Issue 65 of INTERNATIONAL SOCIALISM JOURNAL Published Winter 1994 Copyright © International Socialism

Frederick Engels: life of a revolutionary



Engels had no doubts on either count. He wrote to his mother in 1871, when he was criticised for supporting the first workers' government, the Paris Commune:

Commenting on his political and intellectual relationship with Marx, he wrote elsewhere that he was doing what he 'was meant for, to play second fiddle.'2 Yet Engels was much more than a 'second fiddle'. He was an independent revolutionary thinker, who was already in the process of writing one of his finest books by the time he began his close friendship with Marx in 1844. He combined an original mind with an enthusiasm for revolution and struggle which never left him.

Early life







Engels was horrified at the poverty and misery that he saw in Manchester. The city had grown up around the cotton industry and was a mass of filthy slums. Infant mortality, epidemic diseases and overcrowding were all facts of life. Up to a quarter of the city's population were immigrant Irish, driven there by even worse conditions in their own country. Poverty had existed in the old towns and rural areas--as it had done in Germany--but the growth of the big cities exacerbated and accentuated these conditions. The attitude of the capitalist class was brutal. Engels describes how:

The effect of Manchester on the young man was electrifying. He came into contact with the Chartists and, in 1843, visited the Leeds office of the Chartist newspaper, the Northern Star. One of their leaders, George Julian Harney, much later recorded this impression of Engels at that meeting: 'a slender young man with a look of almost immaturity, who spoke remarkably pure English, and said he was keenly interested in the Chartist movement'. Harney went on to say that Engels was as modest and retiring 50 years later as he was when a young man of 22 years old.5

Engels travelled round, spoke to workers and studied official statistics to produce his remarkable first book, The Condition of the Working Class in England. It documents not only how people lived, but also explains how this state of affairs could be--and needed to be--changed. Even today the book is cited by those quite hostile to Engels' politics for its accurate and sympathetic descriptions of working class life. However, the book is much more than reportage of the terrible conditions in which workers lived. Woven into it is the political analysis of capitalism which Marx and Engels later developed but which even at this stage was central to the book's analysis. Engels starts by looking at how the Industrial Revolution transformed the old ways of working to such an extent that it created a whole class of wage labourers, the proletariat. The introduction of machinery into the production of textiles, coal and iron turned the British economy into the most dynamic in the world, creating a mass of communications networks--iron bridges, railways, canals--which in turn led to more industrial development.

The new working class soon accounted for the mass of the population, as capitalist methods of manufacturing destroyed many of the old artisan or middle classes, turning the bulk of them or their children into workers. The needs of manufacturing industry led to the building of factories and mills and, moreover, 'population becomes centralised just as capital does.'6 Industrial towns then developed into the great cities that Engels observed when he first visited England. He describes in great detail the condition of life in these cities, using a variety of contemporary press reports, official investigations and even diagrams of the back-to-back houses which formed the early Manchester slums. Nothing escapes Engels' eye, not even the workers' diet:

At the heart of the misery Engels describes is the very nature of the capitalist system. The competition between capitalists leads them to pay their workers as little as possible, while trying to squeeze more and more work from them: 'If a manufacturer can force the nine hands to work an extra hour daily for the same wages by threatening to discharge them at a time when the demand for hands is not very great, he discharges the tenth and saves so much wages.8 This leads in turn to competition between workers for jobs, and to the creation of a pool of unemployed who can be pulled into the workforce when business is booming, and laid off again when it is slack. The existence of this reserve of unskilled and unemployed workers--especially among the immigrant Irish in the cities of the 1840s--holds down the level of wages and conditions for all workers.

The effects of this system are brutal. Engels describes the ill health and low life expectancy of workers compared with the bourgeoisie, the increasing tendency to suicide, the very widespread drunkenness and 'sexual licence'--'the bourgeoisie has left the working class only these two pleasures'9--and the very obvious class divisions, so that 'the working class has gradually become a race wholly apart from the English bourgeoisie... the workers speak other dialects, have other thoughts and ideals, other customs and moral principles, a different religion and other politics than those of the bourgeoisie'.10

Perhaps the most devastating aspect of this new society for Engels was that, far from resulting in increased prosperity for the workers, the development of capitalism had the inevitable result of producing great wealth for some and increased misery for many. Machinery which should have made lives easier in fact replaced jobs and drove down wages. To pay for their investment the capitalists introduced night working. Workers thrown out of work by the spread of machinery were reduced to selling oranges or shoelaces on the streets, or simply to begging for food. The factory owning class was castigated by Engels: 'I have never seen a class so deeply demoralised, so incurably debased by selfishness, so corroded within, so incapable of progress, as the English bourgeoisie... It knows no bliss save that of rapid gain, no pain save that of losing gold.'11 The mass of beggars created by the system had at all costs to be hidden from view, and the bourgeoisie devised one of the most hated institutions ever just a few years before Engels visited Britain--the workhouse, into which poor, sick and destitute members of the working class were forced.


Engels dedicated the book to 'the working classes of Great Britain' and it marked the start of his lifelong commitment to the working class as the agent of revolutionary change.14 Writing towards the end of his life, Engels explained the importance of this in the development of his thought:


If anything this underestimates Engels' abilities and influence on Marx at the time. He had a much surer grasp of economics than Marx but also had a background in philosophy and communist politics which was comparable to that of Marx. In addition he had direct experience of the first mass workers' movement. As Franz Mehring wrote about the two men's early influences on one another:

Mehring also commented that, despite Engels' modest denials, with regard to economics 'the fact remains that in the beginning it was Engels who gave and Marx who received on that field on which in the last resort the decisive struggle must be fought out.'18

Engels went briefly back home to Barmen after this meeting. The town was buzzing with communist ideas--'in Barmen the police inspector is a communist', wrote Engels to Marx--and in early 1845 a communist meeting attracted 200, such was the level of discontent among even the factory owners and the middle classes.19 But Engels never settled in Barmen. He railed against the place, against his bourgeois father and at having to work in the family firm:

His father was in turn horrified at his son's communism and by his illegal political activities in this small town in which Engels senior was such a respected citizen. Close interest from the police led Frederick to beat a retreat to Brussels, where Marx was already living. He moved in next door and 'never again did they work in such close contact as in those years before the revolution, when they were working out their final position both in philosophy and in practical politics'.21

The foundations of historical materialism

Marx and Engels' first written collaboration in 1844 was The Holy Family, or as they originally called it, A Critique of Critical Criticism (the final title was regarded as more punchy but worried Engels who thought it would offend his religious father). In 1846 they wrote The German Ideology, subtitled Critique of modern German philosophy according to its representatives Feuerbach, Bruno Bauer and Stirner. Its aim was to attack the ideas which dominated German philosophical and political thinking. These the two regarded as mystical and idealist, because they started from ideas in the abstract rather than a materialist analysis. The weight of Marx and Engels' argument was that an understanding of the world had to start, not from the ideas which existed in people's heads in any particular historical period, but from the real, material conditions in which these ideas arose. Their starting point was therefore an understanding of the historical development of class society and how people's ideas altered in this process of social change:


However, although the stress in The German Ideology is heavily weighted against the idealist philosophers, and their political counterparts the 'True Socialists', Marx and Engels did not make the mistake of believing that progress in history was inevitable or that socialists could ignore what human beings actually did to bring about change: 'circumstances make men just as much as men make circumstances'.24 In any class society, they argue, the class which owns the wealth--the ruling class--also has a monopoly on the ideas of that society:

In addition, 'for each new class which puts itself in the place of the one ruling before it, is compelled, merely in order to carry through its aim, to represent its interest as the common interest of all the members of society... it has to give its ideas the form of universality, and represent them as the only rational, universally valid ones.'26

So the ruling class controls both the means of producing wealth and the production of ideas which justified that control of wealth. The working class, on the other hand, was without property. Workers were also alienated from the products of their labour because they have no control over the productive process and because 'each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape.'27 The working class can only escape by making the revolution, by collectively seizing the means of production from which it is separated under capitalism. The description of this process is worth repeating for its clarity:


He found it heavy going at first. The artisans' tradition of craft working, small family businesses and the like made them much less amenable to communist politics than the Manchester cotton workers. Trying to build among workers meant a sharp argument with other socialist tendencies inside the movement, including the 'True Socialists', followers of Karl Grun. Marx and Engels attacked the 'True Socialists' in their writings at the time, and saw them as a rival to communist ideas inside the emerging working class movement. The 'True Socialists' talked in very radical terms but Marx and Engels saw them as in fact the product of the retarded nature of Germany's economic and social development. The dominance of the petty bourgeoisie, of small businessmen, artisans and craftsmen, in German society meant that a socialism which played down the fundamental antagonism between the two major classes inside capitalism, and 'proclaims instead the universal love of mankind' could have a real appeal.29

A letter from Engels to the Communist Correspondence Committee describes a fraught meeting in Paris in October 1846 where Engels defined the aims of the communists off the cuff in response to the 'True Socialists' criticisms:

The form which the earliest communist organisation took was the Communist League. Marx and Engels joined the League of the Just, along with groups of exiled Germans and other nationalities of workers and artisans. Although Engels' direct experience led him to despair of the Paris League, Marx and Engels put their faith in the London branch. In late 1846 the leadership of the League moved from Paris to London. This group, led by Schapper, Moll and Bauer, was in the process of looking for new ideas and 'they turned to Marx, perhaps because the Marxian stress on economics and class warfare meant more to them, exposed as they were to the Chartist movement in the advanced industrial England'.31

At the League's London congress on June 1847 it changed its name to the Communist League and its slogan to 'Proletarians of all lands unite' from the previous, more 'True Socialist', 'All men are brothers'. At the London congress Marx and Engels were instructed to draft a platform--which became their most famous joint work and which remains one of the clearest statements of their politics--The Communist Manifesto. The first draft, known as Principles of Communism, was written by Engels. Marx worked on Principles to produce the final draft which was printed in German in early 1848.

Principles of Communism is a beautiful example of Engels' writing style: a very short, simple pamphlet written in question and answer form. He describes how capitalist society creates two major classes which stand in contradiction to one another:



But this revolutionary system is prone to crisis. The unplanned nature of capitalism and its drive to accumulate leads to overproduction, which in turn leads to factory closures and unemployment. Suddenly there is, as The Communist Manifesto puts it, 'too much civilisation, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce... the conditions of bourgeois society are too narrow to comprise the wealth created by them.'34 In the midst of such previously unheard of wealth there is misery and waste. The capitalist looks for ways out: destruction of some capital--so that the crisis leads to the collapse of individual capitalists to the benefit of their rivals--or the search for new markets and new investment. This search leads to greater investment, but there is less relative return on the investment. Both 'solutions' expand the system but eventually lead to further crises.




Revolution in Europe

The creation of the Communist League in 1847 took place against a background of growing social unrest. Economic depression had worsened living conditions. Famine and hunger were stalking Europe, most notoriously in Ireland where millions emigrated or starved, but also in continental Europe where bread riots occurred in many countries. 'The climax of the Hungry Forties in Europe came when the depression of 1847 brought business failures, unemployment and frequent reduction in wages. Every third family in Cologne received public relief'.37 Among the middle classes there were growing liberal and nationalist protests in Germany, Austria and Italy--countries all under various forms of feudal rule.

Engels had returned to Paris in December 1847, after attending the second League congress in London in November and then staying with Marx in Brussels. He attempted to establish contact with the French socialist Louis Blanc, with some success. But by January 1848 he wrote to Marx in some despair, 'Things are going wretchedly with the League here'.38 He was more optimistic about the state of the democratic movement and the impetus for bourgeois revolution in countries such as Germany and Austria, but at the end of January he was expelled from France just as revolution was about to break out. The government prohibited a big reform banquet in Paris, due to take place on 22 February. A number of such banquets had been held in the previous months as part of the growing mood for reform. Within two days there were barricades on the streets and the king abdicated. France was left with a provisional government which in turn proclaimed a republic. For the first time the government contained workers' representatives; Louis Blanc and the representative of the Parisian workers, called simply Albert. The government initially guaranteed a 'right to work' for all, with the creation of 'national workshops' for the jobless, to be paid for by increased taxation.

The movement spread throughout Europe in the following weeks: to Sicily, Vienna, Berlin, Milan. The Prussian regime was forced to allow political activity, and to endorse national unification. Engels wrote in March 1848 that, with the exception of Cologne, where some communists were arrested, 'otherwise the news from Germany is splendid. In Nassau a revolution completed, in Munich students, painters and workers in full revolt, in Kassel revolution on the doorstep, in Berlin unbounded fear and indecision, in the whole of western Germany freedom of the press and National Guard proclaimed'.39 Two weeks later he wrote to Marx, 'In Germany things are going very well indeed, riots everywhere and the Prussians aren't giving way'.40

Marx and Engels returned to their native Germany in April--to Cologne, a city which was under Prussian rule but which had the liberal press laws inherited from French occupation under Napoleon. They launched their new daily paper as the 'organ of democracy'. The Neue Rheinische Zeitung appeared from June.

The historian Eric Hobsbawm has written of 1848, 'Within a matter of weeks no government was left standing in an area of Europe which is today occupied by all or part of ten states, not counting lesser repercussions in a number of others.' Yet 'within six months of its outbreak its universal defeat was safely predictable, within 18 months of its outbreak all but one of the regimes it overthrew had been restored, and the exception (the French Republic) was putting as much distance as it could between itself and the insurrection to which it owed its existence'.41

The 1848 revolutions were bourgeois, not workers' revolutions--which meant that in countries such as Germany the liberal capitalists and the middle classes such as doctors and lawyers, determined the course of the revolution, even though it was supported by the poorer classes of peasants, artisans and the emerging working class. That explains the nature of the revolution's early days when all classes united against the old order. Marx described February 1848 in France, symbolised by the poet Lamartine, as 'the beautiful revolution, the revolution of universal sympathy'.42 Only seemingly small numbers of reactionaries were opposed to the revolutions.





Events in Paris influenced the revolution elsewhere in Europe and nowhere more so than in Germany. Here the revolutionary fervour was high. Despite concessions from the Prussian king, Frederick William IV, in March 1848--a Berlin parliament, an end to censorship and a unified Germany--barricades were thrown up in Berlin too. Shots had been fired at crowds celebrating their gains outside the royal palace. The crowds fought with the soldiers. The king called off the troops and was forced to pay his respects to the dead as they were carried past his balcony. By April the liberal leaders, Camphausen and Hansemann, were in key positions in the Prussian parliament and the transition towards a bourgeois democracy in Germany seemed inevitable.


The liberal leaders in Germany gained the benefits of the February revolution in France, because Germany's rulers were frightened into making concessions without much resistance. But the liberals were also confirmed in their timidity by the June events which taught them that too many concessions to the masses would lead to 'anarchy'. They wanted stability and order in the new Germany. To this end they introduced various programmes of job creation and public works to buy off discontent.

The Neue Rheinische Zeitung appeared in this context at the beginning of June. Marx and Engels saw their place as being on the extreme left wing of the democracy movement, rather than cutting the communists off from the movement completely. They saw the major division as being between old reaction and the new democratic forces. So the first issue of their paper described the feudal reactionaries' victory over the revolution in Naples and Sicily and warned of the dangers of the military attacking the revolution in Germany.45 Engels also attacked the Frankfurt parliament for its lack of drive and decisiveness.46 The Prussian assembly came under even greater attack, especially when further street fighting loomed in the middle of June.

When the French June Days took place the German movement was split in its response. Marx and Engels and the Neue Rheinische Zeitung were fully behind the working class fighters, while the 'moderate' democrats opposed them and attacked the communists. The democrat and republican Bonner Zeitung's attack had a now familiar ring when it stated 'we want freedom, but we also want order, without which no freedom can exist. Was the Neue Rheinische Zeitung truly defending democracy when it praised a wild insurrection which endangered the republic, the first fundamental basis for a democracy?'47

The fear of the June Days marked the turning point after which there was increased repression of the democratic and workers' organisations. The Camphausen ministry in Berlin was replaced by that of Hansemann which stressed constitutional monarchy and increased law and order. Yet the revolutionary mood remained, heightened in the summer by the Frankfurt parliament's capitulation over the Danish annexation of the northern Schleswig-Holstein province. By September the situation had reached boiling point. The class forces were polarising: the military, monarchy and aristocracy towards further repression and a showdown with the Prussian assembly, the democrats by demonstrating against the Hansemann ministry and against the attacks by reactionaries on the Democratic Society. The assembly's attempts to control the army were blocked by Hansemann, who in turn faced demonstrations and protests.


Engels spent the closing months of the year walking through eastern France to Switzerland, where he stayed for a couple of months until things had died down in Germany. While there he wrote a large number of articles for the Neue Rheinische Zeitung (only briefly prevented from publication) on Swiss politics and what was happening to the revolution elsewhere in Europe, especially in the Austrian empire, where the Hungarians led by Louis Kossuth were fighting for independence. Engels' views on the various national struggles have long proved controversial, since he distinguished between certain national groups who he believed had a future as independent nations within Europe--especially the Germans, the Italians, the Poles and the Hungarians--and those, in particular the small groups of Slavic peoples, whose national movements Engels regarded as sometimes little more than a cover for reactionary Russian despotism. So Engels wrote in 1849 that 'the revolution of 1848 compelled all the European peoples to declare for it or against it. In one month all the peoples which were ripe for revolution had made their revolution, all the unripe peoples had formed an alliance against the revolution.'48 He saw the development of the revolution, especially in the Austrian empire, as clearly divided into 'two huge armed camps: on one side, the side of revolution, were the Germans, Poles and Magyars; on the other side, the side of counter-revolution, were the others, ie all the Slavs with the exception of the Poles, plus the Romanians and the Saxons of Transylvania'.49


Mehring continues, 'Their struggle for national independence made them the willing tools of Tsarism, and not all the well-meaning self-deceptions of the democratic Pan-Slavs could alter this fact'.50


It was this which motivated his views on the national question.


Tension in the Rhineland mounted in early May 1849, as the hopes of the people clashed with the military might of Prussia, encamped in occupation of the region. The government's mobilisation of the militia to thwart democratic revolt brought matters to a head and barricades were thrown up in Engels' home town of Elberfeld, where a Committee of Public Safety was appointed. Engels threw himself into the struggle with his usual gusto, despite attempts by the local bourgeoisie to drive this dangerous red from their town.

But the uprising was defeated, the Neue Rheinische Zeitung suppressed and the end of the German Revolution was in sight. While Marx went to Paris, Engels stayed in the Palatinate, last bastion of revolution. When the Prussians invaded, Engels joined in the ensuing war, fighting in the army as assistant to the 'True Socialist' Willich, and was the veteran of four battles before he once again retreated to Switzerland. This time, however, his exile was anything but temporary.



In their writings therefore Marx and Engels put a lot of emphasis on workers needing to follow a bourgeois revolution with their own workers' revolution and increasingly talked about the need for a 'permanent revolution' until workers' power was achieved. Their address to the Communist League written in 1850 said:



In 1850 Engels made a decision which meant great personal sacrifice to him; he agreed to work once again in the family firm of Ermen and Engels in Manchester. He did so to ensure that he received a decent income from his father, who wanted a member of the family keeping an eye on the Ermen side of the partnership while he himself stayed in Germany. Engels' income went in large part to sustain Marx and his family--a task which Engels took upon himself from 1850 until Marx's death over 40 years later. He did so out of personal and political regard for Marx, whose family were suffering terrible poverty.

Marx's wife, Jenny, endured many pregnancies but only three children survived into adulthood--Jenny Caroline, Jenny Laura and Jenny Eleanor. Marx wrote to Engels in 1850 on the death of his baby son Heinrich Guido that his wife was in a state of exhaustion and that the baby had died as a 'victim of bourgeois misère'.56 The family had to endure much travelling, police persecution and above all poverty. They lived in miserable lodgings in London's Soho and were constantly beset with problems of ill health and unpaid bills.




So the threatened rift between the two was mended. Why did Marx respond in this way? We can only conjecture, but it would seem to be a combination of obsession with his own problems (he and Jenny had decided to get the two older daughters posts as governesses and move into a lodging house with their youngest daughter--although Engels eventually came to their rescue on this, as on so much else) plus, possibly, a lack of understanding of Engels' feelings for Mary. Their relationship was unconventional. Mary and Engels never married and lived apart, at least formally. The great class differences between them were much harder to overcome in the 19th century than they would be today. Culturally they must have seemed very far apart--Mary was probably illiterate, for example, and did not share the same friends as Engels.


Much is made of Engels' unconventional relationships with the Burns sisters (he only married Lizzie on her deathbed in 1878). It is often implied that their relationship must have been unequal and so fits closely the image of the well off bourgeois man with his working class mistresses who are kept out of the way of respectable society. Terrell Carver's remark that, 'in love Engels does not seem to have gone searching for his intellectual equal' is fairly typical.60 It is impossible at this distance to know whether the Burns sisters were his 'intellectual equal'. But we do know that they were political, sympathetic to communism and to the cause of Irish nationalism. Eleanor Marx learnt about Irish oppression from Lizzie Burns who also showed her the haunts of the Fenian Manchester Martyrs.61 When Engels met the young Mary Burns in 1840s Manchester she was almost certainly involved in the Chartist politics of the time, as were so many Irish textile workers. There is no sign that the relationships were ever regarded by any of the participants as one sided or oppressive. There is, however, some evidence that Engels gained a great deal from living with these women, and that their personalities were at one with his own. Engels wrote to the German socialist August Bebel's wife in 1878 after Lizzie's death, 'She was of genuine Irish proletarian stock and her passionate, innate feeling for her class was of far greater value to me and stood me in better stead at moments of crisis than all the refinement and culture of your educated and aesthetic young ladies.62 The 14 year old Eleanor Marx wrote home in 1869 with a description of the Burns household:






He and Marx had already debated whether the North was likely to win. The superior tactics of the South, under General Lee, led Engels at times to despair of the North's victory. On purely military grounds he had good reason, since the North conducted the first two years of war in a shambolic and half hearted way. Most importantly, its leaders and military men refused to mobilise the radical sentiments of the mass of Northerners and its natural supporters in the Southern states--the slaves themselves. Marx wrote in August 1862 that 'the North will finally make war seriously, adopt revolutionary methods and throw over the domination of the border slave statesmen. A single Negro regiment would have a remarkable effect on Southern nerves'.67

This is in fact what happened. Crucial to the North's fortunes were, firstly, Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation to free the slaves and, secondly, the bringing into play of the superior industrial strength of Northern industrial capitalism over the slave system of the South. Engels recognised the mark the Civil War would make on future development in what was to become the United States. He wrote to his old friend Joseph Weydemeyer, now living in St Louis, that:

The First International

Solidarity among British workers with the Northern side in the American Civil War, the massive sympathy for Garibaldi's attempt at Italian unification in 1861, and support for the democratic struggle in Poland, all contributed to a sense of internationalism among the British working class and also formed the backdrop for Marx and Engels' decision to involve themselves directly in working class organisation for the first time since the collapse of the 1848 revolutions. The International Working Men's Association, known as the First International, was set up in 1864 and held its first Congress in 1865. Marx was absolutely central to its political development and to the fact that it held together as an organisation over the ensuing years.

The International was an amalgam of very different politics, drawn from its two main national components, the English and French. Its main English support stemmed from the London Trades Council, a body which was beginning to feel its industrial strength after years when the working class had remained quiescent. But it represented only a minority of the working class, the skilled trade unionists, and its leaders--men like the shoemaker George Odger, the cabinet maker Robert Applegarth and the carpenter William Cremer--held politics a fairly long way from Marx's. One of their main aims in establishing the International was to stop foreign scab labour from undermining trade unions in Britain, although they were also keen on developing solidarity with movements for democracy in other countries. The French were followers of Proudhon, and therefore adhered to some form of artisan socialism which criticised capitalism from the point of view of returning to small scale production. Consequently they were hostile to the state and were also opposed to strikes and revolution.


Again in 1866 he wrote, 'The workers' demonstrations in London, which are marvellous compared with anything we have seen in England since 1849, are purely the work of the International'.70




Engels wanted to write a history of Ireland and visited the country with Lizzie and Eleanor Marx in 1869, after he had left Ermen and Engels. He wanted to explain the economic reasons why Ireland was kept in subordination, but why also this subordination had not--despite the best efforts of the English rulers--wiped out Irish identity, culture and nationalism. He wrote to Marx on his return, 'Irish history shows one how disastrous it is for a nation to have subjected another nation... things would have taken another turn in England too, if it had not been necessary to rule in Ireland by military means and to create a new aristocracy there.'72

However, the book did not materialise. Some sections were found in Engels' papers after his death, but it seems that much of it was never completed. Perhaps the reason for this was the turn in political events and, to a lesser extent, in Engels' personal circumstances. He and Lizzie moved to London in the autumn of 1870, to a house in Regent's Park Road, since he now had the financial independence to work full time at politics.

The political situation in Europe was then in flux. When war broke out between the two major continental European powers, France and Germany, in the autumn of 1870, Engels backed Germany at first, seeing its expansion as the means of defeating the French emperor on the one hand, and of curtailing the power of reactionary Russia on the other. It was only after Napoleon III's defeat at the battle of Sedan that he saw the main threat to European workers as German expansionism. The annexation of Alsace-Lorraine (the provinces on France's eastern borders) by Germany, Marx and Engels predicted, would only lead to further war between France and Germany.





Its life span was short. Just two months after its inception the Commune was once again besieged, this time by the Versailles government's army. The Commune was put down after over a week of the bloodiest fighting imaginable: thousands were killed by counter-revolutionaries and many more were exiled or deported.


Here Marx spelt out his ideas on the capitalist state and how the crushing of the Commune represented the most basic class instincts not just of the French bourgeoisie, but of its counterparts elsewhere: 'Class rule is no longer able to disguise itself in a national uniform; the national governments are one as against the proletariat!'73 The Commune was a new form of democracy, 'a working, not a parliamentary, body, executive and legislative at the same time'.74 Education was open to all and free from religious or state interference. Public functionaries were paid workmen's wages. Judges and magistrates were accountable and elected. The army and conscription were abolished, replaced by a National Guard made up of all citizens. Elections were by universal male suffrage.

The crucial lesson of the Commune for Marx was that 'the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes'.75 Instead revolutionaries had to be prepared to smash the old capitalist state, which was there to protect the capitalist class and its property, and to establish in its place a workers' state, based on the most complete form of democracy and on new forms of power: a workers' militia which could protect the gains of the revolution and ensure that the capitalists did not regain power. This, Engels said, was what he and Marx meant by 'the dictatorship of the proletariat'.76

The need for a completely new form of state was vindicated by the terrible events with which the Commune met its end. The attempt to storm heaven by the Communards was destroyed in the most bloody way by the men--and women--of property. It became the habit of fashionable women to go and watch the execution of many thousands of Communards in the days following its defeat.

There were demonstrations of solidarity with the Commune among workers in many different countries. The workers' movement internationally saw the Commune's defeat as a blow to them all. Conversely, the rulers of all the capitalist powers took heart from the smashing of this first workers' government, and themselves launched a witch hunt against the International. In 1872 membership of the International became a punishable offence in France. Similarly repressive measures were considered elsewhere, and Bismarck proposed a European alliance against the International.77



To this end they held a closed conference in September 1871, which Marx and his supporters were able to dominate because so few of their opponents turned up. They argued strongly for a centralised organisation against the decentralising tendencies of Bakunin. In the months that followed the debates continued, with Engels--responsible for corresponding with Italy and Spain--spending a great deal of time trying to win more influence for his and Marx's ideas in areas where Bakunin and his supporters were relatively strong.



But despite the trade union leaders' attitude Engels realised that the majority of delegates would vote with him and Marx. He argued that Bakunin was in fact organising a centralised secret conspiracy, quite against the interests and spirit of the International. Engels then pushed the question of Bakunin's secret organisation into a subcommittee, managed to win the expulsion of Bakunin and his ally Guillaume, and then proposed the removal of the General Council to New York. From America it was unable to influence events in Europe and was much less prey to internal intrigue.


The end of an era

Engels now lived in London, and so was able to collaborate much more closely with Marx, as his increased intervention in the International between 1870 and 1872 demonstrated. He continued his military writing and interests, and was given the nickname of 'the General' by the Marx family because of his skill and enthusiasm in military matters.


The background to the argument was the Franco-Prussian War and the collapse of the Commune. This was a watershed in European politics. Germany replaced France as the pivotal continental European power. This had its impact on the workers' movements in various countries. They tended to develop stable nationally based parties, often oriented to the parliamentary structures which had also emerged at this time. This was true above all in Germany, where two socialist groups--those influenced by Marx and those influenced by the ideas of Lasalle--merged in the 1870s to form what became the Social Democratic Party (SPD), the most powerful socialist party in the world. The party participated from its inception in the new parliament created as a result of German unification.

Marx and Engels were extremely critical of the German socialists. The party's unity programme, moved at the Gotha conference in 1875, was subject to a critique by Marx because it accepted a number of non-Marxist concepts, such as the idea that all other classes apart from the working class were 'one reactionary mass'. In the Critique of the Gotha Programme Marx argued that socialists should not dismiss all other classes as incapable of struggling against the system.79 At various points in their lives Marx and Engels were prepared to ally with even bourgeois parties against reactionary feudalism, and very often with various petty bourgeois organisations and tendencies.

The 'one reactionary mass' formulation came from the supporters of the socialist Lasalle, who despite his rhetoric against all other classes, had in practice favoured alliance with the Bismarckian monarchy against the bourgeois opposition.

Hal Draper has described how, for Marx and Engels, the petty bourgeoisie had to be viewed as capable of both reactionary and progressive political action. They considered that the programme of the German party would lead to sectarianism. Both the petty bourgeoisie and the peasantry (the urban and rural sectors of the class) are 'classes that are on the decline and reactionary in relation to the proletariat as soon as they aspire to maintain themselves artificially', wrote Engels:


Engels's Anti-Dühring, a critique of the ideas of Dr Eugen Dühring, has to be seen against this background. He and Marx were extremely perturbed at the influence Dühring had on even the intellectuals of the party such as the young Eduard Bernstein. Anti-Dühring started as a series of articles in the German party's publication Vorwärts in 1877. The articles came under attack from within the party itself. The tone of Engels' articles and their content were regarded by some as 'objectionable' and they were relegated to the paper's scientific supplement.82


Engels describes how the great Utopian socialists, Saint-Simon, Fourier and Owen, derived their ideas from the rationalist thinking of the Enlightenment, which culminated in the great French Revolution. They expressed the disappointment felt at the political and social institutions which came out of the revolution. According to Engels, 'Society presented nothing but wrongs; to remove these was the task of reason.'83 He describes how this sort of socialism dominated the earliest socialist thinkers:


With the ideas of Marx, 'socialism was no longer an accidental discovery of this or that ingenious brain, but the necessary outcome of the struggle between two historically developed classes--the proletariat and the bourgeoisie'.85 A system which should have been able to make life easier for all of humanity instead made it far more wretched for many, while a minority benefited:

Moreover, the constant development of newer and more powerful machinery, which is central to the accumulation of capital, produces great wealth but leads eventually to crisis: 'markets are glutted, products accumulate... hard cash disappears, credit vanishes, factories are closed, and the mass of workers are in want of the means of subsistence, because they have produced too much of the means of subsistence.'87


The success of Socialism, Utopian and Scientific helped to establish Marx and Engels' reputation among a new generation of socialists internationally. However, the political problems which Marx and Engels encountered in their dealings with the German party did not disappear. In 1879 the Anti-Socialist Law was passed by Bismarck in response to the growing strength of the party. In fact, the law did not harm the party's growth, but its leaders responded to restrictions on their activity in the most compromising and mealy mouthed way. Its parliamentary group followed a policy of adaptation, and its leader, Wilhelm Liebknecht, declared in the Reichstag (parliament) that the SPD would obey the law. Marx said of the parliamentary group of socialists that 'they are already so far affected by parliamentary idiotism that they think they are above criticism'.89

Engels in particular was angry with the leadership of the German party at the time. He felt attacked unjustifiably over Anti-Dühring and also believed that residual 'Lassalleanism' kept showing through in the party's politics. He considered that the advice that he and Marx had given was not readily accepted by the German party and that this often led it to opportunist and even reformist tendencies, as over the Anti-Socialist Law. Although a visit to London by August Bebel in 1880 helped allay his fears, the German party remained a source of worry to Engels for the rest of his life.

Lizzie Burns had died in 1878, and had become Engels' wife on her deathbed. Three years later Marx's wife, Jenny, also died, to be followed just over a year later by her eldest daughter, Jenny. Marx had long been in bad health, as his correspondence frequently testified, but these deaths had a terrible effect on him. His health deteriorated further, despite convalescent trips to Algeria and the Isle of Wight. He developed a tumour on the lung and died on 14 March 1883, just two months after his eldest daughter and a few days before his grandson, the four year old Harry Longuet, who is buried in Marx's grave.

Engels was there at the time of death and wrote the next day to their old friend in America, Frederick Adolph Sorge, 'Mankind is shorter by a head, and that the greatest head of our time'.90 He spoke at Marx's graveside where he stated that 'just as Darwin discovered the law of development of organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of development of human history'. He went on to reaffirm their revolutionary commitment:

After Marx

The void in Engels' life following the death of Marx must have been great, but he was not the sort of person to allow it to prevent him from carrying on the work to which the two men had always devoted their energies. Therefore Engels' final years--he was to live another 12 years after Marx--were as full and demanding as any in his younger life. His life in those years was devoted to arguing for, explaining and clarifying Marx's ideas; working on the remaining volumes of Capital which would probably never have seen the light of day if it were not for Engels; looking after the Marx daughters, Laura and Eleanor; and advising those trying to build organisations in various countries, especially in Germany and Britain.

Engels' theoretical production never diminished. Indeed in 1884 he published one of his best known books, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, which drew on anthropological writings to trace the course of women's oppression throughout class society. This was a pathbreaking book in more ways than one. Not only did it tie the development of family forms and structures to the rise of private property held by a particular class in society, it also demonstrated a completely egalitarian attitude towards women. Throughout his life Engels saw women's oppression as an unnatural product of property relations which would disappear once those property relations disappeared. He therefore developed a view which set him well in advance of even liberal commentators in Victorian England, who all too often saw women as weak beings who had to be protected, rather than as equals.92


The desire to finish Capital may be one reason that Engels stayed in England, rather than return to his native Germany or to German speaking Switzerland. He often stressed that he felt able to continue his theoretical studies better in London than in Germany or Switzerland. He was also much less directly involved in the workers' movement in Britain than he would have been in Germany. Indeed, Engels was fairly isolated from the working class movement--in contrast to his youth when he was involved with the Chartists, the Communist League and later with the International. In part this reflected what had happened to the working class movement over the intervening two decades--although the passivity and lack of struggle among English workers began to change in the last years of Engels' life.

He also had a number of strong personal commitments in England: to Helene Demuth, the lifelong friend and servant of the Marx family, and like them a committed socialist--she spent the last years of her life as housekeeper to Engels in Regent's Park Road; to 'Pumps' (Mary Ellen) Burns, niece of Mary and Lizzie, who with her husband and family was also ensconced there much of the time; and to the Marx daughters. Laura lived with her husband the French socialist Paul Lafargue in Paris, but Eleanor lived in London, in a relationship with the socialist Edward Aveling from 1883.

Engels treated them with the utmost affection and generosity, tact and sympathy, and smoothed many problems, such as Laura's unhappiness that Eleanor, not she, was one of her father's executors. Right up until his death, he provided them with money and left them both enough in his will to provide for them for the rest of their lives. Engels took all this as a matter of course, just as he had supported Marx throughout his life. He also defended them from attack--an impulse which he generously extended to Edward Aveling, who had a bad personal reputation but whom Engels always regarded as one of the most able socialists in Britain.

Rebirth of the English socialist movement

When Engels had first come to England in the early 1840s, his enthusiasm for the English working class movement knew no bounds. The Chartist movement was the most advanced in Europe. But the defeat of Chartism after 1848 and the ensuing dominance inside the working class movement of a layer of skilled trade union leaders led him to change his views. The experience of the First International reinforced these later views that the English working class movement--or at least its leaders--were narrow, parochial and all too willing to do deals with the bourgeois Liberal Party, rather than form their own independent workers' party. So Engels could write to Eduard Bernstein in 1879:


Things began to change around the time of Marx's death. Engels himself had started to write articles in the London Trades Council paper the Labour Standard in 1881, in which he called for the establishment of a workers' political party rather than just trade union organisation--a call which led to his departure from the paper.95 Soon afterwards came the establishment of tenuous socialist organisation in Britain. The Democratic Federation, led by H M Hyndman, was a coming together of various radical organisations. It developed in a socialist--as opposed to Liberal--direction. In 1884 it renamed itself the Social Democratic Federation, with a socialist programme and widespread support, especially among young trade unionists who were to become famous later in the decade for their role in leading strikes.

But the SDF soon split. Its departing members cited Hyndman's opportunism coupled with his authoritarian behaviour--and set up the Socialist League in the beginning of 1885. The signatories to its founding statement included some of the best known names of English socialism such as Eleanor Marx, Edward Aveling, William Morris, Belfort Bax and John Lincoln Mahon. Their quarrel with Hyndman was understandable: he had irritated Marx with his frequent visits during the last years of his life, and irritated Engels as somebody who although he had read Capital did not grasp the essentials of Marxism. Neither had he broken fully from his own bourgeois background and ideas, in particular suffering from a degree of national chauvinism which coloured his socialism, and so was indeed capable of the opportunism of which he was accused. The SDF concentrated on abstract propaganda, did not see the relevance of strikes and was incapable of grasping many of the opportunities which came its way. Engels regarded it as a sect: 'It has not understood how to take the lead of the working class movement generally, and to direct it towards socialism. It has turned Marxism into an orthodoxy'.96 But the SDF did attempt to popularise Marx's ideas, in however distorted a way, to a new generation of socialists. Hyndman's book England for All was an attempt to put forward Marx's ideas (although without crediting them).






The women's strike was followed by that of the gas workers, led by Will Thorne (whom Eleanor Marx taught to read and write) and then by the London dockers' strike for their 'tanner' increase, led by the socialists John Burns and Tom Mann. Other strikes followed in all the sweated, unskilled trades--shops, transport, food industries. They also affected the unionised sections of the working class, who themselves became more militant.


The success of the agitation was shown in the mass May Day demonstration organised around the theme of the Eight Hour Day in 1890. Despite sectarian opposition from some of the old union leaders around the London Trades Council, hundreds of thousands went to Hyde Park--organised through a committee including the Avelings. Engels was on one of the speakers' platforms and was full of enthusiasm for the event, which he saw as symbolising the reawakening of the working class.101


The final years


At the birthday celebration guests were 'all regaled with claret and champagne until half past three in the morning, when twelve dozen oysters were consumed'.104 Among the guests were the German socialists Liebknecht, Bebel and Singer. The international links between the socialists were growing by now, given a boost by the founding of the Second International, the first congress of which took place in Paris in 1889, on the hundredth anniversary of the storming of the Bastille.


The growth of socialist organisations, often under the influence of at least some form of Marxism, meant that Engels' advice was much in demand. He became close friends with Victor Adler, a leader of the Austrian Social Democratic Party, who visited him in London, and also corresponded with socialists in countries as far apart as Russia and Portugal. The leaders of the emerging movement looked to him as the embodiment of a revolutionary tradition stretching back before 1848--and as one of the last survivors of his generation.

A sign of this recognition came at the Zurich International Socialist conference in 1893. Yet again this was one of two conferences--the other called by the English trade unions in London, which Engels saw as a political challenge to the more advanced continental socialists. Engels managed to get the English conference cancelled by urging the German, Austrian and French trade unions to pass resolutions demanding one conference. Engels used the occasion to revisit Germany after many years and turned up only near the end of the Congress. He was feted by the international delegates and made the closing speech to the Congress. Engels' lifelong modesty was evident here as elsewhere:

But Engels found that despite the growth of these parties there was a danger within them--that their very success could hide theoretical and political problems. His concern was always that they should develop into proper mass workers' parties, as opposed to the sects with no real roots in the class struggle which had so often dominated the left. He was therefore always extremely critical of anarchist tendencies, and took the side of the German party when it was faced with an anarchist splinter in the 1890s. But the stress that he put, quite rightly, on the need to work through the unions and parliament, the need to build up a mass base, could easily lead the German party to an opportunist accommodation with the system.

The arguments that broke out after Engels' death in favour of 'revisionism'--led by the theoretician Eduard Bernstein--had their seed in the years before. The idea that the system would simply expand without contradiction and would therefore yield up the fruits of socialism almost as a matter of course were there, in Engels' view, in the revised programme put to the German party's 1891 conference. Engels had always been very bitter about the suppression by Liebknecht of Marx's Critique of the Gotha Programme. He was even more furious when that programme came to be revised after the repeal of the Anti-Socialist Law that no acknowledgement of past mistakes, or of Marx's critique, was made by the party's leaders.


In Engels' final years he found no respite from the demands for theoretical clarification which had dominated his life. 'In the last five years of his life Engels had some 135 works of greater or lesser importance to his credit'. He read seven daily papers (three German, two English, one Austrian and one Italian) and 19 weeklies in a variety of languages.107 His most important work in these years was volume III of Capital which he wrote largely from scratch.



But the balance of forces changed after the Franco-Prussian War, when Germany became the fastest growing industrial and imperial power, gradually rivalling even Britain. Whereas German socialists would earlier have supported war against Russia, by the 1890s this meant siding with their own imperialist ruling class. Yet Engels still clung to the idea that in certain circumstances there could be a justified defensive war, for which German socialists would have to vote war credits. His 'argument was to be parroted with disastrous effect in 1914 by the same party leaders who censored Engels' other writings when the German socialists supported their ruling class in the imperialist First World War and, indeed, voted them war credits.109




  1. G Mayer, Frederick Engels (London, 1936), p208.
  2. Ibid, pp56-57.
  3. Ibid, p15.
  4. Quoted in F Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England (Moscow, 1973), p313.
  5. Quoted in G Mayer, op cit, p49.
  6. F Engels, op cit, p60.
  7. Ibid, pp111-112.
  8. lbid, p120.
  9. Ibid, p167.
  10. Ibid, p162.
  11. Ibid, p312.
  12. Ibid, p261.
  13. Ibid, pp333-334.
  14. Ibid, p11.
  15. F Engels, On the History of the Communist League in K Marx and F Engels, Selected Works (London, 1968), p436.
  16. G Mayer, op cit, pp59-60.
  17. F Mehring, Karl Marx (Sussex, 1981), p93.
  18. Ibid, p95.
  19. K Marx and F Engels, Correspondence 1844-1851 (London, 1982), p4.
  20. Ibid, p20.
  21. G Mayer, op cit, p69.
  22. K Marx and F Engels, The German Ideology (London, 1965), pp37-38.
  23. Ibid, pp55-56.
  24. Ibid, p50.
  25. Ibid, p60.
  26. Ibid, pp6l-62.
  27. Ibid, p44.
  28. Ibid, pp85-86.
  29. Ibid, p503.
  30. K Marx and F Engels, Correspondence, op cit, p82.
  31. O J Hammen, The Red 48ers (New York, 1969), p160.
  32. F Engels, Principles of Communism (Peking, 1977), p3.
  33. Ibid, p8.
  34. K Marx and F Engels, Communist Manifesto (Tirana, 1981), p34.
  35. F Engels, Principles, op cit, pl1.
  36. K Marx and F Engels, Communist Manifesto, op cit, p25.
  37. O J Hammen, op cit, p187.
  38. K Marx and F Engels, Correspondence. op cit, p54.
  39. Ibid, pp159-160.
  40. Ibid, p165.
  41. E Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution (London, 1977), p22.
  42. K Marx in Neue Rheinische Zeitung, 29 June 1848, reprinted in D Fernbach (ed), The Revolutions of 1848 (Harmondsworth, 1973), p131.
  43. Article in Deutsch-Brusseler Zeitung, 23 January 1848, quoted in G Mayer, op cit, p88.
  44. Article in Neue Rheinische Zeitring, 29 June 1848, reproduced in D Fernbach, op cit.
  45. Quoted in O J Hammen, op cit, p234.
  46. Ibid, p236.
  47. Ibid, p250.
  48. F Engels in Neue Rheinische Zeitung, 16 February 1849, reprinted in D Fernbach, op cit, p239.
  49. F Engels in Neue Rheinische Zeitung, 13 January 1849, reprinted in D Fernbach, op cit, pp216-217.
  50. F Mehring, op cit, p164.
  51. The most detailed criticism from a Marxist point of view comes from R Rosdolsky in Engels and the Non-historic Peoples: the National Question in the Revolution of 1848, (Glasgow, 1986).
  52. T Carver, Frederick Engels: His Life and Thought (Basingstoke, 1989), p201.
  53. K Marx and F Engels, Correspondence, op cit, p211.
  54. K Marx and F Engels, 'Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League (March 1850)', printed in D Fernbach, op cit, p330.
  55. L Trotsky, Permanent Revolution (New York, 1962).
  56. K Marx and F Engels, Correspondence, op cit, p241.
  57. Y Kapp, Eleanor Marx, Vol 1, p112.
  58. Quoted in T Carver, op cit, p155.
  59. See G Mayer, op cit, ppl71-174 and T Carver, op cit, pp153-155, for different interpretations of the correspondence.
  60. T Carver, op cit, p159.
  61. Y Kapp, op cit, p113.
  62. Quoted in ibid, p114.
  63. T Carver, op cit, and The Daughters of Karl Marx (London, 1984).
  64. K Marx and F Engels, Collected Works, Vol 39 (Moscow, 1983), pp434-435.
  65. Letter from Marx to Engels in Selected Correspondence (Moscow, 1982), p114.
  66. Ibid, pp126-127.
  67. Ibid, p125.
  68. Ibid, p140.
  69. Ibid, p163.
  70. Ibid, p168.
  71. Ibid, p180.
  72. Ibid, p209.
  73. K Marx and F Engels, The Civil War in France in Selected Works, op cit, p306.
  74. Ibid, p287.
  75. Ibid, p285.
  76. F Engels introduction, ibid, p259.
  77. D Fernbach introduction to K Marx, The First International and After (London, 1974), p43.
  78. See the article by John Rees in this volume.
  79. In K Marx and F Engels, Selected Works, op cit.
  80. H Draper, Karl Marx's Theory of Revolution, vol II (London, 1978), pp308-309.
  81. F Mehring, Karl Marx (Sussex, 1981), p5l1.
  82. Ibid, p512.
  83. F Engels, Socialism, Utopian and Scientific in Selected Works, op cit, p398.
  84. Ibid, p404.
  85. Ibid, p410.
  86. Ibid, pp418-419.
  87. Ibid, p419.
  88. Ibid, p422.
  89. Letter from K Marx to Friedrich Adolph Sorge in Hoboken, 19 September 1879, in Selected Correspondence, op cit, p309.
  90. Ibid, p340.
  91. Speech at the Graveside of Karl Marx in Selected Works, op cit, pp429-430.
  92. F Engels, The Origin of the Family Private Property and the State in Selected Works, op cit, pp449-583. For a fuller view of this and other works by Engels on human origins see the chapter by Chris Harman in this volume.
  93. Letter from F Engels to Eduard Bernstein in Zurich, 17 June 1879, in Selected Works, op cit, p301.
  94. Letter from F Engels to Karl Kautsky in Vienna, 12 September 1882, in Selected Works, op cit, p678.
  95. A L Morton and G Tate, The British Labour Movement (London, 1979), pp162-163.
  96. H Draper, op cit, p120.
  97. Letter from Engels to J Adolph Sorge in Hoboken in Selected Correspondence, op cit, p375.
  98. Y Kapp, Eleanor Marx, Vol II (New York, 1976), pp212-213.
  99. Quoted in E Hobsbawm, Labour's Turning Point (Brighton, 1974), p72.
  100. Engels to Sorge in London, 7 December 1889, in Selected Correspondence, op cit, p385.
  101. Y Kapp, Vol II, op cit, pp377-380.
  102. A L Morton and G Tate, op cit, p204.
  103. Y Kapp, Vol II, op cit, p423.
  104. Ibid, p425.
  105. Ibid, p549.
  106. Engels' introduction to Marx's The Class Struggles in France was abridged for publication in Die Neue Zeit. For details see chapter by John Rees in this volume. For the introduction see K Marx and F Engels, Collected Works, Vol 27 (London, 1990), pp506-524.
  107. Y Kapp, op cit, p446.
  108. See F Engels Socialism, Utopian and Scientific in Selected Works, op cit, pp421-422.
  109. C Harman, 'Hidden Treasure', in Socialist Review 149 (London, January 1992), p30-31. For a discussion on the argument about socialists and war see G Mayer, op cit, pp285-295.
