Friedrich Engels, the comrade in arms of Karl Marx, was born on November 28, 1820, in Barmen, Germany. His father was a textile manufacturer, a reactionary and religious man. He forced young Engels into a commercial apprenticeship, first in his own company, then in another. Despite his reluctance, Engels mastered this profession.
In 1841-2, Engels did voluntary military service in Berlin where he could attend lectures at the university. There he made contact with liberal, anarchist and left-Hegelian circles, and studied military science. In 1842, he began work in his father’s cotton mill in Manchester, England. Engels would go after work into the working-class neighborhoods where he saw the misery of the proletariat. He got to know English labor leaders and married an Irish worker, Mary Burns.
Workers of Manchester made Engels a communist
Engels read everything that had been written about the situation of the English working class and carefully studied available official documents. Engels came to understand that it is their dire economic situation that drives workers to fight for their liberation. However, liberation from capitalism will only happen if the working class consciously sets it as its goal. At the age of 25, Engels published The Condition of the Working Class in England. As early as 1844, he had published Outline of a Critique of Political Economy in Franco-German Yearbooks where Marx also worked. Contact with Engels was undoubtedly a factor in Marx's decision to study political economy, the science in which his works have produced a veritable revolution (Lenin).
In 1848, Marx and Engels published the world-famous Manifesto of the Communist Party. In that year, as democratic revolutions broke out in Europe, both worked on the revolutionary newspaper, Neue Rheinische Zeitung. The Prussian state persecuted the paper and its editors, and expelled Marx from Germany.
In May 1849, Engels fought on the barricades in his homeland during an uprising. In June, he fought in another uprising. After Prussian troops crushed it, he fled to Switzerland. In 1850, Engels returned to Manchester, where he worked again in the Ermen & Engels spinning mill. Meanwhile he carried out revolutionary organizing, and supported Marx financially. Both men joined the International Workers Association, the First International, which helped workers' parties, newspapers and organizations worldwide.
During this period Marx began systematic work on the materialist criticism of bourgeois political economy, culminating in the first volume of Capital in 1867. Could Marx have done this without the constant professional and scientific advice and material support from Engels? It is doubtful. After Marx's death in 1883, Engels published two more volumes of Capital and was a leader of the international socialist and communist labor movement.
Engels fought for materialism
Marx and Engels rejected the preconceived idealist view that it is the development of the mind that explains the development of nature but that, on the contrary, the ideas of the 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 (Lenin, Frederick Engels 1895).
Lenin fought for Engels’ elaboration of this revolutionary-materialistic point of view in his great philosophical work Materialism and Empirio-Criticism. While Marx at that time worked his way further into the depths of the critique of political economy, Engels … dealt with general scientific problems and with diverse phenomena of the past and present in the spirit of the materialist conception of history and Marx's economic theory in works such as Anti-Dühring (analyzing highly important problems in the domain of philosophy, natural science and the social sciences), The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, The Peasant War in Germany, and other works
There are many stories about the generous, humorous, witty host, who was a disinterested helper to countless comrades. Engels put all his strength and inheritance at the disposal of the working class. “The European proletariat may say that its science was created by two scholars and fighters whose relationship to each other surpasses the most moving stories of the ancients about human friendship. Engels always … placed himself after Marx. … His love for the living Marx and his reverence for the memory of the dead Marx were boundless (Lenin “Fredrick Engels”).
Engels has no grave. “In accordance with Engels’s instructions his body was cremated and his ashes scattered in the sea …” (T. Carver, The Life and Thought of Fredrich Engels)