To the French Left in May 1936, the electoral triumph of the Front Populaire – a coalition of the Communist, Socialist, and Radical Parties – signified nothing if not the victory of legal republicanism over the criminal machinations of domestic fascism. Consequently, embarrassment – not to mention confusion – was widespread, when the proletariat chose to greet this victory with a wave of sit-down strikes that was at once massive, spontaneous, joyful, and utterly illegal. It is true that the roots of the strikers' grievances went much further back than the political campaign of recent months. Five years of lowered wages, poorer working conditions, and the indifference of many employers to the lot of their men were behind the workers' monumental audacity. Nevertheless, the coincidence of the strikes with Leon Blum's accession to office was far from accidental.

Most histories of the nineteenth-century labour movement give some account of George Potter's conflict with the men the Webbs called the Junta; and it is generally recognised that one main bone of contention was control of the Bee-Hive newspaper. But there has been little real analysis of this quarrel, and even less of the eventual reconciliation. It is true that some of the old generalisations are no longer accepted. Nowadays, most labour historians agree that the Webbs, writing under Applegarth's influence, dismissed Potter too contemptuously. There is also some recognition of the fact that Raymond Postgate's Builders' History, although more accurate on Potter's early position in the labour movement, gives a completely false impression of his later career and the changes that took place in the Bee-Hive. But through it all, Potter has remained a rather shadowy figure, and in published works the Bee-Hive's own history has been surprisingly neglected. Even a recent work in which the author avowedly sets out to correct the record on Potter – B. C. Roberts's The Trades Union Congress, 1868–1921 – is in many ways unsatisfactory. Roberts does make an attempt to analyse the conflict, and on the whole he sums up Potter's aims and achievements more accurately than either the Webbs or Postgate did. But in trying to give Potter due credit for his part in founding the TUC, Roberts has over-estimated his contribution, and minimised his weaknesses. Above all, he has paid too little attention to the Bee-Hive itself. As a result, the consequences of the way in which the paper was founded and conducted, and the relationship between Potter's other activities and the Bee-Hive's successive changes of ownership, editorship and policy, are either disregarded or mistakenly interpreted. Potter's career in the labour movement, and the development of the Bee-Hive, were completely interwoven, and neither can be fully assessed without the other.

Seit der vollständigen Veröffentlichung der Marxschen Frühschriften ist es gesichertes Ergebnis der Forschung, daΒ der philosophische Ansatz des jungen Marx fundamental von dem verschieden ist, was der späte Engels im weltanschaulichen System des “Anti-DÜhring” (1877/78) als Marxismus formuliert hat. Iring Fetscher hat diesen Gegensatz vorläufig abschlieΒend dargelegt. Chronologisch differenziert wurde dieses Bild durch Hermann Bollnow, der gezeigt hat, daΒ sich Engels, der bei der “Deutschen Ideologic” (1845) zur völligen Identität der Auffassung mit Marx gelangt war, bereits in seinen “Grundsätzen des Kommunismus” (1847) in Richtung auf den “Anti-Dühring” von Marx entfernt hat – wenn auch erst in einem MaΒe, daΒ nur die feinsten interpretatorischen Mittel dem auf die Spur kommen können. Alfred Schmidt hat dann nachgewiesen, daβ der Kritik der politischen ökonomie des mittleren und späten Marx ein nicht-ontologischer Materialismus zugrundeliegt, während Engels' “Naturdialektik” zwar um die Gefahr der Ontologie weiΒ, jedoch nur unzureichend gegen sie gesichert ist und in den entscheidenden Aussagen in einen metaphysischen Materialismus abgleitet. Die DifFerenz zwischen Marx und Engels ist also bisher in den prinzipiell-philosophischen Fragen untersucht worden. Wir wollen an Hand der Auseinandersetzung, die Marx und Engels mit Darwin geführt haben, die DifFerenz auf einem anderen Felde darstellen und dabei zu zeigen versuchen, wie sich die unterschiedlichen philosophischen Ansätze auf ein Randproblem – und um das handelt es sich hier natürlich – ausgewirkt haben. Die bisherige Literatur über die Beziehung von Marx und Engels zu Darwin, auch in anderer Hinsicht ungenügend, ist nicht bis zu dem Punkt vorgedrungen, an dem eine Differenz zwischen Marx und Engels sichtbar wird.