subsistence and luxury production, the structural features of legal systems and class divisions, and a rejection of any explanations or theories of historical development in terms of ideas alone, whether religious, moral, or philosophical. Calling this a new materialism (to distinguish it from the philosophical idealism that they were criticizing), the two linked this demystification of historical change to the socialist movement and working-class politics. After all, workers were engaged in the quintessential human activity but denied adequate subsistence, yet others—who merely owned property—were guaranteed a life of leisure. For Marx and Engels capitalist production presented this glaring contrast, yet industrialization held out the promise of

adequate levels of consumption for everyone. This was the socialist vision they promoted all their lives.

Working with both liberals and socialists, Marx and Engels associated themselves with international "correspondence committees," among which was the Communist League. The two were commissioned to write a unifying document, and Engels drafted two: a communist confession of faith, and a more declaratory set of principles. At the London conference in November 1847 the two were charged with preparing a final version, published there in February 1848. Though Marx was the final hand on the document, the narrative historical sweep and withering scorn for middle-class morality are characteristically Engelsian. This work was soon lost in the revolutionary events of 1848 as they swept across Continental Europe, and its major influence came much later in the 1870s when the Communist Manifesto was used to promote a "Marxist" tendency in international socialism.

During the revolutionary events Engels joined Marx successively in Paris and Cologne, engaging in radical journalism and local agitation. He also found time to take a walking tour of Burgundy during the late autumn of 1848, and then rather more excitingly he joined the revolutionary troops in Elberfeld the following May. He led an armed raid on a Prussian arsenal, but eventually beat a final retreat into Switzerland. He re-established contact with Marx and other exiles in London in late 1849 on his way to work once again for the family firm in Manchester.

exile and marxism

In a role that he later characterized as "junior partner," Engels reviewed Marx's A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859). While little read at the time, this review contains all the most important elements of his "framing" of his mentor, and in effect signals the founding of Marxism with these defining concepts: dialectic, materialism, determinism, metaphysics, idealism, interaction, contradiction, and reflection. These were later presented somewhat more systematically in works such as Anti-Dühring (1878), Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (1880), Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy (1886), and the posthumously published Dialectics of Nature (1927). Engels presented Marx as a "materialist" Hegel, formulating a unified theory of nature, history, and thought, and using a method summarized in three dialectical laws: interpenetration of opposites, transformation of quantity into quality, and negation of the negation. Moreover in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884), he attempted to merge Marx's work with that of Darwin, by incorporating biological reproduction and sexual selection into their account of human social structure and long-term political change.

While Marx's works show little of this drive for such a comprehensive quasi-Hegelian philosophical synthesis, Engels's thus appeared supplementary, rather than contradictory, to most Marxists. Engels, of course, was Marx's earliest intellectual biographer, and the biographer of their relationship, which he portrayed as seamless. Early-twenty-first-century scholarship is making this account increasingly untenable, and also putting Engels's editing of Marx's manuscripts for Capital, volumes 2 (1885) and 3 (1894), under rigorous scrutiny.

later years

In 1869 Engels (at the age of forty-nine) retired from his duties with the family firm and set up house in London (and also settled some money on Marx). He had for some years maintained a discreet domestic relationship, first with Mary Burns (c. 1823–1863), and then with her sister Lydia ("Mrs Lizzie") (1827–1878), both Irish working-class in origin and mill-girls by trade. It is likely that neither attained real literacy, and neither was ever received by the Engels family back home. Cross-class marriage was unthinkable at the time, and inheritance was clearly an issue: Engels married Lizzie on her deathbed. Whether this was a socialist arrangement flouting bourgeois convention, or an all too bourgeois form of masculine exploitation, is up to one's own judgment. Both views were current at the time.

Engels was a considerable personal influence on international socialism as it gained ground, particularly in Germany, during the 1880s when it was illegal and then in the 1890s after liberalization. He attended the 1893 congress of the Socialist International in Zurich as a "grand old man" and honorary president. He died of cancer of the throat in London, and both the German Social Democratic Workers' Party and the Marx family benefited from his will.

See alsoCommunism; Marx, Karl; Second International; Socialism.