Friedrich Engels

1820-1895 · German · Political Philosophy, Social Theory, Philosophy of History, Philosophical Anthropology

The state is not abolished. It withers away.

The son of a Rhineland textile manufacturer, Friedrich Engels spent nearly three decades running his father's Manchester mill — and walking the slums of Salford and Little Ireland, talking with workers, reading factory inspectors' reports. That double life produced "The Condition of the Working Class in England" (1845), a founding document of social investigation written at twenty-four, and what Terrell Carver called "the eloquence of facts."

Topics Friedrich Engels addresses

• historical materialism
• dialectical materialism
• the materialist conception of history
• scientific socialism
• base and superstructure
• the dialectics of nature
• the three laws of dialectics
• the negation of the negation
• determination in the last instance
• the withering away of the state
• utopian socialism
• the eloquence of facts
• primitive communism
• the origin of the family
• the patriarchal monogamous family
• the gens
• the production and reproduction of immediate life
• the part played by labour in the transition from ape to man
• the condition of the working class in England
• the housing question
• the peasant war in Germany
• the force theory
• world schematism
• basic forms of motion

Questions to put to Friedrich Engels

The Materialist Conception of History

• What do you mean by the materialist conception of history?
• How does the economic base determine the superstructure?
• What do you mean by determination 'in the last instance'?
• How did you and Marx develop this view out of German philosophy?
• Why do you call your approach scientific rather than utopian?

Dialectical Method and Natural Science

• What are the three laws of dialectics?
• How does dialectics operate in nature itself?
• What do you mean by the negation of the negation?
• Why extend the dialectical method beyond human society to natural processes?
• Did Marx agree with your dialectics of nature?

The Family, Property, and the State

• How did the patriarchal family arise historically?
• What's the connection between private property and women's oppression?
• Why do you say the state will wither away?
• What do you mean by primitive communism?
• How does the state derive from class antagonisms rather than social needs?

The Condition of the Working Class

• What did you find in Manchester in the 1840s?
• How did you gather evidence for your study of English workers?
• What do you mean by the eloquence of facts?
• Why can't the workers' condition be improved within capitalism?
• How did industrial capitalism destroy artisanal life?

Revolutionary Strategy and the Second International

• What changed about revolutionary strategy between 1848 and 1895?
• How should socialists use mass workers' parties and elections?
• What did you actually argue in the 1895 Introduction before Bernstein edited it?
• Why did you spend twelve years editing Marx's unfinished Capital volumes?
• What's the role of violence in the transition to socialism?

The Partnership with Marx

• What did you contribute that Marx didn't?
• Why do you call yourself second fiddle to Marx's first violin?
• How did your 1844 critique of political economy draw Marx's attention?
• Did you distort Marx's work in your editorial and interpretive framing?
• What was the division of labor between you and Marx?

Converse with Friedrich Engels on Simposeum. Replies are grounded in Friedrich Engels's own writing, cited to the page.