Frederick Engels: The First Marxist?

 

Bruce McFarlane

As activists ponder how much we can draw from the first volume of Karl Marx’s Capital, a little more than 150 years after its publication, we should reflect also on how much we owe to Marx’s comrade of forty years, Frederick Engels (1820–95). Without his mental, moral, and material support, Marx might well never have completed even that volume, which Engels revised for its third (1883) and fourth (1890) German editions. He also had to edit the second and third volumes, which Marx had been too ill to complete, guiding them to publication in 1885 and 1894. In the meantime, he oversaw an English translation of the first volume (1886–87

From the respectful attention that Engels gave to Marx’s discoveries, no less than from his own extensions of them in tune with fresh actualities, we learn how to better interpret both evidence and concepts for guiding change toward the communist ideals that Engels had absorbed before meeting Marx in 1844.74 Furthermore, the roles that Engels filled as organiser, economist, and polemicist in the development of Western labor movements illumine how we can best honor his memory and his contributions to Capital. In the words of one biographer, Engels “wanted no monument other than the coming socialist revolution.”

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