It was 5 August 1895, at 10:30 pm, when the heart of Friedrich Engels, the man who, alongside Karl Marx, co-formed the revolutionary worldview of the working class, stopped beating. He was 75 years old.
A leading figure of the world's proletariat and a pioneer of the international communist movement, Engels contributed immensely to the foundation of scientific communism, the theory that illuminated that path for the liberation of the working class from the shackles of capitalist oppression and exploitation.
From the beginning of his political action to the end of his life, Engels – the son of a wealthy textile manufacturer who became a renegade of his own class - was a staunch fighter of the proletarian revolution and an unwavering enemy of opportunism. After his friend Karl Marx (who died in 1883), Engels was the finest scholar and teacher of the modern proletariat in the whole civilised world, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin wrote.
Lenin had emphasized that Marxism could not be understood completely, without taking into account the contribution and all the works of Friedrich Engels. Nonetheless, he himself was too humble to accept such a compliment. In a footnote of his work “Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy”, he writes:
“Here I may be permitted to make a personal explanation. Lately repeated reference has been made to my share in this theory, and so I can hardly avoid saying a few words here to settle this point. I cannot deny that both before and during my 40 years’ collaboration with Marx I had a certain independent share in laying the foundation of the theory, and more particularly in its elaboration. But the greater part of its leading basic principles, especially in the realm of economics and history, and, above all, their final trenchant formulation, belong to Marx. What I contributed — at any rate with the exception of my work in a few special fields — Marx could very well have done without me. What Marx accomplished I would not have achieved. Marx stood higher, saw further, and took a wider and quicker view than all the rest of us. Marx was a genius; we others were at best talented. Without him the theory would not be by far what it is today. If therefore rightly bears his name.”
After Marx’s death, Engels devoted all his energy to what he saw as a binding obligation, the continuation and completion of his friend’s manuscripts and intellectual legacy, while he managed to advance his own studies in various fields and also worked intensively in support of the growing international labour and socialist movement.
Alongside Karl Marx, the name of Friedrich Engels will endure through the ages, and so also will his work.
* Nikos Mottas is the Editor-in-Chief of In Defense of Communism.
