Remembering Engels

As an ordinary working person, I think that we should remember Friedrich Engels, who was born into a privileged family, but fought all his life for the poor. Engels also worked dutifully at a job he detested for decades, primarily in order to provide financial support to his friend Karl Marx. In addition, Engels wrote several influential and theoretically substantial books and hundreds of pamphlets, reviews, and articles. He actually wrote many of the articles purportedly written by Marx, so that upon publication, Marx would have the royalties. Engels co-authored several books with Marx, edited Marx’s work, and translated some of Marx’s writing into English. Engels was also a brilliant organizer, publicist, and man of action. And unlike Marx, Engels took up arms and put his life on the line, fighting alongside his comrades in several pitched battles against the forces of oppression and autocracy.

And despite Engels’ later deferential attitude toward Marx, there is no doubt that early on in the relationship Engels’ critique of political economy impressed Marx deeply, and was instrumental in shaping Marx’s own views. Engels’ observations and research led to the publication in 1845 of his masterpiece, The Condition of the Working Class in England. Here is how Engels begins:

Working men!
To you I dedicate a work, in which I have tried to lay before my German countrymen a faithful picture of your condition, of your sufferings and struggles, of your hopes and prospects. I have lived long enough amidst you to know something about your circumstances; I have devoted to their knowledge my most serious attention, I have studied the various official and nonofficial documents as far as I was able to get hold of them—I have not been satisfied with this, I wanted more than a mere abstract knowledge of my subject, I wanted to see you in your own homes, to observe you in your everyday life, to chat with you on your condition and grievances, to witness your struggles against the social and political power of your oppressors.
(Marx/Engels, Collected Works, London 1975, vol. 4, p. 296)

When he heard that Engels had died, Lenin wrote: “After his friend Karl Marx, who died in 1883, Engels was the finest scholar and teacher of the modern proletariat in the whole civilized world.” How many American intellectuals today have Engels' courage or his humble devotion to a cause?