Friedrich Engels Quotes on Politics
Friedrich Engels collaborated with Marx on the Communist Manifesto (1848) and The German Ideology (composed 1845–46, published 1932), developed the philosophical and natural-scientific dimensions of the Marxist tradition more systematically than Marx himself, and after Marx's death edited and partly composed the second and third volumes of Capital from the surviving manuscripts. The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State (1884), Anti-Dühring (1878), and Dialectics of Nature (composed 1873–86, published 1925) supply the principal independent Engelsian contributions: the historical-materialist analysis of the family and the state as products of the development of class society, the philosophical defense of dialectical materialism against the eclectic German socialist Eugen Dühring, and the unfinished attempt to extend the dialectical analysis to the natural sciences.
Quotes
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“The state is not abolished, it withers away.”
Anti-Dühring , pt. 3, ch. 2 (1877) -
Attributed to Friedrich Engels:
“All history has been a history of class struggles.”
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Attributed to Friedrich Engels:
“The materialist conception of history starts from the proposition that the production of the means to support human life is the basis of all social structure.”
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Attributed to Friedrich Engels:
“Force, however, plays yet another role in history, a revolutionary role.”
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Attributed to Friedrich Engels:
“When it is a question of making a profit, the bourgeoisie has no fatherland.”
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Attributed to Friedrich Engels:
“The first condition of socialism is the abolition of private property in the means of production.”
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“For I am of the opinion... that the reconquest of the German speaking left bank of the Rhine is a matter of national honour, and that the Germanisation of a disloyal Holland and of Belgium is a political necessity for us. Shall we let the German nationality be completely suppressed in these countries, while the Slavs are rising ever more powerfully in the East?”
Written under the pseudonym of Friedrich Oswald, “Telegraph für Deutschland”, Telegraph für Deutschland , Nos. 2-5, (January 1841) -
“How do you think the transition from the present situation to community of Property is to be effected? The first, fundamental condition for the introduction of community of property is the political liberation of the proletariat through a democratic constitution .”
Draft of a Communist Confession of Faith (1847) -
“The Austrian Germans and Magyars will be set free and wreak a bloody revenge on the Slav barbarians . The general war which will then break out will smash this Slav Sonderbund and wipe out all these petty hidebound nations, down to their very names. The next world war will result in the disappearance from the face of the earth not only of reactionary classes and dynasties, but also of entire reactionary peoples. And that, too, is a step forward.”
The Magyar Struggle in Neue Rheinische Zeitung (13 January 1849) | Referring to the Serb uprising of 1848–49 , in which Serbs from Vojvodina fought against the previously victorious Hungarian revolution .