Friedrich Engels

Friedrich Engels
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Friedrich Engels
Name:
Friedrich Engels
Birth:
November 28, 1820 (Wuppertal, Germany)
Death:
August 5, 1895 (London, England)
School/tradition:
Marxism
Main interests:
Political philosophy, Politics, Economics, class struggle
Notable ideas:
Co-founder of Marxism (with Karl Marx), alienation and exploitation of the worker, historical materialism
Influences:
Kant, Hegel, Feuerbach, Stirner, Smith, Ricardo, Rousseau, Goethe, Fourier
Influenced:
Luxemburg, Lenin, Trotsky, Mao, Guevara, Sartre, Debord, Frankfurt School, Negri, more...
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 (148). Engels also edited the second and third volumes of Das Kapital after Marx's death.
Contents[hide]
[edit] Early Years
Friedrich Engels was born in Barmen, Rhine Province of the kingdom of Prussia (now a part of Wuppertal in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany) as the eldest son of a German textile manufacturer, with whom he had a strained relationship. [1] Due to family circumstances, Engels dropped out of High school and was sent to work as an nonsalaried office clerk at a commercial house in Bremen in 1838. [2] [3] During this time, Engels began reading the philosophy of Hegel, whose teachings had dominated German philosophy at the time. In September of 1838, he published his first work, a poem titled The Bedouin, in the Bremisches Conversationsblatt No. 40. He also engaged in other literary and journalistic work.[4][5] In 1841, Engels joined the Prussian Army as a member of the Household Artillery. This position moved him to Berlin where he attended university lectures, began to associate with groups of Young Hegelians and published several articles in the Rheinische Zeitung.[6] Throughout his lifetime, Engels would point out that he was indebted to German philosophy because of its effect on his intellectual development. [7]

[edit] England
In 1842, the twenty-two year old Engels was sent to Manchester, England to work for the textile firm of Ermen and Engels in which his father was a shareholder.[8] [9] Engels' father thought working in at the Manchester firm might make Engels reconsider the radical leanings that he had developed in High school.[10] [11] On his way to Manchester, Engels visited the office of the Rheinische Zeitung and met Karl Marx for the first time though the pair did not impress each other. [12] In Manchester, Engels met Mary Burns, a young woman with whom he began a relationship that lasted until her death in 1862. [13] Mary acted as a guide through Manchester and helped introduce Engels to the British working class. Despite having a lifelong relationship, the two were never married as Engels was against the institution of marriage which he saw as unnatural and unjust.[14]
During his time in Manchester, Engels took notes and personally observed the horrible working conditions of British workers. These notes and observations, along with his experience working in his father's commercial firm, formed the basis for his first book The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844. Whilst writing Conditions of the Working Class, Engels continued his involvement with radical journalism and politics. He frequented some members of the English labour & Chartist movements and wrote for several different journals, including The Northern Star, Robert Owen’s New Moral World & the Democratic Review newspaper.[15] [16]

[edit] Paris
After a productive stay in England, Engels decided to return to Germany in 1844. While traveling back to Germany, he stopped in Paris to meet Karl Marx, with whom he had an earlier correspondence. Marx and Engels met at the Café de la Régence on the Place du Palais, August 28, 1844. The two became close friends and would remain so for their entire lives. Engels ended up staying in Paris in order to help Marx write The Holy Family, which was an attack on the Young Hegelians & the Bauer brothers. Engels' earliest contribution to Marx's work was writing to the Deutsch-französische Jahrbücher journal, which was edited by both Marx and Arnold Ruge in Paris in the same year.[17]

[edit] Brussels
Between 1845 and 1848, Engels and Marx lived in Brussels, spending much of their time organizing the city's German workers. Shortly after their arrival, they contacted and joined the underground German Communist League and were commissioned, by the League, to write a pamphlet explaining the principles of Communism. This became the The Manifesto of the Communist Party, better known as the Communist Manifesto. It was first published on February 21 1848.[18]

[edit] Return to Prussia
During the month of February in 1848, there was a revolution in France that eventually spread to other Western European countries. This event caused Engels & Marx to go back to their home country of Prussia, specifically the city of Cologne. While living in Cologne, Engels and Marx created and served as editors for a new daily newspaper called the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. [19] However, during a June 1849 Prussian coup d'état the newspaper was suppressed. The coup d'état separated Engels and Marx, the latter was deported, since he lost his Prussian citizenship, and fled to Paris and then London. Engels stayed in Prussia and took part in an armed uprising in South Germany as an aide-de-camp in the volunteer corps of the city of Willich. [20] When the uprising was crushed, Engels managed to escape by traveling through Switzerland as a refugee and returned to England.[21]

[edit] Back in Manchester
Once Engels made it to England, he decided to re-enter the commercial firm where his father held shares in order to help support Marx with his publications. He hated this work intensely, however knew that his friend needed the support. [22][23] He started off as an office clerk, the same position he held in his teens, but eventually worked his way up to become a joint proprietor in 1864. Five years later, Engels retired from the business to focus more on his studies.[24] At this time, Marx was living in London but they were able to exchange ideas through daily correspondence. In 1870, Engels moved to London and lived with Marx until the latter's death in 1883. [25]

[edit] Later years
After Marx's death, Engels devoted much of his remaining years to editing and translating Marx's unpublished works. However, he also contributed significantly to other areas, such as feminist theory. Engels believed that the concept of monogamous marriage was created from the domination of man over women. Engels would tie this particular argument to communist thought by arguing that men have dominated women just as the capitalist class has dominated workers. One of the best examples of Engels' thoughts on these issues are in his work The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State.
Engels died of throat cancer in London in 1895[26]. Following cremation at Woking, his ashes were scattered off Beachy Head, as he had requested.