"Dialectical Materialism, " as a phrase is Plekhanov's, no?
David McLellan's, "Marxism After Marx, " cites these sources on DiaMat, Gustav Wetter, "Dialectical Materialism, " , " The Tragic Deception: Marx Contra Engels, " by Norman Levine, Z..A. Jordan, "The Evolution of Dialectical Materialism."
John Rees of the UK SWP on Engels, http://www.marxists.de/theory/reeseng/engels1.htm (Charles Brown, in a long, heated offlist exchange w/ Brian Dauth, Todd Archer and I, on M-L and homophobia and DiaMat specifically, a few yrs. ago, excoriated for for citing Lichtheim, an excellent scholar) The critics of Engels
One of the first studies to systematically assert a cleavage between Marx's ideas and those of Engels was George Lichtheim's Marxism: an Historical and Critical Study, first published in 1961. [2] Lichtheim insisted that in Marx's vision "critical thought was validated by revolutionary action", but in Engels' scheme "there now appeared a cast-iron system of 'laws' from which the inevitability of socialism could be deduced with almost mathematical certainty ... the 'goal' was transferred from the here-and-now of conscious activity to a horizon so distant as to be almost invisible." [3]
For Marx, Lichtheim claims, "the only nature relevant to the understanding of history was human nature." Engels therefore broke with Marx when he argued that "historical evolution is an aspect of general (natural) evolution and basically subject to the same 'laws'." [4] This meant that Engels had appropriated Hegel's heritage quite differently to Marx. Marx had taken from Hegel the importance of self conscious activity in the making of history. In contrast "what really fascinates" Engels "is Hegel's determinism: his ability to make it appear that nature (and history) follow a pre-ordained course". [5] Such a drastic recasting of Marxism inevitably had political consequences:
... determinism in thought making for dogmatism in action. The cast-iron certainty which Engels imported into Marxist thinking found its counterpart at the political level in an unshakable conviction that the stars in their courses were promoting the victory of socialism. [6]
Consequently, Engels, Kautsky – the leading thinker of the Second International – "and the orthodox school in general" transformed Marxism "from the vision of a unique breakthrough into a doctrine of a casaully determined process analogous to the scheme of Darwinian evolution". [7]
Lichtheim's book rehearses many of the themes that were to become so familiar in other work published over the following 20 years: that Engels replaced Marx's notion of conscious activity with an empiricist notion of science, that he mistakenly extended Marxism so that it covered the natural as well as the social world, that this inevitably drew him into deterministic and reductionist formulations and that these in turn led him at the end of his life to endorse a reformist political practice on the part of the German Social Democratic Party. And not for the last time the revolutionary, humanist Marx was counterposed to the reformist, determinist Engels by a writer such as Lichtheim who was an opponent of Marxism in theory and a convinced reformist in practice.
After Lichtheim the deluge. Alfred Schmidt's otherwise more careful and interesting book, The Concept of Nature in Marx, first published in German in 1962, argued that "where Engels passed beyond Marx's conception of the relation between nature and social history, he relapsed into a dogmatic metaphysic". [8] Schmidt also saw a departure from the concerns of the early Marx: "For Engels, nature and man are not united primarily through historical practice; man appears only as a product of evolution and a passive reflection of the process of nature, not however as a productive force". [9] By adopting this approach Engels also abandoned Marx's view of how consciousness is formed:
The movement of thought in Marx is by no means limited to a mere mirroring of the factual. The uncritical reproduction of existing relationships in consciousness has precisely an ideological character for Marx. [10]
So Schmidt believed that where Marx saw ideas formed in interaction with the material world Engels saw only a crude reflection of the outside world in the brains of human beings, a vulgar "copy theory" of consciousness. By 1969 Lucio Colletti could question, almost in passing:
how far this distortion of Marx's thought by Kautsky and Plekhanov ...was already prepared, if only in embryo, in some aspects of Engels's work; and how in general the search for the most general laws of development in nature and history made these attempts a preconstitution of the contamination with Hegelianism and Darwinism. [11]
He went on to argue that Engels' influence on the leaders of the Second International was partly a result of "the place given in Engels' work to philosophical-cosmological development, 'the philosophy of nature', in other words, the 'extension' of historical materialism into 'dialectical materialism'." [12]
In books as diverse as John Lewis's The Marxism of Marx (1972), Shlomo Avineri's widely read textbook The Social and Political Thought of Karl Marx (1970) and Leszek Kolakowski's sophisticated and profoundly anti-Marxist Main Currents of Marxism (1978) it became an article of faith that Engels had distorted Marx. [13]
Even authors Paul Walton and Andrew Gamble, who were sympathetic to Marxism at the time they wrote From Alienation to Surplus Value (1972), could conclude that:
[Engels] seems debarred from understanding the real premises of Marx's method because he seeks to make Marxism an objective science on the model of the natural sciences... he tries to establish the truth of historical materialism by treating human interaction as analogous to the interaction of chemical particles. [14]
For Gareth Stedman Jones, influenced by Louis Althusser's structuralism, it was Engels' "inability adequately to think through the novelty of historical materialism as a science" which "led him to an understandable attempt to fill in the gaps with philosophy – the Hegelian philosophy of his youth". This not only led to a "lack of any theory of the political instance of social formations" but to Engels embracing "a dangerous implication of the Hegelian theory of knowledge – that everything in reality is, in principle at least, already known". Thus Engels "unintentionally converted the infant science of historical materialism into the appearance of a finished system, a corpus of absolute knowledge which encompassed the whole of empirical reality". [15]
By the early 1970s the pattern was fully established – Engels was the villain. And it did not seem to matter what political or theoretical position a writer set out from – the neo-Kantianism of Colletti, the humanism of Avineri or Schmidt, the Althusserianism of New Left Review contributors – the destination was always the same: Engels was at the root of whatever was wrong with Marxism. With few exceptions, [16] the argument against Engels had now become a virtual orthodoxy, perhaps best summarised in Norman Levine's The Tragic Deception: Marx contra Engels (1975) and Terrell Carver's Marx and Engels, the Intellectual Relationship (1983). Levine states the anti-Engels orthodoxy in its bare essentials:
Engels' materialism ... was a cold, unremitting, and remorseless system. Men had little impact on fashioning the course of development of history and nature. Rather than being the subject of history, men were basically the passive objects of unrelenting external forces ... Engels' materialism was mechanistic. [17]
Naturally, for Levine, it followed that "Engels continuously affirmed the copy theory of knowledge ... there was absolutely no variance, no difference between our comprehension of the external world and the external world itself." [18]
Engels' grave error lay in "making the laws of nature themselves dialectical ... something which Marx himself never attempted". [19] Engels "was a unilinear evolutionist" [20] for whom "causality ... meant additive sequence" [21] and from whose thought "the notion of human praxis was absent". Consequently:
Engels' thought moved from a mechanistic materialist view of the universe to a deterministic view of human history ... it was Engels, not Marx, who was the originator of economic determinism. [22]
Carver's work is more qualified and careful in its argument, but it arrives at similar conclusions. [23] Engels was led to "incorporating the causal laws of physical science and taking them as a model for a covertly academic study of history, 'thought' and, somewhat implausibly, current politics". [24]
There are many more writers who have argued that Engels was responsible for transforming Marxism into a crude, deterministic philosophy of nature which led to the reformism of the Second International and even Stalinism. To those already quoted could be added Richard Gunn in Marxism Today, Jeff Coulter in Socialist Register, Frederick (sic.) Bender's The Betrayal of Marx, Z.A. Jordan's The Evolution of Dialectical Materialism and many others. [25] These authors combine different elements of the argument in different ways, and few agree on all the arguments used against Engels, but they say little new.
There are two ways of examining these claims. One is to look at the record of Marx and Engels' partnership. The second is to study the works in which, both jointly and separately, they elaborated their ideas. <SNIP>
-- Michael Pugliese