Communist giant shaped by unconventional lover

When a 21-year old businessman, Friedrich Engels, a budding philosopher and political theorist was passing through Cologne in 1842 on his way to England he visited the new editor of the Rheinische Zeitung. Engels had contributed several articles to the newspaper and was interested in meeting the editor, Karl Marx, a brilliant radical philosopher.

The two men were very different. Engels was a neat, handsome, wellpresented young man from a wealthy family that owned textile mills and he was on his way to England to take up a job in a cotton factory. He lacked a formal degree, but had educated himself and shown talent as a writer. Marx was a scruffy, disorganised, man with a doctorate, who was from a higher social strata and was married to an aristocrat. The meeting did not go well, Engels left it unimpressed, feeling he had been patronised.

But they would later meet again, discover a great deal of common ground, hit it off and become good friends. It was the beginning of an important relationship.

The two men became collaborators on the Communist Manifesto, and Engels would help Marx with his magnum opus Das Kapital, which had a far reaching effect on global politics in the 19th and 20th centuries. But while Marx influenced Hegels’s ideas, Hegels’s love of a working class Irish woman had just as profound an effect.

He was born two centuries ago today, on November 27, 1820 in Barmen, in the Rhine Province of the Kingdom of Prussia.

Barmen (now part of the city of Wuppertal) was then a rising industrial town, where Engels’s father, Friedrich senior, was the owner of cotton mills. Engels had a strict Protestant upbringing and was expected to join the family business. His father took him out of school at 17 to begin his education as a the city, in his spare time he attended lectures at a university. Lacking formal educational requirements he never took a degree, but he became part of a group of Hegelians. Marx was also a part of the group but the pair did not meet at this stage and another intellectual had a big influence on him before Marx.

After leaving the army in 1842 he met journalist, philosopher and socialist Moses Hess, who convinced him of the merits of communism. Hess told him that advanced industrial nations such as England would play a major part in the transition to a socialist future.

Hegel then took up the opportunity, offered by his father, to work at the family’s company that manufactured cotton sewing threads in Manchester. In England he met with some of the leading writers on economic theory and made observations on the English working class, which he later compiled into a book The Condition Of The Working Class in England, published in 1845. He also began an unconventional relationship with an Irish working class woman, Mary Burns, who he never married but lived with as if they were wed. She would imbue him with a unique sympathy for the working class.

Returning from England in 1844 he and Marx met again and realised that they agreed on many things and began to work together to promote communism. In 1847 Engels helped transform the clandestine socialist movement The League Of The Just, into the Communist League. In 1848 Engels and Marx published the Communist Manifesto as a blueprint for revolution. Both took part in the 1848 revolution in Germany, but were forced into exile in England.

Engels took up a job in the family firm to help fund Marx and his formulation of his great analysis of capitalism, Das Kapital, published in 1867. After Marx died in 1883, Engels worked on promoting and defining Marx’s ideas.

He died in London in 1895.