Frederick Engels, 1820-1895
Friedrich
Engels was born November 28, 1820 in Barmen Germany and went on to be a
Writer/Philosopher best known as Karl
Marx’s collaborator and editor. He moved from Germany to England in 1842, where
he worked as a manager in a factory in Manchester. In 1845 he published The
Condition of the Working Class in England, which suggested that the poor
working class would only benefit if they fought for socialism. Engels had met
Karl Marx in 1844 and together they wrote the Communist Manifesto, predicting
ultimate victory for the proletariat. After 1848 Engels returned to England and
financially supported Marx, whose works he also edited and translated. He died
in August 5, 1895
1. Taken from Answers.com
“Friedrich Engels” at http://www.answers.com/topic/friedrich-engels
This
is how Frederick Engels spoke over thirty years in advance of the future World
War I in a preface to a pamphlet by Sigismund Borkheim, In Memory of the German
Arch-Patriots of 1806-1807 (Zur Erinnerung für die deutschen Mordspatrioten
1806-1807 ). (This pamphlet is No. XXIV of the Social-Democratic Library
published in Göttingen-Zürich in 1888.):
“No
war is any longer possible for Prussia-Germany except a world war and a world
war indeed of an extent and violence hitherto undreamt of. Eight to ten millions
of soldiers will massacre one another and in doing so devour the whole of
Eurepe until they have stripped it barer than any swarm of locusts has ever
done. The devastations of the Thirty Years’ War compressed into three or four
years, and spread over the whole Continent; famine, pestilence, general
demoralisation both of the armies and of the mass of the people produced by
acute distress; hopeless confusion of our artificial machinery in trade,
industry and credit, ending in general bankruptcy; collapse of the old states
and their traditional state wisdom to such an extent that crowns will roll by
dozens on the pavement and there will be no body to pick them up; absolute
impossibility of foreseeing how it will all end and who will come out of the
struggle as victor; only one result is absolutely certain: general exhaustion
and the establishment of the conditions for the ultimate victory of the working
class….This is the prospect when the system of mutual outbidding in armaments,
taken to the final extreme, at last bears its inevitable fruits. This, my
lords, princes and statesmen, is where in your wisdom you have brought old
Europe. And when nothing more remains to you but to open the last great war
dance—that will suit us all right (uns kann es recht sein ). The war may
perhaps push us temporarily into the background, may wrench from us many a
position already conquered. But when you have unfettered forces which you will
then no longer be able again to control, things may go as they will: at the end
of the tragedy you will be ruined and the victory of the proletariat will
either be already achieved or at any rate (doch ) inevitable.” 2
2. Taken from Lenin’s Collected Works, 4th English
Edition, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1972 Volume 27, pages 494-499 and also
online in V.I. Lenin “Prophetic Words” at
http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1918/jun/29b.htm