“He was a disappointment to his parents and a traitor to his class,” writes Camilla Royle in her new biography of Friedrich Engels, A Rebel’s Guide to Engels.

Born in an upper-class family in Germany, young Engels combined the family profession of a textile magnate with his vocation for journalism albeit with social and political concerns. He also united the feelings of German nationalism with inspiration from the French Revolution, later on becoming a Young Hegelian pretty much like his future friend and associate Karl Marx in the latter’s own time at the university.

Royle tells us that even as early as 1847, when Engels had not totally broken away from the Young Hegelians, he was more widely published than Marx, who had a reputation in Germany as the greatest living philosopher.

Engels spent several years of his youth in Manchester, the world’s first industrial city, where his family owned a textile mill. His move to England in November 1842 was to change his life politically and personally. He met the love of his life, Mary Burns, who was a worker and who introduced the budding philosopher to the inner worlds of working-class Manchester at that time.

Chapter 2 of the book is devoted to Engels’s first book The Condition of the Working Class in England, which was originally written for a German audience. His analysis of the working class in Manchester brought him into contact with Marx: the beginning of a lifelong political and intellectual partnership.

Engels’s meeting with Marx in 1844 and subsequent collaboration with him was to change the face and fortune of politics and philosophy. After collaborating on The Holy Family, the two wrote The German Ideology, which stressed the primacy of flesh and blood humans over abstract ideas; the role of economic relations in shaping people’s lives; and that the clash between what they called ‘forces of production’ and ‘relations of production’ was the seed for class conflict and then revolution.

Engels’s contribution to the writing of The Communist Manifesto together with Marx is well-known. This infectious tract proved prophetic as revolts soon broke out in Europe against assorted kings and autocrats. Not the one to hold back, Engels participated in the revolts in the Rhineland to defend the gains that the parliament there had made; here he burnished his credentials as Marx’s General by directly participating in battles against the Prussian army. Eventually the uprising in Germany was defeated, as were all the uprisings eventually across Europe. Engels fled to England.

Though Engels is lionised by the Left everywhere, Royle is by no means an uncritical biographer. In Chapter 2, she takes Engels to task for using language in his first book for Irish migrants that was perhaps in fashion then, and perhaps could be taken for granted, but not any longer. Royle reserves the same treatment for Engels’s moralistic judgments about female socialising. In Chapter 5, which is about Engels’s Manchester sojourn, Royle points to his ‘contradictory existence, advocating for workers’ insurrection while at the same time managing a cotton mill and profiting from their exploitation.’

The last few chapters of Royle’s tiny book are devoted to Engels’s theoretical contributions after the passing of his best friend Marx. The chapters on Engels’s contributions to the dialectics of science and the women question comprehensively prove that Engels was not just a lieutenant to Marx or one whose reputation primarily rests on his financial contributions to and collaborations with Marx while he was alive, or helping complete Marx’s most important work Das Kapital after he died. Not least on the questions of science and women, Engels was an original and independent thinker in his own right. In fact, unlike Marx, who, being dependent on Engels’s generous assistance, was more of a thinker as he laboured on the volumes of Capital; Engels remained involved with the European socialist movement right till his death (he lived for twelve years after Marx’s death).

Crucially, Royle also reminds us that Engels had accurately predicted a world war as early as 1887; and that neither he nor Marx were votaries of economic determinism, of which they have been frequently accused posthumously.

Royle’s introductory work, though surprisingly the only fresh addition to our understanding of Engels in his bicentennial year, disappoints on two counts. One, the reader fails to understand why despite devoting a long chapter to Engels’s thoughts on ‘women and the family’ and their critique by leading feminists of today, we fail to get a more rounded portrait of the two women in Engels’s own life: namely his longtime partner, Mary Burns; and after her unexpected death, her sister, Lizzie Burns, whom Engels married on her deathbed only to satisfy the former’s Christian sensibilities. Engels would hardly have been introduced to the world of the English working class or the comforts of a domestic life had it not been for the sacrifices of the remarkable Burns sisters.

Secondly, as a South Asian reader and reviewer of a book which I suspect has been written primarily for a Western audience, I would have liked a short chapter on the articles that Marx and Engels wrote on India for the New York Tribune between 1853 and 1863; which can possibly be divided into three parts by topic. The first part could relate to the social and economic conditions of India and the strategy of British imperialism, the second to the events of the Mutiny of 1857 and the third to the economic crisis in India that followed the Mutiny. In addition to India, Marx and Engels wrote many articles on Persia, the Persian Gulf and China that read like a charge sheet against the exploitative activities of the most powerful and imperialist power of that time – Britain.

A Rebel’s Guide  

 to Engels

Author: Camilla Royle

Publisher: Bookmarks

Publications, London (2020)

The reviewer is a social scientist, book critic, translator and dramatic reader based in Lahore, where he is also the president of the Progressive Writers’ Association. He can be reached at: razanaeem@hotmail.com