(64) Engels' best guide to Marxism, "The Anti-Dühring Theory.

Engels' best guide to Marxism, "The Anti-Dühring Theory," is "A Study in the Life and Thought Background of Marx Engels" (64)

In the above article, we have provided a brief chronological overview of the lives of Marx and Engels, but in this series, "Learning from the Life and Thought Background of Marx and Engels," we will look at the lives and thought of Marx and Engels in more detail.

I will now refer to the book by Tristram Hunt.Engels, The Man Marx Called General.This is a biography of Engels called.

What makes this book excellent is that it explains in an easy-to-understand manner which ideas influenced Engels and how his writings were produced from them.

It is very easy to understand the flow of history because you can learn along with the historical background of the time and the ideas that were popular at the time. It is easy to understand how the ideas of Engels and Marx were developed. The book also gives me a road map of what to read next to learn more about Marx and Engels. I appreciated this.

And this book made me realize how much Engels had influenced Marx's writings. It is quite amazing.

Although this book is a biography of Engels, it also goes into great detail about Marx. It was such a great biography that I thought I could learn more about Marx by reading this book than by reading a biography or commentary on Marx.

We may use other Marx biographies to supplement some of Marx's life and interesting episodes, but basically we will focus on this book and take a closer look at the lives of Marx and Engels.

For other reference books, see the following articles"List of 12 recommended Marx biographies--to learn more about the life and thought of Marx Engels."Please refer to this page for a summary.

So let's get started.

Who was Eugen Dühring, whom Engels considered an enemy?

One of the reasons The Dialectic of Nature was published only after Engels' death was that he interrupted his studies to indulge in his and Marx's favorite pastime: ideological slapstick.

It is quite all right for you to talk," he wrote to Marx in 1876, feigning annoyance. You can lie comfortably on your bed, undisturbed, and study the general land rent, especially the condition of the Russian farmlands. I, on the other hand, have to sit on a hard bench, gulp down a glass of cold wine, and suddenly stop everything to work on my tedious duhring.

The target of their ire, Eugen Dühring, a blind philosophy lecturer at the University of Berlin, the socialism he preached was beginning to penetrate deeply into German social democracy.

Among his early followers was Eduard Bernstein. Like Bakunin and Proudhon before him, Dühring criticized the centralization and economic determinism of Marx and Engels, proposing instead a progressive political platform in which the working class could secure more immediate material benefits.

Dühring believed in "direct political power" and emphasized strikes, collective action, and even the efficacy of violence to achieve his ideal of a wirtschaftskommune - an autonomous commune of workers - as a social institution.

Dühring's street politics were clearly captivating, and many of Germany's leading socialists saw them as an attractive alternative to Marx's seemingly intractable and unattainable philosophy.

All of this infuriated Endels. Never before has anyone written such a gross piece of nonsense," he wrote to Marx from his summer cottage in Ramsgate in July 1876.

It's a glib cliché - nothing more, a bunch of utter nonsense, all of it quite cleverly mapped out for the reader, whom the author knows all too well. They are the ones who want to give you alms, and with a little effort, to order you to do all kinds of things out of your mind.

Even more troubling, Dühring was as much an aggressive ideological fighter as the "old mouth dongers."

He ignored Marx as a "delightful scientific figure," but the full-blown tantrum was directed at Engels, the "Siamese twin," who "only needed to look into himself" to come up with the portrait of the exploiting factory owner in The State of the Working Class in England.

Dühring took direct aim at Engels' Achilles heel. He was "rich in capital, but lacking in insight into that capital. He is one of those who - according to the venerable theory once formulated in Jerusalem - are often compared to a rope or a camel that cannot go through the eye of a needle" [New Testament, Matthew 19:23 et seq. It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God. (The original Aramaic word for "camel" may have been mistranslated as "rope").
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Chikuma Shobo, Tristram Hunt, translated by Erika Togo, Engels: The Man Called General by Marx, p. 380-381

Dühring, like Bakunin, was also very intense, and yet he was also a nuisance who saw exactly where Marx Engels' weaknesses were. (For more on Bakunin, see the following articleBakunin, who saw that Marx's communism would become autocratic state authoritarianism, "Learning from the Life and Ideological Background of Marx and Engels" (58)(See the following table).

As in the quote above, Dühring here exploits "the contradiction that Engels, who is thoroughly attacking the bourgeoisie, is himself a bourgeois and now a stockbroker with enormous assets.

We have discussed this issue in the following article that we have previously introduced, so please refer to this article as well.

And as I read here, I thought that Marx Engels and Dühring are similar in their warfare.

He beats and rubs down his opponents thoroughly. In this way, he tries to get many people to recognize his absolute legitimacy.

Engels may have been particularly angry at being the target of that attack, but I also got the sense that there may have been some homophobia involved.

Engels' Counterattack, "Anti-Dühring Theory"

Encouraged by Wilhelm Liebknecht, and forgetting his initial remorse over his attack on the blind man ("The man is so arrogant that I cannot consider such a thing"), Engels began a series of condemnations of Duhring and his writings in Germany's leading socialist newspaper, the Vorherwelt", Germany's leading socialist newspaper.

Engels dismissed Dühring's claims as nothing more than "mental incompetence due to megalomania," but the text went beyond the usual Marx-Engels venom to a broader definition and defense of "the dialectic and the vision of the communist world."

The philosophy of dialectical materialism, which Engels had studied in his miscellaneous notes on the Dialectic of Nature, was by this time refined and polished and put into book form as "The Scientific Revolution of Mr. Eugen Dühring". This became better known as The Anti-Dühring Theory (1878).

Marxism as opposed to Duhring's fascination withscience,,Engels' great talent as a propagandist and popularizer was on full display as he explained and refuted Marx in vivid and captivating terms. After years of immersion in mathematics, biology, physics, and chemistry, Engels had begun to see himself and Marx's analysis as belonging to the same scientific framework. (omitted).

Engels' real achievement in Anti-Dühring Theory was to apply dialectical materialism to capitalism after immersing himself in the natural sciences and gaining plenty of information.

Engels' three laws-the conflict of opposites, the transition from quantitative to qualitative change, and the negation of negation-can now explain not only biology, chemistry, and evolution, but also the tensions that exist within bourgeois society.

He rattled off a dialectic: "Both the productive forces generated by the modern capitalist mode of production and the system of distribution of goods established by it are in tense contradiction with the mode of production itself."

If the whole of modern society is not to disappear, then a revolution in the modes of production and distribution must take place. All class distinctions will come to an end.

Opposites must be opposed, negations denied, and, like a butterfly hatching from its chrysalis, a new society would be born from the old contradictions inherent in it. This crucial tool for reading the endless shifting contradictions of society and its readiness for revolution was Marx's decisive contribution to Western thought.

For Marx, the point of philosophy was always to change the world, not merely to interpret it. And the political implications of dialectical materialism are also clearly stated in a passage from the Anti-Dühring Theory, which was eventually rewritten by Engels and published infantasyutopiaThe idea for this more focused introduction to scientific socialism came from Marx's daughter-in-law, Paul Lafargue, who had been a member of the Marxist Society for the Advancement of Science. The idea for this more focused introduction to scientific socialism came from Paul Lafargue, Marx's son-in-law.
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Chikuma Shobo, Tristram Hunt, translated by Erika Togo, Engels: The Man Called General by Marx, p. 381-384

This is how it was writtenThe Anti-During Theory."had a tremendous impact on the spread of Marxism.

A new book, "From Imagination to Science," excerpted from this book, will likewise be familiar to many as a guide to Marxism. This book will be introduced again in the next article.

Response to "The Anti-During Theory.

According to David Ryazanov, the first president of the Marx-Engels Society, the Anti-Dühring Theory was a landmark in the history of Marxism.

The younger generation that began working in the late 1870s learned from this book what scientific socialism was, its philosophical premises, and its methods. ...... Apart from Capital itself, nothing had a greater influence on the popularization of Marxism as a special method and a special system than the Anti-Dühring Theory. Every young Marxist who stepped onto the public stage in the early 1980s grew up reading it."

Like August Böbel, Georgi Plekhanov, Victor Adler, and Eduard Bernstein (who, after reading Engels' book, recanted his belief in Duhring and turned to Marxism), Karl Kautsky was part of a generation that, under Engels' tutelage Kautsky was part of the generation that came to fully understand scientific socialism and to take it to the public stage.

No other book has been more helpful to me in understanding Marxism, judging from the effect that 'Anti-Dühringism' has had on me," he wrote late in life. Marx's 'Capitalism' is, of course, a more compelling work." But it was only through 'Anti-Durink's Theory' that we learned to understand 'Capital' and to read it properly."
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Chikuma Shobo, Tristram Hunt, translated by Erika Togo, Engels: The Man Called General by Marx, p. 386-387

It is easy to see how much the Anti-Dühring Theory had a major impact on the propagation of Marxism.

In contrast, however, in recent years there has been a strong criticism that "Engels distorted and spread Marx. The criticism that "Engels was the cause of the events that Marxism caused afterwards" has become stronger.

Did Engels really distort Marx? Or did he successfully explain Marx's difficult (and incomprehensible) ideas? This is the big question.

In response, the author states the following. This is a bit long, but it is a very important section, so I will read it carefully.

Did Engels really distort Marx with his "Anti-Dühring Theory"?

Nevertheless, another stream of thought, beginning with Western Marxist scholar Lukács Gergi and continuing with Jean-Paul Sartre and Louis Althusser, has maintained that what Engels systematized in the 180s was not the original Marxism.

thatthat (someone or something distant from both speaker and listener, or situation unfamiliar to both speaker and listener),,It is materialism,that (someone or something distant from both speaker and listener, or situation unfamiliar to both speaker and listener),,Dialectics,that (someone or something distant from both speaker and listener, or situation unfamiliar to both speaker and listener),,With science universalism,He is.,,It was a false connection between Hegel and Marx.

Lukács said, "The misunderstandings that arise from Engels' account of dialectics generally arise from the fact that Engels - following Hegel's misguidance - applied this method to nature as well." But the crucial determinants of the dialectic-the interrelationship of subjectivity and objectivity, the integration of theory and practice, the historical changes in reality underlying the categories being the root cause of changes in thought-are not present in our knowledge of nature."

The Marxism that appeared in "Anti-Dühring Theory" and "From Fancy to Science" was therefore "Engels' creation" or "Engels' false idea," which represented an outrageous misunderstanding of Marxist thought.

According to Norman Levin's scathing review, "It was Engels who first deviated from Marxism. Thus, it was Engelsism that laid the foundation for later dogmatism and the materialist idealism of Stalin in later times."

As evidence, these "true Marxists" point to a series of periods of broken correspondence between Marx and Engels. They say that this suggests that Marx never acknowledged Engels' later writings and was trying to casually distance himself from them without hurting his friend's feelings.

Whatever the major changes in Marxism in the 20th century, it is a misreading of the relationship between Marx and Engels to imply that Engels deliberately distorted Marxist theory or that Marx had such a fragile friendship with him that it was unbearable for him (Karl Marx!) to express disagreement. It is a misreading of the relationship between Marx and Engels to imply that it was unbearable for Engels to express his disagreement because Marx had only a fragile friendship with him.

There is no evidence that Marx was ashamed or concerned about Engels' popularization of Marxism.

On the contrary, it was Marx who first initiated the "Anti-Dühring Theory," had the manuscript read in its entirety, contributed to a short section on economics, and in 1878 recommended the book as "very important for a real understanding of German socialism.

In fact, Marx, like Engels, was energized by the scientific advances of his time. Especially in the field of natural science," Wilhelm Liebknecht recalled.

Marx was an avid follower of every new appearance and advance - including in physics and chemistry - and in history as well. And Molescott, Liebig, and Huxley - whose "public lectures" we patiently attended - were as much in our company as Ricard, Adam Smith, McCulloch, and the Scottish and Irish economists, Darwin was a name that was often talked about. And when Darwin quoted the results of his investigations and presented them to the world, we spent months talking about Darwin and the revolutionary power of his scientific conquests.

Marx himself was drawn back to Hegel's work in the 1870s, and he was the first to argue that dialectical laws apply to both nature and society.

Whatever one may think of the grand theoretical system of the Anti-Dühring Theory, there is no denying that it was a genuine and mature expression of Marxist views.

For the previous 30 years, Engels had devoted himself to explaining and popularizing the works of the "First Violin," and there seems to be little reason why he would suddenly in the 1870s, under Marx's watch, seek to twist, falsify, and deviate from his master's voice.

In subsequent decades, others have reinterpreted Engels' interpretation, as will be discussed below, but that is not something he can be blamed for on the ideological front.
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Chikuma Shobo, Tristram Hunt, translated by Erika Togo, Engels: The Man Called General by Marx, p. 387-389

The author's assertion, "Would I bother to distort his ideas in the face of Marx's scrutiny?" made me think, "Indeed! I thought to myself, "Indeed! Since the perfectionist Marx was involved in the production of this work, it would be harsh to pin all the blame on Engels.

The Anti-Dühring Theory is a work that had a very significant impact on the world that followed. It was the most interesting work to learn how Marx and Engels spread throughout the world.

In the next article, I will discuss "From Imagination to Science," which was derived from this work.

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