Engels on nature and humanity

April 4, 2020 

Written by Michael Roberts 

Published in Engels 200

Marx-Engels Forum. Photo: Flickr/fhwrdh

In the third of our series on the revolutionary Frederick Engels, on the 200th anniversary of his birth, we repost this excerpt from an upcoming short book on Engels' contribution to Marxian political economy by Michael Roberts

Marx and Engels are often accused of what has been called a Promethean vision of human social organisation, namely that human beings, using their superior brains, knowledge and technical prowess, can and should impose their will on the rest of the planet or what is called ‘nature’ – for better or worse.

The charge is that other living species are merely playthings for the use of human beings. There are humans and there is nature – in contradiction. This charge is particularly aimed at Friedrich Engels, who it is claimed, took a bourgeois ‘positivist’ view of science: scientific knowledge was always progressive and neutral in ideology; and so was the relationship between man and nature.

This charge against Marx and Engels was promoted in the post-war period by the so-called Frankfurt School of Marxism, which reckoned that everything went wrong with Marxism after 1844, when Marx and Engels supposedly dumped “humanism”. Later, followers of the French Marxist Althusser put the blame on Fred himself. For them, everything went to hell in a hand basket a little later, when Engels dumped ‘historical materialism’ and replaced it with ‘dialectical materialism’, in order to promote Engels’ ‘silly belief’ that Marxism and the physical sciences had some relationship.

Indeed, the ‘green’ critique of Marx and Engels is that they were unaware that homo sapiens were destroying the planet and thus themselves. Instead, Marx and Engels had a touching Promethean faith in capitalism’s ability to develop the productive forces and technology to overcome any risks to the planet and nature.

That Marx and Engels paid no attention to the impact on nature of human social activity has been debunked recently in particular by the ground-breaking work of Marxist authors like John Bellamy Foster and Paul Burkett. They have reminded us that throughout Marx’s Capital, Marx was very aware of capitalism’s degrading impact on nature and the resources of the planet. Marx wrote that,

“the capitalist mode of production collects the population together in great centres and causes the urban population to achieve an ever-growing preponderance…. [It] disturbs the metabolic interaction between man and the earth, i.e., it prevents the return to the soil of its constituent elements consumed by man in the form of food and clothing; hence it hinders the operation of the eternal natural condition for the lasting fertility of the soil. Thus it destroys at the same time the physical health of the urban worker, and the intellectual life of the rural worker.”

As Paul Burkett says:

“it is difficult to argue that there is something fundamentally anti-ecological about Marx’s analysis of capitalism and his projections of communism.”

To back this up, Kohei Saito’s prize-winning book has drawn on Marx’s previously unpublished ‘excerpt’ notebooks from the ongoing MEGA research project to reveal Marx’s extensive study of scientific works of the time on agriculture, soil, forestry, to expand his concept of the connection between capitalism and its destruction of natural resources. (I have a review pending on Saito’s book).

But Engels too must be saved from the same charge. Actually, Engels was well ahead of Marx (yet again) in connecting the destruction and damage to the environment that industrialisation was causing. While still living in his home town of Barmen (now Wuppertal), he wrote several diary notes about the inequality of rich and poor, the pious hypocrisy of the church preachers and also the pollution of the rivers.

Just 18 years old, he writes:

“the two towns of Elberfeld and Barmen, which stretch along the valley for a distance of nearly three hours’ travel. The purple waves of the narrow river flow sometimes swiftly, sometimes sluggishly between smoky factory buildings and yarn-strewn bleaching-yards. Its bright red colour, however, is due not to some bloody battle, for the fighting here is waged only by theological pens and garrulous old women, usually over trifles, nor to shame for men’s actions, although there is indeed enough cause for that, but simply and solely to the numerous dye-works using Turkey red. Coming from Düsseldorf, one enters the sacred region at Sonnborn; the muddy Wupper flows slowly by and, compared with the Rhine just left behind, its miserable appearance is very disappointing.”Barmen, 1913. Photo: Public Domain

He goes on:

“First and foremost, factory work is largely responsible. Work in low rooms where people breathe more coal fumes and dust than oxygen — and in the majority of cases beginning already at the age of six — is bound to deprive them of all strength and joy in life." 

He connected the social degradation of working families with the degradation of nature alongside the hypocritical piety of the manufacturers.

“Terrible poverty prevails among the lower classes, particularly the factory workers in Wuppertal; syphilis and lung diseases are so widespread as to be barely credible; in Elberfeld alone, out of 2,500 children of school age 1,200 are deprived of education and grow up in the factories — merely so that the manufacturer need not pay the adults, whose place they take, twice the wage he pays a child. But the wealthy manufacturers have a flexible conscience and causing the death of one child more or one less does not doom a pietist’s soul to hell, especially if he goes to church twice every Sunday. For it is a fact that the pietists among the factory owners treat their workers worst of all; they use every possible means to reduce the workers’ wages on the pretext of depriving them of the opportunity to get drunk, yet at the election of preachers they are always the first to bribe their people.”

Sure, these observations by Engels are just that, observations, without any theoretical development, but they show the sensitivity that Engels already had to the relationship between industrialisation, the owners and the workers, their poverty and the environmental impact of factory production.

In his first major work, Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy, again well before Marx looked at political economy, Engels notes how the private ownership of the land, the drive for profit and the degradation of nature go hand in hand.

“To make earth an object of huckstering — the earth which is our one and all, the first condition of our existence — was the last step towards making oneself an object of huckstering. It was and is to this very day an immorality surpassed only by the immorality of self-alienation. And the original appropriation — the monopolization of the earth by a few, the exclusion of the rest from that which is the condition of their life — yields nothing in immorality to the subsequent huckstering of the earth.”

Once the earth becomes commodified by capital, it is subject to just as much exploitation as labour.Dialectics of Nature, Friedrich Engels

Engels’ major work (written with Marx’s help), The Dialectics of Nature, written in the years up to 1883, just after Marx’s death, is often subject to attack as extending Marx’s materialist conception of history as applied to humans, into nature in a non-Marxist way. And yet, in his book, Engels could not be clearer on the dialectical relation between humans and nature.

In a famous chapter “The Role of Work in Transforming Ape into Man.”, he writes:

“Let us not, however, flatter ourselves overmuch on account of our human conquest over nature. For each such conquest takes its revenge on us. Each of them, it is true, has in the first place the consequences on which we counted, but in the second and third places it has quite different, unforeseen effects which only too often cancel out the first. The people who, in Mesopotamia, Greece, Asia Minor, and elsewhere, destroyed the forests to obtain cultivable land, never dreamed that they were laying the basis for the present devastated condition of these countries, by removing along with the forests the collecting centres and reservoirs of moisture. When, on the southern slopes of the mountains, the Italians of the Alps used up the pine forests so carefully cherished on the northern slopes, they had no inkling that by doing so they were … thereby depriving their mountain springs of water for the greater part of the year, with the effect that these would be able to pour still more furious flood torrents on the plains during the rainy seasons. Those who spread the potato in Europe were not aware that they were at the same time spreading the disease of scrofula. Thus at every step we are reminded that we by no means rule over nature like a conqueror over a foreign people, like someone standing outside nature — but that we, with flesh, blood, and brain, belong to nature, and exist in its midst, and that all our mastery of it consists in the fact that we have the advantage over all other beings of being able to know and correctly apply its laws.” (my emphasis)

Engels goes on: 

"in fact, with every day that passes we are learning to understand these laws more correctly and getting to know both the more immediate and the more remote consequences of our interference with the traditional course of nature. … But the more this happens, the more will men not only feel, but also know, their unity with nature, and thus the more impossible will become the senseless and antinatural idea of a contradiction between mind and matter, man and nature, soul and body. …”

Engels explains the social consequences of the drive to expand the productive forces.

“But if it has already required the labour of thousands of years for us to learn to some extent to calculate the more remote natural consequences of our actions aiming at production, it has been still more difficult in regard to the more remote social consequences of these actions. … When afterwards Columbus discovered America, he did not know that by doing so he was giving new life to slavery, which in Europe had long ago been done away with, and laying the basis for the Negro slave traffic. …”

Arawaks fighting the Spanish, Trinidad and Tobago. Photo: Creative Commons

The people of the Americas were driven into slavery, but also nature was enslaved. As Engels put it:

“What cared the Spanish planters in Cuba, who burned down forests on the slopes of the mountains and obtained from the ashes sufficient fertilizer for one generation of very highly profitable coffee trees–what cared they that the heavy tropical rainfall afterwards washed away the unprotected upper stratum of the soil, leaving behind only bare rock!”

The Mill yard, Antigua 1823. Photo: Creative Commons

Now we know that it was not just slavery that the Europeans brought to the Americas, but also disease, which in its many forms exterminated 90% of native Americans and was the main reason for their subjugation by colonialism.

Aztec smallpox victims. Photo: Creative Commons

As we experience yet another pandemic, we know that it was capitalism’s drive to industrialise agriculture and usurp the remaining wilderness that has led to nature ‘striking back’, as humans come into contact with more pathogens to which they have no immunity, just as the native Americans in the 16th century.

Engels attacked the view that ‘human nature’ is inherently selfish and will just destroy nature. In his Outline, Engels described that argument as a “repulsive blasphemy against man and nature.” Humans can work in harmony with and as part of nature. It requires greater knowledge of the consequences of human action. Engels said in his Dialectics:

“But even in this sphere, by long and often cruel experience and by collecting and analyzing the historical material, we are gradually learning to get a clear view of the indirect, more remote, social effects of our productive activity, and so the possibility is afforded us of mastering and controlling these effects as well.”

But better knowledge and scientific progress is not enough. For Marx and Engels, the possibility of ending the dialectical contradiction between man and nature and bringing about some level of harmony and ecological balance would only be possible with the abolition of the capitalist mode of production. As Engels said: “To carry out this control requires something more than mere knowledge.” Science is not enough. “It requires a complete revolution in our hitherto existing mode of production, and with it of our whole contemporary social order.” The ‘positivist’ Engels, it seems, supported Marx’s materialist conception of history after all.

From Michael Roberts blog

Engels' Marxism

In the second of our series on the revolutionary Frederick Engels, 

on the 200th anniversary of his birth, we are republishing this piece 

by John Rees which first appeared in the International Socialism Journal in 1994

March 20, 2020 

Written by John Rees 

Category: Engels 200

Frederick Engels: life of a revolutionary

In the first of our series on the revolutionary Frederick Engels, 

on the 200th anniversary of his birth, we are republishing this

 piece by Lindsey German which first appeared in the 

International Socialism Journal in 1994

February 21, 2020 

Written by Lindsey German 

Category: Engels 200

FIFTY YEARS AGO 

MARX AND ENGELS AND THE ‘COLLAPSE’ OF CAPITALISM

In 1786, three years before the outbreak of the French Revolution, Gracchus Babeuf wrote:

“The majority is always on the side of routine and immobility, so much is it unenlightened, encrusted, apathetic . . . Those who do not want to move forward are the enemies of those who do, and unhappily it is the mass which persists stubbornly in never budging at all.”

The events of 1789 disproved his gloomy predictions but, by the time Babeuf became prominent, the reaction was already setting in. His slogan of “The revolution is not finished, because the rich absorb ail wealth and rule exclusively, while the poor work like veritable slaves, languishing in poverty and counting for nothing in the State” was not taken up by the peasants and artisans. Faced with this, Babeuf and his followers planned an insurrection in which they would seize power, constitute themselves as the ‘Insurrectionary Committee of Public Safety’, crush all opposition and — only then — introduce democracy. It was this method of conspiracy and coup d’etat which became the standard technique for 19th-century insurrectionaries such as Blanqui and which formed the inspiration for their innumerable secret societies and abortive rebellions.

From the start, Marx and Engels were scathing about this concept of revolution. For them it was self-evident that “the emancipation of the working class must be the act of the working class itself” and that, in any case, “revolutions are not made intentionally and arbitrarily” as the plotters imagined.

“It goes without saying that these conspirators by no means confine themselves to organising the revolutionary proletariat. Their business consists in forestalling the process of revolutionary development, spurring it in to artificial crises, making revolutions extempore without the conditions for revolution. For them the only condition required for the revolution is a sufficient organisation of their own conspiracy. They are the alchemists of the revolution.”

Yet, however devastating the attack which Marx might make on the Blanquists and others, in one aspect he and Engels were in a very weak position. If they maintained that it was the entire working class which would be responsible for establishing socialism, how would they square this with the obvious fact that the mass of workers still gave every sign of being as “unenlightened, encrusted, apathetic” as they had been in Babeuf’s time? To counter this, Marx and Engels fell back on the theory that it was the crisis in capitalist production which would galvanise the masses into revolutionary activity.

Even in their earliest writings both Marx and Engels attached great importance to crises: but over the years their observations caused them to modify their ideas, especially in relation to the business cycle. In his Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy (Deutsche-Franzosische Jahrbucher. 1844) Engels mentioned that slumps occur every five to seven years, “just as regularly as the great plagues did in the past”. He repeated this in Principles of Communism (1847) while, in theCondition of the Working Class in England in 1844 (1845), there are references to five-year and five to six-year cycles. Marx held similar views during this period. for in an Address on Free Trade delivered in Brussels in 1848 he drew attention to “the average period of from six to seven years — a period of time during which modern industry passes through the various phases of prosperity, overproduction, stagnation, crisis and completes its inevitable cycle”. At the same time they both expected crises to become “more frequent and more violent” Wage Labour and Capital. Marx. 1847) and “more serious and more universal” (Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy, Engels. 1844).

‘Ten-year cycle’

By the time Marx came to publish Capital (Volume I. 1867) he was writing that “the course characteristic of modern industry” was “a decennial cycle (interrupted by smaller oscillations” — and adding that as accumulation advanced the “irregular oscillations” would follow each other more and more quickly. This perspective was echoed by Engels in most of his writings in the 1870s and early 80s as well. (See Dialectics of Nature. Anti-Dühring (1878), articles in the Labour Standard (1881), for example). Although Engels continued to put this line for some time after Marx’s death – see his letter to Kautsky, November 8 1884 – there was a new development during his last ten years in that more and more he came to maintain that an era of chronic stagnation had overwhelmed capitalism. As early as January 1884 in a letter to Bebel (January 18 1884), he wrote that “the ten-year cycle seems to have broken down” and, that same year, he made a similar point — although more hesitantly — in his Preface to Marx’s Poverty of Philosophy:

“The period of general prosperity preceding the crisis still fails to appear. If it should fail altogether, then chronic stagnation would necessarily become the normal condition of modern industry, with only insignificant fluctuations.”

From then until his death in 1895 his writings were full of references to “permanent and chronic depression” (Preface to the English edition of Capital, Volume I. 1886), to the “chronic state of stagnation in all dominant branches of industry” (Preface to the English edition of The Condition of the Working Class in England. 1892) and to “chronic overproduction, depressed prices, falling or disappearing profits” (Capital, Volume III, 1894).

Parallel to this development of their ideas on the business cycle, Marx’s and Engels’ theories on the relationship between crises and revolution also went through a number of phases. As we have seen, in their early writings both held that the crises in capitalist production would become “more frequent and more violent”. But, if this is seen as an absolute tendency, it must mean that eventually capitalism will be brought to a point where it can no longer recover. At any rate, this was certainly Engels’ interpretation of the trends taking place in the 1840s and he repeatedly implied that crises would produce a revolution independently of the level of socialist consciousness reached by the working class:

“Every new crisis must be more serious and more universal than the last. Every fresh slump must ruin more small capitalists and increase the workers who live only by their labour. This will increase the number of the unemployed and this is the main problem that worries economists. In the end commercial crises will lead to a social revolution far beyond the comprehension of the economists with their scholastic wisdom.” (Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy, 1844.)

“The revolution must come; it is already too late to bring about a peaceful solution: but it can be made more gentle than that prophesied in the foregoing pages. This depends, however, more upon the development of the proletariat than upon that of the bourgeoisie. In proportion, as the proletariat absorbs socialistic and communistic elements, will the revolution diminish in bloodshed, revenge, and savagery.” (Condition of the Working Class in England, 1845).

Thus, although the extent to which socialist ideas had penetrated the working class might be important in influencing the revolution which Engels thought he saw emerging in England, that was the limit of their role. In both these works, it is the increase in misery of the workers which Engels stresses as the vital factor in the development of their revolutionary activity — rather than their growing understanding of socialism as an alternative method of organising society to capitalism. This contrasts sharply with some of Marx’s writings of the same period, where he puts all his emphasis on the spread of socialist concepts among the working class:

“It is true that, in its economic development, private property advances towards its own dissolution; but it only does this through a development which is independent of itself, unconscious and achieved against its will — solely because it produces the proletariat as proletariat, poverty conscious of its moral and physical poverty, degradation conscious of its degradation, and for this reason trying to abolish itself.” (Holy Family, 1845.)

In fact, socialist consciousness was considered of such vital importance by Marx that he grossly exaggerated its depth and extent

“There is no need to dwell here upon the fact that a large part of the English and French proletariat is already conscious of its historical task and is constantly working to develop that consciousness into complete clarity.” [In 1845!]

The upheavals in France, Germany, and elsewhere in Europe in 1848, however, had a profound influence on Marx, and for a time at any rate his enthusiasm got the better of him and he was evidently prepared to suspend his former commitment to socialist consciousness. His writings of this period suggest that it is the commercial crisis and the resulting hardship of the workers which are the critical factors in inducing the working class to turn to revolution. The articles he wrote for the Neue Rheinische Zeitung in 1850 all revolve around the axiom that “crises produce revolution”, and since the revolutionary tide had by then ebbed away, that “a new revolution is only possible as a result of a new crisis”. Naturally, Engels’ earlier ideas readily accommodated themselves to this new development in Marx’s thought and together they wrote:

“With this general prosperity, in which the productive forces of bourgeois society develop as luxuriantly as is at all possible within bourgeois relationships, there can be no talk of a real revolution. Such a revolution is only possible in periods when both these factors, the modern productive forces and the bourgeois productive forms, come in collision with each other.”

This was the line they were to take throughout the 1850s. Living in exile in London and Manchester, they anxiously searched for any signs of the next crisis — and oscillated between wild optimism and more justified impatience in time with the fluctuations in world trade. In September 1852 Engels is writing to Marx that “with the temporary prosperity … the workers (in France) seem to have become completely bourgeois after all. It will take a severe chastisement by crises if they are to become good for anything again soon.” By April 1853, however: “Europe is admirably prepared; it needs only the spark of a crisis”. (Engels to Weydemeyer). When the required spark didn’t materialise he became more cautious but in 1857, when a crisis really did develop, they were both certain that “now our time is coming”. As early as September 1856, Marx had recognised the symptoms of the approaching disruption in industry and had written to Engels: “This time, moreover, the thing is on a European scale never reached before and I do not think we shall be able to sit here as spectators much longer”. The following year, in the midst of the crisis, he is “working like mad all through the nights at putting my economic studies together so that I may at least have the outlines clear before the deluge comes.” (Letter to Engels, December 8, 1857). Meanwhile Engels was maintaining that a really chronic crisis would be needed to stir the workers into revolution since “the masses must have got damned lethargic after such long prosperity” (Engels to Marx, November 15, 1857). When trade started to pick up again at the end of December 1857 both of them were sadly disappointed and, a year later, we find Engels returning to a familiar theme: “The English proletariat is ‘becoming more and more bourgeois”.

The crisis of 1857 and its failure to evoke a revolutionary response from the working class had a big impact on Marx. So when he came to publish Capital (Volume I, 1867), although he outlined the cycle of modern industry as “a series of periods of moderate activity, prosperity, overproduction, crisis and stagnation”, there were no references to revolution automatically arising from this sequence. But if Marx seems to have largely shaken himself free of his former romantic notions, they remained well in evidence in Engel’s writings. Anti-Dühring (1878) in particular was as outspoken in its commitment to the idea that capitalism would ‘collapse’ as any of his earlier works had been.

“… this mode of production (capitalism), by virtue of its own development, drives towards the point at which it makes itself impossible.”

Anticipating Rosa Luxemburg, Engels wrote that “if the whole of modern society is not to perish, a revolution in the mode of production and distribution must take place” and that the working class would be “forced to accomplish this revolution”, “under penalty of its own destruction”. Crises, then, were still seen as “means of compelling the social revolution”.

Until the early 1880s Engels’s ideas on crises and revolution hardly showed any advance on those he had held 30 years before. This is made clear enough by a letter he wrote to Bernstein in January 1882.

“That crises are one of the most powerful levels of revolutionary upheaval was already stated in The Communist Manifesto and was treated in detail up to 1848 inclusive in the review in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, where, however, it was shown too that returning prosperity also breaks revolutions and lays the basis for the victory of reaction.”

But after Marx’s death in 1883, with Engels deciding that capitalism might well be entering a phase of chronic stagnation with correspondingly less chance of acute crises occurring, his emphasis naturally shifted from the earlier concept of a crisis-provoked revolution to the view that the capitalist system would be driven into an economic impasse. Thus in his preface to the first German edition of Marx’s Poverty of Philosophy (1884) he refers to “the inevitable collapse of the capitalist mode of production which is daily taking place before our eyes to an ever greater degree”. Four years later, in his introduction to Marx’s Address on Free Trade, he writes that society will be “brought to a deadlock, out of which there is no escaping but by a complete remodelling of the economic structure which forms its basis”.

Engels’s correspondence during his last ten years is also an interesting record of his tendency to imagine that capitalism would ‘collapse’. In a letter to J. P. Becker in June 1885 he assessed the political currents at work in England and concluded that “the masses will turn socialist here too. Industrial over-production will do the rest”. As late as 1893, in a letter to Danielson (February 24, 1893), he is still convinced that there are “economic consequences of the capitalist system which must bring it up to the critical point”, that “the crisis must come”.

Yet although at times during this final period of his life, Engels was to foreshadow the determinism of the leaders of the Second International on this question, at others he came near to the position of the Socialist Party of Great Britain and its companion parties. As we have shown, as long as Marx was alive, it was he rather than Engels who emphasised the need for socialist consciousness as a precondition for the overthrowing of capitalism by the working class. But with Marx dead, Engels seems to have become aware of the need to stress this himself. Although he could not free himself entirely from the ideas which had dominated his thinking on revolution for over 40 years, yet he could also write that:

“… the old bourgeois society might still vegetate on for a while, so long as a shove from outside does not bring the whole ramshackle old building crashing down. A rotten old casing like this can survive its inner essential death for a few decades, if the atmosphere is undisturbed. So I should be very cautious about prophesying such a thing” (the collapse of bourgeois society). (Letter to Bebel, October 24, 1891).

When this is coupled with other statements he was to make, to the effect that “where it is a question of a complete transformation of the social organisation, the masses themselves must also be in it, must themselves have grasped what is at stake, what they are going in for with body and soul” (Introduction to Marx’s Class Struggles in France, 1895), one gets an entirely different slant from that conveyed in some of his other writings.

This study of the attitude of Marx and Engels towards crises and the concept of capitalism ‘collapsing’ shows, then, the extent to which they were influenced by the various phases which capitalism passed through in 19th-century Europe. If we have outlined some of the mistaken attitudes they adopted this is not to detract from the immense contributions they made to socialist thought. What it does mean, however, is that it was left to other socialists to produce a more penetrating analysis of the role of crises in capitalist production. What was most useful in their work on this topic was later summed up in the pamphlet Why Capitalism Will Not Collapse which the Socialist Party published in 1932:

“Until a sufficient number of workers are prepared to organise politically for the conscious purpose of ending capitalism, that system will stagger on indefinitely from one crisis to another.”

 SOCIALIST STANDARD no-776-april-1969

 

A Companion Party of The World Socialist Movement – Advocating socialism and nothing but since 1904

Marx and the Communist Enlightenment

Post on: August 2, 2020
Doug Enaa Greene
Harrison Fluss


Marxism is the completion of the Radical Enlightenment project.



Part I | II | III | IV | V | VI

Marx and Engels were the philosophes of a second Enlightenment.
— Louis Menand
Enlightenment and the Young Marx

For Jonathan Israel, Marx’s status as a Radical Enlightenment figure ended prematurely in 1844. According to this interpretation, Marx was a Spinozistic liberal until he discovered the proletariat and converted to communism.1 But this sharp break that Israel assumes in Marx’s thinking did not occur. Israel provides only a cursory treatment of Marx’s writings after 1844 and never shows how Marx broke with the Enlightenment. This stark division between Enlightenment ideas and communism is arguably the worst part of his latest book, The Enlightenment That Failed. Israel implies that if only Marx had not collaborated with the bad Engels, but had stuck with the liberal Young Hegelians, he would have been saved from the economic “determinism” and “authoritarianism” that marred his later political career. Israel’s case for a counter-Enlightenment Marx ignores how earlier “Spinozistic” concerns and themes were integrated into his theory of communist revolution. Neither the “young Marx” nor the “old Marx” renounced humanism, naturalism, and the progressive ideas of Radical Enlightenment.

Israel mentions Marx’s father, Heinrich, in passing, but he neglects an entire backdrop of Marx’s Enlightenment-influenced childhood. This refers to the impact of Baron Ludwig von Westphalen, the privy councillor of Marx’s hometown of Trier and his future father-in-law. It is true that Heinrich Marx was a fan of Voltaire and Rousseau, but he was a fairly moderate liberal; it was in fact Ludwig who introduced the more radical aspects of the French Revolution to Marx, such as the utopian socialism of Henri de Saint-Simon. One other influence Israel ignores is that of Ludwig’s daughter and Marx’s future bride, Jenny von Westphalen. Four years his senior, and sometimes scandalously wearing a French tricolor in her hair, the young Jenny was key to Marx’s political development.2

As Israel notes, in order to practice law, Heinrich was forced to convert from Judaism to Lutheranism. Seven years after the defeat of the Grande Armée, Frederick William III revoked the civil emancipation of Jews that Napoleon had established in Trier. The emancipation of Jewish people was a conquest of the French Revolution, championed by Robespierre and Napoleon alike, and won the admiration of liberal elements in Germany. The revocation of Jewish emancipation affected not only the Marxes but also future associates of Karl such as the Hegelian law professor Eduard Gans and the poet Heinrich Heine. Heinrich Marx, Gans, and Heine were all pressured to civilly renounce Judaism.

After his conversion, Heinrich Marx continued to admire the French Enlightenment, and as a fellow liberal, he befriended Ludwig von Westphalen.3 Together, they were members of the Trier Casino Club, a club of bourgeois professionals with a liberal or left-wing bent. On one particular Bastille Day, the members spontaneously sang “La Marseillaise” in celebration. Little did they know that there was a Prussian spy in their midst, and once word reached the king about this rousing rendition of the subversive anthem, the club was unceremoniously shut down.

Soon after Karl began studying at university, he immersed himself in Hegelian philosophy. Heinrich feared the increasing radicalization of his son and believed that Karl’s path into philosophy would do him little good for his professional career. Once Marx told his father that he discovered Hegel in 1837, Heinrich all but despaired for his son’s prospects. Marx, however, ignored his father and delved deeper into the exciting world of Young Hegelianism.4

The two most important professors whom Marx had at the universities of Berlin and Bonn were Eduard Gans and Bruno Bauer. Gans was one of Hegel’s students, but after the July Revolution of 1830, Gans took Hegelianism in a republican and socialistic direction. Bauer was also a disciple of Hegel’s, and originally belonged to the Hegelian right; he favored orthodox Lutheranism and monarchism. But later, he transformed into a radical republican and a staunch critic of the Bible. Arnold Ruge christened Bauer the “Robespierre” of theology.5 From these teachers, Marx absorbed Hegelian philosophy and democratic republicanism.
Enlightenment and the Young Engels

Growing up in different circumstances, the young Friedrich Engels was raised by strict conservative Pietists. The wealthy Engels family was based in Wuppertal, and his father, Friedrich Sr., owned textile factories as part of the firm Ermen & Engels. Young Friedrich gradually shook off the traditional religious beliefs of his parents and converted to atheistic Hegelianism after reading David Strauss’s The Life of Jesus (1835–36). Strauss was one of the first left Hegelians, combining Hegel’s philosophy with Enlightenment rationalism. He argued that the Gospels were not literal histories but mythopoetic illustrations of the human condition. Jesus was not the son of God but a poetic representation of humanity’s own infinite worth.6

After beginning military service in Berlin, Engels joined forces with the Young Hegelians. He frequented the Hippel café, where Bauer and others would drink and converse. Engels liked to draw funny caricatures of their rowdy philosophical debates,7 and he even wrote a bombastic epic poem about Young Hegelianism, entitled “The Insolently Threatened yet Miraculously Rescued Bible.” There, Engels portrays the Young Hegelians as more dangerous than the Jacobin Club and refers to himself by his new Jacobin alias, Oswald:


Right on the very left, that tall and long-legged stepper
Is Oswald [Engels], coat of grey and trousers shade of pepper;
Pepper inside as well, Oswald the Montagnard;
A radical is he, dyed in the wool, and hard.
Day in, day out, he plays upon the guillotine a
Single solitary tune and that’s a cavatina,
The same old devil-song; he bellows the refrain:
Formez vos bataillons! Aux armes, citoyens!
[Form your battalions! To arms, citizens! — from the Marseillaise]8

Marx knew Engels in 1842 but did not think much of him at the time. Two years later, however, when they reencountered each other in Paris, they recognized that they shared the same fundamental worldview and thus began a lifelong friendship and collaboration as communists. Engels was the first to accept communism through the work of Moses Hess. From his experiences with the Parisian working class and after reading Engels’s Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy (1843), Marx embraced communism in turn. In another essay written in the same year, Engels deduces socialism as the logical result of British economics, the French Revolution, and German philosophy:


The English came to the [socialist] conclusion practically, by the rapid increase of misery, demoralisation, and pauperism in their own country: the French politically, by first asking for political liberty and equality; and, finding this insufficient, joining social liberty, and social equality to their political claims: the Germans became Communists philosophically, by reasoning upon first principles. This being the origin of Socialism in the three countries.9

Marx repeats this European trinity of British economics, French politics, and German philosophy in his writings from 1844: “It must be granted that the German proletariat is the theoretician of the European proletariat just as the English proletariat is its economist and the French its politician.”10 With this new communist worldview, Marx and Engels attempted to settle their philosophical debts with the Young Hegelians. In doing so, they took up the philosophy of Ludwig Feuerbach, which combined materialism, empiricism, and humanism.
The Holy Family

Making their Feuerbachian debut together in The Holy Family (1845), Marx and Engels saw Feuerbach’s materialism as repeating the Enlightenment’s battle against metaphysical abstractions. As Hegel put it in The Phenomenology, Enlightenment liberated itself from any metaphysical rationalism, emphasizing what’s finite and concrete over what’s theological and abstract. In The Holy Family, Marx and Engels saw Hegel himself as the German repetition of 17th-century rationalism (e.g., Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Malebranche), while Feuerbach represented the return to the Enlightenment of Holbach, Helvétius, and Bentham. According to Marx and Engels, Feuerbach had finally exorcised the ghost of metaphysics once and for all, and now all philosophy had to go through the “fire bath” of Feuerbach. As Marx put it once earlier, “There is no other road for you to truth and freedom except that leading through the brook of fire (the Feuerbach). Feuerbach is the purgatory of the present times.”11

But even in their criticism of Spinoza as a rationalist metaphysician, Marx and Engels maintained a materialist basis. In The Holy Family, they affirm a materialist monism, that “body, being, substance, are but different terms for the same [material] reality. It is impossible to separate thought from matter that thinks. This matter is the substratum of all changes going on in the world.”12 But, in contrast to Bauer and to Israel, Marx and Engels in The Holy Family trace the impact of John Locke’s empiricism on French materialism. It is true, as Israel has pointed out, that Spinozism was an important philosophical component of the Radical Enlightenment; nevertheless, Lockean epistemology had radical implications for philosophers on the Continent as well.13

The Holy Family criticizes the elitism of the Young Hegelians, where Bauer merely echoes the unhistorical conception of human progress that pits a disembodied reason against the spirit of reaction. For Marx, progress advances from social contradictions, and the masses themselves are the bearers of this progress. The masses are the most important factor in Enlightenment, and this process of Enlightenment is inseparable from class struggle.14 The question of the masses is central to Marx and Engels’ critique of Bauer. Bauer saw philosophical criticism as a task directed against the ignorant masses; for him, the lofty fight for self-consciousness and liberty was antagonistic to the crude material interests of the crowd. As one reviewer of The Holy Family wrote, satirizing Bauer’s own elitism, “To get rid of the French Revolution, communism, and Feuerbach, he [Bruno Bauer] shrieks “masses, masses, masses!,” and again: “masses, masses, masses!”15

For Marx and Engels, the two main sources of French materialism were Lockean epistemology and Cartesian natural science. “The two trends intersect in the course of development,” giving birth to the more refined and sophisticated materialism of Holbach and Helvétius. This materialism, however, contains a dialectic within itself, one that points beyond bourgeois society. From the philosophical claims of materialism, the authors deduce the political conclusion of communism. It is worth quoting The Holy Family at length here, since Israel argues that Marx stopped his association with Radical Enlightenment in 1844. But in 1845, Marx and Engels assert the contrary:


French materialism leads directly to socialism and communism. There is no need for any great penetration to see from the teaching of materialism on the original goodness and equal intellectual endowment of men, the omnipotence of experience, habit and education, and the influence of environment on man, the great significance of industry, the justification of enjoyment, etc., how necessarily materialism is connected with communism and socialism. If man draws all his knowledge, sensation, etc., from the world of the senses and the experience gained in it, then what has to be done is to arrange the empirical world in such a way that man experiences and becomes accustomed to what is truly human in it and that he becomes aware of himself as man. If correctly understood interest is the principle of all morality, man’s private interest must be made to coincide with the interest of humanity.16

Here, Marx and Engels take up key Enlightenment tenets, including the essential goodness of human nature (i.e., the rejection of original sin); the importance of education and environment; the “great significance” of industry; and hedonistic ethics, or what they call “the justification of enjoyment.” These are the principles that any socialism must defend for it to make philosophical sense. Again, Israel’s stark demarcation between Enlightenment and Marx’s communism is belied by such passages.

Without the backbone of these Radical Enlightenment premises, the struggle for social equality would be meaningless. Marx and Engels affirm equality as,


man’s consciousness of himself in the element of practice, i.e., therefore, man’s consciousness of other men as his equals and man’s relation to other men as his equals. Equality is the French expression for the unity of human essence, for man’s consciousness of his species and his attitude toward his species, for the practical identity of man with man, i.e., for the social or human relation of man to man.17

In other words, equality is the social expression of our common human identity. It serves as the basis for criticizing the dehumanizing economic relations that pit human beings against each other.
The German Ideology

In The German Ideology (1845-6), written shortly after The Holy Family, Marx and Engels criticize Feuerbach for being insufficiently materialist, since he, like the French materialists before him, was an idealist when it came to history. In this domain, Feuerbach still privileges ideas over material reality. The German Ideology is where the authors first clearly articulate the materialistic conception of history, which is marked by a series of different modes of production. The products of consciousness such as law, religion, and philosophy are all conditioned by material circumstances. Such a theory of history in particular explains how French materialism is a necessary outgrowth of the bourgeoisie’s struggles against feudalism.18

The German Ideology acknowledges what Hegel had already discovered in The Phenomenology: that the spirit of Enlightenment came about through emerging bourgeois conditions. The truth of Enlightenment was “utility,” and utilitarianism was the philosophy of the radical French bourgeoisie. Before the consolidation of capitalism, philosophers like Holbach and Helvétius did not carefully distinguish human flourishing from economic competition and exploitation. Bourgeois reality was assumed to be the natural order of things. According to Marx, this idealized conception was a necessary and justified illusion, without which there would be no ideological motivation for the bourgeois revolution. But there is a darker side to bourgeois Enlightenment, of what Hegel called “the spiritual animal kingdom.” Beneath the idealistic image of human flourishing lurked the dehumanized relations of commodity exchange.

In The Holy Family, Marx and Engels extracted the communist kernel from the shell of bourgeois Enlightenment, meaning a transition from Helvétius and Holbach to the utopian socialism of Gracchus Babeuf and Charles Fourier. Here, in The German Ideology, the authors focus on the illusion of bourgeois Enlightenment, which could not fulfill the promise of human flourishing. While Helvétius and Holbach represent the bourgeoisie in its heroic and more universal phase, Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill represent the philosophical conscience of a cynical bourgeoisie that has resigned itself to the reality of exploitation. For the latter, human flourishing is fully identified with market relations.
The Communist Manifesto

Nonetheless, as jaded as bourgeois Enlightenment can be, there is something refreshing about its rejection of feudalism. Repeating what Hegel argued in The Phenomenology, Marx and Engels see bourgeois reality as achieving a relative kind of Enlightenment. As Marx and Engels put it famously in The Communist Manifesto (1848): “All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.”19 The enlightened bourgeoisie “has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation.”20 This description of feudal culture’s demise was strongly foreshadowed in the pages of Hegel’s Phenomenology and its discussion of Rameau’s Nephew.21

In the Manifesto, Marx and Engels not only praise the bourgeoisie for uniting the world economy; they also acknowledge the democratic “representative state” as its most important political achievement. Not just the (partial) liberation of the productive forces, but liberal ideas like freedom of conscience, equality before the law, and freedom of the press are legitimate gains for humanity. Political equality, however, is insufficient without economic equality. The bourgeoisie achieved Enlightenment only halfway since it clings to a superstitious belief in private property. Thus the bourgeoisie cannot complete its own Enlightenment, since a truly human and secular society is incompatible with class relations.22

In the third chapter of the Manifesto, Marx and Engels attack what they call feudal socialism and “true socialism.” Both of these false socialisms are reactionary, insofar as they advocate romantic solutions to capitalism. The feudal socialist wants workers to return to an imagined organic aristocratic society, in which they will resubmit to their noble betters. On the other hand, the “true socialist” wants to push aside class struggle in favor of a classless humanitarianism. Such ethical idealism denounces bourgeois society in toto as sinful and irredeemable. While the “true socialists” think they are moving past bourgeois society, they inadvertently adopt the romantic critique of capitalism. For Marx and Engels, one cannot achieve socialism without presupposing the accomplishments of bourgeois society and bourgeois enlightenment.

True socialism “forgot, in the nick of time, that the French [socialist] criticism, whose silly echo it was, presupposed the existence of modern bourgeois society, with its corresponding economic conditions of existence, and the political constitution adapted thereto, the very things those attainment was the object of the pending struggle in Germany.”23 In their absolute rejection of everything progressive in bourgeois society, including constitutional law, true socialism gives aid to reaction. Presupposing the advancement of science and industry, socialism not only liberates the productive forces; it also consummates the struggle for democracy. Socialism does not simply cast off the forms of democracy and republicanism, but makes democracy real for the working class.
The Dead Dogs

As Marx matured in his economic thinking, he returned to Hegelian dialectics as the basis for his critique of capitalism. In a letter to Ludwig Kugelmann, he accuses Feuerbach, along with the rest of the German intelligentsia, of treating Hegel like a “dead dog.”24 According to Marx, one must extract the rational side of Hegel’s dialectics and discard its irrational idealism. It is no coincidence that when Marx defends Hegel in his afterword to the first volume of Capital (1867), he compares Hegel’s fate with that of Spinoza’s. If the German Enlightenment stunted itself in treating Spinoza as a “dead dog,” then the same goes for Eugen Dühring and others when they treat Hegel as a mere mystic.25

Marx’s approach to Spinoza and Hegel is itself dialectical. As he puts it in a letter to Ferdinand Lassalle, “Even in the case of philosophers who give systematic form to their work, Spinoza for instance, the true inner structure of the system is quite unlike the form in which it was consciously presented by him.”26

Spinoza is not absent in Marx’s Grundrisse (1859) and Capital. Marx wrote his critique as a “natural history,” wherein he laid bare the economic law of motion for the capitalist system. This presupposes a Spinozistic outlook of paying attention to rational causes over mere appearances: “Vulgar economy which, indeed, ‘has really learnt nothing,’ here as everywhere sticks to appearances in opposition to the law which regulates and explains them. In opposition to Spinoza, [political economy] believes that ‘ignorance is a sufficient reason.’” 27 Not only does Marx assume Spinoza’s materialism of causation; like Hegel, he also accepts Spinoza’s insight that all determination is negation; that it is not enough to negate something, but to overcome that negation in turn. Negation is determined not just by particular things, but by an overall process, or what Marx refers to as “the negation of the negation.” For Marx, Spinoza provides the philosophical basis for this dialectical logic: “This identity of production and consumption amounts to Spinoza’s thesis: determinatio est negatio.”28 Needless to say, this reemergence of Spinozism as integral to Marx’s critique refutes Israel’s argument that the later Marx abandoned Spinozism.
Marx and Engels’ Second Enlightenment

In the Grundrisse, Marx takes issue with bourgeois socialists, who merely affirm the ideals of the French Revolution, while ignoring the realities of capitalism. In pursuing liberty, equality, and fraternity one-sidedly, these socialists ironically reinforce unfreedom, inequality, and atomization. This is because they do not understand the reality of competition and exchange, and fall prey to its logic. This is certainly the case for Marx when he discusses the petty bourgeois socialism of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and his followers.29 As Marx puts it in Capital, “There alone rule [in bourgeois society] Freedom, Equality, Property and Bentham,” where the name of Bentham signifies the crass logic of exploitation.30

Seemingly strange bedfellows, both Israel and the structuralist Marxist Louis Althusser claim that the later Marx abandoned his original humanism. But the evidence in the mature economic manuscripts is clear. Marx reaffirms that socialism will be a realm of freedom based on an advanced material economic base. The realm of necessity will not be abolished but workers will “rationally” regulate “their interchange with Nature, bringing it under their common control, instead of being ruled by it as by the blind forces of Nature.”31 The realm of freedom will “blossom forth only with this realm of necessity as its basis. The shortening of the working-day is its basic prerequisite.”32 In socialism, humanity will live “under conditions most favourable to, and worthy of, their human nature.”33

The interrelation between humanity and nature, a Spinozistic point, is an echo of what Marx and Engels previously wrote decades before in The Holy Family: “If man is shaped by his surroundings, his surroundings must be made human. If man is social by nature, he will develop his true nature only in society, and the power of his nature must be measured not by the power of separate individuals but by the power of society. This and similar propositions are to be found almost literally even in the oldest French materialists.”34 These passages from The Holy Family and Capital show continuity in Marx’s Enlightenment humanism.

In his separate works, Engels celebrates the thinkers of the Enlightenment. Diderot and Rousseau are credited for inventing modern dialectics in their respective criticisms of bourgeois society and property relations. But the entirety of the French Enlightenment comes in for special praise in his Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy (1886): “The French materialists no less than the deists Voltaire and Rousseau held this conviction [of historical progress] to an almost fanatical degree, and often enough made the greatest personal sacrifices for it. If ever anybody dedicated his whole life to the ‘enthusiasm for truth and justice’ — using this phrase in the good sense — it was Diderot, for instance.”35

In Anti-Dühring (1877), Engels calls Spinoza “a dialectician,” and in Dialectics of Nature (1883), he affirms Spinoza’s idea of a self-caused substance as expressing the activity of matter in motion, that is, as anticipating dialectical materialism. 36 In an anecdote, Plekhanov recounts how Engels told him that “old Spinoza” was “absolutely right” to see mind and matter as two sides of one nature. In contrast to Israel, Plekhanov unequivocally states, “I am fully convinced that Marx and Engels, after the materialist turn in their development, never abandoned the standpoint of Spinoza.”37

According to Engels, it was the radical bourgeoisie that originally developed the modern idea of equality. This idea was “first formulated by Rousseau, in trenchant terms but still on behalf of all humanity.”38 The emerging proletariat, however, went deeper than the bourgeoisie in adopting equality under its revolutionary banner, and as “was the case with all demands of the bourgeoisie, so here too the proletariat cast a fateful shadow beside it and drew its own conclusions (Babeuf). This connection between bourgeois equality and the proletariat’s drawing of conclusions should be developed in greater detail.”39 Hence, we see that proletarian morality for Engels is not the total negation of bourgeois Enlightenment morality, but its dialectical negation. Political equality is insufficient and needs social equality to be made substantive and permanent.
The Critique of the Gotha Program

This leads us to Marx’s conception of equality in The Critique of the Gotha Program (1875). Under the banner of social equality, the proletariat establishes its rule. But, according to Marx, during the first phase of communism (i.e., socialism), the right to equality still presupposes inequality. How is this possible? In this initial stage, the productive forces still need to be reorganized and further developed. Socialism frees society from the domination of what Marx called “the law of value” (i.e., commodity relations), but it cannot totally do away with principles of exchange. For the sake of developing the productive forces, the first phase of communism is governed by the principle from each according to their ability, to each according to their deed. This means that “as far as the distribution of [the means of consumption] among the individual producers is concerned, the same principle prevails as in the exchange of commodity equivalents: a given amount of labor in one form is exchanged for an equal amount of labor in another form…The right of the producers is proportional to the labor they supply; the equality consists in the fact that measurement is made with an equal standard, labor.”40

Under this first phase of communism, it does not recognize class differences, but it does recognize differences when it comes to what workers can contribute. Some workers, either physically or mentally, will contribute more than others, and they may need more compensation than others because of their particular circumstances. Perhaps they have to take care of more dependents, or they have a greater skill set. Regardless, Marx is clear that a kind of exchange still exists under socialism.

Only in the upper stage of socialism, namely communism proper, does exchange value completely wither away in favor of use value. Hegel had already seen the contradictory nature of value in his analysis of the bourgeois Enlightenment. The truth of bourgeois Enlightenment for Hegel was utility, a contradictory phenomenon that expressed both the promise of human flourishing and the reality of exploitation. Utility was bound up with the commodity form, in which use-value is dominated by market exchange. But for Marx, only full communism can liberate use value from exchange value, thus resolving the main contradiction of bourgeois Enlightenment. Thus, communism is not the abstract negation, but the completion of the Enlightenment project. This completion is summed up in the slogan: “From each according to their ability, to each according to their needs!”41

Under communism, equality is understood as a law of proportion — that all human beings have a right to equal development and satisfaction of their different needs. Helen Macfarlane, the Chartist radical and first translator of The Communist Manifesto into English, put it as follows: “The Rights of one human being are precisely the same as the Rights of another human being, in virtue of their common nature.”42 Without this common human nature, Marx’s slogan for the realization of human wants is unintelligible and unachievable. This slogan is at one with Macfarlane’s translation of the Manifesto’s statement that the “old Bourgeois Society, with its classes, and class antagonisms, will be replaced by an association, wherein the free development of EACH is the free development of ALL.”43

Whether it is Spinozism, French materialism, or the ideas of the French Revolution — particularly the idea of equality — Marx and Engels were no strangers to Radical Enlightenment. On the contrary, they were its most advanced representatives. We have demonstrated that Radical Enlightenment was not just a passing phase of Marx’s youth but the consistent philosophical thread throughout his thinking.

Part V of this series on the Enlightenment will appear next Sunday.


Notes

1. ↑ “Marx’s early thought, shaped by Bauer and Feuerbach, was in a sense a variant of Spinozist materialism, naturalism, anti-providentialism, and anti-Scriptualism which, before long, became dramatically infused with zeal for democratic transformation.” Jonathan I. Israel, Enlightenment that Failed, 905.



This ignores Bauer’s explicit anti-Spinozism, which favored self-consciousness over substance, as well as Feuerbach’s empiricist critique of Spinoza as a metaphysician. Marx himself in his dissertation repeats Bauer-like criticisms of Spinoza, while in later works, such as The Holy Family, he repeats Feuerbach’s critique. Israel does not deign to comment on Marx’s criticisms of Spinoza in this early period.
2. ↑ Harrison Fluss and Sam Miller, “Subversive Beginnings,” Jacobin, June 19, 2016; Harrison Fluss and Sam Miller, “The Life of Jenny Marx,” Jacobin, February 14, 2016.
3. ↑ For more on Heinrich Marx’s opinions on the French Revolution and Napoleon, see Michael Heinrich, Karl Marx and the Birth of Modern Society: The Life of Marx and the Development of His Work, vol. 1: 1818–1841 (New York: Monthly Review, 2019), 81–82.
4. ↑ The young Marx was into dueling, drinking, and, now, Hegel. In Berlin, a group of Young Hegelians met at Hippel’s café, calling themselves the Berlin Frei. There they drank and vigorously argued, celebrating not just free thought but free spirits. When the future anarchist Mikhail Bakunin visited Berlin in its Young Hegelian heyday, he liked to play a philosophical drinking game:




In Russia, the young Bakunin became a member of a literary group so intoxicated with Hegelian idealism that even their love affairs were permeated by it, and who, volatilizing in the Russian way the portentous abstractions of the German, used to toast the Hegelian categories, proceeding through the metaphysical progression from Pure Existence to the divine Idea.

Edmund Wilson, To the Finland Station: A Study in the Writing and Acting of History (New York: New York Review of Books, 2003), 262.
5. ↑ David Leopold, The Young Karl Marx: German Philosophy, Modern Politics, and Human Flourishing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 103.
6. ↑ Marilyn Chapin Massey, Christ Unmasked: The Meaning of the Life of Jesus in German Politics (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983); and Friedrich Engels, Letters of the Young Engels (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1976).
7. ↑ For Engels’s drawings, see “Die Freien by Friedrich Engels,” Wikipedia Commons.
8. ↑ “The Insolently Threatened Yet Miraculously Rescued Bible,” in MECW, vol. 2, 335.
9. ↑ “Progress of Social Reform on the Continent,” in MECW, vo. 3, 392–93.
Later in the same article, the young Engels inferred that the premises of German philosophy lead to the conclusion of communism:




Our party has to prove that either all the philosophical efforts of the German nation, from Kant to Hegel, have been useless — worse than useless; or, that they must end in Communism; that the Germans must either reject their great philosophers, whose names they hold up as the glory of their nation, or that they must adopt Communism. (Ibid., 406.)

Lenin also popularized Marxism as a synthesis of British economics, French politics, and German philosophy:


The Marxist doctrine is omnipotent because it is true. It is comprehensive and harmonious, and provides men with an integral world outlook irreconcilable with any form of superstition, reaction, or defence of bourgeois oppression. It is the legitimate successor to the best that man produced in the nineteenth century, as represented by German philosophy, English political economy and French socialism. (“The Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism,” 1913, in Lenin Collected Works [henceforth LCW], vol. 19 [Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1974], 23–24.)

Before Marx and Engels, Hess was the first to conceive of this progressive trinity of England, France, and Germany in his European Triarchy (1841), wherein he claimed that Spinoza represents “the ideal foundation of modern times.” Four years before he wrote this work, Hess had announced in The Holy History of Mankind (1837) that humanity had entered into the Age of Spinoza.
10. ↑ “Critical Notes on the Article: ‘The King of Prussia and Social Reform. By a Prussian,’” in MECW, vol. 3, 202.
11. ↑ Karl Marx, “Luther as the Arbiter between Strauss and Feuerbach,” in Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society, ed. L. D. Easton and K. H. Guddat (New York: Doubleday, 1967), 95.
12. ↑ The Holy Family, in MECW, vol. 4, 129.



The relationship between Feuerbach and Spinoza is unfortunately outside the scope of this series. The scholar Marx W. Wartofsky, however, explains that Feuerbach saw himself as a legatee of Spinoza’s pantheism and materialism: “Thus, Feuerbach contrasts pantheism, as the theoretical negation of theology, with empiricism, as the practical negation of theology. But he says pantheism — that is, Spinoza’s pantheism, which accords matter divine status, albeit abstractly and metaphysically — as the legitimation and sanction of the “materialistic tendency of modern times.’” Feuerbach (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 370.
13. ↑ Joseph de Maistre, in his St. Petersburg Dialogues, engages in a long rant against Lockeanism. In the sixth dialogue, by denying the doctrine of innate ideas, Locke is called an enemy of Christian authority, and Maistre despairs that so many French philosophers fell under Locke’s spell. They neglected their own “Christian Plato” (Malebranche) in favor of English empiricism. Joseph de Maistre, St Petersburg Dialogues: Or Conversations on the Temporal Government of Providence (London: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1993), 187, 188.
14. ↑ According to Lukács, during the Restoration period, defenders of human progress redefined Enlightenment as inextricably bound up with mass struggle:




According to the new interpretation the reasonableness of human progress develops ever increasingly out of the inner conflict of social forces in history itself; according to this interpretation history itself is the bearer and realizer of human progress. The most important thing here is the increasing historical awareness of the decisive role played in human progress by the struggle of classes in history. The new spirit of historical writing, which is most clearly visible in the important French historians of the Restoration period, concentrates precisely on this question: on showing historically how modem bourgeois society arose out of the class struggles between nobility and bourgeoisie, out of class struggles which raged throughout the entire ‘idyllic Middle Ages’ and whose last decisive stage was the great French Revolution. These ideas produce the first attempt at a rational periodization of history, an attempt to comprehend the historical nature and origins of the present rationally and scientifically.

(Georg Lukács, The Historical Novel (London: Merlin Press, 1989), 27–28.)
15. ↑ Massimiliano Tomba, Marx’s Temporalities (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 22.
16. ↑ The Holy Family, in MECW, vol. 4, 130.
17. ↑ Ibid., 39.
18. ↑ The German Ideology is frequently described as a work that treats philosophy as a mere epiphenomenon of material class relations, or as simply bourgeois mysticism. But in their polemic against Max Stirner, Marx and Engels defend certain philosophers for their progressive contributions to humanity. This includes praise for the Stoic tradition and for Epicurus as a radical Enlightener: “Epicurus…was the true radical Enlightener of antiquity; he openly attacked the ancient religion, and it was from him, too, that the atheism of the Romans, insofar as it existed, was derived. For this reason, too, Lucretius praised Epicurus as the hero who was the first to overthrow the gods and trample religion underfoot.” The German Ideology, in MECW, vol. 5, 141–42. As we can see, Israel even ignores Marx’s own use of the phrase radical Enlightenment.
19. ↑ Manifesto of the Communist Party, in MECW, vol. 6, 487.
20. ↑ Ibid.
21. ↑ For Hegel’s discussion of Diderot, see Hegel, Enlightenment, and Revolution.
22. ↑ In On the Jewish Question (1843), Marx pointed out that abstract rights to property and religion presupposed an unequal and alienated society. Any society in which private property and religion predominate, such as in the United States, is not a truly humanized one, but still alienated. While political emancipation is certainly an achievement, it is not enough if it stays at the political level and ignores the so-called private realm of civil society. Thus, the problem is not that American society is secular, but since it rests on an alienated bourgeois reality, it is not secular enough. See “On the Jewish Question,” in MECW, vol. 3, 146–47.
23. ↑ Manifesto, 512.



Around the time of the Manifesto, Marx also wrote,


The workers know that the abolition of bourgeois property relations is not brought about by preserving those of feudalism. They know that the revolutionary movement of the bourgeoisie against the feudal estates and the absolute monarchy can only accelerate their own revolutionary movement. They know that their own struggle against the bourgeoisie can only dawn with the day when the bourgeoisie is victorious. Despite all this they do not share Herr Heinzen’s bourgeois illusions. They can and must accept the bourgeois revolution as a precondition for the workers’ revolution. However, they cannot for a moment regard it as their ultimate goal.

(“Moralising Criticism and Critical Morality,” in MECW, vol. 6, 332–33.)

We will address how Marx changes his position on the proletariat’s relationship to bourgeois revolutions in part six of this series. Suffice it to say, following the failure of the bourgeoisie to lead revolutions on the Continent in 1848, Marx argues that the proletariat cannot simply wait for the bourgeoisie to fulfill its original democratic tasks. By the 1840s, the heroic phase of bourgeois revolutions was over, and the proletariat must now play the leading revolutionary role; it must fight not only for the older tasks of democracy, but for socialism. Hence, after the failed struggles of 1848, Marx disavows a stagist conception of revolution, committing himself to a politics of permanent revolution. On the history and politics of permanent revolution, see Neil Davidson’s How Revolutionary Were the Bourgeois Revolutions?

It is interesting to note that Davidson himself uses the phrase “radicalized Enlightenment” to describe Marx and Engels’s socialist transformation of the bourgeois Enlightenment in the Manifesto: “From these doubts [about bourgeois society] came the radicalized Enlightenment at the heart of Marxism.” Neil Davidson, How Revolutionary Were the Bourgeois Revolutions? (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2012), 655.
24. ↑ “Marx to Kugelmann. 27 June 1870,” in MECW, vol. 43, 528.
25. ↑ In the afterword to the second German edition of Capital, Marx said,




The mystifying side of Hegelian dialectic I criticised nearly thirty years ago, at a time when it was still the fashion. But just as I was working at the first volume of “Das Kapital,” it was the good pleasure of the peevish, arrogant, mediocre ‘Epigonoi who now talk large in cultured Germany, to treat Hegel in same way as the brave Moses Mendelssohn in Lessing’s time treated Spinoza, i.e., as a “dead dog.” I therefore openly avowed myself the pupil of that mighty thinker, and even here and there, in the chapter on the theory of value, coquetted with the modes of expression peculiar to him. The mystification which dialectic suffers in Hegel’s hands, by no means prevents him from being the first to present its general form of working in a comprehensive and conscious manner. With him it is standing on its head. It must be turned right side up again, if you would discover the rational kernel within the mystical shell.

(Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1, in MECW, vol. 35, 19.)
26. ↑ “Marx to Lassalle. 31 May 1858,” in MECW, vol. 40, 316.
27. ↑ Capital, vol. 1, in MECW, vol. 35, 311.
28. ↑ Karl Marx, Grundrisse, trans. Martin Nicolaus (New York: Vintage Books, 1973), 90.
29. ↑ Ibid., 248.
30. ↑ Capital, vol. 1, in MECW, vol. 35, 186. In a footnote to Capital, Marx contrasts Bentham — that “genius of bourgeois stupidity” — unfavorably with the more sophisticated French materialists. Marx does not dismiss the category of utility but argues that one cannot derive an adequate conception of human nature from utility alone: “The principle of utility was no discovery of Bentham. He simply reproduced in his dull way what Helvétius and other Frenchmen had said with esprit in the 18th century. To know what is useful for a dog, one must study dog-nature. This nature itself is not to be deduced from the principle of utility. Applying this to man, he that would criticise all human acts, movements, relations, etc., by the principle of utility, must first deal with human nature in general, and then with human nature as modified in each historical epoch.” Ibid., 605.
31. ↑ Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 3, in MECW, vol. 37, 807.
32. ↑ Ibid.
33. ↑ Ibid.
34. ↑ The Holy Family, in MECW, vol. 4, “131.
35. ↑ Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy, in MECW, vol. 26, 373.
36. ↑ “Reciprocal action is the first thing that we encounter when we consider matter in motion as a whole from the standpoint of modern natural science. We see a series of forms of motion, mechanical motion, heat, light, electricity, magnetism, chemical compound and decomposition, transitions of states of aggregation, organic life, all of which, if at present we still make an exception of organic life, pass into one another, mutually determine one another, are in one place cause and in another effect, the sum-total of the motion in all its changing forms remaining the same (Spinoza: substance is causa sui strikingly expresses the reciprocal action).” The Dialectics of Nature. Fragments and Notes, in MECW, vol. 25, 511.
37. ↑ Georgi Plekhanov, “Bernstein and Materialism,” Marxists Internet Archive.
38. ↑ “Preparatory Writings for Anti-Dühring,” in MECW, vol. 25, 603.
39. ↑ Ibid.
40. ↑ Critique of the Gotha Programme, in MECW, vol. 24, 86.
41. ↑ Ibid., 87. According to Eric Hobsbawm, the phrase “From each according to their ability, to each according to their needs!” was originally a Saint-Simonian one. Eric Hobsbawm, How to Change the World: Reflections on Marx and Marxism, 29–30.



While Saint-Simon himself eschewed the Jacobin Terror, he defended the achievements of the French Revolution, and his conception of history and utopian socialism built on Enlightenment ideas. According to the Marxist historian Samuel Bernstein, “Saint-Simon set himself the objective of founding the science of man. He desired to follow in the tradition of Newton, and he conceived of science as organized and directed toward the improvement of mankind. Equally with other great Utopians, he looked to those in power for the fulfillment of his dream.” Samuel Bernstein, “Saint-Simon’s Philosophy of History,” Science & Society 12, no. 1 (Winter 1948): 85.

In Louis Blanc’s speech of 1848 (“A Community of Labor”), we find an early popularization of the slogan that Marx would adopt. The French reformist said, “The ideal toward which humanity must proceed is the following: to produce according to its powers, to consume according to its needs” [authors’ translation]. The original French reads, “L’idéal vers lequel la société doit se mettre en marche est donc celui-ci: produire selon ses forces, consommer selon ses besoins.” Louis Blanc, Pages d’histoire de la Révolution de Février, 1848 (Paris: Imprimerie et Librairie de V Wouters, 1850), 217.
42. ↑ Helen Macfarlane, Red Republican (London: Unkant Press, 2014), 66–67.
43. ↑ Ibid., 139.


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Tags: History

Marx on nothingness in Buddhism

Pradip Baksi

Abstract:
Marx had made two near identical statements on the concept of nothingness

(Sanskrit:Śūnyatā;Pali:Suññatā; Vietnamese:Không) in some forms of Buddhism in two of his letters written on 18and 20 March 1866. He wrote those letters while suffering from

hidradenitis suppurativa and residing as a medical tourist in Margate, England. He arrived at his understanding of nothingness in Buddhism from the following books of his intimate friend

 Carl (Karl) Friedrich Koeppen(Köppen) (1808-1863):
Die Religion des Buddha, 2 Bde. Erster Band.
Die Religion des Buddhaund ihre Entstehung, 1857. Zweiter Band.
Die lamaische Hierarchie und Kirche, 1859; Berlin:Ferdinand Schneider.

 Marx’s personal copies of these books appear to be lost; they are not yet
indicated in the reconstructed catalog :MEGA 2 IV/32. 

The above indicated statements of Marx may be treated as the ground zero for future investigations on the interrelationships of Marxism's and Buddhism's. Many currents of Buddhism and Marxism have converged in Vietnam over many years from many directions. That has created some unique opportunities for the future emergence of scientific investigation on the teachings of Siddhartha Gautam Buddha and those of Karl Marx from within the contemporary societies there.

https://www.academia.edu/60278029/Marx_on_nothingness_in_Buddhism

Engels, Dialectics and Buddhism

Ramkrishna Bhattacharya

The paper explores the sources from which Frederick Engels might have got his idea of the Buddhists of India being adepts in dialectics.

The book that has come down to us under the title Dialectics of Nature
is strictly speaking not a book but an edited version of four folders containing miscellaneous notes and jottings left unfinished by their author, Frederick Engels. The material was never published in Engels’s life time although parts of it were published in 1896 and1898 posthumously. The full text of the manuscripts was first published in the then USSR in 1925 alongside a Russian translation. Later editions and translations mostly follow the text and the arrangements of the folders made in the 1941 Russian edition. Neither Marx nor Lenin had seen the drafts that Engels had been preparing for along time. Yet Dialectics of Nature is Engels’s most significant contribution to the extension of the area of dialectics to the natural sciences.

Marx had encouraged Engels to take up this work in right earnest and Engels felt it incumbent upon him to establish dialectics in the domain of nature as in the world of man. In spite of many errors and shortcomings in the work, nuggets of wisdom as well as pregnant hypotheses make the work more valuable as a quarry of ideas rather than a finished formulation to be treated as the outcome of detailed research and analysis. Everything was in the draft stage. Engels certainly would not have published the draft without drastic revision. That there are glaring errors in the drafts has been pointed out by the Marxists themselves. 

J.B.S. Haldane, for instance, in his Preface to the first English translation of
Dialectics of Nature (1940/1946), noted: ‘In the essay on “Tidal Friction,” Engels made a serious mistake, or more accurately a mistake which would have been serious had he published it. But I very much doubt whether he would have done so. … I have little doubt that either he or one of his scientific friends such as Schorlemmer would have detected the mistake in the essay on “Tidal friction.” But even as a mistake it is interesting, because it is one of the mistakes which lead to a correct result…. Such mistakes have been extremely fruitful in the history of science

Elsewhere there are statements which are certainly untrue, for example, in the sections on stars and Protozoa. But here Engels cannot be blamed for following some of the best astronomers and zoologists of his day. The technical improvement of the telescope and microscope has of course led to great increases in our knowledge here in the last sixty years’ (xi).In spite of all this, Haldane frankly admitted: ‘Had his (sc. Engels’s) remarks on Darwinism been generally known, I for one would have been saved a certain amount of muddled thinking’ (xiv). Hence, what Sebastiano Timpanaro said about Lenin’s Materialism and Empirio-criticism – ‘the value of which is no way affected by the ten or fifty errors in physics which can be found in it’ (42) – also applies to Dialectics of Nature

.https://www.academia.edu/12569254/Engels_Dialectics_and_Buddhism

How Marxists Brought Science to Politics and Politics to Science

JACOBIN INTERVIEW WITH

HELENA SHEEHAN

08.22.2022

From Marx and Engels to the present day, socialists have been deeply engaged with the world of science. With the provision of lifesaving vaccines held hostage by corporate profiteering, the story of this relationship is more important than ever.

The Marx and Engels monument in Berlin. (Getty Images)

The COVID-19 pandemic may have been a disaster for humanity, but it’s been a great boon for the world’s leading pharmaceutical companies. Our reliance on Big Pharma for lifesaving vaccines has reminded us how badly we need to understand the links between science, politics, and commercial interests.

For Marxists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, these were some of the most important questions to be addressed in their work. The cross-fertilization between Marxism and science had major implications for the development of both.

Helena Sheehan is an emeritus professor at Dublin City University and the author of Marxism and the Philosophy of Science, a book that traces the history of this encounter.

This is an edited transcript from Jacobin’s Long Reads podcast. You can listen to the episode here.
DANIEL FINN

What connection did Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels see between their own work and the developments in the natural sciences at the time?
HELENA SHEEHAN

Marx and Engels were acutely attuned to the science of their day. They saw it as a kind of rolling revelation of the world. They were constantly writing to each other about various discoveries — which were coming very fast in the nineteenth century — and what they meant. They were struck by three discoveries above all.

One was the discovery of cellular structure, which they thought demonstrated the unity of the organic world. Then there was the discovery of the law of conservation and transformation of energy, which they thought revealed nature as a continuous and dynamic process. But most of all, there was the discovery of the evolution of species, which they saw as demonstrating the natural origins of natural history. They were particularly enthusiastic about Darwinism and the implications of evolution in both the natural world and the historical sphere.Marx and Engels saw science as a kind of rolling revelation of the world.

This took place amid a massive shift in mood, as the nineteenth century witnessed a general transition from seeing the world as a static and timeless order of nature to viewing nature as more of a developmental and temporal process. As part of this, and within this whole atmosphere, Marx and Engels pushed the theory of evolution of species further into a theory of the evolution of everything. They explored the implications of this in formulating a philosophy that came to be called dialectical materialism.

DANIEL FINN

What were the most significant arguments that Engels made in his work Dialectics of Nature?
HELENA SHEEHAN

Dialectics of Nature was a posthumously published, unfinished manuscript by Engels, which he meant to be a major work elucidating the philosophical implications of the natural sciences. When he died, parts of it were fully written, while other parts were sketchy. Some of the science has been superseded. On the other hand, some of what Engels wrote anticipated scientific discoveries that only came later.

The core of Dialectics of Nature was its methodology, which was an epistemology and ontology of a new materialism — a materialism that was dynamic and fluid, one that saw the world as an interconnected totality, as opposed to an older materialism that was static, mechanistic, and reductionist. The epistemology and ontology were also in contrast to various idealist tendencies.

DANIEL FINN

There are two separate arguments that could be made — and have been made — about the attempt by Engels to extend the scope of Marxism beyond the limits of human history. One is to say that you simply can’t come up with any general principles that would apply to the history of the universe and also to human history. The second is to say that the particular set of principles that Engels did come up with were unhelpful and misconceived. What’s your opinion of those two arguments?

HELENA SHEEHAN

I disagree with both arguments. I think it’s impossible to think coherently, or even to live coherently, without working out a comprehensive worldview that encompasses everything. Marx and Engels believed this. They repudiated the idea that there was one basis for science and another for life.

Although some later Marxists tried to blend Marxism with various other philosophies, such as neo-Kantianism, with its sharp dividing line between nature and history, the mainstream of Marxism with which I identify has held on to a more holistic approach in thinking about both the natural world and human history. Those pulling in the other direction — I’m referring here to the Austro-Marxists, the Frankfurt School, the Yugoslav Praxis school, and much of the 1960s New Left — have tended to align natural science with positivism and to leave natural science to the positivists.

However, the best of Marxism, I think, from Marx and Engels on, developed a critique of positivism as well as a nonpositivist philosophy of science. I believe that politics needs to be grounded in a worldview that’s coherent and comprehensive and empirical, and I believe that science is crucial to this, as the cutting edge of empirically grounded knowledge.

Of course, people sometimes get involved in politics on the basis of particular issues, and we can work with people with whom we disagree on other questions. But I think that we need an intellectual tradition and a political movement that pulls it all together. As I discovered in my own journey, and as I hope I conveyed in Marxism and the Philosophy of Science, there’s a brilliant intellectual tradition tied to a political movement that has been doing this, and that’s Marxism.

DANIEL FINN

What were the main trends in Soviet philosophy and science during the first decade of the revolution, and how did they interact?

HELENA SHEEHAN

I found this period very exciting when I discovered it and began researching it. In the first decade of the revolution, there were debates about absolutely everything: about industrialization strategy and its relation to the collectivization of agriculture; about nationalities policy; about the nature of the state and the status of law under socialism; about the liberation of women, the future of the family, and free love; about avant-garde art and architecture; about various educational theories; about the idea of proletarian culture.

There were debates within every academic discipline, which also obviously involved debates about philosophy, science, and the philosophy of science. The most interesting debates of all were those among the Bolsheviks themselves. The debate about philosophy of science was a complex philosophical and political struggle, with much higher stakes than most intellectual debates.J. D. Bernal saw Marxism as extending the scientific method to the whole range of phenomena, from the smallest particle to the whole shape of human history.

At one level, there was a debate about the relative emphasis on Hegel and more generally about the history of philosophy versus the stress on the natural sciences. There were accusations, on the one side, of reversion to idealism or, on the other side, of reversion to mechanistic materialism, both of which had been superseded by Marxism.

There’s always been a tension in Marxist philosophy throughout the history of Marxism, but this debate was supercharged by its implications in complex historical currents and a complex struggle for power within the USSR. In 1931, there was a closing down of these debates and a push to accept one position in all of these different debates as the Marxist position. It was not only a matter of who was making the most convincing arguments in these debates, or who would get university positions or be on editorial boards. It was also a matter of who might be purged.

In philosophy, a group of young philosophers went to Joseph Stalin. Their position was a kind of synthesis between the two positions, which I believe made sense philosophically. But it was also complicated by ambition and opportunism, as is often the case. When I was in Moscow doing research on this, I interviewed Mark Mitin, who was the most prominent of these young philosophers. He argued that the philosophical debates didn’t have political consequences, although my research told me otherwise.

But what’s important about these debates is to see them in a wider context. In my book, I dealt with the whole cluster of debates, particularly this one in the area of philosophy, as well as the other debates in the natural sciences, which involved many factors swirling around each other. Of course, the one in biology was particularly fierce and consequential.

DANIEL FINN

What impact did the Soviet delegation that came to London in 1931 for a scientific conference have on the development of British science?

HELENA SHEEHAN

The appearance of a Soviet delegation at the Second International Congress of the History of Science in London in 1931 was the first appearance by any Soviet delegation at a major international academic congress. For this reason alone, it created quite a stir, not only at the congress itself but also in the mass media at the time. A book called Science at the Crossroads also came out of this, where the Soviet papers were published. It was translated into many languages and many editions and circulated all over the world. In fact, it can still be read today.

The delegation was led by Nikolai Bukharin, who was once a contender to succeed Vladimir Lenin. His appearance at the 1931 congress was midway down his trajectory, in terms of his position in the Soviet power structure. Bukharin and the others came forward at this congress with a fresh and vigorous proclamation of Marxism as an integrating philosophy that made more sense of science than anything else on the horizon.

It had a lasting impact, particularly on the Left. Some of the scientists who were present, such as J. D. Bernal, Joseph Needham, and others, were major figures, not only in British science but also in international science at the time.
DANIEL FINN

What did J. D. Bernal and J. B. S. Haldane in particular take from Marxism for their scientific work? How did they understand the relationship between politics, philosophy, and science?

HELENA SHEEHAN

What they took from Marxism was philosophical integrality and social purpose, based on Marxism as the key to integrating the various results of the natural sciences to form a coherent picture of the natural world, and then beyond that, for connecting nature to history and science to political economy. Both Bernal and Haldane wrote massive philosophical and historical works about science, as well as continuing their leading role in basic scientific research and organizing a movement for social responsibility in science.

Bernal saw Marxism as extending the scientific method to the whole range of phenomena, from the smallest particle to the whole shape of human history. He saw science as a social activity that was integrally tied to the whole spectrum of other social activities: economic, political, cultural, philosophical. He contrasted science under capitalism with science under socialism. Bernal believed that the frustration of science was an inescapable feature of the capitalist mode of production, and that science could only achieve its full potential under socialism.

Haldane also had a synthesizing approach extending beyond science, reaching for a theory of everything, from the beginning of time to the end of the world. He found this in Marxism. He saw Marxism as a scientific method applied to society, extending the unity to all knowledge, analyzing the same basic processes in nature and society. For Haldane, as for Bernal, there was no hermetic boundary between science and politics. He believed that those who thought otherwise were deluded. On one occasion, he said that even if the professors left politics alone, politics wouldn’t leave the professors alone.

DANIEL FINN

You’ve argued that Christopher Caldwell, who wasn’t a professional scientist, made a strikingly original contribution to the philosophy of science in his book The Crisis in Physics. What were some of the key points that Caldwell put across?

HELENA SHEEHAN

Caldwell was an autodidact. Not only was he not a professional scientist; he also wasn’t an academic, and he didn’t even attend university. He was a loner for most of his short life, but he read voluminously, and was relentlessly searching for a coherent and comprehensive worldview, which he, too, ultimately found in Marxism. He didn’t simply take it off the shelf: he made it his own in a fresh and original way across many areas, encompassing not only science but also philosophy and culture.Christopher Caldwell addressed the theoretical fragmentation that he found in all disciplines and argued that it was rooted in a crisis in bourgeois culture.

He also joined the Communist Party and threw himself into party work. He went to fight in the Spanish Civil War, where he died. It was a terrible loss to Marxism that this brilliant figure died so young. I feel very mournful every time I think about him, which is quite often.

Caldwell wrote with great clarity, passion, and profundity, and with the same sort of integrality as Bernal and Haldane. He addressed the theoretical fragmentation that he found in all disciplines and argued that it was rooted in a crisis in bourgeois culture. He said that at the root of that culture’s most basic thought patterns was the subject-object dichotomy, which had its basis in the social division of labor — in the separation of the class that generated the dominant ideology from the class that actively engaged with nature.

Caldwell thought that this distorted art, science, psychology, philosophy, economics, and indeed all social relations. He argued that while there had been great empirical advances in genetics, evolution, quantum mechanics, and other fields, at the same time, however, there was an inability to synthesize the meaning of these discoveries.

He analyzed the crisis in physics in terms of the metaphysics of physics. Caldwell displayed an acute grasp of theoretical physics — in particular the tensions between relativity and quantum theory. He argued that physics was advancing along the empirical front and generating a growing body of knowledge that could not be fitted into the existing theoretical frameworks and was rent by the same dualisms as all other intellectual disciplines.

He also analyzed the crisis in biology and the tensions between genetics and evolution, between heredity and development, equally brilliantly. He really was an extraordinary figure.

DANIEL FINN

What impact did the purges under Stalin have on the Soviet scientific community, including some of those who had gone to London in 1931?

HELENA SHEEHAN

It was tragic for Soviet science and for Soviet society. Soviet society became engulfed in a terrible spiral where truth-seeking seriousness was caught up with compulsion, paranoia, ignorance, slander, revenge, deceit, and indeed a brutal struggle for political power. Several of those who so fervently stood up for Marxism at the 1931 congress — Bukharin, Boris Hessen, Nikolai Vavilov — were portrayed as conspiring against the revolution, and perished in the purges.

The purges are often put down to Stalin becoming a megalomaniac, which I don’t deny. But I don’t think that this is a sufficient explanation. I think it is necessary to understand the complex forces in motion, the monumental nature of what the Soviet Union was trying to achieve, particularly in the period of the first five-year plan, the massive obstacles in their path, and the frenzy that resulted from this cauldron.

DANIEL FINN

What was the nature of what became the infamous Lysenko controversy in Soviet biology?

HELENA SHEEHAN

It was part of that monumental struggle and the resulting frenzy. The Lysenko controversy is often portrayed as a cautionary tale against ideological interference in science, but I don’t see it that way. The relation of ideology to science is complex: eliminating ideology to get pure science is not possible or even desirable, in my opinion.

The controversy has to be understood in terms of what forces were in motion at the time. First of all, there were the tensions in mainstream international science between genetics and evolution. The contemporary synthesis between genetics and evolution, which we take for granted now, was not in place then. As well as the particular tensions and problems in the international science of 1920s and ’30s, there was a wider, more long-term tension between heredity and environment. This was the question of how much of what we are is due to heredity and how much of it is determined by our environment — nature versus nurture — which is still an ongoing debate.Eliminating ideology to get pure science is not possible or even desirable.

There was also a whole history, which played into this particular set of debates, of ideological positioning, associating the Right with one pole and the Left with the other. This played out in a very forceful way in the Soviet Union. On top of these international intellectual tensions, there were specific tensions in Soviet intellectual life. There was a need to create a new Soviet intelligentsia, the problem of how to deal with bourgeois expertise, the challenges of meeting the very ambitious targets of the first five-year plan — especially the question of how to raise the productivity of Soviet agriculture.

Trofim Lysenko walked into these swirling tensions. He was a Ukrainian agronomist who came to prominence with an agricultural technique called “vernalization” that allowed winter crops to be generated from summer planting. He pushed forward from this to articulate a whole theory of biology, which was basically a theory of inheritance of acquired characteristics and a denunciation of genetics. In terms of international science, it was essentially a Lamarckist position versus a Mendelian one.

This coincided with the frenzy of the purges, and the Soviet authorities proclaimed the Lysenkoist position to be the correct Marxist position in biology, with tragic consequences for science and scientists, and particularly for genetics and geneticists. Vavilov, who I previously mentioned, was an internationally renowned geneticist and one of those who came to the 1931 congress in London. He perished in the purges.

DANIEL FINN

What do you think are the most important legacies from this historical period for the way that we think about science and about politics today?
HELENA SHEEHAN

I think what has weathered every storm are the core concepts of Marxism in its approach to science. There have been many debates about Marxism vis-à-vis other approaches, but as I see it, having studied all these debates, both the ones before I came onto the scene and those that have unfolded during my own lifetime, I believe that nothing makes so much sense of science as Marxism. Indeed, nothing makes so much sense of everything as Marxism.

I want to say clearly just what is distinctive about Marxism as a philosophy of science. It is materialist in the sense of explaining the natural world in terms of natural forces and not supernatural powers. It is dialectical in the sense of being evolutionary, processive, and developmental. It is radically contextual and relational in seeing everything that exists within an interacting web of forces in which it is embedded. It is empiricist without being positivist or reductionist. It is rationalist without being idealist. It is coherent and comprehensive while being empirically grounded.In its basic concepts, Marxism is still the most coherent, comprehensive, and well-grounded philosophy on the horizon.

It is an integral philosophy. It is a way of seeing the world in terms of a complex pattern of intersecting processes, where others see it only as disconnected and static particulars. It is a way of revealing how all forces in motion are products of a pattern of historical development shaped by a mode of production. It sees science as socially constructed, but at the same time as an empirically grounded revelation of the natural world.

Throughout the whole period of its history, Marxism rises and falls in its status and in its influence. The period now is not a particularly high point. However, I think that there is a revival of Marxist philosophy of science in response to the exigencies of ecological crisis and also in response to the current pandemic, which is still playing out. By the way, although there’s an atmosphere of the pandemic being over, this particular one isn’t. One point that is being reinforced by anyone who has dealt seriously with this pandemic, most of whom were Marxists, is that the conditions are still there for future pandemics.

I think that Marxism is as relevant and as important today as it ever was — perhaps even more so. I think that Marxism needs to be constantly updated and developed to move forward. I always thought that there were areas where it was weak, such as psychology, although the foundations were there to make it superior to any other contending positions in psychology. But even in areas where it was most developed, such as political economy, the world is constantly changing — indeed it is doing so at an ever-accelerating rate.

There’s always much to do. I think that Marxism has showed itself to have that kind of dynamic capacity, and it is still developing further. I think that in its basic concepts, it is still the most coherent, comprehensive, and well-grounded philosophy on the horizon. Whether or not it is popular, it is right, and I still see it as the unsurpassed philosophy of our time.

CONTRIBUTORS

Helena Sheehan is emeritus professor at Dublin City University. She is the author of Marxism and the Philosophy of Science and Navigating the Zeitgeist.

Daniel Finn is the features editor at Jacobin. He is the author of One Man’s Terrorist: A Political History of the IRA.