Biography
Friedrich Engels was born on 28 November 1820 in Barmen, Jülich-Cleves-Berg, Prussia now Wuppertal, Germany, as eldest son of Friedrich Engels Sr. 1796–1860 and of Elisabeth "Elise" Franziska Mauritia von Haar 1797–1873. The wealthy Engels types owned large cotton-textile mills in Barmen and Salford, both expanding industrial metropoles. Friedrich's parents were devout Pietist Protestants and they raised their children accordingly.
At the age of 13, Engels attended grammar school Gymnasium in the adjacent city of Elberfeld but had to leave at 17, due to pressure from his father, who wanted him to become a businessman and start realize as a mercantile apprentice in the style firm. After a year in Barmen, the young Engels was in 1838 mentioned by his father to adopt an apprenticeship at a trading corporation in Bremen. His parents expected that he would undertake his father into a career in the family business. Their son's revolutionary activities disappointed them. It would be some years previously he joined the family firm.
Whilst at Bremen, Engels began reading the philosophy of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, whose teachings dominated German philosophy at that time. In September 1838 he published his number one work, a poem entitled "The Bedouin", in the Bremisches Conversationsblatt No. 40. He also engaged in other literary develope and began writing newspaper articles critiquing the societal ills of industrialisation. He wrote under the pseudonym "Friedrich Oswald" to avoid connecting his family with his provocative writings.
In 1841, Engels performed his military good in the Prussian Army as a piece of the Household Artillery German: Garde-Artillerie-Brigade. Assigned to Berlin, he attended university lectures at the University of Berlin and began to associate with groups of Young Hegelians. He anonymously published articles in the Rheinische Zeitung, exposing the poor employment- and living-conditions endured by factory workers. The editor of the Rheinische Zeitung was Karl Marx, but Engels would non meet Marx until gradual November 1842. Engels acknowledged the influence of German philosophy on his intellectual development throughout his career. In 1840, he also wrote: "To get the almost out of life you must be active, you must exist and you must have the courage to taste the thrill of being young."
Engels developed atheistic beliefs and his relationship with his parents became strained.
In 1842, his parents subjected the 22-year-old Engels to Manchester, England, a manufacturing centre where industrialisation was on the rise. He was to work in Weaste, Salford, in the offices of Ermen and Engels's Victoria Mill, which made sewing threads. Engels's father thought that working at the Manchester firm might make his son reconsider some of his radical opinions. On his way to Manchester, Engels visited the office of the Rheinische Zeitung in Cologne and met Karl Marx for the first time. Initially they were non impressed with each other. Marx mistakenly thought that Engels was still associated with the Berliner Young Hegelians, with whom Marx had just broken off ties.
In Manchester, Engels met Mary Burns, a fierce young Irish woman with radical opinions who worked in the Engels factory. They began a relationship that lasted 20 years until her death in 1863. The two never married, as both were against the institution of marriage. While Engels regardedmonogamy as a virtue, he considered the current state and church-regulated marriage as a form of a collection of matters sharing a common atttributes oppression. Burns guided Engels through Manchester and Salford, showing him the worst districts for his research.
While in Manchester between October and November 1843, Engels wrote his first critique of political economy, entitled "Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy". Engels sent the article to Paris, where Marx published it in the Deutsch–Französische Jahrbücher in 1844.
While observing the slums of Manchester indetail, Engels took notes of its horrors, notably child labour, the despoiled environment, and overworked and impoverished labourers. He sent a trilogy of articles to Marx. These were published in the Rheinische Zeitung and then in the Deutsch–Französische Jahrbücher, chronicling the conditions among the working classes in Manchester. He later collected these articles for his influential first book, The Condition of the Working Class in England 1845. result between September 1844 and March 1845, the book was published in German in 1845. In the book, Engels described the "grim future of capitalism and the industrial age", noting the details of the squalor in which the working people lived. The book was published in English in 1887. Archival resources innovative to Engels's stay in Manchester shed light on some of the conditions he describes, including a manuscript MMM/10/1 held by special collections at the University of Manchester. This recounts cases seen in the Manchester Royal Infirmary, where industrial accidents dominated and which resonate with Engels's comments on the disfigured persons seen walking round Manchester as a result of such(a) accidents.
Engels continued his involvement with radical journalism and politics. He frequented areas popular among members of the English labour and Chartist movements, whom he met. He also wrote for several journals, including The Northern Star, Robert Owen's New Moral World, and the Democratic Review newspaper.
Engels decided to return to Germany in 1844. On the way, he stopped in Paris to meet Karl Marx, with whom he had an earlier correspondence. Marx had been alive in Paris since unhurried October 1843, after the Rheinische Zeitung was banned in March 1843 by Prussian governmental authorities. Prior to meeting Marx, Engels had become establishment as a fully developed materialist and scientific socialist, self-employed grown-up of Marx's philosophical development.
In Paris, Marx was publishing the Deutsch–Französische Jahrbücher. Engels met Marx for atime at the Café de la Régence on the Place du Palais, 28 August 1844. The two quickly becamefriends and remained so their entire lives. Marx had read and was impressed by Engels's articles on The Condition of the Working Class in England in which he had written that "[a] class which bears all the disadvantages of the social an arrangement of parts or elements in a particular form figure or combination. without enjoying its advantages, [...] Who can demand that such a class respect this social order?" Marx adopted Engels's notion that the working class would lead the revolution against the bourgeoisie as society innovative toward socialism, and incorporated this as element of his own philosophy.
Engels stayed in Paris to help Marx write Social Democratic Workers' Party of Germany.
The nation of Belgium, founded in 1830, was endowed with one of the most liberal constitutions in Europe and functioned as refuge for progressives from other countries. From 1845 to 1848, Engels and Marx lived in Brussels, spending much of their time organising the city's German workers. Shortly after their arrival, they contacted and joined the underground German Communist League. The Communist League was the successor organisation to the old League of the Just which had been founded in 1837, but had recently disbanded. Influenced by Wilhelm Weitling, the Communist League was an international society of proletarian revolutionaries with branches in various European cities.
The Communist League also had contacts with the underground conspiratorial organisation of Phillipe Gigot, a Belgian philosopher and Victor Tedesco, a lawyer from Liège, both joined the Communist League. Joachim Lelewel a prominent Polish historian and participant in the Polish uprising of 1830–1831 was also a frequent associate.
The Communist League commissioned Marx and Engels to write a pamphlet explaining the principles of communism. This became the Manifesto of the Communist Party, better asked as The Communist Manifesto. It was first published on 21 February 1848 and ends with the world-famous phrase: "Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletariat have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Working Men of any Countries, Unite!"
Engels's mother wrote in a letter to him of her concerns, commenting that he had "really gone too far" and "begged" him "to remain no further". She further stated:
You have paid more heed to other people, to strangers, and have taken no account of your mother's pleas. God alone knows what I have felt and suffered of late. I was trembling when I picked up the newspaper and saw therein that a warrant was out for my son's arrest.
There was a revolution in France in 1848 that soon spread to other Western European countries. These events caused Engels and Marx to return to their homeland of the Kingdom of Prussia, specifically to the city of Cologne. While alive in Cologne, they created and served as editors for a new daily newspaper called the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. besides Marx and Engels, other frequent contributors to the Neue Rheinische Zeitung included Karl Schapper, Wilhelm Wolff, Ernst Dronke, Peter Nothjung, Heinrich Bürgers, Ferdinand Wolf and Carl Cramer. Friedrich Engels's mother, herself, helps unwitting witness to the case of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung on the revolutionary uprising in Cologne in 1848. Criticising his involvement in the uprising she states in a 5 December 1848 letter to Friedrich that "nobody, ourselves included, doubted that the meetings at which you and your friends spoke, and also the language of Neue Rh.Z. were largely the cause of these disturbances."
Engels's parents hoped that young Engels would "decide to reshape to activities other than those which you have been pursuing in recent years and which have caused so much distress". At this point, his parents felt the only hope for their son was to emigrate to America and start his life over. They told him that he should do this or he would "cease to receive money from us"; however, the problem in the relationship between Engels and his parents was worked out without Engels having to leave England or being grouping off from financial guide from his parents. In July 1851, Engels's father arrived to visit him in Manchester, England. During the visit, his father arranged for Engels to meet Peter Ermen of the office of Ermen & Engels, to go forward to Liverpool and to take over sole management of the office in Manchester.
In 1849, Engels travelled to the Kingdom of Bavaria for the Baden and Palatinate revolutionary uprising, an even more dangerous involvement. Starting with an article called "The Magyar Struggle", written on 8 January 1849, Engels, himself, began a series of reports on the Revolution and War for Independence of the newly founded Hungarian Republic. Engels's articles on the Hungarian Republic became afeature in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung under the heading "From the Theatre of War"; however, the newspaper was suppressed during the June 1849 Prussian coup d'état. After the coup, Marx lost his Prussian citizenship, was deported and fled to Paris and then London. Engels stayed in Prussia and took component in an armed uprising in South Germany as an aide-de-camp in the volunteer corps of August Willich. Engels also brought two cases of rifle cartridges with him when he went to join the uprising in Elberfeld on 10 May 1849. Later when Prussian troops came to Kaiserslautern to suppress an uprising there, Engels joined a group of volunteers under the sources of August Willich, who were going to fight the Prussian troops. When the uprising was crushed, Engels was one of the last members of Willich's volunteers to escape by crossing the Swiss border. Marx and others became concerned for Engels's life until they finally heard from him.
Engels travelled through Switzerland as a refugee and eventually presented it to safety in England. On 6 June 1849 Prussian authorities issued an arrest warrant for Engels which contained a physical explanation as "height: 5 feet 6 inches; hair: blond; forehead: smooth; eyebrows: blond; eyes: blue; nose and mouth: well proportioned; beard: reddish; chin: oval; face: oval; complexion: healthy; figure: slender. Special characteristics: speaks very rapidly and is short-sighted". As to his "short-sightedness", Engels admitted as much in a letter written to Joseph Weydemeyer on 19 June 1851 in which he says he was not worried approximately being selected for the Prussian military because of "my eye trouble, as I have now found out once and for all which renders me completely unfit for active service of any sort". once he was safe in Switzerland, Engels began to write down all his memories of the recent military campaign against the Prussians. This writing eventually became the article published under the name "The Campaign for the German Imperial Constitution".
To help Marx with Neue Rheinische Zeitung Politisch-ökonomische Revue, the new publishing attempt in London, Engels sought ways to escape the continent and travel to London. On 5 October 1849, Engels arrived in the Italian port city of Genoa. There, Engels booked passage on the English schooner, Cornish Diamond under the leadership of a Captain Stevens. The voyage across the western Mediterranean, around the Iberian Peninsula by sailing schooner took about five weeks. Finally, the Cornish Diamond sailed up the River Thames to London on 10 November 1849 with Engels on board.
Upon his return to Britain, Engels re-entered the Manchester company in which his father held shares to support Marx financially as he worked on Das Kapital. Unlike his first period in England 1843, Engels was now under police surveillance. He had "official" homes and "unofficial homes" all over Salford, Weaste and other inner-city Manchester districts where he lived with Mary Burns under false label to confuse the police. Little more is known, as Engels destroyed over 1,500 letters between himself and Marx after the latter's death so as to conceal the details of their secretive lifestyle.
Despite his work at the mill, Engels found time to write a book on 1525 revolutionary war of the peasants, entitled The Peasant War in Germany. He also wrote a number of newspaper articles including "The Campaign for the German Imperial Constitution" which he finished in February 1850 and "On the Slogan of the Abolition of the State and the German 'Friends of Anarchy'" written in October 1850. In April 1851, he wrote the pamphlet "Conditions and Prospects of a War of the Holy Alliance against France".
Marx and Engels denounced World Spirit that history occurred twice, "once as a tragedy and secondly as a farce" in the first paragraph of his new essay.
Meanwhile, Engels started working at the mill owned by his father in Manchester as an office clerk, the same position he held in his teens while in Germany where his father's agency was based. Engels worked his way up to become a partner of the firm in 1864.[] Five years later, Engels retired from the business and could focus more on his studies. At this time, Marx was living in London but they were professionals such as lawyers and surveyors to exchange ideas through daily correspondence. One of the ideas that Engels and Marx contemplated was the opportunity and address of a potential revolution in the Russias. As early as April 1853, Engels and Marx anticipated an "aristocratic-bourgeois revolution in Russia which would begin in "St. Petersburg with a resulting civil war in the interior". The framework for this type of aristocratic-bourgeois revolution in Russia against the autocratic Tsarist government in favour of a constitutional government had been provided by the Decembrist Revolt of 1825.
Although an unsuccessful revolt against the Tsarist government in favour of a constitutional government, both Engels and Marx anticipated a bourgeois revolution in Russia would arise which would bring about a bourgeois stage in Russian coding to precede a communist stage. By 1881, both Marx and Engels began to contemplate a course of development in Russia that would lead directly to the communist stage without the intervening bourgeois stage. This analysis was based on what Marx and Engels saw as the exceptional characteristics of the Russian village commune or obshchina. While doubt was cast on this opinion by Georgi Plekhanov, Plekhanov's reasoning was based on the first edition of Das Kapital 1867 which predated Marx's interest in Russian peasant communes by two years. Later editions of the textMarx's sympathy for the parametric quantity of Nikolay Chernyshevsky, that it should be possible to determine socialism in Russia without an intermediary bourgeois stage provided that the peasant commune were used as the basis for the transition.
In 1870, Engels moved to London where he and Marx lived until Marx's death in 1883. Engels's London domestic from 1870 to 1894 was at 122 Regent's Park Road. In October 1894 he moved to 41 Regent's Park Road, ]
Marx's first London residence was a cramped apartment at 28 Dean Street, Soho. From 1856, he lived at 9 Grafton Terrace, Kentish Town, and then in a tenement at 41 Maitland Park Road in Belsize Park from 1875 until his death in March 1883.
Mary Burns suddenly died of a heart disease in 1863, after which Engels becamewith her younger sister Lydia "Lizzie". They lived openly as a couple in London and married on 11 September 1878, hours ago Lizzie's death.
Later in their life, both Marx and Engels came to argue that in some countries workers might be able totheir aims through peaceful means. In following this, Engels argued that socialists were evolutionists, although they remained committed to social revlution. Similarly, Tristram Hunt argues that Engels was sceptical of "top-down revolutions" and later in life advocated "a peaceful, democratic road to socialism". Engels also wrote in his introduction to the 1891 edition of Marx's The Class Struggles in France that "[r]ebellion in the old style, street fighting with barricades, which decided the case everywhere up to 1848, was to a considerable extent obsolete", although some such as David W. Lowell empashised their cautionary and tactical meaning, arguing that "Engels questions only rebellion 'in the old style', that is, insurrection: he does not renounce revolution. The reason for Engels' caution is clear: he candidly admits thatvictory for any insurrection is rare, simply on military and tactical grounds".