Le preziose note e osservazioni di Engels confluite nella grande opera di Marx

“Engels more than once gave Marx an idea for a book. His notes entitled ‘Principles of Communism’ were worked up by Marx into the arresting ‘Communist Manifesto ‘ in 1848, and Engels gave Marx a hint for the striking opening of the ‘The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte’ (1852). Writing to Marx on 3 December 1851, the day after Louis Napoleon’s ‘coup d’état’, Engels wittily invoked Hegel: ‘it really seems as though old Hegel, in the guise of the World Spirit, were directing history from the grave and, with the greatest conscientiousness, causing everything to be re-enacted twice over, once as grand tragedy and the second time as rotten farce’. The remark, made briefer and more trenchant, duly appeared at the beginning of Marx’s work. Engels wanted no credit for such gifts of ideas, any more than he did for money given. Indeed, he often insisted to Marx that only Marx could work up the ideas satisfactorily. Referring to another such case, which had resulted in Marx’s ‘Holy Family, or Critique of Criticism’ (1845), Engels reminded Marx, ‘I similarly wrote a few sheets because a pamphlet was envisaged, and you turned it into a full-blown book of 20 sheets in which my trifle looked strange indeed. Once again you would assuredly do so much to it that my contribution, in any case hardly worth mentioning, would quite disappear before your heavy artillery’ (27). Engels’s modesty here serves both to flatter Marx and to keep him at work. No doubt Engels himself felt relieved that he could give Marx the financial and moral support he needed to complete important works, especially the great work on capital, and thus evade the direct responsibility himself of painstakingly laying the scholarly groundwork for future action” [Rosemary Ashton, ‘Little Germany. Exile and Asylum in Victorian England’, Oxford, 1986] [(27) Engels to Marx, 3 Dec. 1851, MECW, XXXVIII. 505; to the same, 27 Nov. 1851, ibid. 495]