Still, the proletariat itself remained for Marx an abstraction, nothing more. He knew nothing about the working poor and never set foot in a factory. His entire picture of their lives was drawn from Engels’s book The Condition of the Working Class in England, published in 1844, even though much of its data was dated and even faked.22 Marx detested socialists who did come from working-class backgrounds, precisely because they tended to oppose violence and looked for a way for labor and capital to cooperate. He drove one, Wilhelm Weitling, out of the Communist International; another, Ferdinand
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