ABSTRACT
Friedrich Engels’s version of ‘dialectical materialism’ differed substantially from Karl Marx’s. Significant work has been done at some critical epistemological and ontological points in the development of Marxist thought, in particular, on the problems contained in Marx’s conception of labor and the connection of the work with Jurgen Habermas’s ‘linguistic’ refashioning of the primary assumptions of historical materialism. In contradistinction to Marx’s historical materialism, Engels’s dialectical materialism is a ‘reversal’ of Hegelian dialectics. Objectivist misinterpretations of Marx’s theory, where they come to prevail, have almost invariably been indicative of a degeneration of socialist practice. Borrowing a bit from Noam Chomsky, Habermas has elaborated on the idea of a ‘universal pragmatics’ which would provide the metatheoretical basis for the reconstruction of both individual and social processes for development. If a systematic reconstruction of cultural evolution, a materialist phenomenology of mind, is to be possible at all, then it must be possible to develop such a theory.
