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Frederick Engels
Frederick Engels (1820–1895), co-founder with Karl Marx of the modern revolutionary socialist movement, was born in the Rhine province of Germany in 1820. He met Marx in Cologne in 1842 and in Paris in 1844, and joined him in Brussels in 1845 to begin a political collaboration and friendship that...
Frederick Engels (1820–1895), co-founder with Karl Marx of the modern revolutionary socialist movement, was born in the Rhine province of Germany in 1820. He met Marx in Cologne in 1842 and in Paris in 1844, and joined him in Brussels in 1845 to begin a political collaboration and friendship that lasted until Marx’s death. Together they became members of the League of the Just, which evolved into the International Communist League, in whose name they wrote the renowned Communist Manifesto in 1847.
Engels took part, as adjutant in a volunteer corps fighting against the Prussians, in a revolutionary uprising in Baden in 1849, and after its suppression fled to England, where Marx also took asylum. For the next two decades, Engels worked in his father’s textile business in Manchester, chiefly in order to support the destitute Marx while he completed his Capital and other theoretical works.
In 1864 they played central roles in the formation of the International Workingmen’s Association, the First International. In 1870 Engels left his job in Manchester and moved to London to devote himself to full-time political and literary activity. After Marx died in 1883, Engels took over the task of completing his friend’s unpublished manuscripts and continuing the immense work of counseling the growing number of national movements dedicated to socialism. In the last years before his death in 1895, he also was active in the congresses of the new Second International.