The Contribution of engels The most influential interpreter of Marx's thought after his death was undoubtedly Friedrich Engels. As a constant companion and collaborator of Marx he was regarded as having a privileged insight into the meaning and importance of Marx's writings. Always a keen correspondent, he acted as mentor to the nascent socialist parties and placed his astound- ingly broad knowledge at the disposal of the socialist movement as a whole. In general, Engels developed Marx's ideas in two distinct direc- tions that were both, to a noticeable extent at variance with the original thrust of Marx's thought. Firstly, Engels took the initial steps along the path that was to end with the portrayal of Marxism as a dogmatic meta ohysical system embodied in Soviet(and other) textbooks on dialectical materialism. Secondly, Engels was forced to come to terms with the prob- lem facing the SPD as an allegedly revolutionary party operating on an ncreasingly successful scale in a parliamentary democracy. Of course, these trends in Marxian doctrine had been developing well before Marx,'s death. In particular, Marx and Engels had operated a con scious 'division of intellectual labour(with Marx concentrating on his tory and economics while Engels looked after military strategy and natural sciences ): from their earliest meeting, there had always been a slight difference of approach between them. Engels, an autodidact, lacked the profound academic training in classical German philosophy and most of his working life was spent in the very practical management of a factory. Even in their respective drafts of the Commumist Manifesto, Engels was slightly more evolutionist and determinist than Marx; and his later spheres of special interest inevitably brought about a different methodological emphasis. It must, however, be remembered that two out of the three major writings in which Engels developed his philo- sophical views were composed during Marx's lifetime: the drafts from
10 Marxism after Marx which the Dialectics of Nature was eventually published (in 1925)were begun in 1873; and Engels actually read out to Marx the instalments of Anti-Duhring as he wrote them for the german Social Democrat news- paper Volkstaat. Only Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy was actually written after Marx's death Philosophy There were two general factors that influenced Engels's development of a general world outlook strongly orientated towards science. The more widespread the socialist movement became, the more need there was of a clear philosophical statement orientating the party members particularly as there were already rival systems in the field. And, quite naturally, the systematic orientation provided by Engels was strongly influenced by the growing preoccupation with scientific methodology in England and Germany. There was also the fact that Engels devoted a considerable portion of his time during the last two decades of his life to the study of natural science. After Engels retired from business in 1870, I went through as complete as possible a"moulting,", as Herr Liebig call it, in mathematics and the natural sciences, and spent the best part of eight years on it. 4 This research was carried on in close contact with a circle of scientific friends such as Karl Schorlemmer, professor of Chemistry at Manchester. What struck Engels as of particular impor- tance were the discovery of the transformation of energy the discovery of the cells as the basic unit of biological transformation, and the evolu- tionary theory of Darwin. These interests inevitably influenced Engels's presentation of his"world view and his emphasis on a materialist con ception of nature rather than of history. In particular, the work of Darwin made a profound impression on Engels, who came in for con siderable criticism from fellow-Marxists for applying to society concepts drawn from biology. 6 A corollary was that some of Engels's writings were directed just as much at scientists as at educated members of the working class; indeed he believed that 'the more ruthlessly and disinterestedly sci ence proceeds the more it finds itself in harmony with the interests and aspirations of the workers'. In addition to this general influence, Engels was also led-paradoxically-to adopt some of the positions of his oppo nents, particularly in his Anti-Duhring(though the Dialectics of Nature was also originally conceived of as an'Anti-Buchner,). Both Duhring and Buchner were thoroughgoing, if rather simplistic, materialists. In spite of his contempt for Duhring'ssystem-creating, Engels said in his Preface that the polemic was transformed into a more or less connected exposition of
The Contribution of Engels 11 the dialectical method and of the communist world outlook,8 Given the increasing popularity in socialist circles of the naively materialist evolu tionary concepts propounded by such thinkers as Duhring, Buchner, Vogt and Haeckel (Duhring,'s work had been greeted enthusiastically on publi cation by Bernstein and Bebel), Engels was tempted to outbid them in order to prevent a new occasion for sectarian divisions and confusion from developing within the Party, and thus merely offer a'superior' form of materialist monism It is indicative of the difference between the approaches of Marx and Engels that Engels made constant use of the concept of" which was entirely foreign to Marx's work o In Anti-Duhring Engels talked of 'the materiality of all existence and said that both matter and its mode of existence motion are uncreatable and. therefore their own final cause! At the same time, however, Engels claimed that his materialism differed from the simple metaphysical and exclusively mechanical materialism of the eighteenth century. In opposition to this concep- tion, modern materialism embraces the more recent advances in natural science.. /2 In the dialectics of Nature, however, Engels went further in his efforts to differentiate himself from mechanistic materialism and flirted with a view of matter that had affinities with German romantic philosophers such as Schelling and contemporary 'life-force theorists This involved investing matter with what looked like a covert spirituali- sation. For although Engels talked about his views being not a philoso- phy at all any more, but simply a Weltanschauung which has to establish and prove itself in the real sciences, he yet introduced a profoundly teleological element into his thinking by claiming that it lay in the essence of matter to evolve into thinking beings. 3 Central to Engels's materialism was his understanding of Hegel. For the later Engels, Hegel was a thinker 'of the greatest genius who stood"in the same relation to consciously dialectical natural science as the utopians to modern communism. 4 And there was indeed a certain similarity between the system-building of the older Hegel and Engels's tendency to systematise Marxism on a natural-scientific basis. Engels, like Marx, inverted'Hegel, but the result was not the abolition-plus-realisation of philosophy so characteristic of their thinking in the 1840s. There was no notion that philosophy might have a content to be realised and put into practice; for Engels anticipated a time whenwhat still survives of all for mer philosophy is the science of thought and its laws-formal logic and dialectics. Everything else is merged in the positive science of Nature and History. What Engels aimed at was the construction of a systematic materialism as all-embracing as Hegels own system; and it is scarcely
12 Marxism after Marx an oversimplification to say that this centrally involved the replacement of 'spirit by matter as the absolute For Engels, Hegels most significant contribution had been that he was the first thinker clearly to formulate the principal laws of the dialectic which'can be reduced in the main to three: the law of the transformation of quantity into quality and vice versa; the law of the interpenetration of opposites; the law of the negation of the negation, 16 It is obviously only in the vaguest sense that these could be called "laws.(It may be significant that they are not given the typical formulation of laws, i.e. 'all quantities when sufficiently increased undergo a qualitative change!. There is diffi culty, for example, in identifying what would count as a thesis and antithesis. 7 And Engels is ambivalent as to the heuristic quality of the laws: sometimes he gives the impression that dialectical thinking is little more than the realisation that there are no hard and fast lines of demar cation in nature, and he defends Marx against Duhring,s charge of hav ing deduced the origin and destiny of capitalism by recourse to dialectical laws. 'On the contrary, he said, 'after he has proved from history that in fact the process has partially already occurred, and partially must occur in the future, he then also characterises it as a process which develops in accordance with a definite dialectical law. 19 Yet at the same time engels could talk of the 'proofs' of these laws(he seems to mean examples) and described the dialectic as'a method of arriving at new results'2as opposed to simply a set of very general(and some would say therefore almost superfluous)categorisations of the results of natural science.21 Integral to Engels's material conception of nature was his epistemology For Engels, man,'s knowledge of the external world were'reflections'22or more or less abstract pictures of actual things and processes',and con- cepts were'merely the conscious reflex of the dialectical motion of the real world, 24 At the same time Engels was far from wishing to abandon entirely the doctrine of the unity of theory and practice: indeed, some- what paradoxically, the pithiest formulation of this doctrine - Marx's Theses on Feuerbach-was first published by Engels as an appendix to his own Ludwig Feuerbach. Engels's idea of what was involved in praxis, however, was sometimes rather anaemic, as when he summarised it as 'experimentation and industry, 25 History Engels's second main contribution to the evolution of Marxist ideas lay in his interpretation of historical materialism and his historical studies
The Contribution of Engels 13 Like most Second International theorists, Engels was stronger in history than in philosophy. Although it would be too neat to say that whereas Marx wished to change the world, Engels aimed to interpret it, this for- mulation does contain some truth. Engels's historical studies tended, unlike Marxs, to have no immediate political reference. Marx certainly became interested in primitive societies towards the end of his life and made extensive extracts from Lewis Morgan's book Primitive Society but it was Engels who turned these notes into a full-scale work on The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. 26 Engels's book was strikingly original in turning the attention of socialists to the possibility that sexual and production relations had in some respects been superior in primitive society. More specifically, the book constituted a substantial contribution to the study of the eman- cipation of women, considerably aided by Bebel's continuation of these themes in his popular Woman under Socialism (1883). It suffered, however, from its dependence on Morgan, whose Darwinist evolution ary perspective led him to posit a much too general scheme of evolu- tion(particularly considering his almost total disregard for Asia and Africa). Given also that Morgan's ideas on primitive sexual promiscu ity group marriage, and the chronological priority of the matrilinear over the patrilinear Gens are extremely dubious, it is not surprising that the section on the family is the weakest part of Engels's book More curious is his strict dichotomy between the production of the species on the one hand and the production of the means of existence on the other. This is exemplified in his view that monogamy was the first form of family to be based not on natural but on economic condi- tions and in his contrast of natural selection in savage and barbaric society with new social forces that only emerged later, all of which seem to posit a most un- Marxist division between the economic and he social. 2/Thus Engels seemed to conceive of primitive society as not subject to the influence of economic factors in the same sense as civilised societies, and had a noticeably more unilinear account of social development than Marx It is, of course, true that in his formulation of historical materialism Engels, if anything, underemphasised the role of the economic factor This was partly because he was writing to Marxists who had run int difficulties by applying to history too simplistic an interpretation of Marx, and was thus trying to combat the trenchant criticisms being directed by non-Marxists at the crude version of the theory then available