Engels, two years younger than Marx, came from an even wealthier family, which owned
half-interest in a factory in Germany and half-interest in another factory in England.
His father had never been as indulgent as Marx’s father, and Engels never attended
a university, but he was well read and by middle age could read and write nearly two
dozen languages.
Engels was sent away at seventeen to get on-the-job training in the family business in Bremen.
Here he was “not overworked”—he was, after all, an owner’s son—and was known
to have beer, cigars, poems, and correspondence with him, and to take a leisurely lunch and
a nap afterwards in a hammock.
He also found time to study Hegel.
Engels eventually became a member of the Young Hegelians, and in 1842 had his first brief
meeting with the editor of the Rheinische Zeitung, Karl Marx.
Their first meeting was cool, for Marx viewed Engels at that point as just another member
of the radical group whose literary contributions to the paper were causing him trouble with
the censors.
From 1842 to 1844, Engels lived in Manchester, England, working in the family business there
and observing the conditions of the working people in this industrial town—observations
which led to his first book, The Conditions of the Working Class in England in 1844.
When he passed through Paris on his way back to the Rhineland in 1844, he again met Marx—and
this time, many days of discussion found them “in complete agreement on questions of theory”—as
they continued to be for the remaining decades of their lives.
At this juncture, Engels was not only further advanced than Marx on the road to communism,
but was also much better versed in economics.
Although their first joint publication—The Holy Family—appeared a year later, there
was at that point no suggestion of a continuing collaboration between them.
The forward to The Holy Family promised future writings from the pair—“each for himself,
of course.”
But in reality later events brought them together again in England, in a permanent alliance
in which their ideas and words were so intermingled that it would be rash to say conclusively,
a hundred years later, what was Marx’s and what was Engels’.
Even Marx’s daughter, after his death, mistakenly published a collection of her father’s newspaper
articles that later turned out all to have been written by Engels.
The most famous of their explicitly collaborative writings was of course The Communist Manifesto.
Its genesis typified the pattern of Marxian political intrigue.
A radical organization in London called the League of the Just was in process of reorganization
to become the Communist League, and it involved several people in the drawing up of its credo.
One of these submitted his draft to Engels who confessed to Marx that “just between
ourselves I played a hellish trick on Mosi”—substituting the Marxian program for the draft entrusted
to him.
Engels realized the enormity of his betrayal, for he cautioned Marx to utter secrecy, “otherwise
we shall be deposed and there will be a murderous scandal.”
Thus Marx and Engels made themselves the voices of communism.
Engels wrote up a document in question-and-answer format, but then decided that he did not like
it.
He turned his work over to Marx to re-do in some other format, and suggested the title,
The Communist Manifesto.
Slowly the document evolved, written mostly in the style of Marx, though reproducing some
ideas from Engels’ earlier draft.
It was published in February 1848 as The Manifesto of the Communist Party, with no authors listed,
as though it were the work of some major organization, rather than of a relative handful of radical
refugees.
The members of the Communist League were overwhelmingly intellectuals and professionals, with a very
few skilled craftsmen.
Their average age was under thirty.
It had the same kind of social composition that would in later years characterize the
so-called International Working Mens Association, and many other radical groups in which the
youthful offspring of privilege called themselves the proletariat.
When Engels was elected as delegate to the Communist League in 1847, in order to conceal
what was in fact an unopposed election, in Engels’ own words, “a working man was
proposed for appearances’ sake, but those who proposed him voted for me.”
Ironically, the year 1848 was a year of revolutions, but revolutions which differed from that described
in The Communist Manifesto.
The bourgeoisie and the proletariat were in revolutionary alliance against the autocratic
European governments on the continent.
During the upheavals that swept across Europe, Marx and Engels returned to Germany—Marx
to edit a newspaper, the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, in his familiar dictatorial style.
Engels worked at first as his chief assistant, until he had to flee an order for his arrest
for inciting to violence.
Engels made his way through France to Switzerland, enjoying along the way “the sweetest grapes
and loveliest of girls.”
This continued Engels’ long-lasting pattern of womanizing, which included the wife of
a fellow communist whose seduction he revealed to another communist “when in my cups.”
He was particularly fond of French women, reporting to Marx in 1846 “some delicious
encounters with grissettes” and later observing: If I had an income of 5,000 fr.
I would do nothing but work and amuse myself with women until I went to pieces.
If there were no Frenchwomen, life wouldn’t be worth living.
In 1849, Engels returned to Germany, where the revolution was being suppressed, and took
part in armed fighting against the government forces.
An expulsion order was issued against Marx, who had to liquidate the newspaper with ruinous
financial losses.
By the latter half of 1849 Marx and Engels had separately made their ways to England,
where they were destined to spend the rest of their lives.