5 August 2026- Engels’ 131st Death Anniversary
It is impossible to speak about Engels without referring at the same time to Marx. The web of their lives was so closely interwoven that it was as if it were only one life.”- Paul Lafargue
Writing on the death of Friedrich Engels, Lenin said: “What a torch of reason ceased to burn! What a heart has ceased to beat!” Even 131 years after his death, that torch continues to burn brightly in the form of his ideas.
Friedrich Engels was born on 28 November 1820, in what is today Wuppertal, Germany (then part of Prussia). From his student days he began participating in political activities. Like Marx, Engels was a member of the Young Hegelian (Left Hegelian) Group. During this period, he wrote several articles for the newspaper Rheinische Zeitung, edited by Karl Marx. At that time, however, Engels had not yet met Marx.
Engels was born into a prosperous middle-class family. His father owned textile mills and naturally disapproved of his son’s political activities. Finally, under pressure from his father, Engels was sent to Manchester, England, in 1842 to manage one of his father’s jointly owned factories.
It was there that he met Mary Burns, an Irish working class woman employed in a factory. Their friendship soon developed into love and a lifelong partnership. They never formally married, however. Neither of them believed in the bourgeois institution of marriage.
Mary Burns exercised a decisive influence on Engels’ life. She was politically conscious and an activist in the workers’ Chartist Movement. It was Mary Burns who introduced Engels to the leaders of the Chartist movement. Thereafter, Engels began writing regularly for the Chartist newspaper The Northern Star.
Mary Burns also introduced Engels to the filthy, overcrowded slums in which the workers lived and to the harsh realities of their daily struggles. This aspect has been portrayed magnificently in Raoul Peck’s film ‘The Young Karl Marx’. On several occasions, Mary Burns even saved Engels from being beaten up in working-class neighbourhoods, because workers initially suspected that a wealthy-looking outsider must have entered their settlements for some selfish purpose.
Engels’ classic work, The Condition of the Working Class in England, published in 1845, was based upon these direct experiences. The credit for introducing him to that world belongs entirely to Mary Burns.
Engels also travelled to Ireland with Mary Burns. That journey played an important role in helping him understand the Irish national question.
Engels had first met Marx in 1842. However, in 1844, the two spent ten days together in Paris, where Marx was then living in exile. After ten days and nights of intense discussion and debate, they arrived at the profound ideological unity upon which what we now know as Marxism was founded.
The distinguished German socialist Franz Mehring wrote that, despite Engels’ characteristic modesty, it is true that Engels introduced Marx to several important aspects of political economy.
Thus, the proletariat of the world found in Marx and Engels its commanders and guides.
Together, Engels and Marx wrote their first book, The Holy Family (1845), followed by The German Ideology in 1846. It was in The German Ideology that revolutionary dialectical materialism was first systematically presented. It was also in this work that the concept of false consciousness, under which the proletariat becomes imprisoned within capitalism, was introduced for the first time.
“It is the material conditions of human life that determine consciousness, not consciousness that determines material conditions.”
This revolutionary proposition, which cut through every form of idealist mystification, comes from this very book.
Another profound dialectical principle was formulated here for the first time:
“circumstances make men just as much as men make circumstances.
It was also in this work that Engels declared:
” Liberation is a historical and not a mental act.”
Interestingly, this revolutionary book had to wait until the Russian Revolution before it could finally be published. It first appeared in print only in 1935 in Soviet Russia and thus became accessible to the general public.
In 1846, Marx and Engels established the Communist Correspondence Committee in order to build unity among people sharing similar ideas.
Through this process, both became members of the Communist League, after passing through the earlier organisation known as the League of the Just.
The task of drafting the League’s manifesto fell upon Marx and Engels. The document was published in February 1848.
It would not be an exaggeration to say that after the publication of The Communist Manifesto, the world was never the same again.
The most beautiful and revolutionary slogan ever raised-
“Workers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains. You have a world to win.”
– originated from this Manifesto.
The Communist Manifesto brought philosophy down from the heads of philosophers and established it in the midst of the struggles of workers.
It proclaimed: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.” [These words are also inscribed upon his grave]
For the first time in nearly two thousand years of the history of philosophy, the question of changing the world became the central concern of philosophy.
For the first time, the entire history of human society (at that time, primitive communism had not yet been discovered) was formulated as the history of class struggle.
The importance of this formulation in the social sciences is comparable to that of Einstein’s equation E = mc² in physics.
The section of The Communist Manifesto dealing with the principles of communism was written by Engels alone. In this section, Engels explained the principles of communism in an exceptionally simple and lucid manner. For the first time, a broad outline of a future classless society was presented.
Engels recognised the proletariat as an independent class and provided the scientific basis for its emancipation. He also advanced another important proposition: the proletariat cannot liberate itself without liberating society as a whole.
It was a remarkable historical coincidence that almost immediately after the publication of The Communist Manifesto, revolutionary upheavals broke out across nearly the whole of Europe against feudalism and monarchy. Marx described this wave of uprisings as the “Continental Revolution.”
The time had come to translate theory into practice. The time had come to bring philosophy down to the ground of real life. Marx and Engels stood in the front ranks here as well. Both plunged immediately into the revolutionary movement.
In accordance with the position laid down in The Communist Manifesto, the proletariat, for the first time, entered the struggle as an independent political class.
Engels wrote in his introduction to Karl Marx’s work titled The Class Struggles in France, 1848 to 1850: “Everywhere the revolution was the work of the working class. It was the workers who erected the barricades. It was the workers who laid down their lives in the revolution.”
Marx and Engels made Cologne in Germany the centre of their revolutionary activities.
Later, Engels went to the Rhine Province and personally took part in armed barricade fighting with a rifle in his hands.
Few people know that Engels possessed an extraordinary command over both the theory and the practice of military affairs. In 1841, he had served for some time in the Prussian Army. Within Marx’s family, Engels was affectionately known as “Mr. General.”
However, the independent political initiative displayed by the working class alarmed the bourgeoisie. The bourgeois class abandoned the revolution midway, joined hands with the feudal forces, and turned its guns upon its former ally, the proletariat.
By June, the course of the revolution had completely changed. The treacherous bourgeoisie, in alliance with the feudal powers, unleashed a massacre of workers.
Marx made a sharp comment on this development:
“The bourgeois republic was founded not in the February Revolution but in the June Counter-Revolution.” Europe now entered a period of reaction.
Because of their revolutionary ideas and activities, Marx and Engels had become notorious throughout Europe. The police in Germany and France, in particular, were searching for them relentlessly.
Eventually, both were compelled to flee to England, where the grip of reaction was comparatively weaker.
Once in England, Engels took the painful decision to return to work in his father’s cotton mill in Manchester, despite having no desire to do so. He accepted this work for one reason alone: to support his beloved friend and comrade Karl Marx and Marx’s family financially.
It was this support that enabled Marx to complete his historic mission of writing Capital.
Marx himself acknowledged this in a letter to Engels:
“The work on Capital has been completed. This was possible solely because of your sacrifice.”
After Marx’s death, Engels devoted himself completely to editing and completing Volumes II and III of Capital, working from Marx’s incomplete and often disordered manuscripts.
Lenin stated unequivocally that, considering the manner in which Engels completed these volumes, they should be regarded as a joint work of both Marx and Engels.
Besides supporting Marx and his family financially, Engels also assisted numerous exiled political workers who had fled mainly from Germany and France to escape reactionary persecution.
Perhaps it was this aspect of his personality that prompted Lenin to describe him as “a matchless heart that beat for everyone.”
Amid all these responsibilities, Engels nevertheless produced another remarkable work in 1850: “The Peasant War in Germany”.
In this book, he identified the socio-economic forces underlying the Protestant Reformation and demonstrated that, beneath its religious appearance, the Protestant movement was essentially a bourgeois movement. Yet the book’s most significant conclusion was that the proletariat would have to forge an alliance with the peasantry if it wished to ensure its victory. Undoubtedly, the failure of the Revolution of 1848 must also have been in Engels’ mind when he arrived at this conclusion.
It would be a mistake to imagine that during this period Marx remained occupied solely with writing Capital, while Engels busied himself only with factory work.
On the contrary, both devoted themselves continuously to rebuilding the workers’ movement.
They remained in close contact with exiled political workers and trade unions in England, offering them guidance and organisational support.
During these years, Marx and Engels also established close relations with those fighting for the liberation of oppressed nationalities, especially the Polish and Irish peoples, and sought to integrate these struggles into the broader international workers’ movement.
They followed developments in the American Civil War with great attention and wrote extensively about it. Engels’ writings on the military dimensions of the Civil War remain particularly important.
All these efforts culminated in the establishment, in 1864, of the world’s first international organisation of the working class:
The International Workingmen’s Association, commonly known as the First International.
It was within the First International that what we now call Marxism established itself through ideological struggles against a variety of non-proletarian tendencies, including Proudhonism, Lassalleanism, Economism, Blanquism, and Anarchism.
Throughout these theoretical battles, Engels stood firmly beside Marx.
Although Engels was less involved in the day-to-day organisational work of the International, his role at its decisive congress was of immense importance.
There, acting with great strategic skill, he prevented the organisation from falling into the hands of the anarchist followers of Mikhail Bakunin.
In fact, Engels successfully engineered the transfer of the headquarters of the International to the United States in 1876, thereby saving it from Bakuninist control.
Although the organisation became inactive after its move to America, this strategic decision prevented its capture by forces hostile to its original objectives.
The strength of the International also ensured that the English bourgeoisie, despite its wishes, could not intervene on the side of the Confederacy during the American Civil War.
Likewise, it prevented the bourgeoisie throughout Europe from employing workers from other countries as strike-breakers, a practice that had been common before the establishment of the International.
It was during the lifetime of the First International that, in 1871, the world’s first workers’ state, the Paris Commune, came into existence.
Engels described the Paris Commune as the child of the First International.
The celebrated filmmaker Peter Watkins later made the highly significant film “La Commune” on this historic event.
Following the defeat of the Paris Commune, a fresh wave of repression swept across Europe. The International was banned throughout the continent, with the sole exception of England. The police of almost every European country (except England) pursued members of the International relentlessly.
Once again, revolutionary workers from across Europe sought refuge in England to escape persecution.
Engels devoted himself tirelessly to arranging accommodation and food for these exiles while simultaneously maintaining close political relations with them. This deeply humanitarian aspect of Engels’ personality has generally received far less attention than it deserves. Yet, under the harsh reactionary conditions of that period, it was of immense significance.
Some of these refugee workers received lifelong assistance from Engels, just as Marx had supported others throughout his life.
Around this time, Engels received a deeply emotional letter from his mother:
“You always listen to strangers and outsiders, but never to your own mother. God alone knows what my condition is these days. Whenever I pick up a newspaper, my hands tremble because I fear I may find news of a warrant for your arrest.”
This letter offers a revealing glimpse into Engels’ character and the anxieties his revolutionary commitment caused his family.
After the death of Mary Burns in 1863, Engels entered into a similar lifelong relationship with her younger sister, Lydia Burns.
Only a few hours before Lydia’s death in 1878, and solely because of her insistence, Engels finally agreed to marry her.
After Lydia Burns passed away, Engels wrote to the wife of the leading German socialist August Bebel:
“My wife was the daughter of an honest Irish proletarian. Her heart always beat for the class into which she had been born. In my eyes she deserved infinitely greater respect than all those educated, refined and attractive middle-class women. During times of hardship, this thought always gave me comfort.”
Marx’s youngest daughter, Eleanor Marx, shared a close friendship with Lydia Burns.
She wrote of Lydia: “Lydia was uneducated. She could neither read nor write. But she was truthful and honest. She was a saintly woman.”
Many bourgeois biographers of Engels refuse to acknowledge either Mary Burns or Lydia Burns as his equal partners. According to them, the two women were merely domestic servants in Engels’ household, whom he happened to treat somewhat better than others.
Such interpretations arise from their own bourgeois outlook. They simply cannot accept that an educated, cultured intellectual from the upper middle class could choose as his life partner an uneducated working-class woman. They failed to understand that Engels represented the future. In 1883, Engels suffered another devastating blow with the death of his closest friend and intellectual comrade, Karl Marx. Engels said: “the greatest living thinker ceased to think.”
The deaths of Lydia and then of Marx shook Engels to his very core. Yet he was a true soldier of the proletariat. There was little time for mourning. He returned immediately to the front line of the struggle.
The priceless unfinished task left by Marx was the completion of Volumes II and III of Capital.
Through Engels’ individual efforts, these volumes were eventually published in 1885 and 1894, respectively.
Meanwhile, efforts had begun in Germany, France, England and other countries to establish national proletarian political parties.
The founders of the German workers’ party, including August Bebel and Wilhelm Liebknecht, remained in constant contact with Engels, regularly seeking his advice and guidance.
It is one of history’s tragedies that the German workers’ party was afflicted with opportunism almost from its inception.
Marx had attacked this opportunism in 1875 through his celebrated work Critique of the Gotha Programme, directed against the programme of the Socialist Workers’ Party of Germany (SAPD). Engels carried this struggle further in a systematic manner through his 1878 masterpiece Anti-Dühring.
For the first time, Engels presented, in a form accessible to ordinary readers, a comprehensive exposition of the three constituent elements of Marxism:
- Dialectical and Historical Materialist Philosophy
- Political Economy
- Scientific Socialism
His famous pamphlet Socialism: Utopian and Scientific was originally a section of Anti-Dühring. On 14 July 1889, the centenary of the storming of the Bastille during the French Revolution, the Second International was founded in Paris.
By then Engels had grown old, yet he never ceased to provide it with invaluable ideological guidance and advice. However, Engels’ greatest achievement was still to come.
That achievement was his 1884 work “The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State.”
Generally speaking, historians regard two nineteenth-century books as having fundamentally transformed the direction of thought in their respective fields.
The first is Charles Darwin’s “On the Origin of Species”.
The second is Karl Marx’s “Capital”.
In my view, however, the third great intellectual achievement of the nineteenth century is Engels’ “The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State.”
Just as Marx’s Capital scientifically investigated the causes of wage slavery and established the objective possibility of its abolition, Engels’ classic work examined the roots of women’s oppression and provided a scientific basis for their liberation.
Lenin himself regarded this work as one of the foundational texts of modern socialism.
The book gave women both an identity and a voice.
Engels himself explained its significance in these words:
“The discovery of the existence of mother-right before father-right has the same significance for the history of primitive society as Darwin’s theory of evolution has for biology and Marx’s theory of surplus value has for political economy.”
Engels possessed a profound interest in the natural sciences.
Both Marx and Engels kept themselves thoroughly informed about the latest developments in every branch of science during their time.
One incident illustrates this vividly.
When Charles Darwin’s “On the Origin of Species” was published on 24 November 1859, Engels was among the very first people standing in line to purchase a copy on the day of its release.
Within a matter of days, he had read the book, written extensive comments on it, and forwarded both the book and his observations to Marx.
From 1872–73 onwards, Engels undertook an extraordinarily ambitious intellectual project: “Dialectics of Nature”. His aim was to extend the method of dialectics beyond society and history to the natural world itself. Unfortunately, this monumental project remained unfinished.
The principal reason was that Engels chose to give priority to completing the unfinished work of his beloved friend and comrade, Karl Marx. He set aside his own project in order to edit and prepare Volumes II and III of Capital for publication.
After Engels’ death, the notes he had prepared for Dialectics of Nature came into the possession of Eduard Bernstein of the German Social Democratic Party. Bernstein showed these manuscripts to the great scientist Albert Einstein. Despite recognising a number of shortcomings in the work, Einstein was deeply impressed by its profound insights and recommended that it should be published in its existing form.
Eventually, Dialectics of Nature was first published in 1925 in Soviet Russia.
The renowned biologists Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin, in their influential 1985 work “The Dialectical Biologist”, dedicated the book to Friedrich Engels with the following words:
“To Frederick Engels, who got it wrong a lot of the time, but who got it right where it counted.”
These two scientists acknowledged that many of their own scientific investigations began from propositions advanced by Engels in Dialectics of Nature.
Another distinguished scientist, Stephen Jay Gould, writing in Natural History in 1975, regarded the chapter “The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man” as being of great significance for modern biology.
Today, a kind of intellectual fog envelops the sciences. Physics is increasingly being reduced to mathematics, while biology and psychology are increasingly being reduced to genes.
To understand this confusion, Dialectics of Nature remains an indispensable work.
Indeed, it is from this very work that one must begin in order to cut through the prevailing intellectual haze.
Similarly, in the social sciences, where postmodernism has generated its own fog of confusion, Engels’ important proposition provides the answer: “There is practice before argumentation.”
The truth is that there is scarcely any field of knowledge that has not been profoundly influenced by the revolutionary ideas of Engels and Marx.
On Engels’ seventieth birthday, Marx’s daughter Eleanor Marx remarked affectionately that Engels never seemed to grow old. She said: “For the last twenty years he has become younger with every passing day.”
Although this was said in a light-hearted spirit of admiration, it contains an enduring truth. The ideas of Engels and Marx continue to grow younger, more vibrant, and more relevant with every passing generation.
In this age of fascism and decaying imperialism, when one ideology after another has collapsed, the torch of Marxism burns with even greater intensity as a torch of hope.
19manish73@gmail.com
Manish Azad, a social activist, based in Allahabad, originally wrote this essay in Hindi.
