SOURCE: “Engels and the History of Marxism,” in The History of Marxism, Vol. 1: Marxism in Marx's Day, edited by Eric J. Hobsbawm, Indiana University Press, 1982, pp. 290-326.

[In the following essay, Jones offers an assessment of Engels' contribution to the theory of historical materialism, noting that typically critics only acknowledge that Engels played a marginal role in the development of this Marxist theory. Jones concludes that Engels contributed significantly to the formulation of the historical materialist theory and that clearly several important Marxist propositions are first developed in Engels' early writings rather than in Marx's.]

Since his death in London in 1895, it has proved peculiarly difficult to arrive at a fair and historically balanced assessment of Engels' place in the history of Marxism, both within the Marxist tradition and outside it. Engels was both the acknowledged co-founder of historical materialism and the first and most influential interpreter and philosopher of Marxism. Yet, since at least the breakup of the Second International, he has been persistently treated, either simply as Marx's loyal lieutenant, or else as the misguided falsifier of true Marxist doctrine. The continued prevalence of these rather stale alternatives cannot be attributed to the lack of an adequate scholarly basis on which Engels' career could more imaginatively be judged. On the contrary, Engels was magnificently served by one of the best of twentieth-century scholarly biographies, that of Gustav Mayer, the product of over three decades research and a scarcely rivalled knowledge of nineteenth-century German labour and socialist history.¹ But Mayer's work has remained little studied, indeed virtually unknown until its republication in the last decade. Because Mayer was not a Marxist, his research went virtually unacknowledged by communist writers, even though he deliberately confined himself to a painstaking descriptive reconstruction of Engels' life and work, and ventured few judgements of his own. He was also unlucky in the timing of his biography. The first volume appeared in 1918 at a time when the attention of German socialists was deflected by the end of the war and the splits of the November revolution. The second volume appeared at the end of 1932 and was almost immediately suppressed by the incoming Nazis. Even in the German speaking world the book almost immediately became a bibliographic rarity, and it was never translated, except in an extremely truncated version. It thus remained the restricted possession of a few specialised scholars in the post-war period.

But the one-sidedness of most modern treatment of Engels was not solely or even principally the consequence of the mishaps of Mayer's book. For, from at least the end of World War I, assessment of Engels' particular contribution to Marxism had become a highly charged political question. After a period of unrivalled prestige, between the 1880s and 1914, Engels' reputation suffered first in the revolutionary leftist critique of the failings of the Second International and subsequently in the non-communist or anti-communist critique of the excesses of the Third.

It was Lukacs and to a lesser extent Korsch, in the revolutionary period following the Russian Revolution who drove the first effective wedge between the theory of Marx and that of Engels.² In a respectful but ominous critique of Engels' Anti-Dühring, Lukacs from a radical Hegelian standpoint attacked Engels' preoccupation with a uniform dialectic linking human and natural history, and in particular his distinction between ‘metaphysical’ and ‘dialectical’ science, on the grounds that it obscured the truly revolutionary dialectic within Marx: that between subject and object within human history. This criticism was not merely epistemological. For in Lukacs' eyes, the prestige of Darwin and evolutionary science within the Second International was intimately bound up with an undialectical separation of theory and practice, and hence the immobilism and reformism of its politics. Although Lukacs' critique had little immediate impact, and he himself later retracted it, it was a prefiguration of the form taken by many later attacks. Dialectical materialism—Plekhanov's term for a Marxist philosophy and a general view of the world—was largely constructed from Engels' later writings, and once this philosophy received the official imprimatur of the Soviet Union, it became difficult to differentiate an attitude to Engels from an attitude to the communist positions of the Stalinist era. On the one hand, the publication of Engels' unfinished manuscript, The Dialectics of Nature, in 1927, became associated with Stalin's attempt to impose a dialectical materialist orthodoxy upon natural scientists. On the other hand, it was the social democrats, Landshut and Meyer who first published a version of Marx's 1844 Manuscripts in an effort to pit an ethical humanist Marx against a Leninist interpretation of Marxism. The alleged rift between the theories of Marx and Engels, first implied by Lukacs, was further widened, no longer as an attack upon social democracy, but in defence of it.

In the post-war period, if Cold War commentators were happy to lump together Marx and Engels as the twin architects of a determinist and totalitarian system, the official spokesmen of the Communist Parties were equally insistent upon the seamless unity of the work of the two men and intensely suspicious of any attempt to distinguish their individual contributions. Alternative interpretations of the Marxist legacy were largely developed by those who felt uncomfortable with either of these poles—a mixed bag of dissident communist theorists. Second International social democrats, radical Christian theologians and existentialist or neo-Hegelian philosophers. Their efforts, either to construct a Marx which challenged the authorised version, or to appropriate him to a pre-existing philosophical tradition, generally took the form of heaping on to Engels all the unwanted components of Soviet Marxism, from which they were so anxious to distance themselves.

The one-sidedness and distortions of the twentieth-century treatment of Engels are really only a measure of the immense and lasting influence that he exerted on the definition of Marxist socialism at the point at which it first began seriously to be adopted by the European socialist movement. This effectively happened, neither in the 1840s, nor in the 1860s, but in the 1880s and the immense burden of work and responsibility that this involved was virtually shouldered by Engels alone. Already in the last years of the First International, the brunt of the battle against Proudhonism and Bakuninism had fallen on Engels, and in the last ten years of his life, Marx produced little of immediate public consequence. His answers to the queries of Russian revolutionaries on the relevance of Capital to the character of a future Russian revolution were hesitant and open-ended. They were not sufficiently decisive to be used by Russian social democrats in their struggle against the Narodniks and were thus left unpublished until the 1920s.³ Similarly, Marx's Critique of the Gotha Programme was an unwanted contribution to the unity negotiations between Eisenach and Lassallean wings of German social democracy in 1875. Little heed was taken of it even by the professed friends and followers of Marx in the social democratic leadership, and it was only made public by Engels during the negotiations over a new party programme fifteen years later. The last joint attempt of Marx and Engels directly to challenge the running of the German Social Democratic Party, the so-called drei Sterne affair of 1879—an angry critique of the leadership's toleration of an attempt from within the party to dilute the proletarian character of the SPD—ended in an equally bitter blow to their pride. Their threat of public dissociation from the party evoked little response, and thereafter it became clear that direct and overt attempts at political intervention would be self-defeating, and that the London exiles would have to accept their honoured but remote role as founding theorists or have their political powerlessness publicly exposed.

But if the late 1870s marked the nadir of Marx and Engels' personal influence upon the policy of the German party, it also marked the effective point of origin of the Marxism of the Second International. For the world-wide diffusion of Marxism in the guise of a systematic and scientific socialism began neither with the Communist Manifesto, nor with Capital but with the publication of Engels' Anti-Dühring.

‘Judging by the influence that Anti-Dühring had upon me’, wrote Kautsky, ‘no other book can have contributed so much to the understanding of Marxism. Marx's Capital is the more powerful work, certainly. But it was only through Anti-Dühring that we learnt to understand Capital and read it properly’.⁴ This was the formative book of the most influential leaders of the Second International—Bebel, Bernstein, Kautsky, Plekhanov, Axelrod and Labriola. Nor was its influence confined to party leaders and theorists. Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, an excerpt from it, shorn of all reference to Dühring published in 1882 became the most popular introduction to Marxism apart from the Manifesto. Not only was it widely read in the social democratic parties of the German speaking world, but it paved the way to an understanding of Marxism in areas of traditional resistance to Marx's and Engels' positions, especially France. The difference in atmosphere between the late 1870s and the late 1880s was evident in Engels' Ludwig Feuerbach of 1888. Anti-Dühring was in origin a reluctant local intervention into the confused socialism of early German social democracy. ‘It was a year before I could make up my mind to neglect other work and get my teeth into this sour apple’,⁵ wrote Engels of his polemic which had been published serially in Vorwärts between 1877 and 1878 (Liebknecht had in fact been urging him to combat Dühring's influence since at least 1874). Feuerbach, however, was written in a quite different spirit. ‘The Marxist world outlook has found representatives far beyond the boundaries of Germany and Europe and in all the literary languages of the world’,⁶ wrote Engels in the Preface. Popular conceptions of orthodox Marxism today still date back to Engels' work of systematisation and popularisation in that crucial decade.

It is this fact which has tended to dominate all subsequent assessments of Engels' achievement. Engels, the prophet of dialectical materialism has wholly overshadowed Engels, the co-founder and elaborator of historical materialism. Little attention has been paid to his early life and work. Criticism or appreciation of Engels has overwhelmingly focussed on his later writings. Those who have defended an orthodox Marxist tradition, particularly when filtered through a Bolshevik perspective, have given equal authority to historical materialism and to Engels' generalisation of the dialectic, as if they formed part of one seamless web. Conversely, in the eyes of his western critics, Engels has loosely been associated with positivism and evolutionism and with the passivity of Second International politics, as if the differences between his outlook and that of Kautsky and Plekhanov were simply one of degree, and as if the positions adopted by Marx would have been substantially different from his own. In the light of the subsequent development of Marxism, preoccupations with dialectical materialism or the failures of the Second International has not been surprising. But they have led to a consistent imbalance in the historical treatment of Engels. In the orthodox view, Engels' individuality as a thinker all but disappears. In the conventional western views, his credentials as a Marxist are seriously impugned.

At a simple level of historical fact, the second view is easier to dispose of than the first. It is an elementary failure of historical interpretation not to make any distinction between the constituents of Engels' own outlook, and the way in which he was read by a generation of intellectuals nurtured on Buckle and Comte. Again to quote Kautsky, ‘they had started from Hegel, I started from Darwin’.⁷ It is highly unlikely that Engels conceived his Dialectics of Nature, as an all-encompassing genetic theory of development, of which Capital was to form the final social-historical part. His concern was rather to redefine materialism in terms which took account of scientific development in the nineteenth century. It was to combat the physiologically based vulgar materialism of Vogt and Büchner so popular in the liberal-dominated Arbeiterbildungsvereine of the 1850s, that Engels had first begun to take an interest in developments in the natural sciences. After the publication of the Origin of the Species, he was in no doubt that the historical materialist conception of a mode of production clearly distinguished human history from the Darwinian struggle for existence, and wryly commented upon the fact that the bourgeoisie first projected its social theory (from Hobbes to Malthus) into the world of nature and then of the basis of Darwin's researches, accepted it back again as an adequate portrayal of human society. Against the later positivist-evolutionist stress upon natural laws of development whose effects were conceived in terms of a simple transitive causality and which proceeded unilinearly from the natural through the economic/technological to the political and ideological, Engels, on the basis of historical materialism was more concerned to demonstrate the effect of human practice on nature through science and production, and in later years particularly, the relative autonomy of politics and ideology from any simple determination by the economic. It was in relation to the spread of positivist and economic determinist ideas, that he wrote to Conrad Schmidt in 1890:

What these gentlemen all lack is dialectics. They always see only here cause, there effect. That this is a hollow abstraction, that such metaphysical polar opposites exist in the real world only during crises, while the whole vast process goes on in the form of interaction—though of very unequal forces, the economic movement being by far the strongest, most primordial, most decisive—that here everything is relative and nothing absolute—this they never begin to see. As far as they are concerned Hegel never existed.⁸

What was problematic in Engels' attempts to theorise the sciences of nature and history, was not the few dubiously positivist formulations to be found there, but his confident resort to a Hegel whom he and Marx had ‘inverted’. Here, however, one should beware of any simple juxtaposition between Marx's and Engels' thought. In the years after Marx's death, Engels had neither the desire, the confidence nor the time to develop new positions of his own. His arguments in Feuerbach on the relationship between historical materialism and the natural sciences and upon the dialectical nature of reality, whether natural or historical had been developing from at least the end of the 1850s and had frequently been raised in his correspondence with Marx.⁹ It is well known that Marx contributed some of the economic chapters of the Anti-Dühring and that he was acquainted with the work as a whole. It should also be mentioned that there are comments in Marx's handwriting on parts of the unfinished manuscript of Engels' Dialectics of Nature. Similarly, although it has been convincingly demonstrated that historical materialism is not an inversion of Hegel's dialectic and that such an inversion is not to be found in the theoretical structure of Capital, that should not obscure the fact that this was how both Marx and Engels tried to theorise its achievement.¹⁰ In this sense Engels' explanations in Feuerbach do not significantly depart from Marx's brief statement in the Preface to Capital, or from Engels' own unfinished review of Marx's Critique of Political Economy, published in Das Volk in 1859. Thus, if there was an inadequacy in Engels' later explanation of the relationship between Marxism and the Hegelian dialectic, it was an inadequacy fully sanctioned by Marx.

But simply to emphasise the congruence of outlook between Marx and Engels is not adequate either. Its effect has been to render invisible the considerable independent contribution that Engels made to the development of Marxist theory and to diminish his own individuality as a thinker. Engels' own very modest assessments of his contribution have been the principle obstacle here, and later commentators have generally been content to follow his judgement. In Feuerbach, he wrote:

I cannot deny that both before and during my forty years collaboration with Marx I had a certain independent share in laying the foundations of the theory, and more particularly in its elaboration. But the greater part of its leading basic principles, especially in the realm of economics and history, and above all their final trenchant formulation, belong to Marx. What I contributed—at any rate with the exception of my work in a few special fields—Marx could very well have done without me. What Marx accomplished I would not have achieved. Marx stood higher, saw further, and took a wider and quicker view than all the rest of us. Marx was a genius; we others were at best talented.¹¹

It would clearly be pointless to contest Marx's theoretical superiority nor need there be any doubt that Engels could neither have given historical materialism the logical coherence and explanatory breadth with which Marx imbued it. Indeed, on his own, he would probably never have arrived at the theory of historical materialism at all. The division of labour between the two collaborators was established almost from the beginning. In one of his earliest letters to Marx (17 March 1845), concerning their respective plans to write critiques of Frederick List's System of National Economy, Engels wrote that he would deal with the practical consequences of List's theory, ‘while I presume in view of … your personal inclinations you will go into the premisses rather than his conclusions.¹²

Most subsequent commentators have left the matter there, assigning to Engels a vaguely auxillary role in the formation of the theory. They miss the centrality of Engels' contribution because they look for it in the wrong place. For theoretical ability, even when possessed in as exceptional a degree as Marx, is a necessary but not sufficient condition of a theoretical revolution: especially in the social domain. For such revolutions to occur, disturbing phenomena are also necessary, which not only point to the inadequacy of the existing theoretical problematic, but are suggestive of the raw components of a new theoretical structure. It was Engels in his writings of 1844 and 1845 who provided these decisive new components—even if in a raw and unsatisfactory theorised practical state. Before, however, making clear what these components were, it is first necessary to say something of Engels himself, so that the importance and limitations of his contribution become easier to understand.

Engels was two years younger than Marx, born in Barmen in 1820, the eldest son of one of the principal manufacturers in the town.¹³ In the backward and non-industrialised state of Germany in the Restoration period, Barmen and its sister town of Elberfeld, as manufacturing towns dependent on the world market were exceptional. Travelling journalists literateurs in the 1830s and 1840s were apt to refer to the region as the German Manchester, although the German Coventry would have been a more apt description, since its principal trade was ribbon-making and its workers generally worked together with their families in their homes for putting-out merchants who controlled the purchase of raw materials and the sale of finished goods. Elberfeld-Barmen was also exceptional in another respect. Although, subject like the rest of the Rhineland to the Napoleonic conquest and the benefits of the Code Napoleon, the population was Calvinist or Lutheran rather than Catholic, and thus much more amenable to Prussian rule after 1815 than the Rhineland itself.

These two features markedly differentiated Engels' family and cultural background from that of Marx. Living in the Francophile zone, and the son of a nominally Protestant Jewish lawyer with liberal enlightenment beliefs, Marx appears to have experienced little early conflict with his father's political or cultural outlook. At least until the end of the 1830s, the local Trier middle class continued to resent the Prussian occupation, the nostalgia for Napoleon remained strong, and the educated population were receptive to French ideas, both liberal and, in the 1830s, Saint-Simonian. The adolescent Marx appears to have been little moved by the political and cultural stirrings of German nationalism and to have felt a much deeper affinity with the outlook of the German Aufklärung with its humanist adulation of classical civilisation. It is therefore not surprising that when after a period in Bonn he arrived as a graduate student in Berlin, he should have felt drawn to a liberal tinged version of Hegel's notion of the state as the guiding principle of his reflection, rather than the emotive principle of the nation. Until his friend and mentor, Bruno Bauer was sacked from Bonn University, he appeared destined for an academic career, and his move to the political left and finally to communism was of a much more gradual and measured kind than that of the young Engels.

Engels' formation was quite different. The pietist Protestantism of the Barmen merchants was fiercely opposed to the pagan associations of the Aufklärung, to any rationalist dilution of Biblical interpretation and to the ambiguously protestant philosophy of Hegel. The value placed on education was strictly practical. The gymnasium at Elberfeld to which Engels went, enjoyed an excellent reputation, particularly in languages, so important for the Barmen merchant's profession. But schooling stopped at the end of the secondary level and was followed by a commercial apprenticeship in the firm of a business colleague. It was in this way that the young Engels was sent to the Bremen import-export firm of Heinrich Leopold in 1838. Within the close society of Barmen merchants, creative literature was suspect, Goethe prone to dismissal as ‘a godless man’ and the theatre regarded as immoral. Although grateful for some of the Napoleonic legal reforms, the prevalent attitude to French ideas was hostile. Family prayers and reading of the Bible, meditation on devotional literature, an ethic of dedication and hard work and a sectarian theology communicated through the terrifying pulpit oratory of preachers like Krummacher were the principle components of the merchant-family culture of Engels' youth (though lightened somewhat by a love of music, both choral and instrumental). The outlook of the merchant manufacturers was strongly patriarchal, in their attitude to their families, to their workers and to their religion. The world of the merchants was closely tied to the world of the preachers. As social equals, it was normal for merchants' sons to marry priests' daughters, and vice versa. Engels' mother, the daughter of a protestant pastor in Hamm was typical of this pattern.

There are early signs of Engels' adolescent striving to escape the narrow imaginative horizons of his family and of Wuppertal society. His father was shocked to discover his 13-year-old son secretly reading a French medieval romance—‘ein schmutziges Buch’. But it is important not to over-individualise or over-psychologise Engels' revolt against his father.¹⁴ He was not an unloved, cruelly treated or neglected child. On the contrary, as the intended heir to the family business, he appears to have been subject to the constant worried solicitude of his parents. However perennial generational conflict might be, it is only in particular historical circumstances that it acquires social and political significance. In the Wuppertal in the late 1830s and 1840s a generational divide in religious and social attitudes was not confined to the Engels household, but present, if in a milder degree, among other of his contemporaries. To understand why this was a social rather than an individual phenomenon, it is necessary to realise that the social and religious world of the old merchant families had by the later 1830s begun to disintegrate. The sober Calvinism of the older generation had been deeply ingrained because it provided a satisfactory ordering of social experience. The merchant élite had made no distinction between the church and municipal government of the town, and the patriarchalism of their religion had been an appropriate articulation of their face-to-face government of the workforce whose cottages clustered round their chapels and their warehouses.

But from the Napoleonic period onwards, Barmen's trade entered a period of prolonged crisis resulting from its dependence on an English-dominated world market. In social terms, the population was threatened by dearth, declining living standards and intensification of work punctuated by frequent spells of unemployment. In religious terms, the result was a break-up of stable church government. Small domestic masters and their apprentices increasingly engulfed by ‘pauperism’, were attracted to breakaway revivalist and millenarian sects, while many relapsed into a state of semi-despair exacerbated by a dramatic increase in cheap schnapps consumption. While preaching became more revivalist and emotional, the traditional merchant élite began to withdraw from active church government. It was against this background that the 19-year-old Engels made his first pseudonymous attack upon the philistinism of the pietism of the Wuppertal.

The dissidence of the young Engels and his circle in Barmen took the initial form of aesthetic revolt against the narrowness of the merchant world and juvenile attempts to emulate the current literary avant garde. Engels' denunciation of the Wuppertal was not that of an embryo socialist, but that of the aspirant poet and representative of modern literary ideas. He particularly identified himself with the poet, Ferdinand Freiligrath, who had come to the Wuppertal to work as a commercial clerk. The image of a double life—a merchant by occupation and a writer by vocation—remained attractive until he managed to escape the family profession in 1845—and it reappeared in various guises in later life.

But by the end of the 1830s, the pre-occupations of literary political and religious debate were too intertwined to allow meaningful separation. Pietism, romantic conservatism and the absolution of the Christian Prussian state were all sharply opposed to the various strands of liberalism, rationalism and post-Hegelian biblical criticism. Since the debate was so polarised, to be a writer or poet necessitated a conscious choice between progress and reaction, and there was little doubt which direction Engels would follow. Unlike Marx, Engels' first political attitudes were strongly shaped by the liberal nationalist literary movement of the 1830s. His earliest heroes had been drawn from teutonic mythology and in Bremen the legend of Siegfried remained important to him as a symbol of the courageous qualities of young German manhood in struggle against the petty servile Germany of the princes. Soon after he began work in Bremen he became an enthusiastic disciple of Young Germany, a short-lived literary group which had arisen in the wake of the 1830 revolution, and modelled its style and stance upon the exiled Jews, Heine and Börne. Engels was at first an admirer of Karl Gutzkow, the editor of the Telegraph für Deutschland, who published his Letters from the Wuppertal. But by the end of 1839, Engels' enthusiasm had began to shift towards Gutzkow's former mentor, Börne whose radical republican denunciations of German princes and aristocrats, combined with his polemic against the Francophobe tendencies of German nationalism appealed to Engels' combative enthusiasm for the ‘ideas of the century’.

But for Engels at this time, the problem of religious belief was uppermost. Despite his discontent with the outlook of his family, the strength of his religious upbringing was not easily shaken off. The intensity of his religious longings can be testified by a pietist poem he wrote at the time of his confirmation. The stages by which he moved away from orthodox Christianity—from a liberal Christianity through Schleiermacher to Strauss—can be traced in detail in his letters from Bremen to his schoolfriends, the Graeber brothers. One thing is clear. He could not simply move away from belief. He could only abandon one belief when he had found another. His first criticisms of Wuppertal pietism were written from the viewpoint of liberal Christianity. But through his reading of Gutzkow's essays, he came across Strauss, and by October 1839, he could write, ‘I am now an enthusiastic Straussian’. Strauss was a bridge to Hegel, and the first impact made upon him by Hegel was akin to a religious conversion. In a real or imaginary voyage across the North Sea in July 1840, he stood at the bowsprit of the ship looking out over the ‘distant green surface of the sea, where the foaming crests of the waves spring up in eternal unrest’ and reflected:

I have had only one impression that could compare with this; when for the first time the divine idea of the last of the philosophers, this most colossal creation of the thought of the nineteenth century, dawned upon me, I experienced the same blissful thrill, it was like a breath of fresh sea air blowing down upon me from the purest sky; the depths of speculation lay before me like the unfathomable sea from which one cannot turn one's eyes straining to see the ground below; in God we live, move and have our being! We become conscious of that when we are on the sea; we feel that God breathes through all around us and through us ourselves; we feel such kinship with the whole of nature, the waves beckon to us so intimately, the sky stretches so lovingly over the earth, and the sun shines with such indescribable radiance that one feels one could grasp it with the hand.¹⁵

It was this difference in intensity of emotional need which is one of the features which distinguished Engels' relationship with Hegel from that of Marx. Engels had no academic education in philosophy, he found Hegel in his search for a secure resting place to replace the awesome contours of the Wuppertal faith which had been so deeply imprinted on his childhood imagination. He never subjected Hegel to the rigorous dissection which Marx undertook in his Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right or his Critique of the Hegelian Dialectic and Philosophy as a whole in 1843 and 1844, and thus when in later years in reaction to vulgar materialism and positivism, he resorted once more to Hegel, he tended to reproduce elements of his own pre-Marxist relationship with the German idealist tradition.

Already an enthusiastic Young Hegelian when he left Bremen for his year's military service in Berlin in 1841, he rapidly replaced the pantheist Hegel by the ‘secret atheist’ Hegel, and soon became one of the most apocalyptic members of ‘the free’. Within weeks in Berlin, he was launching polemics against Schelling, who had been summoned to the chair of philosophy there in order to combat the dangerous tendency of Hegelianism. He did not appreciate the incompatibility between Bruno Bauer's left Hegelian concept of ‘self-consciousness’, and Feuerbach's Man which through the method of inversion, effectively annulled the Hegelian dialectic altogether. In all his references to German philosophical radicalism up to the Holy Family, he bracketed Bauer and Feuerbach together as part of a single line of thought. Years later in Ludwig Feuerbach, he wrote of the Essence of Christianity ‘one must himself have experienced the liberating effect of this book to get an idea of it; enthusiasm was general. We all became at once Feuerbachians’.¹⁶ This was much truer of himself than of other members of the group. For what captured his attention and his enthusiasm, both in the Essence of Christianity and in the later Provisional Theses for the Reform of Philosophy, was not Feuerbach's criticism of Hegel, but his conversion of theology into anthropology, his humanist religion. In all his writings up to his meeting with Marx in Paris in the late summer of 1844, he remained methodologically a Hegelian, all his more ambitious essays taking the form of a dialectical juxtaposition of the development of one-sided principles, whose contradiction was transcended in a higher unity represented by the postulates of communist humanism.

Perhaps another reason why Engels never felt impelled to subject Hegel to a searching critique, was that unlike some of the other Young Hegelians, he never seems to have taken Hegel's theory of the state very seriously. This appeared to him part of Hegel's conservative ‘system’ rather than to his ‘revolutionary method’, and unlike the rest of the circle Engels had already become a revolutionary republican democrat before he became a Hegelian. Thus in Berlin, he still believed he could combine a Hegelian philosophy of history with Börne's republican view of politics. In a comic Young Hegelian mock epic which he wrote with Edgar Bauer in the summer of 1842, he referred to himself as:

… Oswald the Montagnard
A radical is he, dyed in the wool, and hard.
Day in, day out, he plays upon the guillotine a
Single, solitary tune and that's a cavatina,
The same old devil-song; he bellows the refrain:
Formez vos bataillons! Aux armes, citoyens!(17)

His political position remained Jacobin until he met Moses Hess at the Rheinische Zeitung offices at Köln, while preparing to go to England, and was converted to Hess's philosophical communism. It is probably because he had participated so fully in the bohemian anti-Christian excesses of ‘the free’, and was at one with Edgar Bauer in his frequent denunciations of the politics of a juste milieu, that his meeting with Marx in Köln around the same time, was so cool.

But Engels' weaknesses were also his strengths. If he did not possess the intellectual persistence and deductive power to be a rigorous original theorist, if his attempts to theorise were more remarkable for their boldness than their finality, his great virtues were his relative openness to new impressions, the persistent radicalism of his temperament, an astonishing quickness of perception, and comprehension, a daring intuition and an omnivorous curiosity about his surroundings. He was and remained marked by his merchant upbringing and training. It was to be seen in his methodical dealing with his correspondence, his careful ordering of his affairs, his ability to use every hour of the day, his irritation at the bohemianism of a Liebknecht and his complete antipathy to the generous flourishes of a disorderly aristocrat like Bakunin. He was by all accounts a good businessman and the acumen with which he represented the family firm in Manchester in the early 1850s greatly helped to ease the tensions caused by the deep rift with his father which had come to its head in 1848. It was the desire to get outside and beyond this background that made him more personally adventurous than Marx, more willing to flout convention, and at the same time more abrasive to those outside his circle. It would be difficult to imagine Marx living with a working-class Irish woman, exploring the slums of Manchester of his own accord, scribbling comic drawings over the manuscript of the German Ideology, roving the French countryside in late 1848 and extolling the charms of the peasant girls, fighting a military campaign in 1849, and back in England, riding to hounds, keeping a pet parrot and boasting of his wine cellar. Spiessburger was one of Engels' favourite terms of abuse, and there was nothing of the petit-bourgeois in Engels' make-up. He never concealed his background and was no diplomatist. Working men were probably justified in their intermittent complaints of his arrogance,¹⁸ though it shouldn't be forgotten that this was accompanied by a genuine personal modesty, a candid avowal of his own limitations, and a warm loyalty to old friends. If, as he wrote, he was no genius, he was certainly a man of exceptional talents. He possessed a fluent and lucid prose and wrote with unusual speed. Not only was he a superb exponent of the application of historical materialism, once it was in his possession, but he was also surely one of the most gifted journalists of the nineteenth century and one of its best historians. It was this unusual combination of attributes that enabled him to make his particular contribution to the formation of historical materialism.

Engels left for England at the end of November 1842, ostensibly to continue his commercial training at the firm of Ermen and Engels in Manchester, and he remained there for 21 months. Looking back to this first stay in England forty years later, Engels wrote:

While I was in Manchester, it was tangibly brought home to me that the economic facts, which have so far played no role or only a contemptible one in the writing of history, are at least in the modern world, a decisive historical force; that they form the basis of the origination of the present day class antagonisms in the countries where they have become fully developed, thanks to large scale industry, hence especially in England, are in their turn the basis of the formation of political parties, and of party struggles and thus of all political history.¹⁹

From the evidence of the writing he produced at the time, the process by which he came to those conclusions, was by no means as simple and clearcut as his later retrospect implied. For he not only had to use his eyes and ears, to open himself to new impressions, but also to frame questions against the grain of some of the basic presuppositions of the German philosophical communism which he now brought with him to England. The beginnings of a break with these presuppositions did not really appear until the second year of his visit, were not manifest until The Condition of the Working Class in England which he wrote up in Barmen after his return home between September 1844 and March 1845, and not completed until the time which he and Marx spent defining their position in opposition to German Ideology in Brussels in 1845 and 1846.

The first signs of his growing preoccupation with the importance of ‘economic facts’ are to be found from the end of 1843 in an ambitious series of essays on political economy, Carlyle's Past and Present and the condition of England, which were in part published in the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher and continued in Vorwärts. A reading of Fourier, but in particular of Carlyle, led him to ‘the condition of England’: ‘the “national wealth” of the English is very great and yet they are the poorest people under the sun’.²⁰ Or as Carlyle put it: ‘in the midst of plethoric plenty, the people perish; with gold walls and full barns, no man feels himself safe or satisfied’.²¹ A reading of Proudhon's What is Property and some of the works of Owen, stimulated him to connect this condition with the consequences of private property. In late 1843, he wrote of Proudhon: ‘The right of private property, the consequences of this institution, competition, immorality, misery, are here developed with a power of intellect, and real scientific research which I never found united in a single volume’.²² However, Engels in his ‘Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy’, published in the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher went considerably further than Proudhon. He did not simply contrast the miserable economic reality with the statements of political economists, but attempted to show that the contradictions of political economy were necessary results of the contradictions engendered by private property. He was the first of the German philosophical left to shift discussion towards political economy and to highlight the connections between private property, political economy and modern social conditions in the transition to communism. Political economy, he defined as ‘a science of enrichment’, ‘a developed system of licensed fraud’ resulting from the expansion of trade and ‘born of the merchants' mutual envy and greed’.²³ For trade was based on competition engendered by private property, which opposed individual interests to one another, and thus produced the division between land, labour and capital, the confrontation between the labourer and his product in the form of a wage, the conversion of man into a commodity, the invention of machinery and the factory, the dissolution of family and nationality and of all other bonds into a mere cash-nexus, the polarisation of society into millionaires and paupers and the universalisation of ‘the war of all against all’. The ‘science of enrichment’ which accompanied this process was seen to be trapped in irresolvable antinomies, and its practitioners to be guilty of ever greater hypocrisy and immorality. For the defenders of free trade and liberal economics from Adam Smith onwards, despite their attacks on monopoly and professions of peaceful progress through free trade, refused to question the greatest monopoly of all, private property, productive, under the name of competition, of the most bloodthirsty and general war of all against all.

It is known that this essay strongly influenced Marx's own first reflections on political economy in the 1844 manuscripts, and was still regarded by him in 1859 as a ‘brilliant sketch on the criticism of economic categories’.²⁴ Nevertheless, it would be quite wrong to regard the Outlines as evidence of a break with his philosophical communism under the impact of English conditions or of an anticipation of historical materialism as it was to be conceived in 1845. Not only was the stress placed upon private property and competition rather than mode of production and the struggle between classes, but private property itself was made dependent on ‘the unconscious condition of mankind’.²⁵ The stance from which Engels made his critique was ‘human’ (that is, anthropological rather than theological), and Carlyle was praised because his book showed ‘traces of a human point of view’.²⁶ Engels fully accepted Carlyle's definition of the condition of England, but he ascribed Carlyle's contempt for democracy and ignoring of socialism, not to his class position, but to his ‘pantheism’ which still placed a supernatural power above man. Carlyle's solution was a new religion based on the gospel of work. But for Engels, religion, far from being an answer to the immorality and hypocrisy of the present, was in fact the root of the present evil. The solution was:

the giving back to man the substance he has lost through religion; not as divine but as human substance, and this whole process of giving back is no more than simply the awakening of self-consciousness. … The root of all untruth and lying is the pretension of the human and the natural to be superhuman and supernatural. For that reason we have once and for all declared war on religion and religious ideas.²⁷

It was for this reason that trade crises could be defined as ‘a natural law based on the unconsciousness of the participants’, that Adam Smith could be described as ‘the economic Luther’ who put ‘Protestant hypocrisy’ in place of ‘Catholic candour’, and the Malthusian population theory be seen as ‘the pinnacle of Christian economics’.²⁸ It was for similar reasons, evidently reinforced by a reading of Marx's essay on The Jewish Question, that a few months later, Engels attempted to develop a theory of the English constitutional monarchy as an expression of ‘man's fear of himself’.²⁹

Furthermore, if the standpoint of Engels' critique was humanist, its method of critique remained Hegelian. As he wrote, with some consternation a few days after his arrival in England in November 1842:

there is one thing that is self-evident in Germany, but which the obstinate Briton cannot be made to understand, namely that the so-called material interests can never operate in history as independent guiding aims, but always consciously or unconsciously serve a principle which controls the threads of historical progress.³⁰

Writing a year later on political economy, he remained equally confident that ‘once a principle is set in motion it works by its own impetus through all its consequences whether the economists like it or not’.³¹ His method of analysing political economy was to ‘examine the basic categories, uncover the contradiction introduced by the free trade system and bring out the consequences of both sides of the contradiction’.³²

Engels came to England in full agreement with Hess's prophecy that England would be the bearer of a social revolution which would consummate and transcend the religious-philosophical revolution in Germany and the political revolution in France.³³ But from the beginning, he was forced to admit that ‘among the parties which are now contending for power, among the whigs and tories, people know nothing of struggles over principles and are concerned only with conflicts of material interests’.³⁴ The problem therefore was to discover how in England principle had realised itself through the apparent domination of material interests and pure practice. His solution to this problem appeared a year later in an unfinished series on the Condition of England, written in the first few months of 1844. ‘The concern of history from the beginning’, he wrote, was ‘the antithesis of substance and subject, nature and mind, necessity and freedom’. World history up to the end of the eighteenth century had only set these antitheses ever more sharply against one another. ‘The Germans, the nation of Christian spiritualism, experienced a philosophical revolution; the French, the nation of classical materialism and hence of politics, had to go through a political revolution’.³⁵ But: ‘The English, a nation that is a mixture of German and French elements, who therefore embody both sides of the antithesis and are for that reason more universal than either of the two factors taken separately, were for that reason drawn into a more universal, a social revolution’. The English embodied these antitheses in their sharpest form and it was their inability to resolve them that explained ‘the everlasting restlessness of the English’. ‘The conclusion of all English philosophising is the despair of reason, the confessed inability to solve the contradictions with which one is ultimately faced, and consequently on the one hand a relapse into faith and on the other devotion to pure practice’.³⁶ This explained the religious bigotry of the English middle class combined with its empiricism but at the same time ‘this sense of contradiction was the source of colonisation, seafaring, industry and the immense practical activity of the English in general’.³⁷ Thus only England had a social history:

Only in England have individuals as such, without consciously standing for universal principles, furthered national development and brought it near to its conclusion. Only here have the masses acted as masses, for the sake of their interests as individuals; only here have principles been turned into interests before they were able to influence history.³⁸

We have stressed the philosophical problematic within which Engels attempted to come to terms with England between 1842 and 1844, not to contradict his statement about his growing awareness of the importance of ‘economic facts’, but to show how great was the intellectual and imaginative effort that had to be made before he could write The Condition of the Working Class in England—a book, which is by no means solely an achievement of observant reportage, but which also embodies a profound shift in his political and theoretical position. The distance he had to travel and the extent to which he had to unlearn, not only the presuppositions of radical German idealism, but also virtually all the available varieties of socialism of the time, can be highlighted by his changing view of the revolution the working class and modern industry.

Engels came to England just after the Chartist general strike, confident of Hess's prophecy of imminent social revolution and the realisation of communism. Communism, in Hess's scenario, it should be stressed, represented the triumph of the principles of community and ‘unity’ over egoism and fragmentation.³⁹ It was not the outcome of a battle between classes, nor was its realisation located in the destiny of any particular class. Hess repeatedly rejected Lorenz von Stein's identification of communism with a proletariat spurred on by a greedy and selfish desire for equality derived from the needs of the stomach.⁴⁰ Thus Engels acted quite consistently in January 1843 when he turned down the invitation of Bauer, Schapper and Moll in London to join the League of the Just. He refused the communism of the German artisans since, as he later confessed, ‘I still owned, as against their narrow-minded equalitarian communism, a goodly dose of just as narrow-minded philosophical arrogance’.⁴¹ As he described the creed of the German philosophical communists, among whom he counted himself, later that year,⁴² ‘a Social revolution based upon common property, was the only state of mankind agreeing with their abstract principles’. Thus Germans were bound for communism since: ‘The Germans are a philosophical nation, and will not, cannot abandon communism, as soon as it is founded upon sound philosophical principles: chiefly if it is derived as an unavoidable conclusion from their own philosophy. And this is the part we have to perform now’.

Since socialism concerned humanity and not the interests of a particular class, it is not surprising to find that for most of his stay in England, Engels should ascribe much more importance to the Owenites than the Chartists. ‘As to the particular doctrines of our party’, he wrote in 1843, ‘we agree much more with the English socialists than with any other party. Their system like ours, is based upon philosophical principle’.⁴³ He was very impressed by how far ahead the English were in the practice of socialism and his only disagreement with them was that: ‘The Socialists are still Englishmen, when they ought to be simply men, of philosophical developments on the Continent they are only acquainted with materialism but not with German philosophy, that is their only real shortcoming’.⁴⁴ His distance from the outlook of the Chartists was further reinforced by their concentration on overcoming solely a form of the state rather than the state itself. For, as he wrote, ‘Democracy is, as I take all forms of government to be, a contradiction in itself, an untruth, nothing but hypocrisy (theology, as we Germans call it), at the bottom’.⁴⁵ He clearly admired the combativity and spirit of the Chartists from the start and he regarded their victory as inevitable, but his sights were set firmly beyond the transitory triumph of democracy. The socialists, he wrote in January 1844, ‘are the only party in England which has a future, relatively weak though they may be. Democracy, Chartism must soon be victorious, and then the mass of the English workers will have the choice only between starvation and socialism’.⁴⁶

Given these positions however, his early impressions of England were somewhat disconcerting. On his arrival, he was surprised to discover that, ‘when people here speak of Chartists and Radicals, they almost always have in mind the lower strata of society, the mass of proletarians, and it is true that the party's few educated spokesmen are lost among the masses’.⁴⁷ He was even more astonished to find that the appeal of socialism was likewise virtually confined to the lower end of society and that the works of Strauss, Rousseau, Holbach, Byron and Shelley were read by workers, but virtually unmentionable in middle class and ‘educated’ circles. Carlyle helped him to understand why the middle class should be so sunk in ‘mammonism’ and bigotry, but he could find no better reason why enlightenment should be confined to the lower classes, than that the situation was analogous to what had occurred at the beginnings of Christianity.⁴⁸

From around the beginning of 1844 however, a shift in his perceptions is detectable. Philosophical humanism and Hegelian method remained dominant, but the weight attached to different elements within this framework changed. Particularly noticeable is the new and primordial importance attached to the Industrial Revolution. After a detailed description of changes in industry, Engels stated:

This revolution through which British industry has passed is the foundation of every aspect of modern English life, the driving force behind all social development. Its first consequence was … the elevation of self-interest to a position of dominance over man. Self-interest seized the newly created industrial powers and exploited them for its own purposes; these powers which by right belong to mankind became, owing to the influence of private property, the monopoly of a few rich capitalists and the means to the enslavement of the masses. Commerce absorbed industry into itself, and thereby became omnipotent, it became the nexus of mankind.⁴⁹

His attention, in other words, had shifted from explaining competition as a consequence of merchant's greed and the political economists’ ‘science of enrichment’ to the real forces which had universalised competition. He had also begun to discern how industrialisation had transformed the class system. The most important fact about eighteenth-century England had been the creation of the proletariat, a wholly new class; while in the same process, the middle class had become aristocratic. But this crystallisation of England into three distinct classes—landed aristocracy, monied aristocracy and working-class democracy—had in turn undermined the state. In an analysis of the English constitution and the legal system written in March 1844, he came to the conclusion that the famed balance of powers inscribed in the constitution was ‘one big lie’.⁵⁰ Contrasting the theory and practice of the Constitution, he wrote: ‘on the one hand the trinity of the legislature—on the other the tyranny of the middle class’. Neither Queen, Lords or Commons ruled England. ‘Who then actually rules in England? Property rules’.⁵¹ The power of the aristocracy did not derive from its constitutional position but from its vast estates. Thus, to the extent that the power both of the aristocracy and the middle class derived from their property and to the extent that ‘the influence conferred by property’ constituted ‘the essence of the middle class’ … ‘to that extent the middle class does indeed rule’.⁵²

But if the constitution were found to be a mere shell concealing the rule of property, and if other English ‘birthrights’—freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, Habeus Corpus and the Jury system—were likewise found to be privileges of the rich and denied to the poor, then what had at first seemed so mysterious to Engels—the unreasoning opposition of the middle class to democracy and socialism—now became much clearer. Socialism remained his guiding aim, and ‘democratic equality’ remained a ‘chimera’. But if the battle against the undemocratic state was in reality, not a political battle, but a social battle against the rule of property, then Chartism assumed a quite different significance. For what sort of democracy would a Chartist victory entail?

Not that of the French Revolution whose antithesis was the monarchy and feudalism, but the democracy whose antithesis is the middle class and property. … The middle class and property are dominant; the poor man has no rights, is oppressed and fleeced, the Constitution repudiates him and the law mistreats him; the struggle of democracy against the aristocracy in England is the struggle of the poor against the rich. The democracy towards which England is moving is a social democracy.⁵³

Around the beginning of September 1844, Engels stayed with Marx in Paris on his way back to Barmen. Continuing his retrospect on his discovery in Manchester, of the decisive importance of ‘economic facts’ as the basis of ‘present day class antagonisms’ Engels wrote in 1885:

Marx had not only arrived at the same view, but had already in the German-French Annals (1844) generalised it to the effect, that speaking generally, it is not the state which conditions and regulates civil society, but civil society which conditions and regulates the state, and consequently, that policy and its history are to be explained from the economic relations and their development, and not vice versa.⁵⁴

This statement is only partly true. For on the evidence of Marx's extant writings up to his meeting with Engels, he had not arrived ‘at the same view’ in at least two important respects. Firstly, while Marx had established the determination of the state by civil society Engels had established—though not in theoretically generalised form—an equally important proposition, the class character of the state. In his Critical Notes on the Article, ‘The King of Prussia and Social Reform’ by a Prussian, written a few weeks before Engels' arrival, Marx's basic definition of the state was that: ‘The state is based on the contradiction between public and private life, on the contradiction between general interests and private interests’.⁵⁵ In this article, there was no conception of a ruling class in a later Marxist sense. The theme was rather the incapacity of political administration in the face of the domination of civil society from whose contradictory character, the illusion of the political realm was itself to be explained. Engels on the other hand, had defined the English state as an instrument used by the propertied ruling class in its struggle against the working class.⁵⁶

Secondly, Engels' allusion to the type of class struggle engendered by modern industry, pertained primarily to himself. Until his unfinished essay on List, written early in 1845, Marx's references to modern industry had been cursory and descriptive. The decisive concept around which the new theory of historical materialism was to crystallise between 1845 and 1847 was that of the mode of production, and the lynchpin of that concept was the emphasis that it placed upon means of production. Theoretically, it would eventually enable Marx and Engels to understand class struggle as the revolt of the forces of production against the relations of production. Politically, it would enable them to declare war on capital, while stressing the progressive tendency of modern industry. The crucial change effected by the industrial revolution had been its transformation of the relationship between the labourer and the means of production. It was this transformation that had produced the unprecedented form assumed by modern class struggle.

Although Engels in 1844 had begun to sense with increasing sureness the revolutionary significance of modern industry through its creation of a new form of class struggle, he was nowhere near to producing the theory of historical materialism. He was simply concerned with the particular path that England appeared to be taking to social revolution, and he clung inconsequentially to a blend of Hegel and Feuerbach writings to explain it. But embodied in the space created by that inconsequentiality were precisely the raw elements which would be the catalyst of the new theory. Marx, on the other hand in the 1844 Manuscripts, precisely because of his theoretical rigour, remained essentially within an artisanal framework. Following with greater consistency the technique of Feuerbachian inversion, the crucial relationship emphasised was not that between labourer and means of production, but between the labourer and his product, and his vision was that of man's pauperisation, both materially and anthropologically—a world of alienation and private property unmediated by the progressive revolutionary possibilities of the new form of production. Marx's particular impact upon Engels in the summer of 1844 was that of a brilliant humanist theorist, bolder and more original in his application and extension of the logic of inversion to the state and political economy, and clearsighted about the incompatibility between Feuerbach and Hegel.

The Condition of the Working Class in England represents the final phase of Engels' thinking before he joined Marx in Brussels. The narrowing of his theme to modern industry, the working class and the development of class struggle is itself indicative of a change in his priorities. Like Marx, who later planned to write a book on dialectics, Engels never found time to write his social history of England, of which The Condition of the Working Class was intended to form a part. The Hegelian categorisation of English prehistory which had formed such a prominent part of his preceding essays, is absent from the book, no doubt as a result of his conversations with Marx. But so also, despite his continuing belief that communism stood above the battle of classes, is the preoccupation with theology and Feuerbach. Engels had contributed some of the most ecstatic passages on Feuerbach in the Holy Family, but already by November 1844, a reading of Stirner's, Ego and His Own had convinced him that:

Feuerbach's ‘man’ is derived from God … and therefore his ‘man’ is still possessed of a theological halo of abstractions. The true path for arriving at ‘man’ is the opposite one. … We must start out from empiricism and materialism, if our thoughts and in particular our ‘man’ are to be something real. We must deduce the general from the particular and not from itself or out of thin air à la Hegel.⁵⁷

Marx evidently disapproved of this programme, in particular its concession to Stirner, and in his next letter, Engels deferred to Marx's judgment.⁵⁸ Nevertheless, the negative impact of Stirner remained. For the results of Engels' irritation with ‘theological chatter’ about ‘man’ and ‘theology’ and his new concern with ‘real, living things, with historical developments and their results’ were clearly to be seen in his book.

The starting point of The Condition of the Working Class was not competition or private property, but the historically specific changes in manufacture from the middle of the eighteenth century. His explanation of this shift was uninformative,⁵⁹ but its rationale can be deduced from the general structure of his argument. Competition in itself could only describe a negative process of dissolution, an ever more brutish struggle between individuals, whose only chance of salvation could arise from a renewed consciousness of their humanity, awakened from outside by philosophy. ‘Manufacture’ on the other hand, could provide the starting point of a more complex and contradictory process—a process which contained the potentiality of liberation within itself: ‘Manufacture, 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 more surely when the time comes’.⁶⁰ ‘Manufacture’ under free competition could not only explain ‘the war of all against all’, but also the growth of a labour movement united in an effort to overthrow the competitive system. The English socialists were no longer praised for their adherence to a ‘philosophical principle, but criticised for being ‘abstract’ and acknowledging ‘no historic development’:

While bemoaning the demoralisation of the lower classes, they are blind to the element of progress in this dissolution of the old social order. … In its present form, socialism can never become the common creed of the working class; it must condescend to return for a moment to the Chartist standpoint.⁶¹

Competition only implied the abstract alternative of community, but ‘manufacture’ was a historic process which by concentrating population into large units of production and large cities had itself created the material possibility of combination between workers:

If the centralisation of population stimulates and develops the property-holding class, it forces the development of the workers yet more rapidly. The workers begin to feel as a class, as a whole; they begin to perceive that, though feeble as individuals they form a power united; their separation from the bourgeoisie, the development of views peculiar to the workers and corresponding to their position in life, if fostered, the consciousness of opposition awakens, and the workers attain social and political importance. The great cities are the birth-places of labour movements; in them the workers first began to reflect upon their own condition, and to struggle against it; in them the opposition between proletariat and bourgeoisie first made itself manifest; from them proceeded the trade unions, Chartism and socialism. The great cities have transformed the disease of the social body which appears in chronic form in the country, into an acute one, and so made manifest its real nature and the means of curing it.⁶²

In his Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy, Engels had defined competition as an affliction of humanity; ‘In this discord of identical interests resulting precisely from this identity is constituted the immorality of mankind's condition hitherto; and this consummation is competition’.⁶³ Now, on the contrary, competition was the nodal point of the class struggle between the bourgeoisie and the working class. The productiveness of each hand raised to the highest pitch by competition among the workers themselves, by division of labour and machinery generated ‘the unemployed reserve army of workers’ and deprived ‘a multitude of workers of bread’. Competition among workers was ‘the sharpest weapon against the proletariat in the hands of the bourgeoisie’.⁶⁴ Moreover competition constituted not only the practice, but the whole theory of the bourgeoisie: ‘Supply and demand are the formulas according to which the logic of the English bourgeois judges all human life’. Even the state was reduced to the minimum necessary to ‘hold the … indispensable proletariat in check’.⁶⁵

Conversely, the constant thread in the growth of the working class movement through Luddism and trade unionism to Chartism had been the battle to abolish competition among the workers. The split between bourgeois ‘political’ democrats and working class ‘social’ democrats after 1842 had revolved around free trade:

Free competition has caused the workers suffering enough to be hated by them; its apostles, the bourgeoisie, are their declared enemies. The working man has only disadvantages to await from the complete freedom of competition. The demands hitherto made by him, the Ten Hours' Bill, protection of the workers against the capitalist, good wages, a guaranteed position, repeal of the New Poor Law, all of the things which belong to Chartism, quite as essentially as the ‘Six Points’, are directly opposed to free competition and Free Trade.⁶⁶

‘This question’, wrote Engels, ‘is precisely the point at which the proletariat separates from the bourgeoisie, Chartism from Radicalism’. Chartism was ‘of an essentially social nature, a class movement’. But because Chartism was a social movement, and because socialism represented the only ultimate alternative to competition, a unification of the Chartists and the socialists in a ‘true proletarian socialism’ was soon to be expected, and in that form it must ‘play a weighty part in the development of the English people’.

How then should we characterise Engels' contribution to Marxism? How essential was his presence to the birth of historical materialism?

There are no signs that Engels on his own would have produced a new general theory which broke decisively with its various philosophical antecedents. A historical materialist theory could not have been constructed from ‘materialism and empricism’ or from a progression from the ‘particular’ to the ‘general’, in the way that Engels had proposed in the late autumn of 1844. A new-found enthusiasm for the empirical produced many of the enduring strengths of his book on the working class, but it could not have produced the positions outlined in the German Ideology from 1845. England was still treated by him as a special case. It was still possible for him to imagine that France's path to communism would be political, and that of Germany, philosophical. Despite signs that in the light of his English experience, his expectations of Germany were becoming less naïve, the distance between his position at the time of the writing of The Condition of the Working Class and the position he was to reach at the time of his collaboration on the German Ideology, remained profound. It can be measured by comparing two reports he wrote in Germany, the first in December 1844, the second in September 1845:

Up to the present time our stronghold is the middle class, a fact which will perhaps astonish the English reader, if he does not know that this class is far more disinterested, impartial and intelligent, than in England, and for the very simple reason that it is poorer.⁶⁷

It is true there are among our middle classes a considerable number of republicans and even communists … who, if a general outbreak occurred now, would be very useful in the movement, but these men are ‘bourgeois’, profit-mongers, manufacturers by profession; and who will guarantee us they will not be demoralised by their trade, by their social position, which forces them to live on the toil of other people, to grow fat by being the leeches, the ‘exploiteurs’ of the working classes?. … Fortunately we do not count on the middle class at all.⁶⁸

Nevertheless, without Engels' work on England, the formulation of a Marxist theory, would at the very least, have been much slower than it actually was. The Condition of the Working Class in England provided an extraordinarily lucid account of how the development of modern industry had by the same token generated proletarian class struggle and the possibility of ultimate liberation. He provided a systematic explanation of the development of a proletarian political economy and of the social character of working-class political demands. It was the process itself rather than the intervention of the philosophers which had awakened workers to a consciousness of their class position, and which he hoped would lead to the emergence of a ‘proletarian socialism’. Moreover his Hegelian formation, for all its limitations, had helped him to avoid two important theoretical obstructions which inhibited advances in the English working-class movement itself. While learning from English socialism the liberating potential of modern industry, through his assumption of a rational kernel to historical development, he could come to avoid their negative evaluation of the antagonism between middle and working class. On the other hand he could come to share the Chartist's belief in the necessity of an independent working-class politics, without having to base its legitimacy on a labour theory of value derived from a theory of natural right.⁶⁹ Thus, distanced by his nationality from some of the more sectarian aspects of the working-class movement, he was able to give a remarkable assessment of the significance of their struggle as a whole.

The importance of this assessment needs to be stressed. For, simply from a comparison of the extant texts, it is clear that a number of basic and enduring Marxist propositions first surface in Engels' rather than Marx's early writings: the shifting of focus from competition to production, the revolutionary novelty of modern industry marked by its crises of overproduction and its constant reproduction of a reserve army of labour, the embryo at least of the argument that the bourgeoisie produces its own gravediggers and that communism represents, not a philosophical principle, but ‘the real movement which abolishes the present state of things’, the historical delineation of the formation of the proletariat into a class, the differentiation between ‘proletarian socialism’ and small master or lower-middle-class radicalism, and the characterisation of the state as an instrument of oppression in the hands of the ruling propertied class.

All these were to become basic propositions in the theory of Marx and Engels, but it is of course true that they only became ‘Marxist’ by virtue of the historical materialist logic which was to connect and underpin them. It was Marx who constructed that logic and conceived the historical causality and new concepts, of which these propositions could be the result. As he wrote to Weydemeyer in 1852, ‘what I did that was new was to prove … that the existence of classes is only bound up with particular historical phases in the development of production’.⁷⁰

It is thus possible to agree with Engels that ‘the materialist theory of history … which revolutionised the science of history is essentially the work of Marx’, but at the same time to dispute his claim to have had ‘only a very insignificant share’ in its gestation.⁷¹ For what Engels had provided, were the raw components which dramatised the inadequacies of the previous theory and formed a large part of the nucleus of the propositions to which the new theory was addressed. Engels' disclaimer becomes more understandable if it is realised that some of the most important of these propositions were not in any sense original to Engels himself. Take, for instance, the definition of the modern state, set out in the German Ideology:

To this modern private property corresponds the modern state, which, purchased gradually by the owners of property by means of taxation, has fallen entirely into their hands through the national debt, and its existence has become wholly dependent on the commercial credit which the owners of property, the bourgeois extend to it, as reflected in the rise and fall of government securities on the stock exchange.⁷²

Such statements or less sophisticated variants of them had been commonplaces of the unstamped press and Chartist politics. So had much of the case against Malthus, the condemnation of overproduction as a result of concentration upon the world market and the notion of the reserve army of labour. The importance of Engels' contribution derived less from his moments of theoretical originality than from his ability to transmit elements of thinking and practice developed within the working-class movement itself in a form in which it could become an intrinsic part of the architecture of the new theory.

The importance of this moment in the beginnings of Marxism is generally ignored. In the standard account, first formulated by Kautsky and subsequently given enormous prestige through its partial adoption by Lenin in What is to be Done, the process of the connection between socialism and the labour movement is wholly one way. Socialist theory is developed outside the working class by bourgeois intellectuals then communicated to the most far-seeing of the working class and finally filters down to the working-class movement. The working class plays a wholly passive role in the process, a picture resembling Marx's view of 1843 in which the proletariat lends its force of arms to the philosopher and is given in return a consciousness of what it is and what its struggle means. It is in accordance with this position to view Marxism's own theoretical break as sui generis—a motor fuelled solely by theoretical introspection. It is only after the theory has been formed, that a juncture is made with the proletarian movement, which then propagates the new ideas.

Against this interpretation it should be stressed that while the concepts and structure of the new theory are certainly irreducible to experience and can only be the result of theoretical work, the changing questions which provoked the new theory had their source by definition outside the pre-existing theoretical discourse. Both in Engels' and in Marx's case, the form of their questioning changed, as their knowledge and experience of the working-class movement increased. It is known that Marx attended meetings of Parisian artisans in 1844 and that this experience made an evident impression on his work.⁷³ But the effect was even more striking in Engels' case. For Paris was not as strategic a place as Manchester to assimilate the connections between modern industry and the modern labour movement.

What distinguished Engels from many of his contemporaries was a deep-rooted discontent with his own background and milieu. It made him willing not merely to learn about, but also from workers, not merely to read the available sources but also to make personal contact, and consider himself part of their movement. How he spent his time in Manchester, is stated by Engels in the Preface to his book, ‘I forsook the company and the dinner parties, the port wine and the champagne of the middle classes, and devoted my leisure hours almost exclusively to the intercourse with plain working men; I am glad and proud of having done so’.⁷⁴ It is known that in Manchester, he became acquainted with the Burns sisters, that he argued with John Watts of the Owenites, that he attended the Halls of Science, witnessed Chartist interventions against the Anti-Corn Law League, met James Leach, a factory worker prominent in the National Charter Association and in the autumn of 1843 introduced himself to Harney at the Northern Star offices at Leeds. The effect of this experience is clear from his book, but part of what he learnt, he tells us explicitly in the Preface, ‘Having … ample opportunity to watch the middle classes, your opponents, I soon came to the conclusion that you are right, perfectly right in expecting no support whatever from them’.⁷⁵

Of course, as we have tried to show, there was no simple capitulation of theory in the face of experience between 1842 and 1845, either on Marx's or on Engels' part. The process was necessarily much more complex, since a theory, however ultimately inappropriate, is more likely to be stretched and forced to take account of new phenomena than to be abandoned—at least, until the possibility or beginnings of another can be discerned. It was Marx who accomplished this theoretical transformation. But it was Engels who had preceded him, in providing so many of the elements of what was to be the object of that theory, though only in a practical state and posed unsatisfactorily within an inappropriate philosophical problematic. If Engels was a less consistent thinker than Marx, that was a crucial virtue in the formative period that led up to the break-through to historical materialism. For what it ensured was that the juncture between a materialist theory of history and the practical assumptions of working class struggle—an event which in the orthodox account took place in 1847 when Marx and Engels joined the Communist League—was already there as part of the new theory at its moment of formation in Brussels in 1845.

Because it has been necessary to argue at some length the importance of Engels' initial contribution to Marxism, it has not been possible to do justice to the many other contributions he made to its subsequent development. There has been no space to deal with his work in the Communist League and in the preparation of the Communist Manifesto. It has been impossible to deal with his work as a correspondent on European affairs and his handling of the vexed problem of nationality in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung in 1848, his growing expertise on military strategy and theory from the early 1850s, his masterly analyses of Germany, developed in the Peasants' War and Revolution and Counter-revolution in Germany and continued in his writings on Bismarck and the new unified German state. Nor has it been possible to consider his later work on natural science, the family, or the origins of the state, nor, in the more immediately political realm, his reflections on Ireland, his many lucid analyses of the situation and strategy of the various working class movements in Europe and America, his battles against Proudhonism and anarchism, his close relations with the leadership of German social democracy nor his growing anxiety about the maintenance of a European peace from the foundation of the Second International. All that can be done in conclusion is to suggest a certain consistency in his strengths and limitations from the beginning through to the end of his long career as a Marxist.

From 1845 onwards, the relationship between Marx and Engels was a remarkably constant one. What Engels wrote in 1887 had applied throughout their working relationship:

As a consequence of the division of labour that existed between Marx and myself, it fell to me to present our opinions in the periodical press, that is to say, particularly in the fight against opposing views, in order that Marx should have time for the elaboration of his great basic work.⁷⁶

Such a relationship could never have lasted, had it simply been one between master and disciple, creator and populariser. It worked because the initial theory was the joint property of both of them, so that both could be equally committed to its enlargement through the development of a specific theory of the capitalist mode of production. Engels never entertained any doubts that Marx rather than he was best fitted for this task. It would therefore be quite wrong to extend sympathy to Engels for his long years' support of Marx during the preparation of Capital. He would not have asked for such sympathy and indeed regarded Capital as much a vindication of himself as of Marx. There are no real signs of strain on Engels' side, except at the time of Marx's unfeeling response to the death of Mary Burns. As might be expected, the tension was felt more by the Marx family, the well-born Mrs Marx in particular resenting the humiliating dependence of her family for their subsistence on the charity of her husband's friend. For Engels himself, however tiresome the long years of office work in Manchester, the relationship fulfilled a deep-felt need for intellectual certainty and a firm basis from which he could develop his much more diverse talents. Engels did not possess the certainty of self to be a great original theorist; he therefore sought this quality in others. Apart from Marx, the only other thinker who satisfied this desire for intellectual security was Hegel.

The initial conception of historical materialism developed in Marx and Engels' work between the German Ideology and the Communist Manifesto was far from unproblematic. Its tendency was to reduce the status of ideology to a mere reflex of the real movement, and the development of the real movement itself to a reflex of the development of the forces of production. Specific countries were allotted their particular roles in the coming revolution according to a scale of development, and there was little space within the theory to enable a distinction between the specific character of the capitalist crisis of the 1840s and an ultimate crisis of capitalism as a whole. The 1848 revolutions did not take their predicted course. Chartism and ‘proletarian socialism’ did not triumph in England, Germany did not accomplish its bourgeois revolution, the French Revolution miscarried, producing the ‘farce’ of the Second Empire, and the ‘history-less peoples’ of Eastern Europe demonstrated in practice the existence of a more complex and uneven historical logic than the initial theory had envisaged.

Nevertheless, the failures of 1848 did not lead to any fundamental recasting of the basic theory. Indeed, after a more detailed analysis of the trade cycle and a recognition of further room for the development of productive forces within capitalism, it appeared to Marx and Engels that the character of the revolutions had only served to confirm the correctness of their position. The theory of the capitalist mode of production was infinitely deepened in Capital, but the general conception of the relationship between the economic, political and ideological realms remained in essentials unchanged. It was reaffirmed in their 1872 Preface to the Communist Manifesto, and it was not until the 1880s in reaction to the growth of a positivist-tinged vulgar Marxism that Engels began to stress the complex and indirect character of economic determination and the importance of the political sphere. Even this, however, remained a qualification rather than a development of the theory, since Engels was unprepared to rethink the character of determination within the terms of the theory itself. It is in fact unlikely that Engels would have conceded the necessity of such a substantial reformulation. For his basic vision of the theory remained remarkably constant. He remained imperturbably convinced of a historical process leading to capitalist downfall, but unlike most of the Second International Zusammenbruch theorists, saw the development of class struggle as an integral part of the process of collapse. Similarly, he remained true to his initial conviction derived from Chartism that the struggle for democracy in capitalist countries was a social struggle and thus part of the struggle for socialism, and this explains his and Marx's continuing enthusiasm for universal suffrage and their belief that the achievement of socialism in certain countries might be a peaceful one. Moreover, for all the sophistication of Engels' analyses of Germany in which he developed his important conceptions of absolutism, of the ‘buonapartism’ of the bourgeoisie and of the ‘revolution from above’, or again of his theory connecting the character of the English labour movement to English domination of the world market, the political point of his interventions remained that which he and Marx had developed in the 1840s—to encourage the formation of independent working-class parties based on class struggle, to make alliances with other progressive forces only on the basis of this independence and to combat all sectarian obstacles to such development.

Engels remained clearly marked by his early English experience. His judgement was always at its most incisive, his intuition most sure in the handling of working-class movements in industrial countries. He retained his youthful conviction of the ‘idiocy of rural life’ and found it difficult to regard peasants except as barbarian survivals or future proletarians.⁷⁷ His sense of proportion went awry in the manner of his dealing with the Bakuninists in Spain and Italy. He never really forgave the Southern Slavs and the Czechs for their anti-teutonic and anti-magyar activities in 1848 and he refused to treat nationalism as a serious phenomenon, except where consciously or unconsciously it aided the cause of the revolution. Both the strength and the weakness of his thinking was contained in the absolute priority he accorded to those situations which apparently offered the best chances of socialist advance, and this sometimes made him insensitive to parallel conflicts of an inconvenient but equally material character.

Such calculations consistently dominated his changing views on international relations. In the 1850s and 1860s, he and Marx hopefully scanned the political horizon for any possibility of a European war which might provoke a progressive alliance against Tzardom, radicalise the citizenry and topple the reactionary autocracies. Once Bismarck had annexed Alsace-Lorraine however, he became increasingly insistent upon the necessity of peace. Since the future of socialism now depended on the future of Germany and the unobstructed development of the SPD, a Franco-Russian alliance must at all costs be prevented and the restitution of France's lost provinces left until after socialist victory. There can be no doubt that this German-oriented position was based on socialist criteria, and not upon any particular national predilections—Bebel and Bernstein were shocked to discover among his papers a plan for the defence of Paris against the Prussians in 1870, and destroyed it for fear of the reaction at home.⁷⁸ Nevertheless this unilateral emphasis on the prospects of German socialist success produced problems in the Second International. French socialists were intensely irritated in 1891, by an attack by Engels upon French chauvinism and the necessity of German socialists supporting a defensive war if attacked, without any mention of what French socialists should do in the case of an offensive attack by Germany.⁷⁹ Engels' preoccupation with a Russian menace and the necessity of peace for the building of socialism in Germany, somewhat blinded him to the case of France, and one result was that the SPD were not wholly unjustified in claiming his authority in its justification of its support of war credits in August 1914.⁸⁰

Both the strengths and weaknesses of Engels' Marxism derived from an intense and enduring sense of the onward march of a historical dialectic, of the concomitant advance of modern industry and the proletarian movement. It was this that explained his lasting attraction to Hegel, and his recurrent resort to Hegel when faced with problems to which Marxism provided no apparent solution. It was to Hegel's concept of ‘historic nations’ that he turned when confronted with the nationalisms of 1848. It was to Hegel's Natural Philosophy that he looked for guidance in seeking to develop an alternative to the mechanical materialism of the late 1850s; and it was to Hegel's notion of dialectical interaction that he returned when he wanted to oppose vulgar Marxist conceptions of economic or technological determination in the 1880s and 1890s.

But Hegel was not the only loyalty he retained from his early years. Despite his insistence upon placing socialism upon a scientific foundation, he remained in many respects a true disciple of the great utopians of his youth. He thought, not only of the immediate strategy of the various socialist parties of his time, but also of the abolition of the distinction between town and country, the liberation of women, the freeing of sexual and social relations from the trammels of property and wage slavery, and of the disappearance of the state. He remained an admirer of Owen, and above all of Fourier. The strength of his hatred of property, government and the miseries of ‘civilisation’ came out to the full in his Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State. And who but someone who had once tasted and not forgotten the vision of a socialist Utopia, could write:

Man's own social organisation, hitherto confronting him as a necessity imposed by Nature and history, now becomes the results of his own free action. The extraneous objective forces that have hitherto governed history pass under the control of man himself. Only from that time will man himself more and more consciously, make his own history—only from that time will the social causes set in movement by him have, in the main and in a constantly growing measure, the results intended by him. It is the ascent of man from the kingdom of necessity to the kingdom of freedom.⁸¹

Notes

1. G. Mayer, Friedrich Engels, Eine Biographie (Köln, 1969); among other biographical studies of Engels, see A. Cornu, Karl Marx et Friedrich Engels, leur vie et leur oeuvre (Paris, 1954); H. Ullrich, Der junge Engels (Berlin, 1961); S.E.D., Friedrich Engels, Eine Biographie (Berlin, 1970); H. Hirsch, Engels (Hamburg, 1968); H. Pelger (ed.), Friedrich Engels 1820-1970: Referate, Diskussionen, Dokumente (Hannover, 1971); W. Henderson, Frederick Engels (London, 1976).

2. G. Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness (London, 1971); Karl Korsch, Marxism and Philosophy (London, 1970).

3. See D. Rjazanov, ‘Briefwechsel zwischen Vera Zasulic und Marx’, Marx-Engels Archiv (Frankfurt/M, 1928), vol. 1, pp. 309-45.

4. F. Engels' Briefwechsel mit K. Kautsky (Vienna, 1955), pp. 4, 77.

5. F. Engels, Anti-Dühring (Moscow, 1969), pp. 9-10.

6. F. Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of German Classical Philosophy, in K. Marx and F. Engels, Selected Works (Moscow, 1969), vol. 3, p. 335.

7. Cited in G. Mayer, op. cit. vol. 2, p. 448.

8. Engels to Schmidt, 27 October 1890, Selected Works, vol. 3, p. 495.

9. See for instance, Engels to Marx, 14 July 1858, in Werke, vol. 29, pp. 337-39.

10. On the problem of the possibility of inverting Hegel, see L. Althusser, ‘Contradiction and Overdetermination’ in For Marx (London, 1970); for the relationship between Engels' later theory and Hegel, see G. Stedman Jones, ‘Engels and the End of Classical German Philosophy’, New Left Review, No. 79, 1973; for other discussions of Engels and ‘dialectical materialism’ see L. Colletti, Marxism and Hegel (London, 1973); S. Timpanaro, On Materialism (London, 1975).

11. Selected Works, vol. 3, p. 361.

12. Werke, vol. 27, p. 26.

13. On the social history of nineteenth-century Wuppertal, see in particular, W. Köllman, Sozialgeschichte der Stadt Barmen in 19 Jahrhundert (Tubingen, 1960).

14. For an interesting attempt at a psychoanalytical interpretation of the young Engels, see S. Marcus, Engels, Manchester and the Working Class (London, 1974).

15. K. Marx and F. Engels, Collected Works (London, 1975), vol. 2, p. 99.

16. Ibid. vol. 3, p. 344.

17. Ibid. vol. 2, p. 335.

18. See for instance, S. Born, Erinnerungen eines Achtundvierzigers (Leipzig, 1898).

19. F. Engels, ‘On the History of the Communist League’, Selected Works, vol. 3, p. 178.

20. F. Engels, ‘Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy’, Collected Works, vol. 3, p. 421.

21. F. Engels, ‘The Condition of England. Past and Present by Carlyle’, Collected Works, vol. 3, p. 449.

22. F. Engels, ‘Progress of Social Reform on the Continent’, Collected Works, vol. 3, p. 399.

23. F. Engels, ‘Outlines’, Collected Works, vol. 3, p. 422-3.

24. K. Marx, ‘Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy’, Selected Works, vol. 1, p. 504.

25. F. Engels, ‘Outlines’, Collected Works, vol. 3, p. 433.

26. F. Engels, ‘Condition of England: Carlyle’, Collected Works, vol. 3, p. 444.

27. Ibid. p. 463.

28. F. Engels, ‘Outlines’, Collected Works, vol. 3, pp. 422, 439.

29. F. Engels, ‘The Condition of England: The English Constitution’, Collected Works, vol. 3, p. 491.

30. F. Engels, ‘The Internal Crises’, Collected Works, vol. 2, p. 371.

31. F. Engels, ‘Outlines’, Collected Works, vol. 3, p. 424.

32. Ibid. p. 424.

33. See M. Hess, Die europaische Triarchie (Leipzig, 1841).

34. F. Engels, ‘The Internal Crises’, Collected Works, vol. 2, p. 371.

35. F. Engels, ‘The Condition of England’, Collected Works, vol. 3, p. 471.

36. Ibid. p. 472.

37. Ibid.

38. Ibid. p. 474.

39. See M. Hess, ‘Philosophie der Tat’, in T. Zlocisti (ed.), Moses Hess: Sozialistische Aufsätze (Berlin, 1921), pp. 62-3.

40. L. von Stein, Der Sozialismus und Kommunismus des heutigen Frankreich (Leipzig, 1842).

41. F. Engels, ‘On History of the Communist League’, Selected Works, vol. 3, p. 175.

42. F. Engels, ‘Progress of Social Reform on the Continent’, Collected Works, vol. 3, p. 406.

43. Ibid. p. 407.

44. F. Engels, ‘Condition of England: Carlyle’, Collected Works, vol. 3, p. 467.

45. F. Engels, ‘Progress of Social Reform’, Collected Works, vol. 3, p. 393.

46. F. Engels, ‘Carlyle’, Collected Works, vol. 3, p. 467.

47. ‘The English View of the Internal Crises’, Collected Works, vol. 2, p. 368.

48. ‘Letters from London’, Collected Works, vol. 3, p. 380.

49. F. Engels, ‘The Condition of England: The 18th Century’, Collected Works, vol. 3, p. 485.

50. F. Engels, ‘The Condition of England, The English Constitution’, Collected Works, vol. 3, p. 498.

51. Ibid.

52. Ibid.

53. Ibid. p. 513.

54. F. Engels, ‘On the History of the Communist League’, Selected Works, vol. 3, p. 178.

55. K. Marx, ‘Critical Marginal Notes on the Article “The King of Prussia and Social Reform. By a Prussian,” ’ Collected Works, vol. 3, p. 198.

56. The discrepancy between Marx and Engels' early views on the state, is brought out, though not adequately explained in R. Hunt, The Political Ideas of Marx and Engels (Pittsburg, 1974), vol. I.

57. Engels to Marx, 19 November 1844, in Werke, vol. 27, p. 12.

58. Engels to Marx, 20 January 1845, in Werke, vol. 27, p. 14.

59. F. Engels, ‘The Condition of the Working Class in England’, Collected Works, vol. 4, p. 325.

60. Ibid.

61. Ibid. p. 526.

62. Ibid. p. 418.

63. F. Engels, ‘Outlines’, Collected Works, vol. 3, p. 432.

64. F. Engels, ‘Conditions of the Working Class’, Collected Works, vol. 4, p. 376.

65. Ibid. pp. 563, 564.

66. Ibid. p. 523.

67. ‘The Rapid Progress of Communism in Germany’, Collected Works, vol. 4, p. 230.

68. ‘The Late Butchery at Leipzig’, Collected Works, vol. 4, p. 647.

69. On this subject, see the forthcoming article, G. Stedman Jones, ‘The Limitation of Proletarian Theory in England before 1850’, History Workshop, No. 5 (Oxford, 1978).

70. Werke, vol. 28, p. 508.

71. Selected Works, vol. 3, p. 179.

72. K. Marx and F. Engels, The German Ideology, in Collected Works, vol. 5, p. 90.

73. For a good account of Marx's changing attitude to the working class in this period, see M. Lowy, La Théorie de la Révolution chez le jeune Marx (Paris, 1970).

74. Collected Works, vol. 4, p. 297.

75. Ibid. p. 298.

76. F. Engels, ‘The Housing Question’, Selected Works, vol. 2, p. 297.

77. Although, see his impressive Of The Peasant Question in France and Germany, Selected Works, vol. 3, pp. 457-77.

78. G. Mayer, op. cit. vol. 2, p. 196.

79. Ibid. pp. 508-9.

80. See Engels to Bebel, 13 October 1891, August Bebel Briefwechsel mit Friedrich Engels, edited by W. Blumenberg (Hague, 1965), pp. 450-3.

81. F. Engels, ‘Socialism: Utopian and Scientific’, Selected Works, vol. 3, pp. 149-50.