Aged only 19, he wrote of the plight of factory workers “in low rooms where people breathe in more coal fumes and dust than oxygen”, and lamented the creation of “totally demoralised people, with no fixed abode or definite employment”.įriedrich Engels, 1879. But from an early age Engels found the human costs of his family’s prosperity hard to bear. His was a loving childhood of plentiful siblings, family wealth and communal cohesion in what was termed “the German Manchester”. Not only was he instrumental in shaping 20th-century Marxism, but his own vision of socialism feels more relevant to our contemporary concerns than does the pure political economy of Karl Marx.īorn on 28 November 1820 in Barmen, along the Wupper Valley, in Prussia, Engels grew up as the scion of a strictly Calvinist, capitalist, and suffocatingly bourgeois family of textile merchants. This month marks the 200th anniversary of the birth of the Rhinelander turned reluctant Mancunian turned old Londoner.Īlways happy to play “second fiddle to so splendid a first violin” as Karl Marx (“How can anyone be envious of genius it’s something so very special that we, who have not got it, know it to be unattainable right from the start?”), he deserves so much more than just being cast as history’s supporting man.
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