Another difference. Late marx was much more skeptical of the value of european ‘civilisation’ and mass consumption and production than Engels. By the late 1850s marx supported anti-imperialist struggles, even if they were ‘feudal’ or ‘tribal,’ a change from the early 1850s when Marx wrote in the New York Tribune that British Imperialism was a progressive force in India. Relatedly, increasingly as the european proletariat became a “bourgeois proletariat” (Engels to Marx Oct. 7 1858) and began to “gaily share the feast of England’s monopoly of the world” (Engels to Kautsky Sep. 12 1882) Marx and Engels needed to wrestle with the fact that their revolutionary subject — the English proletariat — was increasingly tending towards reformism. From the 60s on, Marx began to respond to this in part by examining rural and non-capitalist societies more closely. He also began to place some hope on an anti-imperialist revolution in being the lever towards socialism, rather than a proletarian one in England.

A quote from a letter from Marx to Engels, Dec. 10 1869 illustrates this point so I’ll quote it in full:

“it is in the direct and absolute interests of the English working class to get rid of their present connexion with Ireland. I am fully convinced of this, for reasons that, in part, I cannot tell the English workers themselves. For a long time I believed it would be possible to overthrow the Irish regime by English working class ascendancy. I always took this viewpoint in the New-York Tribune. Deeper study has now convinced me of the opposite. The English working class will never accomplish anything before it has got rid of Ireland. The lever must be applied in Ireland.”

Engels leaned more towards a view where the non-capitalist societies were doomed to fall to imperialism, resistance should be supported, but was ultimately futile. There’s a large amount of theory here with regards to tendencies and countertendency in the rate of profit wrt all three volumes of Capital, but the short of it is that Engels broadly thought it would be necessary for capitalism to continue progressing to a point where the proletariat would again be a revolutionary (rather than reforming) subject. This has to do with how primitive accumulation (accumulation by dispossession) ‘increases’ (its more complicated) the rate of profit. This isn’t to say he advocated pacificism, giving up, (Kautsky tho) or supporting imperialism,(KAUTSKY) its more a mark of pessimism on his part in my opinion.

This leads into marx’s later notes, contrary to the claim of his first biography that his last decade was a “slow death” with no intellectual work, he actually undertook some of his most interesting studies in this period. There was much more focus on rural areas, more focus on colonies, rejection of “asiatic mode of production” and “asian despotism” for more complex models based on his studies on land ownership and production in India and Indonesia and Algeria among other places. He also investigated non-capitalist societies to gather further evidence/knowledge of how Capitalism is a) historically constructed and so b) not natural and c) has a beginning and hence d) an inevitable end. However none of this was published, all we have is his excerpt-notes.

Engels book based on some parts (mostly the sections on Morgan) of the notes, “Origin of the Family Private Property and the State” has some differences. Some examples; Marx challenged Morgans’ statement that ‘females’ were ‘defeated’ at some prehistoric time. Marx’s view was that there is a struggle between genders (which following Delphy’s Close to Home can be understood to some extent as a class relationship), he pointed to instances of womens’ struggle for rights through history, successes and failures. Engels’ regurgitated Morgans’ formulation, albeit with the anendum that sexism would somehow end with the death of capitalism, implying no need to struggle against it specifically.

Dialectics of nature is more correct than incorrect in my view, but not in sense of ‘nature IS dialectical,’ rather in the sense of ‘nature can be understood dialectically.’ But this is honestly rly extra abstract nerd stuff imo so I’m going to move on.

A thing many say wrt nature dialectics is “Engels did science but Marx stuck to political economy, division of labour” but this is wrong. Marx extensively researched science and mathematics as well as political economy, history and contemporary events. One key example to the theory of Capital is Marx’s study of Liebig in the 1860s before finishing vol1 of Capital. Liebig was a soil scientist who looked at the issue of diminishing crop returns. The mainstream understanding at the time was farms have diminishing returns on crops because as the population grows they farm less fertile areas for lack of land. Liebig challenged this assumption of soil being static and unchanging, arguing instead that the yield of crops was based on the presence of nutrients in the soil. Modern agriculture was “robbery baron agriculture” he argued; because the products of the soil are transported to cities and the waste is not returned to the soil, there is a net loss of nutrients from the soil and hence diminishing returns over time, eventual depletion of soil. This was “solved” in the 19th century with guano and later with artificial fertilizers. Liebig and Marx both argued that it was not solved; that the “metabolic rift”, the net drain on the soil was a dangerous threat to our society, simultaneously postponed and intensified by our use of non-renewable artificial fertilizers.