ABSTRACT
After the death of Marx in 1883, the European labour movement and worker organisations turned more and more to Engels for intellectual leadership and the practical application of historical materialism to the socialist project. Marx's death can be taken as a significant point in the history of Marxist thought and practice. As Gareth Stedman Jones records, it “marked the transition … from Marx to Marxism” (Stedman Jones, 1973: 19). It is certainly the case that Engels had worked in a close collaboration with Marx and had been significant in supporting (including financially) his work. However, it is generally considered amongst Marxian historians that it was in the years immediately after Marx's death that Engels “reached the apex of his intellectual career, consciously speaking as the foremost authority on a comprehensive socialist worldview that bore the birthmarks of his own interpretive spin but [which he] mostly ascribed to his dead friend” (Steger and Carver, 1999a: 4). It is also recognised that this was a time when the materialist view of history became increasingly cast in determinist forms and political reformism was emphasised over social revolution. The part that Engel's ‘interpretive spin’ on historical materialism played in this ‘revision’ is a matter of intense debate amongst Marxist scholars (see Steger and Carver, 1999b). However, whatever scholarly conclusion is reached, it is generally recognised that Engels did, at least occasionally, give a nod to mechanical determinism. For example, while “historical events [might] appear on the whole to be … governed by chance [and] surface accident holds sway, [history is] actually … always governed by inner, hidden laws and it is only a matter of discovering these laws” (Engels, 1946/1886: 48).
