Manjur Karim wrote:
>
>
> BTW, the thing that I don't like about Anti-Duhring (and Dialectic of
> Nature) is the way Engels applied the dialectical method to nature.
> What was supposed to be a terrain of social analysis (in ontological,
> epistemological, and historical senses- all these three moments are
> present in Marx's method), Engels, positioning himself against the
> positivist trend within the Second International, tried to make it a
> method of the understanding of nature.
On contingency: Oddly enough, I got my own emphasis on contingency partly by reading Engels! Partly by reading Lenin! Partly by reading Mao (!), who has a wonderful parenthesis in one of his essays, I forget which: He is emphasizing having correct strategy, but pauses to note that, correct or incorrect, one can also lose simply because the enemy is stronger! For political purposes that, I believe, is the core of honoring contingency. People keep going back to the drawing board because they think that a loss indicates that their fundamental theory must somehow be wrong. That is horseshit!* And it all got crystallized for me in reading the essays of Stephen J Gould. As to Dialectics of Nature (and Marx almost certainly did not object to Engels's perspective), have you read Lewontin & Levins on _The Dialectical Biologist_?
Carrol
*There is a lot of ultra-leftism in the post-vietnam marxist history disguised as ultra-rightism. At root it is despair at the strength of capitalism, but it disguises itself as traditional opportunism -- which stems from an _underestimation_ of the strength of capitalism. Doug likes to call himself "opportunist" et cetera, but the core of his thought is ultra-left.