Friedrich Engels (1820–95) was the son of a prosperous German industrialist whose business interests extended to cotton mills in Manchester, where Engels spent 20 years of his life and witnessed conditions that greatly influenced his loathing for capitalism. Although attracted in his youth to the rather vague romantic radicalism of the Young Hegelians, he realized the vital importance of economics and began to think of history and philosophy in terms of materialism somewhat earlier than the man who later became his lifelong friend, Karl Marx. Indeed, Engels introduced Marx to many of the ideas that the latter made so thoroughly his own. So Engels was not only the great popularizer of Marxism, but should also be recognized as the originator of much that has entered the Marxist canon. In particular, Engels was a first-class empirical observer, and documents such as The Condition of the Working Class in England contain brilliant analyses.
The most popular and earliest of the great Marxist writings, The Communist Manifesto, was drafted by Engels and only revised by Marx. A theoretically more complex work attacking the rest of the Hegelian movement, The German Ideology, which is the backbone of Marxist views on social consciousness, was written by Marx and Engels jointly. Late in his life, mostly after Marx’s death in 1883, Engels became closely involved with the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) and fought a bitter campaign against the revisionism of its reformist wing. His attack in 1878 on the intellectual leader of that faction, Eugen Dühring, entitled simply Anti-Dühring, became perhaps the most important vehicle through which Marxism as a doctrine reached the next generation of young socialists, which included the leaders of the Russian Revolution. Engels had himself been actively involved in revolutionary activities in 1848, the great year of European revolutions, and throughout his life was associated with working-class movements and émigré revolutionary cadres. His intellectual interests were prodigious, and his writings spanned a large number of intellectual disciplines, though Marxists have always considered his greatest service to socialism to be his editing of Marx’s last great work, Das Kapital.
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