Date: Tue, 9 Jul 96 09:28:23 GMT
Subject: Re: Dialectics of Nature -Forwarded -Reply



Jerry wrote that the ISJ article on Engels said nothing new.
I shall have to put it on my "to be reread" list.

But, from memory :

i) In a way, there was no need to say much that was actually new.
It was after all, an article to celebrate the centenary of his death.
We took advantage of this to restate what he actually stood for. We
did this in the context of the collapse of Stalinism and the rightward
gallop of reformism in General, Blair's Labour Party in particular.
Choosing to reexamine Engel's life in these circumstances was a choice
to re state the classical marxist tradition.

But, having made this choice, it immediately becomes neccessary to
rescue Engels from the Stalinist icon he has become. The point of this
is not particularly to argue against Stalinists, who are basically
irrelevant, but to argue against those who disagree with Stalinism but
agree with the Stalinist caricature of Engels. Hence you get lots of
people saying basically "Marx good, Engels bad". So, poor old Engels
gets blamed for the mechanical marxism and reformism of the second
international, and the stupid things the Stalinists said about science.

ii) And this is what IS new about the article - it presented Engel's
life as a whole. There are plenty of works on Marx, which examine 
his relationship with Engels. There are plenty of works on those
works of Engels which are obviously "his" - but none or few anyway
on Engels himself, and none of them good enough to get on your average
SWP district bookstall. [ In contrast to one of the two biographies
of Rosa Luxembourg, or one of Gramsci, or three ( Cliff, Deutscher,
Trostky ) of Trostky ) ].

There were two aspects of his life which I had not been aware of until
that article, both of which have a direct bearing on the rescuing of
Engels from the charge of "mechanical materialism / Stalinism /
2nd International Reformism" : his early life as a practical revolutionary,
and the extent of his collaboration with Marx on the "Communist Manifesto";
and the battle with the tendency to reformism in the German SPD in his 
later life. The article shows us an Engels fighting at the  beginning an
the end of his life in practise against a mechanical interpretation of Marxism,
while "his" theoretical contribution , aside from his general collaboration
with Marx, also is shown to have this same, non mechanical, outlook.

I also liked all the personnal stuff about who he was bonking when.

Adam.


Adam Rose
SWP
Manchester
UK


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