Affinities in Marx and Engels Before the Collaboration
When Marx and Engels began their lifetime collaboration in Paris in 1844, each had developed a coherent body of ideas and assumptions which was to remain remarkably consistent throughout long years of intense endeavor. Reading their biographies one is struck by statements such as “Engels taught him [Marx] that his philosophic speculations … needed … a good knowledge of economic developments …,” 1 and, “Marx first showed him [Engels] that politics and history are explicable only in terms of social relations …,” 2 statements ascribing some prominent characteristic of each man’s though to an insight gained from the other. Some of these supposed cross-insights, however, seem to have been native to both before meeting or reading the writings of the other. Furthermore, one can’t help occasional suspiciousness when it is simultaneously asserted that two men taught each other the same or very similar ideas. Of course Marx and Engels did reveal differences in emphasis and interests, and it is useful to ask to what extent the two men might have mutually influenced each other in their first years of writing. Also it is instructive to see how fully developed were the parallels between Marx’s and Engels’ thought as early as 1844, and to trace the intellectual route of two different personalities to a similar intellectual end.
Engels’ juvenilia reveal his increasing political consciousness. His first efforts were poems, including translations and imitations of Shelley, the English romantic radical and idealist. This early poetry emphasizes not only a belief in love as the deepest link between man and man but an incipient dissatisfaction with the current economic order. He longs for the day when ships will carry “no long goods to profit one alone.” 3 In 1842, at the age of 22, Engels went to Berlin as a soldier, where he associated with the Young Hegelians whom Marx had recently left. He must have learned of Marx from them, for that year when he published a mock epic in four cantos, Christliches Heldengedict (!), he not only describes himself as “most radical of all … from top to toe,” but introduces Marx as a swarthy churl raging from unrest, pursued as though by 10,000 devils. 4 Clearly Engels’ ideological self-image had been formed, never to change, and Marx’s name was already associated for him by hearsay with the emotional and mental force of genius. The same year Engels published two pamphlets defending Hegel against Schelling, attacking the latter’s failure to see God as operative, not in external and fortuitous divine interventions, but in the development of history. 5 Marx also had seen in Hegel’s developmental theory a similar potential for inversion into an active materialism, a belief in the progress of history as the source of value. Engels was also, like Marx, at this stage influenced by Feuerbach’s publication of Essential Christianity, an attack on the “spiritual” nature of religion as opposed to the importance of action and material reality. 6 Throughout his later writings, Engels was to intersperse among his economic comments the assertion that Feuerbach had “proved the necessity of atheism and the independent existence of nature.” 7 Thus Engels, like Marx, travelled an inner route from postulating the developmental nature of the dialectic to Feuerbachian anti-Christianity. Each was hereafter to continue developing in a parallel manner, studying the French socialists and British political economists.
The twentieths century reader coming naively to accounts of the development of the Young Hegelians is astonished by the similarity in intellectual context and preoccupation of these men, but even more by the passionate interest in philosophical disputation expressed by these young self-proclaimed activists. Why did they feel the need to assert materialism through wrestling in such detail with the Hegelian dialectic? Why did the existence or non-existence of God have to be postulated on the basis of assertions by Feuerbach? Engels gives a partial answer in the first chapter of Ludwig Feuerbach and the Outcome of German Classical Philosophy, where he states that many of the practical arguments put forth against the existing religion and state “still used the meager cloak of philosophy only to deceive the censorship.” 8 Yet the insistence upon post-Hegelian philosophical concerns was to recurrent in both Engels and Marx to have resulted from a non-spontaneous or external compulsion; it is clear they desired to reform their world, but through associating this reform with German intellectual and philosophic tradition. They wished to carry their philosophic world with them into socialism, to conquer and remake philosophy, to cause the proletariat to discover “its intellectual weapons in philosophy.” 9 Only when they were based upon a philosophic analysis could understanding or alteration of economic and social realities occur.
Another less philosophic aspect of Engels was simultaneously developing, however, and one in which he was to differentiate himself from Marx. At the age of eighteen he had contributed descriptions of his native Wuppertal to a local newspaper, portraying the industrial scenes he has observed as a boy on the way to school. His gift for dramatic description was to continue to develop, overlapping with his progression in philosophy and in practical analyses of economics and revolution. In England in late 1842 through 1844, Engels continued his journalistic writings, publishing articles on the condition of German socialism (“The Advance of Social Reform on the Continent”), on Carlyle’s “Past and Present”, and the “Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy” (1844). The first of these praises Hess as the introducer of communism to German intellectuals, but makes the distinction between middle-class socialism and proletarian communism which foreshadows the similar distinction in the Manifesto. The article on Carlyle praises Carlyle’s passionate indictment of the coldness and separatism of a society based on the cash-nexus; later in The Condition of the Working Class in England he frequently cites and comments on Carlyle 10—a tribute to Engels’ literary propensities and the deeply emotional basis of his interest in the British working class, since few radicals could have found even temporary and partial common cause with the progressively more reactionary Carlyle. The third article, “Outlines of a Critique on Political Economy”, was not only that one of Engels’ early writings which most impressed Marx, but it reveals the synthesis of what had become Engels’ special interests – a loosely dialectical method applied to the history of economics, a series of arguments directly against Smith, Ricardo, and Malthus, and specific applications of every topic discussed to the nature of British industrialism. His highly rhetorical and emotional style, his historical interests, his analysis of the specific machinery of economics, and his philosophical references and methodology have all merged. And in passing he discusses theories of value, the nature of alienation of labour, the pervasive importance of competition in industry, the chaos of unprogrammed production, the effect which increased science and technology will have upon men’s capacity to feed themselves, and the effect of industrialization upon the family and social relationships. His comments on labour and alienation resemble a capsulization of those which Marx will make in his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts; commenting on the renting of the earth, he states, “It was and is to this very day an immorality surpassed only by the immorality of self-alienation.” 11 And on labour:
…the product of labour confronts labour as wages, is separated from it, and is as usual once more determined by competition…. If we do away with private property, this unnatural separation also disappears. Labour becomes its own reward, and the true significance of the wages of labour, hitherto alienated, comes to light…. 12
These terms will be used lengthily in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts. Similarly his treatments of the nature of value and the different guises of competition will find parallels in Marx, along with his early exposition of the reasons for dispensing with private property, the evils of Malthusianism, and the need for planning rather than competition as a sane regulator of productive capacity. Although Marx was also to look forward to the advancement of science, he mentions past and future scientific discoveries less frequently in his early works than does Engels. He will attack Malthus also, but less extensively on practical than on philosophic grounds, and his interest in disproving his opponents historically is less strong than his interest in exploding their philosophy. Engels had also used the dialectic, but it was a dialectic devoted more to organizing a historical survey of the progress of theoretical economics than to arguing a tightly constructed series of philosophical statements. At one point, for example, he proves a definition of “price” to be self-contradictory, then adds, almost as a concluding afterthought, “as is well known, this inversion is the essence of abstraction; on which see Feuerbach,” then shifts immediately to a new topic. Not only is Engels’ style more clear and emotional than Marx’s but his treatment switches constantly from general assertion to specific description, hypothesis, or evaluation, until one feels the vigour of his ability to unify British economic theory with the nature of British society. One preoccupation which engages Engels in the “Outline”, however, I do not think was shared as fully or as emphatically by Marx: his insistence that one of capitalism’s greatest evils was its effect upon family life. Marx does discuss in his Economic Manuscripts the relationship between the sexes as the essential social relation, and Engels, in his introduction to his The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, written after Marx’s death, states that Marx had wished to comment upon Morgan’s researches into primitive family life. Yet Engels seems to have been concerned since his first visit to England with the effect of industrialism upon the percentage of men employed, as opposed to women and children, upon the quality of marriages, the education of children, and other specific matters which keep occurring to his mind. Marx will also be interested in the problem of female and child exploitation in Das Kapital, 14 but less prone to discuss the inferior status of women in society as due to bourgeois private property, or to theorize on the nature of the family unit. The passages in the Manifesto which describe these beliefs might be at least partially the construction of Engels. Only a few more topics concerned Engels in the “Outline”—the inevitability of increasing monopolies and the greater competitive power of capital over labour, the cyclical and progressively worsening nature of over-production crises, and the evils of increased machinery and division of labour. These are all descriptive analyses which will aid in structuring his Condition of the Working Class, and which will be subsumed in passing by Marx in his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts.
We have seen some of the convictions which Engels was developing while progressing through his adolescent radical poetry, his readings in Hegel, Feuerbach, and early German socialism, and his final enthusiastic and thorough attention to political economy, along with his morally outraged descriptions of the brutalizing effects of British capitalism upon people and society. Meanwhile Marx was coming to hold startlingly parallel ideas, differently expressed, and developed through a somewhat different route. He too, like Engels, wrote boyhood poetry, but this does not seem to have borne any relationship to his next works. As editor of the “Rheinische Zeitung” Marx contributed miscellaneous articles attacking the exploitive Prussian gentry and the authoritarian Prussian czarist regime, and supporting both democracy and atheism. His first two major works, however, appeared in the single edition of the “Deutsch-Franzosiche Jahrbücher”, which he co-edited in February, 1844. One was a critique of Hegel undoubtedly similar to the one he published in his Economic Manuscripts the same year. The other, “Zur Judenfrage”, reveals the condition of his thought up to the time of his intense study of French socialism and British economic theory.
“Zur Judenfragen” (“On the Jewish Question”) has been often passed over as an embarrassing expression of early anti-Semitism on the part of a man of Jewish background, baptized by his father presumably only to aid in his cultural assimilation into German society. Still it would be surprising if the first work of a philosopher as great as Marx were a trivial outburst of irrational prejudice. In actuality the treatise does not seem to me to express unqualified anti-Semitism at all, but rather to condemn all religion as a concomitant of bourgeois culture. Marx condemns Jews for desiring the state to accept their religion rather than fighting to abolish all religion. They wish to join the state as it is, the bourgeois Christian state in which each man is his own law, participating in a “self-centered material life.” 15 Such a state is as arbitrary and as opposed to human life as religious belief; the state, by its material nature, creates the artificial philosophy of religion, and religion and the state together enslave man. It is perhaps significant that the worst insult Marx can think of to hurl at the believing Jew is to associate him with the bourgeois Christian, just as the worst insult he can hurl at the Christian is to call him a Jew. He seems rather strangely, however, to associate Christianity with the theoretical aspects of bourgeois society and Judaism with its practical aspects. A certain stridency does enter some of his final definitions of Judaism:
What is the Jew’s foundation in our world? Material necessity, private advantage. What is the object of the Jew’s worship in this world? Usury. What is his worldly god? Money. (in boldface type) 16
It is perhaps true that a certain latent anti-Semitism impelled him to so unequivocal a definition of Judaism—Christianity is anathema to him, but nowhere, to my knowledge, does he feel the need to attack its usurious qualities with such vehemence. Engels, by the way, shared this modified and inverted form of anti-Semitism; in his Condition of the Working Class he shows his fierce scorn of the English middle-class by identifying them with Polish Jews, and insults British merchants by the reverse comparison. Perhaps he was influenced by Marx to make this identification; at any rate it is difficult to imagine an anti-Semitism on the part of Engels and Marx which could transcend by very far their opposition to the Christian middle class. Also the argument of “Zur Judenfragen” can be followed without reference to the bypath of anti-Semitism; Marx is arguing that a religious, bourgeois, property-owning class alienates man from himself and turns both man and nature into saleable objects.17 Since he postulates that material conditions determine the nature of ideas, he feels that when materialistic egotism disappears, so will all religious belief, and man will once again become a humanized species rather than a set of atomistic individuals. There is even a bit of carefully curtailed visionariness in this conclusion; Marx has discussed the need for a propertiless state but he has not yet developed his view of the nature of class war.
Marx’s interest in the dialectical method is revealed much more clearly in his “Critique of Hegelian Dialectic and Philosophy As a Whole”, published at the end of his Economic and Philosophic Documents of 1844. By the time he published these manuscripts, he had read Engels’ “Outline” and the British economists, and his discussions of economics show a careful fusion of economic studies with philosophical argument. “The Critique of the Hegelian Dialectic” seems to return to clarifying an earlier stage of his intellectual endeavor, however, since it is not concerned with the economic matters which pervade the rest of his book. Its progression from Hegel to Feuerbach, and its concern with attacking the Young Hegelians, remind one of Engels’ later historical survey in his Feuerbach and the issues which Marx and Engels will mutually raise in The German Ideology. First he attacks the Young Hegelians for altering the Hegelian dialectic but continuing to accept what he considers its fundamental premise, the separation between a spiritual self-consciousness and the physical world. Marx exercises his full sarcasm on the intellectual snobbery and remoteness produced by such attitudes:
…now that it has made known in print its superiority to human feelings as well as its superiority to the world, only letting fall from time to time from its sarcastic lips the ringing laughter of the Olympian Gods…. 19
He then lists Feuerbach’s achievements, emphasizing his belief in everything rendered only into thoughts (philosophy, religion) is therefore estranged from man’s true essence.
Thus the Young Hegelians have alienated their philosophy from material reality, and Feuerbach has revealed this impotency and alienation of the abstract idea for what it is. Next Marx attacks Hegel lengthily on the same grounds he used against Hegel’s followers. By speaking of the consciousness of the philosopher, Hegel, according to Marx, is postulating the separation of subject and object; he objectifies himself as opposed to what he knows, the very essence of abstraction, of separation from humanness, i.e., religion philosophy, postulates concerning the state. These objections to philosophical separation of subject and object will find a parallel in Marx’s later attacks on the separation of labour from man’s nature. Marx attacks the assumption that man is estranged by his dependence on objects, for a “being which does not have a nature outside itself is not a natural being, and plays no part in the system of nature.” 20 In other words, man is only himself when in nature and history, not when withdrawing into a state in which subject is separated from object. We see here his great objection to individualism, for man is a “species-being”, seeking others as sensuous objects, and himself constituting for them an object, a part of their being. Engels assumes in his descriptive works the conclusions which Marx arrives at here, but he is not as interested in postulating the nature of self-estrangement and the need for union of subject and object – his humanitarianism is more direct and instinctive, less needing of conceptual proof.
Once Marx has redefined his Hegelian and anti-Hegelian terms for value – species consciousness, sensuousness, positive humanism, end of self-alienation and estrangement – he examines political economy on the basis of these terms. Like Engels he accepts the grim predictions of Smith, Malthus, and Co. with literal minded faith, only substituting disgust and anger for the Malthusians’ pious compliance with the evils of inevitable starvation and poverty. Marx’s first few essays in the Economic Manuscripts are merely his own commentary on long quotations from Adam Smith, Charles Loudon, Jean-Baptiste Say, etc. He accepts Smith’s premises that capital and labour must polarize, that the labourer loses whether the capitalist gains or loses, that competition between capitals will eliminate small capitals and render the percentage return on capital progressively smaller, that all forms of capital are directly related and derive from competition, a point which Marx later credited Engels’ “Outline” with demonstrating. Surprisingly some of the book’s more cynical analyses are Smith’s not Marx’s:
The consideration of his own private profit is the sole motive which determines the owner of any capital to employ it…. (Smith) 21
This [the manufacturers and traders] is a class of people whose interest is never exactly the same as that of society, a class of people who have generally an interest to deceive and to oppress the public. (Smith) 22
Like Engels, he attacks the assertion that competition is based on the right of exchange, since clearly the workers have little to exchange and must suffer in competition with each other. Unlike Smith, however, he defines the interest of the landlord as opposed to that of society and identifies its ultimate interest with that of other forms of monopoly and competitive capital. He is less interested than Engels in showing practical results or the self-contradictions of the economists he quotes, more interested in reworking their conclusions. Or as he himself says in concluding this portion of the work, “We have proceeded from the premises of political economy. We have accepted its language and its laws. We presupposed private property, the separation of labour, capital and land, and of wages, profit of capital and rent of land – likewise division of labour, competition the concept of exchange-value, etc.”23 He then begins a philosophical analysis of private property—labour’s product confronts labour as “a power independent of the producer”, or objectification; 24 it alienates the labourer from himself; 25 it is forced labour, belonging to another, and constitutes loss of his real self; and it estranges man from the life of his species, causing the life of the individual to be the purpose of the species. 6 Thus labour has three alienating qualities – it alienates the product, the worker’s humanity, and his “species-life”. We can see that these ideas are very similar to Marx’s definitions of alienation in his “Critique on the Hegelian Dialectic”. This alienated labour produces private property; therefore even the Proudhonian desire for equality of wages is merely another variety of alienation, with society “conceived as an abstract capitalist.”27 Needless to say he compares the alienated quality of private property with that of abstract philosophy and religion; then he begins a discussion of the relationship of the non-worker to work before this portion of his manuscript breaks off unfinished. In his discussion of the antithesis of capital and labour he continues attacking the view of man as commodity, a man only insofar as he is a worker, yet existent only if some capital exists for him (i.e., without wages he dies).28 Interestingly he uses an analogy which he had commended Engels for using in his “Outline”, that between Luther (who liberated only to re-enslave) and the bourgeois economists, who did likewise. By seeming to recognize man, and postulating labour as the basis of value, bourgeois economics has completely defined itself as anti-human, 29 and progressed in cynicism. Just as Marx had found a dialectical progression of abstraction among the Hegelians, so also he finds a progression in the cynical separation of labour from labourer, of value from man, within the works of the English political economists. Lastly he defines the need for another antithesis, that of property and propertilessness, to be seen in terms of the antithesis of capital and labour, and attacks other forms of socialism which have not grasped the significance of this opposition. Especially he attacks primitive communism for believing in the community of women, who by degrading the relation of man to woman are expressing again their desire for a variant form of private property. He finds the relationship of man to woman the “most natural relation of human being to human being”;30 this is the extent of his discussion of the relation between capitalism and sexual roles. He here comes as near as ever to defining the ideal state, where every man is active in relationship to other members of his species, even if active individually—for example, scientifically—since both his own self and his relationship to other men is social.
Marx’s final chapter resembles more closely Engels’ “Outline”, discussing political economists on the subjects of luxury vs. thrift, population, diminution in interest on money, relationship of different capitals to one another, division of labour as alienation, the power of money, etc. He relates these to his former philosophic definitions of alienation, in contrast to Engels, who when discussing the same topics, often switches to direct attacks upon the moral and practical consequences of these phenomena. Thus Marx has exploited a series of limited dialectical analyses—of the progression of past economists, of the basic abstractions of economic theory, and of the development and nature of communism. Almost every topic with which he concerned himself had been treated in Engels’ “Outline”, but whereas Engels had been loosely historical and interested in specific analyses of industrialism, Marx’s analysis is still chiefly conceptual (I dare not say abstract!) and concerned far more with the abstract dichotomy between capital and labour than with the phenomenon of industrialism.
Only one more book remained to be published, this time by Engels, before Marx and Engels began in 1844 the collaboration which was to begin with The Holy Family and The German Ideology and last until Marx’s death. This was Engels’ The Condition of the Working Class in England which Engels carried back with him in manuscript when he returned to the continent and again met Marx. Again this reveals preoccupation with the same topics which had concerned him in the “Outline”, but in greatly expanded form, and with an increased expression of some of the qualities which had previously differentiated him slightly from Marx. It is interesting to examine this final independent work of Engels, since after this the work of the two men becomes almost indistinguishable.
The Condition of the Working Class is almost a model of descriptive art. It is divided into segments of vivid, thorough, and yet passionate descriptions of specific portions of working class experience (“The Great Towns”, “The Miners”, “Working Class Movements”, “The Attitude of the Bourgeoisie”), each headed by an emotional, highly rhetorical interpretive introduction, asserting the background and nature of the phenomena about to be presented. As the examples are introduced, they are bound together by similar moral and historical assertion, eg. continuing arguments concerning the motivations of the bourgeoisie, the future of industrialism, etc. A successful polemic needs to be neither so interpretive as to avoid detail and illustration nor so pedantic as to contain only repetition of detail, and Engels’ fusion of the two is unusual. As an example of his arrangement of his material to promote immediate understanding, I will give the topic sentences of a few of his paragraphs in chapter two. They tell a simple and ardently clear story, arranged to construct a definite ideology:
At the present time virtually the whole of the industrial proletariat supports the workers’ movement.
We have seen how industry has been concentrated into fewer hands. Industry needs large amounts of capital in order to erect colossal factories which work so efficiently and cheaply that they drive the lower middle class craftsmen out of business.
It was not only industry but population and capital which became centralised. There is nothing surprising in this because industry regards its workers not as human beings but simply as so much capital for the use of which the industrialist has to pay interest under the name of wages.
Industry and commerce attain their highest stage of development in the big towns, so that it is here that the effects of industrialization on the wage earners can by most clearly seen.
The vast majority of the inhabitants of these towns are the workers.31
Sometimes Engels has been given much less credit as a thinker than Marx, partially because he presented his material so forcefully that his argumentation came to seem self-evident. But throughout the book his emotional comments on the details he records, his constant stance as eyewitness, and his simplistic historical summary, incessantly asserted, combine to form a very starkly dramatic interpretation of the nature of industrialism. It is almost a dramatic cycle with light and deep shadows – originally there existed a peaceful rural society, now invaded by the attendant evils of industrialism – poverty, disease, competition, division of labour, the complete separation of man from man – which obscures totally the brightness of nature and the earth. Yet the workers will arise and destroy this conspiracy of bourgeoisie coldness, of dehumanization, and form a communally organized world. Precisely because for Engels industrialism has no merits, it exists in a state of progressive collapse, and the end of its existence is nigh. His interpretation is of course an eschatology – yet one so permeated with details that all seems physically real, an eschatology developed from scientific and historical observation. He develops the progressive separation of workers from their employers, the complete permeation of an entire society and its laws by monetary values, the callousness and hypocrisy even of middle-class attempts at reform, the lessening of the role of the male family head and the destruction of family life, the inevitability of economic crises, the nature of competition, the character of the working class, and its progressive involvement in the working class movement, and the latter’s inevitable and imminent success (here more than anywhere else he is unable to cite much evidence, but attempts to compensate by confident and optimistic repetition). Unlike Marx, to whom thus far the labourer seems chiefly an abstraction of “alienated man”, Engels lists thousands of lovingly culled facts on workers’ houses, diets, hours, death, crime-rates, education, working conditions, physical strength, salaries, domestic problems, and variant sufferings. His work seems the proof through example of clear assumptions – the dialectic has been left farther behind than in his “Outline” – while Marx proves the same assumptions through a careful process of interrelated definitions. No one who has read Engels’ two page description of the loneliness and coldness of a bourgeois city (33) can deny that his response to his society was at the same time convincedly ideological and also a lucidly emotional perception of the actual quality of loneliness and estrangement, the human horror of subsuming all to monetary values. It is a personally experienced, as well as an economically defined, series of beliefs. The Condition contains all the argumentation of the “Outline”, with more descriptive details and predictions, and mentions in passing the various concerns and doctrines which have hitherto been the parallel discoveries of Engels and Marx. However in amplification Engels emphasizes the specific analyses and descriptive concerns which thus far have distinguished his method from that of Marx, and prepares the dramatic style which, I think, was in large part his contribution to the Manifesto (eg., compare the rhetoric of his introduction to the Condition with that of the Manifesto).
How much, the, did Marx and Engels influence one another in developing their early thought? Both seem to have come independently to their remarkable identical doctrines. Perhaps this is why their friendship was able to continue with an almost complete absence of intellectual friction – neither had swayed the other into his deep belief in any major dogma. Their early writing often reveals differences in methodological emphasis, but there is almost no place in which either contradicts the opinions of the other. They seem interested in parallel topics, however differently developed, and their evaluative judgments are the same. A major cause of the compatibility is their very similar intellectual background – the Young Hegelians, the French and German socialists, the English economists. They each read in similar schools of thought, and reacted in very similar ways. Engels could possibly have been influenced by Marx through the opinions of the Young Hegelians, but otherwise his development seems independent. Marx took Engels’ “Outline” very seriously as a guide to thought, but once cannot help feeling after reading his commentaries on the British economists that he would have come to much the same conclusions in any case. The absence of discussion of any particular industrial society or class conflict in Marx’s Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, contrasted with the Condition’s vivid presentation of ideological struggle within a particular nation and time, indicated that Engels contributed to the partnership his ability to analyze and present a precise, impassioned account of the historical workings of bourgeois-proletarian warfare. Marx was until this time interested chiefly in proving the material basis of ideas and the inevitable mutual alienation of capital and labour. Even concerning the most material matters he carefully argues through a dialectical method. By contrast Engels assumed certain simplified methods and products of the dialectic, much in the nature of a direct creed, and set out to analyze their consequences in society. After a historical survey of the British economists assures him that capital and labour are antithetical, he illustrates from British life that this is preeminently so. Some of Engels’ dramatic view of the class struggle, and a small portion of his powerful optimism, were to become part of the official Marxian-Engels manner in the Manifesto. Also Engels’ observations on the specific results of class opposition – child labour, sexual exploitation, etc. – were more or less clearly passed on to Marx and the Manifesto. It is easy to see how the philosopher-ideologue and the historian-ideologue saw in each other his intellectual complement. Each subscribed in theory to an exact correlation between philosophy and the real world, and the achievement of each added to the other’s that half of the correlation which he had not yet been able fully to develop. Marx evolved the philosophical bases of the alienation whose mechanisms Engels first ordered and dramatized. Although Engels always gave Marx credit for a wider achievement, the practical significance of that achievement was often defined by his own perceptions and language.