Friedrich Engels (1820–95) was a German socialist and political philosopher. The closest intellectual collaborator of Karl Marx, Engels was the source of much of the money with which Marx lived. Together they founded modern communism. They co-authored The Communist Manifesto (1848.) After Marx’s death, Engels edited the second and third volumes of Das Kapital.
Born in Barmen, Rhine Province, Prussia, Engels mainly lived in England after 1842. He worked in Ermen & Engels, a family business in Manchester’s “cottonopolis.” He established contacts with the Chartist movement and wrote Condition of the Working Classes in England in 1844 (1845.)
Engels and Marx became friends in Paris in 1844 when both were in their mid-20s. They remained extremely close until Marx died in 1883. Engels left Manchester to work with Marx on the “Communist Manifesto,” and the two spent the late 1840s crisscrossing Europe to follow the continental revolutions of the time, ending up in England.
Engels and Marx collaborated on the Communist Manifesto (1848) and returned to Germany to work on the Neue Rheinische Zeitung: Organ der Demokratie (“New Rhenish Newspaper: Organ of Democracy”) newspaper.
After Marx died in 1883, Engels devoted the remaining years of his life to organizing the chaotic notes Marx left behind for volumes II and III of Das Kapital, compiling the second (1885) and third (1894) volumes, thus establishing the materialist interpretation of history. A “fourth volume” of Das Kapital was published as Marx’s Theories of Surplus Value (1863.)
German journalist and historian Gustav Mayer wrote Friedrich Engels: A Biography (1936.) British historian Tristram Hunt wrote Marx’s General: The Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels (2010.)
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Friedrich Engels
An ounce of action is worth a ton of theory.
—Friedrich Engels
Topics: Entrepreneurs, Action, Courage
Bare-faced covetousness was the moving spirit of civilization from the first dawn to the present day; wealth, and again wealth, and for the third time wealth; wealth, not of society, but of the puny individual, was its only and final aim.
—Friedrich Engels
Topics: Wealth
From the first day to this, sheer greed was the driving spirit of civilization.
—Friedrich Engels
An ounce of action is worth a ton of theory.
—Friedrich Engels
Topics: Entrepreneurs, Action, Courage
Freedom is the recognition of necessity.
—Friedrich Engels
Topics: Necessity
The first act by virtue of which the State really constitutes itself the representative of the whole of society the taking possession of the means of production in the name of society this is, at the same time, its last independent act as a State. State interference in social relations becomes, in one domain after another, superfluous, and then dies out of itself; the government of persons is replaced by the administration of things, and by the conduct of processes of production. The State is not abolished. It dies out.
—Friedrich Engels
Some laws of state aimed at curbing crime are even more criminal.
—Friedrich Engels
Topics: Lawyers
Thus the freer the judgement of a man is in regard to a definite issue, with so much greater necessity will the substance of this judgement be determined.
—Friedrich Engels
Topics: Rationality
By bourgeoisie is meant the class of modern capitalists, owners of the means of social production and employers of wage labor. By proletariat, the class of modern wage laborers who, having no means of production of their own, are reduced to selling their labor power in order to live.
—Friedrich Engels
Topics: Class
All history has been a history of class struggles between dominated classes at various stages of social development.
—Friedrich Engels
Topics: Class, History
Just as Marx used to say about the French Marxists of the late seventies: All I know is that I am not a Marxist.
—Friedrich Engels
People think they have taken quite an extraordinarily bold step forward when they have rid themselves of belief in hereditary monarchy and swear by the democratic republic. In reality, however, the state is nothing but a machine for the oppression of one class by another, and indeed in the democratic republic no less than in the monarchy.
—Friedrich Engels
Topics: Government
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