Frock-Coated Communist

by Hunt, Tristram

  In July 1858 a bored Engels had asked to borrow Marx's copy of Hegel's Philosophy of Nature. ‘I am presently doing a little physiology which I shall combine with comparative anatomy,’ he wrote of his extracurricular endeavours (to which Marx wondered whether ‘it [was] on Mary you're studying physiology, or elsewhere?’). ‘Here one comes upon highly speculative things, all of which, however, have only recently been discovered; I am exceedingly curious to see whether the old man may not already have had some inkling of them,’ continued Engels. He was particularly keen to see whether anything in Hegel's philosophical writings had forecast the recent breakthroughs in physics and chemistry. For properly understood, Engels suggested, ‘the cell is Hegelian “being in itself” and its development follows the Hegelian process step by step right up to the final emergence of the “Idea” – i.e. each completed organism’.15 From his earliest days reading Hegel, with a glass of punch in his Barmen bedroom, Engels had always admired the methodology of the dialectic: the critical process by which, through each progressive, contradictory stage of thought, Spirit was eventually self-realized. Previously, Marx and Engels had applied Hegel's dialectic to the realm of history, economics and the state. In The Poverty of Philosophy (1847), Marx had criticized Proudhon for failing to understand how the roots of modern capitalism were embedded in pre-existing economic systems – ‘that competition was engendered by feudal monopoly’ – and used Hegel's method for revealing as much:

  Thesis: Feudal monopoly, before competition.

  Antithesis: Competition.

  Synthesis: Modern monopoly, which is the negation of feudal monopoly in so far as it implies the system of competition, and the negation of competition insofar as it is monopoly.

  Thus modern monopoly, bourgeois monopoly, is synthetic monopoly, the negation of the negation, the unity of opposites…16

  Similarly, with the historic transition of the social structure – from feudalism to the bourgeois age and thence the proletarian revolution – the dialectic was a helpful explainer. Now Engels thought he had also discovered signs of the Hegelian method in the newly revealed processes of the natural and physical sciences. As a materialist and atheist, Engels had as his scientific starting point the presence of matter existing independently of and prior to human consciousness. In contrast to the mechanical materialists of the eighteenth century (with their static view of nature and humanity), Engels regarded this matter as being in a constant, Hegelian state of change and transformation. ‘Motion is the mode of existence of matter,’ he wrote in an essay on natural philosophy. ‘Never anywhere has there been matter without motion, nor can there be.’17 This was where the genius of Hegel's dialectical method came in, as its rhythms of contradiction and progress offered a perfect intellectual explanation for the transformation of things in themselves which the nineteenth-century scientific revolution was now revealing – energy from heat, man from ape, repeated cell division. ‘The modern scientific theory of the interaction of natural forces (Grove's Correlation of Forces, which I think appeared in 1838) is, however, only another expression or rather the positive proof of Hegel's argument about cause, effect, interaction, force, etc.,’ he wrote in a letter in 1865 to the German philosopher Friedrich Lange, explicitly linking advances in physics to Hegel's philosophy.18 Again and again Engels returned to ‘old man Hegel’ as an ancient prophet whose theories unknowingly forecast the new terrain of evolutionary biology and atomic theory. ‘I am deeply immersed in the doctrine of essence,’ he explained to Marx in 1874 after reading some recent speeches by the physicist John Tyndall and Darwin popularizer T. H. Huxley. ‘This brought me back again… to the theme of dialectics,’ which Engels thought ‘goes much more nearly to the heart of the matter’ than the empirically minded English scientific community could possibly appreciate.19

  Clearly, there was a book in all this. ‘This morning in bed the following dialectical points about the natural sciences came into my head,’ Engels wrote lackadaisically to Marx in 1873 before expounding ad nauseam on Newtonian matter in motion, the mathematics of trajectories, and the chemical nature of animate and inanimate bodies.20 A distracted Marx, far more concerned about the poor marital prospects of his daughters, failed to reply to most of the points. Undeterred, Engels ploughed on, happy to use his Primrose Hill retirement to pursue these questions of fundamental science. ‘When I retired from business and transferred my home to London,’ he later reflected, ‘I went through as complete a “moulting”, as [Justus von] Liebig calls it, in maths and the natural sciences, as was possible for me, and spent the best part of eight years on it.’21

  From these investigations emerged the jumbled reams of notes and short essays which became the symbolically titled Dialectics of Nature. Or, rather, it didn't emerge until 1927 when the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow published it after Eduard Bernstein, one of Engels's literary executors, passed the manuscripts to Albert Einstein, who thought the science confused (especially the mathematics and physics) but the overall work of such historical note as to be worthy of a broader readership.22 Composed between 1872 and 1883, the Dialectics is a mélange of German, French and English notations on the scientific and technological developments of the day. ‘Wenn Coulomb von particles of electricity spricht, which repel each other inversely as the square of the distance, so nimmt Thomson das ruhig hin als bewiesen,’ reads a typical sentence. Just as he had earlier attempted with military history, Engels sought to explain the scientific advances emerging out of industrial England, France and Germany as responses to the changing mode of production. His lifetime in the cotton industry meant he knew only too well the natural symbiosis between economic necessity and technical breakthroughs in such fields as dyeing, weaving, metallurgy and milling.

  The Dialectics’ grander ambition was to explain the nineteenth century's seemingly disparate scientific discoveries as the logical, tangible fulfilment of Hegelian dialectics. Whereas Hegel's philosophy had been limited to the ethereal world of Spirit, Engels's concern was to connect theory with practice (praxis) just as he and Marx had done earlier by inverting Hegelian idealism into a materialist theory that could explain the history and progress of social and economic formations. ‘In nature, amid the welter of innumerable changes, the same dialectical laws of motion impose themselves as those which in history govern the apparent fortuitousness of events,’ he announced, linking the Hegelian idea of the ‘cunning of reason’ in history to the logic behind the apparent randomness of events in the laboratory.23 The great merit of the Hegelian system was, Engels argued, that ‘for the first time the whole world, natural, historical, intellectual, is represented as a process – i.e., as in constant motion, change, transformation, development; and the attempt is made to trace out the internal connection that makes a continuous whole of all this movement and development’.24 By turning Hegel the right way up – by regarding ideas as the product of nature and history – one could show how the apparent randomness of the natural and physical world was eminently explicable. ‘If we turn the thing round, then everything becomes simple, and the dialectical laws that look so extremely mysterious in idealist philosophy at once become simple and clear as noonday.’25

  Leaning heavily on new discoveries in the conservation of energy, cellular structure and Darwinian evolution, Engels followed Newton in proposing three laws of what would later become known as dialectical materialism (although Engels himself would use only the term ‘materialist dialectic’). The first law, ‘of the transformation of quantity into quality and vice versa’, proposed that qualitative change in the natural world is the result of quantitative change following an accumulation of stresses. For instance, an increased number of atoms in a molecule would produce substantive, qualitative change (say, ozone instead of oxygen); an increase or decrease in temperature could transform H2O from solid to liquid to gas (ice to water to steam). Secondly, ‘the law of the interpenetration of opposites’ stated in faithful Hegelian fashion that ‘the two poles of antithesis, like positive and neg
ative, are just as inseparable from each other as they are opposed, and despite all their opposition they mutually penetrate each other’.26 In other words, contradictions inherent within natural phenomena were the key to their progressive development. A contention buttressed by Engels's third and final dialectic, ‘the law of the negation of the negation’, in which the internal contradictions of a phenomenon give rise to another system, an opposite, which is then, in turn, itself negated as part of a teleological process leading to a higher plane of development. In the same thesis–antithesis–synthesis format which Marx had employed in The Poverty of Philosophy, Engels offered in Dialectics of Nature a totalizing vision of the natural and physical world which then he illustrated with a series of test cases. ‘Butterflies, for example, spring from the egg by a negation of the egg, pass through certain transformations until they reach sexual maturity, pair andare in turn negated, dying as soon as the pairing process has been completed and the female has laid its numerous eggs.’ Similarly, ‘the whole of geology is a series of negated negations, a series in which old rock formations are successively shattered and new ones deposited’.27

  In the shadow of Darwin, Engels put his dialectics to the test with a materialist account of man's early evolution in a chapter entitled ‘The Part played by Labour in the transition from Ape to Man’ – an essay the late evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould always regarded as one of the more impressive side alleys of Darwinian thought in the nineteenth century.28 As ever, Engels had his aim trained on the Idealist tradition which, in this case, meant the false doctrine by which homo sapiens was primarily identified in terms of his brain power. Matter not mind was still this Young Hegelian's mantra. Focusing on three essential features of human evolution – speech, a large brain and upright posture – Engels sought to prove how ‘labour created man himself’. This was in contrast to Darwin's more cerebral template, which assumed that the growth in brain size and intellect occurred prior to the development of two-legged walking. It also reaffirmed Engels's hostility to any transfer from the animal kingdom to human society since labour was ‘an exclusively human characteristic’ marking it out from the bestial world.

  When man came down from the trees and ‘adopted a more and more erect posture’, according to Engels, he freed his hands for using tools. ‘Mastery over nature began with the development of the hand, with labour, and widened man's horizon at every advance.’ The demands of labour slowly brought communities together, nurtured systems of mutual support and created the context in which speech and other intellectual acts could then occur. In the long chronology of human evolution, the material demands of labour came first followed only later by speech – and, in turn, the move from a vegetable to meat diet and, with it, the nourishment of larger brains together with the domestic use of fire and animal husbandry.29 In the midst of this intriguing if rambling essay, Engels observes that one of the early differences between the animal world and human society was the latter's ability to manipulate the natural environment to its advantage.30 By contrast, animals were limited to utilizing their accumulated sensory knowledge of the environment for safety and food. That said, this animal instinct was an impressive natural capacity which Engels had seen at work on numerous occasions from his Cheshire mount. ‘While fox-hunting in England one can daily observe how unerringly the fox makes use of its excellent knowledge of the locality in order to elude its pursuers, and how well it knows and turns to account all favourable features of the ground that cause the scent to be lost.’31 Yet another solid socialist reason for riding to hounds.

  Engels's contribution to mathematical theory was less noteworthy. Always strong on arithmetic, from the 1870s he started to develop an interest in calculus, geometry, applied maths and theoretical physics. For mathematics had undergone an equally significant process of intellectual evolution during the nineteenth century which both Marx and Engels followed closely. Calculus had been rethought by Karl Weierstrass, a new understanding of algebraic integers developed by Richard Dedekind, and there had been advances in differential equations and linear algebra. As with his researches into biology, physics and chemistry, Engels thought a dialectical method and an appreciation of materialist fundamentals was an essential explainer to all developments in the discipline. ‘It is not at all true that in pure mathematics the mind deals only with its own creations and imaginations,’ he confidently asserted. ‘The concepts of number and form have been derived from no source other than the world of reality.32 To Engels's mind, there was nothing in maths which wasn't already in nature; mathematics was simply an explanatory reflection of the physical world. As a result, he attempted to crowbar all sorts of mathematical models into his triadic system of dialectics. ‘Let us take an arbitrary algebraic magnitude, name a,’ begins one passage in Dialectics of Nature. ‘Let us negate it, then we have -a (minus a). Let us negate this negation by multiplying -a by -a, then we have +a, that is the original positive magnitude, but to a higher degree, namely to the second power.’33 As the Trotskyist scholar Jean Van Heijenoort has pointed out, this is all horribly confused whereby ‘negation’ in Engels's terms can mean any number of differing mathematical operations to achieve the final result.34 Worse was to come as Engels, playing the reductive philistine, dismissed complex numbers and theoretical mathematics – those parts of theoretical science which went beyond a reflection of natural phenomena – as akin to witchcraft. ‘When one has once become accustomed to ascribe to the [square root of] -1 or to the fourth dimension some kind of reality outside of our own heads, it is not a matter of much importance if one goes a step further and also accepts the spirit world of the mediums.’35

  Despite the obvious limitations of Engels's scientific modelling, it proved in the twentieth century among his most durable and damaging legacies. For generations of communists, Engels's writings on the natural and physical sciences offered a guide to research in and out of the laboratory. Eric Hobsbawm remembers scientists of the 1930s earnestly hoping their bench work would fit within Engels's template.36 In the Soviet Union and communist bloc, this aspiration became government policy as the official practice of science took place within the strict paradigm of dialectical materialism with any research suspected of subjectivism or idealism summarily dismissed as ‘bourgeois science’. In a celebrated 1931 paper, for example, the Soviet physicist Boris Hessen reinterpreted Isaac Newton's work on gravitational attraction as the inevitable product of a decaying feudal and rising mercantile, capitalist society. Similarly, a 1972 biography of Engels produced in the GDR could straight-facedly explain twentieth-century scientific advances entirely in light of Dialectics of Nature: ‘the discoveries in the field of quantum theory [have] proved the dialectical thesis of the unity of the continuity and discontinuity of matter; in the field of physics, Einstein's theory of relativity concretized the philosophical ideas of Engels about matter, motion, space and time, and the theory of the elementary particles confirmed the views of Engels and Lenin on the inexhaustibility of atoms and electrons’.37

  Scientific research amongst British communists was also carried out against the backdrop of Engels's system. In 1940 an English edition of Dialectics of Nature was published with a preface by the British geneticist and communist J. B. S. Haldane helpfully explaining how dialectics ‘can be applied to problems of “pure” science as well as to the social relations of science’.38 The cult intensified after the war with the establishment of the Engels Society by the philosopher Maurice Cornforth (author of Dialectical Materialism: An Introductory Course) and a small band of Communist Party scientists. Intended to be open to ‘all science workers who are concerned with approaching and developing the problems of their science from the standpoint of Marxism-Leninism’, its aim was to combat reactionary tendencies in science, counter ‘misuse’ of scientific knowledge by the West and to take a stand ‘against very long-term objectives, divorced from contemporary problems of practice’ and to oppose ‘agnosticism and impotence, which are characteristic of decaying capitalism
’. Discussion groups in London, Birmingham, Manchester and Merseyside were set up alongside chemistry, physics, psychology and even astronomy subgroups. A taste of the society's debates is given by the 1950 edition of the ‘Transactions of the Engels Society’, which ran a paper headed ‘Against Idealist Cosmology’. The authors gleefully reported how ‘modern bourgeois astronomy finds itself in a condition of chronic ideological crisis’ whereas Soviet astronomy was in rude health thanks to its being ‘firmly based on the materialist conception of the infinity of the universe’