Frederick Engels: A life devoted to revolution and scientific socialism

Communist Party USA

  Frederick Engels (1820–95) and his close friend Karl Marx (1818–83) dedicated their lives to prepare the working class for its revolutionary future. As Vladimir Lenin put it, the two “taught the working class to know itself and be conscious of itself, and they substituted science for dreams.” In Engels’ and Marx’s formative years, the newly forming industrial urban working class faced dramatic and unprecedented challenges — choosing sides in wars, impoverishment, long working days, and, not least, securing for itself an independent and conscious role in humanity’s affairs. Marx and Engels met that challenge and in the process made a world-historic advance in philosophy, political economy, and political strategy, birthing what is known today as Marxism, or the ideology of the revolutionary working class. When Marx and Engels developed their theory — maturely expressed in their Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848) — socialism was popularly seen as a…

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Frederick Engels: A life devoted to revolution and scientific socialism