y and economically, except as regards certain
portions of their territory. They brought to their work, on the
contrary, the philosophic thought which alone had placed and maintained
their country upon the level of contemporary history:--this philosophic
thought which in their hands was undergoing that important
transformation which permitted materialism, already renewed by Feuerbach
combined with dialectics, to embrace and understand the movement of
history in its most secret and until then unexplored causes,--unexplored
because hidden and difficult to observe. Both were communists and
revolutionists, but they were so neither by instinct, by impulse nor by
passion. They had elaborated an entirely new criticism of economic
science and they had understood the connection and the historic meaning
of the proletarian movement on both sides of the Channel, in France and
in England, before they were called to give in the Manifesto the
programme and the doctrine of the Communist League. This had its center
in London and numerous branches on the continent; it had behind it a
life and development of its own.

Engels had already published a critical essay in which passing over all
subjective and one-sided corrections he brought out for the first time
in an objective fashion the criticism of political economy and of the
antitheses inherent in the data and the concepts of that economy itself,
and he had become celebrated by the publication of a book on the
condition of the English working class which was the first attempt to
represent the movements of the working class as the result of the
workings of the forces and means of production.[4] Marx, in the few
years preceding, had become known as a radical publicist in Germany,
Paris and Brussels. He had conceived the first rudiments of the
materialistic conception of history. He had made a theoretically
victorious criticism of the hypotheses of Proudhon and the deductions
from his doctrine, and had given the first precise explanation of the
origin of surplus value as a consequence of the purchase and the use of
labor power, that is to say the first germ of the conceptions which were
later demonstrated and explained in their connection and their details
in Capital. Both men were in touch with the revolutionists of the
different countries of Europe, notably France, Belgium and England;
their Manifesto was not the expression of their personal theory, but the
doctrine of a party whose spiri