Marx & Engels

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels met in 1844 in Paris, when Marx was twenty-six and Engels was twenty-four. Engels was returning from Manchester, where he had been managing a textile factory owned by his father. Marx was a radical journalist who had recently lost his editorship and was living in exile. They spent ten days in intense conversation and began a correspondence that lasted until Marx's death in 1883: nearly forty years.

The practical structure of their relationship was extraordinary and remained more or less constant throughout. Engels worked: first in Manchester at the family factory, later in various capacities in business, always generating income that he systematically funneled to Marx. Marx did not work, in any conventional economic sense. He wrote, researched, theorized, organized, attended meetings, participated in the political life of the European left, and was chronically, desperately, overwhelmingly short of money.

The gap between Marx's theoretical writing about labor, exploitation, and the conditions of the working class, and his practical reliance on the income generated by a factory that employed working-class labor, was something Engels managed with a discretion that amounted to a sustained act of protectiveness toward the project they shared.

Engels did not simply send money. He managed Marx's relationship with creditors, intervened in domestic crises, provided cover when Marx's financial situation became untenable, and sustained the material conditions under which Das Kapital was written. Without Engels, the book almost certainly would not have been completed. This is not an exaggeration. The letters document, in detail, the recurring near-collapses of Marx's ability to function that Engels's intervention repeatedly forestalled.

The standard account of the collaboration gives Marx the ideas and Engels the practical work of dissemination, organization, and communication. This is partially accurate and also an oversimplification.

The Communist Manifesto, published in 1848, was commissioned from Marx and Engels as a statement of principles for the Communist League. The drafting history shows that Engels wrote an earlier draft, the "Principles of Communism," which Marx used as the basis for the final document. The Manifesto's most famous passages are Marx's prose, but the structure and many of the arguments were developed by Engels first.

Engels was, throughout their collaboration, a more effective communicator than Marx. His writing was clearer, more direct, more accessible to the non-specialist reader. His book The Condition of the Working Class in England, written in 1845 from firsthand observation in Manchester, is in some ways a more compelling document of what capitalism actually did to actual people than the corresponding sections of Das Kapital, which has the density of economic analysis that reflects Marx's deeper commitment to the theoretical apparatus.

The self-awareness in this letter is striking and also, given that Marx continued to accept the arrangement for the eighteen more years of his life, something less than a resolution of the asymmetry it acknowledges.

Engels maintained a long relationship with Mary Burns, an Irish working-class woman from Manchester, until her death in 1863, and then with her sister Lizzie Burns until Lizzie's death in 1878. He married Lizzie on her deathbed, which was legally necessary to secure her financial interests.

The Burns relationships are significant for several reasons. They represented a genuine personal commitment to women who were the embodiment of the class Engels was theorizing: Irish immigrants, factory workers, people living with the specific material conditions that The Condition of the Working Class in England documented. Whatever the emotional texture of those relationships, they gave Engels a proximity to the actual working-class experience that Marx, who lived in genteel poverty but middle-class social arrangements, did not have.

When Mary Burns died in January 1863, Marx's response was notably cool, focused more on his own financial difficulties than on condolence. Engels's response to Marx's response, documented in the correspondence, was brief, hurt, and quickly recovered from. The friendship held. But the exchange reveals something about the emotional texture of the relationship and about the limits of even a very close male intellectual friendship of that era.

The forty-year correspondence between Marx and Engels is one of the largest and most extensively documented intellectual friendships in history. The letters cover politics, philosophy, economics, natural science, military affairs, gossip about the left, family news, health updates, and the details of their ongoing shared project. The intellectual range is extraordinary. The emotional warmth is also, at times, striking.

Marx needed from Engels something close to everything: money, editorial feedback, intellectual sparring, emotional support, practical intervention in crises, and the assurance that the work they shared had value and that he had value. Engels's willingness to provide all of this, for forty years, without significant complaint and apparently without fundamental resentment, is one of the more unusual features of the historical record.

What Engels needed from Marx is less clear. The intellectual partnership clearly mattered to him: his own writing is less ambitious without Marx, and the projects he completed after Marx's death, particularly the later volumes of Das Kapital that he edited from Marx's notes, were acts of sustained dedication to the shared project rather than to his own intellectual agenda.

Whether there was something else in the arrangement, something closer to the codependency that Melody Beattie would theorize a century later, is a question the historical record poses but cannot answer. What is clear is that Engels organized his entire economic and intellectual life around making Marx's work possible, and that this was a choice he made and renewed continuously for four decades.

Marx's household in London was, for much of the 1850s and 1860s, a domestic catastrophe. Three of his seven children died in childhood. His wife Jenny, who had given up her aristocratic connections to marry a radical philosopher, was frequently unwell and exhausted by the material conditions of their life. Helene Demuth, the family's housekeeper and, it later emerged, the mother of an illegitimate child fathered by Marx, was a constant presence.

The illegitimate son, Frederick Demuth, was publicly attributed to Engels during Marx's lifetime to protect Marx's reputation. Engels told the truth about the father only on his deathbed, in 1895. Eleanor Marx, who learned the truth then, was reported to be deeply distressed.

The gap between Marx's theoretical project, the liberation of the working class from exploitation, and his treatment of Helene Demuth, who was in a position of economic dependency that left her with extremely limited options regarding the pregnancy, is one of the more uncomfortable details of the biographical record. It does not invalidate the theoretical work. It does complicate the portrait of the man.

What the Marx-Engels collaboration produced that neither could have produced alone: a body of theoretical and political work that shaped the twentieth century more directly than almost any other intellectual partnership. The Communist Manifesto, the three volumes of Das Kapital, Engels's own theoretical contributions in Anti-Duhring and The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, the political organizing, the journalism, the correspondence with political figures across Europe: all of it emerged from a collaboration that was also a forty-year act of sustained personal commitment by one person to another.

The intellectual product is inseparable from the personal arrangement. Das Kapital exists because Engels existed, and worked, and sent money, and kept Marx functional long enough to write it. The history of the twentieth century is, in part, a function of that arrangement. This is either the strongest possible argument for friendship or the strongest possible argument against codependency. Possibly both.

- Carver, Terrell. Engels: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press, 2003. - Gabriel, Mary. Love and Capital: Karl and Jenny Marx and the Birth of a Revolution. Little, Brown, 2011. - Henderson, W.O. The Life of Friedrich Engels. Frank Cass, 1976. - Jones, Gareth Stedman. Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion. Harvard University Press, 2016. - Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. Selected Correspondence. International Publishers, 1942. - McLellan, David. Karl Marx: His Life and Thought. Harper & Row, 1973.

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Interpretive opinion based on the public record. Not a clinical assessment or diagnosis of any individual.