ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a host of attempts to show that Karl Marx need not only avoid the weight of Stalinism but also the various theories, such as positivism, naturalism, Darwinism, technological determinism and the dialectics of nature, that have served to support it. In the course of building up their defence of Marx, the modem critics have developed an elaborate but often confusing rationale whose premise consists in attributing the nefarious tendencies in Marxism to the thought of Frederick Engels and particularly to Engels' philosophy of nature. Partisans of the New Orthodoxy argue that it is Engels alone who leads the people to the idea of a general administration of things, a technique, in which freedom is equated with control over the necessary laws of nature. In Marx's economy, there is a "natural" reciprocity between production and needs.
