ABSTRACT
The distinct contribution of Friedrich Engels to the Marxist tradition (apart from his extensive collaborative work with Marx) may be identified in three ways. The first concerns his remarkable military insights, due not merely to his experience in military training and fighting in the 1848 revolution, but to his keen insight into the nature warfare and tactics. This under-acknowledged feature of Engels’s work would translate into the Russian communist movement, which became aware of the need for a well-trained Red Army. The second point concerns Engels’s early insights into the nature of a capitalist market economy, drawn from his direct experiences in Manchester. These insights would subsequently be put into Marx’s rigorous framework. The third is Engels’s abiding argument that a religion like Christianity has a distinct revolutionary dimension to it.
