BY GEORGE NOVACK
The following are excerpts from the essay "In Defense of Engels" by George Novack contained in his book Polemics in Marxist Philosophy. Pathfinder just reissued this title with a new cover.

George Novack (1905-1992) joined the communist movement in the United States in 1933, and remained a member and leader of the Socialist Workers Party until his death.

As national secretary of the American Committee for the Defense of Leon Trotsky, Novack helped organize the 1937 International Commission of Inquiry that investigated the charges fabricated by Stalin's Moscow trials. In the 1940s Novack was national secretary of the Civil Rights Defense Committee, which gathered support for leaders of the SWP and of the Midwest Teamsters strikes and organizing drive who were framed up and jailed under the witch-hunting Smith Act.

He played a prominent role in numerous other civil liberties and civil rights battles over subsequent decades, including the landmark lawsuit against FBI spying and disruption won by the Socialist Workers Party in 1986. He was also active in defense of the Cuban revolution and against the war in Vietnam.

His works include: An Introduction to the Logic of Marxism; Genocide against the Indians; The Origins of Materialism; Existentialism versus Marxism; Empiricism and its Evolution; How Can the Jews Survive? A Socialist Answer to Zionism; The Marxist Theory of Alienation; Democracy and Revolution; Understanding History; Humanism and Socialism; The Revolutionary Potential of the Working Class; Pragmatism versus Marxism; and America's Revolutionary Heritage.

Frederick Engels (1820-1895) together with Karl Marx laid the foundations of the modern working-class movement. Various political tendencies throughout the 20th century have tried to separate Engels from Marx and, under cover of attacking Engels only, have abandoned Marxism. The excerpt below is a fitting tribute to one of the founders of the communist movement on the centennial of his death.

The essay excerpted here, written in 1975, is copyright © Pathfinder Press and is reprinted by permission. Subheadings are by the Militant.

BY GEORGE NOVACK

I will focus upon Frederick Engels and his contributions to the elaboration of dialectical materialism, for the following reason. The cocreator of scientific socialism has come under heavy fire in recent years on the ground that he switched Karl Marx's thought onto the wrong track and distorted his teachings on philosophy.

Just as Leon Trotsky is portrayed by the Stalinists as the antagonist of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin after 1917, so Engels is separated by his detractors from Marx and depreciated in a like manner on the philosophic front. He is accused of deforming Marx's method in a mechanistic way, thereby being the progenitor of Social Democratic deviations and Stalinist dogmatism. This fabrication has been broadly accepted and embroidered by New Left ideologists in both East and West because it undermines those elements of dialectical materialism the critics want to discredit and discard.

This variegated grouping applies "salami tactics" to the body of Marxist thought, although they do not all slice it up the same way. The most unrestrained slicers cut Marx himself in half by discovering a contradiction between the young Marx and the mature Marx. He is supposed to have shifted his views in the wrong direction between his early humanistic writings and the publication of Capital. They unjustifiably introduce a sharp break in the normal process of growth through which Marx deepened his understanding of many things from one decade to the next.

However, most of the revisionists find Marx guiltless of misinterpreting himself, or let him off lightly as ambiguous. The other half of the team is singled out as the main culprit and bears the brunt of the attack as the prime falsifier of Marx's real beliefs. The core of the indictment against Engels is that his version of dialectical materialism is essentially different from Marx's historical materialism.

The true, innovative, humanistic Marx is to be found in such writings of the 1840s as the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 and the "Theses on Feuerbach" (which, incidentally, Engels recovered and published after Marx's death). This humanity-centered philosophy of praxis, according to the allegation, was disfigured and displaced by the deterministic, mechanistic, positivistic, and scientistic rendering of dialectical materialism Engels presented in his writings. (Praxis is a Greek word for human activity, popularized by contemporary philosophers.)

The false antithesis between Marx and Engels contradicts the basic facts about their relationship. It is, bluntly speaking, a hoax; and serious socialists should beware of being taken in by it. When Engels first visited Marx in Paris in the summer of 1844, he later wrote: "We found that we were in complete accord in all theoretical domains; this was when our joint work began." It continued without letup until Marx died in 1883.

History has rarely witnessed so close, harmonious, and unabated an intellectual and political partnership. Their correspondence testifies to the communion of thought and lively interchange of ideas on a multitude of subjects that found expression in their writings.

Although Engels modestly assigned himself the role of "second fiddle" to Marx, the development of the dialectical method and historical materialism was a collective creation. Engels and George Plekhanov(1) later named the synthesis dialectical materialism. Marx and Engels elaborated its fundamental principles together in the 1840s. Most of what they wrote thereafter, whether in the form of newspaper articles, manifestos, pamphlets, or books was either discussed beforehand or submitted to each other's searching critical scrutiny.

After settling their basic philosophical principles in their own minds, Marx and Engels divided the tasks at hand in the exposition of their common ideas. While Marx immersed himself in the prodigious labor of investigating the problems of political economy, Engels undertook to popularize their philosophic positions.

The most important of these works were Anti-Duhring, from which Socialism: Utopian and Scientific was extracted, and later Ludwig Feuerbach and the Outcome of Classical German Philosophy. These were to be crowned by Dialectics of Nature, which remained unfinished at his death. In addition to Capital, which stands as the supreme example of the application of their method, these classical writings are the prime sources for our knowledge about Marxist philosophy.

From the inventory of previous philosophizing, Marx and Engels retained the materialist conception of the world and dialectical logic, making these acquisitions the cornerstones of their systematic thought. The distinctive character of the revolution they effected in philosophy was to fuse these two disconnected elements into a synthetic world outlook that posed the necessity for the working class to transform society and offered a theoretical guide for this emancipation struggle.

Materialism was extended from natural to social phenomena and to the development of the thought process; the idealist dialectic of Hegel(2) was turned upside down and given a solid scientific basis in the realities of the universal evolution of matter in motion. Philosophy linked with class struggle

Marxism redefined and revitalized philosophy by linking it with the class struggle and political activity, by converting it into an instrument to be added to the arsenal of the revolutionary proletariat in its struggle to change the world through class action, and by absorbing the results of the growing scientific knowledge about nature, history, and the mind into its principles.

The unfounded allegation that Marx and Engels held divergent philosophical views sets up Engels as a whipping boy for Marx himself. The objections raised against his positions are actually aimed against the tenets of the dialectical materialism they held in common. The detractors ought to come out from ambush and challenge Marx fairly and squarely.

If all the criticisms they make of Engels were accepted as valid, few parts of Marxist theory would be left intact. They begin with nothing less than an abandonment of its materialist foundation.

From its origins in antiquity, the materialist philosophy has been based on a specific interpretation of the nature of reality; its highest expression in dialectical materialism is no exception.

Materialism maintains that nature alone, based on matter in motion, has a self-sufficient existence; everything in human life is derived from and dependent upon the objective world.

Idealism, on the contrary, denies that nature is primary, making it subordinate to mind or spirit. In Hegel's system, for example, nature is the alienated reflection of the logical process - or, as Marx said, the son begets the mother.

These are the two fundamental opposing camps in the history of philosophy. However, their contraposed positions do not exhaust the possibilities in this field. A heterogeneous array of thinkers and tendencies have, on one ground or another, refused to align themselves in a clear- cut manner with one side or the other. They try to combine elements from both the materialist and idealist viewpoints and they oscillate unsteadily between these two poles.

These eclectics commonly skate around the crucial question of whether nature or social and intellectual phenomena come first. The humanist exponents of praxis stand on the left flank of this category. They affirm that neither nature nor thinking but human activity is the essence of reality, and therefore praxis is the fulcrum of Marxist theory.

They consider this intermediate variant superior to vulgar materialism, as they call it, or out-and-out idealism. Yet their standpoint fails to face up to the need to define the fundamental relation of practice to the external world. When hard pressed, most of the praxologists dispose of the problem by arguing that this question really has no meaning and needs no definite answer because nature and thought are inseparably united in and through practice.

While this happens to be true as far as it goes, it leaves undecided whether matter or mind, the objective or the subjective, takes priority in existence. Their ambiguity and evasiveness on this issue is actually a half- concession to idealism, which holds that there is no object without a subject and that the object is solely a shadow or "reflective moment" cast by the subject - variously called in the history of philosophy, God, spirit, mind, nous, the Word, etc.

The "critical theorists" of the Frankfurt school, as they are known, believe that the objective world cannot be severed from the subject because it is itself a product of human activity. In viewing the object only through the mediation of the human subject and rejecting determinism as a metaphysical aberration, they revert to the standpoint of the left Hegelians, which Marx and Engels, using Ludwig Feuerbach's(3) materialism as a bridge, threw off early in their intellectual evolution. Nature comes before humanity

Materialism teaches that nature has objective reality before and apart from the human subject. This paramount premise has been confirmed by the discoveries of the natural sciences, from astrophysics to biochemistry, showing the evolution of the cosmos over billions of years. The earth and its lower organisms had a prolonged history before humanity came on the scene with its distinctive productive activities.

Practice, to be sure, thereupon became the motive force in social history. But it cannot be considered the basis of material being. The praxis school tends to make social life eclipse the natural matrix of which it is an outgrowth. The value we rightly attach to the activities, achievements, and further progress of our species, which is the focus of our attention, should not contract our vision of reality as a whole.

Anthropocentrism is as outdated as the view that the earth is the center of the universe. It is extremely parochial at a time when rockets are invading outer space, researchers are looking for signs of life on remote planets, and scientists are exploring ever deeper into the atom.

Thus George Lichtheim(4), whom Quinton describes as "one of the most active and enthusiastic exponents of this current of thought," writes: "The external world, as it exists in and for itself, is irrelevant to a materialism which approaches history with a view to establishing what men have made of themselves."

This is in the same vein as the statements by Georg Lukács(5) in History and Class Consciousness that "Existence is the product of human activity" and "nature is a societal category." The discovery of nature is a social enterprise and the concept of nature is a social-historical category, but not nature itself. Leszek Kolakowski(6), too, tells us in Marxism and Beyond: "The world is a human."

Finally, Alfred Schmidt(7), a younger member of the Frankfurt school who has devoted an entire book to The Concept of Nature in Marx, says: "Nature exists for man only as it is mediated by history." He contrasts Engels with his "naturalized Hegelianism" to Marx, who subordinated nature to its "appropriation through social labor." "Nature," he writes, "only appears on the horizon of history, for history can emphatically only refer to men. History is first, and immediately, practice."

This is a half-truth: it applies to human but not to natural history. As Marx and Engels stated in The German Ideology, "We know only a single science, the science of history. History can be contemplated from two sides, it can be divided into the history of nature and the history of mankind. However the two sides are not to be divided off; as long as men exist, the history of nature and the history of men are mutually conditioned."

Schmidt disregards the decisive qualification in the quotation: "as long as men exist." Several million years ago humanity did not yet exist, although nature did. That fact is what the philosophic materialism of Marx and Engels is predicated on. It embraces but goes beyond the horizon of human history as such.

We can agree with other socialist humanists that the problems of human life - and the revolutionary theory and practice of coping with them - are central to the teachings of Marxism. But the point at issue is not the center but the circumference of materialist philosophy, that which identifies the total field of its concerns. Does dialectical materialism deal only with what is specifically human or with all of reality? Most critics of Engels contend that the broader concern with ontology, the theory of being, is an outworn metaphysical relic of Hegelianism; Marxism limits itself to social experience. The world and human subjectivity

Their narrow conception of Marxism as historical materialism alone is an unwarranted abridgment of the dialectical materialism Marx and Engels developed. This issue has far-reaching implications.

The world outlook and procedure of science itself was made possible only when its first practitioners cast aside animism, religion, teleology, and other anthropocentric notions. They learned to separate themselves from nature, and nature from themselves, and approach the world objectively, as it really was in its own right, having an independent existence and operating in accord with its own laws.

According to Karl Klare, editor of a collection of articles on the leading figures of so-called Western Marxism from Lukács to Marcuse(8), their signal achievement has been "to restore human consciousness, human subjectivity to the heart of Marxism." Genuine Marxism does not need any injection of subjectivity.

But these critical theorists, who find the determinism and lawfulness upheld by dialectical materialism to be the source of Social Democratic fatalism and Stalinist totalitarianism, felt that the socialist movement could not be reoriented without it. The trouble is that they gave Marxism such an overdose of subjectivity as to throw it off balance both in theory and in practice.

Marxism was the first system of thought to give a correctly balanced account of the objective and subjective aspects of human activity. It views the object-subject relation as a unity of opposites in which one can be transformed under certain conditions into the other.

In the same process whereby the flint was chipped into a hand ax, thus mingling the physical raw material with the subjective (human) factor of labor, the concept of the tool and its purpose were objectivized by the maker in the artifact itself. The idea became materialized as the natural thing was humanized.

The primary basis of the object-subject relation is to be found in the interaction between humankind and nature that is incorporated in productive activity. Here nature is objective to the human subject; this object-subject relationship develops as the forces of nature are converted to social use by labor. The essence of history consists in the progressive modification of nature by the productive activity of humankind, and in the correlative transformation of humankind itself as the powers of production grow.

The early Lukács and the Frankfurt school term the artificial environment in which we live, work, and think "second nature." They focus exclusively upon the phenomena in this domain and try to shove the original and underlying nature into the shade. In doing so they give greater weight to the subjective factors in human history and social life than to the objective conditions of development. Being determines consciousness

Historical materialism teaches that what is subjective (human) is governed by objective realities, laws, and necessities. This is summarized in the statement that social being determines social consciousness. This does not mean, as some critics contend, that the subjective element is negligible or powerless. Quite the contrary, it is omnipresent in human affairs and can play a more or less influential part, depending upon the material circumstances of the case.

At climactic junctures in the process of historical determination the subjective factor can even be decisive, as I have discussed in the article "The Role of the Individual in History Making."(9) Recognition of this fact necessitates the building of the revolutionary party, a conclusion that most New Left apostles of praxis refuse to draw. Their subjectivity shrinks from accepting this objective necessity.

NOTES

1. George Plekhanov (1856-1918) - The founder of Russian Marxism in 1883. Author of many valuable philosophical works, in particular The Development of the Monist View of History and Fundamental Problems of Marxism. He remained a central leader of the Russian Social Democracy until 1903, when he sided with the Menshevik faction against V.I. Lenin's Bolsheviks. He became a social patriot in World War I and opposed the Russian revolution of October 1917. Despite this political break, Lenin and Trotsky continued to prize and highly recommend Plekhanov's philosophical writings.

2. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) - The culminating figure of the German idealist school of philosophy that began with Kant. He sought to resolve the traditional philosophical disjunction of mind and matter by postulating a unified, monistic reality in which matter is the "alienated" expression of its own inner organizing force, reason or the Absolute Idea. While reason or mind was predominant in Hegel's system, it viewed reality as undergoing a progressive evolution through the process of dialectical change.

3. Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-1872) - German materialist philosopher. Beginning as a young Hegelian, he discarded Hegel's idealism as well as religion in his 1840 work, The Essence of Christianity. Though very influential on the development of the young Marx and Engels, Feuerbach himself developed only a metaphysical, humanistic materialism, stressing the centrality of humanity in the natural order and proposing literary criticism of religion rather than class struggle.

4. George Lichteim (1912-1973) - German-born Marxist scholar. Lichtheim was close to the left-centrist Socialist Workers Party of Germany in the 1930s, then became an unaffiliated Social Democrat in exile, first in Palestine and then, from the 1940s, in England. In his book Marxism (1961) he advanced the thesis that Marxism and liberalism had been twin products of the Enlightenment, both seeking a means to give conscious direction to society. He considered them outmoded by the rise of centralized bureaucratic governments in the 20th century. An opponent of empiricism, he sought a synthesis of Marxist and Hegelian elements in a new theory on the direction of social evolution. In particular he hoped to find a new agency for social change to replace the industrial proletariat.

5. Georg Lukács (1885-1971) - Hungarian Communist philosopher and cultural critic, best known for his book History and Class Consciousness (1923). Principal inspirer of the Hegelian current in 20th century Marxism, stressing the revolutionary will over objective conditions. The young Lukács rejected dialectical materialism as a general theory of reality, while in social analysis he placed major emphasis on alienation and cultural phenomena at the expense of productive relations as determinants of social change. He renounced his views in 1933 and grudgingly conformed to Stalinism. In his later years he became a dissident in Stalinist circles in Hungary and returned partially to the orthodox Marxist teachings on dialectical materialism.

6. Leszek Kolakowski (1927- ) - He joined the Polish Communist Party in 1945 and remained a Stalinist in philosophical questions until the Polish October of 1956, when he went into opposition. In 1968 he left Poland after incessant harassment and has since taught in Western universities in various countries. He has come to reject large parts of the body of Marxism, including its materialist basis.

7. Alfred Schmidt (1931- ) - Succeeded Theodor Adorno in 1971 as director of the Institute of Social Research in Frankfurt, West Germany (the Frankfurt school). He is the author of The Concept of Nature in Marx (English edition, 1972), in which he denies that laws of nature are dialectical.

8. Herbert Marcuse (1898- ) - German Marxist philosopher and longtime staff member of the Frankfurt school (1933- 49). His best known works, Eros and Civilization (1955) and One Dimensional Man (1964), were written after his break with the Frankfurt school, when he moved to incorporate elements of anarchism and Heideggerian existentialism with his previous views. Though known today as a mentor of the 1960s New left, Marcuse's works in the 1930s and 1940s hold the most interest. Despite an Hegelianizing bent, books such as his Reason and Revolution (1941) are valuable Marxist studies.

9. Article included in the Pathfinder book Understanding History by George Novack.  
 
 
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