A spectre is haunting Europe — the spectre of communism. So starts one of the most important and powerful literary works in human history. On this day in 1820 one of the authors of The Communist Manifesto, Friedrich Engels, was born in Barmen, a town in the kingdom of Prussia. Born into a textile manufacturing family, Engels did not finish high school and much of his radical thought had already begun to form by this time. In 1842, his father sent Engels to England to work in a textile manufacturing plant. On his way to England, Engels first met Karl Marx briefly at Rheinische Zeitung, a newspaper that Marx edited. It was in Manchester that Engels wrote his first major work, The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844.
The wage-worker sells to the capitalist his labour-force for a certain daily sum. After a few hours’ work he has reproduced the value of that sum; but the substance of his contract is, that he has to work another series of hours to complete his working-day; and the value he produces during these additional hours of surplus labour is surplus value, which cost the capitalist nothing, but yet goes into his pocket. That is the basis of the system which tends more and more to split up civilised society into a few Rothschilds and Vanderbilts, the owners of all the means of production and subsistence, on the one hand, and an immense number of wage-workers, the owners of nothing but their labour-force, on the other.
Engels would again meet up with Marx in 1844 and their relationship would flourish. Together they wrote The Holy Family. In the online introduction of The Holy Family, Marxist.org related that one paper wrote that, in The Holy Family, “every line preaches revolt… against the state, the church, the family, legality, religion and property.”
It wasn’t until a few years later that Marx asked Engels to write a document about for The Communist League. It was this paper, The Communist Principles, that Engels delivered to Marx who reworked it into The Communist Manifesto.
Vladimir Ilyich Lenin wrote of the importance of Engels:
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.
As you prepare to celebrate the anniversary of Friedrich Engels’ birth, let me leave you with another line from The Communist Manifesto.
The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.