Distinction between Marx and Engels

I don't claim to be any great expert in such weighty matters but I was under the impression that Marx endorsed much of Engels work on dialectics. He even wrote (or supplied much of the material for) chapter 10 of Anti-Duhring, fulfilling his promise to help Engels after encouraging the other to attack Duhring. At Lafargue's request he wrote an introduction to Socialism: Utopian & Scientific and also supported Engels when he wrote to the editor of Vorwarts concerning Anti-Duhring: "not only simple workers but scientifically educated people can learn from Engels’s positive explanations" (Marx to Bracke, 11 April 1877).

If Engels works were a departure from Marx, it must been a rather subtle one for Marx himself not to notice.

This isn't really what I was referring to. I was referring to the philosophical/theoretical basis of Second International Marxism as it descends from Engels. Obviously the politics are not entirely separate from this question but they're not immediately identical either.

And in any case, Marx brutally criticized the Gotha Programme. Even though he supported its formation he certainly attacked its theoretical claims (and note also that they did not accept Marx's critique!).

Your conclusion does not follow from the premises. That Marx studied pre-capitalist societies doesn't prove that he was working on "a general theory of the evolution of social forms" in any significant sense. The Grundrisse, for example, arrives precisely at the conclusion that there are a number of different paths to the capitalist mode of production, i.e. a non-universal theory of history. Also, it seems that part of Marx's reason for studying pre-capitalist societies was the fact that not all societies in Marx's time were capitalist. I have seen it written (I forget where, but I'll check) that Marx's ethnographic notebooks were much more focused on contemporary (in Marx's time) non-capitalist societies rather than pre-capitalist modes of production (which Engels focused on in his Origins...). I can't confirm this since I have not read Marx's Ethnographic Notebooks (I figure I'll wait until the full English translation is published) but it is definitely something worth thinking about.

And I quote a (nowadays) well-known statement from Marx on precisely this topic, a statement which makes no sense from the standpoint of the epigones of Marxism: "Success will never come with the master-key of a general historico-philosophical theory whose supreme virtue consists in being supra-historical." (From his letter to the editorial board of Otechestvennye Zapiski, in response to an article by Mikhailovsky, in pg. 136 of Late Marx and the Russian Road ed. Teodor Shanin. The date of its writing is unknown (according to Wada's article in the book) but is supposed to have been written either at the end of 1877 or 1878. I'm not sure what it's listed under in the Collected Works.)

But Marx had no trouble in criticising Engels' views in other matters. For example, he questions Engels' dismissal of a book by a chap called Tremaux concerning evolution and geology. He had a deep interest in all scientific matters of his day and his letters show that he shared and discussed these matters with Engels regularly. At one point he even said (according to Mehring, I can't find the letter) that he lagged behind Engels in his understanding of science "everything for me comes late and I always follow in your footsteps".

You mention Marx ignoring Engels' criticisms on the Contribution. He also happened to ignore Engels' advice on writing Capital. The latter thought the presentation was too dense and too much remained of the Hegelian form of presentation. Engels was of the opinion that even by then, no-one knew or understood that form anymore and Marx was making a mistake in using it. Marx largely ignored Engels but - in my humble opinion at least - Engels might have had a point!

So Marx ignored Engels' criticisms in certain regard and its perfectly possible Engels ignored Marx when he thought he was wrong (which, upon occasion, he undoubtedly was). But this didn't stop Marx from defending Engels, largely supporting his work and did not see Engels' work as constituting a serious enough misapplication of their method to prevent him from publically endorsing it.

I think the problem with this whole debate is that it reduces us to behaving like biblical scholars, poring over minute discrepencies in letters or forms of presentation, trying to decide who deviated from some divine from the prophet's vision. Einstein and Bohr had considerable disagreements over the import of quantum theory - Bohr was largely proven right, but you don't hear scientists arguing over which one was a proper scientist or not! Their respective theories are considered in their own right.

So I think trying to make Marx and Engels identical in every respect is flawed, it's clear they often disagreed. It's also mistaken to try and split them with implications that Engels wasn't a "proper" Marxist. The method Marx developed does not "belong" to him any more than mechanics belongs to Newton - it seems to me to be quite acceptable to "deviate" if that deviation can be justified by reality. At the end of the day, Marxism, dialectical, historical, scientific materialism, whatever you want to call it is a tool for understanding that reality. If it fails to do so, it should be criticised and modified - if the failure is complete, throw it away.

mikus - I welcome your last posts becuase they do offer the possibility of debate. There is much to think about in what you write (in particular the quote from Grundrisse). I haven't read Carver's book and in fact have only heard of it recently, but it looks as though it is essential reading. I am in a rush but three quick points:

- it seems impossible to read the Preface to the Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy except as a summation of a general theory of the rise and fall of forms of class society. Of course each mode of production has its own specific 'laws of motion' but Marx is precisely trying to draw out what is common to the whole movement - in particular the onset of phases in which the relations of production enter into increaisngly violent conflict with the forces of production, thus pointing the way towards the overcoming of capitalist society;
- what Marx certainly opposed was a purely linear and pre-determined succession of modes of production (caricatured in particular by Stalinism). The debate on Russia was especially important in this respect, since Marx was engaged in a polemic with Russian 'marxists' who argued that Russia would inevitably have to go through a bourgeois epoch before it would be 'ripe' for socialism, a mechanistic and narrowly national method which Marx rejected
- I agree with Demo's post that looking for tiny differences isn't the main point here. But I have noticed that those who argue that there was a serious gulf between Marx and Engels often grudgingly accept that Marx and Engels 'were of course good friends'. As indeed they were. But this approach downplays the degree to which Marx and Engels also saw themselves as a 'party' (more accurately, a fraction...) which was committed to theoretical/political unity and coherence in the face of very widespread levels of confusion in the workers' movement of their day.

Sorry this has taken me so long to respond. I've been busy trying to find work, mostly unsuccessfully.

The first two sentences are misleading. Yes, Marx criticized Engels on one rather trivial issue. This doesn't imply that Marx was open to criticizing Engels on issues that had to do with communist revolution. In addition, the fact that Marx didn't understand natural science as well as Engels doesn't lend support to your argument. It would even possible to use this as an argument against the view that Marx supported the dialectic of nature -- if Marx's method was really what Engels said it was, then one would think that Marx would have spent more time studying natural science, since in Engels' interpretation of Marx the dialectical worldview (including the dialectic of nature) is necessary for Marx's theory of capitalist production.

You have misunderstood me here. Engels never criticized Marx's Contribution. Rather, when Engels attempted to explain Marx's method in the Contribution, he explained it in a way directly contrary to the way that Marx explains his own method in his Introduction to the Grundrisse. There is simply no way to reconcile the two views: Engels says that the logical progression of categories is the same as the historical progression of categories; Marx says that the two proceed in the opposite direction. One can see that Marx stood by his claim in the Grundrisse in Capital insofar as he treated merchant's capital and interest-breaing capital after industrial capital, although they historically preceded industrial capital. This cannot be reconciled with Engels' interpretation of Marx.

And yet, Marx never openly spoke out against Engels on this issue; nor, so far as we know, did he criticize Engels in private. Clearly Marx held his tongue for one reason or another. It is this combination of facts (the fact that they disagreed, and the fact that Marx did not openly criticize Engels) that must be examined. Since these two things are facts, it is impossible to argue that because Marx didn't criticize Engels openly on this issue, they must have agreed (i.e. Marx must have supported Engels' dialectical worldview).

As far as Engels' criticism of Marx's initial presentation of Ch. 1 of Capital goes, that is a different issue and so far as I can tell not relevant to the present topic. There's nothing mysterious in that exchange between the two.

This does little good for us today. In Marx's day, Engels' weltanschuuang could not have been seen as a major issue. Today, with the benefit of hindsight, we can see that it is first of all simply wrong (no scientist would accept Engels' view of natural philosophy), and secondly damaging insofar as it makes it impossible for Marxists to reconcile themselves with natural science, leading to the twin errors of Lysenkoism and the anti-scientific theories of Western Marxism (and here I support the thesis that Western Marxism and diamat are not so different in spite of the former's rejection of the dialectic of nature).

Okay, I have no problem with evaluating Marx's and Engels' respective theories in their own rights. In fact, this is a necessary corollary of what I've been arguing. But before one tests the two theories against reality, one must understand that there are two different theories, and that if one falls down the other doesn't necessarily fall down with it.

And here it is obvious that Marx's theory stands up while Engels' doesn't -- the main theses of Capital have been shown to be correct while the development of natural science has become no more dialectical and yet its knowledge has greatly progressed. As I said above, no scientist would defend the dialectic of nature in its original form (of course, one can refer to real oppositions as "dialectical contradictions" but this is mere wordplay and does not support the substance of what Engels is saying).

The problem is that when one brings up Engels' mistake most Marxists defend Engels by saying "Marx agreed with Engels, so if Engels is wrong Marx must have been as well!" My argument is therefore twofold: Firstly, there is no reason to think that Marx and Engels agreed on the dialectic of nature, and secondly Marx's general theory is valid while Engels' isn't.

See above. There is no justification for the dialectic of nature "in reality". Its justification lies only in the dogmatism of Second International influenced Marxism.

Mike: there are a lot of issues raised in your posts which I can't do justice to right now. But I would like to reply to the following passage:

"But this is precisely a general form of antagonism. In itself it provides no insight into the capitalist mode of production or its economic law of motion. This abstraction "forces of production" is similar to Marx's abstraction of "labor" in general, which he discusses in Part I of Ch. 7 of Capital Vol. 1 as well as the Introduction to the Grundrisse. It is what is common to all modes of production and therefore tells us nothing about any specific mode of production.

So I see no sense in which Marx's 1859 Preface is teleological or even a theory/philosophy of history in the usual sense"

Some brief comments:
- I seriously don't understand why defining what is common to all modes of production tells us nothing about a specific mode of production. Marx surely tried to understand how the specific social relations of production in bourgeois society - wage labour, generalised comodity production - were bound to turn from "forms of development" into "fetters", so that wage labour, as he put it (I think in the Grundrisse) would stand in the same relation to historical development as serfdom and slavery had stood in relation to previous social forms. The concrete, specific translation of this general approach was the investigation of contradictions specific to the capitalist mode of production, hence the examination of the tendency towards overproduction and the tendency for the rate of profit to fall as particular manifestations of the wage labour relationship. As Bordiga once put it, Marx's work is the 'necrology' of capital: in other words, its fundamental aim is to demonstrate why the seemingly triumphant bourgeois society of his day was doomed to go the same way as vanished forms of social organisation like classical slavery or oriental despotism.
- I doubt whether Marx would have termed such a general historical theory a 'philosophy' given his view that, to all intents and purposes, the proletarian movement had already overcome philosophy, at least in its traditional sense. As I understand it, the issue is not whether marxism is an all-encompassing 'weltanshcauung' (which it isn't), nor whether it is 'teleological' in the metaphysical sense of the term. The issue is whether Marx's method can lead us to a grasp of the historical process that takes us further back than bourgeois society, and it seems evident to me that Marx thought that it did.

For me, the major distinction between Marx and Engels is in terms of their personality types and development as Human beings, and not in the content of their ideas.

Marx is fundamentally a poet and philosopher who got into mathematics and economics.

Engels is fundamentally a scientist, economicist, and officer who got into philosophy.

They both embraced the dialectic, but Engels is much more of an, for lack of a better word, "equtian - ist". As an equationist, Engels always sought to find the perfect mathematical equations to plug things into, and then illustrate the dialectic. He categorized things quickly, and had no problem seeing things as such.

Marx was much more of the philosopher, and what he would do was refrain from equations, and illustrate the dialectic of things through example.

Compare Engels "Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy" with the rest of The Paris Manuscripts (EPM of 1844). These very early works contain the nucleus of what will be the major differences between the two.

Engels follows the empirical model much more than Marx. For Engels, the theories and formulas are very important, whereas for Marx, the methodology is key. The information that he digs up and illuminates is his gift to the world.