Skip to main content
Friedrich Engels: organiser, thinker and joint author of the Communist Manifesto
JOHN FOSTER pays tribute to Friedrich Engels on the 200th anniversary of his birth
Marx & Engels

IN CELEBRATING the 200th anniversary of the birth of Friedrich Engels it is difficult to overestimate his contribution both to the development of the international working-class movement or to Marx’s own theoretical work and its wider dissemination.  

Engels was an organiser. He was a profound critic of capitalist society. He developed a pathbreaking analysis of the origins of class societies and of gender relations.  

And he did this in a close working partnership with Marx — a partnership that ensured Marx’s own work of transcendent genius was fully preserved and made available to our movement.
 
First and foremost, I want to stress the importance of Engels’s first book The Condition of the English Working Class. 

Morning Star call for advertising
Support the Morning Star
You have reached the free limit.
Subscribe to continue reading.
More from this author
Alex Salmond speaks at the SNP conference in Glasgow, Octobe
Features / 17 October 2024
17 October 2024
JOHN FOSTER examines how the late SNP leader shifted the party leftwards and upwards, bringing Scottish independence to the forefront while fundamentally failing to address deeper issues of class and corporate capture
ucatt
Features / 2 December 2023
2 December 2023
Ahead of a TUC special Congress next weekend to fight Conservative anti-strike laws, JOHN FOSTER looks back to 1969 and 1972 when similar proposals were defeated through class solidarity and painstaking organising work
FINDLAY
Book Review / 13 August 2023
13 August 2023
JOHN FOSTER recommends the down-to-earth realism of a political memoir that navigates the surreality of Scottish politics
HMS Queen Elizabeth
Features / 14 August 2021
14 August 2021
JOHN FOSTER discusses the role of communists in responding to the aggressive militarisation initiated by the US in a world that faces an unprecedented period of acute crisis, as he introduces the international resolution for this autumn's Communist Party Congress