So, there has, as I'm sure many of you know, been this new fad to separate Marx from Engels as much as possible, and trying to discredit the works of Engels. It has even gotten to a point where unapologetic revisionists are posting articles called "Marx versus Historical Materialism" by Cyril Smith. Have they not read the German Ideology? Also, everyone who wants to reject Engels, dialectical materialism, historical materialism, etc. and still for some reason want to identify themselves as "Marxists" keep dividing Marx as much as possible to fit their revisionist arguments. For example, people like Althusser wanted to basically suggest that the only work of Marx worth reading was Capital. Whats up with this new fad?
I think it has a lot to do with the reactions against or for Stalinism. If you don't accept the Orthodox Trotskyist/Cliffite explanations for what happened in the Soviet Union for whatever reason (or, sometimes, even if you do, atleast for OrthoTrots), there can be a tendency to try to find the errors in orthodox Leninist or Marxist theory itself. This can have its right-wing versions of outright rejection of Marxism, and it can have its 'left-wing' versions, in revisionism, of which this 'fad' is simply one of the latest incarnations (when I say 'one of the latest', it must be kept in mind that attempts to seperate Marx and Engels date back to at latest the 60s).
