Post War Socially Constructed Reality

Key to the social amnesia that occurred around the revolutionary potential of the proletariat after WWII is the social construction of the myth of the middle class. The dull boring fifties as popular history refers to it, was a utopian myth created by the beginnings of a post war boom in America.

It was anything but, with the Cold War, the homosexual and communist witch hunts, the rise of the UAW in the automobile industry and the unification of the CIO and AFL, the war in Korea, mass automation, etc. But by the end of the Fifties the neo-con ideologists who once had been leftists such as Daniel Bell could declare the End of Ideology, that is the end of class war and the end of the potential of Marxism to appeal to the American working class who now owned their own homes, had washing machines, cars, summer vacations.

It was a wonderful myth for in reality America still had poverty and lots of folks missing out on the post war boom as the black listed movie Salt of the Earth showed. Women had been forced out of the factories into the dull and monotonous career of being house wives. Segregation kept blacks and white workers separated through out America and not just in the south, but also in the factories of the north where they worked together.Mexican Americans like those depicted in Salt of the Earth, lived lives of brutal poverty not unlike folks during the Great Depression. But all this was white washed by the myth of the growing American Middle Class. A myth perpetrated by sociologists and other academics as well as the media.

Another myth that had to be created was that of the nuclear family, since the war had destroyed all social relations between the sexes and had opened up sexual opportunities with out the need for marriage. Sometimes war brides had several husbands, homosexual liaisons increased, sex for pleasure became an antidote to pending death, there could be no long term commitments given as those who left for the front might never come back. With the revelations about sexuality published by Kinsey and subsequent social turmoil created by sexual relations during the war, the post war planners saw the need to create the ideal family that returning G.I.'s would fit into, forgetting their real experiences of another kind of sexual relationship, one that was not forever and ever. One based on pleasure, however fleeting, not just for reproduction.

Increased production, automation, the creation of mass consumption, wide spread home ownership, increasing the access to higher education for G.I.'s, the creation of Ozzie and Harriet land, all this was planned in advance of the end of the war. As this amazing web site shows.

Those in charge of America were worried that the revolutionary and radical movements that emerged during the great depression and subsequently in resistance to fascism in Spain would re-emerge after WWII. Johnny had gotten his gun and was coming home, and the last thing the ruling class wanted was an armed proletariat with grievances unresolved from the depression. The creation of the house wife, that paradigm of virtue was the result of the need to move women out of the factories in order to avoid the crisis of post war unemployment that had led to the General Strike wave of 1919 following WWI.

During WWII the U.S. military created a special education program based on comics and propaganda pamphlets aimed at changing the consciousness of their draftees. To create the myth of American Democracy as we know it today, and to create the conditions for a post-war ideology of the Middle Class, the great mushy middle the happy worker consumer who was the 'American Citizen', no longer a 'proletarian' who could be appealed to by socialists, communists and labour activists.

They were pamphlets designed by Management to educate workers about their place in the world, not unlike the Team Work posters you see in your workplace today.

The whole modern management scheme of reification, which takes the socialist ideal of self management and transforms it into a management scheme to get us to work harder for less evolved from this ideological construct that occurred after this WWII experiment. It was the source of the Dimming school of ideology where Team Work Management was used to further enslave the working class through application of modern automation.

The new management strategies of getting us to participate in our own exploitation are well criticized by Kevin Carson.

And they originate in the ivory towers that created the North American post WWII world as this site reveals.



Constructing a Postwar World: Background and Context

These pamphlets arose from impulses that are generally overlooked in the celebratory historiography of World War II. In a very real sense, the impetus for the pamphlets was fear—fear among military and civilian leaders that enlistees formed a potentially restless, dangerous, and uncontrollable group (particularly among those stationed overseas) who were likely to have difficulty adjusting back to civilian lives.

Social unrest among enlistees after World War I provided some cause for caution, but their concerns were substantially heightened and reinforced by new and extensive efforts to poll and test the mood and morale of the service men and women. Sociologists working for the Army found that servicemen were deeply ambivalent about the war, uneasy about their relationship with the civilian population, and deeply concerned about their lives after the war. In this respect, the emergence of the field of social psychology was critical, as it created new tools to measure morale and discontent in large groups of men and suggested new means of social manipulation.

The records of the Army’s Information and Education Division (IED) demonstrate that as early as the summer of 1943, military and civil leaders became concerned that after the conclusion of hostilities, the absence of common enemies and goals might unleash widespread social unrest. The definition of the problem and the resulting efforts at a solution were shaped by two important factors—the particular personality and background of the division’s commander, Frederick Osborn, and the emergence of social psychology as a discrete discipline with its own institutional imperatives.

As early as the summer of 1943, Osborn and others in the War Department were tying these issues together, and pointing to the need to ameliorate wide-scale social disruption after the war. They were particularly concerned about the period between the end of fighting and the moment when the servicemen could be shipped home. In a memorandum to the chief of personnel, Osborn noted the experience of the services after World War I, which “amply demonstrated that without an adequate substitute for military training, administered with vigor and conviction, cases of absence without leave, desertion, insubordination, petty misdemeanors, and even serious crises mounted week by week.” The solution offered by Osborn’s staff was a comprehensive program of nonmilitary training, recreational and athletic activities, and an educational program in which the G.I. Roundtable series would be a featured component.

Democratic Education or Engineering?


In his first report on preparing for the postwar transition, to the Chief of the Personnel Branch, Osborn sets out four avenues for ameliorating potential negative behavior: a nonmilitary education program (a system of correspondence courses for high school and college credit), “information activities,” recreational activities, and an athletic program. Under information activities, Osborn sketches out a program of information, “derived from nonmilitary sources and prepared so far as possible by nonmilitary agencies,” on such issues as jobs; “local, state, and national problems which men will find confronting them as citizens with explanations of the historical, geographical, and economic backgrounds of these problems”; and “international problems facing the United States.” This sketch would form the basis for the G.I. Roundtable series.


However, as William Graebner has noted, similar programs were being developed in the civilian world in the same period. This notion had fairly deep roots, stretching back to notions of progressive education, which had gained credence at the end of the 19th-century and been further developed by progressive philosophers and social scientists like John Dewey.These ideas had a particularly strong advocate in Francis T. Spaulding, chief of the Education Branch, and another civilian pressed into temporary service for the war. Spaulding joined the division from a post as dean of education at Harvard to accept a temporary commission as colonel for the duration of the war.[21] In articles and a variety of consultant’s reports, he had been actively promoting these ideals of democratic education, noting in one article that

the conventional school teaches history out of books, and civics also out of books. As a result, its graduates know a good many of the facts of American history and something of about the machinery of national government, and perhaps recognize their rights as American citizens to freedom of speech and of assembly and of the press. But most of these pupils, as studies of representative schools have shown, have no clear realization of the social and political problems to be found in their own local communities; few of them know how to go about the task of being active citizens in their own right; only a minority are willing even to say that they would do certain things necessary to make democracy actually work, in situations where the task of making democracy work involved some personal effort or self-denial.

Spaulding would bring these ideals of an engaged form of education into the military, and was quite active in advocating the “democratic” form of the discussion group as a necessary leisure-time activity.An important component in their thinking was a very similar program being conducted by the British military under the Army Bureau of Current Affairs (ABCA). Both Osborn and Spaulding had traveled to England and been noted that it was a deficiency that the U.S. military lacked a similar program.Osborn was particularly impressed with the way these were carefully structured to “guide” discussion into certain topic areas, and promote small group cohesion. While the discussion on how to establish a specific program comparable to ABCA is not recorded, in early September 1943 Spaulding approached the American Historical Association about producing the materials for these discussion groups.

At a disciplinary level, the contrast between the involvement of the history profession and that of social psychologists is quite instructive. While social psychologists were provided an abundance of resources to apply the tools of their discipline, the history profession was feeling largely excluded from the work of the war. The historical profession and particularly the leadership of the AHA were casting about for some way to support the war effort. Even before war was formally declared, the papers submitted for the AHA annual meeting in December 1940 were dominated by discussions of war, and the analogical evidence that could be brought to bear on the forthcoming conflict.The subsequent correspondence of the AHA’s executive director, Guy Stanton Ford, over the first two years of the war reflects a clear sense of frustration at the marginalization of the profession, which had enjoyed a prominent role in World War I

According to Spaulding, the criteria for selecting the AHA were largely based on the discipline’s pretensions to social scientific objectivity, which he praised as the profession’s “recognized disinterestedness and impartiality.” At the same time, the AHA had the added benefit of being free of the taint of being seen by Congress as a social science, noting that an earlier collaboration with the Social Science Research Council ran into heavy criticism because “Congress does not know the difference between socialist, social science, and social worker.

The War Department was quick to publicize the relationship, noting in a press release that, “With the birth of the voluntary group discussion forums and its rapid fire spread, the Army is undertaking to provide informational pamphlets presenting basic facts of special concern to the men as evidenced by their own choice of subjects.” In a rather fulsome review of the new program (which also fails to note the significance of the program to postwar planning), Fortune magazine expanded on this, stating,

The men who are behind the orientation program ...want above all, and with the greatest disinterestedness and democratic faith in the world, to make the American soldier conscious. They have no desire to give him political notions; they do want to give him a democratic-mindedness, a faith in what he is fighting for, equal to his pride of outfit and his physical courage. They do not ask him to take sides; they ask him to be aware of the fact that there are sides to be taken in the world, and that some principles can be as lethal as weapons.

The authors initially commissioned to write the pamphlets tended to come from the same spheres, typically senior-level faculty and management in many of the same organizations. Among the domestically related pamphlets, for instance, Clifford Kirkpatrick, professor of sociology at the University of Minnesota, would author essays on war marriages and working wives. Francis Brown, assistant director at the American Council on Education, would write on G.I.’s returning to school. Grayson Kirk, professor of government at Columbia University, would draft a pamphlet on universal military training that was subsequently censored. Emerson Schmidt, deputy director of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, would author a pamphlet on small businesses, and Thorsten Selden, professor of sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, would author a pamphlet on the possibility of a postwar crime wave.

While both the Historical Services Board and military described their potential readers as “democratic citizens,” there was a fundamentally different way in which they each conceived of the term. The historians and social scientists serving as authors and on the board placed the accent on “democratic,” envisioning readers who would read and discuss these in a non-hierarchical setting, who would be improved simply in the process of learning, thinking, and discussing their subjects. For the military, the accent was always on the “citizen,” in the term. While democracy might serve as a cause and goal for the prosecution of the war, there was no intention of permitting free and full expression on these topics. From the first, the pamphlets were intended to provide the basis for guided discussions in which their role as citizens who had given up certain rights afforded by a democracy were to be clearly understood

As important as the ideological differences were, the convergence in the normative outlook of the board and the military, seems equally important. The pamphlets addressing postwar domestic issues all share the same underlying premise, holding up an ideal that was essentially white, heterosexual, and upper middle class. It is not surprising that the target audience is clearly enlisted men who were young, white, and male. To make the point explicit, the authors often use the device of injecting a Private (sometimes promoted to Sergeant) Pro and Private Con on different sides of an issue (in the pamphlet on war marriages, they are called Private Hasty and Private Wait). In every instance where this device is used, their differences are viewed by an omnipotent narrator as arising, at least in part, from ignorance of the “facts.”[44] But whatever the differences, the omnipotent narrator typically aligns with certain norms and ideals.

	Figure 1: This image from the War Marriages pamphlet is fairly typical in depicting women as problems that men will have to deal with on their return.

Apart from their general exclusion as participants in the discussion, women are typically depicted in domestic, maternal, or sexualized roles. Given the largely male military audience, it’s hardly surprising that pamphlets treating the subject of women directly—Do You Want Your Wife to Work after the War? and Can Wartime Marriages Work?—present them in highly objectified terms, as a problem to be solved. However, throughout the pamphlets women are often depicted as disturbing domestic harmony—in a pamphlet on consumer credit, for instance, women are depicted as potential spendthrifts who threaten to plunge the family into debt (Figure 1). And despite the pro-and-con debate on whether working women should return to the home after the war, the pamphlets typically depict only male figures as workers, producers, and managers.

While the texts express a measure of ambivalence about the future role of women, the images in the pamphlets, prepared by military artists, are less ambivalent. In a wide variety of pamphlets, women are depicted in sexualized contexts ranging from the young Eskimo woman casting an appraising glance over three single G.I.’s (in a pamphlet encouraging young men to move to Alaska), or the bare-breasted women in a pamphlet on the Pacific Islands, and the happy mother of triplets in the pamphlet on working women.[45]

Equally striking in the pamphlets is the near total absence of people of color except in exoticized settings like the Pacific Islands. The only mentions of African Americans appear in the pamphlet on crime and in a picture of black sharecroppers in the pamphlet on farming.[46] In this the pamphlets reflect the characteristics and the attitudes of their audience, most of whom felt that African Americans needed no further benefits in the postwar world.

Middle-class economic roles are generally privileged throughout the pamphlets, as (typically men) are directed toward business or other forms of white-collar work, such as business and civil service careers. There are a few exceptions to this norm, including an entire pamphlet devoted to farming and a few asides in the pamphlet encouraging men to move to Alaska, where they could “use their hands.” However, even in pamphlets that don’t address a specific career, this orientation toward a middle-class norm recurs throughout the pamphlets. In the pamphlets on postwar housing and borrowing, for instance, the ideal is a single-family suburban home—a class ideal that is reinforced by images of white men in suit and tie pondering their future dwelling. And throughout, the pamphlets emphasize individual striving and economic achievement as key measures of success in the postwar world.

The pamphlets privilege a white upper-middle-class lifestyle throughout, and place a particular accent on the veterans returning to a golden future as consumers of a plethora of new goods. This has a particularly technological accent in the series, as pamphlets prepare them for purchases of new radios, televisions, cars, and even private planes.This image of technological opportunities reflects the culture of the time, as a review of the periodical literature reveals a profusion of stories of technological progress in support of the war effort, supported by advertising from war-related industries who plowed some of their war profits back into ads that promoted their own technological creations on behalf of the war effort.

The significant level of technological hubris is suggested most clearly in the pamphlet Will There Be a Plane in Every Garage? which cautions against expecting that the title proposal will come to pass, while nevertheless leaving open the possibility. The authors note that “until private planes can do everything that automobiles can do, and fly as well, they will not displace the automobile.”[55] This is reinforced visually with pictures of a father returning home from work in the family helicopter. The postwar world envisioned by the pamphlets offered not only near limitless possibilities for personal economic progress, but intimately tied the notion of personal progress to vast new levels of consumer opportunities made possible by technological progress.

Figure 2: This image from Will There Be a Postwar Crime Wave? reflects the tone of the pamphlet, which suggests the urban environment is an unhealthy place to be.

The pamphlets also privilege a middle-America view of the world, which is probably not surprising given that the staff of the project were all from the Midwest (with most coming from Minnesota).[56] In discussions of the lived environment of the postwar world, for instance, urban settings are represented almost exclusively as sites of danger and crime, which are juxtaposed with rural and “hometown” settings, which are depicted as places of opportunity and community.[57] In Is a Crime Wave Coming? the authors lay out the social science data on urban crime rates, but generally ignore issues of crime and disorder outside of the city. To reinforce the implications of the data, the pamphlet’s images are typically urban, dark, and intentionally disturbing, in a way that viscerally connects crime to the urban environment (see Figure 2). This is in sharp contrast to the pamphlet on hometown life, which is filled with idyllic images of small towns that are lighter aesthetically, and in tone and spirit. This reinforces a narrative that emphasizes optimism and the nurturing environment of small-town life, noting that, “Going home will not mean going back but going forward from wherever you and your community find yourselves when victory comes.”

	Figure 3: This illustration from Can War Marriages Work? was the most frequently reproduced in the media coverage of the series.

The pamphlets finally began appearing in the fall of 1944. In early September, the War Department announced the publication of the G.I. Roundtable series, noting that they would begin to replace earlier discussion kits comprised of government- and privately produced materials.[61] The information in the release and related information in news reports makes it clear that these were intended as part of a larger effort to deal with domestic concerns about postwar readjustment of servicemen.The New York Times Magazine devoted five pages to the pamphlets, including a two-page spread showing the covers of all the completed pamphlets. The series received similar coverage from other media outlets nationwide.As Spaulding and Osborn had expected, the AHA’s role in the series provided exceptional cover for the Army, as the media coverage generally extolled the pamphlets’ objectivity in sum and detail.

However, some of the latent misogyny in the pamphlets did not pass by unnoticed. The Christian Science Monitor mocked the pamphlet Do You Want Your Wife to Work after the War? suggesting satirically that “its real purpose may be determined by revealing that one section of this subversive pamphlet actually deals with the need for assisting wives to wash and dry dishes. Can you imagine the effect on the boys overseas just as they are beginning to dream of returning home? Is the War Department trying to slow down demobilization?”The New York Herald and Boston Post offered similar critiques over the coming days. Nevertheless, the rest of the media coverage was exceptionally positive, and the shared insensitivity to the portrayal of women is reflected in the prevalent use of the demeaning up-skirt picture from the War Marriages pamphlet to illustrate stories about the series (Figure 3).

The Army continued to distribute the pamphlets in the quantities of 200,000 through 1946, and made additional copies available to civilians through the Government Printing Office. However, the intended uses of the series to guide and shape the thought of servicemen and women seemed to dissolve, even as the concerns about discontent among servicemen overseas quickly came to pass, as the Research Branch had predicted. Rather ironically, Osborn’s warnings about a sudden and dramatic exodus of personnel proved particularly true among the officers in his own division. The officers who had overseen the G.I. Roundtable project, from Osborn down to AHA liaison Major Goodrich, had departed for other positions within three months. This merely reflected the predicted agitation of servicemen overseas, who began to ask for a quick return.

Apparently in a last-ditch effort to revitalize the program, the lowly captain who had been left in charge of the program conducted another series of surveys of military bases on the West Coast to observe discussion groups of 20 to 100 people, and discuss the continuing use of the program. He found fairly extensive interest and readership for the pamphlets, but this often seemed to be as a relief of boredom, rather than a concerted programmatic effort to use them. The officers at the eight bases visited all said the pamphlets were being widely distributed aboard troopships returning from overseas and in the redistribution centers to which they were returning. The surveys demonstrated that they were popular as reading material, particularly those treating more controversial subjects. But the waning of the ideals that served to produce the pamphlets is evident in the workmanlike report that the captain produced. The language of guiding and shaping the men’s thoughts are completely absent from his lengthy report, noting that they will only “play a valuable role in keeping Army personnel well informed and personally interested in important current problems involving the nation’s best interests.”

In the end, the value of the pamphlet series is not in the actual effect it had, but in what it tells us about the times in which it was produced. The series was an abject failure in terms of the goals of those who initiated it—the evidence suggests that the pamphlets’ role in ameliorating social discontent was never accepted by those further down the chain of command, and they were never implemented on the local level with that goal in mind.

However, as a mirror on their times, the pamphlets illuminate a number of features in the war years that seem to have been lost in the historiography of the period. The notion that servicemen would pose a significant social problem in the postwar world seems largely unexplored in the current literature, which tends to treat postwar planning as either a foreign policy issue (in terms of constructing a postwar international order) or an economic issue (in terms of the supply of available jobs). At another level, the pamphlets highlight many of the cultural presuppositions that were taken for granted at the time. They provide useful evidence of efforts to envision a postwar world even as the military conflict was taking place, and offer some fresh evidence of the cultural representations of women and minorities at the time. They also highlight the early formation of a white-collar ideal and technological hubris that we tend to associate with the postwar world. As such, they open an interesting line of analysis about when the cultural forms of “the fifties” can be said to have started, and provide a suggestive opening to further inquiry into the culture of the period and the military’s role in shaping it.

SEE:

tick-tock-we-live-by-clock

The End Of The Leisure Society

Black History Month; Paul Lafargue

Take Time From the Boss

Work Sucks

Time For The Four Hour Day

Goof Off Day

The Right To Be Greedy

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Pakistan: Feudalism Not Democracy

While the pseudo democrats of the Bush and Harper regimes bemoan the passing of Benazir Bhutto let us not forget that she, her family and their political party do not reflect a movement of democracy but rather the entrenched feudal interests of Pakistan's ruling classes.

To one side of the villa is the town of Nau Dero itself; to the other, the family's expansive estates, mirroring the separation between Pakistan's political elite and the country's teeming millions. Today, under the portraits of her hanged father and dead brothers, her testament will be read by Bilawal, her grieving 19-year-old son.

The family's franchise on political leadership will be handed on. The will's contents will determine the future not simply of her party, the Pakistan People's Party, but of Pakistan. But whether it contains enough to stop the violence is, perhaps, out of the Bhutto family's hands as the nation teeters on the edge of perhaps the worst bloodletting since Partition in 1947.

TIME reports that Benazir Bhutto’s son will likely be named on Sunday as new Pakistan People’s Party leader

As Georg Luckas points out in History and Class Consciousness, his seminal ultra left text which should be mandatory reading for all who claim a revolutionary class struggle perspective , this is the political reification of feudalism, that the poor and oppressed identify not with their class interests but with the landlord class.

It is difficult to imagine any good coming out of this tragedy, but there is one possibility. Pakistan desperately needs a political party that can speak for the social needs of a bulk of the people. The People's party founded by Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was built by the activists of the only popular mass movement the country has known: students, peasants and workers who fought for three months in 1968-69 to topple the country's first military dictator. They saw it as their party, and that feeling persists in some parts of the country to this day, despite everything.

In effect there has been no bourgeois revolution in Pakistan that would allow it to evolve a modern capitalist democratic state. The creation of modern Pakistan sixty years ago was a still born bourgeois state.

The coming civil war is the failure of the bourgeois class struggle in Pakistan, to create the conditions for a modern capitalist state. Class War Not Civil War!

See:

Pakistan A Fascist State


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Dietzgen and Dialectics

A follow up on my previous post on Dialectics I mentioned Joseph Dietzgen in passing as having discovered dialectical materialism prior to Marx and Engels.

I also referenced him in this post;
Dialectics, Nature and Science.


A brief bio can be found here.

As well as in Wikipedia.

In fact Marx is reported to have introduced this auto-didactic working class intellectual as "Our Philosopher" to fellow members of the First International
( the International Working Man's Association, IWMA).

Joseph Dietzgen and the History of Marxism

Joseph Dietzgen (1828–1888) had an important role in the history of Marxism. One reason for this is that he coined the phrase “dialectical materialism” — the hallmark of “orthodox” Marxism. Another reason is that at the beginning of the 20th century, in the absence of Marx’s early writings, humanist critics of “orthodox” Marxism like Anton Pannekoek appealed to Dietzgen. An understanding of Dietzgen’s thought sheds new light on our understanding of “dialectical materialism” and on the debate between “orthodox” and “Hegelian” Marxists.

Tony Burns, in his study "Joseph Dietzgen and the History of Marxism," looks again at this remarkable and still little known German printer who independently developed the essential doctrines of (what came to be called) Marxism; in fact, the first use of the term "dialectical materialism" is attributed to him. Burns emphasizes Dietzgen's contribution to philosophy, especially his attempt to overcome what he saw as the one-sidedness of both classical materialism and idealism, and his early emphasis on psychology in relation to consciousness. Recalling Dietzgen's original contributions today contributes to our understanding of a number of present-day debates -- especially the rift between "orthodox" and "Hegelian" or "western" Marxism

Dietzgen was a contemporary with the Haymarket Anarchists and with one of the martyrs; August Spies jointly published the German Anarchist Social Democratic daily Chicagoer Arbeiterzeitung.

My pal Larry Gambone does an excellent job outlining his view in his Dietzgen political biography; Cosmic Dialectics. He also has the The Joseph Dietzgen Page

Cosmic Dialectics

chapbook / 22 pages / publisher: Red Lion Press / main creator: Larry Gambone / $2 / 1579 Centre, Montreal, PQ, H3K 1H5

This booklet offers a quick look at the life and libertarian philosophy of Joseph Dietzgen (1828-1888), a German socialist who moved to the States and continued his radical political activism until his death. Why should we care? Because "What makes Dietzgen important is that he deals directly with the underlying problems of cognition, and while one can find many similar ideas in the writings of the great libertarians and anarchists such as Proudhon, Tucker, Stirner and Malatesta, these concepts remain scattered throughout their works and can be easy to ignore. (And have been ignored). Too often libertarian social and political ideas are adopted while the underlying philosophy remains authoritarian. Dogmatic, Positivist and absolutist thinking has never been lacking in the movement. Dietzgen is a powerful antidote to this contradiction." So there.

Adam Buick outlines Dietzgen's views in Joseph Dietzgen - The Workers Philosopher

From 1928 we have this centenary celebration of Dietzgen published in the One Big Union the Western Canadian Journal of the Socialist Party of Canada.
Dietzgen was highly influential on the self taught working class intellectuals involved in the One Big Union and the Socialist Party of Canada as Peter Campbell observes in his book Canadian Marxists and the Search for the Third Way.

There are some striking ambivalences, if not paradoxes, about the role which Fourier designs for himself here: the proletarian who is uncontaminated by official philosophy, and determined both to excel in it and to overthrow it. The character was to have hundreds, if not thousands, of real-life embodiments in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe and America. The most notable, probably, is Joseph Dietzgen (1828-88), the Rhineland tanner and Social-Democrat whose name became a byword f or "proletarian philosophy" from St Petersburg to Chicago and New York, Glasgow, Liverpool, South Wales, the Netherlands and on to Petrograd again [ll]. There were also fictional versions, such as Earnest Everhard, the exigently named "proletarian philosopher" hero of Jack London's The Iron Heel (1908). The proletarian philosophers are robustly evolutionist, materialist, and socialist; what is hard to make out is why they saw their revolutionary project as requiring them to pay any attention at all to philosophy. Why didn't they just ignore it, as one of the most insignificant of all the elements of the old immoral world?

Dietzgen influenced not only the autodidact Marxists in Canada but was influential on the working class autodidact Marxist movement in England and the U.S.;especially the followers of Daniel De Leon. "Our philosopher" thus had to be refuted by Lenin when he attempted to adopt the mantel of Marx's philosophic heir and spokesman for European Social Democracy.

V. I.Lenin
Preface To The Russian Translation Of Letters By Johannes Becker, Joseph Dietzgen, Fredericik Engels, Karl Marx, And Others To Friedrich Sorge And Others

Lenin: On the Question of Dialectics
Philosophical idealism is only nonsense from the standpoint of crude, simple, metaphysical materialism. From the standpoint of dialectical materialism, on the other hand, philosophical idealism is a one-sided, exaggerated, &uumlberschwengliches (Dietzgen)development (inflation, distention) of one of the features, aspects, facets of knowledge into an absolute, divorced from matter, from nature, apotheosised. Idealism is clerical obscurantism. True. But philosophical idealism is ("m o r e c o r r e c t l y " and "i n a d d i t i o n ") a road to clerical obscurantism through o n e o f t h e s h a d e s of the infinitely complex k n o w I e d g e (dialectical) of man.

On the Significance of Militant Materialism

At any rate, in Russia we still have - and shall undoubtedly have for a fairly long time to come - materialists from the non-communist camp, and it is our absolute duty to enlist all adherents of consistent and militant materialism in the joint work of combating philosophical reaction and the philosophical prejudices of so-called educated society.Dietzgen senior (4) - not to be confused with his writer son, who was a pretentious as he was unsuccessful - correctly, aptly an clearly expressed the fundamental Marxist view of the philosophical trends which prevail in bourgeois countries and enjoy the regard of their scientists and publicists, when he said that in effect the professors of philosophy in modern society are in the majority of cases nothing but "graduated flunkeys of clericalism".

Our Russian intellectuals, who, like their brethren in all other countries, are fond of thinking themselves advanced, are very much averse to shifting the question to the level of the opinion expressed in Dietzgen's words.But they are averse to it because they cannot look the truth in the face. One has only to give a little thought to the governmental and also the general economic, social and every other kind of dependence of modern educated people on the ruling bourgeoisie to realise that Dietzgen's scathing description was absolutely true.One has only to recall the vast majority of the fashionable philosophical trends that arise so frequently in European countries, beginning for example with those connected with the discovery of radium and ending with those which are now seeking to clutch at the skirts of Einstein, to gain an idea of the connection between the class interests and the class position of the bourgeoisie and its support of all forms of religion on the one hand, and the ideological content of the fashionable philosophical trends on the other.

August Thalheimer, the old German Bolshevik, used the 1928 Centenary to once again suggest, as did many of his detractors, that Dietzgen should not be read until one is well founded in the basics of Marx and Engels, and probably some Lenin.

Not surprisingly we find Dietzgen embraced by the Avant Garde modernist revolutionary cultural intellectuals around DADA

For Marxists and revolutionary thinkers who found Lenin too stringent in his ideology Dietzgen offered an intellectual alternative;

Josef Dietzgen and the Materialist Dialectic A chapter from Dialectics: The Logic of Marxism, and Its Critics--an Essay in Exploration

His influence on Anton Pannekoek and the German/Dutch Left Communist movement is documented in Chapter II of Anton Pannekoek and the socialism of workers' self-emancipation, 1873-1960.

The Workers' Councils in the Theory of the Dutch-German Communist Left

For that the contribution of Dietzgen is fundamental to explain the birth of the Dutch Communist left and the development of the theory of the Workers’ Councils by Pannekoek.

For the Dutch left, the revolution is not a product of rough material forces, like in the physical field, but primarily a question of development of the spirit: there is initially a victory of the spirit before all material victory.

This is the reason why its adversaries often presented it as an "idealist current".

The Dutch Left was a Marxist current which, like all the "radicals", such as Rosa Luxemburg, underlined importance of the consciousness factor in the class struggle, factor that in these times was defined –according to the terminology– as "spiritual factor".

The intellectual guide of the Dutch Marxists, throughout their first fights against the Revisionism and the mechanicism of the "Vulgate-makers" of the Marxism, was incontestably Joseph Dietzgen.

You can read Pannekoek on Dietzgen in his Lenin As Philosopher.

Bertell Ollman also points out the importance of Dietzgen's work in humanizing dialectical materialism and its influence on Pannekoek and the Left Communists. Whom today we would view as humanist Marxists, more interested in the dynamic of the relationship between individual development and our alienation from production/consumption.

Alienation: Marx's Conception of Man in Capitalist Society
Bertell Ollman
Chapter 3
The philosophy of internal relations

Marx never dealt with the special problems raised by the materialist content he gave to the philosophy of internal relations. No doubt this would have been part of the work he wanted to do on Hegel, but the pressing claims of his social and economic studies and of political activity never allowed him to begin. Provided that he could successfully operate with his relational view, he gave low priority to its elaboration and defense. This task was undertaken to some degree by Engels, particularly in his writings on the physical sciences, but more directly by the German tanner, Joseph Dietzgen. "Here is our philosopher," Marx said on introducing Dietzgen to the Hague Congress of the First International (Dietzgen, 1928, 15).¹³ Yet, despite further eulogies by Engels, Dietzgen's work remains relatively little known.¹⁴ However, Dietzgen's views provide a necessary supplement to Marx's own. The relationship between these two thinkers is clearly set out by Anton Pannekoeck, who claims that Marx demonstrated how ideas "are produced by the surrounding world", while Dietzgen showed "how the impressions of the surrounding world are transformed into ideas" (Pannekoeck, 1948, 24).¹⁵

Mindful of the dangers of using what one thinker says to support an interpretation of another, I shall limit my comments to features which Marx could not have missed in praising Dietzgen's work. Like Hegel, Dietzgen affirms that the existence of any thing is manifested through qualities which are its relations to other things. Hence, "Any thing that is torn out of its contextual relations ceases to exist" (Dietzgen, 1928, 96). So, too, Dietzgen declares—in almost the same words as Hegel-"The universal is the truth," meaning that the full truth about any one thing includes (because of its internal relations) the truth about everything (Dietzgen, 1928, 110).¹⁶ But unlike Hegel—and Marx too—who proceeds from these foundations to an investigation of the whole in each part, Dietzgen's inquiry is directed toward how such parts get established in the first place. For Hegel's and Marx's approach suggests that the preliminary problem of deciding which units of the whole to treat as parts has already been solved. Yet, it may legitimately be asked whether the unity posited by this conception does not preclude the very existence of those separate structures in which they claim to have caught sight of this unity. This is essentially the problem of individuation, or "abstraction", and it constitutes a major stumbling block for any philosophy of internal relations.

Dietzgen's contribution to the solution of this problem is his account of what can occur in individuation and what does occur. He asks, "Where do we find any practical unit outside of our abstract conceptions? Two halves, four fourths, eight eighths, or an infinite number of separate parts form the material out of which the mind fashions the mathematical unit. This book, its leaves, its letters, or their parts—are they units? Where do I begin and where do I stop?" (Dietzgen, 1928, 103). His answer is that the real world is composed of an infinite number of sense perceptible qualities whose interdependence makes them a single whole. If we began by applying the relational conception to social factors and then to things, we see now that it can also apply to qualities. Because the process of linking up qualities may be stopped at any point between the individual quality and the whole, the ways of dividing up the latter into distinct parts called "things" is endless. One result is that what appears as a thing here may be taken as an attribute of some other thing there. Every quality can be conceived of as a thing, and every thing as a quality; it all depends where the line is drawn. So much for what is possible.¹⁷

What actually occurs, that is the construction of units of a particular size and kind out of the "formless multiplicity" presented to our senses, is the work of the human mind. In Dietzgen's words, "the absolutely relative and transient forms of the sensual world serve as raw material for our brain activity, in order through abstraction of the general or like characteristics, to become systematized, classified or ordered for our consciousness" (Dietzgen, 1928, 103). The forms in which the world appears to our senses are "relative" and "transient", but they are also said to possess the "like characteristics" which allow us to generalize from them. "The world of the mind", we learn, finds "its material, its premise, its proof, its beginning, and its boundary, in sensual reality" (Dietzgen, 1928, 119). In this reality, like qualities give rise to a single conception because they are, in fact, alike. This is responsible, too, for the wide agreement in the use of concepts, particularly of those which refer to physical objects. Yet, it is only when we supply these similar qualities with a concept that they become a distinct entity, and can be considered separately from the vast interconnection in which they reside.

According to Dietzgen, therefore, the whole is revealed in certain standard parts (in which some thinkers have sought to reestablish the relations of the whole), because these are the parts in which human beings through conceptualization have actually fragmented the whole. The theoretical problem of individuation is successfully resolved by people in their daily practice. The fact that they do not see what they are doing as individuating parts from an interconnected whole is, of course, another question, and one with which Dietzgen does not concern himself. He is content to make the point that, operating with real sense material, it is the conceptualizing activity of people that gives the world the particular "things" which these same people see in it. Even mind, we learn, results from abstracting certain common qualities out of real experiences of thinking; they become something apart when we consider them as "Mind" (Dietzgen, 1928, 120).¹⁸

Dietzgen's practical answer to the problem of individuation suggests how structures can exist within a philosophy of internal relations, something which Althusser for one has declared impossible.¹⁹ Yet, if individuation is not an arbitrary act but one governed by broad similarities existing in nature itself, there is a necessary, if vague, correlation between such natural similarities and the structures conveyed by our concepts. This is how the study of any conceptual scheme, whether based on a philosophy of internal relations or not, teaches us something about the real world (unfortunately, this cannot be pressed—as many insist on doing—beyond what is common to all conceptual schemes). That Marx, through his study of capitalism, came to stress certain social relations as more important does not in any way conflict with his conception of each part as relationally containing its ties of dependence to everything else. The fact that some ties are preferred and may, for certain purposes, be viewed as forming a structure is no more surprising than any other act of individuation (conceptualization) based on real similarities.

The significant service Dietzgen renders Marx is to show how a proper balance can be reached on a relational view between accepting the reality of the external world (including, too, the general trustworthiness of sense perception) and holding that the conceptual activity of human thought is responsible for the precise forms in which we grasp the world. Marx's support for Dietzgen and, more so, his own practice in conceptualizing new social units show clearly that he accepted such a balance. Yet, by stressing the first part (in criticism of his idealist opponents) and neglecting to develop the second, he left his epistemology open to misinterpretation as a kind of "naive realism"; and it is this belief that lies behind the widespread, mistaken use of ordinary language criteria to understand Marx's concepts.²⁰

Walter Benjamin another 'humanist' Marxist refers to Dietzgen in his Theses On History;

XI

The conformism which has been part and parcel of Social Democracy from the beginning attaches not only to its political tactics but to its economic views as well. It is one reason for its later breakdown. Nothing has corrupted the German working, class so much as the notion that it was moving, with the current. It regarded technological developments as the fall of the stream with which it thought it was moving. From there it was but a step to the illusion that the factory work which was supposed to tend toward technological progress constituted a political achievement. The old Protestant ethics of work was resurrected among German workers in secularized form. The Gotha Program * already bears traces of this confusion, defining labor as ‘the source of all wealth and all culture.’ Smelling a rat, Marx countered that ‘…the man who possesses no other property than his labor power’ must of necessity become ‘the slave of other men who have made themselves the owners…’ However, the confusion spread, and soon thereafter Josef Dietzgen proclaimed: ‘The savior of modern times is called work. The …improvement… of labor constitutes the wealth which is now able to accomplish what no redeemer has ever been able to do.’ This vulgar-Marxist conception of the nature of labor bypasses the question of how its products might benefit the workers while still not being at, their disposal. It recognizes only the progress in the mastery of nature, not the retrogression of society; it already displays the technocratic features later encountered in Fascism. Among these is a conception of nature which differs ominously from the one in the Socialist utopias before the 1848 revolution. The new conception of labor amounts to the exploitation of nature, which with naive complacency is contrasted with the exploitation of the proletariat. Compared with this positivistic conception, Fourier's fantasies, which have so often been ridiculed, prove to be surprisingly sound. According to Fourier, as a result of efficient cooperative labor, four moons would illuminate the earthly night, the ice would recede from the poles, sea water would no longer taste salty, and beasts of prey would do man's bidding. All this illustrates a kind of labor which, far from exploiting nature, is capable of delivering her of the creations which lie dormant in her womb as potentials. Nature, which, as Dietzgen puts it, ‘exists gratis,’ is a complement to the corrupted conception of labor.

*The Gotha Congress of 1875 'United the two German Socialist parties, one led by Ferdinand Lassalle, the other by Karl Marx and Wilhelm Liebknecht. The program, drafted by Liebknecht and Lassalle, was severely attacked by Marx in London. See his ‘Critique of the Gotha Program’

Dietzgen's work continues to be the basis of all critical thinking around dialectics and contributes to a Marxism that is a living critique not an ossified ideological testament.

One of the most prominent Serbian philosophers, Bogdan Šešić was born in Valjevo on July 4, 1909. After 90 years of active life, he died in Belgrade on February 10, 1999.

Living in tumultuous times of the breakthrough and later disaster of the Hitler's Nazism, rise and fall of the Stalinism, as well as in times of the Yugoslav socialism of self-management, professor Šešić encountered numerous difficulties and conflicts, trying to maintain a theoretically consistent and ethically proper attitude, often defying the "fooleries" of his own time and milieu, with a feeling of "a hunted game".

As a teacher of philosophy at the Philosophical Faculty of Belgrade he acted calmly and thoroughly. His public appearances and comments in journals, although very polemic, were chiefly based on theoretical rather than ideological arguments and explications which were not much compliant with the spiritual climate of the time.
Professor Šešić is one of the most prolific writers among the Yugoslav philosophers. He published a considerable number of works in the area of logic and gnoseology. He also dealt with the problems of other philosophical disciplines such as: ontology, anthropology, axiology, esthetics, modern Marxist philosophy, philosophy of science, etc.

His opus published in Serbia includes:
1. Dialectic Materialism of Joseph Dietzgen. 1957.

Even the 'intellectual giant' of the new right; Ludwig Von Mises refers to Dietzgen, disparagingly of course in his simplistic philosophical counter to Dietzgen's dialectics. Dialectical Materialism was always an anathema to Von Mises as much as it is today to his followers. His is a universe of inputs and outputs, one where alienation does not exist it is simply an excuse for being lazy. Von Mises, like many of his right wing students sees no difference between the Nazi's and Marxists, which is where this quote comes from.

Until the middle of the nineteenth century no one ventured to dispute the fact that the logical structure of mind is unchangeable and common to all human beings. All human interrelations are based on this assumption of a uniform logical structure. We can speak to each other only because we can appeal to something com­mon to all of us, namely, the logical structure of reason. Some men can think deeper and more refined thoughts than others. There are men who unfortunately cannot grasp a process of inference in long chains of deductive reasoning. But as far as a man is able to think and to follow a process of discursive thought, he always clings to the same ultimate principles of reasoning that are applied by all other men. There are people who cannot count further than three; but their counting, as far as it goes, does not differ from that of Gauss or Laplace. No historian or traveler has ever brought us any knowl­edge of people for whom a and non-a were identical, or who could not grasp the difference between affirmation and negation. Daily, it is true, people violate logical principles in reasoning. But who­ever examines their inferences competently can uncover their errors.

Because everyone takes these facts to be unquestionable, men enter into discussions; they speak to each other; they write letters and books; they try to prove or to disprove. Social and intellectual coöperation between men would be impossible if this were not so. Our minds cannot even consistently imagine a world peopled by men of different logical structures or a logical structure different from our own.

Yet, in the course of the nineteenth century this undeniable fact has been contested. Marx and the Marxians, foremost among them the "proletarian philosopher" Dietzgen, taught that thought is determined by the thinker's class position. What thinking produces is not truth but "ideologies." This word means, in the context of Marxian philosophy, a disguise of the selfish interest of the social class to which the thinking individual is attached. It is therefore useless to discuss anything with people of another social class. Ideologies do not need to be refuted by discursive reasoning; they must be unmasked by denouncing the class position, the social background, of their authors. Thus Marxians do not discuss the merits of physical theories; they merely uncover the "bourgeois" origin of the physicists.

The Marxians have resorted to polylogism because they could not refute by logical methods the theories developed by "bour­geois" economics, or the inferences drawn from these theories demonstrating the impracticability of socialism. As they could not rationally demonstrate the soundness of their own ideas or the un­soundness of their adversaries' ideas, they have denounced the accepted logical methods. The success of this Marxian stratagem was unprecedented. It has rendered proof against any reasonable criticism all the absurdities of Marxian would-be economics and would-be sociology. Only by the logical tricks of polylogism could etatism gain a hold on the modern mind.

Polylogism is so inherently nonsensical that it cannot be carried consistently to its ultimate logical consequences. No Marxian was bold enough to draw all the conclusions that his own epistemological viewpoint would require. The principle of polylogism would lead to the inference that Marxian teachings also are not objec­tively true but are only "ideological" statements. But the Marxians deny it. They claim for their own doctrines the character of abso­lute truth. Thus Dietzgen teaches that "the ideas of proletarian logic are not party ideas but the outcome of logic pure and sim­ple."[xi] The proletarian logic is not "ideology" but absolute logic. Present-day Marxians, who label their teachings the sociology of knowledge, give proof of the same inconsistency. One of their champions, Professor Mannheim, tries to demonstrate that there exists a group of men, the "unattached intellectuals," who are equipped with the gift of grasping truth without falling prey to ideological errors.[xii] Of course, Professor Mannheim is convinced that he is the foremost of these "unattached intellectuals." You simply cannot refute him. If you disagree with him, you only prove thereby that you yourself are not one of this elite of "unattached intellectuals" and that your utterances are ideological nonsense.

For Von Mises and his followers both Fascism and Socialism are ideologically driven not market driven. They are ideals imposed on the market, not arising from the conditions of the marketplace. Once again mistaking the very real political structures of existing capitalism for an idealized free market, which never has or will exist. Fascism, the New Deal, Stalinism, indeed even post-WWII welfare capitalism is anathema to the Von Mises school. But the fact is that they are the historical development of capitalism not as 'free enterprise' but as state monopoly capital, regardless of their ideological clothing.

Von Mises ideal capitalism evolved in the 2oth Century in order to deal with its own internal contradictions and crisis's. Something that the idealists of his school of thought fail to recognize even today. They still promote the ideal of some mythical free market that exists only in their own imaginations. Thatchers England, Reagan's America, these are the creatures of Von Mises imagination.

As the economic boom of the 1980s proceeded, 'stage-set' schizophrenia - where every shopfront resembled an art-installation and every pedestrian a method actor -- proved prophetic: repro-pubs with mocked-up drawing rooms and fake book-shelves sprang up overnight. Leeds City Centre was overhauled so that the very alleys looked like Disney's concept of Victoriana. Visiting London's Docklands was like a trip round a toystore hallucinating a building in each gaudy trinket. The film Bladerunner and cyberpunk Science Fiction made Philip K. Dick's schizoid alienation a prize commodity. William Burroughs was read more and more widely. Those in regular work reported that 'straights' were all taking drugs. The certified experience of schizophrenia certainly made me cynical about its use as a kind of sugar on the pill of various academic novelties:[2] Jean Baudrillard, for example, read like a cash-in rather than a fellow-traveller. Finally, only the dialectical philosophy of Marx, Dietzgen and Lenin was up to dealing with the relativity of ideology in a material world that is still there when you reopen your kaleidoscope eyes.

During the eighteen months of depression that followed the 'hyperactivity' of the visions, the poet found solace in literature. By concentrating on the paradoxes of representation, certain writers -- Christopher Dewdney, J. H. Prynne, Philip K. Dick -- demonstrated that the disturbance of normal perception had been a product of social being rather individual consciousness. In 1991, Iain Sinclair's Downriver proved that 80s schizophrenia was not so much an individual affliction; more a national event. The poet resorted to writing imaginary reviews in non-existent literary journals.

Indeed Von Mises, Ayn Rand and the other deep thinkers on the right still lack the depth of philosophic inquiry that Dietzgen, the self taught worker intellectual, was capable of. Von Mises misrepresentation of dialectics and Dietzgen actually fails to grasp the liberatory conception of the importance of the individual to Dietzgen. So shrill is he and his followers in equating dialectics=Marxism=authoritarianism.

Dialectical materialism is a way of confronting the false precepts of idealism not by conquering them but absorbing them which is a libertarian process. In other words the Left promoted individual liberty before the Right claimed to be its champion. Which is why in the world of real politics the New Right gave way to the political machinations of the Protestant Evangelical Moral Majority under Reagan who only paid lip service to libertarianism.

The doctrine of being of materialism fights the one of idealism by absorbing it rather than by rejecting it. Materialism considers idealism as being neither a truth nor a falsity, but rather a gnoseological INCONSISTENCY. "The inconsistency does not lie in the fact that IDEAL driving forces are recognized, but in the investigation not being carried further back behind these into their motive causes" (Marx-Engels 1959: 231). "Ideal forces" are present indeed in the existence, but they are GENERATED by the highly complex material conditions. Plainly and concretely, the starting point of the materialist doctrine of being can be exemplified as follows:

"My desk as a picture in my mind is identical with my idea of it. But my desk outside of my brain is a separate object and distinct from my idea. The idea is to be distinguished from thinking only as a part of the thought process, while the object of my thought exists as a separate entity."

(Dietzgen 1906a: 62-63 - published in 1869)

If we neglect for the moment the HISTORICAL praxis that produced the desk Joseph Dietzgen (1820-1888) is specifically referring to and eventually placed it in front of him and him in front of it, we isolate, with that example, the two fundamental ontological principles describing the relationship between matter and spirit according to materialism.

"The first principle of materialism can therefore be put like this: that causal process in space and time, given to us in sensation, exists or continues INDEPENDENTLY of any mind or spirit, consciousness or idea. The second principle is the complement of this, and DENIES the INDEPENDENT existence of anything non-material. Perceptions, ideas, intuitions, feelings, purposes, ideals, consciousness and mind only exist as products of particular kinds of material processes. They are the perceptions, ideas and so on of material organisms, products of the functioning of specific organs of their bodies, formed in the conditions of their material mode of life.

(Cornforth 1968: 45)

It is ironic that Von Mises missed reading Eugene Dietzgen's work, see below, which compared his fathers writings with the father of individualist anarchism, Max Stirner. Dietzgen had more in common with the anarchist thought of American individualists like Benjamin Tucker than the apologists for idealistic capitalism like Von Mises.

At the Marx Internet Archive they have posted two works by Dietzgen

And his works are still available in print.

• Nature of Human Brain Work: An Introduction to Dialectics
  by Joseph Dietzgen
  Hardcover, Charles H Kerr Pub Co, ISBN 0882861050 (0-88286-105-0)
  Softcover, Left Bank Books, ISBN 0317185586 (0-317-18558-6)

A German version is available here and can be translated by Google. Which is what I have done with the link.

His work on Brain work is echoed in the writings of Kropotkin who also saw no difference between mental or manual labour.

Google has his Philosophical Essays On Socialism And Science, Religion, Ethics: Critique-of-reason And The World-at-large available as a limited access online text.

A full digitalized version of the book in PDF and other formats is available from the University of California for free online here.

Far from being considered irrelevant today Dietzgen is brought up by Stephen Lyng in his book Holistic Health and Biomedical Medicine -A Counter System Analysis in comparison with Althusser; The Dialectical Paradigm

Joseph's son Eugene Dietzgen preserved his fathers legacy of ideas and
published them through the Chicago Socialist publishing house Charles Kerr.
Which he helped finance.

He was involved with DeLeon's Marxist Socialist Labor Party. DeLeon like many
Marxists suffered from authoritarian tendencies to be the sole voice of the class
and the party.

The despotic sway of DeLeon had not been
relished and bad feeling existed all over the country.
Some were jealous of it, others were disgusted by it.
Of these latter was Eugene Dietzgen of Chicago, whose
father, Joseph Dietzgen, had been a compatriot with
Karl Marx. Dietzgen saw how DeLeonism was perverting
the movement and rebelled against it. He had
been friendly to the Social Democratic Party, and this
was made a pretext by some of DeLeon’s henchmen in
Chicago to prefer charges and to ultimately expel him.
He issued a pamphlet in March against DeLeonism
under the title Leze Majesty and Treason to the “Fakirs”
in the Socialist Labor Party, and sent it to every section
of the party in the country. This, in conjunction with
a weekly onslaught on DeLeonism which Wayland’s
Appeal to Reason was making in the interests of a united
socialist movement, had some effect.

Eugene went on to become a successful Chicago manufacturer of slide rulers,
survey equipment and the first table top printing process in the U.S.
known as Diazo type.

His essay on the importance of his fathers work is;

AN ILLUSTRATION OF THE PROLETARIAN METHOD OF RESEARCH AND CONCEPTION OF THE WORLD.

MAX STIRNER AND JOSEPH DIETZGEN.

BY EUGENE DIETZGEN.

LOCARNO, March, 1905.

("Philosophical Essays", Joseph Dietzgen. Publ.: Charles Kerr & Co., Chicago 1917)

(Translated by Ernest Untermann.)

(Scanned, proof-read and slightly improved translation by Richard O. Hamill and Svein O. G. Nyberg, Edinburgh 1998)

For further reference see:

PROLETARIAN PHILOSOPHY

Bricianer, Serge. Pannekoek and the Workers' Councils, intro. by John Gerber, trans. by Malachy Carroll. St. Louis, MO: Telos Press, 1978.

Burns, Tony. "Joseph Dietzgen and the History of Marxism", Science & Society, vol. 66, no. 2, Summer 2002, pp. 202-227.

Dietzgen, Joseph. Philosophical Essays. Translated by M. Beer and Th. Rothstein; with biographical sketch and introduction by Eugene Dietzgen, translated by Ernest Untermann; edited by Eugene Dietzgen and Joseph Dietzgen, Jr. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr & Company, 1917.

Dietzgen, Joseph. The Positive Outcome of Philosophy. Introduction by Dr. Anton Pannekoek; translated by Ernest Untermann; edited by Eugene Dietzgen and Joseph Dietzgen, Jr. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr & Company, 1906.

Easton, Loyd D. "Empiricism and Ethics in Dietzgen," Journal of the History of Ideas, vol. 19, no. 1, Jan. 1958, pp. 77-90.

Macintyre, Stuart. A Proletarian Science: Marxism in Britain 1917-1933. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980.

Mehring, Franz. "Philosophy and Philosophizing" (1909), trans. Rubin Gotesky, Marxist Quarterly, April-June 1937, pp.293-297.

Nizan, Paul; Fittingoff, Paul, trans. The Watchdogs: Philosophers and the Established Order. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972.

Rée, Jonathan. Proletarian Philosophers: Problems in Socialist Culture in Britain, 1900-1940. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984.

.

Joseph Dietzgen, a companion of Marx and Engels, once said that an old man who looks back on his life may see it as an endless series of mistakes which, if he could only have his time back again, he would doubtless choose to eliminate. But then he is left with the dialectical contradiction that it was only by means of these mistakes that he arrived at the wisdom to be able to judge them to be such. As Hegel profoundly observed, the self-same maxims on the lips of a youth do not carry the same weight as when spoken by a man whose life’s experience has filled them with meaning and content. They are the same and yet not the same. What was initially an abstract thought, with little or no real content, now becomes the product of mature reflection.

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