“All my life I’ve been doing what I was meant to do—I’ve been playing second fiddle—and I think I’ve done my job pretty well. I was glad that I had such a great first violin like Marx.” Friedrich Engels.
“After his friend Karl Marx (who died in 1883), Engels was the most remarkable scientist and teacher of the modern proletariat in the entire civilized world. Since the fate of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, the life work of both friends has become their common cause. Therefore, in order to understand what Friedrich Engels did for the proletariat, it is necessary to clearly grasp the significance of Marx’s teachings and activities in the development of the modern working-class movement.
Marx and Engels were the first to show that the working class with its demands is a necessary product of the modern economic order, which, together with the bourgeoisie, inevitably creates and organizes the proletariat; they showed that it is not the benevolent attempts of individual noble personalities, but the class struggle of the organized proletariat that will save humanity from the disasters now oppressing it.
Marx and Engels, in their scientific works, were the first to explain that socialism is not an invention of dreamers, but the ultimate goal and necessary result of the development of productive forces in modern society. The whole written history up to now has been the history of class struggle, the change of domination and victories of some social classes over others. And this will continue until the foundations of class struggle and class domination – private property and disorderly social production – disappear. The interests of the proletariat demand the destruction of these foundations, and therefore the conscious class struggle of the organized workers must be directed against them.”
V.I. Lenin, “Friedrich Engels”, 1896
