Date: Wed, 22 Nov 1995 12:33:28 -0500 (EST)
From: ROSSERJB-AT-VAX1.ACS.JMU.EDU
Subject: Re: Engels


     There are at least two areas where Engels' 
"additions" to Marx are serious and potentially questionable.
1)  Central planning.  It is only in _Anti-Duhring_ that the
full argument for central planning is laid out.  Marx was alive
when this was written and probably agreed with it.  But Marx
did not write about planning except in the most general terms.
Thus Marx could be consistent with either a command planned
socialist economy or a market socialist economy with indicative
planning.
2)  Dialectical materialism.  Engels' _The Dialectics of Nature_
was written after Marx's death and laid the groundwork for 
Plekhanov's "dialectical materialism," a phrase never appearing
in any writing of either Marx or Engels.  Marx wrote of historical
materialism.  DM allowed the extension of dialectics to all
areas of thought, culture, etc. (granted, Hegel did this also).
In Stalin's hands this led to DM control of science as with the
horrendous Lysenko business in genetics.  In short, DM deriving
from arguments of Engels, not found in Marx, became the ideological
foundation for the most totalitarian and anti-democratic forms
and practices in Stalinism, a crucial link in the "100 years of
misunderstanding."
Barkley Rosser


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