“It was Engels, McLellan contended, who had introduced positivism into Marxism”
“The very idea that Marx had “a methodology” was attributed to Engels, and hence declared false. Removed from his association with Engels and stripped of all determinate content, Marx was easily made acceptable to the status quo, as a kind of intellectual forerunner. As Carver recently put it, with no apparent sense of irony, “Marx was a liberal thinker.””
“But most criticisms of Engels have been directed at his alleged scientism in Anti-Dühring and his unfinished Dialectics of Nature. McLellan in his Engels biography stated that the latter’s interest in natural science “made him emphasize a materialist conception of nature rather than of history.””
“He was accused of bringing “the concept of matter” into Marxism, which was “entirely foreign to Marx’s work.” His main mistake was in attempting to develop an objective dialectics that abandoned “the subjective side of the dialectic,” and that led to “the gradual assimilation of Marx’s views to a scientific world outlook.””
“Just as Marx was increasingly presented as the refined intellectual, Engels was seen more and more as the coarse popularizer. Engels has thus served in the academic discourse on Marxism as a convenient whipping boy.”
“Yet Engels had his admirers, as well. The first real sign of a reversal in his fading fortunes within contemporary Marxist theory arose with historian E. P. Thompson’s The Poverty of Theory in 1978, which was primarily directed against the structuralist Marxism of Louis Althusser. Here Thompson defended historical materialism against an abstract and hypostatized theory divorced from any historical subject and from all empirical reference points.”
“In the process, he valiantly — and in what I have always seen as one of the high points in late twentieth-century English letters — stood up for that “old duffer Frederick Engels,” who had been the target of so much of Althusser’s criticism.”
“On this basis, Thompson made a case for a kind of dialectical empiricism — what he admired most in Engels — as essential to a historical-materialist analysis.”
“A few years later, Marxian economist Paul Sweezy’s Four Lectures on Marxism began by boldly reasserting the importance of Engels’s approach to dialectics and his critique of mechanistic and reductionist views.”
“A few years later, in 1983, Gould extended his argument in the New York Review of Books, pointing out that all theories of human evolution were theories of “gene-culture coevolution,” and that “the best nineteenth-century case for gene-culture coevolution was made by Friedrich Engels in his remarkable essay of 1876 (posthumously published in The Dialectics of Nature), ‘The part played by labor in the transition from ape to man.’””
“The case for the indispensability of Engels for the critique of capitalism in our time is rooted in his famous thesis in Anti-Dühring that “Nature is the proof of dialectics.” This was often derided within Western Marxist philosophy. Nevertheless, Engels’s thesis, reflecting his own deep dialectical and ecological analysis, would have to be rendered in today’s parlance: Ecology is the proof of dialectics — a proposition the significance of which few would now be prepared to deny.”
“Viewed in this way, it is easy to see why Engels has assumed such an important place in contemporary ecosocialist discussions.”
“Works in ecological Marxism commonly quote as leitmotif his famous words of warning in The Dialectics of Nature:
Let us not, however, flatter ourselves overmuch on account of our human victories over nature. For each such victory nature takes its revenge on us. Each victory, it is true, in the first place brings about the results we expected, but in the second and third places it has quite different, unforeseen effects which only too often cancel out the first . . . 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 creatures of being able to learn its laws and apply them correctly.”
“For Engels, as for Marx, the key to socialism was the rational regulation of the metabolism of humanity and nature, in such a way as to promote the fullest possible human potential, while safeguarding the needs of future generations.”