Fredrick Engels

Name: Fredrick Engels
Contribution: 2nd Father of Modern Communism
Organization: League of Communists

Fredrick Engels was born in Barmen, Kingdom of Prussia in 1820. In 1838 while he was still in High School, Engels had to become a Clerk in Bremen to help support his family, but it didn't put a damper on his political and scientific education. Engels already hated the Autocracy and Bureaucrats then. He became a follower of the philosopher Hegel, who at that time had many revolutionary ideas. But then Engels began to think, why should the system just change a bit with the Capitalist class towering over the people forever? Part of the difference is that Hegel was a idealist with the mind and things while Marx and Engels rejected that. They were Materialists believing that the development of human society is conditioned by the material forces, the productive forces.

Engels settled in Manchester in 1842 the industrial heart of England at the time, and he observed the proletariat there. The product of these observations and studies was the book: The Conditions of the Working Class in England, which was finished in 1845. Engels said that it was the working classes exploitation which countinued to drive it ever furthur to its total emancipation. It also began to be quoted everywhere as the best picture of the modern working class. When Marx and Engels lived in Paris and Brussels in 1845-1847, they established connections with the secret German Communist League. It was through this that they wrote the famous Communist Manifesto.

Following that work, revolutions broke out in West Europe, Engels fought in three battles before going to London with Marx. He and Marx countinued their friendship until Marx's death in 1883. After that, Engels countinued to head Marx's organization, The International Working Men's Association, and prepared the other two volumes of Capital for publishing with notes from Marx. This fighter and teacher died on August 5th, 1895.