Engels' Prefaces
Preface I
Engels' first preface was published in June 1878. He begins by setting out the background to the work, as I have detailed in the Foreword.
“It was not my fault that I had to follow Herr Dühring into realms where at best I can only claim to be a dilettante. In such cases I have for the most part limited myself to putting forward the correct, undisputed facts in opposition to my adversary's false or distorted assertions. This applies to jurisprudence and in some instances also to natural science. In other cases it has been a question of general views connected with the theory of natural science — that is, a field where even the professional natural scientist is compelled to pass beyond his own speciality and encroach on neighbouring territory — territory on which he is therefore, as Herr Virchow has admitted, just as much a "semi-initiate" as any one of us. I hope that in respect of minor inexactitudes and clumsiness of expression, I shall be granted the same indulgence as is shown to one another in this domain.” (p 6)
Preface II
Preface II was published in September 1885. By that time, as mentioned in the Foreword, Duhring and his system had been, largely, forgotten. Engels says that the reason for renewed interest in Anti-Duhring was the fact that it, along with his other works, had been banned after the introduction of the Anti-Socialist Laws, in October 1878. Much as with alcohol prohibition, in the US, or as with the “war on drugs”, and other such bureaucratic measures of censorship and proscription, the result was to promote even greater interest, sales and distribution by other means.
“To anyone whose brain has not been ossified by the hereditary bureaucratic prejudices of the countries of the Holy Alliance, the effect of this measure must have been self-evident: a doubled and trebled sale of the banned books, and the exposure of the impotence of the gentlemen in Berlin who issue bans they cannot enforce. Indeed the kindness of the Imperial Government has brought me more new editions of my minor works than I can claim the credit for; I have had no time to make a proper revision of the text, and in most cases have been obliged simply to allow it to be reprinted as it stood.” (p 7-8)
Such is the experience of all bureaucratic attempts to legislate for what people think, as with the attempts to impose such censorship in the realm of the Internet and social media, hate crime, and so on.
But, there was another reason set out by Engels, which is that, in the intervening period, the labour movement, itself, had grown, and the ideas set out by he and Marx, in The Poverty of Philosophy, The Communist Manifesto, and, later, in Capital, had also grown along with it, “and now finds recognition and support far beyond the boundaries of Europe, in every country which contains proletarians on the one hand and undaunted scientific theoreticians on the other. Therefore, it seems that there is a public with an interest in the subject great enough to accept the polemic against the Dühring tenets for the sake of the positive conceptions accompanying it, although the polemic has now largely lost its point.” (p 8)
The second edition, Engels says, is mostly unchanged from the first, because of lack of time, on his part, given the requirements for him to prepare Marx's manuscripts for the publication of Capital Volume II and III, but, also, because of not changing what had been a polemic against Duhring's work.
“The book is a polemic, and I think I owe it to my adversary not to improve anything in my work when he is unable to improve his. I could only claim the right to make a rejoinder to Herr Dühring's reply. But I have not read, and will not read, what Herr Dühring has written concerning my attack, unless there is some special reason to do so; in point of theory I have :finished with him. Besides, I must observe the rules of decency in literary warfare all the more strictly in his regard because of the despicable injustice that has since been done to him by the University of Berlin. (p 9)
Only in relation to the second chapter of Part III is there a significant change.
“This chapter deals solely and simply with the exposition of a pivotal point in the world outlook for which I stand, and my adversary cannot therefore complain if I attempt to state it in a more popular form and to make it more coherent. In fact there was an extraneous reason for doing so. I had revised three chapters of the book (the first chapter of the Introduction and the first and second of Part III) for my friend Lafargue with a view to their translation into French as a separate pamphlet and after the French edition had served as the basis for Italian and Polish editions, I issued a German edition under the title: Die Entwicklung des Sozialismus von der Utopie zur Wissenschaft.” [Socialism: Utopian and Scientific] (p 10)
As this chapter had been expanded in these publications, it made sense to include that version in the second edition.
Anti-Duhring, as Engels states began as a polemic against Duhring's system, but became a positive statement of his and Marx's theory of historical materialism. As such, it touches on the development of human societies far wider than just the evolution of capitalism. At the time of its publication, Lewis Morgan's anthropological study had only just appeared. That study, also contained much of the ideas set out by Marx and Engels, and which could only be presented as hypotheses, prior to such detailed study. Engels notes that he was able to incorporate that further data in his, The Origins of The Family, Private Property and The State, and so a reference to that work removed the need to include it in the new edition.
The other deficiency, in the first edition, Engels says, was in relation to theoretical natural science. By its nature, all of its hypotheses are subject to confirmation by experiment, and so necessarily provision in nature.
“There is much that is awkward in the exposition and much of it could be expressed today in a clearer and more definite form. I have not allowed myself the right to improve this section, and for that very reason am under an obligation to criticise myself here instead.” (p 10-11)
A knowledge of maths and natural science is vital to a theory that is both dialectical and materialist. Despite being polymaths, neither Marx nor Engels could hope to keep pace with the torrent of new scientific discoveries of their age, and, even less is that possible, today.
“For this reason, when I retired from business and transferred my home to London, thus enabling myself to give the necessary time to it, I went through as complete as possible a "moulting", as Liebig calls it, in mathematics and the natural sciences, as was possible for me and spent the best part of eight years on it. I was right in the middle of this "moulting" process when, as it happened, I had to occupy myself with Herr Dühring's so-called natural philosophy. It was therefore only too natural that in dealing with this subject I was sometimes unable to find the correct technical expression, and in general moved with considerable clumsiness in the field of theoretical natural science. On the other hand, my lack of assurance in this field, which I had not yet overcome, made me cautious, and I cannot be charged with real blunders in relation to the facts as then known or with incorrect presentation of recognised theories. In this connection there was only one unrecognised genius of a mathematician who complained in a letter to Marx that I had made a wanton attack upon the honour of √-1.” (p 11)
Engels wanted, via these studies, to confirm to himself that what appears, in nature, as chaos or chance, just as with social laws, is, in fact, only a superficial manifestation of underlying natural laws and dialectical processes.
“The old natural philosophy — in spite of its real value and the many fruitful seeds it contained — was manifestly unable to satisfy us. As is more fully brought out in this book, the old natural philosophy, particularly in the Hegelian form, erred because it did not concede to nature any development in time, any "succession", but only "co-existence". This was on the one hand grounded in the Hegelian system itself, which ascribed continued historical development only to the "spirit", but on the other hand was also due to the whole state of the natural sciences in that period. Here, Hegel fell far behind Kant, whose nebular theory had already indicated the origin of the solar system,' and whose discovery of the retardation of the earth's rotation by the tides had also proclaimed the doom of that system. Finally, for me there could be no question of superimposing the laws of dialectics on nature, but of discovering them in it and developing them from it.” (p 12-13)
The nebular theory, proposed by Kant, is, today, accepted as the most likely model for the formation of the solar system, and other planetary systems.
Engels lists a series of discoveries of the time that illustrated that the old absolutes, and fixed categories could no longer hold. All gases had now been liquefied, and it had been shown that matter can exist in a state where the gaseous and liquid forms are indistinguishable; that heat is a consequence of the speed of movement of molecules; discoveries were indicating that rather than energy being merely conserved, it is transformed. In the first part of the 20th century, Einstein would not only show that time is relative, but would show that matter is also transformed into energy – E = MC2.
Already, in the 19th century, it was shown, not just that energy is required to move matter, but that the opposite is true. Matter via motion, produces energy. In biology, Darwin's theory of evolution had demonstrated this same process of transformation, in place of the old ideas about everything that existed always having existed.
“The almost unclassifiable intermediate links are growing daily more numerous, closer investigation throws organisms out of one class into another, and distinguishing characteristics which had almost become articles of faith are losing their absolute validity; we now have mammals that lay eggs, and, if the report is confirmed, also birds that walk on all fours.” (p 15)
Preface III
The third preface was published in 1894, a year before Engels' death. In this edition, Engels made substantial changes to the Tenth Chapter of Part II, remedying the earlier deficiency that he had to severely cut its contents, written by Marx, originally intended for separate publication. This section was the most of interest.
“I consider myself under an obligation to give in as full and faithful a form as possible the passages in which Marx assigns to people like Petty, North, Locke and Hume their appropriate place in the genesis of classical political economy; and even more his explanation of Quesnay's “Economic Tableau”, which has remained an insoluble riddle of the sphinx to all modern political economy. On the other hand, wherever the thread of the argument makes this possible, I have omitted passages which refer exclusively to Herr Dühring's writings.” (p 17)
I have also dealt with these writers, and Marx's analysis of their works, Theories of Surplus Value.
No comments:
Post a Comment