(This August 5th marked the 129th anniversary of Frederick Engels’ death, who together with Karl Marx founded the modern working class movement. For this occasion we are republishing an article originally printed in recognition of the 150th anniversary of his birth.)
BY TIM WOHLFORTH
… So closely did Marx and Engels collaborate in this work that it is difficult and in many cases impossible to separate out their distinct contributions to Marxist thought.
Engels in particular wrote on questions of philosophy and for this we must pay special tribute at this time. While this in part reflects his special interests in anthropology and science, it was just as much due to Marx’s preoccupation with Capital. Capital, of course, was for Marx a theoretical task of the highest order and as such a real development of Marxist philosophy. For those who look for a ‘‘textbook’’ by Marx on dialectical materialism could well start with Capital. Particularly important among his philosophical writings was Anti-Duhring with its important section Socialism; Utopian and Scientific, Dialectics of Nature, and Feuerbach. Because Engels took up such a sharp fight for materialism and insisted that dialectical logic was a reflection in the mind of the real contradictory movement of material reality, he has come under increasing fire by idealists.
ATTACKS
Their essential argument is to contrast the early Marx who had not yet fully developed his materialist and class outlook with the later writings of Engels. These attacks on Engels’ materialism, which have become popular in current academic ‘‘Marxist’’ circles, actually have their origins in this country with the pragmatists of the 1930s. It was Professor Sydney Hook who wrote in 1936:
“Marx himself never speaks of a NaturDialektik, although he was quite aware that gradual quantitative changes in the fundamental units of physics and chemistry result in qualitative changes. Engels, however, in his Anti-Duhring and in his posthumously published manuscript Dialektik und Natur openly extends the dialectic to natural phenomena. His definition of dialectic, however, indicates that he is unaware of the distinctive character of the dialectic as opposed to the physical concept of ‘change’ and the biological concept of ‘development.’ ‘Dialectic,’ he writes, ‘is nothing more than the science of universal laws of motion and evolution in nature, human society and thought.’” (From Hegel to Marx, Page 75.)
This attempt to pit the later Engels against Marx is of course a blatant fraud. For instance Marx himself writes in 1873 in the preface to the Second Edition of Capital:
“(My dialectic method is not only different from the Hegelian, but is its direct opposite. To Hegel, the life process of the human brain, i.e., the process of thinking, which, under the name of ‘The Idea,’ he even transforms into an independent subject, is the demiurge of the real world, and the real world is only the external phenomenal form of ‘The Idea.’ With me, on the contrary, the ideal is nothing else than the material world reflected by the human mind, and translated into forms of thought.”
These attacks on Engels were continued by James Burnham, leader of the petty bourgeois opposition within the Socialist Workers Party in 1940. Burnham wrote of Engels:
“I find about 75 percent of what Engels wrote in these latter fields (He is referring to ‘‘philosophy, logic, natural science and scientific method’’—TW) to be confused or outmoded by subsequent scientific investigation - in either case of little value. It seems to me (and as a Marxist I do not find it astonishing) that in them Engels was a true son of his generation, the generation of Herbert Spencer and Thomas Huxley, of the popularizers of Darwin who thought that by a metaphorical extension of the hypothesis of biological evolution they had discovered the ultimate key to the mysteries of the universe.”
PRAGMATISTS
Trotsky is-then accused of serving up “only a stale re-hash of Engels.”
What these American pragmatists find so reprehensible in Engels is Engels’ insistence that the development of the real world is lawful and that our minds can accurately reflect this development if we can master dialectical thinking. Through dialectics our very forms of thought are developed so as to bring out the real struggle and change in the natural and social world.
The idealism of Hook and Burnham was actually a reflection of a class position of the middle class intellectual, confronted with the rise of fascism and the needs of its own ruling class to prepare for imperialist war. Thus they sharply rebelled against a philosophical stand which exposed the real class nature of society and their responsibility to take a stand on class issues and fight to change the world through the construction of the party. For them the real world was not lawful and thus they could not really effect it. They could thus only accept it by adapting to the needs of those who ran it - the imperialists.
The thinking of Engels was always in sharp contradiction with American pragmatism. It was Engels who said of this country:
“...From good historical reasons the Americans are worlds behind in all theoretical things, and while they did not bring over any medieval institutions from Europe they did bring over masses of medieval traditions, religion, English common (feudal) law, superstition, spiritualism, in short every kind of imbecility which was not directly harmful to business and which is now very serviceable for making the masses stupid.’’ (Letter to Sorge in 1886.)
American pragmatism was to be in the later period a development of such imbecility.
To Engels the development of dialectics was precisely to make possible revolutionary activity, to prepare for and carry through the socialist revolution. Engels, in his later years, carried on an extensive correspondence to this end with American Marxists. In this way he became thoroughly acquainted with American conditions, the level of the American working class and its historical peculiarities as well as the weaknesses of the American Marxists themselves. It must be remembered that Engels had authored the articles which appeared under Marx’s name in the New York Herald on the German revolution and that he had written extensively on the American Civil War, particularly its military aspects.
It was in this context that Engels took up the fight to turn the early Marxists in America into the actual organizations of the American working class and urged them to take up the fight for a labor party. He wrote:
“The first great step of importance for every country newly entering in the move- ment is always the constitution of the workers as an independent political party, no matter how, so long as it is a distinct workers’ party.”
This brought him into collision with a section of the German-American movement about which he stated:
“The Germans have not understood how to use their theory as a lever which could set the American masses in motion; they do not understand the theory themselves for the most part and treat it in a doctrinaire and dogmatic way as something that has to be learned by heart, which then will satisfy all requirements forthwith. To them it is a credo and not a guide to action.”
THEORETICAL
The meaning of Engels’ work and struggle for us today comes out sharply in all this. First, we can see that the first real development of an understanding of the American working class, its theoretical backwardness and its great potential if and only if, the American Marxists learn to penetrate it so as to pit it politically against the capitalists - this understanding came from Engels along with Marx. Thus a perspective for the development of the American working class came out of the international experience and theoretical leadership of the proletariat - and not out of some peculiar American development.
This perspective, this need to struggle for a labor party in the United States and through this struggle for Marxists to penetrate deep into the working class, can only be carried forward through an understanding of Engels’ theoretical work as a whole - in particular his fight for dialectics as a comrade-in-arms of Marx. American pragmatism comes into collision with Engels’ materialist dialectics and as such reinforces the American bourgeoisie making it impossible for American Marxists to penetrate the working class.
It is precisely the pragmatism of the present-day Socialist Workers Party which leads it to adapt to middle class movements, abstain from work in the trade unions, and refuse to fight actively for the labor party as Engels urged. It is not surprising that the SWP makes no mention of the 150th birthday of Engels. To the SWP Engels is a figure but not the leader of a theoretical struggle vital to the construction of the party now.
CP
The Communist Party organ Political Affairs publishes an editorial on Engels’ birthday which does not say a single word about his relationship to the United States and the political and theoretical struggle he waged for a class party here. This is then followed, not by an editorial, but actually a Political Committee Resolution on the 60th birthday of Gus Hall. Engels merits an editorial but Gus gets a resolution (which he no doubt voted for as a member of the Political Committee.)
What is essential today is that we go to school with.Engels and seek to learn from him what the early Marxists in this country turned a deaf ear to, what the pragmatists of the 1930s sought to deny, and what the contemporary revisionists and opportunists treat with disdain as they go about their essentially liberal business.
TURN
We must take a sharp turn towards dialectical materialism as we actually go out into the working class and take up the struggle to defend the working class politically against the new attacks of Nixon, Agnew and the whole imperialist ruling class behind them. The solution to the American question requires above all an international perspective and this at heart is a fight for dialectical materialism.
