Source: International Socialist Review, April 1906 issue, Vol. VI, No. 10. pp. 605-609.
Transcription and Markup: Bill Wright for marxists.org, April, 2023.
To lay bare the historical roots of Marxism means to uncover the rootless theories of those who claim to have outgrown it. The furies of private interest, who are stirred by every discussion of the question of private property, are responsible, on the field of economic science, for a spectacle which would be impossible on any other scientific field. A professor of natural history, who would revert from Darwin’s theory of natural development to Cuvier’s catastrophic theory, would be met by universal ridicule. But a man who turns back from Marx to Adam Smith or Kant is deemed as worthy of laurels in advance of the fray as a general who takes the field against the Chinese boxers. And yet all the confusion which poses nowadays as brand-new wisdom has been sifted and cleared as long ago as the forties of the nineteenth century by Marx and Engels. “No matter how many phantastic dummies of orthodox Marxists are put to the sword, in fortunately bloodless encounters, for the enjoyment of patriots and philistines, the field is ultimately held by the only orthodox Marxist that ever was, namely, the historical course of things.”
Thus wrote Franz Mehring in the summer of 1901, in his preface to his edition of the “Posthumous Writings of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels.” But a little more than four years of capitalist development have demonstrated that he had too good an opinion of bourgeois science. For in the meantime we have seen official spokesmen in capitalist universities repudiating the Darwinian theories and reverting to the Mosaic theories of creation, without encountering either great ridicule or strong opposition. We have seen theological dabblers in natural science openly supported or seriously discussed by “great authorities” in natural science. We have seen metaphysics and theology fastening themselves like a plague upon science and trying to revive the golden age of medieval scholasticism. And yet all this is but another proof that the historical course of things upholds the theories of Marx and Engels. Official bourgeois science, like all bourgeois intelligence, is on its declining curve, because the industrial basis of capitalism is disintegrating.
So much more does the revolutionary proletariat feel the need of a reliable science and realize that science from the point of view of the proletariat, proletarian science, is the only safeguard of its historical interests. The defenders and lovers of capitalism may resign themselves to their adulterated science as they do to their adulterated food, and pretend to regard these things as divine retributions for their awful sins, while they persuade themselves that it pays them to do so. But by the same token the proletarian will not be so meek. Wherever official science recoils from its own logical conclusions, there the revolutionary proletariat will call for volunteers to follow up the thread of scientific investigation until they find the undistinguished truth. For only the full truth can make us free. Whenever the ruling class shall attempt to drag any truth upon the scaffold, she will find a revolutionary working man ready to die in her defense.
Under these circumstances it is high time that the American socialist movement should acquaint itself with the first scientific socialist who sprang to the side of Marx and Engels when they flung the gage of battle into the teeth of bourgeois political economists and historians, the man who “sifted and cleared all the confusion which nowadays poses as brand-new wisdom” in philosophy and natural science, just as Marx and Engels did in their own special fields.
This man was Joseph Dietzgen. Born in 1828, he was but twenty years old (ten years younger than Marx) when the “Communist Manifesto” made a socialist of him and drove him out on the street to make socialist speeches. At 21, the victory of the Central European reaction served to improve his education by driving him to the United States. Two years later he returned to Germany and resumed his father’s trade, the tanning business, at the same time spending all his leisure in the study of history and philosophy. In 1853, he married. At the age of thirty-one, we find him once more in the United States, trying his luck at storekeeping in Montgomery, Alabama. But his advanced views on the slave question irritated the good southern church people, who compelled the “ignorant foreigner” to flee for his life, in 1861.
He passed the greater part of the following twenty-three years in Germany, except a period of about five years, during which he superintended a government tannery in St. Petersburg, Russia. In all these years, he devoted as much time to study as he could spare from the struggle for existence.
Just as he had been one of the first to respond to the call of the “Communist Manifesto”, so he was one of the first to greet with enthusiasm the publication of the first volume of Marx’s “Capital.” It was especially the philosophical element in the Marxian theories which appealed to him, and nearly all the articles which he wrote for the struggling socialist papers of that day are permeated by the breath of a growing scientific philosophy. In these articles we find an answer to all the specious and shallow assertions which still pass in certain circles for an evidence of great learning.
It was but natural that Dietzgen should feel himself attracted by Ludwig Feuerbach even more than Marx and Engels were, and that he remained to the end a close friend of the author of the “Essence of Christianity.”
The first great work of Dietzgen matured in 1869, two years after the publication of the first volume of Marx’s “Capital” and two years before the death of Feuerbach. It was written in St. Petersburg and bore the title, “The Nature of Human Brain Work.” Dietzgen took issue in this book with Kant and Hegel, and vindicated the materialist conception of history by demonstrating that the human faculty of thought is itself a material product, not a supernatural entity. At the same time, this line of research led him to develop the Marxian method beyond Marx and the field of human society into a natural and cosmic theory of human understanding.
Marx and Engels were quick in recognizing the genius of the young tanner, who, although economically of the middle class, was nevertheless, like themselves, a proletarian by intellectual adoption. Marx in his preface to “Capital”, and Engels in his “Feuerbach,” have acclaimed Dietzgen as their independent and equal co-worker. At the international socialist congress at The Hague, in 1872, Marx introduced him to the assembled delegates with the words: “Here is our philosopher.”
The fury of the Bismarckian reaction, in 1878, struck also this proletarian philosopher. But it did not prevent him from continuing his contributions to the underground socialist press and his studies. His children had grown up in the meantime, and when his son Eugene emigrated to the United States, in 1880, in order to prepare a home in that country for the Dietzgen family, our philosopher devoted himself to the philosophical education of this son by a series of letters on logic, which showed that the man was marching undauntedly forward on the trail which he had begun to blaze in his younger years. When he followed his son to the United States in 1884, setting foot on this country for the third time, he at once took an active part in the socialist movement of that period by editing first the New York party organ, Der Sozialist, and later, after re-moving to Chicago, by taking charge of the Arbeiterzeitung just when the capitalist storm was wreaking vengeance on the communist anarchists of that city.
His maturest work, written in 1887, one year before his sudden death, is the “Positive Outcome of Philosophy,” in which he perfected his naturalist dialectics into a consistent natural monism. The scattered contributions of Joseph Dietzgen to the literature of the socialist movement have been carefully collected by his son Eugene, and the first volume of an English edition will soon be published by Charles H. Kerr & Company, Chicago. A second volume will follow in the not distant future.
The first volume opens with a sketch of Joseph Dietzgen’s life, by his son Eugene Dietzgen, who also contributes an illustration of the proletarian method of study and world-conception, in an essay entitled “Max Stirner and Joseph Dietzgen.” This is followed by a collection of some of the most important articles written by Joseph Dietzgen during the early stages of the German socialist movement for some of the first German socialist papers. In the article on “Scientific Socialism,” Dietzgen gives a philosophical explanation of the principles of scientific socialism. In his six sermons on “The Religion of Social-Democracy” he shows that morality is based on common needs and that standards of ethics change with changes in the material conditions of peoples. The next essay, on “Social-Democratic Philosophy” demonstrates that human salvation depends on material work, not on theological moonshine, and that socialists, therefore, look for salvation not so much to religious and ethical preaching as to the organic growth of social development. In “The Limits of Cognition,” “Our Professors on the Limits of Cognition,” and “The Inconceivable,” he draws the veil from the contradictory and immature notions of official theology and science concerning the nature of the human faculty of thought, and shows that this faculty has only natural, not supernatural, limits. In the “Excursions of a Socialist into the Domain of Epistemology,” he takes issue with the bourgeois Darwinians and belated followers of 18th century materialism, and shows that even the most advanced scientific materialist of the bourgeoisie, [Ernst] Haeckel, fails to apply his scientific method uniformly (or monistically). Especially the chapter on “Materialism versus Materialism,” in which he sets forth the difference between proletarian monism and bourgeois materialism, and that on “Darwin and Hegel,” in which he compares the relative merits of these two thinkers in the formulation of a scientific theory of evolution, are very valuable and should serve as eye openers, particularly for those who fancy that they have refuted the scientific naturalism of the modern proletariat when they have delivered themselves of a few commonplaces against the bourgeois conception of materialism.
The socialist movement has hitherto given almost exclusive recognition to Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. It will gradually learn to appreciate also Joseph Dietzgen and give him his just dues. Karl Marx was the first to formulate in a general way the theory of historical materialism and to apply Darwinian principles to society by culling the natural kernel from the mystic shell of Hegelian evolution. Dietzgen proved the correctness of this general theory by demonstrating beyond peradventure the material origin and nature of the faculty of thought, thereby completing the explanation given of this faculty by modern biological psychology, and applying the very ultimate conclusions of his discovery with unfaltering consistency.
It is this discovery of Dietzgen’s which gives the death blow to all metaphysical and dualistic thought. Once that we have grasped the import of his work, we are armored against all attacks of reactionary speculation.
Thanks to Joseph Dietzgen, we can apply the historical materialism of Marx with perfect understanding and with a conviction of its irrefutable truth. A proletarian armed with the intellectual weapons of Darwin’s natural selection theory, Marx’s historical materialism, and Dietzgen’s theory of understanding, can approach every phenomenon in society and nature with scientific objectiveness and precision.
And if the spokesmen of modern bourgeois philosophy prate learnedly of the Passing of Materialism, and if some bourgeois parrots in the socialist movement echo their glittering generalities, with an air of pronouncing the latest scientific truths, it is due to the work of these three revolutionary thinkers that we are enabled to reply: “Speak for yourselves! We know your tune, and we also know why you are singing it. There was a time when you used to sing another tune, which you called the Passing of Socialism. Now that the facts have proved your ignorance of social development, you have taken up the new tune of the Passing of Materialism. This tune is true enough so far as you and your class are concerned. Among you, the passing of materialism, that is to say, the passing of an uncompromising adherence to scientific induction and experiment, is but a reflex in your mind of the Passing of Capitalism. But scientific materialism has found a strong and young champion in the rising proletariat, and the Coming of Socialism means the Coming of Scientific Materialism and the Passing of Dualistic Theology and Metaphysics.”
Ernest Untermann.
Last updated on 9 April 2023