The collaboration of Friedrich Engels (1820–85) with Marx over forty years rules out any Manichean distinctions (e.g. between Marx the ‘good dialectician’ and Engels the ‘bad materialist’)
The importance of Marx in this connection is that, no doubt for the first time since Spinoza’s conatus (‘effort’), the question of historicity (or of the ‘differential’ of the movement, instability and tension within the present which are carrying it towards its own transformation) is posed in the element of practice
If we can today read Hegel’s work as something other than a long ‘theodicy’ (as he himself put it, taking the term from Leibniz) – i.e. a demonstration that ‘evil’ in history is always particular and relative, whereas the positive end for which it prepares the ground is universal and absolute – do we not owe this to the way in which that work has been transformed by Marx?
But this thoroughgoing change of perspective merely brings out all the more clearly the difficulties, if not indeed the aporias, this project of rationality encounters.
This point is all the more important as Marx speaks here of necessity and even of ineluctable necessity.
