Marx & Engels: Scholar

Two Marxisms? — the contested ground

A course on the thought of Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels.

What you will learn

• Understand the charge that Engels's 'dialectics of nature' turned Marx's method into a positivist cosmology.
• Weigh whether Engels completed Marx or changed him — and why the texts support both readings.
• Understand the claim that 'Marxism' was constructed posthumously and is not identical with what Marx wrote.
• See Engels's own central, knowing role in building the icon he is now read against.
• Understand Althusser's 'epistemological break' between the humanist young Marx and the scientific mature Marx.
• Weigh the evidence for rupture against the evidence for one continuous development.
• Hold the tension between the 'determinist' Marx (forces of production drive history) and the 'agency' Marx (men make their own history).
• See why mechanical Marxism and a Marxism of human action both have textual roots.

Course outline

1. The Invention of Dialectics: Did Engels Distort Marx? — After Marx died, a doctrine called 'dialectical materialism' was built in his name — and some of the sharpest readers say it was Engels's invention, a dialectic stretched from human history onto the…
2. The Making of an Icon: Marx vs 'Marxism' — In his own lifetime Marx disowned the 'Marxists.' The systematic doctrine the world came to know was largely built after he died — by Engels, the parties, and the states — until the man and the icon…
3. Young Marx vs Mature Marx: Is There a Break? — The young Marx wrote of alienation and the human essence; the mature Marx wrote of value-forms and impersonal structures. One mind deepening — or, as Althusser claimed, two Marxes split by an…
4. Iron Laws or Agency: Does History Decide Us? — Marx is read both ways: as the prophet of iron laws that grind on whatever anyone does, and as the theorist of men making their own history. His own texts give ammunition to both — and the difference…
5. Engels on Gender and the Family: Foundational or Flawed? — Alone, after Marx died, Engels carried the materialist method into the household — and called the rise of private property 'the world historical defeat of the female sex.' A founding text of…
6. Greatness or Illusion: Was Any of It Science? — Engels called it 'scientific socialism' — a science of history to set beside Darwin's of nature. Was it? Or was it a prophecy, a faith dressed in the language of law? Here the whole course comes to…

Works read in this course

• Anti-Dühring — Engels' 1878 polemic — the most systematic statement of 'dialectical materialism,' extending the dialectic to nature and science.
• Dialectics of Nature — Engels' unfinished notebooks (1883) applying dialectical laws to the natural sciences — the heart of the 'did Engels distort Marx?' debate.
• Theses on Feuerbach — Marx's eleven terse 1845 theses — including 'the philosophers have only interpreted the world; the point is to change it.'
• The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte — Marx's 1852 study of the 1851 coup — the great statement that men make history, but not in conditions of their choosing.
• A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy — Marx's 1859 work; its Preface gives the sharpest 'determinist' statement of the materialist conception of history.
• The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State — Engels' 1884 materialist history of the family — a founding text of socialist feminism, and a contested one.

Part of the Simposeum course library.