Today marks two hundred years since the birth of Friedrich Engels, a giant of the nineteenth-century socialist movement — and for four decades, Karl Marx’s closest collaborator. After his friend’s death in 1883, Engels devoted much of his own final years to editing and popularizing Marx’s work.

But as Marxist economist Michael Roberts insists in his new book, Engels 200: His Contribution to Political Economy, Engels was also an innovative thinker in his own right. From his work on humanity’s relationship with nature to his writings on finance, Engels offered sharp insights into many problems that socialists have to confront today.

Roberts spoke to Jacobin’s David Broder about Engels’s role in shaping the young Marx’s thinking, the relevance of his ideas on unemployment and the housing question, and why he should be reclaimed from attempts to paint him as a purely dogmatic figure.