Engel's story is very interesting. I highly empathise with his perspective and I think it's a part of history that needs more resolution. And I really never thought I would to be completely honest.
We're living at a time where there's a complete polarization or detachment from history as if there's nothing to learn. As if some people are evil and others are good, period.
And it's all emotional. For many years I completely ignored a lot of ideas and people just because there was a big movement in a different direction.
I really don't want to be like that. If we don't learn from history we are doomed to repeat it. Learning means really learning and putting ourselves into people's positions.
Here's a text:
When we hear “Engels,” most people think Marx’s sidekick.
But Friedrich Engels wasn’t just a theorist — he was a witness.
In 1842, Engels was sent to Manchester to work in his father’s textile business. What he saw there shocked him to the core:
Overcrowded slums: Families packed into one damp room, with sewage running in the streets.
Child labor: Kids as young as six working 12–14 hours, stunted, deformed, exhausted.
Disease everywhere: Typhus, cholera, tuberculosis ripping through neighborhoods, while the wealthy lived just a short walk away in green suburbs.
Misery and survival: Prostitution, alcoholism, petty crime — not because workers were “lazy,” but because they were being crushed by a system that treated them as disposable.
Engels compared this to the comfort of the bourgeoisie — factory owners enjoying gardens and fine homes, funded by the destruction of the people who worked for them.
This is why Engels was so annoyed by abstract “armchair” philosophers and utopian dreamers.
While they debated theory, he had walked through neighborhoods where children were dying at ten.
For Engels, socialism wasn’t about dogma or purity. It was about confronting real conditions: sewage in the streets, kids in factories, human lives shortened for profit.
That’s why he never had patience for sects, cliques, or doctrinaire posturing.
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Now, Marxism later on lead to very bad outcomes as we all know.
But don't you think we are in a similar situation? Isn't interesting that Engels actually had good intentions and a good diagnosis of the situation?
#politics #philosophy #economics