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The SAGE Encyclopedia of World Poverty Engels, Friedrich Contributors: Amitabh Vikram Dwivedi Edited by: Mehmet Odekon Book Title: The SAGE Encyclopedia of World Poverty Chapter Title: "Engels, Friedrich" Pub. Date: 2015 Access Date: May 6, 2017 Publishing Company: SAGE Publications, Inc City: Thousand Oaks Print ISBN: 9781483345703 Online ISBN: 9781483345727 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781483345727.n247 Print page: 483 ©2015 SAGE Publications, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This PDF has been generated from SAGE Knowledge. Please note that the pagination of the online version will vary from the pagination of the print book. SAGE SAGE Reference Contact SAGE Publications at http://www.sagepub.com. Friedrich Engels, the son of a textile manufacturer, was born on November 28, 1820, in Barmen (now Wuppertal), a Rhine province in Germany. His literary career started at the age of 17 when he published a poem, “The Bedouin,” in a newspaper in 1838. The next year he published Letters from Wuppertal, which gave an account of the exploitation and suffering of factory workers in the Rhineland. In this work, Engels argued the factory system had abolished the urban petty bourgeoisie, the peasantry, and handcraftsmanship in Barmen and Elberfeld. Engels’ inborn humanism struggled with the contradictions and conclusions found in the Bible, and he eventually found a solution in the “absolute idealism” of philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Engels wrote to Friedrich Graeber on January 21, 1840, that he could not become “an inveterate Hegelian.” Commerce did not attract Engels, and when he was sent to Bremen by his father to work in a big trading firm, Engels used his time at work to master different languages, reading books that were outlawed in Germany and analyzing the needs of the working people. This otherwise excellent boy, as his father described him, did not follow his father into the textile business but joined the Prussian army and the Young Hegelians in 1841. By the end of 1842, Engels established himself as a literary and political critic having written more than 50 pamphlets and articles. His writings expressed ideas for democratic change and unification of Germany. Engels eventually left the Young Hegelians; he abandoned idealism and became an independent communist and materialist, studying the condition of the working class. Engels and Marx Engels first met Karl Marx in 1842. The following year, Engels’s Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy appeared, in which he criticized the bourgeois political economy and capitalism. This work deeply impressed Marx, who described it as “a brilliant essay.” Engels and Marx met again in 1844 and spent 10 days in conversation. This meeting helped Engels sum up his work on English social relations, leading to the publication of The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1845. In this book, Engels concluded that political struggle and a mass revolutionary movement of the workers would result in socialism. He claimed that industrial transformation had produced two classes, the “industrial bourgeoisie” and the “English proletariat.” The partnership of Marx and Engels started with a jointly written work, The Holy Family, in which they proposed that the masses were the real makers of history and outlined their philosophy of “revolutionary materialism.” Engels and Marx’s next book, The German Ideology, denounced Young Hegelians, criticized idealist Hegelian philosophy, showed the shortcomings of Ludwig Feuerbach’s passive contemplative materialism, and set forth the idea of “objective, law-governed, historically conditioned replacement of socio-economic systems.” Birth of Communism In 1847, the Communist League was established with the motto, “Working men of all countries, unite!” Engels and Marx drafted the principles of communism in Communist Manifesto (1848). This work outlined the revolutionary theory of communism and its Page 2 of 4 The SAGE Encyclopedia of World Poverty SAGE SAGE Reference Contact SAGE Publications at http://www.sagepub.com. component parts. Marx and Engels argued that all human history was a history of class struggle between the exploiters and the exploited, between the ruling and oppressed classes. The manifesto showed the way to eradicate abject poverty and terrible suffering. In addition, Engels and Marx also discussed the role of the Communist Party as the means for the successful struggle and victory of the proletariat, tracing the shape of future communist societies and laying a strong foundation for many political movements. The Communist Manifesto became the foundational theory of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (established in 1869) and the governments of the Soviet Union from 1917 to 1989, China from 1949 to the 1980s, and Cuba from 1959 to the present day. The years following the publication of The Communist Manifesto witnessed many revolutionary events. Engels and Marx hailed these events and saw them as “a prologue to proletarian revolution.” On June 1, 1948, they started Neue Rheinische Zeitung, a newspaper that advocated democracy and supported many revolts. However, on May 17, 1849, the Prussian government issued a warrant to arrest Engels, and the newspaper published its last issue two days later. The Communist League dissolved in 1852 following arrests and trials of its members. By then, both Engels and Marx were exiled in England. In 1850, Engels rejoined a Manchester business in which his father owned shares in order to support Marx while he was writing Das Kapital (1867). Marx and Engels lived in different cities for 20 years, yet their collaboration strengthened during this time. The duo comprised two different personalities: Marx was a deep thinker, whereas Engels was a better journalist; Marx was careless with appearance and money, while Engels had a good understanding of business; Marx had a family, Engels spent his life without one. Despite their differences, their collaboration produced Das Kapital, one of the greatest critiques of political economy. When Marx died in 1883, only the first volume was in print; Engels carefully selected and edited the materials from Marx’s notebooks for the second and third volumes and wrote 80 pages of volume three. Engels died in London on August 5, 1895. Amitabh Vikram Dwivedi Shri Mata Vaishno Devi University See Also:Capitalism; Communism; Marx, Karl; Socialism. Further Readings Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels. Collected Works. New York: International Publishers, 1975– 2004. Schmitt, Richard. Introduction to Marx and Engels: A Critical Reconstruction. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997. Stepanova, Evgeniia A. Frederick Engels: A Short Biography. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1988. Amitabh Vikram Dwivedi Shri Mata Vaishno Devi University Page 3 of 4 The SAGE Encyclopedia of World Poverty SAGE SAGE Reference Contact SAGE Publications at http://www.sagepub.com. http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781483345727.n247 10.4135/9781483345727.n247 Page 4 of 4 The SAGE Encyclopedia of World Poverty