Friedrich Engels

Friedrich Engels was born in 1820 at Barmen in the Prussian Rhineland, the son of a textile manufacturer, and was sent into business by his father before finishing school. During his military service in Berlin he attended university lectures and joined the Young Hegelians. At twenty-two he was sent to work in the Manchester mill of which his father was a partner, where he saw for himself the wretched conditions of English workers and wrote The Condition of the Working Class in England. In 1844 he met Marx in Paris, beginning a collaboration of nearly forty years. To support Marx's work he went back to the Manchester mill and worked there for nearly twenty years. After Marx's death he edited and published the second and third volumes of Capital and became the acknowledged leader of the international workers' movement. He knew a dozen languages and was a serious student of military science; his friends called him 'the General'.