THE MYTH OF THE MARXIST DIALECTIC
71
script is remarkable chiefly-like the scraps of the "Theses on Feuer–
bach"-for indicating that, though Marx was aware of the import–
ance of certain problems, he never really got around to going into
them. He dropped this discussion and never went on with it.
II\ regard to the role of science in their system, Marx and Engels
became \quite confused, because their own work is supposed to be
scientific, and they must believe in its effect on society at the same
time that they are obliged to acknowledge its kinship with the other
ideologies of the superstructure. In Marx's preface (a different work
from the fragment mentioned above) to
his
"Critique of Political
Economy" he says that, in studying the transformations resulting
from social revolutions, "the distinction should always be made be–
tween the material transformation of the economic conditions of
production, which can be determined with the precision of natural
science, and the legal, political, religious, aesthetic or philosophical–
in short, ideological forms, in which men become conscious of
this
con–
flict and fight it out." Natural science then, is not to be numbered
among the ideological outgrowths of the superstructure, but has a
precision of which they are incapable; and this precision social
science may share. Yet at the time when he and Engels had been
discrediting the "abstract man" of Feuerbach, they pointed out in
"The German Ideology" that "even the 'pure' natural sciences begin
by deriving their aims as well as their materials from trade and in–
dustry, from the sensible activity of men"; and he was later to declare
in "Capital" that "in the domain ofpolitical economy, free scientific
research encounters not merely the same enemies which it encounters
in the other domains," but others more formidable still, because "the
very nature of the subject with which it is dealing brings into the
field against it those
passior~s
which are at once the most violent, the
basest and the most abominable of which the human breast is ca–
pable: the furies of personal interest." Engels in "Anti-Diihring"
claims
little for the precision of science. In those sciences, he says,
such as mechanics and physics, which are more or less susceptible
of mathematical treatment, one can speak of final and eternal truths,
though even
in
mathematics itself there is plenty of room for uncer–
tainty
and error; in the sciences that deal with living organisms, the
immutable truths consist solely of such platitudes as that all men are
mortal and that all female mammals have lacteal glands; and in the
sciences which he calls "historical," precision becomes still more diffi–
cult: "once we pass beyond the primitive stage of man, the so-called
Stone Age, the repetition of conditions is the exception and not the
rule, and when such repetitions occur, they never arise under exactly
similar conditions," and when it does tum out, "by way of exception,"
