Re: [OPE-L] karl marx

From: Christopher Arthur (arthurcj@WAITROSE.COM)
Date: Fri Nov 03 2006 - 09:54:34 EST


There is no joint work at all by M & E after the Manifesto (to which 
E's contribution was minor).  If anything exactly the opposite occurred 
- that there was something of a division of labour with M doing the PE 
and E doing Military questions, History etc. What is really amazing , 
if you read the correspondence, it becomes clear Marx  never showed E 
any of his drafts. Very occasionally he would summarise the plan for E 
and E would reply extremely tentatively. So Capital was  all Marx. he 
did not even have the benefit of E as a reviewer of the sort we today 
are very familiar with either from unofficial colleagues or formal 
comments at conference, journal reviewers, or publishers' readers. As 
to Engels work Marx did contribute one chapter to Anti-D but it remains 
to be shown that Marx was awake when E 'read it to him'. Marx still did 
not show E his stuff when E moved to London otherwise how could E 
express such horror when he finally found the Mss for V2 and V3 still 
far from ready. Whether they agreed with each others' work or not is a 
separate question from whether they worked together which they 
certainly never did after 1847.
As to dialectics the discourse of the later Engels is markedly  
different from the joint works of the 1840s IMO.
Chris A

17 Bristol Road
Brighton
BN2 1AP
On 2 Nov 2006, at 17:32, Dogan Goecmen wrote:

>
>
> Jerry, I thank you very much for your comments.
>   
> I am conscious about Engels' originality before he met Marx and after 
> Marx's death. So for example his 'Outline to the Critique of Political 
> Economy'.
>   
> Where is the philosophy of dialectical materialism, as distinct from 
> historical materialism,
> to be found in the writings of Marx?  It is certainly true that Engels 
> held some of the
>  perspectives of what came to be called dialectical materialism (as, 
> for instance,
>  explained in _Dialectics of Nature_) but that does not mean that Marx 
> shared those
> perspectives.
>  
> I take these concepts as requiring one other. Dialectical materialism 
> taken as a concept of epistemology (it is more than that) is 
> prerequisite for historical materialism. Many elements of this 
> epistemology (dialectical and materialist) may be found in the Holy 
> Family, German Ideology, the Poverty of Philosophy and Anti-Dühring. I 
> see what Engels says about natural philosophical aspects of 
> dialectical materialism Dialectic of Nature in the tradition of these 
> grand co-works of Marx's and Engels'. I do not deny that there are 
> also important differences between them but I am not sure whether they 
> can be defined as contradition as many scholars saw it in the past.
>  
> Fraternite,
> Dogan


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