Friedrich Engels
German philosopher and social scientist (1820 to 1895); co-author of The Communist Manifesto.
Friedrich Engels did not write this page.
We collected these quotes from things they published elsewhere, and every quote links to where it was said. They have no account here and have not endorsed this site. Quotes are word for word; the short line under each one is our own restatement, not their wording. Their own site. Is this you? Claim it or ask us to remove it. Or tell us what is wrong here.
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Their wordsThe history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class struggles.
↗Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848; English edition of 1888)gutenberg.org All 36 from this book
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Their wordsThe executive of the modern State is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.
↗Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848; English edition of 1888)gutenberg.org All 36 from this book
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Their wordsThe bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society.
↗Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848; English edition of 1888)gutenberg.org All 36 from this book
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Their wordsOwing to the extensive use of machinery and to division of labour, the work of the proletarians has lost all individual character, and consequently, all charm for the workman. He becomes an appendage of the machine, and it is only the most simple, most monotonous, and most easily acquired knack, that is required of him.
↗Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848; English edition of 1888)gutenberg.org All 36 from this book
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Their wordsWhat the bourgeoisie, therefore, produces, above all, is its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.
↗Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848; English edition of 1888)gutenberg.org All 36 from this book
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Their wordsIn this sense, the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.
↗Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848; English edition of 1888)gutenberg.org All 36 from this book
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Their wordsBut in your existing society, private property is already done away with for nine-tenths of the population; its existence for the few is solely due to its non-existence in the hands of those nine-tenths.
↗Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848; English edition of 1888)gutenberg.org All 36 from this book
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Their wordsCommunism deprives no man of the power to appropriate the products of society; all that it does is to deprive him of the power to subjugate the labour of others by means of such appropriation.
↗Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848; English edition of 1888)gutenberg.org All 36 from this book
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Their wordsThe working men have no country. We cannot take from them what they have not got.
↗Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848; English edition of 1888)gutenberg.org All 36 from this book
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Their wordsThe ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class.
↗Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848; English edition of 1888)gutenberg.org All 36 from this book
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Their wordsThe proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degrees, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e., of the proletariat organised as the ruling class; and to increase the total of productive forces as rapidly as possible.
↗Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848; English edition of 1888)gutenberg.org All 36 from this book
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Our reading
Political power in the proper sense is the organised power of one class to oppress another
Their wordsPolitical power, properly so called, is merely the organised power of one class for oppressing another.
↗Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848; English edition of 1888)gutenberg.org All 36 from this book
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Their wordsIn place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.
↗Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848; English edition of 1888)gutenberg.org All 36 from this book
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Their wordsChristian Socialism is but the holy water with which the priest consecrates the heart-burnings of the aristocrat.
↗Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848; English edition of 1888)gutenberg.org All 36 from this book
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Their wordsThey desire the existing state of society minus its revolutionary and disintegrating elements. They wish for a bourgeoisie without a proletariat.
↗Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848; English edition of 1888)gutenberg.org All 36 from this book
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Their wordsIn proportion as the modern class struggle develops and takes definite shape, this fantastic standing apart from the contest, these fantastic attacks on it, lose all practical value and all theoretical justification.
↗Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848; English edition of 1888)gutenberg.org All 36 from this book
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Our reading
Communist aims can be reached only by forcibly overthrowing all existing social conditions
Their wordsThe Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions.
↗Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848; English edition of 1888)gutenberg.org All 36 from this book
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Their wordsThe proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.
↗Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848; English edition of 1888)gutenberg.org All 36 from this book
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Their wordsEngland is the classic soil of this transformation, which was all the mightier, the more silently it proceeded; and England is, therefore, the classic land of its chief product also, the proletariat.
↗The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 (1845; Florence Kelley Wischnewetzky translation)gutenberg.org All 20 from this book
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Their wordsThey were comfortable in their silent vegetation, and but for the industrial revolution they would never have emerged from this existence, which, cosily romantic as it was, was nevertheless not worthy of human beings.
↗The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 (1845; Florence Kelley Wischnewetzky translation)gutenberg.org All 20 from this book
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Their wordsHence also the deep wrath of the whole working-class, from Glasgow to London, against the rich, by whom they are systematically plundered and mercilessly left to their fate, a wrath which before too long a time goes by, a time almost within the power of man to predict, must break out into a Revolution in comparison with which the French Revolution, and the year 1794, will prove to have been child’s play.
↗The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 (1845; Florence Kelley Wischnewetzky translation)gutenberg.org All 20 from this book
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Our reading
Large-scale manufacture created the working class and annihilated the old petty middle class
Their wordsManufacture, on a small scale, created the middle-class; on a large scale, it created the working-class, and raised the elect of the middle-class to the throne, but only to overthrow them the more surely when the time comes. Meanwhile, it is an undenied and easily explained fact that the numerous, petty middle-class of the “good old times” has been annihilated by manufacture, and resolved into rich capitalists on the one hand and poor workers on the other.
↗The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 (1845; Florence Kelley Wischnewetzky translation)gutenberg.org All 20 from this book
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Their wordsHence it comes, too, that the social war, the war of each against all, is here openly declared. Just as in Stirner’s recent book, people regard each other only as useful objects; each exploits the other, and the end of it all is, that the stronger treads the weaker under foot, and that the powerful few, the capitalists, seize everything for themselves, while to the weak many, the poor, scarcely a bare existence remains.
↗The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 (1845; Florence Kelley Wischnewetzky translation)gutenberg.org All 20 from this book
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Our reading
Manchester is arranged so the wealthy can cross workers' districts without seeing their misery
Their wordsAnd the finest part of the arrangement is this, that the members of this money aristocracy can take the shortest road through the middle of all the labouring districts to their places of business, without ever seeing that they are in the midst of the grimy misery that lurks to the right and the left.
↗The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 (1845; Florence Kelley Wischnewetzky translation)gutenberg.org All 20 from this book
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Their wordsThe proletarian is, therefore, in law and in fact, the slave of the bourgeoisie, which can decree his life or death.
↗The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 (1845; Florence Kelley Wischnewetzky translation)gutenberg.org All 20 from this book
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Their wordsSurplus population is engendered rather by the competition of the workers among themselves, which forces each separate worker to labour as much each day as his strength can possibly admit.
↗The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 (1845; Florence Kelley Wischnewetzky translation)gutenberg.org All 20 from this book
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Their wordsFrom this it is clear that English manufacture must have, at all times save the brief periods of highest prosperity, an unemployed reserve army of workers, in order to be able to produce the masses of goods required by the market in the liveliest months.
↗The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 (1845; Florence Kelley Wischnewetzky translation)gutenberg.org All 20 from this book
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Their wordsSuch occupations are therefore especially overcrowded with Irishmen: hand-weavers, bricklayers, porters, jobbers, and such workers, count hordes of Irishmen among their number, and the pressure of this race has done much to depress wages and lower the working-class.
↗The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 (1845; Florence Kelley Wischnewetzky translation)gutenberg.org All 20 from this book
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Their wordsI have now to prove that society in England daily and hourly commits what the working-men’s organs, with perfect correctness, characterise as social murder, that it has placed the workers under conditions in which they can neither retain health nor live long; that it undermines the vital force of these workers gradually, little by little, and so hurries them to the grave before their time.
↗The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 (1845; Florence Kelley Wischnewetzky translation)gutenberg.org All 20 from this book
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Their wordsIt is all very pretty and very agreeable to the ear of the bourgeois to hear the “sacredness of property” asserted; but for him who has none, the sacredness of property dies out of itself.
↗The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 (1845; Florence Kelley Wischnewetzky translation)gutenberg.org All 20 from this book