In Engels’ view, any approach to human relationships that emphasizes competition over cooperation is not only mistaken—insofar as it ignores the fundamentally inter-relational dimension of human nature and society—but also immoral, as the following quotation indicates:
In other words, because private property isolates everyone in his own crude solitariness, and because, nevertheless, everyone has the same interest as his neighbour, one landowner stands antagonistically confronted by another, one capitalist by another, one worker by another. In this discord of identical interests resulting precisely from this identity is consummated the immorality of mankind’s condition hitherto; and this consummation is competition.
(“Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy”, Marx/Engels, Collected Works, London 1975, vol. 3, p. 418)
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It is long time since I last opened Engels, but my general impression is that he considerably vulgarized Marx's dialectic, e.g. in his "Dialectic of Nature".
ReplyDeleteI never ran into any work discussing Engels' historical views, although Marx's views are, of course, much discussed, with diametrically opposing results (cf., e.g., Popper's storming criticism with Baudrillard's sympathetic reading).
Soviet historians of philosophy, for obvious ideological reasons, carefully avoided any talks about any discrepancies between Engels and Marx, and in the post-Soviet period there is not much talk about them at all, as people are too happy to freely select other topics.