How important is Engels 'Anti-Dühring'?

For most dialectical Marxists, it is a classic defence of dialectics (or the first half is).

For us materialists, it's one of the worst books ever written by a socialist (easily rivalling Lenin's Materialism and Empirio-criticism, and Trotsky's ABC of Dialectics).

It was recently pulled apart here:

http://www.revleft.com/vb/anti-duhri...412/index.html

Much of the second half is excellent though.

In fact, you can find a list of the threads on dialectics at Revleft since I joined 3 years ago here:

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/rosa.l/RevLeft.htm

Not a pretty sight for the dialectical mystics though...

Okey Dokey, хорошo! - Cпасибо товарищ Роза !

Will buy it and just skip the first half or so...

The other comrades will kill me - oh well....

'Live for nothing or Die for something!'

Cпасибо for the links!

P.S.: Note my new title (under my name) -
you will be pleased!

This is the sentence you should probably take away from this post - the other ones (especially the amusing claim that Rosa has ever managed to pull the work apart) are just meant to be simple mud slinging.

YS:

Well, you can't take me on, can you?

Grunt:

Apart from the odd exception here and there, with respect to the many hundreds of 'debates' I have had with our dialectically-distracted comrades over the last twenty-five years, they all argue roughly like YS here. They can't respond to me so they either attack me personally, ignore me or distract attention by any means they can think of.

As the quotation I posted on that other thread said, they almost all turn in an "absurdly pathetic performance" -- no wonder workers ignore them in their hundreds of millions, and it's no surprise either that they have presided over 150 years of almost total failure.

If it wasn't so serious, it would be a joke.

Yehuda Scopes here being one of the more risible.

Yes. And that is according to Schopenhauer's 'Die Kunst, Recht zu
behalten' (roughly: 'The art of winning a discussion') the last resort,
if everything else fails...

Almost is the important word.

Here is a great exception:

^^^I agree, but dialectics had nothing to do with this.

But it did help in destroying it.

Details here:

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/rosa.l/page%2009_02.htm

Or you read it and make your own decision.

Do not fall prey to Rosa bullying tactics. She is not an authority on what is right or wrong.

It is quite funny, if you read anti-duhring you see that Engels has already dealt with criticisms made against materialist dialectics by Duhring himself. Rosa criticisms are very much the same as Duhrings, and have already been dealt with. So for me and others, Rosa isn't worth our time.

Hiero:

Maybe I am and maybe I'm not, but one thing is for sure, you can't respond effectively to my demolition of Engels's 'theory'.

That's a lie; my criticisms of Engels are almost totally original -- but you would not know, since you haven't read them, but are quite happy to pontificate about my ideas from a position of almost total ignorance.

At least I had the decency to study Engels carefully before dismantling his 'theory'.

And it looks like Grunt does not need to be 'bullied' into anything; he has already made his mind up that dialectics is hogwash, and inferior hogwash at that.

"Only owing to Anti-Dühring did we learn to read and understand Capital the right way."

[ ]

http://www.revleft.com/vb/scrapping-...34/index6.html

No - certainly not. But the grunts of the Glorious Red Army had everything to do with that!


We must never forget:






10,700,000 soldiers of The Red Army were KIA, froze to death,
died of starvation and/or diseases or were plain slaughtered

11,400,000 civilian Sovjet human beings were killed, froze to death,
died of starvation and/or diseases or were plain slaughtered

1,000,000 Sovjet jews were exterminated

That brings the Sovjet death toll to: 23,100,000



In comparison(totals):

US: 418,500
UK: 449,800
F: 567,600



___________________________________________

Will do! But if I smell Hegel (yes, yes - I read some of his supposedly
'important' stuff...) - I am allowed to skip those parts, am I not?


She is not bullying me the least! On the contrary: Being a
materialist and firm believer of analytical logical positivism
in the great tradition of B. Russell - I am relieved that there
are Bolshevik's around who don't buy the Hegelian mysticism
and mumbo-jumbo.

(I have to admit though that I now and then coquette/flirt
a bit with nihilism and that I consider F. Nietzsche as one of the
real great thinkers...{The Nazi's ab-used bits and pieces of his
philosophy as they pleased - not one of them had the faintest
idea what N. really was talking about.})


Sounds intriguing...

Well - I will acquire the (in-)famous book some time in
January and read it - to see what all the fuss is about
and then I will judge.

I can chose between the German original (Dietz Verlag:
Marx-Engels Werke Band: 20), a Swedish and an English
translation. I think I will read it in the original.

Now, now - who is bullying whom here?? She has
read more than I ever will manage to read in my lifetime -
and you only have to check her site to see that her
arguments are well-founded, as far as I can tell.

I am not sure whether I can muster the patience and dilligence -
if he really goes on and on about mystic things...

Oh well, I can try...

Damn right! I made the crucial choice between: Logic, Reason, Science, Matter, Energy
AND Idealism, Mysticism, 'Religion', Spirit, Soul and other nonsense,
a long time ago!

Is that a quote from the great Ильи́ч ?
It doesn't say in the thread you referred to.

Thanks for the link.

So: One has to read Anti-Dühring first and then Das Kapital?

Bummer! But maybe that's the reason why I understood only
about 50% of Das Kapital...

What's your opinion, Rosa?

The anti-Engels crowd would like to forget that Marx wrote a chapter of Anti-Duhring and also edited it.

It's definitely worth reading.

CG:

1) Who would like to forget it? Not me.

2) What do you mean "edited it"?

3) What has this got to do with whether the first half is any good or not?

4) Marx's chapter was in the second half.

Grunt:

I'm not suggesting you should, but I had to study it if I was to demolish it fairly and accurately.

The JR quote is from Kautsky, and he was wrong if he meant the first half of that book.

Certainly read the second half, which is excellent in many ways.

Yes - that's the right Modus operandi of course.
Still it sure as hell was/(is?) hard, hard work and
requires an IQ I can only dream about...

Thanks! Dunno much about him. Will check wiki.


Will do as promised - although now I'm a bit scared...

I'm not 'the sharpest knife in the drawer', you know!


I suddenly have the uneasy feeling that all the other
comrades here are 'mental giants' with unlimited amounts
of time to spare and/or unlimited energy...

No offense intended!