>From the perspective of today's romantic elevation of primitive peoples we tend to condemn Marx and Engels for what are actually rather sensible judgments. Life in less developed societies was, despite Marshall Sahlins' fantasies, mostly unrewarding, stupid and cruel.
The complication comes because the world economy developed unevenly, so that some parts of the world were developed before others. For some, the proper rejection of primitive modes of existence became a condemnation of those races happened to live under them. In a loose way, Marx and Engels did slip into that way of talking. But despite that, they were in their deliberate political actions, militant anti-racists, organising, for example, the manchester cotton workers to campaign against slavery, or supporting the Irish Fenians in their struggle against Britain ('a marvellous thing, at once violent and anti-British' Marx wrote).
Despite Chris's objections, I think they were right to see German unification as a positive. Rosdolsky, who drew out lots of Engels more damning condemnations of the Slavs (Engels and the Non-historic Peoples) was condemning Engels for not supporting the policies of 1918 in 1848. The problem with the East European states that the Versailles Treaty created was that they were indeed lacking in an internal dynamic that would stop them becoming puppets of the Great Powers.
Their harsh judgements against the Highland Scots, which Neil Davidson objected to, are not so off the mark, either. The Scottish people as a whole saw the Highlanders as a barrier to their development, and only reworked their 'national dress' as an emblem of Scottishness after they had been decisively defeated (see T.M. Devine, Scotland's Empire, London, Penguin, 2004, p 354)
Marx and Engels' judgement was not an abstract moral imperative. They changed their minds about Ireland's independence, at first dismissing it, later embracing it, because it became clear that Britain was a barrier to human progress there, in a way that it was not in Scotland or Wales.
> Fortunately, M and E had the ability to learn and develop
> their thinking throughout their adult lives, and by the time
> of Marx's ethnological notebooks and _The Origin of the
> Family, Private Property and the State_, they had a better
> idea of the nature of "primitive" cultures.
> Engels even added an ethnological footnote to the first
> sentence of _The Manifesto of the Communist Party_
>
> Charles