Friedrich Engels

Friedrich Engels: The Mill Owner Who Funded Communism

He was the eldest son of a Barmen cotton manufacturer, sent to Manchester in 1842 to learn the family trade at the Victoria Mill. Instead he found an Irish factory worker named Mary Burns, who took him into the slums his class did not enter, and at twenty-four he published a book about what he saw there. For the next fifty years he ran a textile firm by day and financed, co-authored and finally edited the most disruptive body of political thought in modern history. On retiring from business in 1869 he wrote to his mother: "Hurrah! Today doux commerce is at an end, and I am a free man."

The Pietist and the Cotton Mill

Friedrich Engels was born on 28 November 1820 in Barmen, Prussia — now part of Wuppertal — the eldest of nine children. His father owned cotton mills; his mother, Elise von Haar, was a schoolmaster's daughter; the household belonged to the Pietist movement, an austere strain of German Lutheranism. He was pulled out of the Elberfeld gymnasium before finishing and sent in 1838 to Bremen as a clerk in a linen export house, where he rode, danced, drank and published cultural criticism under the pseudonym "Friedrich Oswald." Reading David Strauss's *Life of Jesus* dissolved his Christianity. Military service with the Royal Prussian Guards Artillery in Berlin from 1841 let him sit in on university lectures and fall in with Die Freien, the radical Young Hegelian circle built on dialectics and atheism. His father, alarmed, dispatched him to England.

Manchester, and Mary Burns

Manchester in 1842 was the shock-city of the Industrial Revolution, and Engels was placed inside its machinery as a member of the owning family. Mary Burns, born in 1821 to emigrants from Tipperary and in factory work from about the age of nine, showed him the other side — including the district he made notorious as "Little Ireland." *The Condition of the Working Class in England*, published in 1845, welded her guided tours to official statistics and parliamentary reports, and produced something new: sustained first-hand social observation deployed as political argument. "I wanted to see you in your own homes," he wrote in the dedication, "to observe you in everyday life, to chat with you on your conditions and grievances, to witness your struggles." He and Mary stayed together until her sudden death in January 1863, when he wrote to Marx that "the poor girl loved me with all her heart." Her sister Lizzie became his partner afterwards; he married her on her deathbed in 1878 out of respect for her Catholicism.

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Café de la Régence

Engels and Karl Marx had met once in Cologne in October 1842, an encounter both remembered as chilly. Their second meeting, at the Café de la Régence in Paris in August 1844, produced what Engels called complete agreement in all theoretical fields, and a partnership that lasted forty years. *The Holy Family* (1845) dispatched the Young Hegelians. *The German Ideology*, drafted in 1845–46, laid out the materialist conception of history: it is not consciousness that determines life, but life that determines consciousness. In 1848 came the *Communist Manifesto*, written up finally by Marx but drawing heavily on Engels's drafts.

The General

When revolution broke out in 1848 the two ran the *Neue Rheinische Zeitung* in Cologne. Engels went further than journalism: in May 1849 he returned to Elberfeld as inspector of barricades, then served as aide-de-camp in the Baden-Palatinate revolutionary army, fighting in four engagements including the defence of Rastatt fortress before escaping to Switzerland that July. He was the only major figure of the movement to have been shot at. He kept the interest, writing respected analysis of the Crimean War, the Franco-Austrian war and the American Civil War, and earning in the Marx household the permanent nickname "the General."

Twenty Years Behind a Desk

From 1850 he reconciled with his family and went back to Ermen & Engels in Manchester as a clerk, rising to partner in 1864, with an income above £1,000 a year by 1860. He kept respectable lodgings for business and a separate household in the working-class districts, and over two decades sent between £3,000 and £4,000 to the perpetually broke Marx family in London. Without that money there is no *Capital*. He also absorbed a piece of Marx's private life, claiming paternity of Freddy Demuth, the son Marx had with the family housekeeper, and admitting the truth only to Eleanor Marx as he was dying. He retired on 30 June 1869 with a £12,500 settlement and moved to 122 Regent's Park Road in September 1870.

The Grand Lama of Regent's Park Road

The London house became the switchboard of international socialism. Engels helped defeat Bakunin's anarchists at the Hague Congress of 1872 and advised the Second International from its founding in 1889. He also wrote the books that actually taught the movement what it believed: *Anti-Dühring* (1878), from which he extracted *Socialism: Utopian and Scientific* (1880) — by 1892 translated more often than either the *Manifesto* or *Capital*, circulating in ten languages; *The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State* (1884), built on Lewis H. Morgan's anthropology, which called the rise of the patriarchal family the "world historic defeat of the female sex"; and the unfinished *Dialectics of Nature*. After Marx died in March 1883, Engels spent his remaining years on a task he called Sisyphean: turning a "real hotchpotch" of drafts and unfinished calculations into *Capital* volumes II (1885) and III (1894). He was diagnosed with oesophageal cancer in March 1895 and died in London on 5 August, aged 74. His ashes were scattered at sea off Beachy Head.

Why Friedrich Is Called a Genius

The honest starting point is that the word is usually reserved for his collaborator, and Engels insisted on that himself. His distinctive faculties were different from Marx's and arguably rarer in combination: an empirical eye, an aptitude for synthesis, and an unusual gift for making difficult material legible. At twenty-four, with no training in what did not yet exist as sociology, he produced in *The Condition of the Working Class in England* a piece of field observation that still functions as evidence. He was a formidable linguist — he claimed conversational command of twenty-five languages — and a competent enough soldier to be taken seriously on military affairs by professionals. *Socialism: Utopian and Scientific* outsold the works it summarised, which is a real measure of expository power.

The counter-case is substantial and comes from inside the tradition. Western Marxists including György Lukács, Herbert Marcuse and Norman Levine have argued that Engels flattened Marx into a rigid, scientistic "dialectical materialism" and that *Dialectics of Nature* supplied the skeleton for Soviet dogma. His editorial interventions in *Capital* II and III modified passages on crisis, the falling rate of profit and the law of value, presenting Marx's manuscripts as more finished than they were. Other scholars call the split thesis a caricature resting on flimsy evidence. Either way, much of Engels's importance is derivative by design: he was the interpreter, the editor, the fundraiser and the executor, and he chose that role.

Legacy

Engels is the reason Marxism exists as a transmissible doctrine rather than a pile of unpublished notebooks — and the reason its twentieth-century form is as systematic, and as brittle, as it turned out to be. His 1895 introduction to Marx's *Class Struggles in France*, arguing that the era of revolution by small conscious minorities was past and that the working class could take power through universal suffrage, was seized on by Eduard Bernstein to justify evolutionary socialism. Engels protested the reading. The argument over what he meant has not ended.