Marxist Theory

Marx, Engels, and 'Anti-Dühring'

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Published on Monday, 29 November 2010 16:35

Written by Radical Socialist

[//284] There is no reason to suppose that Marxist scholarship should deviate from the canons of philology. Those canons require initially the scientific establishment of a text. There must be a stemma of manuscripts and editions whereby variant texts can be identified, as well as a list of conjectured readings for corrupted passages, etc. Next, these canons require attribution of the textual passages to authors, to joint authors, or to some other hand. Where the composition period was brief, the temporal order of the several passages can be indicated; where composition or publication was more protracted, the passages can be dated as well. A third step (which can be omitted for certain purposes) is the interpretation of the established, attributed, and dated text in terms of themes, motives, intended audiences, etc. Finally, the philological approach includes an evaluation, with suggestions for further study.

Since Anti-Dühring was intended to summarize and popularize the doctrines of historical materialism, dialectics, and Marxian political economics, it has become the focal point for much of this debate. If Marx and Engels agreed upon a `division of labor' as Anguelov suggests, whereby Marx was to concentrate on political economy while Engels concentrated on philosophical topics, then Anti-Dühring transcended that division by incorporating sections on political economy as well as natural philosophy./2/ Thus the rather neat distinctions that [284/285] can be drawn by attributing the authorship, say, of Capital I to Marx and Dialectics of Nature to Engels are obscured in the case of Anti-Dühring.

Engels acknowledged in the `Preface' to the second, 1886 edition of Anti-Dühring that "the outlook expounded in this book was founded and developed in far greater measure by Marx, and only in an insignificant degree by myself" and that "I read the whole manuscript to [Marx] before it was printed."/3/ Terrell Carver comments on this passage that "there is nothing in the Marx-Engels correspondence, in their works, or anywhere else to support this."/4/ Thus Carver's argument against the theoretical accord of Marx's and Engels' thought turns upon Engels' veracity.

In cases such as the "Marx-Darwin correspondence," veracity is indeed impugned. But, in such a case, (a) credibility is questioned in terms of evidence independent of the text in question, and (b) the 'authority' in question must be of less than credible character anyhow; recall the "disreputable dog," Aveling, implicated in the "Marx-Darwin correspondence."/5/ Apart from these two conditions, an argument such as Carver's is quite problematic, involving as it does the disordering of the canons of scholarship. Attribution of authorship thereby turns illicitly upon the interpretation of the 'author's' motives.

Before returning to Carver's main argument, consider for an instance his characterization of Engels' motives. Carver avers that in Engels' Dialectics of Nature, "his views on the 'general nature of dialectics' were formulated explicitly, which was not the case in the first edition of Anti-Dühring. He continues "Engels, it seems, was canny enough to avoid creating disagreements with Marx."/6/ After Carver has thus impugned Engels' intellectual honesty, one turns to the text of Anti-Dühring and is perhaps surprised to find Engels stating that "dialectics, however, is nothing more than the science of the general laws of motion and development of nature, human society, and thought."/7/ And that passage was unchanged by Engels throughout the three editions of the book./8/

Returning then to Carver's main contention, he reiterates that "Marx said nothing [in the 'surviving Marx-Engels correspondence'] to confirm Engels' claim that he was familiar with the lengthy text of Anti-Dühring."/9/ In contrast to much of the argument for the theoretical divergence of Marx and Engels, turning as it does on subtle issues of emphasis and tone, Carver's bold textual claim has the merit that it can be addressed rather directly. Moreover, the focus on Anti-Dühring has benefit of the scientifically established text in the Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe (MEGA). There are several possibilities here. Marx may have been familiar with a draft of Anti-Dühring as a result of his or Engels' reading of [285/286] it; or, he may have discussed the substance of Anti-Dühring with Engels (without necessarily having been familiar with a draft). In light of the review of Dühring's Critical History of National Economy which Marx contributed to Anti-Dühring, the second possibility cannot seriously be questioned./10/ The question thus is Marx's familiarity with draft materials of Anti-Dühring.

Marx makes an interesting reference in a letter to Wilhelm Freund which bears upon this issue. Carver observes that "Anti-Dühring appeared during 1877-78 in installments in Vorwarts, which Marx could easily have read."/11/ Of course this is quite beside the point, as many people did read the serialized Anti-Dühring; the issue is whether and what Marx knew of the contents prior to serialization. On 21 January 1877, Marx asked Freund to remind Dr Moritz Traube to send along citations of Traube's writings, because Engels is "laboring on a work of philosophy and, as it happens, Traube's achievements are emphasized."/12/ Thus Marx had some familiarity at that date with the contents of Anti-Dühring. But the chapter of Anti-Dühring which addressed the 'Traubesche Kunstzellen' was published in Vorwarts, Number 24, only on 25 February 1877./13/

Why should Marx have asked for Traube's citations and have known a month before publication that Traube's discoveries would be addressed in the serialized Anti-Dühring, unless Marx was familiar with this material in draft. And, on Carver's own argument, this would not have been the most likely topic of Anti-Dühring with which Marx would have been familiar; it was a less likely topic, for instance than those from the social sciences./14/ If it seems at all likely that Marx was familiar with draft material of Anti-Dühring on topics of organic chemistry, it is much more likely that he had read (or listened while Engels read from) other draft materials as well. Be that as it may, it seems that Marx's correspondence, contrary to Carver's assertions, does tend to confirm the veracity of Engels' claim that Marx had knowledge of some if not all of the draft materials of Anti-Dühring.

At this juncture, attention can properly focus on motives. On the one hand, Marx did not publicize either his familiarity with, or his contributions to Anti-Dühring. At the personal level, this can be imputed to Marx's modesty and sense of propriety. At the political level, this can be imputed to Marx's and Engels' perception of the issue of Marx's 'authority' in the Continental working-class movement in the 1870s./15/ On the other hand, after Marx's death, Engels did acknowledge his lifelong collaborator's familiarity with, and contributions to Anti-Dühring in the 1886 'Preface'. In correspondence with Franz Mehring, Engels explains his relationship to Marx and incidentally sheds light on his acknowledgements of 1886. "When one had the good fortune to work for forty years with a man like Marx, one usually does not during his lifetime get the [286/287] recognition one thinks one deserves. Then, when the greater man dies, the lesser easily gets overrated and this seems to me to be just my case at present."/16/ Thus the 'Preface' of 1886 can be imputed to Engels' own well-known modesty and sense of propriety.

II.

The resolution of these issues permits the consideration of another point that also involves the rather careful reading of the text of Anti-Dühring. Engels defines the subject matter of political economy at the beginning of Part II as "the science of laws governing the production and exchange of the material means of subsistence in human society."/17/ Turning from subject matter to the method of political economy, he continues "it must first investigate the special laws of each individual stage in the evolution of production and exchange, and only when it has completed this investigation will it be able to establish the few quite general laws which hold good for production and exchange in general." Engels concludes with the proviso that "the laws which are valid for definite modes of production and forms of exchange hold good for all historical periods in which these modes of production and forms of exchange prevail."/18/ This is surely a concise and intriguing formulation of the subject matter and method of political economy. On the one hand, it suggests that the object of Marx's and Engels' political economic studies was not limited to bourgeois society./19/

On the other hand, it has been proposed that Engels' characterization of political economy differs substantially from Marx's own. Lucio Colletti, for instance, holds that the views of Engels and that of Marx represent "two profoundly different ways of seeing things."/20/ Indicting Engels among others for a "total lack of understanding of the relationship between the logical process and the process of reality," Colletti charges that the logical categories of Capital I, namely commodities, money, capital, etc., have been applied historically (and thereby illicitly) to a "succession of the various forms of society."/21/

Were these charges true, of course, they would evidence a serious misspecification on Engels' part. When we turn to Engels' text, however, we quite another set of categories than those of Capital I applied to the historical cases./22/ For instance: communal property in land corresponds to fairly equal distribution of the labor product, while the dissolution of community corresponds to considerable inequality of distribution. (Indeed Marx had addressed with great brevity this inverse relationship of communal property and impoverishment in his notebooks dating from the late 1850s)./23/ Consider an [287/288] historical example. As the Israelite patriarchal communal form was dissolving during the ninth and eighth centuries, the prophets reacted strongly to the ever increasing inequality among the populace. In Ephraim, Amos condemned the extreme inequality manifested in debt-slavery (Amos 2:6) and foretold alienation of the land, i.e. the complete dissolution of communal or redemptive property in land (Amos 7:17); in Judah, Micah likewise condemned debt-slavery (Micah 2:2) and also anticipated alienation of the land (Micah 2:4). For another instance: agriculture on a large scale corresponds to a class-antagonistic social structure, while agriculture on a small scale corresponds to the absence of such class antagonisms. (Later, Kautsky and Lenin were to address the relationship of the scale of agricultural production and class antagonism; both Arthur Stinchcombe and Jeffrey Paige have recently made extensive studies of this relationship.)/24/ As Engels continues, it becomes evident that the categories he utilizes in his general political economy not only are not simply those of "commodities, money, capital," Engels' are instead more general categories of forms of property, forms of appropriation of the labor product, forms of social antagonism, etc.

These categories may subsume those categories of Capital I; for example, 'capital' is subsumed under the more general 'property' or the category 'social antagonism'. (Similarly, Marx's categories of Capital I subsume those of Capital III: for example, 'finance capital', 'industrial capital', and 'landed capital' are subsumed under the more general category 'capital'.) But Engels cannot be convicted on this evidence of having confounded these several sets of categories. These more general categories give rise to 'laws' of their own which may be nomothetically less satisfying than the laws of Capital (say that treating the tendency of the rate of profit to decline). But Engels admits as much: "political economy in this wider sense has still to be brought into being. Such economic science as we possess up to the present is limited almost exclusively to the genesis and development of the capitalist mode of production."/25/

Thus Engels' categories in Anti-Dühring are not vulgar misappropriations of those of Capital I; even so, the question remains whether Engels' and Marx's understandings of the subject matter and method of political economy accord. This issue can be addressed rather directly, as Marx too has prepared a draft discussion of the topic. In the 'Introduction' to the Critique of Political Economy, Marx has three major sections./26/ The first section addresses 'Production' and the second, the Interrelationship of Production, Distribution, Exchange, and Consumption. These sections indicate the subject matter of political economy. The third section addresses 'The Method of Political Economy'. These three sections comprise a whole; the understanding of any single section depends upon the comprehension of the whole.

Marx's argument in the first section establishes that material production is [288/289] socially determined production by individuals; this implicates production at a definite stage of social development. Marx explicitly considers and rejects defining this stage in an historical account or by taking the stage in isolation. Both these analyses are based on the unreflective standpoint of the individual. Instead, he points out that each stage includes the moment common to several stages of production in general as well as the moment of specific differences of production between stages. By way of illustration, the stage of finance capitalism is understood to incorporate the moment of capitalist relations (i.e. the capitalist appropriation of surplus value) common to any bourgeois society, with the moment of imperialist relations (that is the metropolitan appropriation of super-profits) specific to this stage. This likewise suggests that Marx's political economic study was not to be restricted to bourgeois society. Further, each stage includes the moment of particular productive sectors as well as that of the totality of production, the conjuncture of the set of particular sectors. Finally, these moments organically presuppose 'a definite social corpus' or social subject./27/ Marx's argument thus moves from the abstract, the general moment, through the ever more specific moments, to the concrete, the social corpus. It moreover moves from the inchoate terms of individualism or an ahistorical analysis to the articulated terms of the dialectic. (The logical form of this argument is explicated in the third section of Marx's 'Introduction'.) In sum, it is thus the social corpus that is the object of analysis rather than the process or mode of production which is a characteristic (albeit a crucial characteristic) of the social form.

III.

Marx's argument in the second section of the 'Introduction' establishes the interrelationship of production (in the 'narrower sense'), consumption, distribution, circulation and material exchange. Analyzed superficially, Marx says, these are related as a syllogism: production is the general term, consumption is the individual term, distribution is the proportional middle term, and material exchange is the particular middle term. This superficial analysis restricts itself to the distribution of the product./28/

More profoundly analyzed, production is the presupposition of the moments of consumption and distribution of the products. Production, consumption, and distribution of the means of production are related as content and form (or production, in the 'wider sense')./29/ Finally, circulation is but a moment of material exchange; both are determined by the moments of distribution and consumption./30/ Hence, all these moments are related organically, comprising a concrete unity (again the 'social corpus'), with the mode of production determining the processes or modes of consumption, distribution, etc. Notice how the argument moves even more strikingly from the abstract formulation to the concrete, and from the inchoate to the dialectical. [289/290]

Engels too had discussed the interrelationship of production, distribution, and exchange in Part II of Anti-Dühring. Amplifying upon his definition of the subject matter of political economy, that is "the science of the laws governing production and exchange," he argues that exchange (to the extent it has emerged in a particular society) presupposes production./31/ This of course accords with Marx's characterization, especially where he holds that "the intensity of exchange, its extent and nature, are determined by the development and structure of production."/32/ It likewise accords with Marx and Engels' earlier formulation in the German Ideology where they had argued that a mode of production is always combined with a mode of co-operation or co-ordination, a "materialist connection of humans with one another."/33/ Moreover, Engels argues that modes of production and exchange determine the mode of distribution of the product, while the mode of distribution (in the wider sense) determines the modes of production and exchange. All this accords with Marx's analysis. Only the category of consumption is omitted from Engels' discussion here, perhaps because that category implicates that of the Person./34/

Habermas, as is well known, has faulted 'historical materialism' for its 'instrumentalist' (or 'technologistic') bias, its oversight of the symbolic moment of communicative action. He identifies in this regard particularly Engels, Georgi Plekhanov, and Josef Stalin./35/ On the one hand, the specifics of Marx and Engels' understanding of the subject matter of political economy give Habermas' critique the appearance of being a misspecification. 'Exchange' is indeed 'social intercourse' (Verkehr) which encompasses both moments of 'material' exchange and 'ideal' forms of interaction./36/ On the other hand, Habermas' account differentiating human social intercourse from communication is warranted only by Habermas' history of the species. He differentiates anthropoids from hominids, not in terms of hominid symbolic behavior but in terms of development of the 'hunting mode of production'./37/ In evidentiary terms, Habermas' notion of the proto-human as hunter has been rejected by Engels as [290/291] well as current anthropologists./38/ In theoretical terms, Habermas' notion that anthropoid behavior was "based on symbolically mediated interaction in [George Herbert] Mead's sense" must similarly be rejected./39/ Thus Habermas' account of the emergence of the human mode of life (Lebensweise) essentially misspecifies the problem. The proto-human was a gatherer who occasionally 'hunted', thus at one with the anthropoids; the proto-human was accultured, a symbol and tool user, hence distinct from the anthropoids. When human social intercourse is acknowledged to incorporate communication, Habermas' critique of historical materialism must in large part be set aside.

Weeks, by contrast, has faulted Engels for his 'circulationist' bias as well as overlooking the role of force in societal transformations. Following Colletti, Weeks holds that Marx and Engels' "views on fundamental issues differed diametrically."/40/ But Weeks faults Engels precisely for what Habermas considers to be a virtue.

On the one hand, the 'circulationist' theory of economic crises holds either inadequate aggregate demand or else the 'profit squeeze' generate the crisis./41/ In either case the understanding is that the crisis is located within the sphere of circulation; by contrast, the Marxian understanding is that it is located in the sphere of production. In Anti-Dühring, Engels explicitly defines and analyses crises in terms of the overproduction of means of production, hence he cannot be characterized on this evidence as an 'underconsumptionist'./42/ He likewise holds that the proletarian standard of living is determined by the division of labor under the regime of capital, hence Engels cannot be accused of supposing that the distribution of 'factor income' to wage fund ('labor's share') and profits is in some sense exogenous to the sphere of production./43/ Thus Engels subscribed to neither an underconsumption theory nor a 'profit squeeze' hypothesis; hence he [291/292] cannot be identified with Paul Sweezy, Michael Kalecki, Samir Amin et al. as 'circulationists'.

On the other hand, Weeks makes much out of Engels' statement in Anti-Dühring that "the whole process [of the development of capitalism] can be explained by purely economic causes; at no point whatever are robbery, force, the state or political interference of any kind necessary."/44/ Weeks simply treats this passage apart from its context. In the nineteenth (and even in the twentieth) century, some social theorists held that society was politically conflictual in essence. (These were not necessarily Social Darwinists.) Eugen Dühring was an important member of this tradition; Engels took pains to dissociate his and Marx's writings from this tradition./45/ Engels, with considerable dialectical skill, showed in the Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State how the earliest fundamental (or generic) transformation of human society, that of the "world-historic overthrow of mother-right" was to be explained without presupposing the existence of the several institutions listed in the book's title./46/ Likewise, he shows in Anti-Dühring how subsequent generic transformations of society such as the rise of the state apparatus or the emergence of domestic and chattel slavery were to be explained without begging the question./47/

When he turns to the capitalist transformation, it is thus not surprising that Engels proceeds similarly. In Anti-Dühring he shows, dialectically (and in this instance echoing Capital I), that the necessity which underlay the earlier transformations of society was present in the development of capitalism as well./48/ This is not to say that chance has no significance in societal transformation, but that it is a determinate significance. Plekhanov, in reviewing just this issue, pointed out that "conquests, confiscations and monopolies" have occurred throughout recorded history. But, he continued, all these 'political' events, "far from determining the direction of economic development were, on the contrary, themselves determined by it in their forms and subsequent social effects."/49/ Hence the appropriateness of Engels' explanation of the development of capitalism in economic terms.

Moreover, Weeks' blatant confounding of the 'logical process' of the accumulation of capital presented in Part VII of Capital I with the 'processes of reality' such as those of primitive accumulation described in Part VIII is precisely the "total lack of understanding" castigated by Colletti. Marx himself indicates at the beginning of Part VII that "an exact analysis of the process [of accumulation] demands that we...disregard all phenomena that hide the play of its inner [292/293] mechanism," while he describes Part VIII of Capital I as "actual history."/50/ But this focuses attention on the method of political economy.

In sum, where Habermas tries to differentiate Marx from Engels by alleging that the latter tended especially towards single-factor technologism, Weeks tries to differentiate the two by alleging that Engels tended towards a circulationist (or even a 'revisionist') dualism while it was Marx who was the monist. But Weeks' discussion withstands close scrutiny no better than does Habermas'.

A few pages before his characterization in Anti-Dühring of the subject matter and method of political economy, Engels had discussed 'Dialectics'./54/ This passage illustrates his understanding of the method of political economy. Engels recounted that Marx examined the historical processes, the "processes of reality" in Colletti's terms, which characterize both the social corpus of mercantile capitalism and that of capitalism per se. These were analyzed in terms of forms of property. Capitalistic private property sublates individual private property. But an expanding and deepening class struggle attends capitalistic production to the point where capitalistic property itself is sublated in social revolution. Hence the synthesis: it is the negation of the negation./55/ Through this 'logical process' (Colletti's terms), through the workings of this 'dialectical law in history' (in [293/294] Carver's terms), the concrete unity of capitalism is concisely revealed in its organic complexity and potentiality.

Thus it appears that Engels' and Marx's conceptions of the method of political economy are in accord no less than their conceptions of its subject matter. Of course this is not difficult to comprehend if Marx was familiar with the drafts of Anti-Dühring.

It would be the height of presumption to suggest that a topic so complex and rich as Marx and Engels' theoretical accord could be definitively addressed in this brief statement. More modestly, it can be proposed that future discussions of this topic be obliged to be couched in scientific rather than doctrinaire terms. This is a timely proposal. On the one hand, the completion of the Gesamtausgabe (MEGA) and the English translation of the Collected Works of Marx and Engels have scientifically established the texts in the former and have made them readily accessible in the latter. On the other hand, the ever widening recognition of the scientific stature of historical materialism demands no less. [294//]

1. S. Avineri, The Social and Political Thought of Karl Marx (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), p. 69; Anguelov "Reflection and Practice," Philosophical Currents, Vol. 5 (1973), p. 76. Anguelov follows Lenin here; see V.I. Lenin Collected Works (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1964), Vol. 21, p. 84.1. S. Avineri, The Social and Political Thought of Karl Marx (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), p. 69; Anguelov "Reflection and Practice," Philosophical Currents, Vol. 5 (1973), p. 76. Anguelov follows Lenin here; see V.I. Lenin Collected Works (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1964), Vol. 21, p. 84.

2. On this 'division of labor', see Marx's testimony in Herr Vogt, K. Marx and F. Engels, Collected Works, (New York: International Publishers, 1975 ff), Vol. 17, p. 114; and Engels in K. Marx and F. Engels, Selected Works (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1962). Vol. 1, p. 549.

3. F. Engels, Anti-Dühring (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1962), p. 14

4. T. Carver "Marx, Engels and Dialectics," Political Studies, Vol. 28 (1980), p. 357.

5. See Lewis S. Feuer "Is the Darwin-Marx Correspondence Authentic?" Annals of Science, Vol. 32 (1975), pp. 11-12. See also R. Colp, Jr. "The Contacts of Charles Darwin with Edward Aveling and Karl Marx," Annals of Science, Vol. 33 (1976), pp. 387-394; also M.A. Fay "Did Marx offer to Dedicate Capital to Darwin?" Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 39 (1978), pp. 133-146 and M.A. Fay "Marx and Darwin" Monthly Review Vol. 31 (1980), pp. 40-57.

6. Carver "Marx, Engels and Dialectics," p. 361.

7. Engels, Anti-Dühring, p. 194.

8. K. Marx and F. Engels Gesamtausgabe (Moscow: Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute, 1935), I. Abteilung: Anti-Dühring/Dialektic der Natur (Sonderausgabe herausgegeben von V. Adoratskii), S. 144. This is the document Carver cites in his note 12.

9. Carver "Marx, Engels and Dialectics," p. 360.

10. Engels, Anti-Dühring, p. 312 ff; also Gesamtausgabe, I. Abteilung, S. 341-371; cf. Engels, Anti-Dühring, pp. 14, 22.

11. Carver "Marx, Engels and Dialectics," p. 360.

12. See Marx's letter to Wm. Freund, 21 January 1877; K. Marx and F. Engels Werke (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1956 ff), Bd. 34, S. 245-6.

13. Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe, I. Abteilung: Anti-Dühring, S. 85.

14. Carver "Marx, Engels and Dialectics," p. 361

15. See Engels' letter to E. Bernstein, 25 October 1881, K. Marx and F. Engels Selected Correspondence (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1975), p. 324. See also the symptomatic discussion of Wilhelm Liebknecht during the 1850s and 1860s in Herr Vogt, Marx and Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 17, p. 113.

16. See Engels' letter to F. Mehring, 14 July 1893, Marx and Engels Selected Correspondence p. 433.

17. Engels, Anti-Dühring, p. 203.

18. Engels, Anti-Dühring, p. 204.

19. Cf. also G. Welty, "The Materialist Science of Culture and the Critique of Ideology," Quarterly Journal of Ideology, Vol. 5 (1981).

20. L. Colletti Marxism and Hegel (London: NLB, 1973), p. 132.

21. Colletti, Marxism and Hegel. p. 130 ff.

22. Engels, Anti-Dühring, pp. 204-5.

23. K. Marx Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations (New York: International Publishers, 1965), p. 83.

24. K. Kautsky La Question Agraire (Paris: Maspero, 1970); V.I. Lenin, The Development of Capitalism in Russia (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1964), esp. ch. II; also A. Rochester, Lenin and the Agrarian Question (New York: International Publishers, 1942), esp. chs. I and III; A.L. Stinchcombe, "Agricultural Enterprise and Rural Class Relations," American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 67 (1961); J.M. Paige Agrarian Revolution (New York: Free Press, 1975), ch. 2.

25. Engels, Anti-Dühring, pp. 207-8.

26. K. Marx Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1970), Appendix, pp. 188-214.

27. Marx, 'Introduction', pp. 188-91.

28. Marx, 'Introduction', pp. 193-4; cf. also G Lukacs, The Ontology of Social Being Pt. I, iv (London: Merlin Press 1978), pp. 59-60.

29. This distinction anticipates that of Departments I and II in Capital II. Cf. also Lukacs The Ontology of Social Being, pp. 60-7.

30. Marx, 'Introduction', pp. 195-204.

31. Engels, Anti-Dühring, p. 203.

32. Marx 'Introduction', p. 204.

33. K. Marx and F. Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 5, p. 43. J. Weeks argues that this passage was the source of the differences he finds between Marx and Engels; cf. his Capital and Exploitation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), pp. 61-2.

34. Cf. K. Marx and F. Engels, Gesamtausgabe (Berlin: Dietz Verlag 1976), II. Abteil, Bd. I, Teil I, S. 26.

35. J. Habermas, Communication and the Evolution of Society (Boston: Beacon Press, 1979), chs. 3 and 4, esp. p. 145; also his Knowledge and Human Interests (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971), chs. 2 and 3. See T. McCarthy, The Critical Theory of Jürgen Habermas (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1978), chs. 1.2 and 3.5.

36. Marx and Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 5, p. 32.

37. Habermas, Communication and the Evolution of Society, p. 135.

38. K. Marx and F. Engels, Selected Works (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1962), Vol. II, p. 186; also K. Marx, The Ethnological Notebooks of Karl Marx (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1972), p. 99. See S. Slocum, "Woman the Gatherer" in R.R. Reiter (ed.), Toward an Anthropology of Women (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975), pp. 36-50; N. Tanner and A. Zihlman, "Women in Evolution," Signs, Vol. 1 (1976) and Vol. 4 (1978); E. Leacock, "Women's Status in Egalitarian Society," Current Anthropology, Vol. 19 (1978). See also Charles Woolfson The Labor Theory of Culture (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982).

39. G.H. Mead, Philosophy of the Act (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1938), pp. 109-10: "It is only man who has entered into a social relation with his environment..."

40. Weeks, Capital and Exploitation, chs. 1 and 2 [with appendix], esp. p. 51. Weeks' inability in general to give an intelligible reading of Engels is beyond the scope of this article. One illustration must suffice for now. Weeks supposes that Geist, when used by Werner Sombart, meant "a mental construct" (p. 14). In fact, this is precisely the opposite of what Sombart (or Engels) meant by the term; see Sombart's Die drei Nationalokonomien (Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1930) or Engels, "Law of Value and Rate of Profit," Capital III, Appendix. Weeks' discussion is thereafter a hopeless morass of the views of Conrad Schmidt, Marx and Engels, and a half dozen other writers.

41. Weeks Capital and Exploitation, p. 9.

42. Engels, Anti-Dühring, pp. 393-4. See also Michael Bleaney, Underconsumption Theories: A Historical and Critical Analysis (New York: International Publishers, 1976) for an extensive discussion.

43. Engels, Anti-Dühring, p. 376. This 'profit-squeeze' hypothesis can be traced at least as far back as Pareto; see V. Pareto Treatise on General Sociology (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1935) §§ 2203-36. It is associated in Great Britain with Andrew Glyn and B. Sutcliffe, British Capitalism, Workers and the Profit Squeeze (London: Penguin Books, 1972) and in the United States with Raford Boddy and J. Crotty, "Class Conflict and Macro-Policy," Review of Radical Political Economics, Vol. 7 (1975).

44. Engels, Anti-Dühring, p. 226; see also Weeks, Capital and Exploitation, p. 20, p. 57.

45. Marx and Engels, Selected Works, Vol. I, p. 34, note 'b'; also Engels, Anti-Dühring, p. 41 (added in the 1882 edition: Socialism: Utopian and Scientific).

46. Marx and Engels, Selected Works, Vol. II, p. 217; again Engels follows Lewis H. Morgan, and Marx, The Ethnological Notebooks of Karl Marx, pp. 119-121. This line of discussion renders quite suspect Habermas' notion that the nuclear family initiated human society; cf. his Communication and the Evolution of Society, p. 136. In support of Habermas, see C.O. Lovejoy, "The Origin of Man," Science, Vol. 211 (1981).

47. Engels, Anti-Dühring, pp. 247-248 on the State; pp. 248-249 on slavery.

48. Engels, Anti-Dühring, pp. 225-226; earlier Engels noted that without an understanding of this inevitability of capitalism, the previous forms of socialism were moralistic and utopian (p. 42).

49. G. Plekhanov Selected Philosophical Works (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1980), Vol. IV, pp. 89-90.

50. Marx, Capital (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1954), Vol. I, pp. 565, 714.

51. Marx, 'Introduction', p. 205 ff.

52. Lukacs, The Ontology of Social Being, p. 27.

This is taken from http://www.wright.edu/~gordon.welty/ENGELS83.HTM and is being published with the ermission of Professor Welty

Administrator, Radical Socialist, 29.11.2010