Toward the Vindication of Friedrich Engels

Abstract

It is by now a commonplace that Marxism is going through an important period of theoretical (and no doubt, for the same reasons, practical) development. It has been noted by many that the ‘crude’ and ‘mechanical’¹ application of Marxian categories which prevailed as orthodoxy for about a half century — starting, roughly, with the formulation of the Erfurt Program, and lasting even beyond the Stalin years — is, in many quarters, fast giving way to a far more sophisticated and sensitive means of cultural analysis. Indeed, even this occurrence of the word ‘cultural’ is itself quite significant. For the most fundamental aspect of Marxism’s current transformation may perhaps be best stated as follows: we are beginning to appreciate what it means to say that Marxian analysis is cultural analysis. It has become clear that Marx’s interest in the economic metabolism of society was rooted in his conviction that this is the way in which the interchange of the products of human creativity is to be most adequately studied. The importance of this formulation is that once Marxism is explicitly conceived as a theory concerning the production and distribution of culture, it becomes quite impossible to treat the ideational aspect of human history as it was treated by the older ‘orthodoxy’: as if it were some merely epiphenomenal dimension riding piggyback upon an essentially non-ideational ‘base’ of society, the latter ‘material foundation’ being something over which human consciousness can have no truly decisive influence.² If there really is a science in ‘scientific socialism’, its insistence upon the materiality of human existence must not be taken to imply that the categories peculiar to human — i.e., conscious — materiality are to be accorded secondary status.