HAVE YOU HEARD THE NEWS? (ZOOM)
Discussion on recent events.
To connect to a Zoom meeting, click https://zoom.us/j/7421974305
Friday, December 05, 2025
Wednesday, December 03, 2025
Bread and circuses for today
The sell-out concert tour of Britain and Europe by Bob Dylan (he’s in his 85th year) presents a prime example of the way capitalism, via its entertainment industry, can sell us meaningless thrills to patch over the uniformity and stress of living in its wage and salary system.
Dylan does have something unique to offer, but the adulation, the hero-worship, as opposed to simple appreciation, of him by the fans at his concerts can only be seen as part of the obsession with celebrity culture that capitalism thrusts upon us as a substitute for mutually cooperative activity. This is something the free access society of economic equality that we call socialism would release.
Tuesday, December 02, 2025
Socialist Sonnet No. 214
Your Party – Not Mine
Is it time a
new party was founded?
Sure, the
old one’s comprehensively failed,
The
locomotive of Labour derailed.
It seems
hope is once again unbounded,
As so often
before, another red flag
To be run up
the polls and kept flying.
Then come
the splits, the schisms, the dying,
Such a
weight of expectation to drag
Down the
vision that was always myopic.
The old
nostrums and canards trotted out,
Members who
cannot debate, only shout:
Who is going
to vote for the shambolic?
This challenge
to capitalism’s resolved,
With, at no
point, socialism involved.
D. A.
Monday, December 01, 2025
World Socialist Radio - Violence and War
Violence and War: Are They Inevitable? The Long View
This episode argues that war and large-scale violence are not primitive constants built into human nature, but rather they became widespread only with the rise of hierarchical, agrarian and class-based societies. For most of human prehistory — during the long era when humans lived as small, egalitarian hunter-gatherer bands — there is scant evidence of systemic war. It was only with the advent of agriculture, permanent settlements and the resultant scarcity that social hierarchies emerged: a privileged minority gained power over resources and labour, dominance replaced egalitarianism, and the structural conditions for permanent class society were created. Thus, war and institutionalised violence are shown as products of social organisation rather than an inevitable aspect of human biology or “original sin.”
Taken from the December 2025 edition of The Socialist Standard.
World Socialist Radio is the official podcast of The Socialist Party of Great Britain. We have one single aim: the establishment of a society in which all productive resources – land, water, factories, transport, etc. – are taken into common ownership, and in which the sole motive for production is the fulfilment of human needs and wants.
Saturday, November 29, 2025
Fred, Charlie's best mate -Two
Frederick Engels, 28th November, 1820 - 5th August 1895
The Aspect column from the October 1971 issue of the Socialist Standard
The second and concluding part of a tribute to Marx co-worker
The writings of Friedrich Engels are indispensable for the study of the growth and development of Scientific Socialism. His writings derive their importance from the fact that even when they were not produced jointly with Marx (as was the case with the Communist Manifesto), they were (until Marx’s death) produced in collaboration with Marx in the sense that the whole plan was discussed by them jointly before the works of either were written The result in each case was submitted for the critical revision of the other.
Engels capacity to explain in a popular manner the ideas and theories of Marx have probably never been excelled. The proof is to be found in the worldwide circulation of Socialism, Utopian and Scientific. Originally this consisted of portions of certain chapters in his polemic against Eugen Dühring. At the request (or suggestion) of Paul Lafargue, Marx’s son-in-law, a separate pamphlet was made out of these sections, which, with Engels’ approval he translated into French and issued in 1880. Translations into other languages and re-prints in the original German text were followed in 1892 by an English translation for which Engels wrote an Introduction which is probably one of his best essays. It has been translated and undergone re-prints in many languages. In 1892 Engels commented upon its great popularity. It remains to this day the best approach to the study of Marxism.
Engels qualities as a writer were shown no less well in his Ludwig Feuerbach. In this essay he shows the connection between the Marxian world-outlook and that of German classical philosophy which came to an end with Feuerbach. Engels skilfully compresses the most profound implications of the Marxian world-outlook into terms that are clear and at the same time carefully guarded against any possibility of over-statement.
In one sense, the essay on Ludwig Feuerbach is a summary of the main theme of Engels’ longest work, his Anti-Dühring. The two works differ in tone and temper; the larger work is a point by point argument against a pretentious, badly-built theory of Socialism while the shorter essay is a straight-forward exposition of the historical origin of the Marxian world-outlook. But while the essay gives that outlook in a summarised form, the Anti-Dühring reaches it in a succession of arguments in which the proposition of Dühring is fully exposed and finally the whole field of philosophical thinking is established for the Marxian view of historical materialism and of revolutionary class-struggle.
The most specialised work of Engels can be placed under three heads:— (a) Military studies, (b) Historical and Political Essays, (c) the completion of Marx’s Capital. Of the works in the first category we need not here concern ourselves.
Engels’s Historical and Political Studies form the largest single section of his writing. For convenience of characterisation they may be sub-classified as (a) the group dealing with the German Revolution, (b) social theory group, and (c) the group dealing with the English working class struggle.
In the first category is his The Peasant War In Germany (one of his neglected writings and now almost forgotten) dealing with events of the early 16th century. Engels traces the historical causation which led to the outbreak in 1515, from which he draws the moral expressed by Marx as “The emancipation of the working class must be the work of the working class itself”, The Peasant War is valuable for its handling of the historical causes of the alliance between peasantry and the working class. During 1851 and 1852 Engels also wrote a series of articles under Marx’s name on the events of 1848 in Germany for The New York Daily Tribune. These were later published as a book, Revolution and Counter Revolution in Germany and still erroneously attributed to Marx.
The social theory group consists of one polemic volume The Housing Question, a study of The Origin the Family, Private Property and the State and an essay The Mark dealing with the form in which tribal communal land ownership, all necessitating a consideration of the nature of the State.
The Origin of the Family deals, in method, with the sociological discoveries of Lewis Henry Morgan, who was the first to prove that human society had undergone a process of historical transformation before even the most ancient of historical records began. At the time when Engels wrote, the notion of a ‘history before history begins’ had barely been discussed. Today the amount of literature on anthropology and related subjects is so vast that the significance of Engels’s work tends to be overlooked. Engels did what modern writers are careful to avoid; he drew a moral from the lessons of the past. Just as Man existed for great lengths of time without developing the idea of such thing as a frontier, so it was possible to envisage a future in which frontiers had disappeared and mankind had become united into a co-operating whole. So with private property; as this, too, was an institution which had evolved by degrees, so it was possible to conceive it passing out of existence and giving place to a form of common ownership on a higher plane. So with the family. As this had its history in the past, it could not he doubted that its future form would change. On all counts the “necessary conditions” of human society — the State with its frontiers, property and the family — which were often regarded as sacred and fixed, were shown to be transitory products of social development and not its immutable causes.
Engels not only draws these Socialist conclusions from his subject matter in a general form; he draws them concretely in his analysis of the State, expounded Anti-Dühring as well as the Origin.
This he shows to be likewise a transitory phenomenon and the product of class divisions based upon property differentiation. He concludes here, that the working class will constitute itself a State force as the capitalists did before them, but under radically different conditions. Since the essence of the State is to coerce and since, further, the essential object of the working class struggle is to abolish class differences, the working class organised as a State, and using its State force, will eliminate all class divisions and must in the end achieve a result in which the State has ceased to be a State at all. So far as the working class eliminates all privileges based upon private property in the means of production and makes the means of production the common property of society, it converts all members of society into workers who are also collective owners. But in doing so, the working class will have abolished distinctly its own working class status. Its own class character will have disappeared with the disappearance of the property relations and the privileges by reference to which it was a class. Its State will therefore cease to be a State since there no longer exists any subjects over whom it can exercise coercion. “The function of the organisation of society will change”, Government over persons will be replaced by administration over things”, the State will die out.
It is extremely difficult to place Engels’s works in any precise order of merit and having in mind the undoubted pre-eminence of the Anti-Dühring, it can be said categorically that Origin of the Family is very necessary for a proper grasp of the ideas expressed by Marx.
The essay, The Mark, is in one sense a foot-note to the Origin. It is useful, however, as showing Engels’ grasp of the various changes and exchanges possible in the ownership of land during its transformation from primitive forms of common ownership to private ownership.
The ‘English’ sub-group contains two works. Engels’ first work The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844, and a later work, a series of articles which appeared in the Labour Standard in 1881 (since re-published under the title of The British Labour Movement.)
In the decade after the Paris Commune of 1871 the independent labour press had practically disappeared but the London Trades Council produced their paper the Labour Standard. Its editor, George Shipton, invited Engels to contribute a series of articles. From May to August Engels wrote ten articles, in which by means of current events he demonstrated that old style trade unionism whose objectives were summed up in the slogan “A fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work” was absurd. It is in the article “Trade Union of May 28, 1881, that he stresses the need for a movement for the “Abolition of the wages system altogether”. Simply worded, quietly and carefully reasoned, these articles are as readable today and as rewarding as when they were written.
These articles, along with the Condition bear testimony to the fact which a perusal of the Marx-Engels correspondence will verify, that Engels’s association with the working class in Britain continued from the time of his contribution to Owen’s New Moral World and O’Connor’s Northern Star down to the date of his death. To the last, he showed pleasure at the memory of the Chartists’ struggle and he never lost his conviction that the British working class would sooner or later find its place in the forefront of the world revolutionary movement of the working class.
The final group of Engels’s writings consists in his completion of volumes II and III of Capital. It was characteristic of him, that with the death of Marx, he should undertake as a matter of course, the completion of the immense work which illness had compelled Marx to leave unfinished. Engels realised and understood that the full importance of Marx’s analysis of the laws which underlie capitalist society could not be appreciated from the first volume alone. Volume I looks at the process of capitalist production only in a general and abstract form. The work of Volumes II and III is to carry forward the analysis to a study of the concrete process which links together production, circulation and consumption. It is these later studies that show the contradiction of capitalist society as a developing whole. In order that Marx’s scientific discovery (The Law of motion of capitalist society) should be presented to the world complete, Engels, at sixty five years of age undertook a task whose immensity can be appreciated by all who have studied the result and compared it with what had been done before in the field of economics.
In connection with his completion of Capital must be considered the number of prefaces written by Engels to new editions of his own works and those of Marx. During the later years of his life, he congratulated himself upon the fact “That there is but a limited number of languages that he could be called upon to assist translators” (Preface to Volume III of Capital). Added to this mass of work of a uniformly high quality must be the enormous amount of correspondence. Nothing Engels wrote ever failed to be interesting and informative. Without the work of Engels, the theories of Marx would be much less known than most people realise. Marx and Engels both stressed the importance of correct theory arising out of historical development as a preliminary to any revolutionary activity. A last quote from Engels’s 1880 preface to The Communist Manifesto is a fitting end to a tribute of this character:
The proletariat cannot obtain its emancipation from the sway of the exploiting and ruling class — the bourgeoisie — without at the same time, and once and for all emancipating society at large from all exploitation, oppression, class-distinction and class struggles.
Bob Ambridge
https://socialiststandardmyspace.blogspot.com/2017/09/engels-man-and-his-work-part-two-1971.html
Fred, Charlie's best mate - One
Frederick Engels, 28th November, 1820 - 5th August 1895
The Aspect column from the September 1971 issue of the Socialist Standard
The first of a two part tribute to Marx’s co-worker Friedrich Engels
Seventy six years have passed since the death of Friedrich Engels, the friend and co-worker of Karl Marx. Much of the interest that has been shown over the years in the Socialist movement has tended to obscure the reputation of Engels by an exclusive pre-occupation with that of Marx — a process which Engels himself encouraged — so it seems more than fitting that we should pay tribute, in recognition of the debt present-day Socialists owe to Friedrich Engels.
Marx’s pre-eminence in their partnership was stressed by no one more emphatically than by Engels himself:
We do not refer only, or even mainly, to the possibility that, without Engels’ aid, Marx would have probably starved to death or been driven insane by privation and disappointment in the years after the failure of the revolt of 1848-9 in Germany and the suppression of the paper (Neue Rheinische Zeitung) in which he had sunk what little money he possessed. This is important enough, but it can be negligible in comparison with the fact that the capability of Marx was fully developed made stronger and richer by his association with Engels and the stimulus of his companionship and talented collaboration. The same process also applies to Engels and his enrichment by his association with Marx. So that the net result is much as Engels expresses it in a letter to Franz Mehring (July, 14 1893):
The friendship of Marx and Engels began in 1844, after having met previously in the office of the Rheinische Zeitung of which journal Marx was the editor. Neither was, at this meeting, much drawn to the other.
Engels, the son of a cotton manufacturer and importer, was born in 1820 in the town of Barmen, now merged with Elberfield and four small towns to form Wuppertal in the province of North Rhine Westphalia. At the time he met Marx, he had just completed his year in the army as a lieutenant in the guard artillery, and although he was deeply interested in the philosophy and and republican-democratic politics of that period, he appears to have been still a rather stiffs “officer of the Guards”. His background in a rigid Lutheran and commercial home was very different from that of Marx who had lived in an atmosphere of eighteenth century culture based on the Rabbinical tradition and legal studies of his father. Marx as a young editor had obtained his knowledge of classical German philosophy and democratic politics by a method opposite to that of Engels, although each was a man of intense feeling and wide sympathy, yet, at their first meeting they did not appear to. have had much in common.
Engels went to England to fill a clerical appointment at his father’s factory in Manchester where he found it necessary to take up the study of commerce. Marx, in his work as editor, found himself engaged in numerous conflicts with the authorities and the censorship. He found himself handicapped by a lack of knowledge of political economy and, what at the time, were new ideas about “Socialism” then prevalent in Paris and from there, spreading out into Germany.
When the Rheinische Zeitung was suppressed in 1844, Marx made his way to Paris expressly to study these subjects. A friend, Arnold Ruge, invited Marx to collaborate with him in producing, from Paris, a review-magazine — the German/French Year book, which was to feature critical philosophical studies upon all the topics then current in Germany. A magazine of this type was impossible to produce in Germany due to the censorship of that period. The collaboration of Radical writers in France and Germany (Feuerbach, Bruno, and Edgar Bauer, Heine and Proudhon among them) were invited and in response to this appeal, an Article “Outlines of Political Economy” was received from Friedrich Engels in Manchester. This led to an invitation from Marx to Engels suggesting a visit to Paris.
Engels’ arrival in Manchester in 1842 coincided with the second upheaval of the Chartist Movement with the strikes and rioting which accompanied it. He was deeply interested in the aims of the Chartists, and through that movement came into contact with the ideas expressed by the supporters of Robert Owen, which ideas overlapped with the Chartist Movement. As a student of commerce, he was naturally brought into a study of classical political economy. It was his association with the Chartists, Owenites and others, which made him aware of the critical conclusions, drawn from that political economy by the other champions of working-class aspirations. These studies, carefully combined with his knowledge of classical German philosophy, resulted in two works. The first, a study of the working class in England in 1844 upon which he was at work when he was invited to contribute to the German/French Year Book. The second was the article he sent in response to that request.
Engels followed his article to Paris, where he and Marx for the next ten days compared notes and views. As a result, they found they had each independently reached the same conclusions; that the capitalist system was historically a transitory phenomenon and bound to give place to a new system, based upon the common ownership of the means of production and that it was the historical mission of the working class to bring the new form of society into being. The fact that each had reached this conclusion by a different method; Engels by the study of classic English philosophy (political), Marx by a study of the French Revolution and its outcome on French proletarian movements, made them complementary to each other. The friendship born out of these circumstances lasted for the remainder of their lives.
The immediate effect of their friendship was that they both commenced upon their life task; to get an understanding and acceptance by the working class of what they regarded as its historic role in society.
Each, in his own way, settled down to the work of propagating the ideas of scientific socialism as opposed to the Utopian ideas of that period. Engels wrote the opening instalment of the Holy Family which Marx completed and published Engels’ fine work The Condition of the Working Class in England was first issued in Germany in 1845. The following quotation is from the preface for the English Edition of 1892: “The author, at that time, was young, twenty four years of age, and his production bears the stamp of his youth with its good and its faulty features, neither of which he feels ashamed”.
The collaboration of Marx and Engels is best shown in the Communist Manifesto. So close was it, that in the final result it is hard to say which is Marx and which is Engels.
When Marx, driven from France, settled in London, Engels joined him and did his best to help Marx get a living by journalism whilst he, in order to get the money for their joint purpose, went to work in the factory owned by his father. Thereafter, for the rest of their lives they never lost contact.
How close their relationship was and how much Engels’ stimulus and encouragement helped in promoting the development of Marx can be seen by this extract from the Marx/Engels correspondence. Marx had completed years of work on his Capital and the first volume was ready for the printer. Marx writes to Engels:
With the name and work of Marx which has endured must be coupled the name and work of Friedrich Engels. With the death of Marx, Engels, at the age of 65 undertook the monumental task of preparing from the notes left by Marx, Volumes two and three of Capital for publication, and spent the rest of his days, vindicating and popularising the work of his friend.
Of Engels’ personality, a word or two is appropriate. He appears to have been a genial person, fond of the open air and country walks, good eating and drinking. He differed from Marx insofar as he was more immediately likeable. But they were as one in their enthusiasm for their joint life's work. In all he did; in his studies and writings he gave all he could. To the Marx children he was an elder brother. When writing of a man like Engels, it is almost impossible not to use superlatives. He was a man in the best possible sense of the term.
In March 1895, he developed cancer in the throat. By August 1895, he was dead. At his own wish his body was cremated and the ashes thrown into the sea off Eastbourne.
Seventy six years have passed since the death of Friedrich Engels, the friend and co-worker of Karl Marx. Much of the interest that has been shown over the years in the Socialist movement has tended to obscure the reputation of Engels by an exclusive pre-occupation with that of Marx — a process which Engels himself encouraged — so it seems more than fitting that we should pay tribute, in recognition of the debt present-day Socialists owe to Friedrich Engels.
Marx’s pre-eminence in their partnership was stressed by no one more emphatically than by Engels himself:
I cannot deny that both before and during my forty year’s collaboration with Marx I had a certain independent share in laying the foundations of the theory, and more particularly in its elaboration. But the greater part of its leading basic principles, especially in the realm of economics and history, and, above all. their final trenchant formulation, belong to Marx. What I contributed — at any rate with the exception of my work in a few special fields — Marx could very well have done without me. What Marx accomplished I would not have achieved. Marx stood higher, saw further, and took a wider and quicker view than all the rest of us. Marx was a genius; we others were at best talented. Without him the theory would not be by far what it is today. It therefore rightly bears his name (F. Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach, Marx-Engels Selected Works Vol. II, Moscow, 1958).This leaves little room for doubt in so far as it concerns Engel’s generous renunciation especially in the reference to “we others.’’ If we differ from it, as in fairness we must, it can only be in respect of the fact which Engels passes over as of no account: the fact that but for Friedrich Engels, there is every possibility that Karl Marx would have been relatively unknown.
We do not refer only, or even mainly, to the possibility that, without Engels’ aid, Marx would have probably starved to death or been driven insane by privation and disappointment in the years after the failure of the revolt of 1848-9 in Germany and the suppression of the paper (Neue Rheinische Zeitung) in which he had sunk what little money he possessed. This is important enough, but it can be negligible in comparison with the fact that the capability of Marx was fully developed made stronger and richer by his association with Engels and the stimulus of his companionship and talented collaboration. The same process also applies to Engels and his enrichment by his association with Marx. So that the net result is much as Engels expresses it in a letter to Franz Mehring (July, 14 1893):
If I find anything to object to it is that you give me more credit than I deserve, even if I count in everything which I might possibly have found out for myself — in time — but which Marx with his rapid coup d’oeil and wider vision discovered much more quickly. When one has the good fortune to work for forty years with a man like Marx, one does not usually get the recognition one thinks one deserves during his lifetime. Then, if the greater man dies, the lesser easily gets overrated and this seems to me to be just my case at present; history will set all this right in the end and by that time one will have quietly turned up one’s toes and not know anything any more about anything (Selected Works, Vol. II).
Now that Engels has “turned up his toes” it is his due that while reserving to Marx that pre-eminence which belongs to him, we must also appreciate and value the work of Friedrich Engels.
The friendship of Marx and Engels began in 1844, after having met previously in the office of the Rheinische Zeitung of which journal Marx was the editor. Neither was, at this meeting, much drawn to the other.
Engels, the son of a cotton manufacturer and importer, was born in 1820 in the town of Barmen, now merged with Elberfield and four small towns to form Wuppertal in the province of North Rhine Westphalia. At the time he met Marx, he had just completed his year in the army as a lieutenant in the guard artillery, and although he was deeply interested in the philosophy and and republican-democratic politics of that period, he appears to have been still a rather stiffs “officer of the Guards”. His background in a rigid Lutheran and commercial home was very different from that of Marx who had lived in an atmosphere of eighteenth century culture based on the Rabbinical tradition and legal studies of his father. Marx as a young editor had obtained his knowledge of classical German philosophy and democratic politics by a method opposite to that of Engels, although each was a man of intense feeling and wide sympathy, yet, at their first meeting they did not appear to. have had much in common.
Engels went to England to fill a clerical appointment at his father’s factory in Manchester where he found it necessary to take up the study of commerce. Marx, in his work as editor, found himself engaged in numerous conflicts with the authorities and the censorship. He found himself handicapped by a lack of knowledge of political economy and, what at the time, were new ideas about “Socialism” then prevalent in Paris and from there, spreading out into Germany.
When the Rheinische Zeitung was suppressed in 1844, Marx made his way to Paris expressly to study these subjects. A friend, Arnold Ruge, invited Marx to collaborate with him in producing, from Paris, a review-magazine — the German/French Year book, which was to feature critical philosophical studies upon all the topics then current in Germany. A magazine of this type was impossible to produce in Germany due to the censorship of that period. The collaboration of Radical writers in France and Germany (Feuerbach, Bruno, and Edgar Bauer, Heine and Proudhon among them) were invited and in response to this appeal, an Article “Outlines of Political Economy” was received from Friedrich Engels in Manchester. This led to an invitation from Marx to Engels suggesting a visit to Paris.
Engels’ arrival in Manchester in 1842 coincided with the second upheaval of the Chartist Movement with the strikes and rioting which accompanied it. He was deeply interested in the aims of the Chartists, and through that movement came into contact with the ideas expressed by the supporters of Robert Owen, which ideas overlapped with the Chartist Movement. As a student of commerce, he was naturally brought into a study of classical political economy. It was his association with the Chartists, Owenites and others, which made him aware of the critical conclusions, drawn from that political economy by the other champions of working-class aspirations. These studies, carefully combined with his knowledge of classical German philosophy, resulted in two works. The first, a study of the working class in England in 1844 upon which he was at work when he was invited to contribute to the German/French Year Book. The second was the article he sent in response to that request.
Engels followed his article to Paris, where he and Marx for the next ten days compared notes and views. As a result, they found they had each independently reached the same conclusions; that the capitalist system was historically a transitory phenomenon and bound to give place to a new system, based upon the common ownership of the means of production and that it was the historical mission of the working class to bring the new form of society into being. The fact that each had reached this conclusion by a different method; Engels by the study of classic English philosophy (political), Marx by a study of the French Revolution and its outcome on French proletarian movements, made them complementary to each other. The friendship born out of these circumstances lasted for the remainder of their lives.
The immediate effect of their friendship was that they both commenced upon their life task; to get an understanding and acceptance by the working class of what they regarded as its historic role in society.
Each, in his own way, settled down to the work of propagating the ideas of scientific socialism as opposed to the Utopian ideas of that period. Engels wrote the opening instalment of the Holy Family which Marx completed and published Engels’ fine work The Condition of the Working Class in England was first issued in Germany in 1845. The following quotation is from the preface for the English Edition of 1892: “The author, at that time, was young, twenty four years of age, and his production bears the stamp of his youth with its good and its faulty features, neither of which he feels ashamed”.
This is a statement with which we must agree. There is certainly nothing to be ashamed of. It is a classic, readable and rewarding; a splendid record of working class life as Engels saw it in 1844, together with its historical background. This was in opposition to the "respectable” and complacent view that saw the working class as the ‘mob’ the 'lower orders’ and sometimes as the ‘swinish multitude’. Engels formulated the proposition that this despised section of society contained the force prepared by historical development for the overthrow of capitalist society, and which would make possible and necessitate the establishment of Socialism.
The collaboration of Marx and Engels is best shown in the Communist Manifesto. So close was it, that in the final result it is hard to say which is Marx and which is Engels.
When Marx, driven from France, settled in London, Engels joined him and did his best to help Marx get a living by journalism whilst he, in order to get the money for their joint purpose, went to work in the factory owned by his father. Thereafter, for the rest of their lives they never lost contact.
How close their relationship was and how much Engels’ stimulus and encouragement helped in promoting the development of Marx can be seen by this extract from the Marx/Engels correspondence. Marx had completed years of work on his Capital and the first volume was ready for the printer. Marx writes to Engels:
London, 16 August, 1867 2 o'clock at nightDear Fred, . . . So this volume is finished. It was thanks to you alone that this became possible. Without your self-sacrifice for me I could never possibly have done the enormous work for the three volumes. I embrace you, full of thanks! (Marx-Engels Selected Correspondence, Moscow, 1956).
After 1869 Engels retired from commerce and in 1870 he came to live in London. The correspondence was now replaced by daily visits. He was also able to relieve Marx of the stresses of his early years by his kindly act of endowing him with a small annual income. It was fitting that it should be Engels himself who found that Marx had died peacefully in his chair and that to Engels should fall the task of making the speech over the grave at Highgate cemetery, March 17, 1883. It included the words: "On the fourteenth of March, at a quarter to three in the afternoon, the greatest living thinker ceased to think . . ", "his name and his work will endure through the ages." (extract from Graveside Speech).
With the name and work of Marx which has endured must be coupled the name and work of Friedrich Engels. With the death of Marx, Engels, at the age of 65 undertook the monumental task of preparing from the notes left by Marx, Volumes two and three of Capital for publication, and spent the rest of his days, vindicating and popularising the work of his friend.
Of Engels’ personality, a word or two is appropriate. He appears to have been a genial person, fond of the open air and country walks, good eating and drinking. He differed from Marx insofar as he was more immediately likeable. But they were as one in their enthusiasm for their joint life's work. In all he did; in his studies and writings he gave all he could. To the Marx children he was an elder brother. When writing of a man like Engels, it is almost impossible not to use superlatives. He was a man in the best possible sense of the term.
In March 1895, he developed cancer in the throat. By August 1895, he was dead. At his own wish his body was cremated and the ashes thrown into the sea off Eastbourne.
Bob Ambridge
https://socialiststandardmyspace.blogspot.com/2017/09/engels-man-and-his-work-part-one-1971.html
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