Table Of ContentThe 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
