This wonderful new documentary on the life of Friedrich Engels was made by the German MLPD in honour of the 200th anniversary of Engels’ birth and as part of their current campaign: Don’t Give Anticommunism a Chance.
Giving a brief overview of the great man’s life and work, the film is divided into seven short sections:
1. The most underestimated classic
2. Friedrich Engels and the working-class movement
3. Engels studies the dialectics of nature
4. Socialism – from utopia to a science
5. Engels – brilliant polemicist and his Anti-Dühring
6. Pioneer of the liberation of women
7. From capitalist’s son to communist
The film is fully dubbed into English and, given its short length, manages to cover many of the most important aspects of Engels’ life and work, from his early shunning of the bourgeois life in favour of investigating the conditions of the factory workers of Manchester to his lifelong partnership with his comradce-in-arms Karl Marx, his expounding of many of the key principles of Marxism, in particular of the Marxist philosophical and scientific viewpoint – dialectical and historical materialism – and of the laws governing the development of human history.
This film is essential viewing for all those who would like to learn more about the man and his work, and we are extremely grateful to the comrades of the MLPD for producing it.
For those wanting to understand more about Engels’ great contribution to the science of Marxism, we recommend reading all the texts linked to in this article. A simple place to start is the brief but profound fragment, The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man.
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Visit the MLPD’s YouTube channel: YouTube.com/mlpdde
