From: Dogan Goecmen (Dogangoecmen@AOL.COM)
Date: Sun Nov 05 2006 - 13:01:15 EST
Dear Chris, I thank you very much for your critical remarks and sorry for the delay. Just two points briefly. I am realy surprised by what you say. On the Capital there is Marx's name. OK. But what about so many letters in which Marx and Engels discuss different aspects of the book and exchange ideas. Before Marx sent volume one to the publisher Engels went through the whole mauscript. Marx and Engels Discussed the whole book in Manchester. Are these not contributions of Engels' to the Capital. Compare to this please the correspondence between Marx and Engels in June 1867. So we have to take the expressionf 'joint work' in its broad sense. You say: '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.' This is not correct I know at least five reviews of Engels' published in German bourgeois papers. (reprinted in Marx-Engels-Werke (MEW), Vol. 16 207-218 and 226-234) He wrote another review for 'Fortnightly Review' (in German translation 22 pages, reprinted in MEW, Vol.16, pp. 288-309). Lastly, I refer to Engels' review for Demokratisches Wochenbaltt (8 pages). (No 12, 21 March 1868, reprinted in MEW, Vol.16, pp. 235-242). Please see Engels' letter of 11 September 1867, in which he asks Marx explicitly whether he should write revies for bourgeois papers, attacking Marx from a bourgeois point of view. And Marx says that this would be the best service to the book (12 September 1867). Dogan In einer eMail vom 03.11.2006 15:55:52 Westeuropäische Normalzeit schreibt arthurcj@WAITROSE.COM: 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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