Two hundred years since his birth, Friedrich Engels’s name remains inextricably linked to that of his friend Karl Marx. On many points, the two authors of The Communist Manifesto were in total agreement, but it’s also true that each man had his own particular sensibilities. For instance, Marx’s philosophical works were richer and more substantial than Engels’s, and we can equally say that Engels’s political activity involved elements and experiences that Marx’s did not. And there was good reason for this: Engels died twelve years after Marx.

This is important — for the period between Marx’s death in 1883 and Engels’s own in 1895 were also years in which the workers’ movement enjoyed considerable growth across Europe. This period, therefore, posed several questions which Marx could only briefly glimpse. Was revolution still on the agenda? Would the development of the working-class’s organizations allow them to take power in the short term? And if so, how? In his final years, Engels tried to offer a series of responses to these burning questions.

But let’s start from the end of the story: the very last text Engels prepared, an introduction to Marx’s The Class Struggles in France, 1848–1850. Written in 1895, for decades this piece would be taken for Engels’s “political testament”; it sparked many debates, especially in Germany. This especially owed to the fact that the version first published by German Social Democratic leaders was falsified, in order to give it more “moderate” trappings.