Today, 5 August 2020, marks 125 years since the death of Friedrich Engels (28 November 1820 – 5 August 1895). To mark this anniversary, we republish a book review of Engels – A Revolutionary Life, by John Green (Artery Publications, London 2008) which was first published in Socialism Today (monthly magazine of the Socialist Party – CWI England & Wales) in 2008, in which Peter Taaffe looks at the life of “one of the greatest figures in human history”. This is followed by an article by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (published in Autumn 1895) following Engels’ death.
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John Green, the author of this impressive book (Engels – A revolutionary Life), is to be commended for bringing to life for modern readers one of the greatest figures in human history, Friedrich Engels. Gustav Mayer’s book on the same subject, written in the 1930s, which the author freely admits he draws on, is excellent on the life and works of Engels. However, the great merit of this book is that it ‘fills in the gaps’ which the English edition of Mayer did not fully cover, particularly on the personality of Engels, his evolution and his relationship with Marx.
The ideas of the Socialist Party (CWI in England & Wales), based on scientific socialism, are identified ‘Marxist’ but Engels deserves to be bracketed with the great ‘philosopher of the millennium’, Karl Marx himself. This is because he not only sustained Marx by sacrificing his own energies to finance Marx’s work but also because of the great contribution he made to their joint ideas on historical materialism, philosophy, economics and many other fields, which laid the foundations for the modern struggle for socialism.
Indeed, in some respects, Engels anticipated Marx on the role of the working class and socialism. This was gained through his experience in England in particular, in the early 1840s, of the Chartist movement – the first independent movement of the working class historically. He was also at one with Marx in analysing the conditions in the factories and in the ideas of economics and philosophy, which are the cornerstones of Marxism. ‘The Conditions of the Working Class in 1844’ is a marvellously written book, which can help to illuminate even the problems of today’s labour movement. It compliments Marx’s chapters on the working day in the first volume of Capital. Astonishingly, it was written by a 24-year old, drawn from his experiences in Manchester- where Engels was later forced to work in his father’s factory – and invokes the picture of China today. The author points out that in the early 19th century, “Life expectancy in Manchester is around 26 years, the lowest figure since the years of the plague.”
Green brings to life how Marx and Engels, almost at the same time, evolved from acceptance of the idealist philosophy of their great teacher Hegel to the ideas of dialectical materialism. Indeed, Marx and Engels rescued ‘dialectics’ -the method of thought which seeks to understand the all-sided character of phenomena, first enunciated by the ancients, the Greeks – by refuting Hegel’s idealism. They “turned Hegel upside down” and put him “from standing on his head firmly back on his feet”.
Ideas, consciousness, are expressions of material forces, which are the driving impulse of history whereas Hegel viewed the evolution of nature, humankind and social relations as based on the development of ideas. Marx and Engels’ ideas, either consciously or unconsciously, are accepted today by most conscientious analysts.
The economy is the ultimate determinant of the ‘political superstructure’, the state, politics, etc, argued Marx and Engels. This idea, expressed crudely Bill Clinton before he was elected in 1992, “It’s the economy, stupid”, is also almost taken for granted today. This does not mean that Marx and Engels had a crude determinist position. On the contrary, they analysed how the state – part of the political superstructure – both had an effect on and is, in turn, affected by the development of economic processes.
Friedrich Engels emerges from this book as one of the greatest but also one of the most human figures in the socialist and the genuine communist movement. In fact, the mere outlining of Engels’ approach to life, as well as politics, creates in the reader a feeling of great admiration, particularly for socialists and Marxists today who share Engels’ vision for the future. He broke from his bourgeois background to place himself on the standpoint of the working class in his ideas but also sacrificed, in order to give the necessary finance to allow Marx to pursue his colossal labour and lay the foundations – particularly through the volumes of Capital – upon which scientific socialism rests today.
The author compares him to Che Guevara and there are some undoubted and striking similarities. Both were men of action, broke from their privileged backgrounds to place themselves at the disposal of the working class and the poor. They were true, both to themselves and also to economic and political processes they accepted, and were courageous.
But there were also big differences in their personalities and particularly the history of these two great figures. Che Guevara, at the time of his murder, had not freed himself completely from the caricature of Marxism purveyed by the then world ‘communist’, in reality Stalinist, movement. He was, however, evolving through his own experiences towards a critique of the ideas of Stalinism and quasi-Stalinism.
Engels, on the other hand, if he had died at the same age as Che Guevara, would still be considered a great theoretician, as well as a fighter for the liberation of the working class. Friedrich Engels had one thing in common with Che Guevara: he participated in big battles in the 1848 revolution, commanding troops, and subsequently earning the nickname of ‘the general’ from Marx, his family and his comrades.
Admirable character
On a personal level also, Friedrich Engels was an admirable character. Not for him a forced marriage or relationships with women from his own privileged background. He defied the capitalist conventions of the time and his family to live first of all with Mary Burns, who had a profound effect on him in relation to the national struggle in Ireland at the time. Her sunny character and temperament gave consolation and joy to Engels as he slaved away in the horrendous conditions in Manchester in order to sustain Marx and his intellectual labours.
So attached was he to Mary that when she died, Marx displayed a certain detachment because of money troubles and this led to a temporary cooling in their relationship, which, however, did not last long. Engels showed concern and acted for people in difficulties in the émigré circles, to members of Mary Burns’ family and many others. After Mary Burns died, the gap in his life was filled after some delay by her sister Lizzie, who also was a ferocious battler for Irish national liberation.
Some of the most interesting parts of this book are of Marx and Engels’ collaboration in the division of labour in the establishment of the International Workingmen’s Association (IWA, the “First International” – 1864-1876) and the culmination of the work of this body, in a sense, in the great Paris Commune of 1871. Because of his involvement in ‘business’, Engels did not take an official position in the IWA’s work because this would have provided ammunition for its enemies that a ‘capitalist’ was involved in a body directed against capitalism itself. But his influence and work was far-reaching and telling. This earned him the bitter opposition of the state, particularly the German state of Bismarck, who deployed a small army of spies to check on and, if possible, to spoil the work of both Marx and Engels for the international workers’ movement.
Engels and Marx, as this book demonstrates, argued for decades for the political independence of the working class from the capitalists. This was the case even when they advocated tactical and ‘critical’ support for specific actions of the rising capitalists, for instance in the 1848 revolution. They fought for an independent party of the working class – in the case of Britain for almost 50 years. This is the same task which the Socialist Party, socialists, trade unionists and militant workers have before them today with the collapse of New Labour into an openly capitalist party. The difference is that the timescale will be much shorter for the emergence of such a formation, as the examples of other countries’ first steps show: the development of The Left party in Germany, the coalition around SYRIZA in Greece, etc.
Insisting upon the working class as the main agent of socialist change, Marx and Engels came into collision in the IWA, as is well known, with the anarchists led by Bakunin. The author is mistaken when he argues that Marx and Engels “seriously underestimated the role of the socially less-developed countries”. He accredits the support for Bakunin and the anarchists in countries like Spain and Italy at the time to the “too critical” attitude of Marx and Engels and an “over-concentration on economics”. But the real reason why the anarchists found an echo in these countries was the character of the economy then, which were relatively undeveloped, with the prevalence of small-scale industry and, therefore, the lack of a large working class united by big industry.
This was the social soil upon which anarchism could develop. Even in the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s, the prevalence of small-scale firms and, therefore, the scattered nature of the working class, helped account for the support for the anarchists in Catalonia and other areas. The onset of heavy industry helped to relegate these ideas to the margins of the workers’ movement.
German Social democracy
Engels’ work and the careful nurturing of an independent working-class party in Germany, the Social-Democratic Party, saw it emerge as the “strongest mass socialist party in the world”. He pointed out that even the anti-socialist laws, introduced in October 1878 by Bismarck, which effectively banned the party until 1891, ultimately strengthened the party: “Herr Bismarck, who has worked for us for the last seven years as if we are paying him for it, now seems incapable of moderating himself in his efforts to accelerate the emergence of socialism.” The author comments: “He is right: in the Reichstag in 1871 there were only two representatives of the party, based on a vote of 3.2%, by 1890, this will rise to 35, with 19.9% of the vote, but by 1912 only 17 years after Engels’ death, the party win 110 seats (out of a total of around 400) with 34.8% of the vote.”
Yet without Engels’ colossal influence, this mighty party, after he died, because the leadership was incapable of consistently following his and Marx’s method, was unprepared for the huge social convulsions of war and its aftermath. Consequently, the working class paid a huge price, including ultimately the destruction of the workers’ organisations after Hitler came to power in 1933.
Engels, as his history showed, was prepared for all kinds of changes in the situation confronting the workers’ movement. The author is wrong when he repeats some of the legends about Engels’ introduction to ‘Class Struggles in France’ where he appears to be arguing against ‘barricades’ – that is the arming of the working class and street fighting – because of the new situation confronting the workers’ movement. This was interpreted by later renegades from Marxism, such as Kautsky, in a centrist and reformist fashion, of partial and piecemeal reforms alone as the method to achieve the goals of the workers’ movement. On the contrary, as Trotsky and Lenin pointed out, Engels was dealing with one specific historical phase. Even his words are qualified, as Engels emphasised that the ‘barricades’ – the organised resistance of the working class to the onslaught of armed capitalism ready to destroy democratic rights – would be required at certain stages.
The author is also wrong in presenting the Mensheviks (minority) in the Russian Revolution as standing on Engels’ ideas in the theory of ‘stages’ in a revolution; first ‘democracy’, then ‘socialism’ after some defined interval in the future. The Bolsheviks are accordingly criticised for seeming to conflict with Marx’s alleged ideas as to where a revolution would first occur. He writes: “We can’t let them [Marx and Engels] off the hook entirely. It was, after all their ideas that laid the basis and made possible the building of communism as a force and led to the subsequent revolutions.”
On the contrary, the regimes that subsequently developed after the isolation of the Russian Revolution – Stalinism, a one-party totalitarian regime – had nothing in common with Marx and Engels’ ideas. The Bolsheviks were correct to begin the revolution in Russia – which was the weakest link in the chain of world capitalism, as Lenin put it – but they envisaged this as the overture to a world revolution. Only a successful revolution in an advanced industrial country could have been the salvation of the Russian Revolution. In isolation, Russia was doomed either to return to capitalism or see a deformed workers’ state emerge, although the Bolsheviks never imagined that the monstrosity of Stalinism would arise. Marx and Engels could not foresee – nor could anybody – at the time they were formulating their ideas in the nineteenth century of how subsequent events could work out in all countries.
What is valuable in this book is not the latter chapters but those which show the evolution of the ideas which provide the bedrock of Marxism, the tools with which to carve out a new socialist future for humankind. Friedrich Engels, a towering historical figure, should be saluted in his own right for great works such as ‘Socialism: Utopian and Scientific’, ‘Anti-Dühring’, ‘The Peasant War in Germany’, ‘The Housing Question’ and many, many other contributions to socialist and Marxist thought. Marx was undoubtedly the greater – fully recognised by Engels – in laying the foundations for ideas that will lead to a new socialist society in the future. But in his labours he was joined by Friedrich Engels, a great figure to inspire and educate the new layers of socialist fighters who are emerging.
‘Frederick Engels’
What a torch of reason ceased to burn,
What a heart has ceased to beat!
By Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (Autumn 1895)
On August 5 (new style), 1895, Frederick Engels died in London. 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. From the time that fate brought Karl Marx and Frederick Engels together, the two friends devoted their life’s work to a common cause. And so to understand what Frederick Engels has done for the proletariat, one must have a clear idea of the significance of Marx’s teaching and work for the development of the contemporary working-class movement. Marx and Engels were the first to show that the working class and its demands are a necessary outcome of the present economic system, which together with the bourgeoisie inevitably creates and organises the proletariat. They showed that it is not the well-meaning efforts of noble-minded individuals, but the class struggle of the organised proletariat that will deliver humanity from the evils which now oppress it. In their scientific works, Marx and Engels were the first to explain that socialism is not the invention of dreamers, but the final aim and necessary result of the development of the productive forces in modern society. All recorded history hitherto has been a history of class struggle, of the succession of the rule and victory of certain social classes over others. And this will continue until the foundations of class struggle and of class domination – private property and anarchic social production – disappear. The interests of the proletariat demand the destruction of these foundations, and therefore the conscious class struggle of the organised workers must be directed against them. And every class struggle is a political struggle.
These views of Marx and Engels have now been adopted by all proletarians who are fighting for their emancipation. But when in the forties the two friends took part in the socialist literature and the social movements of their time, they were absolutely novel. There were then many people, talented and without talent, honest and dishonest, who, absorbed in the struggle for political freedom, in the struggle against the despotism of kings, police and priests, failed to observe the antagonism between the interests of the bourgeoisie and those of the proletariat. These people would not entertain the idea of the workers acting as an independent social force. On the other hand, there were many dreamers, some of them geniuses, who thought that it was only necessary to convince the rulers and the governing classes of the injustice of the contemporary social order, and it would then be easy to establish peace and general well-being on earth. They dreamt of a socialism without struggle. Lastly, nearly all the socialists of that time and the friends of the working class generally regarded the proletariat only as an ulcer, and observed with horror how it grew with the growth of industry. They all, therefore, sought for a means to stop the development of industry and of the proletariat, to stop the “wheel of history.” Marx and Engels did not share the general fear of the development of the proletariat; on the contrary, they placed all their hopes on its continued growth. The more proletarians there are, the greater is their strength as a revolutionary class, and the nearer and more possible does socialism become. The services rendered by Marx and Engels to the working class may be expressed in a few words thus: they taught the working class to know itself and be conscious of itself, and they substituted science for dreams.
That is why the name and life of Engels should be known to every worker. That is why in this collection of articles, the aim of which, as of all our publications, is to awaken class-consciousness in the Russian workers, we must give a sketch of the life and work of Frederick Engels, one of the two great teachers of the modern proletariat.
Engels was born in 1820 in Barmen, in the Rhine Province of the kingdom of Prussia. His father was a manufacturer. In 1838 Engels, without having completed his high-school studies, was forced by family circumstances to enter a commercial house in Bremen as a clerk. Commercial affairs did not prevent Engels from pursuing his scientific and political education. He had come to hate autocracy and the tyranny of bureaucrats while still at high school. The study of philosophy led him further. At that time Hegel’s teaching dominated German philosophy, and Engels became his follower. Although Hegel himself was an admirer of the autocratic Prussian state, in whose service he was as a professor at Berlin University, Hegel’s teachings were revolutionary. Hegel’s faith in human reason and its rights, and the fundamental thesis of Hegelian philosophy that the universe is undergoing a constant process of change and development, led some of the disciples of the Berlin philosopher – those who refused to accept the existing situation – to the idea that the struggle against this situation, the struggle against existing wrong and prevalent evil, is also rooted in the universal law of eternal development. If all things develop, if institutions of one kind give place to others, why should the autocracy of the Prussian king or of the Russian tsar, the enrichment of an insignificant minority at the expense of the vast majority, or the domination of the bourgeoisie over the people, continue for ever? Hegel’s philosophy spoke of the development of the mind and of ideas; it was idealistic. From the development of the mind it deduced the development of nature, of man, and of human, social relations. While retaining Hegel’s idea of the eternal process of development,[1] Marx and Engels rejected the preconceived idealist view; turning to life, they saw that it is not the development of mind that explains the development of nature but that, on the contrary, the explanation of mind must be derived from nature, from matter…. Unlike Hegel and the other Hegelians, Marx and Engels were materialists. Regarding the world and humanity materialistically, they perceived that just as material causes underlie all natural phenomena, so the development of human society is conditioned by the development of material forces, the productive forces. On the development of the productive forces depend the relations into which men enter with one another in the production of the things required for the satisfaction of human needs. And in these relations lies the explanation of all the phenomena of social life, human aspirations, ideas and laws. The development of the productive forces creates social relations based upon private property, but now we see that this same development of the productive forces deprives the majority of their property and concentrates it in the hands of an insignificant minority. It abolishes property, the basis of the modern social order, it itself strives towards the very aim which the socialists have set themselves. All the socialists have to do is to realise which social force, owing to its position in modern society, is interested in bringing socialism about, and to impart to this force the consciousness of its interests and of its historical task. This force is the proletariat. Engels got to know the proletariat in England, in the centre of English industry, Manchester, where he settled in 1842, entering the service of a commercial firm of which his father was a shareholder. Here Engels not only sat in the factory office but wandered about the slums in which the workers were cooped up, and saw their poverty and misery with his own eyes. But he did not confine himself to personal observations. He read all that had been revealed before him about the condition of the British working class and carefully studied all the official documents he could lay his hands on. The fruit of these studies and observations was the book which appeared in 1845: The Condition of the Working Class in England. We have already mentioned what was the chief service rendered by Engels in writing The Condition of the Working Class in England. Even before Engels, many people had described the sufferings of the proletariat and had pointed to the necessity of helping it. Engels was the first to say that the proletariat is not only a suffering class; that it is, in fact, the disgraceful economic condition of the proletariat that drives it irresistibly forward and compels it to fight for its ultimate emancipation. And the fighting proletariat will help itself. The political movement of the working class will inevitably lead the workers to realise that their only salvation lies in socialism. On the other hand, socialism will become a force only when it becomes the aim of the political struggle of the working class. Such are the main ideas of Engels’ book on the condition of the working class in England, ideas which have now been adopted by all thinking and fighting proletarians, but which at that time were entirely new. These ideas were set out in a book written in absorbing style and filled with most authentic and shocking pictures of the misery of the English proletariat. The book was a terrible indictment of capitalism and the bourgeoisie and created a profound impression. Engels’ book began to be quoted everywhere as presenting the best picture of the condition of the modern proletariat. And, in fact, neither before 1845 nor after has there appeared so striking and truthful a picture of the misery of the working class.
It was not until he came to England that Engels became a socialist. In Manchester he established contacts with people active in the English labour movement at the time and began to write for English socialist publications. In 1844, while on his way back to Germany, he became acquainted in Paris with Marx, with whom he had already started to correspond. In Paris, under the influence of the French socialists and French life, Marx had also become a socialist. Here the friends jointly wrote a book entitled The Holy Family, or Critique of Critical Critique. This book, which appeared a year before The Condition of the Working Class in England, and the greater part of which was written by Marx, contains the foundations of revolutionary materialist socialism, the main ideas of which we have expounded above. “The holy family” is a facetious nickname for the Bauer brothers, the philosophers, and their followers. These gentlemen preached a criticism which stood above all reality, above parties and politics, which rejected all practical activity, and which only “critically” contemplated the surrounding world and the events going on within it. These gentlemen, the Bauers, looked down on the proletariat as an uncritical mass. Marx and Engels vigorously opposed this absurd and harmful tendency. In the name of a real, human person – the worker, trampled down by the ruling classes and the state – they demanded, not contemplation, but a struggle for a better order of society. They, of course, regarded the proletariat as the force that is capable of waging this struggle and that is interested in it. Even before the appearance of The Holy Family, Engels had published in Marx’s and Ruge’s Deutsch-Franz\”osische Jahrb\”ucher[5] his “Critical Essays on Political Economy,”[6] in which he examined the principal phenomena of the contemporary economic order from a socialist standpoint, regarding them as necessary consequences of the rule of private property. Contact with Engels was undoubtedly a factor in Marx’s decision to study political economy, the science in which his works have produced a veritable revolution.
From 1845 to 1847 Engels lived in Brussels and Paris, combining scientific work with practical activities among the German workers in Brussels and Paris. Here Marx and Engels established contact with the secret German Communist League,[7] which commissioned them to expound the main principles of the socialism they had worked out. Thus arose the famous Manifesto of the Communist Party of Marx and Engels, published in 1848. This little booklet is worth whole volumes: to this day its spirit inspires and guides the entire organised and fighting proletariat of the civilised world.
The revolution of 1848, which broke out first in France and then spread to other West-European countries, brought Marx and Engels back to their native country. Here, in Rhenish Prussia, they took charge of the democratic Neue Rheinische Zeitung[8] published in Cologne. The two friends were the heart and soul of all revolutionary-democratic aspirations in Rhenish Prussia. They fought to the last ditch in defence of freedom and of the interests of the people against the forces of reaction. The latter, as we know, gained the upper hand. The Neue Rheinische Zeitung was suppressed. Marx, who during his exile had lost his Prussian citizenship, was deported; Engels took part in the armed popular uprising, fought for liberty in three battles, and after the defeat of the rebels fled, via Switzerland, to London.
Marx also settled in London. Engels soon became a clerk again, and then a shareholder, in the Manchester commercial firm in which he had worked in the forties. Until 1870 he lived in Manchester, while Marx lived in London, but this did not prevent their maintaining a most lively interchange of ideas: they corresponded almost daily. In this correspondence the two friends exchanged views and discoveries and continued to collaborate in working out scientific socialism. In 1870 Engels moved to London, and their joint intellectual life, of the most strenuous nature, continued until 1883, when Marx died. Its fruit was, on Marx’s side, Capital, the greatest work on political economy of our age, and on Engels’ side, a number of works both large and small. Marx worked on the analysis of the complex phenomena of capitalist economy. Engels, in simply written works, often of a polemical character, dealt with more general scientific problems and with diverse phenomena of the past and present in the spirit of the materialist conception of history and Marx’s economic theory. Of Engels’ works we shall mention: the polemical work against D\”uhring (analysing highly important problems in the domain of philosophy, natural science and the social sciences),[2] The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (translated into Russian, published in St. Petersburg, 3rd ea., 1895),[9] Ludwig Feuerbach (Russian translation and notes by G. Plekhanov, Geneva, 1892),[10] an article on the foreign policy of the Russian Government (translated into Russian in the Geneva Social-Demokrat, Nos. 1 and 2),[11] splendid articles on the housing question,[12] and finally, two small but very valuable articles on Russia’s economic development (Frederick Engels on Russia, translated into Russian by Zasulich, Geneva, 1894).[13] Marx died before he could put the final touches to his vast work on capital. The draft, however, was already finished, and after the death of his friend, Engels undertook the onerous task of preparing and publishing the second and the third volumes of Capital. He published Volume II in 1885 and Volume III in 1894 (his death prevented the preparation of Volume IV).[14] These two volumes entailed a vast amount of labour. Adler, the Austrian Social-Democrat, has rightly remarked that by publishing volumes II and III of Capital Engels erected a majestic monument to the genius who had been his friend, a monument on which, without intending it, he indelibly carved his own name. Indeed these two volumes of Capital are the work of two men: Marx and Engels. Old legends contain various moving instances of friendship. The European proletariat may say that its science was created by two scholars and fighters, whose relationship to each other surpasses the most moving stories of the ancients about human friendship. Engels always – and, on the whole, quite justly – placed himself after Marx. “In Marx’s lifetime,” he wrote to an old friend, “I played second fiddle.”[15] His love for the living Marx, and his reverence for the memory of the dead Marx were boundless. This stern fighter and austere thinker possessed a deeply loving soul.
After the movement of 1848-49, Marx and Engels in exile did not confine themselves to scientific research. In 1864 Marx founded the International Working Men’s Association,[16] and led this society for a whole decade. Engels also took an active part in its affairs. The work of the International Association, which, in accordance with Marx’s idea, united proletarians of all countries, was of tremendous significance in the development of the working-class movement. But even with the closing down of the International Association in the seventies, the unifying role of Marx and Engels did not cease. On the contrary, it may be said that their importance as the spiritual leaders of the working-class movement grew continuously, because the movement itself grew uninterruptedly. After the death of Marx, Engels continued alone as the counsellor and leader of the European socialists. His advice and directions were sought for equally by the German socialists, whose strength, despite government persecution, grew rapidly and steadily, and by representatives of backward countries, such as the Spaniards, Rumanians and Russians, who were obliged to ponder and weigh their first steps. They all drew on the rich store of knowledge and experience of Engels in his old age.
Marx and Engels, who both knew Russian and read Russian books, took a lively interest in the country, followed the Russian revolutionary movement with sympathy and maintained contact with Russian revolutionaries. They both became socialists after being democrats, and the democratic feeling of hatred for political despotism was exceedingly strong in them. This direct political feeling, combined with a profound theoretical understanding of the connection between political despotism and economic oppression, and also their rich experience of life, made Marx and Engels uncommonly responsive politically. That is why the heroic struggle of the handful of Russian revolutionaries against the mighty tsarist government evoked a most sympathetic echo in the hearts of these tried revolutionaries. On the other hand, the tendency, for the sake of illusory economic advantages, to turn away from the most immediate and important task of the Russian socialists, namely, the winning of political freedom, naturally appeared suspicious to them and was even regarded by them as a direct betrayal of the great cause of the social revolution. “The emancipation of the workers must be the act of the working class itself” – Marx and Engels constantly taught.[17] But in order to fight for its economic emancipation, the proletariat must win itself certain political rights. Moreover, Marx and Engels clearly saw that a political revolution in Russia would be of tremendous significance to the West-European working-class movement as well. Autocratic Russia had always been a bulwark of European reaction in general. The extraordinarily favourable international position enjoyed by Russia as a result of the war of 1870, which for a long time sowed discord between Germany and France, of course only enhanced the importance of autocratic Russia as a reactionary force. Only a free Russia, a Russia that had no need either to oppress the Poles, Finns, Germans, Armenians or any other small nations, or constantly to set France and Germany at loggerheads, would enable modern Europe, rid of the burden of war, to breathe freely, would weaken all the reactionary elements in Europe and strengthen the European working class. That was why Engels ardently desired the establishment of political freedom in Russia for the sake of the progress of the working-class movement in the West as well. In him the Russian revolutionaries have lost their best friend.
Let us always honour the memory of Frederick Engels, a great fighter and teacher of the proletariat!
(source: Marxist Internet Archive; https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1895/misc/engels-bio.htm)
