Know them is to much to be said
, but obviously I heard about them. They created foundation of communistic systems, but as I was taught the differences of system (best known to me in ZSRR) and their ideas/theories were clear. It's often this way, isn't it?
It's difficult to me to distinguish between these though because I haven't read the works of them (The Communist Manifesto is on my to read list). But I think that as what you say is correct Marx believed in equality of outcome.
The majority of the communist manifesto, which is a short book and doesnt represent Marx in his entirety at all, is taken up with his criticism of various different schools of socialist thought, he is very critical of all of them and gives them all negative literary reviews, I'm not sure if you would call it equality of outcome and I'm pretty sure he would not either but his idea was "from each according to their ability and to each according to their needs", the abilities and needs arent going to be the same one person to the next.
There's way more rhapsodizing and praising of capitalism in the communist manifesto than anything else, some of it gets missed because he doesnt talk about capitalism always, sometimes its the capitalist class that he is impressed with but in any case both the system and the class which was its standard bearer he seemed to love because it was constantly modernising, changing, innovating, advancing, developing, improving and with each move it was creating greater and greater abundance.
Marx and Engels thought that the increasing yields and super abundance would make questions of equality totally superfluous, those questions, along with a lot of other questions, would be besides the point, in the way it appeared to be besides the point within a single social class already, the new class of factory owners. The thing about this super abundance is that you can ask questions if we've reached it already, if we ever could, is it in the future or is it in the past? Like I mean Marx and Engels were amazed at what steam driven ploughs could do, superabundance may have meant the days of plenty the world has already experienced, I'm pretty sure they wouldnt recognise any society experiencing an obesity epidemic as resembling their own society in which starvation and being under feed was a real thing.
I know Marx described the talk of equality in letters to Engels as "bourgousie cantor" and Engels was just as scathing too, I'm not sure which of them wrote about it but one of them (probably Engels, I've probably read more of him) talked about how great differences where between goat herders on the steppes and the average factory worker, that it would be impossible to make them equal. It was a great illustration of how equality does mean sameness to most people, sameness and a kind of homogenisation.
I think there's got to be some sort of complexity introduced into the theory of equality for it to be valid, obviously that was lacking, its at least part of the reason that Marx and Engels were so dismissive of it.
When it comes to questions about any actual communist society that's ever existed resembling anything that Marx or Engels would consider praiseworthy there's a good joke about his being brought to the soviet union by a time traveller and saying "Workers of the world, I'm sorry" and that about sums it up. Marx and Engels only praised a short lived municipal government in all their days, the Paris Commune (communism is short hand for municipalism but is meaning changed), besides that they really liked what they had heard about the colonials in the America, the both wrote about how much they liked the lack of big government there, the fact that there little or no salaried or pensionable officials. Really. No one knows the guys by their own letters and essays. Especially Engels. He wrote plenty of stuff which would make a libertarian go blush. I dont mean a socialist libertarian or an anarchist either, I mean a plain old free market, drug pushing, breaking bad, anti-law enforcement variety.
