Vladimir Lenin
Biographical Article on Fredrick Engels
Written: Autumn 1895
Source: Collected Works, Volume
Publisher: Progress Publishers, Moscow, USSR
First Published: In 1896, in the miscellany Rabotnik, No. 1-2.
Online Version: marx.org, marxists.org 1999
Transcribed: Zodiac
HTML Markup: Brian Basgen and David Walters
What a torch of reason ceased to burn,
What a heart has ceased to beat!
[from N. A. Nekrasov's poem
"In Memory of Dobrolyubov"]
On August 5 (new style), 1895, Frederick Engels died in London. After his friend
Karl Marx (who died in 1883), Engels was the finest scholar and teacher of the
modern proletariat in the whole civilised world. From the time that fate brought
Karl Marx and Frederick Engels together, the two friends devoted their life's
work to a common cause. And so to understand what Frederick Engels has done for
the proletariat, one must have a clear idea of the significance of Marx's
teaching and work for the development of the contemporary working-class
movement. Marx and Engels were the first to show that the working class and its
demands are a necessary outcome of the present economic system, which together
with the bourgeoisie inevitably creates and organises the proletariat. They
showed that it is not the well-meaning efforts of noble-minded individuals, but
the class struggle of the organised proletariat that will deliver humanity from
the evils which now oppress it. In their scientific works, Marx and Engels were
the first to explain that socialism is not the invention of dreamers, but the
final aim and necessary result of the development of the productive forces in
modern society. All recorded history hitherto has been a history of class
struggle, of the succession of the rule and victory of certain social classes
over others. And this will continue until the foundations of class struggle and
of class domination -- private property and anarchic social production --
disappear. The interests of the proletariat demand the destruction of these
foundations, and therefore the conscious class struggle of the organised workers
must be directed against them. And every class struggle is a political struggle.
These views of Marx and Engels have now been adopted by all proletarians who are
fighting for their emancipation. But when in the forties the two friends took
part in the socialist literature and the social movements of their time, they
were absolutely novel. There were then many people, talented and without talent,
honest and dishonest, who, absorbed in the struggle for political freedom, in
the struggle against the despotism of kings, police and priests, failed to
observe the antagonism between the interests of the bourgeoisie and those of the
proletariat. These people would not entertain the idea of the workers acting as
an independent social force. On the other hand, there were many dreamers, some
of them geniuses, who thought that it was only necessary to convince the rulers
and the governing classes of the injustice of the contemporary social order, and
it would then be easy to establish peace and general well-being on earth. They
dreamt of a socialism without struggle. Lastly, nearly all the socialists of
that time and the friends of the working class generally regarded the
proletariat only as an ulcer, and observed with horror how it grew with the
growth of industry. They all, therefore, sought for a means to stop the
development of industry and of the proletariat, to stop the "wheel of history."
Marx and Engels did not share the general fear of the development of the
proletariat; on the contrary, they placed all their hopes on its continued
growth. The more proletarians there are, the greater is their strength as a
revolutionary class, and the nearer and more possible does socialism become. The
services rendered by Marx and Engels to the working class may be expressed in a
few words thus: they taught the working class to know itself and be conscious of
itself, and they substituted science for dreams.
That is why the name and life of Engels should be known to every worker. That is
why in this collection of articles, the aim of which, as of all our
publications, is to awaken class-consciousness in the Russian workers, we must
give a sketch of the life and work of Frederick Engels, one of the two great
teachers of the modern proletariat.
Engels was born in 1820 in Barmen, in the Rhine Province of the kingdom of
Prussia. His father was a manufacturer. In 1838 Engels, without having completed
his high-school studies, was forced by family circumstances to enter a
commercial house in Bremen as a clerk. Commercial affairs did not prevent Engels
from pursuing his scientific and political education. He had come to hate
autocracy and the tyranny of bureaucrats while still at high school. The study
of philosophy led him further. At that time Hegel's teaching dominated German
philosophy, and Engels became his follower. Although Hegel himself was an
admirer of the autocratic Prussian state, in whose service he was as a professor
at Berlin University, Hegel's teachings were revolutionary. Hegel's faith in
human reason and its rights, and the fundamental thesis of Hegelian philosophy
that the universe is undergoing a constant process of change and development,
led some of the disciples of the Berlin philosopher -- those who refused to
accept the existing situation -- to the idea that the struggle against this
situation, the struggle against existing wrong and prevalent evil, is also
rooted in the universal law of eternal development. If all things develop, if
institutions of one kind give place to others, why should the autocracy of the
Prussian king or of the Russian tsar, the enrichment of an insignificant
minority at the expense of the vast majority, or the domination of the
bourgeoisie over the people, continue for ever? Hegel's philosophy spoke of the
development of the mind and of ideas; it was idealistic. From the development of
the mind it deduced the development of nature, of man, and of human, social
relations. While retaining Hegel's idea of the eternal process of development,
[1] Marx and Engels rejected the preconceived idealist view; turning to life,
they saw that it is not the development of mind that explains the development of
nature but that, on the contrary, the explanation of mind must be derived from
nature, from matter.... Unlike Hegel and the other Hegelians, Marx and Engels
were materialists. Regarding the world and humanity materialistically, they
perceived that just as material causes underlie all natural phenomena, so the
development of human society is conditioned by the development of material
forces, the productive forces. On the development of the productive forces
depend the relations into which men enter with one another in the production of
the things required for the satisfaction of human needs. And in these relations
lies the explanation of all the phenomena of social life, human aspirations,
ideas and laws. The development of the productive forces creates social
relations based upon private property, but now we see that this same development
of the productive forces deprives the majority of their property and
concentrates it in the hands of an insignificant minority. It abolishes
property, the basis of the modern social order, it itself strives towards the
very aim which the socialists have set themselves. All the socialists have to do
is to realise which social force, owing to its position in modern society, is
interested in bringing socialism about, and to impart to this force the
consciousness of its interests and of its historical task. This force is the
proletariat. Engels got to know the proletariat in England, in the centre of
English industry, Manchester, where he settled in 1842, entering the service of
a commercial firm of which his father was a shareholder. Here Engels not only
sat in the factory office but wandered about the slums in which the workers were
cooped up, and saw their poverty and misery with his own eyes. But he did not
confine himself to personal observations. He read all that had been revealed
before him about the condition of the British working class and carefully
studied all the official documents he could lay his hands on. The fruit of these
studies and observations was the book which appeared in 1845: The Condition of
the Working Class in England. We have already mentioned what was the chief
service rendered by Engels in writing The Condition of the Working Class in
England. Even before Engels, many people had described the sufferings of the
proletariat and had pointed to the necessity of helping it. Engels was the first
to say that the proletariat is not only a suffering class; that it is, in fact,
the disgraceful economic condition of the proletariat that drives it
irresistibly forward and compels it to fight for its ultimate emancipation. And
the fighting proletariat will help itself. The political movement of the working
class will inevitably lead the workers to realise that their only ...
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