Marx was a highly-gifted theorist, a master in the realm of thought,
but he was quite unpractical in the affairs of everyday life. Had he
enjoyed a regular income throughout life, he would probably have
attained his end even without the help of Engels. On the other hand,
Engels was an exceedingly able, energetic, and highly-cultured man,
eminently practical and successful in everything he undertook, but not
endowed with that speculative temperament which surmounts intellectual
crises and opens out new horizons. But for his intellectual
association with Marx he would, in all probability, have remained
little more than a Moses Hess. Marx was never a Utopian; the complete
saturation of his mind with Hegelian dialectics made him immune to all
eternal truths and final social forms. On the contrary, up to 1844
Engels was a Utopian--until Marx explained to him the meaning of
political and social conflicts, the basis and the motive force, the
statics and dynamics of the history of civilised mankind. Engels'
"Criticism of Political Economy" is a very noteworthy performance for
a youth of twenty-three engaged in commerce, but it does not rise
above the level of the writings of Owen, Fourier, and Proudhon.
Engels' contributions to Owen's "New Moral World" (1843-44) are indeed
more philosophical than the other articles by Owenites, but as far as
matter goes, there is no perceptible difference between them. "The
System of Economic Contradictions," on which Proudhon was working when
Engels published his "Outlines," is couched, as far as the critical
side is concerned, in the same strain of thought as we find in Engels.
Both sought to expose the contradictions of the middle-class economic
system, not in order to discover in them the source of the progress of
society, but to condemn them in the name of justice. Whereas the
Owenites considered their system as perfect, Proudhon and Engels had,
independently of one another, striven to free themselves from the
Socialist Utopias. Proudhon became a peaceful Anarchist and found
salvation in the scheme of autonomous economic groups, which should
carry on an exchange of labour equivalents with one another. Engels,
on the other hand, found a solution of his difficulties in Marx, whom
he rewarded with a lifelong friendship and devotion, which proved to
be Marx's salvation. Without Engels' literary and financial help,
Marx, with his unpractical, helpless, and, at the same time, proud and
uncompromising disposition, would most probably have perished in
exile.
III. CONTROVERSIES WITH BAUER AND RUGE.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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