From: dlaibman@JJAY.CUNY.EDU
Date: Thu Apr 20 2006 - 09:56:11 EDT
Once more, thanks to Allin (and Google!).
Although the biblical citation appears first in *The German Ideology*,
it re-emerges later in *Anti-Duhring* and also in Engels'
correspondence, so I think we can assume it originated with Engels,
not Marx. It appears first in a jointly authored work; this is
interesting in that it shows that the joint works by M and E were
indeed *co*-authored; that Engels' name was not simply attached to
Marx's writings.
Opposition to rigid antitheses ("metaphysics") does not exhaustively
describe the dialectic -- but this is another story altogether.
Best to all,
David
----- Original Message -----
From: Allin Cottrell <cottrell@WFU.EDU>
Date: Wednesday, April 19, 2006 11:42 pm
Subject: Re: [OPE-L] Help! Marx Quote
> On Fri, 31 Mar 2006, dlaibman@JJAY.CUNY.EDU wrote:
>
> > As usual, when I need a remembered quote from Marx, it is not
> > (apparently) where I thought it would be, in this case in one of
> > the Prefaces to Capital I.
> > The quote (from memory): "What all these gentlemen lack is
> > dialectic. Their communication is 'yea, yea, nay, nay, and
> > whatsoever cometh not of these cometh of evil.'"
>
> This Biblical tag is quoted in Lenin's "What the 'Friends of the
> People' Are and How They Fight the Social-Democrats"
>
> http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1894/friends/06.htm
>
> A citation of it is also attributed to Engels, by Alan Woods
>
> http://www.marxist.com/Latinam/marxists_and_venezuela.html
>
> but without any specific bibliographical information.
>
> This information comes from a Google search on the keywords in
> your quotation, with "Marx" appended. The fact that no text by
> Marx shows up in the first page or two of Google hits, when Marx's
> works are well archived and accessible to Google's robots,
> suggests that it does not appear in his published works.
>
> Allin Cottrell
>
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