Engels,humanism and revolutionary praxis : The centrality of the dynamic analysis of historical materialism and its inherent relation to overcoming capitalist alienation

Introduction

Historically, a mainstream perspective has been identified in Marxism that has associated the theoretical crises of historical materialism with Engels, relating his interpretation of Marxism to the introduction of ‘Stalinism… positivism, naturalism, Darwinism, technological determinism, and the dialectics of nature’ to historical materialism (Stanley, 1991: 647). This discussion will be referred to, throughout this paper, as the ‘Engels debate’. These criticisms of Engels gained strength at the end of the 19th century and developed in the 20th century.

The syndicalist philosopher Sorel ([1897] 1931: 12) outlined the grounds for the debate in a letter to the historian and philosopher Benedetto Croce, dated 27 December 1897. Sorel ([1897] 1931: 12) described the need to distance Engels from Marx, to make Engels responsible for the theoretical gaps in historical materialism in the academic community. Sorel ([1897] 1931: 12) stated that Engels more than once deviated from the ‘scientific interpretation’ of Marx’s thought, because he ‘had only a general philosophical education’; thus, in Anti-Dühring, Engels ([1877] 1987) provided a dim view of Hegel’s philosophical ideas. Sorel ([1897] 1931: 12) accused Engels of guiding historical materialism along the path of ‘evolutionism’, and turning it into an ‘absolute dogmatism’ based on ‘non-critical empirical discoveries’, denying the human being action. He also tried to disassociate Marx from his intellectual predecessors, especially Hegel and Feuerbach. Sorel ([1897] 1931: 12) proposed eliminating the expression ‘dialectical method’, considering it outdated for interpreting Marx because it connected Marx with German philosophy. Later, Croce (1914: 27-28) recognised Engels as the author who helped reduce the complex Marxian categories.

These interpretations emerged at a time of theoretical crisis for Marxism. ‘Imperialism, mass suffrage and the growth of reformism faced Marxists’, and they assumed these issues in different ways from Marx and Engels (Rees, 2005: 158). During this period, trade unionism advanced and became a national phenomenon, while Marxist ideas gained followers in Europe (Rees, 2005: 121). In 1889, the workers organised into the Second International; until its dissolution in 1916, it was theoretically dominated by a reformist version of Marxism, expressed in Kautsky and Bernstein’s works (Rees, 2005: 122).

After the First World War, attempts were made to re-conceptualise Marxism and differentiate it from Soviet thought (Callinicos, 2021: 87). Simultaneously, the ‘Engels debate’ assumed more complexity. For example, in History and Class Consciousness, published in 1923, the philosopher Lukács ([1923] 1971) underlined the importance of a pure understanding of Marx. Lukács ([1923] 1971: xxiii) divided Marx from Engels, in order to safeguard Marxian theory. Lukács tries to separate Engels’ interpretations from Marx, focusing on discrediting Engels’ work, mainly due to what Lukács ([1923] 1971: 18) sees as Engels’ incorrect application of the dialectical method. In this way, a breach is generated that separates Engels’ and Marx’s historical alliance, and it consolidates the ‘Engels debate’.

In 1960, the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre’s book Critique of Dialectical Reason was published, which called Engels’ method, in Ludwig Feuerbach and Dialectics of Nature, ‘external, or transcendental, dialectical materialism’ to distance it from Marx (Sartre, [1960] 2004: 27). Sartre ([1960] 2004: 26-27) assumed that a position of analysis of nature related to Marx’s dialectical materialism should present a very general synthesis of human knowledge that orders the facts. However, for Sartre ([1960] 2004: 26), Engels’ work is not fulfilled because he presents ‘facts’, not a ‘synthesis of ordering of facts’. For that reason, Engels’ work was characterised by Sartre ([1960] 2004: 31-32) as inductive and idealistic. Sartre’s work was influenced by ‘a political environment dominated by mass Communist parties whose ideological initiatives and strategic problems provided the key reference point’ for his theory (Callinicos et al., 2021: 6). Sartre broke his relationship with the French Communist Party in 1956 due to the Soviet repression of the Hungarian Revolution. Therefore, his criticism of Engels in 1960 is also a criticism of the Soviet Union.

In Il Marxismo e Hegel, Colletti (1969: 97) maintains that Engels arrived at the notion of ‘theoretical communism’ through an analysis of classical political economy, but without engaging in Hegelian speculative philosophy, as Marx had done. Colletti (1969: 97) contributes to establishing a distinction between the two authors by holding that Marx’s analysis was developed with strict theoretical rigour, while Engels’ work was ‘amateur’ and ‘vulgar’. In Engels’ approach, Colletti (1969: 97) identifies a ‘process of involution and dogmatic sclerosis’ of Marxism.

In the early 1970s, there was a mainstream view of Engels’ negative role in Marxism. This idea was found in Colletti’s (1969) Kantian reinterpretation, in Avineri’s (1968) or Schmidt’s (1971) humanism, and in the contributors’ Althusserian perspective to the New Left Review (Rees, 1994).

Horowitz and Hayes (1975: 21) considered that Engels’ work had a deterministic character that eliminated the possibility of ‘volitive’ behaviour in human beings, leading Marxism to scientific reductionism. Similarly, Kolakowski published in 1976 Main Currents of Marxism and concluded that Engels took a different view from Marx regarding the ‘cognitive and ontological link’ between ‘man and nature’ (Kolakowski, [1976] 1980: 185). For Kolakowski ([1976] 1980: 185), Engels developed a theory that ‘subjugates’ humanity to the general laws of nature. Thus, human history is conceived as a specific case of those laws. Kolakowski, ([1976] 1980: 185) finds that Engels breaks completely with Marx because Engels leaves the human subject and the ‘humanisation’ of nature as the foundation of his theory.

From the 1970s onwards, some academic careers were built on the ‘Engels debate’ (Foster, 2017: 48), such as Levine (1973, 1975) and Carver (1983). Levine (2007: 79) states that ‘the original message of Marx was maimed’ by Engels, and ‘the collapse of the Soviet Union opened the opportunity to... cleanse Marxism’. Levine (2018) has tried to purify Marxism, distinguishing that Lenin relied on Engels rather than Marx, so Lenin’s work represents an ‘Engelsian Leninism’ (Levine, 2018: 177). Carver (1983: 151) proposes that Engels’ and Marx’s works of research are not theoretically coincident. He affirms that Engels reinvented Marxism under his parameters (Carver, 1983: 151). Subsequent research on Carvel’s ‘Engels debate’ has specialised in interpreting Engels’ work through a biographical analysis (Carver, 2021).

Zarembka (2020: 2) concluded that Engels did not follow Marx’s instructions editing Capital. Marx conceived ‘primitive accumulation’ as a distinct part of Capital (Zarembka, 2020: 2). Thus, ‘Engels’ failure’ meant that ‘non-English readers are almost always reading a book of seven parts, with text suggesting a broader sweep of history than Marx had in his French edition and had wanted for... German edition’ (Zarembka, 2020: 2). Zarembka (2020: 2–3) argues that Marx’s discussion changed into the issue of workers’ employment, which ‘Engels left the same as in the 2nd German edition’, leading to the distortion of Marxism. However, Rees (1994) and Foster (2017) have shown that the ‘Engels debate’ lacks a theoretical ground. They demonstrated that Marx and Engels maintained a strong intellectual relationship.

However, the ‘Engels debate’ has failed to take into account the humanist contributions that Engels made to historical materialism. Engels has been associated with an anti-humanist, scientistic vision that vulgarised Marxism, condemning it to ostracism, and excluding from its proposals to overcome capitalist alienation conditions because it linked Engels to the negation of human will.

The idea of revolutionary praxis is taken from the work Philosophy of Praxis by the Mexico-based philosopher Sánchez Vázquez ([1967] 2003a), who elaborated a vision that has been interpreted as ‘critical Marxism’ ¹ and that originates on the margins of the dominant Marxism in Mexico. ² It formulates a theoretical alternative to the ‘Engels debate’. The study of Engels’ and Marx’s works, in Sánchez Vázquez, does not imply a divergence. For Sánchez Vázquez, the praxis, or the idea of labour, in Engels and Marx, responds to subjects’ features, as teleological and generic ³ beings, because their activity is oriented to a specific goal, and it takes place in a social context.

For Sánchez Vázquez ([1967] 2003a), the concept of revolutionary praxis – as developed by Marx in the 1840s in the eleventh thesis on Feuerbach: ‘the philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways’ but ‘the point... is to change it’ (Marx, [1888] 1974: 123) – is central to the writings of both Marx and Engels. This idea became even more critical after the publication of the Manifesto of the Communist Party in 1848 (Marx and Engels, [1848] 1908). Sánchez Vázquez ([1967] 2003a: 30) asserts that the work of Engels and Marx is based on a revolutionary praxis that ‘is the transition from theory to practice... guaranteeing the unity of one and the other’.

The revolutionary praxis is founded on the radical transformation of alienating capitalist reality associated with a conscious critique of it, based on the development of historical materialism (Sánchez Vázquez, [1967] 2003a: 140). In Ludwig Feuerbach, it is possible to find some critical elements of revolutionary praxis that contradict the dominant view that associated Engels with dogmatic scientific and positivist Marxism, as well as with the crises of historical materialism.

Engels’ research, in Ludwig Feuerbach, concludes that the Hegelian dialectic had a ‘dynamic’ and revolutionary underpinning; however, Hegel conditioned the scope of the dialectics by instituting a philosophical system that was restricted to the apology of the social reality. This article argues that the Hegelian system should be considered ‘static’ due to its inability to transform social reality. In contrast, the process of demystification undertaken by Engels and Marx of Hegelian and Feuerbachian philosophy results in a revolutionary praxis that aims to transform capitalist social reality, and it is assumed as a ‘dynamic’ approach. This notion can be identified in joint and separate works of Engels and Marx, such as the Theses on Feuerbach, the Manifesto of the Communist Party, Capital, and Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy.

To this end, the following section of this paper explains how the relationship between Marxism and Hegelian philosophy, analysed by Engels, involves a recognition of the theoretical foundations of historical materialism, through a process of adoption and transformation of the Hegelian method. In Engels’ approach, historical materialism is presented with an intrinsically dynamic character that is opposed to the dogmatic and static characteristic of Hegelian philosophy; hence, Engels’ method of analysis does not differ from that of Marx. Second, this paper analyses how historical materialism assimilates and transforms Feuerbach’s notion of nature and proposes a historical materialist vision beyond mechanicism. Third, it exposes the historical human subject’s construction, following a humanist line that implicates overcoming capitalist domination using the revolutionary praxis.

The criticism of the Hegelian philosophical system and the dynamic character of historical materialism

One of the apparent problems found in Ludwig Feuerbach is Engels’ return to Hegelian philosophy. Some scholars of historical materialism criticise Engels here because, although they find revolutionary features in Engels’ work, they consider that philosophically it represents an ideological step backwards (Jones, 1973: 35–36). This argument gained strength, especially after Althusser’s (1965) work and his thesis on the ‘epistemological break’ between the work of the early Marx and the late Marx was extended. Thus, any connection with Hegel or the Young Hegelian ⁴ philosophy present in Engels or Marx’s work has been described as a burden and a theoretical weakness in developing historical materialist analysis.

Engels’ and Marx’s production analysis shows a ‘complex’ connection between Hegelian philosophy and historical materialism. Engels’ and Marx’s studies adopted Hegelian philosophy notions, but both authors profoundly transformed them in constructing historical materialism. Therefore, in Engels and Marx’s works, we find philosophical conceptions close to those of Hegel but resulting from a critical process of clarification and reversion of Hegelian philosophy. We cannot consider the relationship of Marx and Engels to Hegel in terms of a simple negation of German philosophy.

The dialectical method of historical materialism results from a critique of Hegelian dialectics. In the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Marx ([1844] 1970) initiated this process. In 1844, Engels published an article, in the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, entitled Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy, which not only influenced Marx’s interest in studying political economy but also reflected the advances in Hegelian criticism made by Marx in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844.

Marx ([1932] 1992: 384), in the Manuscripts, focuses on two problems within Hegel’s philosophy. The first issue is raised by the fact that in Hegel’s Phenomenology, the ‘spirit’ ⁵ is the essence of the human being, and its authentic form is the ‘thinking’ or ‘speculative’ spirit (Sánchez Vázquez, 2003b: 191). Therefore, the human being has an abstract character that follows a journey from ‘ordinary consciousness’ to ‘absolute knowledge’ ⁶ through a dialectic movement (Sánchez Vázquez, 2003b: 191). It consists of ‘objectification, alienation and overcoming alienation’ (Sánchez Vázquez, 2003b: 197–198).

Marx ([1932] 1992: 385) finds the second complication when the objective world is presented in Hegel’s work because the human being still maintains an ‘abstract’ condition. Besides these problems, Engels ([1886] 2000: 10) argued, years later, in Ludwig Feuerbach that Hegel intended to present a complete philosophical system, characterised by an ‘absolute truth’, which is alienated from nature, and which later recovers its existence in thought and history. To complete the philosophical system, Hegel introduces the ‘end of history’ when humanity becomes conscious of the ‘absolute idea’. But in response to Hegel, Engels ([1886] 2000: 10) argued that the dialectical method’s possibilities are incompatible with the Hegelian notion of the ‘end of history’.

In response to these complications, Marx started a procedure of ‘reconquering’ the Hegelian posture in the Manuscripts (Sánchez Vázquez, 2003b: 198). Marx ([1932] 1992) points out that Hegel ([1807] 1977) discovered the movement through which the human being objectifies his ‘essence’. However, Hegel does this in a ‘mystified’ way because he attributes it to the ‘spirit’ and therefore only alludes to the human ‘history’ of thought. Marx ([1932] 1992: 385–386) shows in the Manuscripts that Phenomenology ‘is the mystifying’ critique for itself; however, insofar as it ‘maintains’ the idea of human ‘alienation’ (although it only manifests itself as ‘spirit’), the Phenomenology contains within it the central elements of a critique that can go far beyond the Hegelian point of view.

Sánchez Vázquez’s (2003b: 199) analysis of the Manuscripts shows that Marx perceives in Hegel ‘the possibility’ of the ‘real’, that is, ‘non-mystified’, use of human ‘alienation’ and ‘critical elements in a concrete social analysis’. Sánchez Vázquez (2003b: 199) explains that Marx conceptualised a historical and real human subject, and therefore alienation, for Marx, gained a ‘practical dimension’. In Marx, the human being is alienated in the process of capitalist production.

Alienation exists in capitalism because first, there is a historical situation in which the human subject is despoiled of the means of production, referred by Marx as ‘the primitive accumulation of capital’; for that reason, the subject is deprived of their creative and productive activity (labour), which is directed to capitalism accumulation. Second, the subjects cannot control their metabolism rationally with nature because the process of labour is alien to them. Third, the subject is separated from his labour products because the goods that workers produce belong to the owner of capital. Fourth, in capitalism, the subject, creator of goods, appears as a commodity and generates surplus-value. Fifth, human subjects are confronted in society because they interact under a condition of subjugation.

Marx ([1932] 1992: 386) considers that the outstanding thing in Hegel’s Phenomenology and the dialectic of negativity is that Hegel ([1807] 1977) conceived the ‘self-creation’ of the subjects as a process that ‘captures the essence of labour’ and considers the real, valid human beings as the result of their labour. These concepts were ‘mystified’ in Hegel’s work because Hegel only alludes to ‘spiritual labour’ (Sánchez Vázquez, 2003b: 201). ⁷ The transformation of these notions in Marx’s work results in the idea that human beings are the consequence of their labour, and the essence of labour is the ‘self-production’ of the human being.

In this sense, Marx ([1932] 1992: 386) proposes how historical materialism builds its conception of the human being. Marx refers to the ‘real and active’ human subject as a ‘species being’; insofar as it externalises its ‘species’ labour powers and behaves towards them as towards objects, this only occurs historically through ‘alienation’. In the same way, Marx ([1932] 1992: 386) shows that, in the process of human self-production, the objectification of labour finds its opposite in the alienation of the products of its labour. Marx’s perspective is based on critique of Hegel because there is a shift from an ‘abstract’ to a ‘real’ human being. Marxism’s central idea is that human beings are fulfilled, through labour, in a social environment only through objectification, and objectification makes alienation possible.

Sánchez Vázquez (2003b: 200) describes how when Marx specifies that ‘objectification makes alienation possible’, he generates a difference between ‘objectification, in general, and the form it can assume as alienation’, which does not appear in Hegel. For Marx, objectification is necessary for human beings to realise themselves. Still, it is problematic because, without objectification, human beings cannot fully develop, they need to ‘externalise themselves through the joint action of human beings’ (Sánchez Vázquez, 2003b: 201).

Marx ([1867] 1990) found that human beings are restricted in objectifying themselves freely in capitalism. The thesis on the relationship between the need for human objectification through labour is embodied in the analysis of ‘the labour process and the valorisation process’ in Volume I of Capital (Marx, [1867] 1990: 283–306). Capitalism is formally denounced for having subsumed the human capacities of labour into capitalist production. This notion also emerged as the core of Engels’ work in The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man. ⁸ The human being is evolutionarily separated from the ape through the transformative action of labour.

Therefore, when Engels ([1886] 2000: 12) wrote Ludwig Feuerbach, he stressed that in the process of research that he had undertaken with Marx, they had detected that there was a ‘revolutionary’ background in Hegelian philosophy, mainly because Hegelian dialectics gave them the possibility to understand reality in a changing way. The demystification of Hegelian philosophy provided the intellectual basis for historical materialism and the critique of classical political economy. Marx confirmed this argument in Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy.

Engels’ criticism in Ludwig Feuerbach, that the Hegelian dialectic was incompatible with Hegel’s conservative and apologetic attitude towards the state, responded to a historical need for the abstract particularity of Hegelian philosophy. The opposition to the idea of the ‘absolute spirit’ was a denunciation of philosophy to make it practical. It was essential to recovering the core function of concepts and their potential to influence society and transform reality (Sánchez Vázquez, [1967] 2003a: 130). Therefore, Marx and Engels’ philosophical concerns focused progressively on the ‘practical’ aspects of social reality.

In Hegel, the ‘practical activity’ of human beings does not stand on its own; it is ‘a station of self-consciousness with the spirit’ and therefore a theoretical step in reaching the ‘absolute’ (Sánchez Vázquez, [1967] 2003a: 129). Thus, Engels ([1886] 2000: 12) stresses that Hegelian philosophy responded to a closed theorisation that resulted in the immobilisation of reality, so that ‘the revolutionary side is smothered’. ⁹ Engels ([1886] 2000: 12) states that ‘truth is in the hands of Hegel... a collection of ready-made dogmatic statements’. Therefore, the role of the philosopher is reduced to ‘understanding’ and ‘justifying’ reality.

Engels, in Ludwig Feuerbach, criticises Hegelian philosophy’s lack of capacity to transform reality, considering it ‘static’. As a result, it can be affirmed that the mission that Engels undertook alongside Marx in demystifying Hegelian philosophy was focused on building a philosophy of praxis, understood not as a theoretical praxis, but as a real activity, which transforms the world (Sánchez Vázquez, [1967] 2003a: 129).

Sanchez Vázquez ([1967] 2003a: 132) describes how the formation of historical materialism can be conceived of as a theoretical-practical process. On the theoretical level, Marx and Engels criticise and assimilate Hegelian philosophy, the contributions of the young Hegelians and Feuerbach’, the theories of the English economists, and the socialist and communist doctrines, while on the practical level they studied and experienced: the capitalist economic reality, the situation of the English workers and the 1848 Revolutions (Sánchez Vázquez, [1967] 2003a: 132). This theoretical-practical process produced a philosophy of revolutionary praxis that can be understood as a ‘dynamic’ epistemic model of analysis and transformation of reality, in opposition to Hegelian philosophy.

Thus, in Ludwig Feuerbach, Engels reaffirms historical materialism’s opposition to the dogmatism associated with the Hegelian notion of ‘absolute’. Engels brings to historical materialism a humanist and dynamic epistemic model because it aims to analyse and transform the alienating reality imposed by capitalism. Therefore, in Engels, there is no theoretical dichotomy with Marx, and his work cannot be characterised as an anti-humanism that cancels out the will of the human being. On the contrary, in Engel’s critique, there is a concept of revolutionary praxis, in which organised subjects can transform the conditions of capitalist reality.

The demystified implementation of Feuerbach’s ontology, and the relationship between human being and nature

Engels describes the tremendous impact of Feuerbach’s 1841 The Essence of Christianity, to the point that ‘all’ young Hegelians became adherents of Feuerbach (Engels [1886] 2000: 17). Feuerbach’s contribution was to develop a humanistic and materialistic philosophy that resolved some of the philosophical problems of the Hegelian system.

Engels ([1886] 2000: 17) recognised that one of Feuerbach’s outstanding contributions was that nature was not questioned by Feuerbach’s philosophy because, in Feuerbach, nature is the basis on which human beings are developed. According to Feuerbach’s conception, subjects are part of nature, and therefore they do not separate from it.

Feuerbach’s critique of religion focuses on the idea that nothing else exists beyond subjects and nature (Engels [1886] 2000: 17). Therefore, the spiritual beings that the human mind has created are only products of the imagination. In this way, Feuerbach marks a milestone in the thought of the Young Hegelians, in which materialism resolves the problem raised in the religious sphere (Engels [1886] 2000: 15). This resolution makes it possible that young Hegelians deal with questions related to objective reality.

For Engels ([1886] 2000: 23-24), Feuerbach’s contributions are immersed in a process that tends towards materialism. Feuerbach presents a turning point because the absolute idea is presented as the residue of faith in an ‘ultra-mundane’ creator (Engels [1886] 2000: 24). Another of the strengths that Engels detects in Feuerbach is that he reinforces the idea that the only thing that exists is the ‘material world’ and that which is ‘perceptible’ by the senses (Engels [1886] 2000: 24). Thus, Feuerbach’s contribution explains that matter is not the product of spirit, but the spirit is the supreme result of matter (Engels [1886] 2000: 24).

Engels’s acceptance of Feuerbach’s philosophical premises has been seen by some as an ideological burden introduced to Marxism. However, this view denies any historical connection between Feuerbach and Marx. With the publication in 1932 of the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 and the joint evaluation of Engels’ and Marx’s work through the MEGA project, ¹⁰ this argument has been reconsidered. We can now consider the relationship among Engels, Marx and Feuerbach in terms of the theoretical-practical process (exposed in the previous section) that resulted in the historical materialism formation.

Marx, in the Manuscripts, accepted that Feuerbach had generated three brilliant achievements. However, while Marx was still heavily influenced by Feuerbach in the Manuscripts, he also understands his limitations in the appreciation of his merits (Sánchez Vázquez, 2003b: 175). As documented by Engels in Ludwig Feuerbach, Marx and Engels subjected Feuerbachian philosophy to a similar process of transformation and demystification as they did with regard to Hegel.

According to Marx, Feuerbach’s key contributions were, firstly, his observation that Hegelian philosophy ‘is nothing more than religion brought into thought and developed in thought’ so that Hegelian philosophy and religion are condemned for representing human alienation (Marx, [1932] 1992: 381). Sánchez Vázquez (2003b: 175) explains that, in Feuerbach, ‘religion and Hegelian philosophy’ have a common anthropological basis, so that both maintain a process of ‘alienation of the human being’ because Hegel presents a ‘rationalised religion’ or ‘a rational elaboration of God’.

Feuerbach considered that the subjects create God through a projection of the best attributes of themselves. Therefore, God is a product of the human mind; however, God becomes a stranger to the human beings and dominates them. Marx shows that, as a result, human capacities are alienated in God. Likewise, this process is repeated in Hegelian philosophy.

Second, Feuerbach’s materialistic conception corresponds to the foundation of ‘true materialism’ and ‘science’ because Feuerbach finds in the social relations between subjects the fundamental principle of theory (Marx, [1932] 1992: 381). In this way, Feuerbach overcomes ‘the infinite’ and replaces it with the ‘sensuous’, the ‘real’ or the ‘particular’ because in the philosophical field Feuerbach’s philosophy goes beyond the relationship of religion and theology (Marx, [1932] 1992: 381).

For Feuerbach, the relationship established from ‘subject to the subject’ is the basis of his theory such that, as ‘an objective, and disinterested activity is opposed to religion’ (Sánchez Vázquez, 2003b: 176). As a generic being, the human being relates to others as a ‘thinking being’. Knowledge can only be found in the community, ¹¹ although knowledge is an anthropological concept in Feuerbach because it refers to the human being’s abstract perception (Sánchez Vázquez, 2003b: 176).

Third, Feuerbach overcomes the sensible, re-establishing ‘abstraction’ through ‘religion and theology’ because he conceives the ‘negation of the negation’ ¹² as ‘the contradiction of Hegelian philosophy with itself’ (Marx, [1932] 1992: 381). In other words, he affirms a theological position after having denied it (Marx, [1932] 1992: 382). Marx ([1932] 1992: 382) explains that Feuerbach understands ‘the negation of the negation’ or ‘the concrete concept as thought which surpasses itself in thought and as thought which strives to be direct awareness, nature, reality’. ¹³

For Marx ([1932] 1992), Feuerbach’s achievement is to assume the close relationship between Hegelian dialectics and idealism, and for this reason dialectics in its speculative form constitutes idealism. However, Marx ([1932] 1992) does not accept that the ‘negation of the negation’ is exclusively associated with the Hegelian idealist form. In this sense, he criticises Feuerbach for his failure to consider that ‘the negation of the negation’ can be associated with real content. Feuerbach’s view is equivalent to assuming that dialectics, in general, has a necessarily idealistic content (Marx, [1932] 1992).

On these three points, it is possible to establish that Marx has concluded that dialectical processes exist in historical reality. So, we can assume that Marx’s criticisms of Feuerbach and Hegel in the Manuscripts sketch out the potential of the ideas of historical materialism that subsequently appear as part of the theoretical-practical process in the Theses on Feuerbach, The German Ideology and A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. In this latter work, this process is a central element in the constitution of historical materialism (Marx, [1859] 2008). Engels also incorporates this idea in Ludwig Feuerbach and Dialectics of Nature, revealing the revolutionary epistemic character of Hegelian dialectics in its demystified form.

In the Manuscripts, Marx criticises Feuerbach for rejecting the dialectic’s historical character, which he dismissed as Hegelian idealism. This critique is also taken up and examined in depth by Engels in Ludwig Feuerbach. Engels ([1886] 2000: 25–26) connects Feuerbach’s theoretical blockage with the impossibility of an interpretation of the relations between mind and matter because Feuerbach focuses on a perspective of the mechanistic materialism of the 18th century, ¹⁴ and he could not conceive of it as ‘a process’ or ‘matter’ that is subject to historical development (Engels [1886] 2000: 25).

Engels deepens the abstract notion of the human being that Marx criticises in Feuerbach. Engels ([1886] 2000: 32) emphasises that Feuerbach aims to generate a new religion. The supreme relationship between human beings is externalised in ‘sexual love’. For Feuerbach, all human relationships involve feelings of love, and they gain their full legitimacy through religion. Engels’ analysis ([1886] 2000: 32) states that idealism is maintained in Feuerbach because it focuses on the fact that human relationships should be considered as the ‘true religion’, which is why the real subject ‘becomes the subject of Hegel’s spirit’ (Sánchez Vázquez, 2003b: 184).

However, Marxism retains from Feuerbach mainly a group of ontological positions (Foster, 2004: 24), which are subjected to a process of demystification. These approaches are underlined by Engels, in Ludwig Feuerbach, because the perception of nature, which is fruitful for historical materialism, is associated with Feuerbach’s philosophy. For Feuerbach, human subjects are part of nature, which is why Feuerbach’s criticism of religion focuses on the idea that beyond the human beings and nature nothing else exists (Engels [1886] 2000: 17).

Marx and Engels retain from Feuerbach firstly the concept of the ‘real human being’. It is possible to see how, in the Manuscripts, Marx adopts this idea from Feuerbach, but he criticises it immediately because it is a subject that has no history (Sánchez Vázquez, 2003b: 184). Engels makes the same point years later, in Ludwig Feuerbach ([1886] 2000: 32). In the Manuscripts, Marx ([1932] 1992: 381) assumes that Feuerbach ‘founded true materialism… by making the social relation of man to man the basic principle of his theory’. This idea can be located, in its mystified form, in Feuerbach’s criticism of religion. When Feuerbach discovers the inversion of the relations between human beings and God, the subjects become aware of themselves (Sánchez Vázquez, 2003b: 217).

However, Marx’s critique does not stop at the subjects’ awareness of their autonomy regarding God, so that the human beings do not appear in Marx as an abstract being, but as a product of themselves and their social relations, in such a way that, in the Manuscripts, the humans themselves generate their existence.

This idea is further developed, in its demystified form, by Engels in The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man. ¹⁵ In this work, as a self-producing activity of the human being, labour emerges as the central element in the evolution from ‘ape to man’ and in which creationism is objectively refuted. It is worth mentioning that Engels takes up again a vision present in the Manuscripts, about the role of science and the discovery of objective evidence that might be used to dissociate the origin of life on earth with a positivist, dogmatic and creationist approach. Engels argues that life on earth responds to a historical process of natural development. Marx had also been concerned with questions of human development from the beginning of his work. In volume I of Capital, Marx ([1867] 1990: 283–306) explains how labour’s capacity as a human self-production mechanism is altered in capitalism. This person’s capacity to labour becomes alienated from them under capitalism because it is directed at accumulation.

Second, the concept of alienation in Marx and Engels is Hegelian and Feuerbachian. In Hegel and Feuerbach, alienation is a spiritual and abstract issue. However, Marx demystifies the Feuerbachian idea of alienation and uses its configuration to illustrate the separation that human beings are subjected to in bourgeois production. In this way, Marx ([1932] 1992: 326-334) considers ‘the act of alienation of human activity’ in four ‘aspects’. The first refers to the relationship of the product of labour as an ‘alien object’, which dominates the worker (Marx, [1932] 1992: 326). For Marx ([1932] 1992: 327), this relationship is also transferred to the level of natural resources, which appear as something ‘strange’ and hostile to the subject. The second aspect refers to the relationship between ‘labour’ and the act of production of labour (Marx, [1932] 1992: 328). The activity carried out by the worker is ‘strange’ to him; it is an activity that does not belong to him and that is directed against him (Marx, [1932] 1992: 328–329). The third aspect of alienation is capitalism’s transformation of human beings’ generic capacity (species being), depriving them of nature and their generic spiritual faculties. The fourth aspect indicates that the human subject is also alienated from other human subjects due to all the above conditions. For that reason, in capitalism, the subjects are at odds with each other (Marx, [1932] 1992: 330).

The studies of Musto (2010b) have shown that Marx maintains in Capital an enhanced notion of the alienation category, in the fetishism of commodities thesis, presented in the introductory chapter of Capital.

Third, the Feuerbachian concept of nature brought to the notion of the human being’s real and historical production in Marx. For Marx, the human subject, as a universal being, ‘lives from inorganic nature’; in this sense, the process of human development shows that the more universal the subjects are, ‘the area of inorganic nature’ which they live is ‘more universal’ (Marx, [1932] 1992: 327). Consequently, nature constitutes ‘a part of human consciousness’ and a part of human life and activity (Marx, [1932] 1992: 327–328).

Marx proposes a physical and biological postulate of nature, and he affirms that the existence of the human being depends on natural resources and human ‘universality’, which is revealed in the relationship that the subject establishes with nature (Marx, [1932] 1992: 328). For that reason, nature is ‘a direct means of life’ (Marx, [1932] 1992: 328). The vital human activity (labour) can only manifest itself through natural resources. Furthermore, the fact that the subjects ‘live’ in nature implies that nature is subjects’ ‘inorganic body’ (Marx, [1932] 1992: 328) and they depend on the continuous relationship with nature in order not to ‘die’. Nature is also a totality, and the human being is part of it (Marx, [1932] 1992: 328).

Therefore, any aspect of the ‘physical’ and ‘spiritual’ life of the human being has an inherent link with nature (Marx, [1932] 1992: 328). It is possible to identify that Feuerbach’s notion of nature and ontological positions, in their demystified forms, had a substantial influence on historical materialism, specifically with regard to Marx and Engels’ denunciations of the capitalist devastation of natural resources. Because Marx and Engels’ retain from Feuerbach the notion of the human being as a ‘natural being’, they do not take a Promethean position towards nature. Their work demonstrates how capitalism has altered the possibility to control the metabolism between human beings and nature rationally, producing a global civilisational crisis in which life on the planet is subjected to capitalist accumulation.

Engels’ argument on the relevance of the development of natural sciences shows the deterioration of human beings and nature in capitalism. A detailed study of the theoretical background of Ludwig Feuerbach makes it possible to recognise the pre-eminence that Engels’ work has had in the contemporary development of the ecological critique of capitalism, and the role of historical materialism as a philosophy of revolutionary praxis, that makes it possible.

The concrete-historical human subject in Marxism and the overcoming of the conditions of capitalist domination

Due to the excessively abstract character of Hegelian philosophy, Marx and Engels needed to confront the need for a conception of the human being, as a concrete-historical being. The interest in developing a historical approach can be traceable to the youthful writings of both authors; for example, in Engels’ (1844) article Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy, his historical references to English economics aim to provide a historical background to the development of the material conditions of production. This article was significant in the collaboration of Engels and Marx. After its publication, both became concerned with theorising the social changes produced by capitalism. One of the significant repercussions of Engels’ article is Marx’s writing of the Manuscripts of 1844, in which the need for a historical approach is not only linked to the process of demystification of German philosophy but also the process of refutation of the apology for private property in the work of bourgeois economists.

Marx supposes that all the characteristics of the human being are necessarily a historical result of their interaction with nature because to the extent that the human beings interact with nature through labour they change it, it becomes a ‘humanised nature’ (Marx, [1932] 1992: 353). Labour, and how production is carried out, constitutes the human history. They represent the actual history of the human being (Marx, [1932] 1992: 353). In the Manuscripts, Marx assumes that the real and historical relationship between human beings and nature is always manifested through labour (Sánchez Vázquez, 2003b: 245).

Sánchez Vázquez (2003b: 245) explains that the concept of human beings, as social and historical beings, is based on the need for historicity because their sociality adopts concrete historical forms. Marx identifies that bourgeois political economy has viewed ‘alienated labour’, as a condition inherent to human labour. This ahistorical notion is criticised throughout the work of Marx and Engels. In A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Marx calls the classical economists Robinsonades ¹⁶ due to the way in which they conceive ahistorical reality. This stance was also taken up by Marx in Capital.

One of the critical debates between historical materialism and classical political economy has focused on homo economicus. The ahistorical notion of classical political economists helped associate human beings with a set of essential characteristics fixed for any time or place. Thus, bourgeois economy has developed epistemically through the analysis of the homo economicus, an ‘atomised’ human being who behaves in the self-interested way characteristic of humans in capitalist society regardless of time or place.

Through their studies of the material conditions of production, associated with their historical concept of the human being, Marx and Engels discovered that none of its essential traits can be fixed. Therefore, the epistemic character of historical materialism, concerning classical political economy, can be considered ‘dynamic’ because it is confronted with a set of ‘static’ and ‘ahistorical’ positions of the bourgeois political economists. The ‘ahistorical and static’ notion of the political economy underpins selfish behaviour and the preservation of capitalism. In contrast, Marx puts forward a historical idea of the human being, primarily a social being. This characteristic is expressed in the concrete conditions of production in such a way that the human productive process is reflected in a set of ‘social relations of production’. This category is presented as a core notion, for the development of Marxist studies, in the famous preface of A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy.

Some mechanistic interpretations of Marxism, such as Althusser’s structuralism, have deformed the idea of Marx and Engels’ historical conception, mostly based on a deterministic reading of A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy and Capital, ¹⁷ that assumes that the laws governing the capitalist system overwhelm the volitional capacities of human beings. The same idea appears in the ‘Engels debate’, whereby Engels is held responsible for assuming a historical determinism. This approach implies that the human beings cannot change their destiny; the subjects must passively wait for the contradictions between the forces of production and relations of production to finish the capitalist system by themselves.

One of the fundamental ideas that Engels explores, in Ludwig Feuerbach, is that the path of history is intrinsically related to the goals of human ‘consciousness and will’, which appear in the outside world as the result of the wills that shape history. This principle highlights the transformative capacity of human beings especially in a capitalist reality that subjugates them.

As Sánchez Vázquez ([1967] 2003a: 355) argues in Philosophy of Praxis, when Engels refers in this work to ‘human consciousness and will’, he alludes to the relationship between ‘the reflexive and the spontaneous’ within Marxism. Sánchez Vázquez’s analysis clarifies that, in Engels’ and Marx’s work, the proletariat can ‘subvert the economic and social order that alienates it’ through a ‘conscious and reflective’ revolutionary praxis.

It should be stressed here that Marx and Engels were addressing their work to the working class. They saw the need for the labour movement to reach ‘a consciousness of its historical mission’ and its aims. In the same way, Engels and Marx thought that the labour movement should know the laws of capitalist functioning and be aware of ‘the objective possibilities of its emancipation’ (Sánchez Vázquez, [1967] 2003a: 355). Therefore, the in-depth analysis presented by Engels and Marx is not reduced to contemplation of the functioning of capitalism but aimed at generating in the working class the theoretical elements that make possible the transformative action of its social movement. For that reason, the proletariat can only ‘liberate itself’ if it becomes ‘conscious of its exploitation’ and of the ‘need to develop a revolutionary praxis’ (Sánchez Vázquez, [1967] 2003a: 355).

It is necessary to stress that the argument on the expiry of the proletariat’s revolutionary praxis, which compares the working-class struggle in the industrialised capitalist countries with the oppressed peoples in the Global South, is contradictory. It is mainly because of the proletarian revolution of 1917 provided a historical milestone for other oppressed classes, in the world, to fight against domination conditions (Sánchez Vázquez, [1967] 2003a: 358). The alliance between the proletariat and the oppressed population avoids the possibility of the bourgeoisie taking the lead in these movements, and avoiding a genuine revolutionary process headed by the working class (Sánchez Vázquez, [1967] 2003a: 358).

An objective and a subjective factor characterise revolutionary praxis. It is objectively related to human needs, limitations and possibilities because it is founded on history and society (Sánchez Vázquez, [1967] 2003a: 355). In a subjective sense, revolutionary praxis requires the working class to plan for social transformation and be conscious of the historical need to exercise praxis, and its limits and possibilities (Sánchez Vázquez, [1967] 2003a: 355). The working class’s revolutionary praxis is not pre-established but dynamically adapted under the historical-social conditions in which it exists (Sánchez Vázquez, [1967] 2003a: 356). The working class’s historical mission, which consists of assuming this revolutionary praxis, is based on the historical-social necessity that answers the subaltern character assigned to the proletariat in capitalism. This historical mission takes on greater relevance when the capitalist system’s contradictions become more intense (Sánchez Vázquez, [1967] 2003a: 357). Sánchez Vázquez highlights that the role of the proletariat as ‘a revolutionary class’ has not expired (Sánchez Vázquez, [1967] 2003a: 357). He rejects the arguments of the reformist theorists (mainly those derived historically from Keynesian policies originating in the post-World War II) who consider that capitalism’s welfare state has annulled the working class’s historical-social function because these reforms do not abolish the capitalist alienation of human beings (Sánchez Vázquez, [1967] 2003a: 357).

Conclusions

The ‘Engels debate’ arose in the 19th century mainly because most academics at the time were not familiar with most of the texts associated with both authors’ theoretical development. The works of the different periods of Engels and Marx were published during the 20th century, and the ‘Engels debate’ should have dissipated. Nevertheless, in the 20th century, this debate was used as an argument to reformist and Stalinist distortions of Marxism were attributed to Engels by his critics.

However, refuting the idea of an ‘apparent divergence between Engels and Marx’ has generated an updated theoretical corpus of historical materialism, demonstrating how, as a philosophy, it goes beyond the contemplation and understanding of capitalist accumulation laws and takes revolutionary praxis as its core argument.

In this way, Marxism maintains a theoretical-practical content because the return to the revision of Engels’ and Marx’s texts has been linked to a set of historical-concrete situations of contemporary capitalism. In such a way, the so-called ‘return of Engels’ and the formation of a ‘Marxist ecology’ have managed to generate a theoretical alternative to interpretations of Marxism that had indicated a Promethean conception of the human being. ¹⁸

Some theorists have associated Engels’ text Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy with an approach that imposes burdens on historical materialism, because it is connected to Hegel and Feuerbach’s work. However, this ignores that Engels tries to explain the process of demystification that he undertook with Marx. Engels and Marx profoundly transformed the dialectical method while the categories of analysis that would make up historical materialism were constructed.

The thesis developed in this article associates historical materialism with a dynamic epistemic approach resulting from a contrast with the Hegelian method, conceived as an apologia for the existing social reality and therefore ‘static’. At the same time, the revolutionary praxis inaugurated by Engels and Marx aims at historically questioning the process of the real domination of social relations and at overcoming capitalist alienation.

Marx and Engels also apply this demystification process to the Feuerbachian ontological categories, in developing their conception of nature and their approach to alienation. In Engels and Marx, these ideas appear transformed as a result of the critique of German philosophy. It has been possible to show that Engels’ statements, in Ludwig Feuerbach, maintain a correlation with the theoretical development followed by the joint production of Engels and Marx and the texts published exclusively by Marx.

One of Engels’ main theoretical contributions is the conception of a historical-concrete vision of the human subject. This paper has argued that the formation of this approach, in the prologue of A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, should not be associated with a mechanistic view of historical materialism. It should be related to the historical necessity to make the proletariat aware of the process of alienation and subjugation that the existence of the capitalist system of production entails and bring it to the field of revolutionary praxis.

The flourishing of Marxism in universities has made it possible for Engels’ and Marx’s ideas to appear in different fields of knowledge. This uprising has also helped to refute the bad reputation that had been attributed to Engels. This article shows that members of the academy must develop a revolutionary praxis and contribute to overcoming the alienating barriers of the capitalist system through it.