Engels Book

I cannot be sure that this book is actually a good book for the presumed target audience: those wanting an introduction to Engels. It is however a fantastic book for me, because it focused solely on the questions I wanted answered: what is the philosophical relationship between Engels and Marx, where do they agree, where do they disagree, and is Engel's work responsible for "Marxism." And if so, how accurate was the Engel's reading of Marx, in the subsequent development of Marxism. Clearly these are not the questions someone is asking, if they are looking for a brief biography of Engels life and thought. Although both are included, they are not the crux of the book. For instance, one will miss out on all the juicy details of Engel's sex life, his participation in revolution, his Christmas pudding, and his fights with Marx over money; where he's always accepting Marx's apologies, that don't actually exist.

In regards to the questions I was concerned with, Terrell Carver (a fantastic author, whose Cambridge Companion to Marx is equally well written, and crystal clear) opens the book informing the reader those are exactly the questions he will be addressing. Thus, he dives right in and explains that Engels was the first Marxist. But Engels was different from Marx. He had a gift for "glossing" and/or "summarizing," but absolutely lacked the original depth of Marx. Thus, if one wanted someone to summarize another's views, Engels could do this well, but he could not come up with original questions of his own, nor give very good answers to original questions. While there's nothing wrong with Engels lacking ability alongside "the master," there is something wrong when people take his words as Marx's words

There are few areas in the study of Marxism, and especially in 20th century Marxists regimes, where this has been done. Engels dialectics of nature, and the anti-duhring, were always seen as reflecting Marx's views. Carver offers brilliant scholarship into this matter, and comes out with unequivocal: wrong. It turns out Engels wrote Marx letters asking if he liked his drafts of the anti-duhring, and his dialectics of nature, and Marx always replied that he did like them but never said he agreed with them. Moreover, sections regarding dialectics and motion, Marx passed along to his chemist friend -due to Marx's own skepticism - and his friend replied that Engels was simply dead wrong. Marx concurred, but Engels published his "findings" on dialectics in motion, unaware of Marx's disagreement, and later ascribed Marx's faux agreement to the text in a preface written after Marx's death.

Engels it seems was always obsessed with final causation, matter as the catalyst of all mind operation and phenomena, and determinism. His obsession with these philosophical matters, along with his glossy summaries of Marx's views, led to the false notion that Engels materialism, causation, and determinism, were Marx's, when in fact they were not. Marx was at pains to avoid laying down positive claims to any of these matters, whereas Engels was making positive claims on these matters throughout his entire life. Marx would work for years on a single problem, Engels summarized positions on many. Thus the rigid materialist determinism found in Marxism, the base as the final cause of all ideology and action, and the doctrine of historical materialism, along with the dialectics of motion, and dialectics as a new Science, are all Engels, and not Marx's. Of course as independent pieces of work, Engels views ought to be treated with standard philosophical cunning, but their false ascription to Marx, and the horrors of myopic Marxists regimes, leads to a tarnishing of Marx's reputation - for positions he never held - and an academic negligence to engage Engels on philosophical terms, and not ad hominem ones.

Ironically though, it was Engels who helped turn Marx on to communism and not the other way around. Additionally, at first Marx co-wrote books with Engels, utilizing Engels popularity to piggy back sales of his own works, whereas after Marx died, Engels cited Marx, to piggy back sales of his books. The two were a perfect match in their contemporary moment, but as thinkers, and theorist, it's now time - especially since the fall of the Berlin wall - to divide their works, and redevelop what exactly is Marxism, what is Engel's reading of Marxism, and what bits of either need to be kept or jettisoned; all the while employing ample caution in conflating either men.