When Marx Met Engels, the Renegade Industrialist

[marmar]

By Mary Gabriel
Sep 22, 2011 8:01 PM ET


(Bloomberg) Friedrich Engels had been traveling from England back home to Germany when he decided to make a slight detour in Paris.

Karl Marx knew him as the author of what he considered a brilliant piece on political economy written earlier in the year. The two met on Aug. 28, 1844, and talked for 10 straight days and as many nights.

At 23, Engels was tall, slim, blond, meticulous in his dress, and athletic. He loved women and horses. At his factory- owning father’s insistence, he had quit school when he was 17 to learn the family trade. A reckless bachelor who rode to hounds and had a gift for discerning good wine, he was also an impassioned revolutionary, who took a radical Irish factory girl as a live-in lover and even as a teenager wrote trenchant newspaper articles on the social evils resulting from unregulated industrialization in his native Barmen.

It was the revolutionary Engels who introduced himself to Marx that August, but Marx readily embraced both sides of this extraordinary character. Engels was a rare combination, a man of ideas and a reformer who could write articles of great eloquence and immediacy, but also a man of business who understood the social, political and economic ramifications of the new industrial system because he had lived it. He was an envoy from the material world, arrived at Marx’s door to fill the gaps in his theoretical studies. ................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-09-23/when-marx-met-engels-renegade-industrialist-commentary-by-mary-gabriel.html