Frock-Coated Communist
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As the Engels Society had to convene in the Music Room of the Society for Cultural Relations with the USSR at 14 Kensington Square, London, its members were also unable to escape the fallout from the campaign of academic repression launched by ‘comrade-scientist’ Stalin and his megalomaniac science tsar, Academician Trofim Denisovich Lysenko. Engels, who in his later years consistently warned of the dangers of reading Marx in a rigid, doctrinal fashion, was now summoned in aid to justify the most terrible assaults on intellectual freedom. In philosophy, linguistics, physiology, physics and most especially biology, Stalin demanded that scientific enquiry coalesce with the ‘correct’ party line, with new discoveries liable to be discounted on purely ideological grounds. What this signalled in the biological sciences was a total disavowal of heredity in genetics (a bourgeois invention with obvious affinities to Nazi eugenics) and, in its place, Lysenko revived the early twentieth-century, neo-Lamarckian ideas of the agriculturalist Ivan Michurin and his conviction in environmental determinism. At the 1948 Congress of the All-Union Agricultural Academy the genetic theories of Mendel and Morgan were denounced as ‘unscientific’ and ‘reactionary’ – their leading advocate, the geneticist Nikolai Vavilov, having already been worked to death in the labour camps – and woe betide anyone who fell on the wrong side of this decree.39 In the Engels Society archives there is a terrifying example of a free-thinking, free-speaking Soviet academic, Youri Zhdanov, who did just that. With the typed endorsement that this letter is ‘of great interest’, Zhdanov's fearful self-denunciation to the Central Committee of the CPSU (B) – cc'd to Comrade Stalin himself – was reprinted in full.
In my contribution to discussion at the Lecturers’ Training College on the disputed question of Modern Darwinism, I undoubtedly committed a number of grave errors… In this, the ‘university habit’ of giving my point of view without reflection in various scientific discussions, made its appearance… I consider it my duty to assure you, Comrade Stalin, and through you to the C.C. of the C.P.S.U. (B), that I was and remain a convinced follower of Michurin. My faults result from my not having studied sufficiently the historical side of the problem, so as to organise a struggle for the defence of Michurinism. All this is the result of inexperience and lack of maturity. I will correct my faults by action.40
To their credit, the Engels Society chose to criticize the Lysenko purges, make a principled plea for intellectual pluralism and, in the process, remain far truer to Engels's original beliefs in scientific debate and research than the academic thuggery of the Politburo.
Part of the reason the Dialectics was published only posthumously was that Engels interrupted his studies to indulge his and Marx's favourite pastime of ideological knockabout. ‘It is all very well for you to talk,’ he wrote to Marx in 1876 with an air of mock-indignation. ‘You can lie warm in bed and study ground rent in general and Russian agrarian conditions in particular with nothing to disturb you – but I am to sit on the hard bench, swill cold wine, suddenly interrupt everything again and break a lance with the tedious Dühring.’41
Eugen Dühring, the object of their ire, was a blind philosophy lecturer at the University of Berlin whose brand of socialism was beginning to make significant inroads into German social democracy. Amongst his early acolytes was Eduard Bernstein. Like Bakunin and Proudhon before him, Dühring criticized the centralism and economic determinism of Marx and Engels and proposed instead a gradualist political programme which would secure more immediately obvious material gains for the working class. Dühring's ‘force theory’ stressed the efficacy of strikes, collective action, and even violence, in leading the proletariat towards his ideal social system of Wirtschaftscom-munen – autonomous communes of working people.42 It was a pragmatic political manifesto which numerous leading German socialists were more willing to embrace than what seemed the arcane and unrealizable philosophies of Marx. All of which infuriated Engels. ‘Never before has anyone written such arrant rubbish,’ he wrote to Marx from his Ramsgate summer cottage in July 1876. ‘Windy platitudes – nothing more, interspersed with utter drivel, but the whole thing dressed up, not without skill, for a public with which the author is thoroughly familiar – a public that wants by means of beggar's soup and little effort to lay down the law about everything.’43 More worrisomely, Dühring was just as aggressive an ideological combatant as the old Londoners. He dismissed Marx as a ‘scientific figure of fun’ but saved his real spleen for Engels, the ‘Siamese twin’, who ‘only had to look into himself’ to come up with his exploitative portrait of the manufacturer in The Condition of the Working Class. Dühring aimed direct for Engels's Achilles heel. ‘Rich in capital, but poor in insight about that capital, he is one of those who are – in accordance with a time-honoured theory once established in Jerusalem – commonly compared to a rope or a camel that cannot pass through the eye of a needle.’44
Encouraged by Wilhelm Liebknecht and putting aside some initial qualms about attacking a blind man (‘the chap's colossal arrogance precludes my taking that into account’), Engels launched a sustained denunciation of Dühring and all his works through the pages of Germany's leading socialist newspaper, Vorwärts.45 Although Engels dismissed Dühring's arguments as no more than ‘mental incompetence due to megalomania’, the text went beyond the usual Marx-Engels invective into a broader definition and defence ‘of the dialectical method and of the communist world outlook’.46 The philosophy of dialectical materialism which Engels had been plugging away at in his Dialectics notebook was now refined, polished and served up in book form as Herr Eugen Dühring's Revolution in Science – which would become more popularly known as Anti-Dühring (1878). All of Engels's great gifts as a propagandist and popularizer were on display as he countered the allure of Dühring with a pacey, engaging and comprehensible explanation of the science of Marxism. For after his sustained immersion in modern maths, biology, physics and chemistry, Engels had begun to regard his and Marx's socialism within the same intellectual template as the scientific paradigm shifts of the nineteenth century.
To help the readers of Anti-Dühring appreciate the context, he transported them back to the 1840s to reacquaint them with the founding moment of Marxism: the move from Hegelian idealism to Marxist materialism via the philosophy of Feuerbach. Marx's genius, as Engels originally pointed out in an 1859 essay, was to turn Hegel right way up, take his head out of the sky and replace his idealism with material realities. Whereas Hegel had charted the march of Spirit towards the Idea, Marx was concerned with the trajectory of material circumstances. ‘Marx was and is the only one who could undertake the work of extracting from the Hegelian logic the kernel containing Hegel's real discoveries in this field, and of establishing the dialectical method, divested of its idealist wrappings, in the simple form in which it becomes the only correct mode of the development of thought.’47 As Marx himself put it in an 1873 afterword to Das Kapital, ‘The mystification which dialectic suffers in Hegel's hands, by no means prevents him from being the first to present its general form of working in a comprehensive and conscious manner. With him it is standing on its head. It must be turned right side up again, if you would discover the rational kernel within the mystical shell.’48 After years of playing down its importance, Engels was now forthright about recording his and Marx's debt to the Hegelian tradition. ‘Marx and I were pretty well the only people to salvage conscious dialectics from German idealist philosophy for the materialist conception of nature and history,’ was how he inelegantly put it in the preface to Anti-Dühring.49 The metaphysical clutter of idealist philosophy was stripped away to leave the pristine dialectical method ready to explain science, history and even modern class antagonism.
However, Engels's real achievement in Anti-Dühring was to apply dialectical materialism, richly informed by his immersion in the natural sciences, to capitalism. Engels's three laws – the transformation of quantitative change into qualitative, the struggle of opposites and the negation of the negation – could now explain not only biology,
chemistry and evolution but existing tensions within bourgeois society. ‘Both the productive forces engendered by the modern capitalist mode of production and the system of distribution of goods established by it have come into crying contradiction with that mode of production itself,’ he proclaimed in full dialectical flow, ‘so much so that if the whole of modern society is not to perish, a revolution in the mode of production and distribution must take place, a revolution which will put an end to all class distinctions’.50 The opposites had to be opposed, the negation negated and, just as the butterfly springs from the chrysalis, a new society would emerge from the inherent contradictions of the old. This critical tool for reading society's endlessly shifting contradictions and readiness for revolution was Marx's definitive contribution to Western thought.
The point of philosophy was always to change, rather than just interpret the world. And the political implications of dialectical materialism were also spelt out in a section of Anti-Dühring rewritten by Engels and then published separately as Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (1880; 1882). The idea for this more focused primer in scientific socialism came from Marx's son-in-law Paul Lafargue, who faced in France similar difficulties to Liebknecht in Germany when it came to cementing Marxism as the dominant socialist faith. The French communist movement was split between the so-called ‘Collectivists’ (centred on Jules Guesde and Lafargue) and the Possibilists (led by Benoît Malon), who advocated a reformist agenda little different from the municipal socialism developing in various British cities. While Marx and Engels criticized Guesde's ‘revolutionary phrasemongering’ inviting Marx's famous quip, ‘All I know is that I am not a Marxist! they supported the Collectivists’ philosophical stance and Engels's pamphlet was designed to bolster their ideological backbone.
The three chapters which comprised Socialism: Utopian and Scientific underlined the effects of Engels's immersion in the natural sciences as he distinguished the scientific rigour of Marxism from the lofty nostrums of the early Utopian socialists (for whom the Possibilists still had a soft spot). The early pages were taken up with a clinical dismemberment of the ‘pure phantasies’ and Utopian dreams of Saint-Simon, Robert Owen and Charles Fourier. Yet the language was not nearly as harsh as it had been in the early 1840s. Instead, the mature Engels found much of worth in Fourier's critique of sexual relations in bourgeois society; he expressed admiration (as a former factory employer himself) for Owen's industrial paternalism; and he saluted Saint-Simon's analysis of the way that economic realities dictate political forms. Nonetheless, the Utopians’ core failure remained a misguided vision of socialism as some kind of eternal truth which had simply to be discovered and explained for its demands to be implemented. By contrast, Engels presented socialism as a science which ‘had first to be placed upon a real basis’.51 And it was Marx who did just that with his explanation of capitalist production (through the theory of surplus value) and the realities of class struggle (through the materialist conception of history). While Marx's method exposed the class-based, capitalist nature of bourgeois society, the genius of his dialectical system was to chart a future course.
After an accumulating series of stresses, Engels explained, quantitative change would become qualitative. Just as steam comes from water and butterflies from caterpillars, ‘The capitalist relation is not done away with. It is, rather, brought to a head.52 Tensions inherent within capitalist society, the disjuncture between the economic base and the political superstructure, reach a tipping point and a workers’ revolution ensues. What then? The proletariat must seize political power, Engels announced, and transform the means of production into state property. ‘But, in doing this, it abolishes itself as proletariat, abolishes all class distinction and class antagonisms, abolishes also the State as State.’53 Here was the great political miracle of communism as startling in its way as the conservation of energy or the biology of the cell. ‘State interference in social relations becomes, in one domain after another, superfluous, and then dies out of itself; the government of persons is replaced by the administration of things, and by the conduct of processes of production.’ Just as Saint-Simon first predicted, future socialist rule would dissolve traditional politics and become a question of rational, technocratic management. Or, in the more obviously biological terminology of Engels, ‘the state is not abolished. It withers away.’54 At last exploitation is no more and the Darwinian struggle for survival is over as ‘anarchy in social production is replaced by systematic, definite organization’. Under the leadership of the proletariat, humanity achieves true freedom liberated from its animal instincts. ‘It is the ascent of man from the kingdom of necessity to the kingdom of freedom.’55 This was the epic, political endpoint for all Engels's lofty speculation on Hegelian idealism, atomic theory, Darwinian evolution and the negation of the negation. Here was where Marx's dialectical materialism led: the proletariat revolution, emerging from the chrysalis of bourgeois society, and the coming communist dawn.
Far in excess of The Condition of the Working Class in England or The Peasant War in Germany or even his military writings, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific was Engels's bestseller. He proudly described it making ‘a regular revolution’ and ‘tremendous impression’ in France. ‘Most people are too lazy to read stout tomes such as Das Kapital and hence a slim little pamphlet like this has a much more rapid effect,’ he boasted to his American friend Friedrich Sorge.56 Lafargue, who commissioned the work, was equally pleased to see it having ‘a decisive effect on the direction of the socialist movement in its beginnings’.57 Neither man exaggerated its impact. Combined with Anti-Dühring, Engels's Socialism: Utopian and Scientific was instrumental in shaping the direction of continental communism as social democrats in France, Germany, Austria, Italy and England finally had a comprehensible guide to Marxism. According to the Soviet scholar and first director of the Marx-Engels Institute, David Ryazanov, Anti-Dühring ‘was epoch-making in the history of Marxism. It was from this book that the younger generation which began its activity during the second half of the 1870s learned what was scientific socialism, what were its philosophic premises, what was its method… For the dissemination of Marxism as a special method and a special system, no book except Capital itself, has done as much as Anti-Dühring. All the young Marxists who entered the public arena in the early eighties were brought up on this book.’58 Together with the likes of August Bebel, Georgi Plekhanov, Victor Adler and Eduard Bernstein (who recanted and converted to Marxism after reading Anti-Dühring), Karl Kautsky was one member of that generation entering the public arena who came fully to understand scientific socialism only under Engels's pupillage. ‘Judging by the influence that Anti-Dühring had upon me,’ he wrote towards the end of his life, ‘no other book can have contributed so much to the understanding of Marxism. Marx's Capital is the more powerful work, certainly. But it was only through Anti-Dühring that we learnt to understand Capital and read it properly.’59
Yet from the Western Marxist scholar Gyorgy Lukács onwards, via Jean-Paul Sartre and Louis Althusser, a recurring criticism has been that what Engels codified in the 1880s was never really Marxism. It was his materialism, his dialectics, his scientism and his false conjunction of Marx with Hegel. ‘The misunderstanding that arises from Engels's account of dialectics can in the main be put down to the fact that Engels – following Hegel's mistaken lead – extended the method to apply also to nature,’ according to Lukács. ‘However, the crucial determinants of dialectics – the interaction of subject and object, the unity of theory and practice, the historical change in the reality underlying the categories as the root cause of changes in thought, etc. – are absent from our knowledge of nature.’60 Marxism as it appeared in Anti-Dühring and Socialism: Utopian and Scientific was thus ‘Engelsian inversion’ or ‘Engelsian fallacy’ which represented a grotesque misinterpretation of Marx's thinking. In the harsh strictures of Norman Levine, ‘The first deviant from Marxism was Engels. And thus it was Engelsism which laid the basis for the future
dogmatism, the future materialistic idealism of Stalin.’61 As for evidence, these ‘true Marxists’ point to a series of silences in the Marx-Engels correspondence which suggests that Marx never approved of Engels's later writings and sought subtly to distance himself without hurting his friend's feelings.
Whatever mechanical revisions happened to Marxism in the twentieth century, it is a misreading of the Marx-Engels relationship to suggest either that Engels knowingly corrupted Marxian theory or that Marx had such a fragile friendship with him that he (Karl Marx!) could not bear to express a disagreement. There is no evidence that Marx was ashamed or concerned about the nature of Engels's popularization of Marxism. Indeed, he was the prime mover behind Anti-Dühring, had the entire manuscript read to him, contributed a small section on economics and in 1878 recommended the book as ‘very important for a true appreciation of German Socialism’.62 The reality is that Marx, like Engels, had been energized by the scientific progress of the day. ‘Especially on the field of natural science,’ as Wilhelm Liebknecht recalled,
– including physics and chemistry – and of history Marx closely followed every new appearance, every progress; and Moleschott, Liebig, Huxley, – whose ‘Popular Lectures’ we attended conscientiously – were names mentioned in our circle as often as Ricardo, Adam Smith, McCulloch and the Scotch and Irish economists. And when Darwin drew the consequences of his investigations and presented them to the public we spoke for months of nothing else but Darwin and the revolutionizing power of his scientific conquests.63