Preface to Marx-Engels Collected Works Volume (25)

Add a subpage to this text

Read the help page for usage.

 

Volume 25 of the Collected Works of Marx and Engels contains two of Engels’ most celebrated works, Anti-Dühring and Dialectics of Nature.

In Anti-Dühring, one of his most popular and widely known writings, Engels not only expounded the fundamental propositions of Marxism, but made substantial progress in the development of revolutionary theory. Lenin wrote that Anti-Dühring analyses the “highly important problems in the domain of philosophy, natural science and the social sciences” (V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 2, p. 25). Anti-Dühring made a substantial contribution to the ideological victory of Marxism over reformism and the various trends of Utopian socialism.

Anti-Dühring became Marxist science’s answer to the demands of a new stage in the development of the international working-class movement, which owed its inception to the heroic struggle of the Parisian Communards in 1871. The experience of the Paris Commune showed that a proletarian revolution could not succeed without a mass working-class party based on the principles of scientific communism. It was for this reason that in the 1870s the task of forming such parties in various countries became paramount. As the international working-class movement gained impetus and the influence of scientific socialism grew among the progressive part of the proletariat, attacks on Marxism were stepped up by its ideological opponents, the representatives of anarchism, reformism and petty-bourgeois Utopian socialism. Moreover, the rapid growth of the working-class movement and the authority of the Social Democratic parties that were being founded and becoming the main opposition to ruling classes, were attracting into the ranks of these parties members of the other classes, especially those from the petty-bourgeoisie. This led to the spread in the working-class movement of unscientific views hostile to Marxism which diverted the proletariat from the true goals of its economic and political struggle.

These phenomena were inherent in the whole working-class movement, but by the mid-1870s they became most clearly manifest in Germany, where the exacerbation of the class struggle facilitated the rapid growth of political consciousness and organisation on the part of the proletariat and its conversion into a significant political force. It was to Germany that the centre of the European working-class movement shifted after the defeat of the Paris Commune. Germany was the first country where, in 1869, at a congress in Eisenach, a mass working-class party was founded based on the ideological and organisational principles of Marxism. In the first half of the 1870s, among German workers who were active members of the socialist movement, there was a growing tendency towards the unification of the Social Democratic Workers’ Party (the Eisenachers) with the General German Workers’ Union (the Lassalleans). In 1875, at a congress in Gotha, both organisations were combined into a single party, the Eisenachers accepting an ideological compromise with the opportunist views of the Lassalleans. Marx and Engels regarded the concessions by the Eisenachers as a serious mistake fraught with grave consequences (see Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Programme and Engels’ letter to Bebel of March 18-28, 1875, present edition, vols. 24 and 45).

The apprehensions of Marx and Engels were justified. After the unity congress in Gotha, the theoretical level of German Social Democracy fell significantly, when the views of Dr. Eugen Dühring, lecturer at Berlin University, became widespread among some Party members including its leaders. He became popular because of his speeches in defence of the oppressed masses and his struggle against the reactionary professors of that institution. Dühring’s views were an eclectic mixture of various vulgar materialist, idealist, positivist, vulgar economic and pseudosocialist views. As distinct from former opponents of Marxism, who had denounced mainly its political principles, Dühring attacked all the component parts of Marxism and claimed to have created a new all-embracing system of philosophy, political economy and socialism, openly opposing his views to the revolutionary proletarian world outlook.

The spread of Diihring’s views among members of the Social Democratic Party of Germany was a real threat to this major contingent of the international working-class movement and to its theoretical foundations. Engels therefore considered it his duty to defend and publicise the principles of Marxism within the German Social Democratic movement. In two years (1876-78), he wrote a major work that was first printed in Vorwärts, the newspaper of the Social Democratic Party of Germany, and was brought out as a separate book in 1878 under the title Herrn Eugen Dührings Umwälzung der Wissenschaft (Herr Eugen Dühring’s Revolution in Science—known in English as Anti-Dühring), in which Engels subjected Dühring’s views to devastating criticism. Alongside his criticism of Dühring Engels expounded his own views on the problems that had at the time scientific and practical significance. His criticism of Dühring, to quote Engels himself, was turned into a positive exposition “of the dialectical method and of the communist world outlook” (this volume, p. 8).

Anti-Diihring not only disclosed and defended the basic postulates of Marxism, it also elaborated a number of fundamental new problems of revolutionary theory. It provided the first ever comprehensive presentation of Marxism as an integral, indivisible science. Engels’ work met the objective need of the working-class movement for a true social science, namely Marxism.

Later, in the Preface to the second edition of The Housing Question, Engels explained why he personally had been obliged to take the initiative in the ideological struggle with Dühring: “As a consequence of the division of labour that existed between Marx and myself, it fell to me to present our opinions in the periodical press, and, therefore, particularly in the fight against opposing views, in order that Marx should have time for the elaboration of his great basic work [Capital.—Ed.]. Because of this, I had to expound our views in the majority of cases in polemical form, counterposing them to other views” (see present edition, Vol. 26).

Marx also took a direct part in the writing of Anti-Dühring. Engels consulted him when planning the work; Marx also helped to collect the necessary material, wrote a critical outline of Dühring’s views on the history of economic doctrines, which was used as the basis for Chapter X of Part II of Anti-Dühring (pp. 211-43) and, finally, read and approved the whole manuscript. Anti-Dühring was thus the result of creative collaboration by Marx and Engels, reflecting their joint views and giving a generalised account of the main propositions of Marxism.

Engels’ book could only have arisen out of the theoretical foundations created by the development of Marxism from the moment of its emergence in the mid-1840s up to the mid-1870s. Engels made masterly use of the method, jointly created by him and Marx, of materialistic dialectics. He drew on a vast store of knowledge from philosophy, political economy, history, and on his own researches into natural science and the art of war. Anti-Diihring draws on the experience acquired by Marx and Engels in many years of ideological struggle. The book is notable for its polemical skill, which Marx and Engels had constantly perfected ever since their early appearances in print. In Anti-Dühring, Engels used and popularised not only Volume I of Capital and A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, but the ideas of Marx that were contained in his economic manuscripts, above all in those of 1857-1858 and 1861-1863 (see present edition, vols. 28-34), and also separate propositions from Marx’s at the time still unpublished Critique of the Gotha Programme. All these ideas were repeatedly discussed by Marx and Engels both in private and in their correspondence.

In the Introduction to Anti-Dühring, Engels outlines in brief the development of the theoretical prerequisites of scientific socialism. While giving full recognition to the merits of Saint-Simon, Fourier and Owen, he stresses that their “socialism is the expression of absolute truth, reason and justice and has only to be discovered to conquer all the world by virtue of its own power” (p. 20). As distinct from the Utopians, Marxism put socialism on a realistic footing, demonstrating its close connection with the economic development of society and the class struggle. “Now,” writes Engels, “idealism was driven from its last refuge, the philosophy of history ... and a method found of explaining man’s ‘knowing’ by his ‘being’, instead of, as heretofore, his ‘being’ by his ‘knowing’ “ (pp. 26-27). In this work Engels for the first time made a conclusion that Marx’s two great discoveries, the materialist understanding of history and the theory of surplus-value, laid the theoretical foundations of scientific socialism (p. 27).

In Part I of Anti-Dühring, the philosophical teaching of Marxism is systematically expounded. A strictly materialist approach to the solution of the fundamental problem of philosophy runs through the whole of Engels’ exposition. In the controversy with Dühring, he formulates and substantiates the most important thesis of materialism, namely, that the “unity of the world consists in its materiality” (p. 41). Elaborating the dialectic teaching on the indivisibility of matter and motion, Engels shows that the infinitely multiform phenomena of nature are only various forms of the motion and development of matter. Thinking is a reflection of the material world. “To me,” writes Engels, “there could be no question of building the laws of dialectics into nature, but of discovering them in it and evolving them from it” (pp. 12-13). Engels formulates here the classic definition of the interrelationship between matter and motion: “Motion is the mode of existence of matter” (p. 55). In this work, the materialistic interpretation of space and time as fundamental forms of all being is developed (see pp. 48-49).

Engels gives a detailed account of dialectics and explains its fundamental difference from the metaphysical mode of thinking. “To the metaphysician, things and their mental reflexes, ideas, are isolated, are to be considered one after the other and apart from each other, are objects of investigation fixed, rigid, given once for all” (p. 22). The dialectical method, however, takes things and their thought reflections in mutual connection, in movement, in emergence and disappearance.

Engels examines in detail the law of the unity and struggle of opposites, the transformation of quantitative changes into qualitative, and the law of negation of the negation. Referring to Marx’s Capital, he quotes, in particular, examples from the field of economic relations in which it is stated that the quantitative change transforms the quality of things and, in the same way, the qualitative transformation of things changes their quantity (see p. 117). Stressing the fundamental significance of the law of negation of the negation, Engels shows that as distinct from the usual understanding of negation as simple elimination, dialectical negation is an essential factor in the emergence of a new quality, a universal form of the development process. The law of negation of the negation, writes Engels, is “an extremely general—and for this reason extremely far-reaching and important—law of development of nature, history, and thought” (p. 131).

After giving a definition of dialectics as “the science of the general laws of motion and development of nature, human society and thought” (ibid.), Engels also discloses the content of its categories: necessity and chance, essence and appearance, causality and interaction. He explains the interrelation between formal and dialectical logic and works out the basic laws of the second; he discloses the chief problems of the Marxist theory of cognition, including the interrelationship between absolute and relative truth. Criticising Dühring’s subjective voluntaristic views, Engels shows the actual correlation between freedom and necessity; and by clarifying the dialectic interrelation of these two categories he shows that freedom is based on the understanding of necessity, on cognition and use of the objective laws of nature and society. “Freedom of the will...” writes Engels, “means nothing but the capacity to make decisions with knowledge of the subject” (p. 105). Proving the necessity for the dialectic-materialist method, Engels writes in Anti-Diihring that its application and the verification of the theory by practice make it possible to solve the most complex problems of the natural and social sciences.

The economics section of Anti-Dühring draws on the achievements of Marx’s political economy. Engels substantiates in detail the scientific understanding of the subject of political economy, points to the difference between political economy in the wide as well as the narrow sense, and shows the historical character of the laws and categories of this science (see pp. 135-40). He also expounds ideas developed by Marx in the Economic Manuscripts of 1857-1858 about the dialectics of production, exchange and distribution, laying emphasis on the primacy of production. Engels singles out in particular the Marxist understanding of value, capital and surplus-value.

Anti-Dühring was a further stage in the development of the political economy of Marxism, above all in the economic substantiation of the theory of scientific communism. Engels indicates that Marx’s explanation of the nature of capitalist exploitation and the creation of the theory of surplus-value is the central point of scientific socialism.

In Anti-Dühring, Engels notes new phenomena in the economics of the capitalist society which were to develop widely later, in the era of monopoly capitalism: the growth of joint-stock companies, the transfer of a number of branches of the national economy into the hands of the bourgeois state. Moreover, Engels stresses that these tendencies are not changing the exploitatory essence of the bourgeois mode of production, nor are they weakening the contradictions of the capitalist society but, on the contrary, are exacerbating them: “But the transformation, either into joint-stock companies, or into state ownership, does not do away with the capitalistic nature of the productive forces... The modern state, no matter what its form, is essentially a capitalist machine, the state of the capitalists, the ideal personification of the total national capital... The workers remain wage-workers—proletarians. The capitalist relation is not done away with. It is rather brought to a head... State ownership of the productive forces is not the solution of the conflict, but concealed within it are the technical conditions that form the elements of that solution” (pp. 265-66).

Drawing on the study of trends in the development of capitalism, Engels puts forward in Anti-Dühring a scientifically grounded conception of the economic basis of the future communist society, formulates a number of its laws, drawing special attention to the planned nature of its development, and discloses the essence and machinery of the mutual interaction of production and distribution: “Distribution...” writes Engels, “will be regulated by the interests of production, and ... production is most encouraged by a mode of distribution which allows all members of society to develop, maintain and exercise their capacities with maximum universality” (p. 186). He speaks of the necessity for a rational distribution of productive forces and predicts certain features which must be inherent in labour under communism.

In Part III of his work, Engels gives an expanded exposition of the history and theory of scientific communism and indicates the qualitatively new stage achieved by Marxist thought in comparison with its predecessors (see pp. 244-54).

In Anti-Dühring, Engels develops the Marxist postulate that scientific communism is the theoretical expression of the proletarian movement and, using the results of Marx’s research into the antagonisms prevalent in capitalist society, he discloses the proposition, finally formulated in Volume I of Capital, on the inevitability of the collapse of capitalism and the victory of the socialist revolution. Drawing on the materialist interpretation of history, Engels shows that the basic contradiction of capitalism lies in the contradiction between the social character of production and the private form of appropriation. It manifests itself as an opposition between the organisation of production at each separate enterprise and the anarchy of production in all society, as an antagonism between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. It finds its solution in the proletarian revolution. The proletariat takes over power and converts the means of production into public property.

Engels examined the main features of the future communist society. As distinct from the representatives of critical Utopian socialism, who constructed “the elements of a new society out of their own heads, because within the old society the elements of the new were not as yet generally apparent” (p. 253), he showed how, in the framework of the capitalist mode of production, conditions ripen for a transition to the new social system.

Discussing the transition from capitalism to communism, Engels stresses that when the means of production are in the hands of the socialist society and new relations of production are established that exclude the exploitation of man by man, anarchy in production will be replaced by its planned organisation in society as a whole. The growth of productive forces will be accelerated, and this will lead, once the higher phase of communism has been attained, to the complete disappearance of the negative consequences of the division of labour for the development of the individual. Labour will be changed from a heavy burden into the first demand of life (see pp. 269-70, 279-80). The antithesis between mental and physical labour and between town and country will disappear (see pp. 282-84). Class distinctions will be abolished and the state will die out: the government of persons will be replaced by the administration of things, and by conduct of processes of production (see pp. 267-68). Education will be combined with labour (see p. 306). Religion will disappear (see p. 302). People will become the real and conscious masters of nature and society. “The extraneous objective forces that have hitherto governed history pass under the control of man himself. Only from that time will man himself, with full consciousness, make his own history... It is the humanity’s leap from the kingdom of necessity to the kingdom of freedom” (p. 270).

Engels’ work resulted in the total theoretical refutation of Dühring’s views and the loss of their influence over the German Social Democrats. Engels irrefutably demonstrated that Dühring, with his claim to having created a system of his own superior to all the socialist theories, including Marxism, was merely a typical representative of that “bumptious pseudo-science” which “is forcing its way to the front everywhere and is drowning everything with its resounding—sublime nonsense” (p. 7). Anti-Dühring facilitated the adoption of Marxism by many representatives of the international working-class movement. Thanks to this book, eminent members of the German and international working-class movement, on their own admission, accepted Marxism as a whole world outlook that embraced philosophy, political economy and socialism, and as the strategy and tactics of the proletariat’s class struggle. The international working-class movement acquired a true encyclopaedia of Marxist knowledge on which many generations of socialists of all countries were raised. As Lenin put it, Anti-Dühring became a “handbook for every class-conscious worker” (V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 19, p. 24).

Several years before beginning work on Anti-Diihring, Engels began writing a major work entitled Dialectics of Nature. From 1873 to 1876, he collected a considerable amount of material and wrote an Introduction to the planned work. Engels continued, in fact, to be preoccupied with these problems while working on Anti-Diihring (1876-78), in which he, in particular, drew on his drafts for Dialectics of Nature. However, the main chapters and articles, and also some fragments of Dialectics of Nature, were written after the publication of Anti-Diihring, from 1878 to 1882. Work on Dialectics of Nature remained unfinished since, after Marx’s death, Engels shouldered the responsibility for the leadership of the international working-class movement, and the preparation for the press of volumes II and III of Capital, which were still in manuscript form. Dialectics of Nature gathered dust in the archives of the German Social Democratic Party for nearly half a century and was first published in the USSR in 1925. Although this work was unfinished and certain of its component parts are preparatory drafts and disjointed notes, it is in fact a complete whole, united by its general basic ideas and overall plan.

When creating a complete world outlook, Marx and Engels not only critically revised the achievements of their predecessors in philosophy, political economy and socialist and communist teachings, but they inevitably had to arrive at the necessity for also generalising in philosophical terms the main achievements of contemporary natural science, to disclose the dialectical character of the development of nature and thereby show the universality of the basic laws of materialist dialectics. In the Preface to the second edition of Anti-Diihring, Engels wrote: “Marx and I were pretty well the only people to rescue conscious dialectics from German idealist philosophy and apply it in the materialist conception of nature and history. But a knowledge of mathematics and natural science is essential to a conception of nature which is dialectical and at the same time materialist” (p. 11).

The deep interest shown by Marx and Engels in natural science and the development of technology was neither haphazard nor temporary, and it evinced itself very early. Their range of interests in natural science was very wide; they followed closely all outstanding discoveries in biology, anatomy, physiology, astronomy, physics, chemistry and other sciences. Furthermore, each had his own special interests. Marx was much preoccupied with mathematics and applied natural science, and also with the history of engineering and agrochemistry, which was to a considerable extent determined by his researches into political economy. Engels was more familiar with the achievements of physics and biology, and he devoted much attention to the problems of theoretical natural science.

Since Marx was wholly absorbed in his main work, Capital, it was Engels who undertook the solution of the latest theoretical tasks raised by the whole course of development of the natural sciences. Practical opportunities for this appeared after Engels retired from the Manchester firm and moved to London. However, as it was necessary to work out a strategy for the working class, given the new historical conditions created by the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71 and the Paris Commune, and because of his involvement in the International, Engels was only able to devote himself to theoretical work from 1873.

The task that Engels set himself in working on Dialectics of Nature (as on Part I of Anti-Diihring), was formulated in the Preface to the second edition of Anti-Diihring: “My recapitulation of mathematics and the natural sciences was undertaken in order to convince myself also in detail—of what in general I was not in doubt—that in nature, amid the welter of innumerable changes, the same dialectical laws of motion force their way through as those which in history govern the apparent fortuitousness of events” (p. 11).

In Dialectics of Nature, Engels drew on a mass of material concerning the history of natural science to demonstrate that the need for the development of productive forces had stimulated progress in engineering and science, especially natural science, particularly those aspects of it which in one way or another were connected with the demands of practice, of production itself.

There were three great landmarks in the development of natural science in the last century: the discovery in 1838-39 by M. J. Schleiden and T. Schwann of an integral cell theory of living organisms; the discovery and substantiation in 1842-47 of the law of the conservation of energy by R. Mayer, J. P. Joule, W. R. Grove, L. A. Colding and H. Helmholtz; and the appearance of Darwin’s theory of the evolution of organic life. In a letter to Engels dated December 19, 1860, Marx stressed that Darwin’s On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection is the book which “in the field of natural history, provides the basis for our views” (see present edition, Vol. 41, p. 232).

The philosophical significance of these natural science discoveries was that they proved in highly concentrated form the dialectical character of natural processes. However, as Engels showed in Dialectics of Nature, a contradiction clearly emerged in the second half of the 19th century between the dialectical character of the new natural science material and the metaphysical method prevalent among the absolute majority of natural scientists. “The bulk of natural scientists are still held fast in the old metaphysical categories and helpless when these modern facts ... have to be rationally explained and brought into relation with one another” (p. 486).

This tendency made itself felt most distinctly among the representatives of vulgar materialism and positivism. In spite of serious differences, vulgar materialism and positivism converged to a considerable extent over the solution to the problem of the mutual relationship between philosophy and natural science. The representatives of vulgar materialism in Germany—K. Vogt, L. Büchner and J. Moleschott—found themselves brought closer to A. Comte, the founder of positivism, by the general tendency to reject philosophy and dialectics as speculative “drivel”, useless to positive science.

Engels’ service is that for the first time in the history of Marxism, in Dialectics of Nature, he comprehensively investigated the problem of the mutual relationship between philosophy and natural science, establishing their inseverable connection and constant mutual action. He showed that “the metaphysical conception has become impossible in natural science owing to the very development of the latter” and that “dialectics divested of mysticism becomes an absolute necessity for natural science” (pp. 313, 486). He presented the natural scientists with the task of consciously mastering the method of dialectic materialism.

Engels disclosed the content of materialist dialectics as a science dealing with universal connections, with the most general laws of all motion, with the laws of the development of nature, society and human thought. As in Anti-Diihring, he distinguished between the objective dialectics of the real world and its reflection—the subjective dialectics of thought. As in Anti-Diihring, he defined the basic laws of dialectics. He indicated that “the dialectical laws are real laws of development of nature, and therefore are valid also for theoretical natural science” (p. 357).

In Dialectics of Nature, Engels elaborates in detail on such problems and categories of dialectics as causality and interaction, necessity and chance, the classification of forms of judgment, the correlation of induction and deduction, and the role of hypothesis as a form of the development of natural science (see, for example, pp. 356-61, 505-08, 520, etc.).

Engels develops the basic propositions of dialectic materialism concerning matter and motion, space and time. In Dialectics of Nature, he works out a classification of the forms of motion of matter and a corresponding classification of the sciences. Engels wrote: “Classification of the sciences, each of which analyses a single form of motion, or a series of forms of motion that belong together and pass into one another, is therefore the classification, the arrangement, of these forms of motion themselves according to their inherent sequence, and herein lies its importance” (p. 528).

Outlining the development of the different sciences— mathematics, mechanics, physics, chemistry and biology, Engels singles out in mathematics the problem of the apparent a priori forms of mathematical abstractions (see pp. 323, 327, 333, etc.), in astronomy—the problem of the origin and development of the solar system (see pp. 510, 546-49), in physics—the doctrine of the transformation of energy (see p. 505), in chemistry—the problem of atomic structure (see pp. 358-59, 530-31, etc.), in biology—the problem of the origin and essence of life (see. pp. 329, 334-35, etc.), cell theory (see pp. 326, 328-29, etc.) and Darwinism (see pp. 452-54, 478, etc.). Engels’ approach to the analysis of the fundamental problems of the separate sciences is a model of the dialecticmaterialist principle of research into the mutual relations of philosophy and natural science. An analysis of the concrete sciences enriches Marxist philosophy which, in its turn, creates a methodological foundation for the given branch of knowledge.

In an essay The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man, Engels elaborated a labour theory of anthropogenesis and sociogenesis. He pointed out the decisive role of labour and the manufacture of tools both in the formation of man and in the emergence of human society. Drawing on the current facts of natural science and, in particular, on Darwin’s discoveries, he showed how from the ape-like ancestor, as a result of a prolonged historical process, a qualitatively distinct thinking and creating being was formed — man.

Engels analyses various aspects of the problem of the interaction between man and nature. As distinct from the majority of 19th-century natural scientists and philosophers, who usually despised research into the influence of the practical and labour activity on the development of human thought, he wrote: “It is precisely the alteration of nature by men, not solely nature as such, which is the most essential and immediate basis of human thought, and it is in the measure that man has learned to change nature that his intelligence has increased” (p. 511).

Engels criticised the views of the scientists who, trading on Darwin’s name, tried to reduce “the whole manifold wealth of historical development, and complexity” to a “meagre and one-sided phrase ‘struggle for existence’” (p. 584). “The interaction of bodies in non-living nature,” he wrote in a fragment “The Struggle for Life”, “includes both harmony and collisions, that of living bodies conscious and unconscious co-operation as well as conscious and unconscious struggle. Hence, even in regard to nature, it is not permissible one-sidedly to inscribe only ‘struggle’ on one’s banners” (ibid.). He spoke out even more firmly against the vulgarising attempts to treat in a like spirit the history of society. He showed how more substantial was the dialectic-materialist approach to the analysis of the processes of the development of human society, drawing on the fundamental propositions of the materialist conception of history: “The conception of history as a series of class struggles is already much richer in content and deeper than merely reducing it to weakly distinguished phases of the struggle for existence” (p. 585).

Engels devoted much attention to examining the role of theoretical thought in understanding the world. He showed that the theoretical thought of each era has had various forms and different content, that “the science of thought is ... a historical science, the science of the historical development of human thought” (pp. 338-39). Engels also wrote about the fate of dialectics in the history of philosophy: about the birth of dialectical ideas among the ancient Greek thinkers and about the development of Hegelian dialectical philosophy. He pointed to the historical significance of Hegel’s dialectics as one of the theoretical sources of Marxist philosophy. However, in calling the Hegelian system “a comprehensive compendium of dialectics”, Engels pointed out that it developed “from an utterly erroneous point of departure” (p. 342). In Dialectics of Nature, he shows that only dialectics reworked in materialist terms could become a component part of Marxist philosophy.

Engels constantly emphasised the role of materialist dialectics as the sole method that gave the clue to an understanding of the laws of the development of nature and society. He said that “dialectics cannot be despised with impunity” (p. 354), and that it is the sole method of thought appropriate in the highest degree to the current stage of development of natural science (see pp. 493-94). Bestowing high praise on D. I. Mendeleyev’s creation of the periodic system of chemical elements, Engels writes: “By means of the—unconscious—application of Hegel’s law of the transformation of quantity into quality, Mendeleyev achieved a scientific feat which it is not too bold to put on a par with that of Leverrier in calculating the orbit of the until then unknown planet Neptune” (p. 361). Engels shows that progressive philosophy not only serves as a theoretical and methodological basis for the natural science of its time, but also partly anticipates the development of specific fields of science and predicts future discoveries. Engels himself in Dialectics of Nature was able to anticipate several of the later discoveries by science.

In Dialectics of Nature, Engels examines the laws of scientific progress and its prospects. He affirms that scientific progress tends to increase man’s chances of taking into consideration all the more remote consequences of his practical activity for the natural and social environment. All the existing modes of production had in view only the nearest, most immediate effects of labour and could not fully regulate its consequences. “This regulation,” writes Engels, “however, requires something more than mere knowledge. It requires a complete revolution in our hitherto existing mode of production, and simultaneously a revolution in our whole contemporary social order” (p. 462).

In Dialectics of Nature, Engels wages an implacable war on various anti-scientific tendencies among the representatives of natural science—against vulgar materialism, metaphysics, idealism and agnosticism, against one-sided empiricism and mechanism, spiritualism and the influences of religious ideology. In an article “Natural Science in the Spirit World”, he shows that contempt for dialectical thinking is fraught with the most baleful consequences for science: “The empirical contempt for dialectics is punished by some of the most sober empiricists being led into the most barren of all superstitions, into modern spiritualism” (p. 354). Engels firmly opposed any ideas that did not correspond to the latest achievements of the science of that time and decelerated further research. Thus, in Dialectics of Nature, he attacks the hypothesis of R. Clausius, W. Thomson and J. Loschmidt on the so-called “death of the universe through lack of heat”.

Needless to say, during the past decades of the spectacular and revolutionary development of natural science, the factual material drawn on by Engels and also certain propositions put forward by him have inevitably dated. However, the general methodology and the general conception of Dialectics of Nature have retained and will continue to retain their abiding significance. Even in its incomplete form, this work by Engels impresses with the wealth and depth of its theoretical content. Dialectics of Nature is an important stage in the development of dialectical materialism. In it, Engels substantially developed materialist dialectics and marked out the road to the solution of the main problems of the natural science of his time.

* * *

The present volume reproduces for the first time in English the rough draft of the Introduction to Anti-Dühring, published in the language of the original by the Institute of Marxism-Leninism of the CC CPSU in the volume: Marx/Engels Gesamtausgabe. Friedrich Engels, Herrn Eugen Dührings Umwälzung der Wissenschaft/Dialektik der Natur. Sonderausgabe, Moscow-Leningrad, 1935, pp. 396-400.

Dialectics of Nature is being published in accordance with the thematic arrangement of the material as adopted in the following publications: K. Marx and F. Engels, Works, Second Russian Edition, Vol. 20, Moscow, 1961 and Marx/Engels, Werke, Vol. 20, Berlin, 1962. In the present publication of Dialectics of Nature, corrections made in the preparation of Volume 26, Marx/Engels Gesamtausgabe (MEGA), Berlin [1985] have been taken into consideration.

The end of Dialectics of Nature is followed by Engels’ list of titles and tables of contents of the folders (see p. 588 and Note 130).

The subsection “From Engels’ Preparatory Writings for Anti-Dühring” does not contain the items which Engels himself used for Dialectics of Nature. They are included in the text of Dialectics of Nature. Among the other supplements, the volume contains Engels’ manuscript, “Infantry Tactics, Derived from Material Causes. 1700-1870”, and “Additions to the Text of Anti-Dühring Made by Engels in the Pamphlet Socialism Utopian and Scientific”.

In addition to the notes, name index and the indices of quoted and mentioned literature and periodicals, there is an index of contents of the folders of Dialectics of Nature and a chronological list of chapters and fragments of Dialectics of Nature. As compared with previous editions, considerable additions have been made to the notes, especially to the dating of certain fragments of Dialectics of Nature. Compared with the Russian edition and Werke, the index of quoted and mentioned literature has been substantially augmented.

The page numbers of works quoted, and also editorial headings and inserts are given in square brackets. Words written in English in the original are given in small caps. Quotations from Greek and French authors are given in English with an indication of their original language in the footnotes. Latin quotations are published in the text in the language of the original with a translation given in the footnotes.

The volume was compiled, the text prepared and notes written by Tatyana Chikileva (Anti-Dühring) and Yuri Vasin (Dialectics of Nature). The editor of the volume was Valentina Smirnova. The preface was written by Tatyana Chikileva, Valentina Smirnova and Yuri Vasin. The name index, the indices of quoted and mentioned literature and of periodicals were prepared by Tatvana Chikileva and Yuri Vasin (Institute of Marxism-Leninism of the CC CPSU).

The translations were made by Emile Burns and Clemens Dutt (Lawrence & Wishart) and edited by Natalia Karmanova, Margarita Lopukhina, Mzia Pitskhelauri, Andrei Skvarsky (Progress Publishers) and Georgi Bagaturia, scientific editor (Institute of Marxism-Leninism of the CC CPSU).

The Volume was prepared for the press by the editors Nadezhda Rudenko and Yelena Vorotnikova (Progress Publishers).