Friedrich Engels

Along with Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels is best-known for writing the massively influential ‘Communist Manifesto.’

History has largely focused upon Marx at the expense of Engels. However, without the financial assistance of Engels it’s highly doubtful that Marx could have led a viable existence. Engels also published posthumous work by Karl Marx and had a great deal to offer in terms of his observations concerning the conditions of the working-class in England.

As the son of a wealthy cotton textile manufacturer, Engels perhaps felt a degree of guilt over the appalling social conditions that faced the working-class during the Industrial Revolution. He agrees with Marx that the means to establish a classless society was via a bloody revolution. Conflict between the workers and the bosses was inevitable because the ruling class would always resist demands for radical social change. As with Marx, his entire outlook was shaped by the Hegelian concept of historical materialism.

In terms of his position within the ideology of socialism, Friedrich Engels was an unequivocal advocate of revolution as opposed to the compromises inherent within the parliamentary route. He was also critical of utopian socialists such as Robert Owen and Charles Fourier for failing to recognise the potential for scientific socialism in which human behaviour was predictable and caused by external factors. Engels also proclaimed that to get the very most out of life one must be active. It was a mindset that was surely encapsulated in his most-famous and widely-cited quote that “an ounce of action is worth a ton of theory.” It seems a fitting epitaph indeed for the co-author of the ‘Communist Manifesto,’ a pamphlet that truly changed the world!