120. have the courage to taste the thrill of being young 

Today I will be celebrating the birthday of the German socialist philosopher Friedrich Engels (1820-1895), an associate of Karl Marx.

I keep referring to his not so famous quote: “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.”

The co-founder of Marxism, a businessman born in a bourgeois background who became a staunch critic of capitalism and lifelong friend and closest collaborator of Karl Marx.

Marx could only survive his financial hardships and devote his entire life in the search of truth because Engels supported him financially for much of his life.

That enabled Marx to continue his writing and create some masterpieces that gave a new vision to the world.

Engels was able to write and speak in numerous languages, including Russian, Italian, Portuguese, Irish, Spanish, Polish, French, English, and German.

Impressed by the philosophy of Hegel and being associated with groups of Young Hegeliaans he published his first work, a poem but later began writing newspaper articles critiquing the societal ills of rapid industrialisation under the pseudonym Friedrich Oswald.

This was the price he had to pay for being born in the same league he was criticising. Due to his atheistic views and his other activities his relationship with his parents became strained. 

Engels was also influenced by his lover Mary Burns who worked in the Engels factory in Manchester. She was a young Irish woman with radical opinions. They were in a relationship that lasted 20 years until her death.

As they both were against the institution of marriage the two never married. Engels regarded the church-regulated marriage as a form of class oppression. 

After her death, Engels was romantically involved with her younger sister Lydia Burns. 

Although he didn’t meet Marx for a long time, he contributed articles to Rheinische Zeitung a paper edited by Karl Marx. 

His depiction of poor employment and living conditions endured by factory workers were so powerful that it immediately drew the attention of Marx.

Engels met Marx only in November 1842 until he was intellectually well developed.

His first series of major articles “Critique of Political Economy” was also published by Marx when he was editing Deutsch-Franzosische Jahrbucher along with Arnold Ruge in Paris. 

Later those articles were collected in his first book, The Condition of Working Class in England.

First published in German in 1845, this book is considered to be a seminal work which was developed into a proper philosophy.

In the book, Engels described the grim future of capitalism and the industrial age since he had observed the slums of Manchester in close detail.

His other two books are equally important.

Dialectics of Nature is an unfinished 1883 work by Engels that applies Marxist ideas, particularly those of dialectical materialism, to science. 

In The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, Engels argues that the family is an ever-changing institution that has been shaped by capitalism. It contains a historical view of the family in relation to issues of class, female subjugation and private property.

Engels wrote that in primeval societies women were treated with a high degree of respect and took major social roles, but this changed drastically with the development of private property.

After meeting Marx in 1844, he jointly authored The Holy Family, The German Ideology, The Communist Manifesto.

It was Engels’ very important words that explains us why the initial hardcore Naxalites later questioned the very rebellion. He has written that ultimate victory for any insurrection is rare, simply on military and tactical grounds.

Engels's statements, in which he wrote that revolution and the so-called socialist society were not fixed concepts, but rather constantly changing social phenomena. 

Also, I would like to quote: “Why, we have no final goal. We are evolutionaries, we have no intention of dictating definitive laws to mankind.”

Mark the word evolutionary not revolutionary.

Engels also argued that it would be suicidal to talk about a revolutionary seizure of power at a time when the historical circumstances favoured a parliamentary road to power that could bring social democracy into power. This was written in 1898.

After Marx's death, Engels devoted much of his remaining years to editing Marx's unfinished volumes of Das Kapital. 

I will conclude what Vladimir Lenin has rightly written in his tribute to the great man: “After Karl Marx, Engels was the finest scholar and teacher of the modern proletariat in the whole civilised world. 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.”