5—
Engels and the Dialectics of Nature

In many ways, the history of Marxist theory is the story of a retreat from Marx's original thinking. Marx himself had premised his understanding on the interaction of real individuals in society: the effective freedom of human agency was his starting point and final hope. Within capitalist societies, he foresaw a rational history unfolding, driven forward by the global development of industrial production and cooperative labor, and, most critically, the resulting conflict between proletarian and capitalist, sharpened and consciously executed along the lines of their divergent interests. Through his original thinking, Marx presented a method of empirical research, an analysis of political economy, and an interpretation of history and its immanent sense—an interpretation that only the political agency of the enlightened proletarians could make meaningful. According to this interpretation, communism appeared as the emancipation of the individual from conditions of alienated self-realization: in addition to abolishing the oppressive property and class relations of capitalism, the individuals within a communist society consummated a transformation in their everyday lives. Through the medium of self-conscious cooperation, society could be restored to the purposeful control of the individuals actually constituting it.

"Orthodox" Marxists after Marx came to ignore or revise many of these aspects of his thought. Confronted with a cautious labor movement, the parliamentary success of socialist parties, and, finally, the victory of revolutionary Marxists in a precapitalist society, the orthodox attempted to consolidate Marxism as a comprehensive world view, capable of dependably orienting action amid the eruption of unforeseen occurrences. In the process, the theory bequeathed by Marx tended to lose the quality of being a mere method and hypoth-

esis about the meaning of history, to become instead a schematic timetable of historical development. Distrusting the uncertainties of human agency, the orthodox justified their theory in terms of predictable natural processes and universally applicable dialectical laws of motion: using this fixed matrix of categories to map the invariant structures of history, they could master unanticipated events by reference to the norm of natural development. What in Marx had been an immanent interpretation, open in principle to modification, became for the orthodox a scientifically confirmed transcendental standard, essentially unaffected by irregular perturbations in the phenomenal world of human affairs. In this context, Marx's own hopes for individual emancipation, the enlightenment of interest, and the practical intervention of men in history were obscured and often altogether suppressed.

Engels and Marx

Ironically, it was Marx's devoted colleague and collaborator, Friedrich Engels, who laid the theoretical foundation for the subsequent rise of orthodox Marxism. A master of popular exposition, Engels's prestige was enhanced by his lifelong association with Marx; in the formative years of Marxian socialism, he played a central role in expounding its "official" theory.

The relation of Engels's theories to Marx's own is complex and ambiguous. By no means a faceless follower, Engels in fact introduced Marx to the study of political economy; he actively participated at many points in developing historical materialism and made original contributions in applying the theory to such fields as politics, anthropology, and military history. Yet his writings frequently seem at odds with Marx, even when they profess to defend the latter's own theory. Never a mechanical expositor, Engels subtly revised entire aspects of historical materialism in the process of popularizing it. His own modesty helped conceal the extent of his contribution to Marxism—a contribution that needs to be distinguished from Marx's own.

In many respects, to be fair, Engels admirably preserved the integrity of Marx's thought. After the latter's death, he consistently disputed any interpretation that portrayed Marxism as reducing all

social phenomena to economic causes. "According to the materialist conception of history, the ultimately determining element in history is the production and reproduction of real life. . . . Hence if somebody twists this into saying that the economic element is the only determining one, he transforms that proposition into a meaningless, abstract, senseless phrase."^[1] His intransigent opposition to economic reductionism allowed Engels on occasion to maintain intact Marx's insistence on the contributions of consciousness to history. "In the history of society . . . the actors are all endowed with consciousness, are men acting with deliberation or passion, working toward definite goals; nothing happens without a conscious purpose, without an intended aim."^[2] The task of scientific socialism lay in educating the proletariat to a clear consciousness of the "conditions and nature" of the act "which it is its destiny to accomplish."^[3]

Other basic aspects of his thought, however, moved in a direction antagonistic to an appreciation of man's role in history. In attempting to consolidate and codify Marx's theory of history, Engels imposed a systematic schematizing foreign to the former's own approach. Originally a method of historical inquiry, Marx's theory was christened by Engels "historical materialism," a comprehensive world view rivaling (and imitating) Hegel's system in its encyclopedic pretensions. This development was precipitated by a need to provide the burgeoning social democratic movement with a Weltanschauung that might supplant the prevalent bourgeois systems. In Anti-Dühring , Engels himself virtually admitted as much; impelled by an occasion to prevent further "sectarian division and confusion" from developing within the German socialist party, he had set out to present positively the materialist viewpoint on a wide range of subjects. The result, as against his ostensible intentions, was "modern materialism" systematically developed—yet another world view in the contemporary constellation.

The principle vehicle of this metamorphosis was Engels's expansion of materialism into an all-encompassing cosmology. Marxism was no longer to be confined to the historical domain of human action. Engels indeed claimed that modern materialism, this "simple world outlook," was validated "within the positive sciences." By allying Marxism with natural science, he hoped to lay the basis for a philosophy of nature that could verify and illustrate the dialectical laws which distinguished modern from archaic materialism. While

for Marx history, including nature as it appears for man, comprised the field of dialectical understanding, for Engels the laws of dialectic were laws of nature. Nature rather than history became the "test of dialectics."^[4] "Dialectical thinking" was in turn relegated to a summation of the results attained by positive science.

Dialectics and Darwin

Engels reduced dialectics to three laws: the laws of the transformation of quantity into quality; the interpenetration of opposites; and the negation of the negation. He believed these were uniformly applicable to the human and natural worlds. The impetus for this inflation of Marx's naturalism lay in the implicit belief of Engels that if dialectical laws could be verified in nature, then the validity of such laws in history would, as a consequence, have also to be admitted; the truth of dialectics in nature entailed the truth of Marx's concept of history.

Engels's doctrine apotheosized motion. Since "motion is the mode of existence of matter," only dialectics, which was "nothing more than the science of the general laws of motion and development of nature, human society and thought," could fully elucidate matter in its various manifestations.^[5] By framing laws of motion, dialectical thought progressively amassed an exact representation of the world. "The dialectics of the brain is only the reflection of the forms of motion of the real world, both of nature and of history."^[6]

Marx himself had seen no need for such an external foundation to historical materialism, whether in nature or in general laws of history. In Engels's case, this generalized underpinning of materialism resulted in statements so broad as to be virtually meaningless. For example, he effusively praised dialectics for revealing "the transitory character of everything and in everything; nothing can endure before it except the uninterrupted process of becoming and passing away. . . . And dialectical philosophy is nothing more than the reflection of this process in the thinking brain."^[7] Dialectics for Engels came to approximate a cosmic theory of evolution, accounting for the whole of natural and human history. In a speech at his comrade's graveside, he praised Marx's discovery of the "law of development" governing human history, an achievement on a par

with Darwin's discovery of the law of development governing natural history.^[8]

Indeed, thanks to the example of Engels, orthodox Marxism was eventually based on an evolutionary version of positivism, stressing the primacy of objective laws of development, and dismissing subjective factors as epiphenomenal. Marx had wanted to dedicate Capital to Darwin, and Engels, following this lead, eagerly sought to incorporate the latest findings of anthropology into Marxism. On more than one occasion, he compared the findings of Darwin in biology and Morgan in anthropology to those of Marx in political economy and history.^[9] The attractions of a neo-Darwinian evolutionary positivism were manifold. Evolutionary positivism promised nothing less than an empiricial explanation of chance and irrationality in the social world. As Engels once remarked, Darwin's discoveries spelled the collapse of metaphysical necessity. Yet Darwin's notion of evolution reinstated a qualitatively higher notion of necessity, incorporating chance. The laws of adaptation and heredity became guiding threads in an evolutionary development eventually issuing in a rational human order.^[10] In short, evolutionary positivism could be interpreted as accommodating irrational digressions while guaranteeing rational progress, all without recourse to the subjective presuppositions of Enlightenment rationalism.

The evolutionary thesis thus conveniently accounted for the empirical diversity of man, the influence of accident, and the existence of unreason, at the same time as it preserved values and upheld a teleological end of history. Evolutionary positivism avoided the pitfalls of relativism while affording the prestige of ironclad natural laws. For Engels, it rescued Hegelian dialectic from mystification and delivered it over to natural scientific treatment: "The old teleology has gone to the devil, but the certainty now stands firm that matter in its eternal cycle moves according to laws which at a definite stage—now here, now there—necessarily give rise to the thinking mind in organic beings."^[11]

For Engels, precise knowledge resided in a perfect reflection of this world of evolving matter in motion. The "materialist conception of nature" comprised "nothing other than the simple concept of nature, just as it presents itself to us, without any foreign admixture [ohne fremde Zutat ]."^[12] Engels founded the possibility of such a perfectly reflective concept of nature in the very notion of evolutionary

materialism. Such a materialism portrayed the universe in its totality as composed of ascending levels of organized matter. "The motion of matter is not merely crude mechanical motion, mere change of place, it is heat and light, electric and magnetic stress, chemical combination and dissociation, life and, finally, consciousness."^[13] The dialectical laws framed by consciousness could then appear simply as the emergent reflection of the dialectics objectively present in all matter, from the simplest to the most complex, including consciousness itself. Properly grasped, mind was matter conscious of itself.

Subjectivity and Nature

Engels's desire to ground his materialism in an autonomous dialectic of nature led him beyond Marx. To be sure, Marx, like Engels, had looked forward to a single science of man and nature. But in Marx's synthesis, nature was presented anthropologically: "The social reality of nature and human natural science, or the natural science of man are identical terms."^[14] Marx consequently viewed history as the preeminent science: "We know only a single science, the science of history."^[15] This divergence between Marx and Engels had implications for other aspects of Marxian theory. Indeed, the doctrine of Naturdialektik contradicted not only Marx, but on occasion his own presentation of historical materialism.

In arguing against economic reductionism, Engels had carefully preserved a margin of creativity for conscious agency. Yet the reflective theory of consciousness growing out of his work on the dialectics of nature could only with difficulty sustain an account of individuality that did not render it vacuous and wholly dependent on external circumstance. If consciousness merely reflected the objective world, subjectivity itself could hardly lay claim to any independent contribution to that world. Consistently extended, Engels's Naturdialektik suggested that man was always determined, and never determining. His recourse to a dialectics of nature thus helped weaken a significant aspect of Marx's original notion of historical materialism.

Engels was aware of this contradiction. Indeed, his late essay of 1886 on Feuerbach in effect attempted a reconciliation of creative human agency with evolutionary materialism. He avoided an immediate reductionism: "All the driving forces of the actions of any indi-

vidual person must pass through his brain and transform themselves into motives of his will in order to set him into action." Yet Engels proceeded to argue that the mind functioned as a "conveyor belt" of "driving forces," mediating the objective world and subjective will. As such, the mind had only a formal significance; its content, as opposed to its form, was determined by and derived from the objective world of matter.^[16] Mind, as the highest form of matter, thus constituted an irreducible moment of the historical dialectic—but its contribution was purely formal.

Unfortunately, this synthesis, for all its ingenuity, narrowed the scope Marx had granted to human agency in transforming the contents of the material world. Marx had described how the individual could conceptualize an object, and then proceed to materialize that object, a totality of form and content, through labor. But Engels's conveyor belt metaphor undermined this teleological account, which Marx had used to stress the interpenetration of form and content, and to show the possibility of objectifying ideas in reality.

Engels's position indeed raised doubts about some of his own statements elsewhere. As he wrote in Dialectics of Nature , "Man is the sole animal capable of working his way out of the merely animal state—his normal state is the one appropriate to his consciousness, one to be created by himself."^[17] Yet even in his appreciation of human practice, Engels tended to depart from Marx's position. For Marx, labor offered testimony to man's constitutive powers of objectification; the triumph of industry gave evidence of man's human faculties. Marx also used his concept of practice to attack that passive view which portrayed truth merely as a product of verified sense experience; he charged that this view ignored the historical constitution of the objective world by active subjects, and forgot that the very objects of sense-certainty were themselves usually the products of previous acts of individuals.^[18] Engels, by contrast, presented practice primarily as an "infallible test" for the correctness of sense perception. In fact he employed the concept of practice in defense of the very contemplative understanding of truth that Marx had attacked: "So long as we take care to use our senses properly, and to keep our action within the limits prescribed by perceptions properly made and properly used, so long we shall find that the result of our action proves the conformity of our perceptions with the objective nature of the things perceived."^[19]

This realignment of Marx's original appreciation of practice

helped attenuate Engels's understanding of the possible creativity of human beings in history. Where for Marx labor was "self-realization and objectification of the subject, therefore real freedom," for Engels labor became "the proof of necessity."^[20] On this basis, Engels proffered his refutation of Kant's thing-in-itself. by "practice, namely experiment and industry."^[21] Indeed, it may not be purely coincidental that where Engels derived his three laws of dialectics from Hegel's "Objective Logic," Marx modeled his analysis of labor on the treatment of causality and teleology in Hegel's "Subjective Logic." The paradigm of dialectics for Engels was no longer really human practice at all: rather, nature and its inevitable motion provided the new model for Marxian science.

Communism, Class Struggle, and Science

Engels did not confine his reinterpretation of Marxism to epistemology and science; he also altered the significance attached to socialism. Marx had portrayed communism as liberating individuals from alienating conditions of self-objectification: on the basis of an equitable satisfaction of wants, a communist society would permit individuals to freely develop their expressive capacities. Engels, by contrast, often presented socialism simply as a kind of efficient technical solution to problems of social engineering: "The government of persons is replaced by the administration of things." The conscious recognition of the social character of production Engels principally saw as a means of averting "disorder and periodic collapse."^[22] Socialism then became primarily a promise of hitherto unattainable progress. "Only conscious organization of social production, in which production and distribution are carried on in a planned way, can lift mankind above the rest of the animal world as regards the social aspect. . . . Historical evolution makes such an organization daily more indispensable. . . . From it will date a new epoch of history, in which mankind itself, and with mankind all branches of its activity, and especially natural science, will experience an advance that will put everything preceding it in the deepest shade."^[23]

An impoverished concept of freedom accompanied this narrowed vision of communism. According to Engels, "Freedom . . . consists in the control over ourselves and over external nature which is founded

on knowledge of natural necessity."^[24] Marx by contrast held that this sort of freedom "in harmony with the established laws of nature" always remained confined within the "realm of necessity"; the "true realm of freedom," while it had as its basis the comprehension and control of natural necessity, existed beyond it, in the unfettered "development of human potentiality for its own sake."^[25]

Engels's interpretation of communism affected his practical program for attaining it, as did his theory of consciousness. Occasionally, for example, he presented the class struggle as a datum wholly external to individual consciousness. "Modern socialism is nothing but the reflex in thought of this actual conflict, its ideal reflection in the minds first of the class which is directly suffering under it—the working class."^[26] Such a conception devalued class consciousness and enlightened interest as constitutive factors of class conflict. Engels insisted that the path to socialism was simply "discovered by means of the mind in the existing material facts of production."^[27] These "facts" of production in turn threatened to become reified, self-activating categories in the hands of Engels; he even went so far as to speak of a mode of production "rising in rebellion" against a form of exchange—as if modes and forms were the real actors in history. History thus appeared self-contained and independent of creative human intervention: "This conflict between productive forces and modes of production is not a conflict engendered in the mind of man . . . it exists, in fact, objectively, outside us, independently of the will and actions, even of the men who have brought it on."^[28]

Such comments supported his conception of historical materialism as an objectified schema that, when applied to the appropriate empirical data, automatically dictated correct tactics. "To me the historical theory of Marx is the fundamental condition of all reasoned and consistent revolutionary tactics; to discover these tactics one has only to apply the theory to the economic and political conditions of the country in question."^[29] If modern socialism was merely the accurate reflection in thought of the "real" historical movement, then the collaboration of modern science with socialism might yield a rigorously valid description of history and the laws of development governing it. Together, modern science and socialism verified the laws of dialectic and thus rendered the insights of Marx into the process and stages of historical development self-evident as to their truth. "The more ruthlessly and disinterestedly science proceeds,

the more it finds itself in harmony with the interests and aspirations of the workers."^[30] With Engels, socialism extended its welcome to the natural scientist as a revolutionary co-worker who would disclose a necessity that, once understood, irrevocably delineated the action of the (essentially passive) proletariat.

Nevertheless, more often than not, Engels in his comments on the actual socialist movement remained close to Marx's own positions. In fact, his thought can be seen throughout as pulling in two different directions simultaneously. On the one hand, Engels sought to secure, consolidate, and codify the theoretical advances inaugurated by Marx in the study of society; at this level, he tried to defend Marx's insights, including the latter's insistence on the importance of class struggle and the irreducibility of subjective factors in the historical process. On the other hand, he attempted to reformulate historical materialism as a sub-discipline within a more inclusive science of dialectics, embracing a dialectics of nature as its ultimate justification; at this level, his own reflex theory of consciousness implied a devaluation of subjectivity, and thus a revision of Marx's original thinking, with far-reaching implications.

Since Engels's commitment to an active pursuit of the class struggle was accompanied by his endorsement of an evolutionary science of historical materialism, his interpretation of Marx proved highly problematic: he raised the ambiguity of Marx's original theory to the level of outright contradiction. Nevertheless, to the extent that proletarians failed to press for a militant and class-conscious politics, the "scientific" side of Engels's outlook, with its promise of a progressive movement of history guaranteed by natural laws, proved an attractive—and authoritative—interpretation of Marx's position. The temptation to extend the dialectical cosmology of Engels into a purely objective (and thus implicitly reductionist) theory claiming the inevitability of socialism became virtually irresistable. Here as elsewhere, Engels, not Marx, pointed the way for orthodox Marxism.