14 December 2006: who was Frederick Engels?

The world is changing, faster than ever before. Each year more people flee the countryside to live in the towns. Each year the cities grow larger, dirtier, more polluted and worse at sustaining life. Roads break with the weight of their traffic. Mountains of waste pile ever higher. Whole industries rise and fall in just a few years.   

Karl Marx taught socialists to see history as a process of different societies, one following the other as production changed and class relationships followed. The first class societies were slave societies, such as ancient Egypt or Rome. Then there were the feudal societies, where most people were tied to the land, and the landlords could trade them, almost like slaves. Marx described our own societies as capitalist societies, divided into two classes: the capitalists who own or manage, and then the workers, living in the towns or on the land.

Karl Marx's friend and collaborator Frederick Engels made two great contributions to Marxism. The first came early in his life. At the age of 24, the young man's family sent him to England, where they hoped he would learn study. Great Britain was then the workshop of the world. Engels arrived in Manchester.

The towns of Northern England were very different from what Engels had expected. He saw thousand living in squalor, with many families together in just single rooms. He saw people fighting each other to find work. In the richest country in the world, Engels was astonished to find that there were beggars starving to death.

Engels was more impressed when he learned see how well workers were organising to resist capitalism. He described the armed uprising attempted by Manchester workers in 1842. He witnessed trade unions and strikes. Above all else, Engels encountered Chartism: the campaign of the British workers for the vote.

When workers campaigned for the franchise, they did so because they wanted to see working-class people elected to parliament, and because they wanted laws that would reflect workers' interests: such as health care, protection for the sick and the elderly, a minimum wage. There were three great petitions sent to London signed by workers demanding the right to vote. Each was signed by more that a million people. This was the greatest working-class movement the world had then seen.

Leaving Manchester, Engels returned to Germany. He had a circle of friends, which also included the young Karl Marx. He described to his friends everything he had seen. His book, The Conditions of the Working Class in England in 1844, helped to persuade Marx that the working class really could change the world.

For the next forty years, Frederick Engels spent much of his time working for his family business. He lived in Manchester, while Marx lived in London. He sacrificed his own ambitions to support his friend. He sent money back to Marx, to enable his friend to write. When popular uprisings happened, Engels played his full part.

In 1847, Engels wrote the first draft of The Communist Manifesto, his and Marx's best-known work. Engels structured his contribution as a series of questions. 'What is Communism?' he asked, 'It is the doctrine of the conditions of the liberation of the working class.'

In the German revolution of 1848, Engels commanded a revolutionary army fighting the Prussians who stood for a return to the old order. When the revolt was defeated, he escaped and joined Marx in exile. In old age, friends would recall Engel's military exploits in the movement. They called him 'the General' as a result.

Engels' second great contribution came later, and especially after Marx's death in 1883. Marx's method had always been to start always from how people lived, their social conditions. In his last years, Engels tried to develop Marx's ideas. He tried to take this method and show that it could be used to explain questions that Marx himself had never considered: Engels wanted to show how people lived before recorded history. He also took an interest in the relationship between politics, philosophy and science.

One of Engels' best-known books is The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. Here, Engels studied the societies of North America and Africa, in which people lived by hunting and gathering. He showed that even before the slave societies, the first human communities lived in what he called 'primitive communism'. People had lived for many hundreds of thousands of years without classes, without rulers, without police. Engels also showed that the oppression of women was a recent phenomenon.

Some writers have criticised Engels. They think that Marx was a more sophisticated writer. They think that when Engels clarified Marx's ideas he made them too simple. But Engels helped produce a popular Marxism, the socialism that in the last years of the nineteenth century spread through Germany, Belgium, Italy, France and Russia: paving a way for the great Socialist and Communist parties of the last hundred years.

Engels wrote that history has a pattern. 'Every change in the social order', he wrote, 'every revolution in property relations, is the necessary consequence of the creation of new forces of production which no longer fit into the old property relations.

We can see something similar at work in our own day. Such new forces of production as computers and the internet make state censorship almost impossible. They undermine the basis of any political dictatorship. They encourage people to think beyond not just this or that regime but even beyond capitalism itself. The genius of Frederick Engels was to show us that history is always moving, and in patterns that are easy to discern.