Friedrich Engels: A Bromance for the Ages
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Time to read 10 min
Questions Answered in This Blog Post
Who was Friedrich Engels, other than the guy who stanned Marx?
How was Engels able to be both a socialist and an industrialist?
What can Engels's observations of industrial Manchester teach us about the nature of poverty and social awareness?
The meme to start with:
An Anti-Capitalist Son of a Capitalist
Born in Prussia in what is now modern Germany, Friedrich Engels (1820-1895) was a revolutionary in the wrong family. His father owned an industrial firm that operated across the Continent and in England at the time. Like many up and coming industrialists, there was no way in hell he was going to let his son pursue silly things like philosophy and the arts.
But Friedrich had different ideas. Though he was removed from the Gymnasium (high school) where he studied as a teenager before he could graduate, this did not stop him from bucking against his father’s mandates. Sent across the country, he courted the Young Hegelians, living among the students of the university and finding discomfort in the conditions of those unlike his family.
In addition, Engels met a young Karl Marx, a serious man working as an editor for a local newspaper. The reception was chilly, as Marx was not a big fan of the Young Hegelians, and as a result, not much of a fan of Engels. They were not quite on the same page yet.
No worries, no worries! Engels’s father contrived a plan to knock all of this out of his son, hauling his inappropriate self off to Manchester, England. Friedrich Engels was given the task of taking charge of a factory there, to be a limb for his father in the UK. That did not go as planned.
Observing the disturbing poverty and working conditions among the laborers of the factory, and in the city in general, young Engels’s revolutionary thoughts gained even more fuel for their fire. He met a young Irish factory worker with whom he started a relationship. Mary Burns introduced him to the life of the working class, up close and personal.
Marx and Engels: The (Sometimes Toxic) Bromance for the Ages
In 1844, the bromance between Engels and Marx began in a Paris chess hall and cafe. The two spoke extensively on their ideas, agreeing on so many concepts that they decided to start collaborating. This would begin a 40-year collab that lasted longer than Engels’s two romantic relationships.
Engels gave a practical aspect to Marx’s philosophical notions on socialism and economy. He was able to offer statistics, current events, and insider knowledge of economics to inform Marx’s ideas of class struggle and dialectical materialism.
At the height of their collab, the two co-wrote The Communist Manifesto (1848), many of the ideas in outline coming from Engels, while the final product is mostly attributed to Marx. The two brought communism to a worldwide audience, uniting the various factions throughout Europe (at least, for a time).
Unfortunately, though, while Marx was undeniably brilliant, he was undeniably idiotic when it came to managing his own finances. When he and his wife Jenny moved house to London, they and their daughters found themselves in very unfortunate impoverished circumstances. Engels sighed to himself, put on his big boy pants, and reconciled with his family, with whom he had fallen out some years prior. Communism versus capitalism and all.
Marx occasionally took advantage of Engels’s payouts, hitting him up for cash on more than one occasion, even coldly returning a letter where Engels wrote to inform him of Mary Burns’s death, an event that was devastating for a man who lost his beloved. Marx replied the 19th century equivalent of: “So sorry. You gonna give me some cash, right?”
In so doing, he returned to his father’s firm for the sake of offering financial support to Marx, so that he and his family could do awesome things, such as eat food and have a roof over their heads. For nearly 20 years, Engels sucked it up and became a capitalist by day with a fancy house, and a communist by night, living with his partner in her humble lodgings. He lived a twisted existence so that he could continue to help his friend. That’s squad goals.
Known affectionately as the “General” by the Marx family, Engels and Marx kept up constant correspondence, Engels continuing to assist with Marx’s writing, and seen as a fatherly presence for the Marx daughters. When Marx died in 1883, Engels was there. By then, they lived within walking distance of each other. Engels spoke the eulogy at Marx’s original grave. Who else could do it better?
More Than a Fan; a Philosopher
While many might say (and reasonably so) that Engels stanned Marx hard and was perhaps the biggest Karl Marx fanboy around, it would be a dishonor to both Engels and Marx to simplify their friendship in that way. Engels, while a faithful friend to a man who was sometimes not emotionally available, was also a thinker and socialist in his own right.
Marx and Engels would not have met that fateful day if they had not been aligned to similar causes, and much of Engels’s economic work predates his relationship with Marx. After Marx passed, Engels kept his legacy alive, meticulously editing volumes II and III of Capital for publication. He authored many historical texts, including on military history, and was involved in actual revolutionary fighting, which led to his disinclinations toward revolution via violence.
Engels also formed Marx’s theories of alienation in economics, borrowing on the idea from Hegel, but giving it a practical spin. When you become the commodity as a worker, you lose some of your humanity.
A bromance for the ages: Friedrich Engels (left), with Karl Marx (right) and three of Marx's daughters, courtesy of Wikipedia.
Engels’s Manchester: The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845)
Written from his observations of the conditions of the working poor in Manchester, along with citations of articles and public documents, The Condition of the Working Class in England offers an unsettling account of daily life for factory workers in an industrialized capitalist society.
Engels, supervising at his father’s firm’s paper mill, got to see suffering in a peculiar way, from the side of an already radical foreign boss, and from the side of a surreptitious socialist under the guidance of his girlfriend. He was both an insider and an outsider in this factory town.
Presenting a scene out of your worst nightmares, Engels describes the mill town in excruciating detail, painting a picture disgusting enough to make you want to puke. He depicts a stroll about the town, the poverty obvious from the first step. As he explores, though, the humble dwellings out in the open look positively palatial next to the squalor and filth he encounters in secret parts of Manchester near the factory, with rude huts slapped between some slightly better houses, much of the inner and outer walking spaces encrusted with excrement and smelling of chemicals and dead animals.
Engels doesn’t shy away from the facts, and offers citations of the work of people who did more than just stroll by one day. Manchester was one of the biggest and most notorious industrial towns of its day. We could even, perhaps, trace its backbreaking work culture to the bleak miserableness of The Smiths in the 1980s. But in Victorian England, the working class was taking shape in Manchester and elsewhere, in an alarming way.
There are others who wrote on the industrial working class at the time. Writer Elizabeth Gaskell (1810-1865) wrote about the wretched conditions of cotton mill factories in North and South (1855), including depictions of the workers rebelling against industrialist John Thornton, a man who made his fortune off good investments and their backs. Charles Dickens (1812-1870) wrote countless tales of the lives of the poor in Victorian London. The critiques through novels, poetry, and social justice were many.
People who worked in the mills at the time constantly risked injuries, spent 10-hour days working at repetitive tasks, and came home to families that were malnourished and in bad health. To use Thomas Hobbes’s phrase, the lives of the working class became “poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”
The 19th century became a hotbed for socialism of many sorts, in direct reference to an industrialization that brought a new class of people into wealth but also exploited the heck out of a lot of others in order to do so.
In his stroll through Manchester, Engels reminds us, when people wonder if the filth and disgustingness are from decades or centuries of neglect:
“Everything which here arouses horror and indignation is of recent origin, belongs to the industrial epoch.” —Friedrich Engels, from The Condition of the Working Class (1844), in The Marx-Engels Reader, Second Edition
“Everything which here arouses horror”: Modern Squalor
We’ve spoken on Victorian squalor (and modern squalor) before in multiple posts. It’s important to have people, like Engels, who take note of such things and write about them or call them out. Engels was not working class by any means. His family were people who got rich off manufacturing. His observations in Manchester, though, helped solidify his stance as a socialist.
The sanitation (or lack thereof) in Manchester was something that, even before germ theory became popular, Engels and others recognized contributed to outbreaks of cholera, for instance. Today, we would say that not having clean water and sanitation is a human rights violation.
I write as I read about the collapse of the Cuban electricity infrastructure, as a result of a fuel blockade by the United States. I think about people trying to survive without power when it is needed for hospitals, schools, and daily tasks. I am reminded of the greed that created the hovels for the factory workers in Manchester.
In the United States, the water sources for Flint, Michigan and Jackson, Mississippi were found to be contaminated with toxins, leaving both places without clean water. It’s worth it to read up on these two very recent issues, but it is also worth it to say that the greed that drove the Victorian industrialists to create subhuman living conditions often does the same today.
We don’t have to see extremes to see the modern squalor of apartments leased to tenants at two or more times what they were charging five years ago, to see the curious phenomenon of Airbnbification, where people outside of the town purchase up properties that area residents can’t afford and “fix” them up in the cheapest manner, renting them out as glorified extended stays.
For over a year, I lived in Macon, GA, in one such dwelling. Having just earned my Masters degree, I had quit my job at a grocery store, using what was left of my student loans to pay for the housing I was sharing with three people. At the end of the day, they decided to move, giving me less than a month to find another place to live. I moved to Macon, where I flitted between several of these Airbnbs in neighborhoods that most would call “bad.”
I rarely slept, kept up all night by screaming dogs, gunshots, and the potential that someone might come to the door in the middle of the night, whether a bad-intentioned person or a member of the police. I spent the vast majority of my paycheck on the monthly rent for this “studio,” which I began giving to a person via Cashapp, when the Airbnb extended stay extended too long. I showered in a bathroom that housed more cockroaches that I’ve seen in my life.
Squalor became a part of my life. I’d always been poor, but now I was getting used to the power going out when I tried to use a space heater during the winter. Like the Pulp song, “Common People,” I “watched roaches climb the wall.” For over a month, I rationed my food, losing 10 pounds for lack of nutrients.
But what bothered me the most was that this house where I was living, which I shared with perhaps five other people, was nothing that people who lived in that neighborhood could afford. It was a neighborhood where a “blight house” existed beside this one. There was no one to take care of it. And there were many who had it worse, who camped out in tents, or just slept under unwashed blankets on the sidewalk.
It’s important to call these things out when you see them. Often, people don’t listen, especially when you look poor or strange, but you can’t lose your voice even if they don’t listen.
Engels shared an important insight: call it out when you see it. Don’t sit there and accept it, even if it is frightening or horrific.
Summary:
Friedrich Engels was a socialist and thinker in his own right, in addition to being Karl Marx's bro.
In looking out for Marx's family, Engels lived the double life of an industrialist and socialist to help support them.
Engels and Marx sustained a fruitful and intellectual friendship for 40 years.
Engels put a pragmatic spin to the higher minded socialist philosophy of Marx.
During his time in Manchester, Engels called out the poverty and exploitation of workers in that factory town.
C. M. Black
C. M. Black holds a B.A. in Philosophy from Wesleyan College and an M.A. in Technical and Professional Writing from Middle Georgia State University. A lifelong goth, she resides in Atlanta, Georgia, where she works as a professional writer. You can view more of her work on Substack, or follow her on Bluesky and Facebook.
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