It is something of a leitmotiv in Western academic and leftist Marxist discourse that Marx and Engels 'overthrew' or 'finished with' philosophy. This notion fits in well culturally with the vulgar British empirical tradition which regards abstract thought in general as an unnecessary epistemological burden. As will be noted below, the 'overthrow' impressionism was strongly rejected by both Russian and Soviet Marxists although we note that Soviet philosophy had its own problems.

What I intend to do here, then, is simple. Not only to actually look at what Marx and Engels wrote about philosophy, rather than what they are reported to have written, but also to consider whether the 'overthrow' thesis is tenable in the context of what other Marxist writers have written.

The view of Engels on philosophy has magnified in importance due to historical circumstances. One can note that the publication of some of Marx's major philosophical works were delayed. As Colletti notes:

"Marx's youthful philosophical work was for the most part only discovered comparatively recently". (1) For example the 'German Ideology' was not published until 1932 in complete form and the 'Paris Manuscripts' were published the same year.

The consequences of such a delay were that Marxist theorists before that time had to rely on extrapolating Marx's philosophical precepts from 'Capital' and other (non-philosophical) works. (2)

It was inevitable, then, that the work of Marx's closest collaborator should fill the vacuum not only because of his systematic presentation of a Marxist philosophical system, (3) but precisely because of the authority invested in him due to his collaboration with Marx.. It is true, for good or ill, to say that, "Engels arguments in the 'Anti-Duhring' decisively influenced the later life of the theory". (4)

In the historical period in which Marx and Engels were writing, there was a marked tendency to emphasise the 'positivist' aspect to Marxist theory in opposition to the influence of utopian socialism. (5) Science, using the term in broad terms, was viewed uncritically as a tool to combat idealism and in particular religious idealism

It is also worth noting, and cannot be emphasised too much, that dialectical movement is emphatically not an invention of thought but that it is drawn from the actual procedures of nature itself. Dialectical movement, even if it was not always referred to by that name, dates from, at least, 5000 BC in China through the ancient Greeks to the present day. Indeed, one of the interesting points about dialectical movement is the manner in which it appears, and re-appears, in philosophical discourses radically differentiated in time, structuration, geography and orientation. This appears to lend substance to the surmise that the dialectic enjoys a certain -explanatory primacy drawn from reality. As Guido De Ruggeiro puts it dialectic is "reality in the making", i.e., to re-emphasise, it is not an abstract intellectual invention but emanates from life itself.

Obviously, this argument constrains Hegel's role as the "discoverer" (6) of dialectic. The, idealist, elaborator yes; the discoverer; no. It is entirely necessary to reject the obsession which some Marxists have with Hegel. Much 'Marxism' is, in fact, radical Hegelianism.

Engels work on the 'Dialectics of Nature' is important if incomplete. It is incomplete because little concern is paid there to the operation of human agency in the historical process: i.e., dialectics apply to social life too. Problems occur when the dialectic as present in nature is taken as a total explanation of dialectical motion. This can lead to the view that Marxism is a theory of causal determinations akin to a natural science: 'vulgar Marxism'. 'The Dialectics of Nature' taken on its own could take you towards a causally deterministic, model of Marxism. However, you would have to ignore the context of the work, the concern to combat utopian socialism with science, and reject, the wealth of Marxist literature - from 'The Paris Manuscripts' to 'Capital' - that present the doctrine as one consisting of explications of conditional determinations. Marx sums up conditional determination succinctly in a famous passage:

"Men make their own history but not of their own free will; not under circumstances they themselves have chosen but under the given and inherited circumstances with which they are directly confronted. The tradition of the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the living." (7)

In other words the doctrine acknowledges the importance of structures but also recognises that people can act in opposition to the constraints imposed by those structures: relative autonomy can be achieved. This must be the case or revolutionary social change would not be possible. Unfortunately, the systematic homage paid to nature and natural science led to the implication of an historical inevitability, as dialectics remote from praxis were applied to historical movement. This has to do with interpreters of Engels rather than simply the theories of the man himself.. (8).

It is worth noting that "Engels arguments", as Carchedi notes, did bear bitter fruit in the historical materialism of the Second International with its 'inevitablist' orientation. (9) The debate on Engels interpretation of philosophy is no abstract affair devoid of consequences in practice. Historical inevitablism both in the sense of a 'final victory' of socialism and the schema that socialism would be reached in a series of rigid 'stages' was mainstream Bolshevik thinking. In this sense Lenin's 'April Theses' were a massive deviation from everything, including his own writings, that had gone before. The final collapse of the Soviet Union from 1989 to 1991 has allowed such historians as Eric Hobsbawn to reinvigorate the argument enacted in 1917 that the October was 'premature'.  

An example from Engels.

Here is how Engels describes the process of negation drawing on an example from plant biology,

"Let us take a grain of barley. Millions of such grains of barley are milled, boiled and brewed and then consumed. But if such a grain of barley meets with conditions which for it are normal, if it falls on suitable soil, then under the influence of heat and moisture a specific change takes place, it germinates; the grain as such ceases to exist, it is negated, and in its place appears the plant which has arisen from it, the negation of the grain. (10)

The fact that Engels has an initial qualification to this passage, that "millions of such grains of barley are milled, boiled and brewed" explicitly indicates that he is not unaware that human intervention can change the course of the "normal" cycle of nature. Here again, if one takes the trouble to apply this process of the negation of negation to social life, we can note it is not an inexplicable explanation of actual social movement. Not in the least to the manner in which whole societies grow and decay and are transformed!

(It is an aside, but an important aside, here to recall that the proposition of the negation of the negation is not compatible with the law of the excluded middle in formal logic. As Plekhanov succinctly explains,

"The movement of matter underlies all the phenomena of nature, but what is movement? It is an obvious contradiction. Should anyone ask you whether a body in motion is at a particular spot at a particular time, you will be unable, with the best will in the world, to answer in accordance with Ueberweg’s rule, that is to say in accordance with the formula "Yes is yes and no is no". A body in motion is at a given point, and at the same time is not there"). (11) 

It is important to carefully consider these two passages from Mao because they present an active dialectic far away from the rigid or causal base-superstructure schema, which has been the orthodoxy, as we note later, in Marxism at times.

"For instance, in the contradiction between the productive forces and the relations of production, the productive forces are the principal aspect; in the contradiction between the economic base and the superstructure the economic base is the principal aspect; and there is no change in their respective positions. This is the mechanical materialist conception, not the
dialectical materialist conception. True, the productive forces, practice and the economic base generally play the principal and decisive role; whoever denies this is not a materialist. But it must also be admitted that in certain conditions, such aspects as the relations of production, theory and the superstructure in turn manifest themselves in the principal and decisive role." (12)

"As opposed to the metaphysical world outlook, the world outlook of materialist dialectics holds that in order to understand the development of a thing we should study it internally and in its relations with other things; in other words, the development of things should be seen as their internal and necessary self-movement, while each thing in its movement is interrelated with and interacts on the things around it. The fundamental cause of the development of a thing is not external but internal; it lies in the contradictoriness within the thing. There is internal contradiction in every single thing, hence its motion and development. Contradictoriness within a thing is the fundamental cause of its development, while its interrelations and interactions with other things are secondary causes. Thus materialist dialectics effectively combats the theory of external causes, or of an external motive force, advanced by metaphysical mechanical materialism and vulgar evolutionism. It is evident that purely external causes can only give rise to mechanical motion, that is, to changes in scale or quantity, but cannot explain why things differ qualitatively in thousands of ways and why one thing changes into another." (13)

A notion of dialectic wholly reliant on nature and the method of natural science is inadequate and distorted. On the other hand my disagreement is total with an important footnote on dialectic which Lukacs appends to 'What is Orthodox Marxism?' arguing that a dialectical explanation applies only to history and society. According to Lukacs, Engels has been misled by Hegel into applying the dialectic to nature. (14) Lukacs appears to follow Marx here in that Marx implies, in his kernel metaphor, that it is possible to extract part of the Hegelian dialectic. There is a difference of emphasis with Engels who believes that a complete extraction of the Hegelian dialectic from his overall system is possible. (Both of them reject the notion that the Hegelian dialectic is totally compromised by its idealist origination.)

The work on science by Engels can be seen as a systematic attempt to reconstruct the dialectic on a fully materialist basis in the positivist traditions of the time. As we shall note Engels approach emphasises the content of the dialectic whilst Marx emphasises its methodology.

When talking about the end of philosophy did Engels mean the end of philosophy as a totality or the end of German Classical philosophy, i.e., Hegelian philosophy? (Which anyway Feuerbach had already begun to lay to waste before Marx or Engels).

Actually Engels said contradictory things, so it is important to deal with this first. A significant problem is that Engels (and Marx) often referred to 'philosophy' when it is clear from the context of the text that they mean 'Hegelian philosophy'. This is partly conceptual slippage but also reflects their conviction that Hegelian philosophy represents the highest level of philosophical discourse reached and therefore Hegelian philosophy can be considered as philosophy in general.

However, the fact that a German artisan, Joseph Dietzgen, was able to develop dialectical materialism independently of Marx and Engels and free from their Hegelian baggage suggests that the identification of Hegelian philosophy as of primary explanatory importance is extremely problematic. This point will be pursued later.

Another point to make is that even though I intend to pursue a textual exegesis the fact is that historically the reliance on such exegesis has crippled Marxism and transformed it from a critical theory to a quasi-religious doctrine locked in dogmatic and sectarian mode. The question actually should not be whether Engels believed that philosophical discourse was concluded, but rather whether he would have been correct or not. Uncritical acceptance of textual 'authorities' as 'proof' has been the bane of Marxism. The debate, for example, between Trotsky and Stalin was not carried out based on whose positions were or were not correct, but rather on who could find most sustenance in the textual authority of Lenin.

Too many times has this biblical study of the sacred texts, which is fundamentally anti-Marxist in terms of methodology, led to bizarre results. So, I want to make it clear that, even though my textual exegesis of Engels leads me to the probable indication that he was finishing with German classical philosophy rather than philosophy in general, if the latter had been his deduction I would argue that he was completely incorrect. My textual exegesis is to determine a matter of historical record not to claim textual authority for intellectual preconceptions.

As ever it is important to deal with a corpus of work rather than isolated incidences and as ever their can be no final answers. What Engels (and Marx) have to say on the 'end of philosophy', (and also what they mean by 'positive science'), is frankly often ambiguous and the reading which I give to them is not the only possible one.

Where Althusser sees a clear 'epistemological break' separating the early and idealist Marx from the mature and materialist Marx I see a progressive and fairly evolutionary development of Marx's thinking. Neither of us are 'wrong', it is a matter of interpretation.

Neither can the influence of fashion be denied. During the late 60's and probably up until the mid-80's when postmodernism became an overt and aggressive academic trend, it was almost impossible to mention Marxism without also mentioning Althusserian theoretical problematics, ISA/RSA, interpolation etc. and conceptualising debate within this paradigm. Attacking, or even questioning, Althusser at the time in an academic debate attracted the same opprobrium as an unsympathetic attitude to postmodernism does now.

The distinction which Comte made between positive philosophy which is reductionist, subject to natural laws and predictive because it is systematic and empirical, and speculative philosophy, which was viewed as metaphysical and unable to fulfil its mission of revealing the essence behind and beyond the essence of phenomena had a general authority and an influence over Engels which can hardly be overestimated.

Engels regarded Hegel's claim to absolute truth as a serious objection to his philosophy. A single philosopher, however brilliant, cannot summarise the learning of the entire human race. This must surely be the case.

"There is an end to all philosophy in the hitherto accepted sense of the word. One leaves alone 'absolute truth', which is unattainable along this path or by any single individual; instead one pursues attainable relative truths along the path of the positive sciences and the summation of their truths by means of dialectical thinking". (15)

There is no ambiguity here: it is clear here that Engels comments apply to Hegel specifically. (Lenin chews over the notion of absolute truth again in Empirio Criticism.)

"Modern materialism… no longer needs any philosophy standing above the other sciences. As soon as each special science is bound to make clear its position in the great totality of things and of our knowledge of things, a special science dealing with this totality is superfluous. That which still survives, independently, of all earlier philosophy is the science of thought and its law - formal logic and dialectics. Everything else is subsumed in the positive science of nature and history." (16)

Whereas Engels, in agreement with Comte, believed that 'positive science' made redundant the pre-scientific speculative philosophy he differed from Comte in not applying this view to philosophy that was not speculative in the above sense. As we can note from the above quotation Engels is stripping away the metaphysical coat from "the science of thought and its law - formal logic and dialectics." This still leaves a very substantial arena of discourse for philosophy! 

In the famous Eleventh Theses on Feuerbach Marx says:

"The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point however is to change it". (Emphasis in original.)

The Eleventh thesis has been misunderstood by both the left, (who read it as the end of philosophy) and in academia (where the relative autonomy of philosophical thought from social life has been, at times, rendered as an absolute autonomy). Both misconceptions reinforce each other.

Far from this being the end to philosophy Marx is actually expanding the philosophical paradigm from one that is purely descriptive to one that is also prescriptive. He is not making a comment about the process of doing philosophy but rather the use to which that philosophical research is to be put. The range of philosophical discourse is extended as 'pure' contemplation which does not lead to action is rejected.

Oizerman presents a dialectical interpretation of the final thesis.

"To counter the many non-Marxist interpretations of that thesis, one should stress the following: Marx does not at all reject the need for a philosophical explanation of the world. He is against reducing the mission of philosophy to the interpretation of that which exists because such self-restriction opposes philosophy to the struggle for a radical transformation of reality. Thus the true meaning of this thesis is a categorical imperative: to make philosophy a theoretical substantiation of the need for the revolutionary transformation of the world". (17)

Oizerman is (along with such philosophers as Ilyenkov) a 'Red Professor' writing in 1982, but it is interesting to note that from Britain John Macmurray was putting forward a similar interpretation in 1935.

"I have drawn attention to this fact (the philosophers own involvement in the world, EH.) in order to explain that much quoted, very fundamental, and usually misunderstood statement of Marx's: "Philosophers hitherto have only interpreted the world in various ways; the task is to change it." This did not mean "Let's stop all this thinking and talking, and do something." It didn't make him a 'practical' man, who had no use for theory. On the contrary, he spent his whole life on the task of working out a theory. He meant that up till his time philosophers had not done their proper task. When he said "the task is to change it," he meant the philosopher's task. He was expressing his insight into the real nature of philosophy." (18)

In the 'German Ideology' Marx suggests:

"Where speculation ends, in real life, there real, positive science, as the representation of the practical activity and the practical development of men begins. Empty and irrelevant talk about consciousness ceases and real knowledge has to take its place. When reality is depicted, philosophy as an independent branch of activity loses its medium of existence. At the most its place can only be taken by a summary of the general results which are derived by abstraction from the historical development of men. Considered in themselves and detached from real history, these abstractions have no value whatsoever." (19)

Marx is noting here that the historical role of philosophy is in a process of transformation. From its place as a universal science from which all other disciplines were derived modern materialism displaces its parametric constraints. Whilst the general argument is true of all philosophy it is obvious that Marx is specifically directing his remarks to idealist philosophy with its "empty and irrelevant talk about consciousness" and detachment "from real history." By definition a materialist philosophy could hardly be a materialist philosophy if it failed to address these two issues!

Engels puts a similar argument in a slightly different manner:

"It (modern materialism) is no longer a philosophy at all, but simply a world outlook which has to establish its validity and be applied not in a science of sciences standing apart, but in the positive sciences. Philosophy is therefore 'sublated' here, that is 'both overcome and preserved', overcome as regards its form and preserved as regards its real content." (20)

This appears to be fairly clear. The dialectical method is imbued with a materialist content. Engels goes on to augment his position. Philosophy was required to provide a summation of positive science by means of dialectical thinking. and to provide a general epistemology of science. In fascinating asides Engels notes that it is impossible to renounce philosophy without falling under the domination of the worst philosophy possible. (21)

A best reading of Engels overall remarks indicates that when a 'positive science' of nature and history is established much, if not all, of 'earlier philosophy' becomes redundant. What remains is the nature of thought and its laws, dialectics and formal logic.

It is worthy of note that Engels allows formal logic to remain. The three major laws of formal logic: the law of identity, the law of opposites, the law of excluded middle are accepted..

These laws are in conceptual conflict with such proposed dialectical movements as the negation of the negation and in particular, what Mao terms the only really important dialectical law, the law of dialectical contradiction.

"As opposed to the metaphysical world outlook, the world outlook of materialist dialectics holds that in order to understand the development of a thing we should study it internally and in its relations with other things; in other words, the development of things should be seen as their internal and necessary self-movement, while each thing in its movement is interrelated with and interacts on the things around it. The fundamental cause of the development of a thing is not external but internal; it lies in the contradictoriness within the thing. There is internal contradiction in every single thing, hence its motion and development. Contradictoriness within a thing is the fundamental cause of its development, while its interrelations and interactions with other things are secondary causes. Thus materialist dialectics effectively combats the theory of external causes, or of an external motive force, advanced by metaphysical mechanical materialism and vulgar evolutionism. It is evident that purely external causes can only give rise to mechanical motion, that is, to changes in scale or quantity, but cannot explain why things differ qualitatively in thousands of ways and why one thing changes into another." (22)

To summarise at this point: I am personally swayed by Macmurray and Oizerman's understanding of the Eleventh Theses on Feuerbach but, naturally, other constructions could be made.

The case of Joseph Dietzgen (1828-1888) is interesting from the viewpoint of a Marxist epistemology in three important ways.

1. If Dietzgen can reach a Marxist account without the intervention of bourgeois intellectuals, then, so can other workers. This should lead worker intellectuals to question the overwhelming predominance of petit-bourgeois intellectuals in the membership and especially the leadership of left wing groupings.

2. Marx, a notoriously contrary human being, thought highly of Dietzgen and considers him as someone who is competent to defend 'Capital'. (23) At the Hague congress of the First International Marx introduced Dietzgen with the words, "Here is our philosopher". Engels salutes Dietzgen and notes that, contrary to popular Marxist belief, Hegel is not, repeat not, a necessary station on the journey to the dialectic.

Dietzgen's ontology is based on Marx and as such attempts to encapsulate an explication of the world without negating thinking as a relatively autonomous activity: 'men make their own history but not of their own free will'. In this manner the historical movement of the dialectic and its logical foundations move into correspondence.

3. British Marxism has acquired the reputation of concentrating on 'bread and butter' issues, i.e. of encompassing a reductionist and empiricist methodology devoid of philosophical input. It did not have to be this way. "For many thousands of worker-students during the first three decades of this century, the name Joseph Dietzgen was indeed synonymous with the study of philosophy". (25)

The elimination of Dietzgen from the Marxist discourse referential in Britain is an indication of a dark regression of the doctrine compounded, as we note later, by crude Soviet Marxist incantations.

We have noted the impact of fashion before and, as Engels himself indicates, the fact that he is considered to be for the great majority of Marxists, the major authority on materialist dialectics is very much a matter of historical serendipity. In Britain the predominant texts used in the National Council of Labour Colleges were by Dietzgen, and the theory was often termed "Marx-Engels-Dietzgenism"

Dietzgen's writings are far from accessible, but this does not explain his lack of status in the Marxist philosophical hierarchy in Britain as an energetic NCLC lecturer, Fred Casey, specialised in popularising Dietzgenism. (26) and works by Dietzgen were a mainstay of NCLC courses. (27) More likely Dietzgen's decline into obscurity began with the publication of Lenin's 'Materialism and Empirio-Criticism' in Britain in 1927, a crude mechanical materialist tract devoid of any concept of mediation, which 'corrected' Dietzgen. (28) after which Dietzgen became persona non grata amongst the official communist left. Tommy Jackson probably finished off any serious reading of Dietzgen when he dismissed Fred Casey in his 'Dialectics' in 1936. (29)

Marx said of the dialectical method,

"In its rational form it is a scandal and abomination to bourgeoisdom and its doctrinaire professors, because it includes in its comprehension an affirmative recognition of the existing state of things, at the same time also, the recognition of the negation of that state, and its inevitable breaking up; because it regards every historically developed social form as in fluid movement, and therefore takes into account its transient nature not less than its momentary existence; because it lets nothing impose upon it, and is in essence critical and revolutionary". (30)

The time when dialectical materialism was 'overthrown', if only temporarily, was during the Soviet period when, far from being the potentially critical theory noted above by Marx, it was transformed into a state religion. To be more precise one should say that the 'understanding' of dialectical materialism was transformed because as was noted before the dialectic itself is an explication emanating from the movement of natural and social life itself.

Contrast Marx's sentence on dialectics with what Marcuse considers to be its methodological degradation in the U.S.S.R.

"But while not a single of the basic dialectical concepts has been revised or rejected in Soviet Marxism, the function of dialectic itself has undergone a significant change: it has been transformed from a mode of critical thought into a universal 'world outlook' and universal method with rigidly fixed rules and regulations, and this transformation destroys the dialectic more thoroughly than any revision. ". (31)

The "rational form" of the dialectic, then, is not immune from revision. Soviet dialectics, far from seeing the society in "fluid Movement", is characterised by its staticity as embodied in the immutable 'laws' of dialectic. Marxism became an ideology of magical incantations providing supporting rhetoric to the ruling elite which sections of it were reluctant to drop until the very end. (32) It is necessary to examine how a method of analysis which "is in essence critical and revolutionary" was rendered down to a profoundly un-dialectical - "universal method" with rigidly fixed rules and regulations".

If we follow through Marcuse's argumentation, the importance of what may have appeared to be fairly esoteric qualifications over the limitations of a dialectic derived solely from nature become clear "because the emphasis on the dialectic of nature is a distinguishing feature of Soviet Marxism" (33) with the 'Dialectics of Nature' the favoured source of authority. (34)

The inattention paid to human activity by Engels and his successors when it intersected with the specific concrete historical conjuncture of Soviet history, led to serious amplification of the theoretical distortion. (35)

The influence of Engels on Soviet theory can be traced directly in Stalin's, 'Dialectical and Historical Materialism'. (36)

Stalin's account can be regarded as an authoritative indication of the 'official' viewpoint. (37) However, it is necessary to add that when Marcuse mentions the "difficulties of Soviet Marxism in producing an adequate 'textbook' on dialectics and logic" (38) he is wrong.

For the historical record it can be noted that the 'Textbook of Marxist Philosophy' was originally published, in Russian and English, in 1937 a year before Stalin's work. (39) Again this work can be assumed to have been closely vetted by the party leadership. It is difficult to accept the importance which Marcuse attaches to the negation of the negation being absent from Stalin's work when it figures prominently in the textbook. Certainly, the work concentrates almost exclusively upon scientific 'proofs' of the veracity of dialectics, yet it is more than a mere "paraphrase" of Engels and, within its given limits, is a comprehensive commentary.

In concrete terms the Soviet argument was that 1917 harmonised the relationship between political superstructure and economic base and furthermore, that whilst economic laws are an objective category, the Soviet state can exercise some influence over them by political means, whereas under capitalism the anarchy of production reigns supreme. (40) This is an extremely important conception because it means that revolutionary change of the economic base was no longer a necessary corollary of social change. Evolutionary change of the extant base was possible: "base and superstructure change their relation." (41)

Precisely when a necessary corrective to Engels would have been to 'bend the stick' in favour of expanding an understanding of the dialectical method to include praxis, the reverse was done and examples drawn exclusively from nature and science were narrowly concentrated upon.

Dialectical method, described not in totality but in part, is necessarily presented un-dialectically and what was a tendency in Engels became in Soviet philosophy, a codification enacted at the level of conscious application. Such an application is particularly useful in the case of base and superstructure because the pair cannot be explicated by 'dialectical examples' drawn from nature and science. This is precisely because subjects inhabit all areas of the pair and substantiate all relationships with their activities and proceedings. In the absence of praxis from any theoretical exposition, the relationships between the pair and its elements is difficult to explain, from a 'Marxist' viewpoint, in any other way than via strict superstructural derivations from economic base. (42).

The position that socialism equals a substantial rise in the productive forces, which in and of themselves will then effect a transformation of all other social areas, was endemic in the Second International and, as Sirianni notes, became rooted in Bolshevik thinking.

"The major theoretical flaw in Lenin's approach was to view the goal of a democratic and classless division of labour as more or less an automatic result of the development of the capitalist productive forces pushed to their limit and the concomitant education of the entire population in economic management...The subjective factor in this process, namely the socio-cultural formation of the working class within this productive apparatus was almost completely ignored." (43)

If we are talking of the end of philosophy in Marxist discourse and not simply the conclusion of the German classical tradition, then, it is important to note that one must accept that early Marxists of the calibre of Franz Mehring and Georgi Plekhanov simply wasted their intellectual lives, and were later followed by Franz Jakubowski and Georg Lukacs, British CP members such as Christopher Caudwell, and Maurice Cornforth, Frankfurt School figures such as Herbert Marcuse and Walter Benjamin and E.V Ilyenkov and Theodore Oizerman in the USSR to name a few.

Lenin spent an enormous amount of time on his 'Philosophical Notebooks' and 'Materialism and Empirio Criticism'. Marxist philosophy was not some part-time interest of Lenin's. Many in the party were shocked when he dropped everything, when significant political events were occurring, to work on Empirio Criticism. He did this for more or less the same reason Engels wrote 'Anti-Duhring': to combat a profound philosophical regression and to combat a widespread and profound attack on dialectical materialism being promoted by Mach, Bogdanov and Lunacharsky. As Ilyenkov notes:

"Lenin had to rummage through mountains of literature devoted to questions which he had previously not studied, and most of all in literature about ‘modern physics’, from which the Machists extracted the arguments for the use of their ‘modern philosophy’". (44) Lenin viewed the writing of Empirio-Criticism as such an important project that he dropped all other tasks for a time in order to work on it. This was because whilst Lenin was still in general agreement with Plekhanov on the question of philosophy, he was opposed to him politically as a leader of the Mensheviks.

I do not have time here to engage in any discussion of theories of truth but the occupation of philosophy is, or at least should be, to engage in leaps of the imagination. Questions such as: freedom and determinism, the nature and arrow of time and space, the nature of reality, the nature of mind, language and reality, perception, self, causation and moral judgements and the nature of truth itself are intrinsically philosophical questions precisely because they do require leaps of the imagination and philosophical speculation. They are not open to an entirely objective description like some bourgeois accountancy.

(Obviously what is called philosophical speculation is a matter of debate in itself: much modern cosmological thinking is philosophical speculation, i.e. what was there before there was nothing?.) The manner in which philosophy plays an emphatic place in cosmology simply illustrates its movement from identifying all endeavours of an intellectual nature to branching out, sometimes entirely, into discrete branches of knowledge. It may be that this process will eventually mean the 'end of philosophy' as a separate thing in itself, but this time-span is not short-term.

The abstract nature of philosophical ideas does not mean that thinking about them should be less robust, in fact the opposite case should apply. The, fairly widespread, idea that other branches of the Marxist doctrine are somehow superior to Marxist philosophy because they are supposedly subject to empirical verification boils down to an ignorant epistemological reductionism. Much left group party ideology could legitimately be described as reductionist not only in terms of issues concentrated upon, but areas of Marxist doctrine which are 'acceptable' to the party gurus. To reject philosophy, then, would be to reject curiosity about life itself. More or less everything that Marx and Engels wrote and did indicates that they would disallow such a position.

The major initiator of the 'overthrow' thesis appears to be the one-hundred and eighty degree mis-understanding of Marx's Eleventh thesis on Feuerbach which took on a momentum of its own. The fact that Marx and Engels 'overthrew' philosophy is one of those 'truths' about Marxism which is regarded as self-evident and which 'everyone knows' to be the case. However, when one carries out a consistent examination of this, then, the issue is much more problematic. To put it succinctly: the 'overthrow' thesis appears to be more myth than authenticity. It appears to have emanated from commentaries about Marx and Engels rather than to be an unproblematic perspective directly emanating from them. The importance of reading what Marx and Engels said directly rather than via commentators of greater or lesser accuracy is emphasised. 

1. COLLETTI, Lucio, Introduction to: 'Karl Marx: Early Writings', Penguin, Middlesex, 1975, page 7.

2. Ibid, page 8.

3. RUBEN, David-Hillel, 'Marxism and Materialism', Harvester, Sussex, 1977, page 67.

4. LUKACS, Georg, 'History and Class Consciousness', Merlin Press, London, 1974, page 3.

5. ENGELS, Frederick, 'Socialism: Utopian and Scientific', Progress, Moscow, 1974. As Engels mentions in this "Special Introduction to the English Edition of 1892", this arrangement of three chapters of the Anti-Duhring had a relatively wide impact. For a useful brief discussion of the historical placement of Marx and Engels in the philosophical tradition see:

RIAZANOV, David, 'Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels', Monthly Review Press, NY/London, 1973. Chapter 3, The Relation Between Scientific Socialism and Philosophy, et al.

6. Letter from Karl Marx to Frederick Engels, 14 Jan 1858

7. MARX, Karl, 'The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte', In:- Surveys From Exile, Penguin, Middlesex, 1973, p.146.

8. TIMPANARO, Sebastiano, 'On Materialism', NLB/Verso, London, 1980.

9. CARCHEDI, Gugleimo, 'Class Analysis and Social Research', Basil Blackwell, London, 1987.

10. Anti-Duhring, op cit, page 152. In:- PLEKHANOV. Georgi, 'The development of the Monist View of History', Progress, Moscow, 1972 the author elaborates on Engels' example in a critique of Mikhailovsky better known to us under his pseudonym of Bogdanov. Pages 92 to 94.

11. PLEKHANOV, G.V., 'Dialectic and Logic', in RYANZANOV, D. Ed., Fundamental Problems of Marxism, Martin Lawrence, London, 1929, page 112.

12. MAO TSE-TUNG, Mao, 'On Contradiction', Selected Works, volume 1, pages.335-6.

13. MAO TSE-TUNG, Selected Works, volume 1, PFLP, 1967, p.313.

14. LUKACS, Georg, op cit, page 24, Reference 6.

15. ENGELS, Frederick, 'Ludwig Feurbach and the End of German Classical Philosophy', Selected Works, vol.II, Lawrence and Wishart, 1950, page 330/ 331.

16. ENGELS, Frederick, 'Anti-Duhring', Moscow, 1959,pages: 39-40.

17. OIZERMAN, Theodore, 'Dialectical Materialism and the History of Philosophy', Progress, Moscow, 1982, p.86.

18. The Nature of Philosophy by John Macmurray in: MURRY, J. Middleton, MACMURRAY, John, HOLDAWAY, N.A., COLE, G.D.H., 'Marxism', Chapman and Hall, London, 1935, p.39.

19. MARX, Karl, 'The German Ideology', quoted in Jordan, Z.A., Page 142.page 15.

20. ENGELS, Frederick, 'Anti-Duhring', Moscow, 1959, page 191.

21. ENGELS, Frederick, 'Dialectics of Nature', Moscow, 1954, pages 58 and 279.

22. MAO TSE-TUNG, Selected Works, volume 1, PFLP, 1967, page.313.

23. MARX, Karl, 'Capital', vol 1, Progress Publishers/Lawrence & Wishart, Moscow & London, 1970, p.26.

24. ENGELS, Frederick, 'Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of German Classical Philosophy, PFLP, Peking, 1976, page 41.

25. MACINTYRE, Stuart, 'A Proletarian Science: Marxism in Britain 1917-1933, Lawrence and Wishart, 1980, page129.

26. For example, CASEY, Fred, 'Thinking: An Introduction to its History and Science', The Labour Publishing Company, 48 Great Ormond St. London, 1927.

27. REE, Jonathan, 'Proletarian Philosophers', Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1980.

28. As a matter of fact Lenin is quite complementary about aspects of Dietzgen's work, but you have to understand the over-reaction of the official communist movement in the context of the times.

29. JACKSON, T.A., 'Dialectics', Lawrence and Wishart, London, 1936, pages 560-625.

30. MARX. Karl. Afterword to the Second German Edition, in his 'Capital', Volume 1, Lawrence and Wishart, 1974, page 29.

An expanded commentary on this passage is given in, SHIROKOV, M, LENINGRAD INSTITUTE OF PHILOSOPHY, 'Textbook of Marxist Philosophy', Proletarian Publishers, Chicago, Ill, 1978.

31. Marcuse, Herbert, 'Soviet Marxism', Penguin, Middlesex, 1971, page 115.

32. The reluctance of Gorbachev to resign as General Secretary of the C.P.S.U. after the 1991 August coup attempt was an indicator of how important, albeit a formal and organisational, adherence to a version of 'socialist ideology' was.

33. Marcuse, Ibid, page 119.

34. Ibid, page 120. Emphasis in original in italics.

35. Ibid, page 120.

36. Ibid, page 119. Emphasis in original in italics.

37. STALIN, J.V. Dialectical and Historical Materialism. In:- FRANKLIN, Bruce, Ed. 'The Essential Stalin', Croom Helm, London, page 300.

As Bettelheim notes, "...it (Dialectical and Historical Materialism, E.H.) is the most systematic exposition of what gradually became, after the late 1920's, the dominant conception in the Bolshevik Party".

BETTELHEIM, Charles, 'Class Struggles in the U.S.S.R. Second Period: 1923 - 1930', Harvester, 1978, page 509.

38. Soviet Marxism, op cit, page 115.

39. SHIROKOV, M., LENINGRAD INSTITUTE OF PHILOSOPHY, op cit, Textbook of Marxist Philosophy.

40. Marcuse, op cit, page 102.

41. Ibid, page 106.

Both Stalin, op cit, pages 318/326-7 and the "Textbook", op cit, page 318 proclaimed the U.S.S.R's socialist credentials.

42. That Marx is somewhat optimistic when he states that the dialectic, "lets nothing impose upon it, and is in essence critical and revolutionary", is illustrated not only by the Soviet episode but also by the manner in which it was converted into a W.R.P. party religion under G. Healy. (HEALY, Gerry, 'Studies in Dialectical Materialism', New Park, London, 1982. A reply, NORTH, David, 'A Contribution to G. Healy's 'Studies in Dialectical Materialism', New Park, London, 1985).

43. SIRIANNI, Carmen, 'Workers Control and Socialist Democracy: The Soviet Experience', Verso/N.L.B., 1982, page 259. (What level of productive forces is necessary to allow this transition from quantity to quality to occur? To ask the question is largely to answer it. One has the impression that, at a certain point, the party will issue a decree pronouncing sufficient material conditions exist for socialism rather like the scientist observing water change into steam at 100 degrees centigrade at sea level).

44. ILYENKOV, E.V., 'Leninist Dialectics and the Metaphysics of Positivism', New Park, London, 1982, page 9.

ASH, William, 'Marxist Morality', Howard Baker, London, 1988.

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