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From: tonyw@ubvax.UUCP (Tony Wuersch)
Newsgroups: net.politics.theory
Subject: Re: Engels on Marx (dialectics)
Message-ID: <149@ubvax.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 1-Apr-85 15:28:39 EST
Article-I.D.: ubvax.149
Posted: Mon Apr  1 15:28:39 1985
Date-Received: Sun, 7-Apr-85 04:54:52 EST
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> From Daniel Mc Kiernan:
> > To arrive at the interpretation of Marx given by Mr Carnes, we must
> > ignore Hegel's *Logic* and *Philosophy of History*, ignore Engels'
> > *Anti-Duhring* and *Dialectics of Nature**, and, indeed, take it that
> > Marx trivialized the definition of 'dialectic' to the point that its
> > essence vanishes in the rhetorical mists.
> 
> OK, Daniel, you made me do it.  Here is Engels on dialectic, from
> *Anti-Duhring*.  This is a lucid, compact explanation of the meaning
> of "dialectic."  Judge for yourself as to whether I have
> misrepresented it.  Let me just add that higher education in the US
> consists to a large extent in training to think undialectically.
> (Rich Carnes)

Probably so, maybe not.  This is another exchange which seems to me to
be badly out of date, both as an argument about Marx and as an argument
about Marxism.  Recent scholarship on Marx (especially the work of Terrell
Carver [in a Modern Masters book on Engels and in the collection "After
Marx" from Cambridge University Press, 1983 and 1984 respectively]) tries
not to put Marx and Engels in the same boat.  Much of it suggests that
Engels did Marx a grave disservice in suggesting that Marx had a unified
methodology or that Marx stuck to a physical-scientific view of social
relations.  Engels on Marx is far from Marx on Marx.

Engels has become a hot issue recently after long years of having been
unread.  Now scholars are reading Engels and they can't stand what he
says.  Blaming Engels for much of the Marxist myth of dialectical
materialism, etc., has become very popular.  This isn't exceptional in
scholarship; it's a less extreme version of the turnabout in Nietzsche
scholarship when he was separated from his sister-guardian, Elizabeth
Forster-Nietzsche.  If the tide against Engels is correct (I think it
is), then ignoring what Engels said about Marx is the right way to go.

Dialectical materialism is metaphor posing as method.  When people are
lost and don't know how to judge which way to go in looking at society,
it offers some guidance.  But when people have a firm idea of what they
are doing and why, DM should be replaced by rigorous thinking.  That's
why once Marx wrote Capital, DM never appeared in his writings again,
except as thanks for some signposts on the road when he was lost and
starting to speculate about society.

Tony Wuersch
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