A World to Win

by Sven-Eric Liedman

  Marx’s mistake can be explained by the enthusiasm that all the new knowledge of chemistry roused in him: Hofmann’s lectures, his acquaintance with Schorlemmer, and much else in a time and environment where many more than just the specialists wanted to acquaint themselves with the new advances of chemistry and the natural sciences in general. As we have seen, Engels did not react appreciably when Marx wrote to him that he was going to compare a historical course of events with the chemists’ new theory about molecules. Marx did not develop the consequences of the concept of dialectical law he thereby introduced, nor would he ever do so. For his part, Marx never returned to his innovation. He did not even use the word ‘law’ when he spoke about the negation of the negation (p. 416 above) at the end of Capital. But his little note about the laws in chemistry and history had repercussions that no one could have imagined. We will now cast a glance over this history.

  Anti-Dühring

  On 30 May 1873, Engels wrote a dramatic letter to Marx. ‘This morning in bed the following dialectical points about the natural sciences came into my head,’ he wrote. The letter was clearly hasty. Marx and he would meet again soon enough. Karl was on a temporary visit to Manchester, and Engels had been living in London for three years.

  It is clear that he had not spoken about anything similar under the numerous meetings face to face they had had in London. Marx’s response also indicated that he was a bit taken by surprise. He said that he could not say anything definite about his friend’s ideas until he had consulted ‘the “authorities”’. These authorities were Carl Schorlemmer on the one hand, and on the other Samuel Moore, the lawyer and mathematician we have already encountered who would also at length translate Capital to English. While Marx was writing his letter, Schorlemmer conveniently showed up and wrote a few notes in the margins of Engels’s letter. They were nothing but agreement: ‘Very good, my own view’ and ‘Quite right!’ Engels himself was certainly not uninfluenced by his outstanding chemist friend. But Schorlemmer was obviously not initiated into Engels’s new ideas, either. According to Marx’s response, he additionally did not want to comment on their more immediate import.49

  The letter from 1873 meant something new in Engels’s life. From that point until Marx’s death, the work that posterity would call The Dialectics of Nature was at the very centre of his activity. To be sure, since 1858 he had been writing scattered remarks on things that interested him in the natural sciences and in philosophy. But now, a whole big project was taking form for him.

  The project was to show how the new natural sciences formed a unity. They formed a hierarchy of different forms of movement. The path ran from the simple to the complex, from mechanics via ‘physics proper’ and chemistry to biology. Engels did not even need to point out to Marx that he ultimately wanted to find a place in this complex unity for their own theories on human society and its development. It is worth noting that Marx’s response to Engels’s new ideas was just as indifferent as Engels’s response to Marx’s ideas on dialectical laws that connected organic chemistry and social theory.

  In any case, Engels worked further on his idea. But he would soon be disrupted in his concentration. The reason was Eugen Dühring’s vehement attack on Capital, which we have touched upon several times and influenced Marx’s postscript to the second edition. The attack had not only irritated Marx but also agitated his social democratic sympathizers in Germany. Dühring was a Social Democrat; he lived in Berlin and his influence over fellow party members – in that city in particular – was growing rapidly. Wilhelm Liebknecht, who after his difficult youth in London was now an important man in the party and managed its newspaper Vorwärts, wrote to Marx and encouraged him to respond to Dühring’s low criticism. But Marx did not have the time; his continued efforts with Capital left him no peace.50 Engels took up the task unwillingly. In the first foreword he wrote to Anti-Dühring, which he later discarded and thereby ended up in The Dialectics of Nature, he wrote: ‘The following work does not by any means owe its origin to an “inner urge”. On the contrary, my friend Liebknecht can testify to the great effort it cost him to persuade me to turn the light of criticism on Herr Dühring’s newest socialist theory.’51 The letters between Marx and Engels also testified to the fact that it was after hesitation, and feeling that he had to put aside a more important work – that is, The Dialectics of Nature – that Engels took on the task of going after Dühring.

  Liebknecht seems to have believed to the very last that it was Marx who should defend himself against Dühring. It was a statement he spread around. Marx got upset and explained that Engels was making a great sacrifice, as this project was forcing him to interrupt ‘an incomparably more important piece of work’.52 The work on Anti-Dühring would thus, assumed Engels and Marx, be a parenthesis. In fact, it would change the direction of Engels’s philosophical labour.

  The Dialectics of Nature consists of a miscellaneous collection of texts. Many of them are only short notices or aphorisms, others are half-length sketches, while others are completely developed chapters. This material is not arranged in chronological order in the printed editions, but most of the texts can be dated. One then finds that what Engels wrote before May 1876, when he began work on Anti-Dühring, is limited to nothing but short texts in which Hegel is constantly present. At the beginning of that period, which began with his letter to Marx in 1873 in which he talks about his new ideas, he is occupied in particular with Hegel’s Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, published in 1817 and 1830. In it, Hegel puts together a bold compilation of the human knowledge gathered in the various disciplines of philosophy, everything from mathematics and the natural sciences to history. Ernst Haeckel, who was the first to draw philosophical consequences from Darwin’s Origin of Species, is also often brought up in Engels’s notes.

  Two lines of thought that are interwoven with each other dominate Engels’s early texts, all the way back to the first one from 1858 on Ludwig Büchner.53 The only thing he ascribes to Hegel is that there are no fixed categories. The new natural science showed that phenomena previously regarded as clearly separate, or even incompatible, flow into and are mixed with each other. In the manuscript on Büchner, Engels makes a distinction between metaphysical and dialectical tendencies; with it, he tries to capture precisely the difference between fixed and fluid categories. Opposites go into each other: reason and consequence, cause and effect, identity and difference, appearance and essence. But the dialectic not only dissolves the concepts. It also shows us that what seems invariable in objective reality passes over into something else and develops into something new. In a note from 1875, it says that there are no ‘hard and fast lines’.54 The examples there are taken from evolutionary biology, which demolishes the idea of unchanging species.

  It is important to remember that even in these early notes, Engels spoke of a dialectic of the same (or at least a similar) type in thought and reality. Ultimately, it is the evasive and constantly changing nature of reality that makes it necessary for thinking, and thereby also science, to work with opposite concepts that nevertheless do not exclude each other.55

  The order of nature is changeable, but all the same there is an order. Such is the second, more specific idea in Engels’s early notes. This is what predominated in the letter to Marx from 1873. Everything that exists is matter in movement, but there are different forms of movement. The new natural science could show how the different forms of movement pass into each other. Mechanical movement, heat, electricity, and so on are not thoroughly separate quantities. They are qualitatively separate, but the transition from one quality to another can be quantitatively determined.

  Soon enough, he would broaden his examples to biology, and immediately thereafter also to humanity and their societies. When he wrote a small text in rough outline about the dialectic in 1875, he had made room for all of reality. Life was linked to the proteins, and human history was pushed forward through conflicts. The transitions between the various levels of reality go so qu
ickly that the reader can scarcely keep up. The notes were surely made for Engels’s own memory and not for other readers.56

  But there was still no hint of any dialectical laws. The dialectical laws first show up when he set about the task of defending Marx’s use of the concept in Capital. It was a crucial step. The extremely general ideas that support the early, brief notes are given greater certainty in one stroke – namely, the certainty that characterizes all of Anti-Dühring and even the majority of the texts that Engels wrote thereafter, which were included in The Dialectics of Nature. But what was its price?

  Engels wrote Anti-Dühring – or, as it is actually called, Herr Eugen Dührings Umwälzung der Wissenschaft (Herr Eugen Dühring’s Revolution in Science) between September 1876 and June 1878. The text was first published as a long series of articles in the newspaper Vorwärts between January 1877 and July 1878, and then as a book in 1879. His correspondence from the time of writing is full of grumbling. Wilhelm Liebknecht is ‘that silly ass Wilhelm’ who suffered from a shortage of manuscripts for Vorwärts and was therefore pushing Engels to write as quickly as possible. In another letter, Engels for once is jealous of Marx: ‘You can lie in a warm bed – study Russian agrarian relations in particular and rent in general without anything to interrupt you – but I have to sit on a hard bench, drink cold wine, and all of a sudden drop everything else and break a lance with the tedious Dühring.’57

  Engels was easily exasperated, but Marx actually also contributed a text to Anti-Dühring. He called it ‘Randnoten zu Dührings “Kritische Geschichte der Nationalökonomie”’ (Margin Notes on Dühring’s Critical History of Political Economy). It was run in an abridged version in the newspaper, but with various small changes by Engels in the book version.58 But the whole of it was Engels’s, and gradually he also found some greater pleasure in his work. This gave him the opportunity to develop the worldview he had displayed such a desire for even before the work on Anti-Dühring.

  On the other hand, he could still say in 1879, when the book version came out, that he never again intended to allow himself to be interrupted in more important matters by ‘journalistic activities’.59 Only later, when he had given up hope of ever completing his great work on dialectics, could he speak a little more appreciatively about Anti-Dühring. But then the book could also become the gateway to Marx’s theories for many active members of the young workers’ movement. It would come to leave its mark on what began to be called Marxism around 1890, but what should rather be called Engelsism.60

  In its way, Anti-Dühring is also a clear, easy-to-understand book. There is no equivalence whatsoever to the artistry in the plan in Capital. It consists of three parts following an explanatory introduction. First, philosophy, which in full accordance with tradition is divided into natural philosophy and moral philosophy. After that comes political economy, and finally socialism. It is a popular course in Marx’s theories wrapped up in the more comprehensive theoretical construction that Engels himself had been putting together for a few years.

  But at the end of the philosophy section are a few brief chapters representing something new. The first is called ‘Dialectics. Quantity and Quality’, and the second ‘Dialectics. Negation of the Negation’.61 In these chapters, Engels replies directly to Dühring’s criticism of the brief lines in Capital where Marx talks about the law of quantity and quality, as well as of the brief lines about the negation of the negation. Most readers of Capital had surely not even noticed these spots in a vast, complex mass of text. But Dühring had, for the simple reason that he had developed his own dialectic to drive Hegel’s out. That is why Marx’s references to Hegel’s connection with the dialectic were like a red flag to a bull for him. He characterized Marx quite simply as a Hegelian, which – as we have seen – enraged Marx. And now it was Engels’s task to defend Marx. The matter was thus blown up to proportions other than the ones it had in Capital.

  Neither Dühring nor Engels made a fuss about Marx, in contrast to Hegel, speaking about a ‘law’ in connection with quantity and quality. Both took it for granted that he was simply following Hegel. Engels complained about Dühring arguing that Marx saw Hegel’s thesis on quantity and quality as a general law, from which every individual case could be inferred through deduction. It is actually the opposite: Marx said that Hegel’s law passes the test in the face of both the empirical cases he compares – one from political economy, the other from organic chemistry. This is an important observation. But on the other hand, Dühring’s mistake is comprehensible when Marx talks about laws.

  Engels also said that Marx was the first to discover this law. Hegel has thus fallen out of the calculation here; Engels himself, with all his ambitions regarding a good natural scientific orientation, grants Marx priority. But in the next step he trumps Marx, talking about the negation of the negation as also a law. Engels describes it as ‘[a]n extremely general – and for this reason extremely far-reaching and important – law of the development of nature, history, and thought’.62 As we have seen, the phrase ‘law of development’ is important. But did Engels really mean that it had the same character as the law of entropy? No, hardly so. What he called the negation of the negation is borne out in a miscellaneous number of contexts – everything from logic and mathematics to history. Engels was aware of its variegated character. The path of the plant from seed to flower with its different stages, for example, did not have a lot to do with integral calculations, he said. We can safely agree with this.

  With two dialectical laws, the way lies open for more. When Engels took up the work on The Dialectics of Nature again in 1878, he first made a plan for the entire work. The introduction that he wrote before he took up Anti-Dühring remains. But an entirely new section came into existence after that: a section on the universal validity of the dialectical laws. Suddenly, these laws have now become four. The law of quantity and quality is the first, and it is followed by a law of the unity of opposites. The unity of opposites had been under discussion in Anti-Dühring as well, but it had not been pointed out as a dialectical law there. Rather, it had had the status as a dialectical principle superior to everything else. Now, it had been given a co-equal position. The law of the negation of negation is number three, and there is also a fourth law: the ‘spiral form of development’.63

  By all appearances, this fourth law was to capture the tendency of development to repeat previous stages but on another level, an observation that is also found in Hegel. But the law quickly disappeared. When Engels developed the outline plan for a somewhat more detailed text the following year, 1879, it was not included. Three laws remained; they are the laws that have become normative in the tradition that has its beginnings when The Dialectics of Nature (first called Natur und Dialektik) was printed in 1925.64 They lived on up to the present day, but above all as long as the Soviet Union existed. They have been repeated in all kinds of handbooks, and expounded in various more or less imaginative ways. Dogmatists have stood up in their defence, but it can safely be said that no one has been drawn to the tradition from Marx, or even Engels, owing to these laws. They have become an extra burden that can only be defended with all sorts of more or less sophistic reasoning.

  As we have seen, their position in Marx’s writings is extremely fragile. His contribution to them is a single one: a few individual lines in Capital. They would certainly have disappeared into the great archive of oblivion if Dühring had not attacked them, and Engels found it important to defend them and then also work further on the concept of ‘dialectical law’. But he then had difficulty making up his mind: two laws became four, and then three.

  When at the end of his life, Marx was composing careful excerpts of rather advanced textbooks and chemistry, no dialectical laws turn up. He goes carefully through organic chemistry, including the paraffins that were the speciality of Carl Schorlemmer – but not a word about any dialectics in the process. His aim, quite simply, is to understand the context as such – very important for both agriculture and the ch
emicals industry.

  The big question is what attitude Marx took towards Anti-Dühring, and in particular the exposition there on the dialectical laws (which were still only two in number). Marx, as we have seen, contributed his own text. But it had nothing to do with the laws. In the foreword to the edition that was published in 1885 – that is, after Marx’s death – Engels assures us that ‘I read the whole manuscript for him before it was printed’.65 In all likelihood, Marx was eager to be more closely informed about a publication that dealt with his own theories to such a great degree. But how carefully did he consider the consequences of the dialectical laws? Could he have imagined that they would have served as a basis for the simplest sloganeering?

  It is not likely that the concept of dialectical law had anything but a highly temporary position in his consciousness. It was the same for Engels. It was not only due to the fact that he was occupied with completing the later portions of Capital. He was also concentrating on a smaller publication in which he would summarise his views on philosophy. It was called Ludwig Feuerbach und der Ausgang der klassischen deutschen Philosophie, published in 1886 as newspaper articles, and in 1888 as a book (and in English in 1929 as Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy).66 It is surely the best he wrote in the genre, a clear and concentrated presentation of approximately forty pages in which he goes through the thinking of Hegel and Feuerbach, the great natural scientific discoveries during the period in which he himself lived, and finally the theories – inspired by Hegel and Marx – that the new workers’ movement were pursuing. But not a word about any dialectical laws! If anywhere, they should have had a place there if they had had any central role in his own philosophy. But the parenthesis is closed; Marx’s little deviation no longer needed to be defended against an aggressive lecturer in philosophy from Berlin. Engels could let them disappear into oblivion without regret.