Engels, Friedrich (1820–1895)

Friedrich Engels was born on November 28, 1820, in Barmen, which was, at that time, part of Prussia. Engels's father was a prosperous German industrialist. Young Engels attended the Gymnasium, (secondary school) in Elberfeld in 1834. Liberal freethinkers directed the school. By 1837, Engels openly expressed sympathy with radical humanism and militant democratic ideas. In 1838, Engels moved to Bremen, Saxony, to train as a factory manager for the firm of Heinrick Leupold. Engels found that liberal ideas were more openly articulated in Bremen.

In 1839, Engels published an article that attacked die absurd mysticism of pietism. Engels claimed diat this ideology was closely linked to the major social ills of Germany and that it justified die wealth of the moneyed elite. Owners who were deeply religious were morally responsible for the pain of child labor. It was justifiable to blame the owners for the poverty and suffering of the working class.

[Page 412]In November 1842, Engels moved to Manchester, England. He went to work at the Victoria Mill office of Ermen and Engels in Manchester. This operation manufactured yarn and sewing thread. During the working day, Engels was a hard-working industrialist. At night, he became a social researcher and labor militant, hanging around the grimy, perilous streets of the Manchester working-class slums. Manchester was, at this time, a major center of the most revolutionary elements in the Chartist movement. Though born into a capitalist family and working as a manager in his family's business, he openly sided with the revolutionary proletariat. Engels began his famous study on the conditions of the English working class. This became the data for his book The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844. This book detailed the life of the industrial proletariat in an advanced industrial capitalist nation. Under such conditions, antagonisms with the bourgeoisie were open and strong. The Industrial Revolution converted tools into machines. Tools, which were extensions of the workers, distorted the worker into an extension of the machine. Because of the dehumanization of the industrial proletariat, the middle class, which became the new ruling class, found that its enemy was no longer the feudal aristocracy but its own workers.

Next, Engels began a serious study of the history and evolution of the sciences. The philosophy of the 18th-century materialist philosophers of France and England provided the connection between philosophy and science. However, the materialism of the 18th century was seriously limited. Materialism needed to be merged with the dialectical logic of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Engels, along with Karl Marx, also wrote in refutation of both the young Hegelians and their master Ludwig Feuerbach. This radical secular humanism would not provide the ideology needed to organize a working-class movement in its struggle for socialism.