Engels' Contribution To Marxism

Abstract

Now that knowledge of Marxism has become a respected path to academic advancement, scholars have increasingly occupied themselves with minute analyses of the differences between Marx's and Engels' writings, and with Engels' role as the foremost interpreter and disseminator of Marxism as a social and philosophical system. A survey of current writing on Marx and Engels in the English language shows two major efforts of scholarship: the reinterpretation of Marx's later thought in terms of his early humanism and the attribution to Marx of a scientific world-view based upon the work of Engels. Because of the association of the one Marxism with liberal values and of the other with the philosophy and scientific outlook of dialectical materialism, the young Marx has become the hero of Marx scholarship and the late Engels its villain. Engels is portrayed as the foremost systematizer and disseminator of Marx's thought, and also as the first and most influential revisionist.' Although the differences in their thinking have been occasionally exaggerated in an indirect political effort to dissociate Marx's views from the dialectical outlook culminating in Soviet philosophy, by and large the critics are right in arguing that Engels was not only Marx's mouthpiece, but that he also had a mind of his own.