Engels, Friedrich (1820-1895)

A leaflet containing the Manifesto of the Communist Party 1848, written by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels while members of the Communist League in London.

A portrait of the German political philosopher Friedrich Engels c. 1869. The Communist Manifesto, by Engels and Karl Marx, was published in 1848. The very next year, aged 29 years, Engels joined his family firm. He remained in the firm for 20 years, eventually retiring from it (in 1869) as director and partner in the company.

German social and political philosopher, a friend of, and collaborator with, Karl Marx on The Communist Manifesto (1848) and other key works. His later interpretations of Marxism, and his own philosophical and historical studies such as Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State (1884) (which linked patriarchy with the development of private property), developed such concepts as historical materialism. His use of positivism and Darwinian ideas gave Marxism a scientific and deterministic flavour which was to influence Soviet thinking.

In 1842 Engels's father sent him to work in the cotton factory owned by his family in Manchester, England, where he became involved with Chartism. In 1844 his lifelong friendship with Karl Marx began, and together they worked out the materialist interpretation of history and in 1847-48 wrote the Communist Manifesto. Returning to Germany during the 1848-49 revolution, Engels worked with Marx on the Neue Rheinische Zeitung/New Rhineland Newspaper and fought on the barricades in Baden. After the defeat of the revolution he returned to Manchester, and for the rest of his life largely supported the Marx family.

Engels's first book was The Condition of the Working Classes in England (1845). He summed up the lessons of 1848 in The Peasants' War in Germany (1850) and Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Germany (1851). After Marx's death Engels was largely responsible for the wider dissemination of his ideas; he edited the second and third volumes of Marx's Das Kapital (1885 and 1894). Although Engels himself regarded his ideas as identical with those of Marx, discrepancies between their works are the basis of many Marxist debates.