Were Engels and the Second International positivists?

[heiss93]

Engels, Kautsky, Plekhanov and most of the Marxists of the 2nd International are often accused of being positivists especially by humanists like Lukacs, Gramsci, Marcuse and the Frankfurt school. To what extent is this a valid criticism, and not simply a slur? Positivism is used to mean a diversity of things including scientism, objectivism, mechanistic materialism, economic determinism, empiricism, naturalism etc.

This harsh critique of Engels mathematic views accuses him of being a follower of Herbert Spencer and John Stuart Mill's empiricist inductive logic. http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/heijen/works/math.htm

Marx was highly critical of positivism as a school of Comte's followers, but positivism in the general sense used in sociology has come a long way from that. There is also the sense in which positivism is conservative and supposedly class neutral and thus used to justify the status quo.
The 1920s Soviet debate between the mechanists and dialecticians could be seen as a battle over positivism.

[Calmwinds]

There is also the sense in which positivism is conservative and supposedly class neutral and thus used to justify the status quo.

Where did you get this from? I request further elaboration on that line.

[JimFar]

I find useful the following typology of positivism that
Russell Keat presented in his 1981 book The Politics of Social Theory.
There, he provided the following typology of positivist theses in social
theory:


1). The 'scientist' thesis which asserts that science alone represents
a genuine form of human knowledge. That all legitimate human
knowledge is science.


2). The positivist conception of science which holds that science aims
at the explanation and prediction of observable phenomena by
treating them as instances of universal natural laws. What Carl
Hempel referred to as the covering-law model of scientific
explanation is adhered to. The scientific validity of
statements describing natural laws is assessed solely in terms
of their logical relationships to other statements describing observation
data. The positivist conception of science was developed over
the years by such thinkers as Berkeley, Hume, Comte, J.S. Mill,
Ernst Mach and in the last century by the logical positivists
including Schlick, Carnap, Feigl, Reichenbach and Frank
amongst others


3). The advocacy of a scientific politics, that is the ideal that
science can provide rational solutions to all problems concerning the
organization of society and that such decisions can be freed from
nonscientific influences. This view can be traced back to Lord
Bacon. In the 19th century Saint-Simon and August Comte were
very notable exponents of scientific politics, and in the 20th century
there have been a host of thinkers who have subscribed to it.


4). The doctrine of value-freedom which is the doctrine that is both
possible and necessary to separate out the realm of science
from the realms of moral and political values. The validity of
scientific theories does not depend on the acceptance or
rejection of any particular moral or political commitments.
Science is therefore 'value-free.' This doctrine can be found
the writings of Hume, Kant and Mill but its greatest exponent
in the social sciences was probably Max Weber.


These four positivist theses are logically independent of each
other. There have been many thinkers who subscribed to only
one or two of these theses while rejecting the others. Thus,
Popper rejected the first thesis - the 'scientist' thesis while
subscribing to a modified version of the second one and largely
rejecting the ideal of a scientific politics as being incompatible with
an "open society." Many people have subscribed to a positivist
conception of science while rejecting the 'scientist' thesis.
Althusser seems to have largely subscribed to the first thesis
but seems to have rejected a positivist conception of science
while subscribing to a variant of the ideal of a scientific politics.
Weber as pointed out before defended the third thesis (the
value-freedom thesis) and he held to a positivist conception of
science but he rejected the possibility of a scientific politics
in favor of a decisionsm.

[mikelepore]

Lewis Henry Morgan's model of human history, which Engels wholeheartedly endorsed in _Origin of the Family..._, seems mechanistic to me. The claim is that all people on all continents developed through the same steps. Lower savagery: from the prehistoric past through the invention of fire. Middle savagery: from the invention of fire to the invention of the bow and arrow. Upper savagery: From the invention of the bow to the invention of pottery. Lower barbarism: from the invention of pottery to the domestication of animals. Middle barbarism: from the domestication of animals to the smelting of iron. Upper barbarism: from the invention of smelting to the invention of the alphabet. Civilization: from the invention of the alphabet to the present time. Each step is said to have it's own list of characteristics in the areas of law, religion, family structure, etc. It's a clockwork conception of history, to go along with a Newton-Laplace clockwork conception of the universe.

[JimFar]

Lewis Henry Morgan's model of human history, which Engels wholeheartedly endorsed in _Origin of the Family..._, seems mechanistic to me. The claim is that all people on all continents developed through the same steps. Lower savagery: from the prehistoric past through the invention of fire. Middle savagery: from the invention of fire to the invention of the bow and arrow. Upper savagery: From the invention of the bow to the invention of pottery. Lower barbarism: from the invention of pottery to the domestication of animals. Middle barbarism: from the domestication of animals to the smelting of iron. Upper barbarism: from the invention of smelting to the invention of the alphabet. Civilization: from the invention of the alphabet to the present time. Each step is said to have it's own list of characteristics in the areas of law, religion, family structure, etc. It's a clockwork conception of history, to go along with a Newton-Laplace clockwork conception of the universe.

Marx's own stagism seems to have been a bit more flexible. While, for Marx, humanity as a whole cannot move to socialism without having first experiencing capitalism, it did not follow that every country had to go through all these stages. Thus, Marx believed that it might be possible for Russia to go directly to socialism, without undergoing a capitalist stage, providing that a Russian revolution was accompanied by proletarian revolutions in the West that would bring socialism to the advanced industrial nations, who would then would comradely assist Russia in developing a socialist society. Thus, when Marx's disciple, the young Plekhanov, asked him to intervene in the debates in Russia between the Marxists and the Narodniks (with the Marxists arguing that Russia would have undergo a capitalist stage of development and the Narodniks arguing that Russia could proceed directly to socialism), Marx after making a very careful study of Russian society and culture (including learning Russian), came out tentatively on the side of the Narodniks.

[heiss93]

Marx's own stagism seems to have been a bit more flexible. While, for Marx, humanity as a whole cannot move to socialism without having first experiencing capitalism, it did not follow that every country had to go through all these stages. Thus, Marx believed that it might be possible for Russia to go directly to socialism, without undergoing a capitalist stage, providing that a Russian revolution was accompanied by proletarian revolutions in the West that would bring socialism to the advanced industrial nations, who would then would comradely assist Russia in developing a socialist society. Thus, when Marx's disciple, the young Plekhanov, asked him to intervene in the debates in Russia between the Marxists and the Narodniks (with the Marxists arguing that Russia would have undergo a capitalist stage of development and the Narodniks arguing that Russia could proceed directly to socialism), Marx after making a very careful study of Russian society and culture (including learning Russian), came out tentatively on the side of the Narodniks.

On the other hand on the controversy over Trémaux pseudoscientific theories it was Marx who initially adhered to an incredibly mechanistic theory of national characteristics determined by the geological age of the soil (calling it a great advance over Darwin) and Engels who refuted these claims.

So I don't think its entirely fair to see Engels as the more mechanical stagist thinker. I would also argue that Engels' "stagism" was superior to Marx's speculations about "Asiatic society". While Marx was undoutablty the greater thinker, I'm strongly opposed to those who see Engels as corrupting Marx. In the few points where Marx and Engels are at odds, I think it is often Engels who has the upper hand.

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&hs=jx8&q=site%3Awww.marxists.org%2Farchive%2Fmarx%2Fworks %2F++Tr%C3%A9maux+&aq=f&oq=&aqi=