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Frederick Engels: 1820-1895

100 years since the death of the co-founder of scientific socialism

By Peter Symonds
28 August 1995

August 5 marked 100 years since the death of Frederick Engels--co-founder with Karl Marx of scientific socialism.

In an obituary written just two months after Engels's death, Vladimir Lenin, a young Russian revolutionary, summed up the significance of Engels's life and work for workers around the world.

"After his friend Karl Marx, Engels was the finest scholar and teacher of the modern proletariat in the whole civilized world. From the time that fate brought Karl Marx and Frederick Engels together, the two friends devoted their life's work to the 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 organizes the proletariat. They showed that it is not the well-meaning efforts of noble-minded individuals, but the class struggle of the organized proletariat that will deliver humanity from the evils which now oppress it. Marx and Engels were the first to explain in their scientific works 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....

"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" (Lenin, "Collected Works", Vol. 2 [Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1960], page 19).

For nearly a century and a half, the capitalist class and its intellectual servants have attempted to bury the ideas of Marxism. Their efforts have received enormous assistance from all those who betrayed the principles of scientific socialism--above all, the Stalinist bureaucracy in the former Soviet Union.

But the contradictions of capitalism which Marx and Engels first identified nearly 150 years ago continue to reassert themselves--in increasingly horrific forms. Scientific and technical developments have reached unprecedented heights, yet the profit system is incapable of providing for the elementary needs of hundreds of millions of people. Once again it is lurching toward depression, economic conflict and war.

The political and theoretical conquests of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels remain the indispensable weapons for the working class to arrive at a scientific understanding of the political and social crisis which it confronts, and to become conscious of itself as a social force capable of re-organizing society for the benefit of humanity as a whole.

Frederick Engels was born on November 28, 1820 in Barmen--an industrial town in the Rhineland region of what is now Germany. His father was a well-to-do manufacturer with conservative political and religious views. Engels received his education at local schools run by the Protestant Pietists.

The intellectual and political ferment of the period and Engels's own broad interests were at odds with the narrow fundamentalist outlook of the Pietists and the politics of his father, a supporter of the ruling Prussian autocracy.

In 1838, before he had completed his schooling, Engels was sent by his father to Bremen to work as a clerk. In the cosmopolitan atmosphere of this major German port city, Engels began to express the traits which marked his entire life--enormous capacities for study and learning, an abhorrence of political tyranny and an ability to enjoy all aspects of life.

While in Bremen, Engels wrote to a friend: "To get the most out of life you must be active, you must live and you must have the courage to taste the thrill of being young." He drank a great deal, indulged in horse- riding, went to the theater and opera, joined a choir and a fencing club.

He also read copiously both at the office and in his spare time, studying philosophy, theology, history and literature and improving his already considerable knowledge of languages. This was a period of great social and intellectual upheaval and Engels, a man of tremendous compassion, was inevitably drawn to the most revolutionary writers and thinkers of his times.

Only three decades before Engels's birth the French Revolution had swept away the feudal aristocracy, and the wars that followed under Napoleon undermined the old feudal order across Europe. The most radical tendency, the Jacobins, had sympathizers among elements of the petty bourgeoisie in Germany and across Europe.

No such revolution took place in Germany, which remained a patchwork of principalities and statelets. After the defeat of the French armies of Napoleon in 1815, the great powers restored the monarchy to France and carved up the rest of Europe among themselves. The Rhineland was placed under the autocratic rule of the Prussian monarchy.

This period of reaction engendered fresh revolutionary eruptions in 1830-31 in France, which had their impact in Germany and elsewhere. In Bremen, Engels was first influenced by Young Germany, a literary movement formed in the early 1830s with democratic political views and a hostility to Pietism. He wrote and published articles under the pen name of Friedrich Oswald.

But Engels was soon attracted to the radical Young Hegelians and in 1841 moved to Berlin as a volunteer in the Brigade of Artillery, in part to complete his military service and in part to participate in the intellectual life of the capital.

Georg Hegel, who died in 1831, had been a professor at the university of Berlin. He represented the highest development of German idealist philosophy, which began with Immanual Kant and included such figures as Johann Fichte and Friedrich Schelling. Although Hegel himself had been an admirer of the autocratic Prussian state, his teachings were based on an implicitly revolutionary dialectical method, which examined every phenomenon from the standpoint of its change and development.

His more radical followers concluded that if everything was in the process of coming into being and passing away, then why not the church and the Prussian autocracy as well? The Young Hegelians like Bruno Bauer and his brothers declared themselves atheists and republicans, but they remained wedded to the idealist core of Hegel's philosophical system.

Hegel maintained that thought governed or determined nature and society. According to his conception, the progress of man from the earliest civilizations to what he considered its highest point of development in the Prussian state was a product of the unfolding of the Absolute Idea in its various stages.

The most revolutionary of the Young Hegelians, in their political struggle against the state and the church, were driven towards the philosophy of materialism--the only firm basis for science--which taught, in opposition to idealism, that nature was the foundation of human society and thought, not the other way round. This materialist outlook, however, fundamentally contradicted the Hegelian system.

Ludwig Feuerbach, a teacher who had been driven from his academic post and forced to live in rural isolation, was the first of Hegel's disciples to reject the idealist basis of his philosophy and advance a materialist alternative.

In his famous pamphlet, "Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy" Engels later described the period and the impact of the publication of Feuerbach's book "The Essence of Christianity" in 1841, shortly after Engels's arrival in Berlin: "With one blow it pulverized the contradiction, in that without circumlocutions it placed materialism on the throne again. Nature exists independently of all philosophy. It is the foundation upon which we human beings, ourselves products of nature, have grown up. Nothing exists outside nature and man, and the higher beings our religious fantasies have created are only the fantastic reflection of our own essence.... One must himself have experienced the liberating effect of this book to get an idea of it" (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1973, pages 19-20).

Engels and Marx were both deeply influenced by Feuerbach. But in formulating his philosophy, Marx did not return, as did Feuerbach, to the mechanical and static view of the world advanced by the French materialism of the previous century. Rather he incorporated the dynamic, dialectical method of Hegel.

As Engels explained: "Feuerbach smashed the system and simply discarded it. But a philosophy is not disposed of by the mere assertion that it is false. And so powerful a work as Hegelian philosophy, which had exercised so enormous an influence on the intellectual development of the nation, could not be disposed of by simply being ignored. It had to be `sublated' in its own sense, that is, in the sense that while its form had to be annihilated through criticism, the new content which had been won through it had to be saved" ("Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy", pages 20-21).

In this intellectual climate Engels spent a year, attending lectures at Berlin University, writing articles and pamphlets and grudgingly completing his military service.

After finishing his military service in October 1842 Engels traveled to Cologne and met with Moses Hess, who was the guiding force behind the radical daily newspaper, the "Rheinische Zeitung", to which Engels had contributed articles.

Influenced by the French utopian socialists, Hess was the first of the Young Hegelians to proclaim himself a communist. The utopian socialists, such as Henri Saint-Simon and Charles Fourier, wrote their first works shortly after the French Revolution.

The bourgeois society which issued from the revolution failed to live up to the revolutionary slogans under which it had taken place--Liberty, Equality and Fraternity for all. Liberty for the bourgeoisie only meant cruel injustice and oppression for the proletariat, and Saint-Simon, Fourier and their followers subjected the existing social conditions to withering criticism.

The utopian socialists drew up elaborate blueprints for the betterment of society and sought to convince the powers-that-be of the necessity of acting on their proposals. Their pleadings, of course, fell on deaf ears. Saint-Simon and Fourier regarded the newly emerging working class as an object of pity, but never as an independent historical force capable of overthrowing the bourgeois order and establishing socialism.

The most advanced capitalist country in Europe was England, where the Industrial Revolution had first begun, and Hess declared that the communist revolution would first be put into practice there. He claimed that his meeting with Engels was responsible for converting the latter to communism.

Whether the claim was true or not, Hess's ideas had an impact. Engels decided after meeting him to go to England, where he spent 21 months working as a clerk in his father's large spinning firm in the industrial city of Manchester.

In Cologne, Engels also met briefly with Marx, who was an editor on the "Rheinische Zeitung". This first encounter was reportedly cool, because Marx regarded Engels as a representative of the Young Hegelians from whom Marx had already begun his philosophical and political break.

In England, Engels made contact with various trade unionists, Chartists and socialists. Besides contributing to Marx's "Deutsch-Franzosische Jahrbucher"on the social and economic conditions in England, he wrote several articles for "New Moral World", the organ of the utopian socialist Robert Owen, describing the spread of communist ideas in Europe.

He collected material for a book on the social impact of the industrial revolution in England and the appalling conditions facing workers, and began a critical study of the works of English political economists, including Ricardo and Adam Smith.

In August 1844 Engels returned to the family home in Barmen. On his way he stayed for 10 days in Paris, then the center of revolutionary movements in Europe and again met with Marx--the beginning of their lifelong friendship and political partnership.

"When I visited Marx in Paris in the summer of 1844 we found ourselves in complete agreement on questions of theory and our collaboration began at that time," Engels later wrote.

Much has been written about the friendship of Marx and Engels, which was to last nearly four decades until Marx's death in 1883, a great deal of it by bourgeois writers who are plainly derogatory, unsympathetic or uncomprehending.

However, in his biography of Marx, Franz Mehring, himself a remarkable fighter for scientific socialism, summed up the intellectual relations between the two men as follows: "Engels always recognized the superior genius in Marx, and he never aspired to play anything but the second fiddle to the other's lead. However, Engels was never merely Marx's interpreter or assistant, but always an independent collaborator, an intellectual force dissimilar to Marx, but his worthy partner. At the beginning of their friendship Engels gave more than he received on a very important field of their activities, and twenty years later Marx wrote to him: `You know that, first of all, I arrive at things slowly, and, secondly, I always follow in your footsteps.' Engels wore lighter armor and was able to see the decisive point of any question or any situation immediately, but he did not penetrate into things deeply enough to see all the pros and the cons of the matter at once. For a man of action such a capacity is a great advantage and Marx never made any political decision without first consulting Engels, who invariably hit the nail on the head" (Mehring, "Karl Marx: The Story of His Life" [Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1979], page 2330).

The ideas and analysis of political economy which Engels contributed in his article for the "Deutsch-Franzosische Jahrbucher" prompted Marx to begin his own study of the English political economists. Contained in Engels's work were the seeds of what was to preoccupy Marx for many years--including the effects of capitalist competition, the population theory of Malthus, the commercial crises of the profit system, the law of wages. These seeds were to form the basis for the writing of his great work "Capital".

The first work on which Marx and Engels collaborated was a critique of the ideas of the Bauer brothers, published in December 1844 as "The Holy Family". The lengthy book contains, in addition to its trenchant criticism, the outlines of revolutionary socialism. In it Marx and Engels demonstrated that the revolutionary role of the working class was due, not to its consciousness, but to its objective position under capitalism.

By the 1830s the working class had already begun to make its appearance in struggle for the first time. Revolts by workers had taken place in 1831 and 1834 in Lyon, the silk-making center of France. In England, Chartist agitation for political reforms had commenced.

In 1845, Engels published his classic book, "The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844" which not only fleshed out in detail the horrific oppression of English workers, but politically educated the working class as to the historic role it had to play. Lenin described the significance of the work as follows: "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 realize 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." (Lenin, Vol.2, page 18).

Engels joined Marx in Brussels where they began another joint work, German Ideology, seeking to clarify further their disagreements with the Young Hegelians and various nonscientific socialist trends and to elaborate more fully their own philosophical standpoint.

Engels always attributed the main philosophical and scientific discoveries to Marx, who, as Lenin later explained, "was the legitimate successor to the best that man produced in the nineteenth century, as represented by German philosophy, English political economy and French socialism."

Engels later summed up the great discovery of Karl Marx: "Just as Darwin discovered the law of development of organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of development of human history: the simple fact, hitherto concealed by an overgrowth of ideology, that mankind must first of all eat, drink, have shelter and clothing, before it can pursue politics, science, art, religion, etc.; that therefore the production of the immediate material means of subsistence and consequently the degree of economic development attained by a given people or during a given epoch form the foundation upon which the state institutions, the legal conceptions, art and even the ideas on religion, of the people concerned have been evolved, and in the light of which they must, therefore, be explained, instead of visa versa, as had hitherto been the case" (Marx and Engels, Selected Works, Vol. 1 [Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1977], page 429).

Marx had succeeded in fusing the dialectical method of Hegel, stripped of its idealist casing, with the conceptions of materialism, to produce for the first time a thoroughly scientific understanding of history and the progress of mankind through various stages, from slave society to feudalism and capitalism. Utilizing the tools of historical materialism, Marx and Engels demonstrated that, from its birth, capitalism brought into existence its grave digger--the industrial working class.

The vast expansion of the productive forces under capitalism led not to the general well-being of society as a whole, but to economic crisis and growing social polarization--vast wealth in the hands of a few at one pole, and, at the other pole, worsening poverty and misery for the many. The task of socialists was to make workers conscious of their position in society and that their historical interest lay in the overthrow of the capitalist system.

During this period, Marx and Engels sought to win political support for the principles of scientific socialism which they were elaborating among the communities of expatriate German workers. In 1846 Engels traveled to Paris to propagate their views and combat the influence of various petty-bourgeois socialists--Proudhon, in particular.

Early in 1847 Engels was approached by Joseph Moll--an emissary from a group of German exiles in London which was to form the basis of the Communist League. Moll asked both Engels and Marx to join their league, indicating a vote would to be taken at an upcoming congress to support their viewpoint. Both Marx and Engels attended the final session of the congress in London in November 1847 where they were commissioned to write the founding document of the league--the Communist Manifesto.

The Communist Manifesto, which set out the basic principles of scientific socialism and exposed the inadequacies of the opposing socialist trends, is even more relevant and potent today than when it was written. It was not a document written simply for German exiles in the 1840s, but addressed the historic interests of the working class as a whole, advancing the necessity for workers of all countries to unite and carry out the socialist overturn of capitalism.

"Hitherto, every form of society has been based, as we have already seen, on the antagonism of oppressing and oppressed classes. But in order to oppress a class, certain conditions must be assured to it under which it can, at least, continue its slavish conditions. The serf, in the period of serfdom, raised himself to membership in the commune, just as the petty bourgeois, under the yoke of feudal absolutism, managed to develop into a bourgeois.

"The modern laborer, on the contrary, instead of rising with the progress of industry, sinks deeper and deeper below the conditions of existence of his own class. He becomes a pauper, and pauperism develops more rapidly than population and wealth. And here it is evident that the bourgeoisie is unfit any longer to be the ruling class in society, and to impose its conditions of existence on society as an overriding law. It is unfit to rule because it is incompetent to assure an existence to its slave within his slavery, because it cannot help letting him sink into such a state that it has to feed him, instead of being fed by him. Society can no longer live under this bourgeoisie, in other words, its existence is no longer compatible with society....

"The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win" (Marx and Engels, Selected Works, Vol. 1, pp. 45 and 63).

No sooner had the Communist Manifesto been published than the European revolutions of 1848 erupted against the remnants of feudal autocracy, first in February in France and then in other countries. In Germany an uprising in Cologne on March 3 forced the Prussian monarch to make concessions. On March 13 revolution broke out in Vienna and on March 18 reached Berlin.

Marx and Engels along with their supporters made their way to Cologne, where they took charge of the democratic Neue Rheinische Zeitung. Through its pages they sought to rally workers and radical sections of the petty bourgeoisie against the forces of reaction, mercilessly exposing the political maneuvers of the Prussian autocracy and the vacillations of the representatives of the German bourgeoisie.

Reaction, however, gained the upper hand. Faced with a far stronger and more developed working class, the representatives of the German bourgeoisie proved incapable of playing the role their counterparts had played during the great bourgeois revolutions in Britain and France. As the struggles intensified the aspiring capitalist class bowed to the Prussian monarchy and made an agreement to crush the opposition of the workers.

Marx and Engels fought to the last. The Neue Rheinische Zeitung was finally suppressed and Marx was deported. Drawing on his military training, Engels took an active part in the armed popular uprising against the Prussian armies--in Elberfield, next to his home town of Barmen, and later in Baden and the Palatinate. When the revolt was defeated, he escaped across the border to Switzerland, and then joined Marx in London.

In the wake of the defeat of revolution across Europe, the two quickly drew the conclusion that a new upsurge was not immediately on the agenda. The economic crisis in the 1840s had given way to a new period of capitalist expansion. Marx and Engels broke with those in the Communist League who vainly attempted to rekindle the revolution in Germany, and turned instead to the theoretical work needed to prepare the working class politically for a fresh outbreak of mass struggles in the future.

In 1850, lacking finances, Engels was forced to accept his family's proposal to return to what he described as his "dog's trade." For 20 years he was to work as a clerk and then partner in his father's firm in Manchester--to provide both for himself and for Marx and his family in London.

As a result Marx was able to immerse himself in his great works of political economy--Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, published in 1859, and the first volume of Capital, in 1867--which for the first time unraveled the economic contradictions inherent in the capitalist system and thus exposed the seeds of its demise.

To free Marx for his studies, Engels wrote or assisted in writing many of the articles Marx had undertaken to produce for the New York Daily Tribune, a widely-circulated American antislavery newspaper. Between the demands of work and bourgeois society in Manchester, Engels also found time to continue his own studies of languages, history, the natural sciences and military affairs. as well as to maintain a voluminous correspondence with Marx on a wide range of matters.

Marx once described his friend as "a positive encyclopedia ready for work at any hour of the day or night, full or sober, quick at writing and active as the devil" [Mehring, Karl Marx, The Story of His Life, The University of Michigan Press, 1979, p. 234]. But it was only in 1870 when he returned to live in London that Engels was able to concentrate on his own research and participate more fully in the international working class movement. He had been able to sell off his stake in the Manchester firm to his partners and thus provide financial support for himself and Marx.

The expansion of capitalism following the 1848 revolutions had led to a rapid growth of the working class and its organizations in England, France and Germany. A fresh economic crisis in 1857-58 in England provoked a general strike in 1859 of London workers. The outbreak of the American Civil War in 1861 produced a shortage of cotton and a further economic shock in England and throughout Europe.

In response to the revival of the working class movement, the International Workingmen's Association--the First International--was founded in 1864 in London. Marx drew up the Inaugural Address and was the guiding spirit of the international during its decade of existence, carrying out a vigorous polemic against various forms of petty-bourgeois socialism, that of the anarchist Bakunin in particular.

When he moved to London in 1870, Engels immediately became a member of the General Council of the International, relieving Marx of much of the burden of correspondence with groups and individuals in Europe and the United States. Both Marx and Engels paid particular attention to the rapid growth of the Social Democratic movement among the working class in Germany in the 1870s. When the followers of Ferdinand Lassalle and the Eisenachers, supporters of Marx and Engels, united to form the German Social Democratic Party in 1875, Marx supported the merger. But he subjected its political basis--the Gotha program--to a trenchant criticism, opposing the many theoretical concessions made to Lassalle's reformist and parliamentary conceptions.

Only months later their concern was aroused once again by the influence being exerted in the Social Democratic Party, particularly among younger party members, workers as well as intellectuals, by the teachings of Eugen Duhring, a former assistant professor at Berlin University. After some hesitation, Engels put aside his own studies in natural science and undertook a comprehensive defense of scientific socialism against the attacks of Duhring in all fields--philosophy, science, economics and politics. Engels's work was published in a series of articles in the party's central organ, Vorwarts, in 1877. They provoked such a storm that attempts were made at the party's congress by supporters of Duhring to ban their publication.

In his preface to the first edition of the book Anti-Duhring, which comprised the entire series of articles, Engels wrote: "Even German socialism has lately, particularly since Herr Duhring's good example, gone in for a considerable amount of sublime nonsense, producing various persons who give themselves airs about 'science,' of which they 'really never learnt a word.' This is an infantile disease which marks, and is inseparable from, the incipient conversion of the German student to Social Democracy, but which our workers with their remarkably healthy nature will undoubtedly overcome" (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1975, p. 11).

Engels's prognosis proved correct. Anti-Duhring had a profound impact not only within German Social Democracy, but in many other countries as well. Selected chapters of it were published as the pamphlet Socialism: Utopian and Scientific and translated into several languages. Many who were to become prominent Marxists were intellectually reared on the book, which systematically elaborated the scientific world outlook of Marx and Engels in all spheres of thought.

More than any other book Anti-Duhring was responsible for spreading scientific socialism in the international workers movement. At its Congress in Erfurt in 1891, the German Social Democratic Party, which had vastly expanded in size and influence, formally abandoned the Gotha program and adopted a Marxist program.

In 1883 Karl Marx died. At his graveside, Engels paid tribute to the life of his great friend and political collaborator, and to the ground-breaking scientific achievements Marx had made. He then added: " Marx was before all else a revolutionist. His real mission in life was to contribute, in one way or another, to the overthrow of capitalist society and of the state institutions which it had brought into being, to contribute to the liberation of the modern proletariat, which he was the first to make conscious of its own position and its needs, conscious of the conditions of its emancipation. Fighting was his element. And he fought with a passion, a tenacity and a success such as few could rival....

"And consequently, Marx was the best hated and most calumniated man of his time. Governments, both absolutist and republican, deported him from their territories.

Bourgeois, whether conservative or ultra-democratic, vied with one other in heaping slanders upon him. All this he brushed aside as though it were cobweb, ignoring it, answering only when extreme necessity compelled him. And he died beloved, revered and mourned by millions of revolutionary fellow workers--from the mines of Siberia to California, in all parts of Europe and America--and I make bold to say that though he may have many opponents, he had hardly one personal enemy.

"His name will endure through the ages and so also will his work!" (Marx and Engels, Selected Works, p. 430).

Engels spent the rest of his life ensuring that the greatest work of Marx, the remaining volumes of Capital, were published. Once again he put aside his own scientific researches, which were only published posthumously as Dialectics of Nature, to take on the arduous task of organizing, deciphering and editing Marx's manuscripts. Volume Two of Capital was published in 1885 and Volume Three, in 1894.

At the same time, as Leon Trotsky explained in an article in 1935, Engels took on the task of leading the international workers movement. "During Marx's lifetime, Engels, as he himself put it, played second fiddle. But with his co-worker's last illness, and especially after the latter's death, Engels became the direct and unchallenged leader of the orchestra of world socialism for a period of 12 years."

Using his facility with languages, Engels maintained a worldwide correspondence with individuals and groups adhering to Marxism. Following the founding of the Second International in 1889, he wrote articles for its publications and provided advice to its leaders. His knowledge of Russian enabled him to follow closely the development of the first Russian Marxist organization, the Emancipation of Labour group, and he met with its founder Georgi Plekhanov in London in 1889.

Unlike Marx, Engels maintained his good health until near to his death. In 1888 he visited the United States for two months and in 1893 he attended the Congress of the Second International in Zurich, where he addressed the final session and received a triumphant ovation from the delegations in attendance from 20 countries.

As late as 1895 Engels was still discussing plans for new literary projects. However, in the summer of 1895 he was diagnosed as suffering from cancer of the throat. He died on August 5, 1895 and, in accordance with his will, his body was cremated and his ashes scattered at sea.

Writing 40 years later, Leon Trotsky, co-leader with Lenin of the Russian Revolution and founder of the Fourth International, wrote in appreciation of Engels: "The elemental side of his personality was optimism combined with humor towards himself and those close to him, and irony towards his enemies. In his optimism there was not a modicum of smugness--the term itself rebounds from his image. The subsoil springs of his joy of living had their source in a happy and harmonious temperament, but the latter permeated through and through with the knowledge that brought with it the greatest of joys: the joy of creative perception.

"Engels's optimism extended equally to political questions and to personal affairs. After each and any defeat he would immediately cast about for those conditions which were preparing a new upswing, and after every blow life dealt him he was able to pull himself together and look to the future. Such he remained to his dying day."

Karl Marx and Frederick Engels left the working class an imperishable legacy--a scientific world outlook on which to base its struggles for a truly human, classless society.