Military History Companion: Friedrich Engels
Engels, Friedrich (1820-95), political economist, military writer, and theorist; friend, colleague, and adviser of Karl Marx; and founder of communism. Born at Wuppertal on 28 November 1820, he began writing political tracts in 1839. In November 1842 he visited Manchester in Britain and became a member of the Chartist movement, and first met Marx in Paris in 1844. His experiences led to writing The Situation of the Working Class in Britain (1844-5) and, in turn, The Communist Manifesto (1848). Further experience of the 1848-50 revolutions in Europe and particularly in Germany led to the writing of Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Germany (1851-2). In 1850 he returned to Manchester where he worked in a commercial firm, partly to subsidize Marx.
In 1870 Marx and Engels attended the Congress of the First International in London. In 1871 Engels welcomed the Paris Commune, fitting it into his view of progress through capitalism towards a dictatorship of the proletariat. After Marx's death in 1883, Engels completed and published the unfinished second and third volumes of Das Kapital.
Engels was an expert analyst of military affairs and, in particular, of the mid-19th-century revolution in military affairs and the role of industry and arms manufacture. Marx considered that he had ‘made the study of military questions his speciality’. Many of the articles attributed to Marx owe much to Engels. Their division of interest was fairly clear cut, Marx studying the political essence of wars and their character, Engels, the material basis of military affairs and the nature and origin of wars and armies.
Engels's detailed study of military affairs was fired by the Crimean and American civil wars, although much of his military analysis dates from later life. He realized that future wars between major powers would be total war, and would depend to an unprecedented degree on technology which, in turn, depended on a nation's industrial base. In 1892 he wrote ‘from the moment warfare became a branch of the grande industries (ironclad ships, rifled artillery, quickfiring and repeating cannon, repeating rifles, steel covered bullets, smokeless powder, etc.) la grande industrie, without which all these things cannot be made, became a political necessity’. In a letter of 1888 he prophesied the nature of war accurately enough. ‘No war is any longer possible for Prussia-Germany except a world war, and a war of an extension and violence hitherto undreamt of.’ The study of war could not be extracted from its political economic and diplomatic context—as he wrote, ‘diplomacy is higher than strategy’.
Engels's views on the military revolution taking place at the time were sound enough, but hardly unique, and he would probably not have gone down in history as a great military thinker and analyst were it not for his friend Marx. It is questionable whether either of them would be remembered today had their work not been taken up by Lenin. But for the study of the 19th-century revolution in warfare his work is important.
— Christopher Bellamy
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