gareth stedman jones engels and the end of classical german philosophy

8/18/2019 Gareth Stedman Jones Engels and the end of Classical german philosophy

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Gareth Stedman Jones

Every science has a beginning. Every new science must come from somewhere.

It is usually easy enough to discover forerunners and anticipations. What is more

difficult is to pinpoint and clarify what is new and original to the science in its

course of elaboration. It is clear for example that one of the basic propositions of

Galileo—that the language of nature is written in mathematical symbols—is

platonic in inspiration and can be traced back through a whole philosophical

tradition. It is clear also that whatever it is that Galileo takes from Plato is

transformed in the act of constructing Galilean physics, and that the end result

is something authentically new which cannot be reduced to the sum total of its

sources. A similar problem arises in the relationship between Darwin and

Malthus. We know from Darwin’s own confession that the initial inspiration of his theory came from Malthus. Yet whatever it is that Darwin takes over from

Malthus, is so transformed in the course of the elaboration of the theory of evolu-

tion, that we can quite consistently both reject the Malthusian theory of popu-

lation and accept in broad outlines the Darwinian theory of the evolution of the

species.

Engels and the End of Classical German Philosophy

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It might be thought that the answer can be found in what scientificinnovators have themselves said about their discoveries and the newscientific procedures they have elaborated. But this is by no means asure guide. Often scientists are unable to think what is authenticallynew in the scientific procedures that they have employed. They are of course aware of the novelty of their conclusions, but they are oftenunable to explain what it was that was novel in their manner of working

on their raw material which enabled them to reach those conclusions.Often, in their search to identify the scientific method they haveemployed, they have recourse to pre-existing philosophic categories.But almost without exception, this resort only compounds the con-fusion: the new science thereby constructs for itself a false genealogy,its discontinuity with the pre-existing state of knowledge is flattenedinto a spurious form of continuity, and its new discoveries risk beingobscured by the weight of philosophical ideology. We can give a veryclear example of this in the case of Newton. When he attempted toexplain his methods of investigation, in the Rules of Philosophizing , heexpressed them in the terminology of Lockean empiricism. This trans-lation of new scientific procedures into the terminology of commonsense empiricism, far from facilitating scientific progress in the 18thcentury, placed a major obstacle in its path.1

The essential point is that a new science in the course of elaboration, israrely if ever able to step back and isolate what is authentically new andepistemologically distinct in its procedures, let alone draw the fullphilosophical consequences from its discoveries. The philosophical

consequences of scientific discoveries are generally perceived only aftera considerable passage of time has elapsed, and when they are per-ceived they generally turn out to be rather different from those whichthe scientist himself had imagined. Cartesian philosophy is quite distantfrom the platonic form in which Galileo expressed his discoveries.Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason is rather different from anything thatNewton envisaged in his Rules of Philosophizing . Hegel correctly per-ceived this lag between the birth of new sciences and the articulationof their philosophical consequences when he wrote that the Owl of Minerva takes wing at dusk.

The Conjunctural Background 1870–1890

The problem that I have just outlined, was Engels’ problem. Moreover,in Engels’ case, it was a problem that could not be left to the fullnessof time for its solution. From the late 1870s, Marx’s work was be-ginning to become known in the European labour movement. It wasalready acknowledged as the correct socialist theory, although barelyunderstood, by Liebknecht and Bebel, the leaders of the GermanSocial-Democratic party. In the course of the next dozen years, groups

and embryonic parties modelling themselves on the German Social-Democratic Party, and basing themselves on what they took to be theideas of Marx, sprang up in every major European country—the PartiOuvrier Francais in 1879, the Russian Group of the Emancipation of

1 For the influence of the Newtonian theory of induction upon 18th century thought,see Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment , New York 1951.

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Labour and the English Social-Democratic Federation in 1883, theParti Ouvrier Beige in 1885, the Austrian and Swiss Social DemocraticParties in 1888 and the Italian Socialist Party in 1892. The task of systematizing historical materialism and deducing its implications hadbecome politically urgent. That task fell to Engels.

Needless to say, Engels’ formulation of historical materialism and the

philosophy he elaborated to accompany it, have been of momentousconsequence. For they marked the transition, so to speak, from Marx toMarxism and provided the formative moment of all the leadingMarxist interpreters of the Second International and most of theleaders of the Third. As Kautsky testified towards the end of his life,‘judging by the influence that Anti-Dühring had upon me, no other bookcan have contributed so much to the understanding of Marxism. Marx’sCapital is the more powerful work, certainly. But it was only through

Anti-Dühring that we learnt to understand Capital and read it properly’.2

According to Ryazanov, Anti-Dühring ‘was epoch-making in thehistory of Marxism. It was from this book that the younger generationwhich began its activity during the second half of the 1870s learnedwhat was scientific socialism, what were its philosophic premises, whatwas its method . . . all the young Marxists, who entered the public arenain the early eighties—Bernstein, Kautsky, Plekhanov—were brought upon this book’.3

The difference in atmosphere between the later 1870s when Anti- Dühring was written and the late 1880s is evident in Engels’ Ludwig Feuerbach of 1888. While Anti-Dühring had been designed as no morethan a political intervention into an ideological dispute within theGerman Social-Democratic Party and was composed with somereluctance—‘It was a year before I could make up my mind to neglectother work and get my teeth into this sour apple’4—Feuerbach waswritten in a quite different spirit. ‘The Marxist world outlook has foundrepresentatives far beyond the boundaries of Germany and Europe andin all the literary languages of the world’, wrote Engels in his preface.‘In these circumstances a short coherent account of our relation to theHegelian philosophy, of how we proceeded, as well as of how we

separated from it, appeared to me to be required more and more.’5

The Inversion of Hegel

How then does Engels characterize the general nature of historicalmaterialism and the intellectual situation from which it emerged? Theanswer in Ludwig Feuerbach is fairly clear: a combination of a materialistworld outlook, Feuerbach’s contribution, and the dialectical method of Hegel, Hegel’s ‘revolutionary side’. According to Engels, Hegel’sgeneral system was in contradiction to his method. According to the

dialectical method: ‘all that is real in the sphere of human history

2F. Engels’ Briefwechsel mit K. Kautsky, Vienna 1955, pp. 4, 77; see also Lucio Colletti,Introduction to Marx’s Early Writings (Penguin, forthcoming).3 D. Ryazanov, Marx and Engels, London 1927, p. 210.4 F. Engels, Anti-Dühring , Moscow 1969, pp. 9–10.5 F. Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of German Classical Philosophy, in: Marx-Engels, Selected Works, London 1968, pp. 594–5.

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becomes irrational in the process of time, and is therefore irrational byits very destination . . . and everything which is rational in the minds of men is destined to become real, however much it may contradictexisting apparent reality.’6 Or in short: ‘All that exists deserves toperish.’7 This was the revolutionary side of Hegel. ‘It once and for alldealt the death blow to the finality of all products of human thoughtand action.’8 This is the implicit conclusion to be drawn from Hegel,

but one that Hegel himself never drew. Because he had to complete hissystem in accordance with philosophical tradition, he rounded it off with a theory of absolute knowledge which dogmatically smotheredthe revolutionary implications of his dialectical method. This inter-pretation of Hegel, was, as Engels correctly points out, the view of theyoung Hegelian Left in the 183os.9

Once Marx and Engels had been converted to a materialist position andhad begun the process of elaborating the materialist conception of history, their attitude to Hegel changed. According to Engels, thischange was of the following kind: ‘Hegel was not simply put aside. Onthe contrary, a start was made from his revolutionary side . . . from thedialectical method. But in its Hegelian form this method was unusable. . . according to Hegel. . . the dialectical movement apparent in natureand history, that is, the causal interconnection of the progressive move-ment from the lower to the higher, which asserts itself through allzig-zag movements and temporary retrogressions, is only a copy of theself-movement of the concept going from eternity, no one knowswhere, but at all events, independently of any thinking brain. This

ideological perversion had to be done away with. We . . . took amaterialist view of the thoughts in our heads, regarding them asimages of real things instead of regarding the real things as images of this or that stage of the absolute concept . . . in this way . . . therevolutionary side of Hegelian philosophy was again taken up and atthe same time freed from the idealist trimmings which with Hegel hadprevented its consistent execution.’10

The Dialectic in Capital

Without for the moment questioning the possibility of such an inversionof Hegel, let us see how this materialist dialectical method, works itself out in the classic scientific work of historical materialism, Capital . Howdid Marx apply this method? It should be possible to find the answer tothis question, in the two chapters of Anti-Dühring which deal with theMarx’s use of the dialectic in Capital . In his chapter on quantity andquality, Dühring had accused Marx of employing the ‘confused hazyHegelian notion’11 that quantity changes into quality and that ‘thereforean advance, when it reaches a certain size, becomes capital by thisqualitative increase alone’.12 Engels replies by citing in detail, the

6 Selected Works, p. 597.7 Selected Works, p. 597.8 Selected Works, p. 598.9 Selected Works, p. 601.10 Selected Works, p. 619.11 Anti-Dühring , p. 153.12 Anti-Dühring , p. 149.

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passage to which Dühring is referring. He shows that Marx, on the basisof his previous examination of constant capital, variable capital andsurplus value, draws the conclusion that ‘not every sum of money orof value, is at pleasure transformable into capital. To effect this trans-formation, in fact, a certain minimum of money or of exchange valuemust be presupposed in the hands of the individual possessor of moneyor commodities’.13 Marx, as Engels points out, gives a number of

examples to demonstrate his proposition, and it is only after his state-ment has already been fully substantiated, that Marx goes on to observe:‘here, as in natural science, is shown the correctness of the law dis-covered by Hegel (in his Logic) that merely quantitative differencesbeyond a certain point pass into qualitative changes’.14

The second major example of dialectical method in Capital , cited byEngels, concerns Dühring’s attack on Marx’s analysis of PrimitiveAccumulation. Dühring praises this chapter, but remarks that it wouldhave been better had it not relied on a ‘dialectical crutch’15 to help it to

its conclusion; for, he argued, ‘Marx has no other way of proving thenecessity of the social revolution, of establishing the common owner-ship of land and of the means of production produced by labour, exceptby citing the Hegelian negation of the negation; and because he baseshis socialist theory on these nonsensical analogies borrowed fromreligion, he arrives at the result that in the society of the future therewill be dominant an ownership at once both individual and social, asHegelian higher unity of the sublated contradiction.’16 Engels, in hisreply to Dühring, first of all shows that the higher unity to whichDühring refers, means nothing more mystical than the combination of the social ownership of land and the means of production on the onehand, and individual ownership of articles of consumption on theother. Having disposed of the idea that socialism will mean ‘sublation’—‘simultaneous overcoming and preserving’—in the Hegelian sense,Engels then proceeds to examine Marx’s argument in his chapter onprimitive accumulation. This section of Capital recounts the expro-priation of petty industry, the transformation of individual andscattered means of production into socially concentrated ones, thetransformation of labourers into proletarians and their means of labour

into capital and then with the further development of the capitalistmode of production, the expropriation of individual capitalists, theincreasing concentration of capital, the development of the cooperativelabour process, the conscious application of science, the creation of socialized labour, the growth of a proletariat itself increasingly unifiedby the concentration of capital, and so on until the point where capitalbecomes a fetter upon the mode of production. ‘The knell of capitalistprivate property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated.’17 Havingreproduced this whole argument, Engels remarks, ‘and now I ask thereader: where are the dialectical frills and mazes and conceptual

arabesques’.18 He then concludes that it is only after Marx has com-

13 Marx, Capital , Moscow 1961, Vol. I, pp. 307–8.14 Capital , Vol. I, p. 309.15 Anti-Dühring , p. 155.16 Anti-Dühring , p. 156.17 Capital ,Vol. I, p. 763.18 Anti-Dühring , p. 160.

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pleted his proof on the basis of historical and economic facts, that heproceeds to a summary of the process employing the Hegelian notionof the negation of the negation. Engels concludes by stating: ‘thus, bycharacterizing the process as the negation of the negation, Marx doesnot intend to prove that the process was historically necessary. On thecontrary: only after he has proved from history that in fact the processhas partially already occurred, and partially must occur in the future, he

in addition characterizes it as a process which develops in accordancewith a definite dialectical law. That is all’.19

Certainly in these passages, Engels disproves Dühring’s idea that Marxhas any need of ‘dialectical crutches’ or that the dialectic exists as a‘proof-producing’ instrument. But Engels has also proved somethingelse, something that he did not intend to prove and something whichhe does not seem to be aware of having proved: that is, that the Hegeliandialectic in Capital is superfluous, that fundamental dialectical laws likethe passage of quantity into quality and the negation of the negation,are mere re-descriptions of processes which have been established byquite different means. All that can be conceded without any difficulty,is, as Marx states in the preface, that in a period when Hegel had almostbeen forgotten and was being treated like a ‘dead dog’, Marx was notashamed to avow himself ‘the pupil of that mighty thinker’ and evenhere and there to ‘flirt’ with ‘modes of expression peculiar to him’.20

The Flux of Notion and Interconnection

Why is it then that Engels was so convinced that the distinctive featureof historical materialism was its application of the dialectic when hisdemonstration of the importance of the dialectic in Capital tends toreduce its actual significance to that of a feeble appendage? It iscertainly not that he misunderstood the actual argument of Capital , forhis exposition of its main points in Socialism, Utopian and Scientific andelsewhere is on the whole a model of lucidity, and his analysis of thesignificance and implications of Marx’s theory of surplus value trulysituates the nature of Marx’s transformation of political economy as ascientific revolution—an idea which has nothing to do with the Hegelian

idea of supersession. To understand why, nevertheless, Engels was soconvinced that the dialectical method is the revolutionary new form of knowledge at work in historical materialism, we must look moreclosely at the way he defined it.

In Feuerbach, he characterizes it this way: ‘thus dialectics reduces itself to the science of the general laws of motion, both of the external worldand of human thought—two sets of laws which are identical in sub-stance, but differ in their expression in so far as the human mind canapply them consciously, while in nature and also up to now for the most

part in human history, these laws assert themselves unconsciously inthe form of external necessity, in the midst of an endless series of seeming accidents’.21 In The Dialectics of Nature, he defines dialectics in

19 Anti-Dühring , p. 161.20 Capital , Vol. I, pp. 19–20.21 Selected Works, p. 619.

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contrast to metaphysics, as ‘the science of inter-connections’,22 andhe condenses these forms of interconnection into three laws—the lawof the transformation of quantity into quality, the law of the inter-penetration of opposites, and the law of the negation of the negation.But, as he stresses in Feuerbach, ‘it is no longer a question anywhere of inventing interconnections from out of our brains, but of discoveringthem in the facts’.23 Hegel’s mistake, he wrote in Dialectics of Nature,

‘lies in the fact that these laws are foisted on nature and history as lawsof thought, and not deduced from them. This is the source of (his) wholeforced and often outrageous treatment . . . if we turn the thing round,then everything becomes simple, and the dialectical laws that look soextremely mysterious in idealist philosophy at once become simple andclear as noonday’.24 Or, as he puts it in Anti-Dühring , they reveal ‘aprocess which is taking place everywhere and every day, which anychild can understand’.25

As far as the natural sciences are concerned, he says in Dialectics of Nature, ‘hard and fast lines are incompatible with the theory of evolution . . . for a stage in the outlook on nature where all differencesbecome merged in intermediate steps, and all opposites pass into eachother through intermediate links, the old metaphysical method of thought no longer suffices. Dialectics which likewise knows no hardand fast lines, no unconditionally, universally valid either/or, and whichbridges the fixed metaphysical differences . . . and reconciles opposites,is the sole method of thought appropriate in the highest degree to thisstage’.26 To sum up, dialectics, as he puts it in Feuerbach, is that ‘great

basic thought that the world is not to be comprehended as a complexof ready-made things, but as a complex of processes, in which thethings apparently stable no less than their mind images in our heads,the concepts, go through an uninterrupted change of coming intobeing and passing away in which in spite of all seeming accidentalityand of all temporary retrogression, a fundamental development assertsitself in the end’.27

We can now begin to see why Engels attributed such tremendous powerto the dialectic, even if its formal concepts are not used very much in

Capital . For the dialectic is synonymous with history itself and historyis everything. Hegel’s dialectic breaks down the fixity of the concepts of the understanding, the immobile distinctions made by the mind—either/or, cause/effect, and so on. History likewise knows no fixedstates; everything comes into being and passes away, everything is inmovement, whether it belongs to the natural world or the human world.Hegel’s mistake was to imagine that this was a process of thought andthen project it rather arbitrarily onto the world; but in fact it is theprocess of the world itself, and all thought does is to reflect it, or rathersince thought is also part of this world process, thought simply raises

this process to consciousness.

22 F. Engels, Dialectics of Nature, Moscow 1966, p. 62.23 Selected Works, p. 631.24 Dialectics of Nature, p. 62.25 Anti-Dühring , p. 162.26 Dialectics of Nature, pp. 212–13.27 Selected Works, p. 620.

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History and Science

But why does history have this infinite power which Engels ascribesto it? Why does he feel it to be so omnipresent, so obviously the domi-nant characteristic of everything that exists? The answer to thisquestion is to be found, not so much in Hegel, as in the whole socio-economic history of the 19th century and the development of science

which accompanied it. On the one hand, European and indeed worldhistory had since 1789 undergone an immensely accelerated course of development. The French Revolution, the Napoleonic conquest of Europe, the risings of 1830, the European revolutions of 1848, theeffective unification of Germany, Italy and the USA, the colonization of vast areas in Africa and Asia, the growth of large scale industry inEngland and its spread through Europe and America, the economicruin of traditional strata of artisans and peasants, the breakdown of feudal relations in agriculture, the mass migrations from the country-side to the towns, the growth of a world market, the internationali-

zation of political ideologies, the growth of mass proletarian parties andthe beginnings of a world socialist movement had all occurred virtuallyin the space of a lifetime. All this in itself would be enough to produce aheightened sense of the absolute omnipotence of the historical process.But this had in its turn been accompanied by the opening up of thehistorical continent to scientific investigation. As Engels interpreted it,scientific advance in the 19th century had taken place in the form of the creation of historical sciences, developmental sciences and sciencesof interconnection. The first group included the Kant-Laplace hy-

pothesis of the origin of the universe, geology, palaeontology andevolutionary biology; the second group included embryology and thetheory of the cell; the third group included comparative anatomy,organic chemistry, the theory of the transformation of energy and themechanical theory of heat. Finally of course, there was the discoveryof the science of history—historical materialism, a science whichsimultaneously connected man to nature and to human history andthus forged the final links in the chain. Thus, if we view the course of scientific development in the 19th century through the eyes of Engels,28

we can on the one hand see a virtually uninterrupted historical process

starting off with the Kant-Laplace theory of the origins of the universeand then proceeding through geology, palaeontology, evolutionarybiology to historical materialism; and on the other, a virtually un-interrupted process of interconnection, the theory of the transformation of energy linking physics and chemistry, organic chemistry, the cell theorylinking inanimate and animate matter, the theory of evolution linkingall life from the simplest cell to man, and historical materialism linkingman as animal and man as history—all in the last resort unified as awhole once they were seen to be differing forms of a general law of motion. It is not difficult to understand therefore how terms like

movement, flux, change, motion and process could be combined intoone single image of extraordinary power.

This image was a concentrate on the one hand of the evolution of realhistory, and on the other hand of all major scientific progress. Two

28 Dialectics of Nature, pp. 26–30,194–5.

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quite distinct developments—the process of scientific thought and theprocess of real history—were merged into one concept, history or

process. Then this concept was further distilled into its essence, its innerprinciple, its general law of motion: the dialectic. Quite unconsciously,an extraordinary verbal sleight of hand had occurred. Nothing so farhad been established by Engels about the dialectic, beyond the factthat in Hegel it was a method whereby the fixity of concepts was broken

down and they were in some manner set in motion. And the same greatadvance had been registered in the 19th century by a number of deter-minate sciences whose mode of establishing their conclusions hadnothing to do with the dialectic. Yet, for Engels, it was not the dia-lectic which must justify its procedures in relation to these determinatesciences. It was, on the contrary, these sciences which must justifytheir procedures before the tribunal of the dialectic. In other words, thecontemporary revolutions in science had been transposed into the fluxof history itself, and their combined power had then been transposedinto the dialectic, which thereby was elevated into the quintessence of the historical process, its general law of motion. This dialectic, nowbloated with the borrowed prestige acquired not only from historyitself but also from the sciences of history, was then directed at the veryscientific procedures which had made the scientific revolutions of theage possible. The methods of these sciences were now declared byEngels to be ‘metaphysical’.29

The nature of this feat can be made even clearer if we ask what is thecontent of these Laws which ‘assert themselves unconsciously in the

form of external necessity, in the midst of an endless series of seemingaccidents’.30 We find that in human history these laws of necessity arenone other than the relation between the forces and relations of pro-duction, which were the object of Marx’s scientific investigation inCapital . We likewise find that in the history of nature, the laws of necessity are the Darwinian laws of evolution, and that in the realm of matter generally they are the laws of mechanics, physics and chemistry.If we then look at the boundary line that separates the laws of necessityfrom all the ‘seeming accidents’, we find that it corresponds in everycase with the boundary between that which has been made the object

of scientific explanation and that which has not yet been made theobject of scientific explanation; or to put it more simply, between thatwhich is so far known in a science and that which is not.

If the ‘unconscious laws’ have been established quite independently of the dialectic by determinate sciences, and if the dialectic is not ‘proof producing’, as Engels insists that it is not, what then does the dialecticadd to what science has already established? Engels tells us that it

29 ‘Until the end of the last century, indeed until 1830, natural scientists could

manage pretty well with the old metaphysics, because real science did not go beyondmechanics—terrestrial and cosmic. . . . Now, however, everything is quite different.Chemistry, the abstract divisibility of physical things, bad infinity—atomistics.Physiology—the cell, and finally the identity of the forces of nature and their mutualconvertibility, which put an end to all fixity of categories. Nevertheless, the bulk of natural scientists are still held fast in the old metaphysical categories . . .’, Dialectics of

Nature, pp. 203–5.30 Selected Works, p. 619.

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provides the general law of motion. Therefore to find out more aboutthe nature of this law of motion, we must examine Hegel’s dialectic,which Engels believed to be its intellectual source.

Hegel’s Definition of Idealism

Hegel defined his system as an absolute idealism.31 Idealism for him

meant the viewpoint that denies that things and the finite world have atrue reality. True being belongs to the infinite, that is to thought—notordinary human thought although it is expressed through it, butabsolute thought, Logos or God. Thus the finite world seems to be butis not; it is the world of illusory being, of appearance. Thereforeidealism must annihilate this finite world and replace it with truereality. According to Hegel, no previous philosophy had succeeded indoing this, because it had adopted the viewpoint, not of ‘reason’ but of ‘understanding’—that is, merely human thinking symbolized in themodus operandi of the natural sciences which are based on the principle

of non-contradiction and the mutual exclusion of opposites. The‘understanding’ separates and divides. Therefore when idealist philo-sophy adopts this mode of thinking, although it declares the finiteworld not to be the true world, it in fact makes the finite world‘imperishable’ and ‘absolute’. The finite becomes eternal, which is whatHegel calls, a ‘bad infinity’, and the infinite is relegated to an emptybeyond; it becomes a mere ideal.32 The ‘understanding’ cannot com-prehend the unity of the finite and the infinite within the infinite; itcannot produce a true totality, but like Kant remains trapped in aninescapable dualism. God for it is only the God of deism, an infinitelyremote figure who winds up the clock.

To produce a true idealism, a philosophy of immanence is necessary.The finite is not only not true being, the finite is also ideal. That is, thefinite has an essence which is other than itself—the infinite, the im-material, thought. Since the essence of the finite is other than itself, thefinite is only truly itself when it is other. This is the dialectic. The finiteis considered in relation to what it is not. The essence of the finite is itsopposite. But this act of negating and finite, is defined by Hegel as theobjective movement carried out by the finite itself in order to go beyonditself and thus pass over to its essence. It is not the ordinary humansubject who negates the finite. It is on the contrary the very nature of the finite itself, to transcend itself and become infinite—in other words,to negate its negation.33 This process is not accomplished by an ex-traneous force, but is immanent in the process itself. As Hegel put it,‘God is only accessible in pure speculative knowledge, and is only in

31 ‘The proposition that the finite is ideal constitutes idealism. The idealism of philosophy consists in nothing else than in recognizing that the finite has no veritablebeing. Every philosophy is essentially an idealism or at least has idealism for its

principle, and the question then is only how far this principle is actually carried out.’Hegel, Science of Logic (tr. Miller), London 1970, pp. 154–5. The best discussions of Hegel’s Logic are to be found in J. Hyppolite, Logique et Existence. Essai sur la

Logique de Hegel , Paris 1953; and L. Colletti, Marxism and Hegel (NLB, forthcoming),Chapters I–IX.32 See Science of Logic , p. 130; Encyclopaedia—The Logic (tr. Wallace), London 1968,p. 177.33 Science of Logic , p. 138.

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this knowledge, and is only this knowledge itself.’34 The identity of being and thought is realised within thought, but this thought is notordinary human thought, but Absolute thought which thinks itself through human thought. Hegel says, ‘real are not those things externalto thought, but those things penetrated by thought’,35 for they are nolonger things but thought-objects. In immediacy a thing is only appear-ance and contingency. It is real only as a moment of the idea, and this is

the true meaning of Hegel’s famous dictum, wrongly taken by theyoung Hegelians and Engels for a revolutionary slogan, that ‘what isrational is real and what is real is rational’. To cite Hegel again,‘illusory being’ or what we would call material reality, ‘is not nothing,but is a reflection, a relation to the absolute’. Thus being is reduced tothought, and thought in its turn is. The logical unity of oppositescomes to exist and is incarnate in the real object. It is this unity of opposites which creates movement. As Hegel says, ‘it is one of thefundamental prejudices of Logic as hitherto understood and of ordinary

thinking, that contradiction is not so characteristically essential andimmanent a determination as identity . . .’. But ‘if it were a question of grading the two determinations and they had to be kept separate, thencontradiction would have to be taken as the profounder determinationand more characteristic of essence. For as against contradiction,identity is merely the determination of the simple immediate, of deadbeing; but contradiction is the root of all movement and vitality; it isonly in so far as something has a contradiction within it that it moves,has an urge and activity’.36 To sum up; ‘external sensuous motion itself is contradiction’s immediate existence. Something moves, not because

at one moment it is here and at another there, but because in this “here”it at once is and is not’.37

It should be clear from this account, that the general law of motioncontained in Hegel’s dialectic really has nothing to do with anyhistorical process as such. It is, of course, true that Hegel did project itinto history. But it is also true that he projected it onto nature, whichhe defined as having no history and only existing in space. The move-ment of the dialectic is in fact purely logical, and it is precisely theidentity of being and thought within thought which creates motion. If,

therefore Engels, as a materialist, starts from the proposition of the non-identity of being and thought, there is no general law of motion left.Engels seems to have been unaware that dialectical motion in Hegel’sphilosophy is based on the inseparability of thought and being. In hisversion, the dialectic is the process of material reality and thought is areflection of this process, ‘merely the conscious reflex of the dialecticalmotion of the real world’.38 But this inversion leads to a result that islogically absurd. For either thought reflects the identity of being andthought and therefore thought is reflecting itself. Or thought reflects

being not endowed with thought, but then there is no dialectic. Forthought is no longer reflecting processes in the original dialectical

34 Cited in Hyppolite, Logique et Existence, p. 24.35 Cited in Colletti, Marxism and Hegel , p. 16.36 Science of Logic , p. 439.37 Science of Logic , p. 440.38 Marx-Engels, Selected Works, p. 619.

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sense of the word, but merely things, what Hegel would term ‘deadbeing’ or the ‘kingdom of death’.

Engels’ Loans from Hegel

We can now see that the inconsistency between method and system is tobe found, not in Hegel but in Engels. We can have materialism or we

can have the general dialectical law of motion. But we cannot haveboth. This inconsistency was first pointed out by Lukács in History and Class Consciousness39 (and he chose to keep the dialectic), and it has sincebeen exhaustively demonstrated from a very different point of view, inthe works of Colletti.40 It certainly led to bizarre results, for whenEngels attacked ‘metaphysics’ in the name of dialectical science, he wasin fact attacking the methods of the natural sciences in the name of aprinciple designed to realize absolute metaphysics. Hegel had criticizedthe old metaphysics, not for wanting to be metaphysical, but on thecontrary for employing a method derived from natural science which

prevented the aim of metaphysics from being realized.

Nevertheless, this inconsistency was doubtless not the most seriousconsequence of Engels’ borrowings from Hegel. It was certainly anti-scientific in implication, but it was not anti-scientific in intention. Onthe contrary. Engels’ stress upon the scientific character of historicalmaterialism and his general emphasis on the importance for socialismof scientific advance in every sphere should be cited to his credit, andnot to his detriment as a long tradition of Lukácsian Marxists, andothers have done ever since the early 1920s.

The gravest consequence of Engels’ theory of the dialectic, stemmednot from his unsuccessful attempt to use it as a bridge between differentsciences, but rather in the way in which it distorted the character of historical materialism itself and unwittingly transformed it from anopen-ended infant science in the course of elaboration into the appear-ance of a finished system already capable of explaining all events, greatand small.

In Hegel, it is the unity of opposites, the identity of being and thought,

which destroys the fixity of the concepts of the ‘understanding’. InEngels, as we have seen, it is the real process of history, the materialistdialectic which subverts the old fixed concepts of ‘metaphysics’. In aletter to Conrad Schmidt, written in 1890, inveighing against aneconomic reductionist interpretation of Marxism, Engels wrote; ‘Whatthese gentlemen all lack is dialectics. They always see only here cause,there effect. That this is a hollow abstraction, that such metaphysicalpolar opposites exist in the real world only during crises, while the vastprocess goes on in the form of interaction—though of very unequal

forces . . . that here everything is relative and nothing is absolute—thisthey never begin to see. As far as they are concerned Hegel neverexisted.’41 Or in another letter again to Schmidt, this time written in

39 G. Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, London 1971, pp. 199–200.40 Colletti, Marxism and Hegel , passim; From Rousseau to Lenin, London 1972, pp.111–28.41 Marx-Engels, Selected Correspondence, Moscow 1965, p. 425.

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1895, he wrote, ‘from the moment we accept the theory of evolution allour concepts of organic life correspond only approximately to reality.Otherwise there would be no change. On the day when concepts andreality completely coincide in the organic world, development comesto an end’.42 Despite his reference to the theory of evolution, Engels ishere once again implicitly invoking Hegel. In another letter to Schmidtwritten in 1891, Engels indicates where the rational kernel of Hegelian-

ism is to be found: ‘the doctrine of essence is the main thing: theresolution of the abstract contradictions into their own instability,where one no sooner tries to hold on to one side alone, than it changesunnoticed into the other’.43

The doctrine of Essence in Hegel’s Logic in fact consists of a dialecticalanalysis of the principal categories characteristic of reflective andscientific thought—identity and difference, content and form, force andits manifestations, the whole and the parts, necessity and accident,cause and effect, interaction and so on. Each concept is weighed up butfound to be inadequate and one-sided; it therefore negates itself andpasses into its opposite; a new synthesis emerges which is in turnnegated; and so on until Being and Essence find their truth in the‘Notion’. Many of Hegel’s analyses are, indeed, as Engels claimed, verybrilliant. But the essential question is: by what criterion are theseconcepts being judged? They are actually all one-sided because Hegel’scriterion of judgment is the Absolute, which by its very definition con-tains every existent. In other words, the concepts examined by Hegelhave been wrenched out of the determinate sciences where they were

operative, and judged according to their ability to express the Absoluteprocess which is the identity of thought and being within thought. Of course, judged by this criterion, it is not surprising that they are foundto be one-sided, especially since some of the concepts analysed byHegel were indeed tautologies devised to help 18th century science overepistemological voids, to provide verbal explanations of factors whichcould not be explained in terms of the sciences themselves.

Contingency and Necessity

Engels accepted the Hegelian transition of concepts and indeed con-sidered it to be the very core of Hegel’s ‘revolutionary side’. But sincehe rejected the Absolute Idea as an ‘ideological perversion’,44 by whatcriterion, in his case, were these concepts found lacking and one sided?The answer is, of course, the real historical process, or the materialistdialectic. But this solution effectively raised history to the status of theHegelian Absolute, and the ‘idealist crotchet’ which Engels believed heand Marx had thrown out of the window, had re-entered by the back-door. This appeal to a new Absolute is very clear in a passage of Anti-

Dühring in which Engels remarks: ‘We find that cause and effect are

conceptions which only hold good in their application to individualcases; but as soon as we consider the individual cases in their general connection with the universe as a whole, they run into each other, and they

42 Selected Correspondence, p. 484.43 Selected Correspondence, p. 438.44 Selected Works, p. 619.

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become confounded when we contemplate that universal action andreaction in which causes and effects are eternally changing places, sothat what is effect here and now will be cause there and then, and viceversa’.45

Moreover, as soon as a new Absolute is admitted, a surreptitiousempiricism is also in fact re-introduced. The Absolute, by definition,

includes everything and must in principle explain everything, other-wise it will cease to be Absolute. Hegel had already been confrontedwith the problems involved in this claim, particularly in his Philosophyof Nature. He had tried to solve them in the following fashion: ‘Thecontradiction of the Idea, arising from the fact that, as Nature, it isexternal to itself, is more precisely this: that on the one hand there is thenecessity of its forms which is generated by the Notion, and theirrational determination in the organic totality; while on the other hand,there is their indifferent contingency and indeterminable irregularity. Inthe sphere of Nature contingency and determination from without hasits right, and this contingency is at its greatest in the realm of concreteindividual forms. . . . This is the impotence of Nature, that it preservesthe determinations of the Notion only abstractly, and leaves their de-tailed specification to external determination’.46 Here, then, Hegel findsthat Being is not able to match up to the Concept. Once the Hegeliandialectic is inverted, it is therefore not surprising to find many state-ments in Engels to the effect that concepts can only ‘approximately’ or‘asymptotically’47 measure up to being. While Hegel found no difficultyin explaining the development of thought and ideology, but had to

admit to a short-term impotence of Nature to accord to the Notion andto an irreducible stratum of contingency or accident, Engels had tograpple with precisely the reverse problem. In a letter to Starkenbergin 1894, he wrote, ‘the further the particular sphere we are investigating,is removed from the economic sphere and approaches that of pureabstract ideology, the more we shall find it exhibiting accidents in itsdevelopment, the more will its curve run zig-zag. But if you plot theaverage axis of the curve, you will find that this axis will run more andmore nearly parallel to the axis of economic development, the longerthe period considered and the wider the field dealt with’.48

Before considering Engels’s general solution to this problem, we mustbriefly assess what the new science of historical materialism hadaccomplished and what it had not yet accomplished by the time of Marx’s death. We shall then be in a better position to understand thepolitical and historical importance of Engels’ solution. Marx’s Capital is the theory of the Capitalist mode of production; it does not concernitself with the examination of any particular social formation, that is,any particular country existing in reality. It therefore does not contain,

except tangentially, any fully theorized conception of the relationshipbetween the base and the superstructure—that is, between the forces

45 Anti-Dühring , p. 32.46 Hegel, Encyclopaedia— Philosophy of Nature (tr. Miller), London 1970, pp. 22–3.47 See, for instance, Engels’ letter to Schmidt, 12 March 1895, Selected Correspondence,p. 482.48 Selected Correspondence, p. 468.

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and relations of production on the one hand, and political, juridical andideological forms on the other. In particular, while it provides amaterialist basis for the statement that the class struggle is the motor of history, it does not pretend to deal with the role, temporality andstrategy of the class struggle in its relation to the structure of a deter-minate social formation in which more often than not, more than onemode of production might coexist. To find indications of what this

relationship might be, we have to turn to Marx’s other works, forexample The Eighteenth Brumaire or The Civil War in France. Yet thesehistorical works were all written after the events they describe; theycertainly contain important indications of the way in which politicalstruggle and to a lesser extent ideological struggle relate to the materialbase or current combination of the forces and relations of production.But these indications are never theorized as such: they have to be readthrough the specific analysis of the historical events described. Whatemerges from them of course, is that the economy is in the last instancedeterminant, and yet that superstructures possess a particular form of causal efficacy which cannot be simply reduced to the economic base.But the precise structural mechanism connecting the two is always leftunclear by Marx.

The Problem of the Role of Superstructures

The most important political and scientific task that was bequeathed toEngels in 1883 was to provide an explanation of this mechanism. It isevident that already by 1880 the task was becoming urgent. The chief threat no longer came from the followers of Lassalle, Bakunin orProudhon, all of whom had been considerably influenced by Hegel.The new danger came from the positivism of Dühring and Buckle, andthe monism of Haeckel—all of which, filtered into historical material-ism, tended to reduce it to a mechanistic economic determinism, inwhich the superstructures became a virtually automatic reflex of thebase. The urgency of combating this conception is reflected in virtuallyevery letter and article of Engels concerning historical materialismfrom the mid 1880s onwards. In 1890, he wrote to Bloch: ‘Accordingto the materialist conception of history, the ultimately determining

element in history is the production and reproduction of social life.More than this neither Marx nor I have ever asserted. Hence if some-body twists this into saying that the economic element is the onlydetermining one, he transforms that proposition into a meaningless,abstract, senseless phrase.’49 Or again in a letter to Mehring who wascomposing an article on historical materialism in 1893, Engels said;‘One more point is lacking, which however Marx and I always failed tostress enough in our writings and in regard to which we were all equallyguilty . . . we all laid and were bound to lay, the main emphasis in thefirst place, on the derivation of political, juridical and other ideological

notions . . . from basic economic facts . . . This has given our adver-saries a welcome opportunity for misunderstandings and distortions.’50

In all his discussions of this question, it is quite clear that Engels wishedto preserve the irreducibility of the two propositions that the economy

49 Selected Correspondence, p. 417.50 Selected Correspondence, p. 459.

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is determinant in the last instance and yet that superstructures havetheir own causal efficacy, and when he discusses specific historicalexamples, he certainly established his position. He showed—amongother things—very clearly that the State could obstruct, channel orpromote economic development, that Roman Law could co-exist withslavery, feudalism and capitalism, and that Christianity had similarlyoutlived the mode of production in which it was born.

But when Engels came to a theorization of the relationship betweenthe base and the superstructure, his clarity of grasp significantly dis-appeared. In his letter to Bloch of 1890, he wrote: ‘There is an inter-action of all these elements (i.e. of the superstructure) in which, amidall the endless host of accidents (that is, of things and events whoseinner connection is so remote or so impossible of proof, that we canregard it as non-existent or negligible) the economic movement finallyasserts itself as necessary . . .’51 In a letter to Starkenberg in 1894, hedeveloped this idea; ‘Political, juridical, philosophical, religious,

literary, artistic, etc., development is based on economic development.But all these react upon one another and also upon the economic base.It is not that the economic situation is cause, solely active, while every-thing else is only passive effect. There is rather, interaction on the basisof economic necessity, which ultimately always asserts itself . . . menmake their history themselves, but not as yet with collective plan . . .Their aspirations clash, and for that very reason all such societies aregoverned by necessity, the complement and form of appearance of which is accident. The necessity which here asserts itself athwart all

accident is again ultimately economic necessity.’

52

Or again, in Ludwig Feuerbach, he wrote: ‘Historical events thus appear on the whole to belikewise governed by chance. But where on the surface accident holdssway, there actually, it is always governed by inner, hidden laws and itis only a matter of discovering these laws.’53

It is clear here that Engels’ involuntary elevation of history to theStatute of an Absolute has engendered the same solution to the problemof the relationship of base and superstructure, as Hegel had advancedfor the relationship of Nature to the Notion. For Hegel had written in

the Encyclopaedia; ‘On the surface of nature, so to speak, Chance rangesunchecked, and that contingency must simply be recognized, withoutthe pretension sometimes erroneously ascribed to philosophy (cf.economic reductionism), of seeking to find in it a could-only-be-so-and-not otherwise . . . the problem of science, and especially of philo-sophy, undoubtedly consists of eliciting the necessity concealed underthe semblance of contingency.’54 Indeed, when Hegel later discussescause and effect and resolves it into reciprocity, he mirrors almost wordfor word Engels’ idea, that there is interaction on the basis of eco-nomic necessity. Hegel says: ‘To make for example the manners of the

Spartans the cause of their constitution and their constitution con-versely the cause of their manners may no doubt be in a way correct.

51 Selected Correspondence, p. 417.52 Selected Correspondence, p. 467.53 Selected Works, p. 623.54 Encyclopaedia—The Logic , p. 265.

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But as we have comprehended neither the manners nor the constitutionof the nation, the result of such reflections can never be final or satis-factory. The satisfactory point will be reached only when these two, aswell as all other, special aspects of Spartan life and Spartan history areseen to be founded in the notion. This pure self-reciprocation is there-fore necessity unveiled or realized.’55

Thus in both Hegel and Engels a hidden empiricist problematic can bedetected at work. The ‘concept’ is constantly in danger of being de-formed by the rich texture of ‘reality’, but in the long run alwaysmanages to assert itself. The latent tug of empiricism is expressivelysuggested in Engels’ disarming statement that; ‘It is no longer aquestion anywhere of inventing interconnections from out of ourbrains, but of discovering them in the facts.’56 History becomes a dualistcombination of the rational and the empirical. The empirical richness of history is not destroyed or reduced to its fundamental law, but isreproduced as a dialectical interaction between an ‘inner’ principle and‘outer’ shell.

Engels, Lenin and the whole Marxist tradition have derided Kant forhis notion of the thing-in-itself, because it makes reality unknowableand thus contradicts any materialist principle of knowledge. There is,however, a more subtle but no less dangerous implication in theHegelian theory of knowledge—that everything in reality is, in prin-ciple at least, already known. Engels concealed in his dialectic of necessity and accident, an actual dialectic between knowledge and

ignorance. He thereby unintentionally converted the infant science of historical materialism into the appearance of a finished system, a corpusof absolute knowledge which encompassed the whole of empiricalreality and raised accident itself into a scientific principle.

The Political Lacunae of the Later Engels

Perhaps what has been said will go some way towards explaining aparadox in the career of the later Engels. It has often been claimed,especially by social-democratic historians, that Engels moved towards

parliamentarism and reformism in his last years, abandoning therevolutionary perspectives of his youth. There is no evidence whateverfor this in any subjective or personal testimony on Engels’ part. Onthe contrary, as he wrote to Trier in 1889; ‘We are agreed on this: thatthe proletariat cannot conquer its political domination, the only doorto the new society, without violent revolution.’57 There is also his well-known letter to Neue Zeit , denouncing Kautsky for cutting his prefaceto the Class Struggles in France in such a way as to suggest that thepeaceful road was not merely present tactics but a fundamental re-

vision of principles. Above all, there were his repeated warnings inarticles and letters that Marxism was not an economic reductionism andhis reiterated insistence on the fundamental importance for it of theState. At the end of one of his letters to Schmidt, after running through

55 Encyclopaedia—The Logic , pp. 281–2.56 Selected Works, p. 631.57 Selected Correspondence, p. 409.

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the historical and philosophical arguments which we have alreadydiscussed, he asks, ‘why do we fight for the political dictatorship of theproletariat, if political power is economically impotent?’.58

On the other hand, there is certainly an objective ambiguity to be ex-plained in a revolutionary leader who could write passages like these:(1) ‘This same large-scale industry has brought into being, in the

bourgeoisie, a class which has the monopoly of all the instruments of production and means of subsistence, but which in each speculativeboom period and in each crash that follows it, proves that it has becomeincapable of any longer controlling the productive forces, which havegrown beyond its power; a class under whose leadership society isracing to ruin like a locomotive whose jammed safety-valve, the driveris too weak to open. In other words, the reason is that both the pro-ductive forces created by the modern capitalist mode of production andthe system of the distribution of goods established by it, have comeinto crying contradiction with that mode of production itself, and infact to such a degree that, if the whole of modern society is not toperish, a revolution in the mode of production and distribution musttake place.’59 (2) ‘As long as the oppressed classes, in our case, there-fore, the proletariat, is not yet ripe to emancipate itself, it will in itsmajority regard the existing order of society as the only one possible,and, politically, will form the tail of the capitalist class, its extreme leftwing. To the extent however, that this class matures for self-emancipa-tion, it constitutes itself as its own party and elects its own representa-tives, and not those of the capitalists. Thus universal suffrage is the

gauge of the maturity of the working class. It cannot and will not beanything in the present day state; but that is sufficient. On the day thethermometer of universal suffrage registers boiling point among the workers, boththey and the capitalists will know what to do.’60 (3) ‘It is now, almost to theyear, sixteen centuries since a dangerous party of overthrow was like-wise active in the Roman empire. It undermined religion and all thefoundations of the state . . . it was without a fatherland, was inter-national; it spread over all countries of the empire . . . (in the army) eventhe wonted barrack bullying of their superior officers was fruitless. Theemperor Diocletian could no longer quietly look on . . . He interfered

energetically . . . He promulgated an anti-Socialist—beg pardon, Imeant to say anti-Christian—law . . . The exceptional law was alsowithout effect. The Christians tore it down from the walls with scorn . . .then the latter (Diocletian) revenged himself by the great persecution of Christians in the year 303 of our era. It was the last of its kind. And itwas so effective that 17 years later the army consisting overwhelminglyof Christians, and the succeeding autocrat of the whole Roman empire,called the Great, by the priests, proclaimed Christianity the statereligion.’61

58 Selected Correspondence, p. 424.59 Anti-Dühring , p. 189.60 Engels, Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State, in Selected Works, p. 589.61 Engels, Introduction to the Class Struggles in France, in Selected Works (two-volumeedition), Moscow 1962, Vol. I, pp. 137–8.

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What these texts indicate, more than anything else, is not reformism,but the lack of any theory of the political instance of social formations.It should be emphasized that this lacuna, and its consequences, was notconfined to Engels. Marx himself never produced a coherent theory of the political superstructures of capitalist social formations; and he toowas responsible for formulations fully as equivocal as those of Engelscited above, in fact if anything even more so. Thus in 1852, he could

write that: ‘Universal suffrage is the equivalent of political power forthe working-class of England . . . Its inevitable result, here, is thepolitical supremacy of the working-class.’62 Marx never retracted thisjudgment; indeed he expressly confirmed its substance twenty yearslater, after the experience of the Paris Commune itself. Addressing theHague Congress of the First International in 1872, he declared: ‘We donot deny that there are countries such as America, England, and Iwould add Holland if I knew your institutions better, where the work-ing-people may achieve their goal by peaceful means.’63 These dis-arming formulations make it clear that Engels never ‘revised’ theheritage of Marx. Yet it would be absurd to argue that Marx was not apassionate revolutionary to the end of his days, and no-one has everdone so. The confusions of some of Engels’ later texts cannot in anyway, therefore, be counterposed to the legacy of Marx, and in no sensereflect any weakening of Engels’ profoundly-rooted revolutionaryconvictions. They reflect, rather, a theoretical limit to the—unfinished—work of both Marx and Engels at the close of the 19th century. Theabsence, on the theoretical plane, of any mechanism to connect thedetermination in the last instance by the economy and the relative

autonomy of superstructures, was reproduced on the political plane inan inability to produce a systematic theory of revolutionary politics.Instead, this absence was largely displaced into the one domain wherea firmly based scientific theory had been established—the theory of thecapitalist mode of production found in Capital . Thus the basic contra-diction traversing this domain—that between the forces and relationsof production—was made to bear the whole weight of what shouldhave been a regional theory of class struggle. It is not surprising, inthis sense, that Bernstein imagined that he had discovered a ‘break-down’ theory in historical materialism.64 The residual role implicitly

assigned by Engels in the passages cited above to the political partiesof the proletariat, was formally resolved but actually evaded by a tacitrecourse to Hegel. The proletariat seems merely to register the growingexacerbations of the basic contradiction between the forces and rela-tions of production; the working-class appears to be simply the meansthrough which this contradiction achieves self-consciousness, rather inthe way that the Absolute becomes self-consciousness through man atthe end of Hegel’s Phenomenology.

It was not that Engels jettisoned his revolutionary beliefs in the lateryears of his life. On the contrary, he remained a fervent andunwavering fighter for the cause of the proletariat down to his death.

62 K. Marx, ‘The Chartists’, in D. Fernbach (ed), Surveys from Exile— Marx’ s Political Writings, Vol. II (Penguin, forthcoming), p. 264.63 Marx-Engels, On Britain, Moscow 1962, pp. 494–5.64 See Colletti’s essay on Bernstein, From Rousseau to Lenin, pp. 45–108.

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Theoretically, however, his inability adequately to think through thenovelty of historical materialism as a science led him to an understand-able attempt to fill in the gaps with philosophy—the Hegelian philo-sophy of his youth. There is no doubt that Marx (who had shared ayouthful Hegelianism) approved this attempt, unambiguously en-dorsing the Anti-Dühring . But, as we have seen, there was noinconsistency between Hegel’s ‘method’ and his ‘system’. Therefore,

in borrowing Hegel’s ‘method’, Engels found himself, despite himself,an unconscious prisoner of the assumptions of the ‘system’.

gareth stedman jones engels and the end of classical german philosophy

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