Friedrich Engels

Friedrich Engels was a German philosopher, social theorist and businessman, and the lifelong collaborator of Karl Marx. The son of a textile manufacturer, he worked for years in his family's cotton firm in Manchester, and what he saw of the city's slums went into The Condition of the Working Class in England. With Marx he wrote The German Ideology and The Communist Manifesto, and his income from the business helped to support Marx and his family. After Marx died, Engels edited the second and third volumes of Capital from Marx's drafts. His own popular books, such as Anti-Dühring and Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, did much to turn Marxism into a complete worldview, while The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State tied the subordination of women to the rise of private property.

Key ideas

• History is driven mainly by changes in how societies produce and exchange the means of life, and by the class struggles those changes bring.
• Industrial capitalism, as he saw it in Manchester, concentrates wealth while leaving workers in poverty, overcrowding and ill health.
• Socialism should rest on a scientific analysis of how capitalism develops rather than on ideal plans for a perfect society.
• The family and the subordination of women have a history, bound up with the rise of private property and the state.
• General laws of dialectics operate in nature as well as in history and thought, an idea later central to dialectical materialism.

Major works

• The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845)
• The German Ideology (with Karl Marx, 1845–1846)
• The Communist Manifesto (with Karl Marx, 1848)
• Anti-Dühring (1878)
• Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (1880)
• The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884)

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