A German revolutionary social and political philosopher, cofounder of Marxism and communism, born in Barmen in 1820.
Friedrich Engels’s father was a well-to-do textile manufacturer. Early in his life, the German poet Heinrich Heine and the German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel influenced him. After serving for one year as an army volunteer in Berlin in 1842, he moved to Manchester already endorsing communism under the influence of the German socialist Moses Hess. In 1844, he published Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy (generally known as the Umrisse), in which he demonstrated that all categories of political economy presuppose competition under private property. For Engels, competition based on self-interest generates monopoly. Competition as a necessary feature of private property leads to the centralization and concentration of property. Thus, he concluded that competition is a law that produces monopoly, the elimination of private property, and social revolution, and that the capitalist system is heading toward self-destruction through forces immanent within it.
While working in his father’s Manchester cotton mill, Engels was shocked by the laborers’ working conditions. In 1845, he published The Condition of the Working Class in England. The capitalist law of competition had already set in motion the Industrial Revolution, thus creating a new revolutionary force: the propertyless working class. Engels contributed several articles to the journal Franco-German Annals (edited and published by Karl Marx in Paris). In 1844, Engels and Marx had their first serious meeting and realized that they truly shared the same understanding of the political economy and philosophy of capitalism. When Marx moved to Brussels after being expelled from France, Engels took Marx to London to meet several Chartist leaders including George Harney. In 1846, they went back to Brussels and set up the Communist Correspondence Committee hoping to unite all European socialists. In 1848 in London they coauthored the 12,000-word pamphlet The Communist Manifesto disseminated in several European languages; their goal was to explain communist theory to an international working-class audience. By the end of 1848, both Marx and Engels were expelled from Belgium. They moved to Cologne where they started publishing the radical newspaper New Rhenish Gazette. In less then a year, Marx and Engels were forced to leave Germany. They went to London in 1849.
Engels was the only source of financial support to the Marx family. Unable to raise enough money in London, Engels returned to Germany and worked in his father’s business. After Marx’s death in 1883, Engels devoted most of his time to editing his friend’s drafts and eventually published the second and third volumes of Das Kapital. He died in London in 1895. His other major works include Synopsis of Capital (1868), On Authority (1872), Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (1877), The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State (1884), and Law of Value (1895).
Fadhel Kaboub
See also: Marx, Karl.
McLellan, David. Friedrich Engels. New York: Penguin, 1978.