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.