Engels claimed in 1892 that his Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (three chapters excerpted from his longer and more difficult Anti-Dühring) was circulating in ten languages. “I am not aware,” he wrote (rather Germanically), “that any other socialist work, not even our Communist Manifesto or Marx’s Capital, has been so often translated. In Germany, it has had four editions of about 20,000 copies in all”.1 This is a sobering, even alarming, claim. It suggests that significant numbers of interested readers were receptive, not necessarily to Marx in any direct sense, but to a Marxism whose scope was self-consciously extended – but also narrowed – by Engels. As Engels himself condescendingly put it in the privacy of a letter, “Most people are too idle to read thick books like Capital, so a little pamphlet does the job much more quickly.”2 In what follows, I argue that this extension – and narrowing – needs urgently to be interrogated. The notion that Socialism: Utopian and Scientific does the job of Capital is an instance of breathtaking hubris. I argue further that Engels’s arguments in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific are in significant respects at variance and plainly incompatible with what Marx had said, and that the wide dissemination of Engels’s arguments as surrogates for Marx’s own has had effects – not just on the reception of Marx’s doctrines but on the development of Marxism as a political movement – that were little short of disastrous.
The development of historical materialism over the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries established a canon of theoretical writings within which Engels’s offerings occupied a hallowed place. The existence of a canon, which at first was not imposed, points to a thirst for theory among German Marxists, as
does the publication history of the texts that made it up, few of which were Marx’s. Eric Hobsbawm writes
In Germany the average number of copies per edition printed of the Communist Manifesto before 1905 was a mere 2,000 or at most 3,000 copies, though thereafter the size of the editions increased. For a comparison, Kautsky’s Social Revolution (Part I) was printed in an edition of 7,000 in 1903 and 21,500 in 1905. Bebel’s Christentum und Sozialismus has sold 37,000 copies between 1898 and 1902, followed by another edition of 20,000 in 1903, and the [German Social Democratic] party’s Erfurt Programme (1891) was distributed in 120,000 copies.3
The reputation and influence of these works, which at one time was considerable, did not survive the First World War and the unexpected triumph of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia (1917). What did survive these developments was the canonical status of Engels’s works, works either like Anti-Dühring and Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, which were given a new lease of life by the Russian Revolution, or works like Dialectics of Nature, which were published for the first time in its wake. Engels failed to complete and publish Dialectics of Nature in his own lifetime. It was published and translated in short order in the Soviet Union and diffused widely, there and elsewhere, even though its editor, David B. Riazanov, the director of the Marx-Engels Institute (note the name), had believed quite correctly, that much – some would say most – of what Engels had to say about natural science in the 1870s (when he put aside work on the book in order to write Anti-Dühring) was now obsolete. Nevertheless, it happened to fit into “the scientistic orientation of Marxism which, long popular in Russia … was reinforced during the Stalin era”4 – a “scientistic” orientation we might add, that Engels’s already-published offerings played no small part in inspiring. Engels, that is to say, emerged over time as “the father of dialectical and historical materialism, the philosophical and historiographical doctrines … [that] became the basis of official philosophy and history in the Soviet Union and in most other countries that declare themselves Marxist”.5 To the extent that Marx’s early writings did not jibe with the canonical works – and we should remember that the Soviet canon, unlike the SPD canon, was state-imposed – these early works were all too frequently marginalized, and their links with Marx’s later writings remained uninvestigated, save by mavericks writing in the West.
Yet selectivity had its limits. The CPSU’s far-from-grudging imprimatur, its desire to put Dialectics of Nature into print in the shortest possible order, indicates that this same Soviet canon proved mightily hospitable to Engels’s writings.
The Russian Revolution … transferred the centre of Marxian textual scholar-
ship to a generation of editors who no longer had personal contacts with Marx, or more usually with the old Engels … his new group was therefore no longer directly influenced either by Engels’s personal judgments on the classic writings or by questions of tact or expediency … which had so obviously influenced Marx’s and Engels’s immediate literacy executors [Eduard Bernstein, Karl Kautsky, August Bebel]…. [C]ommunist (and especially Russian) editors tended – sometimes quite correctly – to interpret the omissions and modifications of earlier texts by German Social Democracy as ‘opportunist’ distortions.”6
Yet it never entered the minds of the same Russian editors and Party stalwarts, who derogated German Social Democrats as “opportunists”, to disparage Engels in anything like the same way. To the contrary, the theoreticians of the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow presented Engels – his own disclaimers notwithstanding – as someone he had never claimed to be, someone on equal footing with Marx himself as a “classic” theorist and founding father.
The Marxist notables of the SPD and the Second International (1889–1914) had taken Engels, who had never claimed to be Marx’s intellectual equal, at his word. They treated him personally as he treated himself, as Marx’s junior partner. Russian Marxists, who did not have to deal at first hand with Engels’s principled protestations, were governed instead by their own need to establish continuities – between Marx and Engels and thus among Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, and whoever else was in vogue at the time. We have no way of knowing with any certainty whether Engels would have welcomed or approved such a development – if indeed “development” is the right word to employ, given the intellectually downward slope of the sequence. But what we can establish with some certainty is that Engels, whatever his intentions might have been, did much to make this sorry sequence possible. There is at least one sense in which the first believer in the mythic joint identity of Marx and Engels was none other than Engels himself.7 To the extent that he appointed himself the posthumous alter ego of Marx (Marx’s literary executor, one might say, in more senses than one), Engels is responsible for creating some of the conditions in which this same myth could take root and flourish, and in which there could be an E in the MEGA (the Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe, the edition of their complete works that was to have been published in the Soviet Union before Riazanov’s purge).
It is with Engel’s canonical status in mind, his canonical status both within the SPD and – there is something remarkable about this double service – within the CPSU, that we should re-examine Engels’s immense productivity, as theorist as well as éminence grise, between Marx’s death in 1883 and his own in 1895 (the very period, on his own admission, when Socialism: Utopian and Scientific began to circulate widely). For he laboured prodigiously, setting himself up as “the custodian not only of Marx’s works, but of the relationship between [Marx and Engels] itself”.8 He once complained that the translator of his Condition of
the Working Class in England, Florence Kelly Wischnewetzky, “translates like a factory”, but he produced texts like a factory himself.
In the years after Marx’s death … Engels produced prefaces to new editions of their Communist Manifesto (five editions), one of his own The Condition of the Working Class in England (two editions) and of (several) works by Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy, Wage-Labour and Capital, The Communist Trial in Cologne and The Class Struggles in France. To these works he contributed editorial notes and changes, but his principal projects as editor were the second and third volumes of Capital (with prefaces).9
Engels put together Capital from Marx’s scattered unpublished notes and drafts: it “has come down to us not as Marx intended it to, but as Engels thought he would have intended to … [even its] first volume is also a text finalized by Engels and not by Marx”.10 This means at one level that some of Marx’s writings were made more widely available than ever before, thanks to Engels’s diligence (and for the record, that of Kautsky, who edited Theories of Surplus Value and Bernstein, who edited Marx and Engels’s correspondence). At another level, however, these were, in Hobsbawm’s words, “a corpus of ‘finished’ theoretical writings [that were] intended as such by Engels, whose own writings attempted to fill the gap left by Marx and bring earlier publications up to date”.11
Marx’s writings, which often took the form of “penetrating but convoluted critiques” and which contain more than their fair share of cryptic or gnomic utterances, could well be regarded as complex and in need of the kind of simplification and popularization that Engels was not alone in bringing to bear. Engels’s most recent English-language biographer points to a “steady focus on intended audience, quick publication and immediate effect” as characteristics of Engels’s – though certainly not of Marx’s – writings. Engels did not share Marx’s “penchant for overblown satires,” satires that were often mordant and heavy-handed into the bargain.12 However terrible he might have been – and he makes an unlikely villain – Engels was very much the simplificateur. But for all this, Hobsbawm’s further point begs the question whether Marx would have agreed that what he had not covered in his own work left “gaps” of the kind that needed to be “filled” by others. This is a question to which I shall return.
Engels’s relentless industriousness was not restricted to the reproduction or updating of Marx’s texts. He also produced a large number of his own, which (we should remember) circulated, by and large, much more widely. Their scope and variety is at first glance impressive. Engels’s Peasant War in Germany could well be regarded as “the first Marxist work of history”; Engels also could well be regarded as the first Marxist anthropologist on the basis of The Origin of
the Family, Private Property, and the State and his manuscript on “Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man” (an early, prototypical attempt – the first of many – to combine Marx and Darwin). Nor is it too much to identify Engels as “the first Marxologist”, for in writing Ludwig Feuerbach and the Outcome of German Classic Philosophy in 1888 (and by adding Marx’s hitherto-unpublished “Theses on Feuerbach” – in an edited form – as an appendix) Engels “launched the first enquiry into young Marx, tracing influences upon him, primarily philosophical, and searching in the earlier works for enlightenment concerning the origins and meanings of the later ones”.13 That Feuerbach is evidently a skewed account of Marx’s development14 may be less important than what the book stood for. It established a modus operandi for dealing with Marx’s development as a theorist, one that is still, in its broadest sense, followed today. There is more than one sense in which “the study of Marx has been footnotes to Engels”.15 These are achievements of some moment, but whose moment depends, in large measure, on the assertion of a joint identity between Marx and Engels that accompanied them into the canon; Engels referred self-consciously to “our doctrine” on several occasions. Engels, in Anti-Dühring, tried to produce “an encyclopaedic survey of our conception of … philosophical, natural, scientific and historical problems”.16 But his use of the first-person plural is misprized. There is no evidence for any joint doctrine outside of Engels’s insistence that it was somehow – or had to be – “there”. Let us be plain. Engels’s post-Marxian doctrines owe little or nothing to the man he called his mentor. Historical materialism – Engels’s term – was something left to us not by Marx, but by Engels (even though he originally credited it to Marx). Even if – or precisely because – Engels “brought Marxism into existence” and “put Marxism on the map”,17 Engels’s Marxism had an improperly scientistic aspect that is radically, and demonstrably, at variance with Marx’s approach, method, and even subject matter.
Engels claimed, in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific and elsewhere, that Marx’s method produced a law of historical development of the kind that invited comparison with Darwinian biology. He proceeded blithely but fatefully to make claims about the certitude and universality of this “law” that have no counterpart in any of Marx’s writings. “Just as Darwin discovered the law of development of organic nature,” Engels declaimed at Marx’s graveside, “so Marx discovered the law of development of human history”18 – a law that is, however, nowhere to be found in Marx’s writings. Marx’s laws of capitalist development – which are tendential lawlike statements rather than anything else – were never invented to have any application outside the capitalist mode of
production. Marx, unlike Engels, never equated these laws with the laws of matter in motion, laws that he never even discussed. Engels, not to put too fine a point on it, departed from Marx in claiming that he had found a historical law in accord, in some ultimate causal sense, with all events. Neither Engels’s view that one, unitary set of dialectical laws account for all phenomena nor his view that “dialectical philosophy itself is nothing more than the mere reflection of this process in the thinking brain”19 appeared in print before Marx’s death. Moreover, “by interpreting ‘material life’ [Marx’s phrase] to imply the materialism of the physical sciences, Engels glossed Marx’s view of [individuals and their] material productive activity out of all recognition”.20 Indeed, Engels’s unwarranted extraction from Marx of a scientistic historical materialism “gave the impression that Marx was merely reflecting a historical course” in his own theoretical writings, rather than doing what he said he was doing: “subjecting a body of economic theory (Capital’s very subtitle is ‘Critique of Political Economy’) to logical, philosophical, mathematical, social, political, and historical analysis.”21
This impression, wrongheaded though it was, became rapidly, indeed eagerly, seized upon by others – either by those in Germany who were intent on developing Engels’s historical materialism into a Weltanschauung (or worldview), or by those in Russia to whom historical materialism so understood (and shorn of its “opportunistic” aspects, to be sure) needed assimilation within that Soviet monster, dialectical materialism. The implications of such seizures, both for the reception or understanding of Marx’s thought and for Marxism’s subsequent, and consequent, degeneration into an ossified dogma were, in a word, disastrous. Marxism in short order became what it has been ever since: a galaxy of contending creeds within which Marx’s thought, effectively marginalized in the jostle at the very point where it should have been most useful, occupies an ambiguous place. Historical materialism perforce turned into what was not so much a means of explanation as an object of study in its own right – by which point the damage was well and truly done. Even before the Bolshevik Revolution set it in stone, historical materialism had become “an object of exegesis independent of the complexities it was designed to summarize”.22
Engels was of course by no means the sole person to blame for this sorry story of confusion worse confounded. But he bears a degree and kind of responsibility for it, in the sense that his misrepresentation of Marx’s legacy made possible or sanctioned in advance later, worse misrepresentations, which came almost to feed on one another exponentially. Even though a fateful degree and kind of distortion of Marx’s views can be laid, for this reason, fairly and squarely at Engels’s door, mendacity and perfidy cannot. (Would that we could say the same of his successors, who garbled Marx’s message even further.) Even though Engels never claimed to have familiarized Marx with the arguments of
Dialectics of Nature, it probably never occurred to Engels that his accounts of what Marx had really meant – or must have meant – could conflict with Marx’s insights, or that his extensions of what he took to be Marx’s method into uncharted regions were in any way out of line or incompatible with what Marx had accomplished.23 That Engels was anything but the last of the true believers in the mythical joint identity of Marx and Engels speaks to and impugns the ulterior motives of later theorists, stalwarts and doctrinaires whose utterances neither Marx nor Engels could possibly have foreseen. But if the employment of Marx’s resources was dogmatic and slanted from the outset, and if, as seems clear, not all of this was Engels’s responsibility, he still has a lot to answer for. By making of Marxism a more universal, more scientistic theory than Marx had ever wanted it to be, Engels left behind the impression that Marx had provided posterity with a key to unlock every door – which leaves Marx himself as a historical figure high and dry.
The disservice done to Marx by the orthodox Marxist-Leninist world-view is to have turned his thought into a kind of overarching theory that Marx never intended to provide. Marxism-Leninism constructed around Marx’s writings, to the extent that these were made available, a grand theory concerned with the ultimate laws and constituents of the universe, the natural as well as the social world, even though Marx himself had maintained discretion on such cosmic questions. Naturalism and cosmology were distant from, even alien to, Marx’s brief, the critique of political economy. Worse still, it was in a sense precisely because Marx had remained reticent on these issues, while claiming a more limited scientific status for his more narrowly defined field of inquiry, that his admirers and followers – to whom Marx’s reticence evidently seemed strange and unnerving – felt the need to fill in the “gaps” and construct a coherent, comprehensive system of materialist metaphysics. Yet Marx’s sustained silence about many of the issues that came to be held to constitute his “system” denoted not a failure of scholarly nerve but a well-judged reluctance to extend his arguments into the domains of nature and physical science, domains to which his arguments could have no meaningful application. When we ask ourselves who thought that Marx’s arguments could and should be extended in such untoward directions and who regarded natural science and the laws of thought as “gaps” needing to be “filled” with Marxist argumentation, Engels is the earliest theorist to snap into focus.
Eric Hobsbawm claims that Anti-Dühring was the book “through which, in effect, the international socialist movement was to become familiar with Marx’s thought on questions other than political economy”.24 But quite apart from the probability that this honour should be claimed, not by the ponderous and elephantine pièce de circonstance that was Anti-Dühring, but by Socialism: Utopian and Scientific instead, Hobsbawm’s claim is disingenuous. Marx, by 1877–78, when Anti-Dühring first appeared, had written very little on “questions
other than political economy”, at least according to his own rather broad understanding of the term, and in future years was to add even less. This means that the international socialist movement had perforce to be made “familiar” with something having little real existence. Small wonder, perhaps, that such familiarity was quick to breed contempt among readers who were not predisposed to accept socialism of any stripe but who were nevertheless content for this very reason to credit Anti-Dühring as a definitive statement of Marx’s doctrine – the very thing it was not.
In the words of Lezsek Kolakowski,
[It] does not appear that the philosophical bases of Marx’s Marxism are compatible with belief in general laws of nature having, as particular applications, the history of mankind and also the laws of thought, identified with psychological or physiological regularities of the brain.
But such laws, rules and regularities are the very Leitmotiv of Anti-Dühring and Socialism: Utopian and Scientific alike. Kolakowski, here at least, is under no illusion. There is, he goes on to say, “a clear difference between the latent transcendentalism of Engels’s dialectics of nature and the dominant anthropocentrism of Marx’s view”, an anthropocentrism that can and should be contrasted with Engels’s “naturalistic evolutionism”. Whereas
Engels, broadly speaking, believed that man could be explained in terms of natural history and the laws of evolution to which he is subject, Marx’s view was that nature as we know it is an extension of man, an organ of practical activity.25
Engels maintained that “our mastery of nature consists in the fact that we have the advantage over other beings of being able to know and apply its laws”, and that “we are more and more getting to know, and hence to control, even the more remote natural consequences … of … our productive activities”.26 This is a much more Baconian- Promethean notion than anything we encounter in Marx.27 The relation of theory to practice Engels proffers is straightforwardly instrumental. The laws of physical nature, because they are laws as Engels understands the term, admit only of being applied for the sake of control. Such control can be
either of nature or of society. Natural science and social management exist – for Engels, not for Marx – on the same continuum. Engels proffered a shift
from Marx’s view of science as an activity important in technology and industry, to seeing its importance for socialists [as] a system of knowledge, incorporating the causal laws of physical science and taking them as a model for a covertly academic study of history, “thought” and … current politics.28
Human beings in Engels’s view are in the last analysis physical objects whose motion is governed by the same general laws that regulate the motion of all matter. Alfred Schmidt tersely observed, apropos of Engels, that “the fact that human history is made by beings endowed with consciousness is nothing more than a factor that tends rather to complicate matters”.29 Engels would not admit this as a criticism; he himself said much the same thing about human consciousness without any discernible irony. Purpose, practice and human thought itself are in Engels’s view complex forms of motion, about which lawlike statements may be made. The “law of the negation of the negation” Engels regarded as “an extremely general – and for this reason extremely far-reaching and important – law of development of nature, history, and thought; a law which holds good in the animal and plant kingdoms, in geology, in mathematics, in history and in philosophy”.30 How such a “law” could possibly admit of so broad a purchase is something Engels never took it upon himself to demonstrate in any adequate sense – unsurprisingly, since, in passages like this one (there are examples aplenty) he was clearly out of his depth. Be this as it may, human history and human thought are on Engels’s account nothing but special fields of play for nature’s general laws of motion and development. This is why, on the one hand, the “government of persons” (in the Saint-Simonian phrase Engels so readily appropriated) can give way without undue difficulty to the “administration of things”31 – a shift that also, far from incidentally, may be encountered in the writings (if not the practices) of Lenin.32
The “government of persons” and the “administration of things” are both simply matters of technique. Slippage from one to the other is unproblematic because each is viewed instrumentally. Either we control nature or nature controls us; subjection or subjugation of people to nature gives way, sooner or later, to their domination of nature, this being what human history finally comports. “Master demons” in due course become “willing servants”.33
Engels even manages to combine the apocalyptic dualism evident in such formulations with what Kolakowski identifies, correctly, as Engels’s “naturalistic evolutionism”. This unlikely alliance does nothing to make Engels’s thought more palatable, or more compatible with the writings of Marx, in whose name Engels took care to advance it. Socialism: Utopian and Scientific declaims:
The whole sphere of the conditions of life which environ man, and which have hitherto ruled man, now comes under the dominion and control of man, who for the first time becomes the real, conscious lord of nature, because he has become master of his own social organization … Man, at least the master of his own form of social organization, becomes at the same time the lord over nature, his own master – free.34
If domination-and-control philosophies of nature all too readily lead into domination-and-control philosophies of human nature and vice versa – and I see no reason to doubt this general proposition – then Engels’s views have repressive, authoritarian implications (though he sometimes sugared these with gradualist, evolutionary coatings, which in fact sit ill with the apocalyptic side of this thought – deep coherence was not Engels’s strong suit). Terence Ball has argued persuasively that “there is a logical link between positivist meta-science and the view that social relations are best managed by technical experts and administra-tors”.35 This at root is why the task of disentangling Marx’s writings from those of Engels is a task that matters. Since the historical links between post-Marxian Marxism and authoritarianism are not in doubt, there is every reason to question the extent of their intellectual grounding in Marx’s writings.
Briefly put, Marx, in Capital, excoriated what he called “the abstract materialism of natural science”.36 The truths of natural science, far from being logically prior to history and society, and far from providing any truths about society, are themselves dependent on the social purposes that provide the climate and context for the scientist’s enterprise. Nature to Engels was by contrast necessitarian; freedom could only be freedom from it or over it. Marx saw nature very differently, and was a much less apocalyptic theorist than Engels. For Marx the continuum of nature does not stop short at the arbitrary barrier of the human senses and cognitive faculties. The implications of this for our understanding of the ontological basis of natural science lend no credence to Engels’s apocalyptic and necessitarian claims. Natural science on Marx’s view of it cannot be what Engels thought it must be: the observation of, and drawing of lawlike conclusions about, an external, material reality that exists independently of the observer it confronts. If nature is not independent of human aims, projects and purposes in the sense Engels requires it to be, then scientific truth cannot be
a matter of a correspondence between human perceptions and judgments, on the one hand, and an independently existing “reality”, on the other. People’s various observations and adaptations of nature are not, in Marx’s view, to be regarded as forays into the uncharted territory of a categorically separate realm (“reality”) that operates according to its own, necessitarian laws – laws we can but confront, interpret and apply within our own social realm.
Engels, who did regard our observations and adaptations in that very way, is often credited for having belatedly seen into print Marx’s “Theses on Feuerbach”. In so doing, however, Engels – whose own thought, let it be said, remains firmly and unambiguously within the confines of the “old materialism” that the “Theses” excoriate – seems not to have reflected very much about their meaning. He seems never to have discerned that if, in the words of the Second Thesis, “the dispute over the reality or non-reality of thinking that is isolated from practice is a purely scholastic question”, then this admonition may be true of scientific thinking as of any other kind. The constitutive function of human thought and action on the world arises not from anything in the realm of thought, as Hegel and the Young Hegelians had believed, but from people’s life in the world. Nature, on this view, cannot be regarded as Engels evidently regarded it: as an inhuman, necessitarian realm to whose laws people are subject until they can “master” them. Nor can the world be regarded as Engels regarded it, as a kind of screen on which we as supine spectators can or should watch natural processes unfold. Engels, to reiterate, understood “dialectics” to be “the science of the general laws of motion and development of nature, human society and thought” considered in all seriousness as constituting a seamless web. He believed that “the dialectic going on in our heads is in reality the reflection of the actual development going on in the world of nature and of human history in obedience to dialectical forms.” People’s cognitive links with nature consist in the subjection to general laws of nature, of which human history and the laws of thought are but particular expressions. Thoughts are identified as physiological regularities of the brain; everything in the last analysis is an instance of matter in motion. Since “the unity of the world consists in its materiality”, we can deduce the “dialectics” of society from the “dialectics of nature” by using “a ‘system of nature’ [like that of the eighteenth-century Aufklärer d’Holbach, but] sufficient for our time”.37
It should be clear how distant such thinking is from Marx’s. It differs not just in degree but in kind, not just in emphasis but in principle. Marx and Engels are separated by a conceptual chasm that should have resisted all attempts at papering it over.
Yet there have been many such attempts. We have been told, for over a century now, that Marx and Engels occupy common ground – and there are still people who subscribe to such a belief. Investigation of their reasons for subscribing to it would take this chapter too far afield; we must remain content with an outline of the textual evidence, which, unless it proceeds from Engels after Marx’s death, all points in a different direction. Engels claimed in 1885 that he had read AntiDühring to Marx – a curious claim, since Marx was not incapacitated or bedridden at the time it was written, and listening to a recitation of its ponderous contents would have taxed the patience of Job – and that it was issued with his knowledge (a much weaker claim, which, as far as it goes, is presumably true but means little). “It was self-understood between us,” wrote Engels, “that this exposition of mine should not be issued without his knowledge.”38 The implication here, seized upon by later true believers, is that Engels, in writing AntiDühring, was faithfully fulfilling his part in what was an agreed-upon division of labour, according to which Engels produced texts that were interchangeable with Marx’s on some subjects and supplementary to, but always compatible with and true to, Marx’s work on others. The trouble is that there is no direct textual evidence anywhere in Marx’s writings – and most of these are by now available – that he agreed with Engels’s overall deterministic materialism and teleological “dialectics”. “We do not find in Marx’s works the confusing, windy and ambiguous philosophizing that we find in Engels.”39 Only after Marx’s death did Engels write that
Marx and I were pretty well the only people to rescue conscious dialectics from German idealist philosophy and apply it in the materialist conception of nature and history … [I]n nature, amidst the welter of innumerable changes, the same dialectical laws of motion force their way through as those which in history govern the apparent fortuitousness of events; the same laws that simultaneously form the thread running through the history of the development of human thought and gradually rise to consciousness in the mind of man.40
Engels’s claims in the first (1878) preface to Anti-Dühring are appreciably more modest. He refers there to “my views” or “the various views which I have advanced”. Even with these, Marx is nowhere on record as having agreed. And why should he have, since the views were so radically at variance with his own? The wearisome argument we have all heard, over and over again – that Marx must have agreed with Engels about science because he never expresses disapproval of Engels’s views in the surviving correspondence – is weak, argues from
silence, and strains credulity. Carver observes wryly that “if it is not really possible to agree or disagree with Engels’s dialectics” anyway, “because they are supposed to underlie everything”.41 Quite apart from this, sustained epistolatory exchanges between friends need to be treated with considerable caution. It is likely that each correspondent will, at times, write what he expects the other to hear, and will humour or even indulge him when nothing pressing or urgent is at stake. Over and above this, it has been noted that “in correspondence on dialectical subjects as Engels understood them Marx was stand-offish or evasive”42 rather than supportive. It is not hard to see why he adopted so markedly “perfunctory and non-committal” an attitude.43
Engels wrote a postscript to Marx on 30 May 1873 that, as Helena Sheehan points out,44 was omitted from the English-language Selected Correspondence (one suspects the usual chicanery and legerdemain). “If you think there is anything in it,” wrote Engels, “don’t say anything about it just yet, so that no lousy Englishman will steal it on [sic] me. It may take a long time yet to get it into shape.”45 The “it” in Engels’s postscript refers to the following:
This morning while I lay in bed the following dialectical points occurred to me: the subject-matter of natural science – matter in motion, bodies. Bodies cannot be separated from motion, their forms and kinds can only be known through motion; of bodies out of motion, out of relation to other bodies, nothing can be asserted. Only in motion does a body reveal what it is. Natural science, therefore, knows bodies by examining them in relation to one another, in motion. The knowledge of the different forms of motion is the knowledge of bodies. The investigation of these different forms of motion is therefore the chief subject of natural science.46
From all appearances Marx did indeed maintain a discreet silence – and presumably an embarrassed one – about this instance of scholarship in majestic stride. Marx’s doctoral dissertation, we might recall, had been about Democritus and Epicurus, either of whom takes us much further than Engels’s amateur peregrination does. Engels had admitted to Arnold Ruge in 1842 that he was an Autodidakt in der Philosophie.47 He still is. One is hard put not to admire Marx’s forbearance in not pointing out to his friend that there is nothing remotely dialectical (or even profound) about Engels’s presumed insight.
Perhaps Marx felt it easier, in view of their long friendship, their role as leading socialists, and the usefulness of Engels’s financial resources, to keep quiet and not to interfere with Engels’s work. After all, Anti-Dühring went out under Engels’s name alone, Engels stated in the preface that the work contained “my views”, and neither Engels nor Marx seem to have revealed publicly during Marx’s lifetime that Marx contributed to the chapter on political economy, or that Marx’s rather distant preface to Socialism: Utopian and Scientific was published under Paul Lafarge’s name.
In general, “Engels, it seems, was canny enough to avoid creating disagreements with Marx. And Marx seems to have been similarly canny in not pressing Engels on his work”.48 The fact remains that, overall,
[t]he surviving Marx-Engels correspondence fails to support the picture painted by Engels in the 1885 preface to Anti-Dühring. Marx did not discuss Engels’s dialectical laws, even after prodding, nor did he say anything to substantiate the contention that he and Engels were the joint expositors of a universal materialism predicated on the natural sciences, understood as the study of matter in motion. Marx said nothing to confirm Engels’s claim that he endorsed it … the diffidence, lacunae, and artful evasion displayed in Marx’s replies to Engels does not illustrate a perfect partnership on theoretical issues.49
Yet this is not how the Marx-Engels intellectual relationship has come down to us. It has come down to us in mythic form as a story of complete agreement expressed in interchangeable works or an agreed-upon division of labour within a perfect partnership. It has come down to us in this mythic form because Engels wanted it to and because, mainly in the 1883–95 period, he bent to the task of “setting Marx’s work in an academic and philosophical context, drawing out its implications as a universal methodology, and adding what was declared in advance to be consistent with it, a positivist account of natural science”.50 To rehearse the long and weary story of how this myth found so many subsequent takers, and why it found so many adherents, will be the subject of subsequent chapters. Suffice it to say in a preliminary sense that the myth set the terms of its own acceptance – again, in large measure because Engels wanted it to do so. Leonard Krieger (one of the best commentators on Engels as a historian) referred in 1967 to “the delicate surgery of detaching Engels from Marx”.51 I
cannot forgo the observation that such surgery has needed to be “delicate” in large measure because Engels wanted it to be “delicate”. He has to this day given us a great deal of work to do, work that is uphill and ought to have been needless. But in saying this we are by no means done with irony.
It is arguable that Engels’s best and most original works – The Condition of the Working Class in England is a minor masterpiece, if ever there was one – were those which owed least to Marx. This is not an idle observation. One could write – many people by now have written – about Marx without much emphasis on Engels. That one could write about Engels without referring to Marx, is, however, much less clear. Engels in his manner may have been perfectly aware of this. His adoption of Marx’s mantle, conscious or unconscious as this may have been, was certainly self-conscious. Without invoking or even (to a considerable extent) inventing the adjectival status of Marx’s name, would he have been listened to? Would he have found as many takers for ideas that were his and his alone? The question is at the very least an open one. I rather suspect that Engels himself knew in his heart of hearts the answer to it has to be no.
1 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Selected Works in Two Volumes, Moscow, Progress Publishers, 1962, vol. 2, pp. 94–95; Carver, Terrell, Engels, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1981, p. 46.
2 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Collected Works in English, New York, International Publishers, 1975, vol. 35, p. 396; see Terrell Carver, Marx and Engels: The Intellectual Relationship, Brighton, Harvester/Wheatsheaf, 1983, p. 132.
3 Eric J. Hobsbawm, The History of Marxism, vol. 1, Marxism in Marx’s Day, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1982, p. 331.
4 Hobsbawm, The History of Marxism, p. 336.
5 Carver, Engels, p. 48.
6 Hobsbawm, The History of Marxism, p. 332.
7 Carver, Engels, pp. 73–6.
8 Carver, Marx and Engels, p. 118.
9 Carver, Engels, pp. 42–3.
10 Hobsbawm, The History of Marxism, p. 330.
11 Ibid.
12 Terrell Carver, Friedrich Engels: His Life and Thought, London, Macmillan, 1989, p. 181.
13 Carver, Engels, p. 53.
14 Terrell Carver, Marx and Engels: The Intellectual Relationship, Brighton, Harvester/Wheatsheaf, 1983, pp. 137–9.
15 Terrell Carver, “Marx, Engels and Scholarship”, Political Studies 32: p. 256, 1984.
16 Marx and Engels, Collected Works, 36:136.
17 Carver, Engels, p. 38.
18 Marx and Engels, Selected Works in Two Volumes, vol. 2, p. 167.
19 Marx, and Engels, Selected Works in Two Volumes, vol. 2, p. 363.
20 Carver, Engels, p. 68.
21 Carver, Engels, p. 40.
22 Carver, Engels, p. 63.
23 Carver, Engels, p. 60.
24 Hobsbawm, The History of Marxism, p. 328.
25 Leszek Kolakowski, Main Currents of Marxism, vol. 1, The Founders, tr. P.S. Falla, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1978, pp. 401–2; Paul Thomas, “Marx and Science”, Political Studies 24: pp. 1–23, 1976; Paul Thomas, “Nature and Artifice in Marx”, History of Political Thought 9: pp. 485–503, 1988.
26 Friedrich Engels, Dialectics of Nature, New York, International Publishers, 1940, pp. 292–30.
27 See below, Epilogue, pp. 132–51, “Nature and Artifice in Marx”.
28 Carver, Marx and Engels, p. 157.
29 Alfred Schmidt, The Concept of Nature in Marx, London, New Left Books, 1971, p. 191.
30 Friedrich Engels, Anti-Dühring, Moscow, Progress Publishers, 1969.
31 Engels, Anti-Dühring, p. 333; Carver, Engels, p. 60.
32 Paul Thomas, Alien Politics: Marxist State Theory Retrieved, New York, Routledge, 1994, p.129.
33 Friedrich Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, New York, International Publishers, 1972, p. 68.
34 Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, pp. 72, 75.
35 Terence Ball and James Farr, eds., After Marx, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1984, p. 236.
36 Karl Marx, Capital, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1976, vol. 1, p. 272, n. 2.
37 Marx, and Engels, Selected Works in Two Volumes, vol. 2: p. 504; Engels, Dialectics of Nature, pp. 314, 179; Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Selected Correspondence, Moscow, Progress Publishers, 1975, p. 590; Marx and Engels, Selected Works in Two Volumes, vol. 2: pp. 65, 136–7; Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Selected Works in One Volume, New York, International Publishers, 1968, p. 622.
38 Engels, Anti-Dühring, p. 13.
39 Carver, “Marx, Engels and Scholarship”, 32: p. 251.
40 Engels, Anti-Dühring, pp. 15–16.
41 Carver, “Marx, Engels and Scholarship”, 32: p. 256.
42 Carver, “Marx, Engels and Scholarship”, 32: p. 252; John Stanley and Ernest Zimmerman, “On the Alleged Differences between Marx and Engels”, Political Studies, 32, 1984: pp. 242–3.
43 Carver, Marx and Engels, pp. 128–9.
44 Helena Sheehan, Marxism and the Philosophy of Science, vol. 1, The First Hundred Years, Atlantic Highlands, Humanities Press, 1985, p. 64.
45 CW 33:81.
46 CW 33:80–81.
47 Carver, Friedrich Engels, p. 93.
48 Carver, Marx and Engels, pp. 129–32; Leonard Krieger, “Introduction”, The German Revolutions, by Friedrich Engels. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967, p. xii.
49 Carver, Marx and Engels, pp. 128–30.
50 Carver, Marx and Engels, pp. 156.
51 Krieger, “Introduction”, p. xii.