Dialectics of Nature is not a book Engels wrote. It is a book the twentieth century made out of papers he left. Between 1873 and 1883 he filled four folders with articles, half-finished chapters, plans and loose notes on the natural sciences, meaning one day to draw them into a work that would do for nature what the materialist conception of history had done for society. He never did. In 1876 he broke off to answer Eugen Dühring, and Anti-Dühring took the years he might have spent finishing this; then Marx died, and the labour of bringing out the unpublished volumes of Capital took the rest. The folders went into a drawer. They were first published in Moscow in 1925, edited by David Ryazanov's Marx-Engels Institute — the same institute, in an earlier form, whose successors' notes fill the back of this volume. The story that Albert Einstein, shown the manuscript on the electricity chapter, judged it of no value to physics but of interest for the light it threw on its author, is true, and it is the right note on which to begin: what the reader holds is a workshop, not a monument. The present translation from the German is Clemens Dutt's, made for the house that became Progress Publishers, and it is a good one; the arrangement into "Plan Outlines", "Articles and Chapters" and "Notes and Fragments" is the editors', imposed on folders that had no such order.
That distinction matters more than it looks, because the whole later history of this book turns on the difference between what Engels was doing and what was done with him. What he was doing was ambitious and, at its best, admirable. He wanted to rescue the natural science of his day from the crude mechanical materialism that treated the world as so much matter pushed about by external force, and he wanted to do it without falling back into the idealism that made mind or spirit the author of nature. His instrument was the classification of what he called the forms of motion of matter — mechanical, physical, chemical, biological — each higher form arising out of the lower and irreducible to it. "A pure change of place is the lowest form of motion, while thought is the highest." This is the living centre of the book, and it has worn far better than most nineteenth-century natural philosophy. Against every attempt to explain life as "merely" chemistry, or mind as "merely" the firing of nerves, Engels holds that the higher forms are real, that they have laws of their own, and that a materialism worth the name must account for emergence rather than explain it away. A century of work on complexity, on levels of organisation, on the ways wholes constrain their parts, has come round to something very like his instinct.
The famous chapter "The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man" is the same instinct applied to ourselves. "Labour is the source of all wealth, the political economists assert. And it really is the source—next to nature, which supplies it with the material that it converts into wealth." From there Engels builds a materialist account of how a species made itself: the freeing of the hand, the discipline of tool-use, the co-operation that required speech, the brain that grew to serve them — humanity as its own product, not its own premise. And in the middle of it stands the passage that has made this the founding text of a whole current of ecological Marxism: "Let us not, however, flatter ourselves overmuch on account of our human victories over nature. For each such victory nature takes its revenge on us." Written a hundred years before the phrase "ecological crisis" existed, it is one of the most quoted sentences Engels ever set down, and one of the least heeded by the states that claimed him.
The weaknesses are as real as the strengths, and they are not only the weaknesses of dated science — the caloric and the ether, the physics Engels wrestled with before it settled. The deeper difficulty is the one that made the book so useful to people who never read it carefully. Engels took the three "laws" that Hegel had spun out of pure thought — "The law of the transformation of quantity into quality and vice versa; The law of the interpenetration of opposites; The law of the negation of the negation" — and argued that they are not laws of thought at all but "real laws of development of nature". Dialectics, on this reading, is not just a supple way of grasping change; it is a set of objective laws written into matter itself, the same in a nebula, a chemical reaction and a revolution. Engels himself, at his most careful, guards against the obvious danger. Method, he insists in the old preface, works the right way round: "the interconnections are not to be built into the facts but to be discovered in them, and when discovered to be verified as far as possible by experiment." Nature is to be the test of dialectics, not its subject. But the book is unfinished, and its bolder formulations — dialectics as the master-science that adjudicates the others — sit unresolved beside its cautious ones. In a workshop that is no scandal. Sealed as scripture, the ambiguity became a licence.
For that is exactly what happened. Published in 1925, Dialectics of Nature arrived just as the young Soviet state was building an official philosophy, and it became a charter document of diamat — dialectical materialism, the codified world-view taught from the primary school to the Academy of Sciences. Stalin's Dialectical and Historical Materialism of 1938 reduced Engels's tentative, groping folders to a numbered list of "features" to be memorised and applied. And once the doctrine claimed to deliver the real laws of nature, the Party that owned the doctrine claimed the right to settle the findings of the sciences. This is the point at which the reader must ask the question the volume's two hundred and twenty notes never ask: was the state that canonised this book consistent in its use of it? The answer is that it inverted it. In 1948, at the Lenin All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences, Mendelian genetics was denounced as bourgeois, idealist and metaphysical, and the charlatan Trofim Lysenko's "Michurinist biology" was installed as the only science compatible with dialectical materialism — by a show of hands and a speech cleared in advance by Stalin. Soviet genetics was destroyed; Nikolai Vavilov, the greatest botanist the country produced, had already died in prison. Around the same years relativity and quantum mechanics were arraigned as "physical idealism", and cybernetics dismissed as a bourgeois pseudo-science, all in the name of the dialectics of nature. The irony is total, and it is worth stating plainly because the apparatus will not. Engels ridicules, in "Natural Science in the Spirit World", the eminent scientists — Crookes, Wallace — who let an a priori conviction override the evidence of their own experiments. Lysenkoism was that posture raised to the level of the state. A book whose one firm methodological rule is that interconnections must be discovered in the facts and verified by experiment was made the warrant for imposing them on the facts and punishing the experiment that disagreed. Philosophy was set to legislate to science — the precise thing Engels said philosophy must never again do.
Before that quarrel it is worth pausing on how much of the science Engels actually got right, because the workshop is full of good tools as well as overreach. He grasped, before it was orthodox, that the physical forces were forms of a single convertible energy; he read the newly discovered cell as the unit from which the whole organic world is built up; he took Darwin's descent of species as settled and pushed it further than most of Darwin's followers dared, into the descent of humanity itself; he insisted that mathematics too has a history and a dialectic, that its "self-evident" axioms are abstractions from the world and not gifts from heaven. Where he is tentative he is usually tentative for good reasons, wrestling with a physics that had not yet found its feet. The trouble is never the particular judgements, most of which were shrewd; it is the general claim laid over them, that a philosophy could hand down the form all such judgements must take. Engels the working naturalist keeps testing; Engels the system-builder occasionally forgets his own rule. The edition, and the state behind it, remembered the system-builder and quietly retired the naturalist.
The editorial apparatus of this edition does its work in the same key, by smoothing rather than by cutting. Nothing is censored; the fragments are printed, the drafts included, the translator's notes are careful and often genuinely useful. But the framing turns a workshop into a finished chapter of the official world outlook, presents Engels's provisional classifications as established results, and — in two hundred and twenty scrupulous notes on the chemistry and astronomy of the 1870s — finds no occasion to mention what the book was used to do to the chemistry and biology of the 1940s. The erasure is achieved not by suppression but by silence: the notes are meticulous about the past and mute about the use. To read the reconstruction as the editors present it is to meet a lawgiver. To read the folders as Engels left them is to meet an experimenter who did not finish, and knew it.
Why it turned out so is a question about circumstances before it is a question about doctrine, and here the tradition from which this introduction is written parts company with two easy readings at once. It was not the "dialectics of nature" that shot Vavilov. A revolution isolated in a backward country, its working class dispersed and killed in a civil war fought under foreign intervention, its founding generation dead or driven out, threw up an administrative caste that made itself permanent and then required a philosophy that could not be answered back — a philosophy that settled questions rather than opening them. Diamat was that philosophy: not the living method of a movement, but the catechism of a bureaucracy. Trotsky, who defended dialectical materialism to the end of his life — against the pragmatists in his own American section, in the letters gathered as In Defence of Marxism — defended it precisely as a tool of thought for people trying to change the world, not as a state metaphysics for people trying to freeze it. The difference between the two is the difference between Engels's folders and Stalin's Short Course. The Marxism that legislated genetics from a philosophy chair was the reification of Engels, and the standard by which that reification can be condemned is Engels's own rule, printed in this very volume, that the facts are the judges.
So what is this Marxism worth now, read against its own ossification? A great deal, and more than when it was official. The anti-reductionist core — the insistence that life is not "merely" physics and mind not "merely" biology, that each level of nature is real and lawful and yet materially grounded in the one below — is the part of Engels that speaks directly to a present crowded with attempts to dissolve the human into the neural and the neural into the algorithmic. The ecological Engels, who wrote that nature takes its revenge and was canonised by a state that drained the Aral Sea, is being read again by people who need exactly his combination of materialism and warning. And the method itself, taken as Engels took it at his best — as a way of following things in their motion and their connection, always to be tested against how the world actually behaves — is worth keeping precisely because it is the opposite of what was built on it. The value of Dialectics of Nature today lies in reading it as the unfinished, self-correcting, experimental thing it is, and refusing the monument the Institute made of it. Engels left a workshop with the door open. It was locked, from the outside, for half a century. This edition is worth having because the lock can now be picked, and because the man inside turns out to have written, in his own hand, the warrant for opening it.