Re: "I am not a Marxist"

[Chris Burford <cburford@xxxxxxxxxx>]

At 21/04/02 04:17 +0000, you wrote:

> Can someone give me a cire to the letter where Engles reports Marx as
> saying (in French), "I am not a Marxist?" Thanks, jks
>
>
> _________________________________________________________________
> Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com/intl.asp.


7th option from Google with "I am not a Marxist"

Sadly 28th option from the Marx-Engels Archive search facility with
"Marxist" and "not"

(delicious passage against mechanical materialism)


 from

Engels to C. Schmidt in Berlin

London, August 5, 1890

Transcription/Markup: Brian Basgen Online Version: Marx/Engels Internet
Archive (marxists.org) 2000


[ ....]

I saw a review of Paul Barth's book [ Die Geschichtsphilosophie Hegels und
der Hegelianer bis auf Marx und Hartmann ] by that bird of ill omen, Moritz
Wirth, in the Vienna Deutsche Worte , and this book itself, as well. I will
have a look at it, but I must say that if "little Moritz" is right when he
quotes Barth as stating that the sole example of the dependence of
philosophy, etc., on the material conditions of existence which he can find
in all Marx's works is that Descartes declares animals to the machines,
then I am sorry for the man who can write such a thing. And if this man has
not yet discovered that while the material mode of existence is the primum
agens [primary agent, prime cause] this does not preclude the ideological
spheres from reacting upon it in their turn, though with a secondary
effect, he cannot possibly have understood the subject he is writing about.
However, as I said, all this is secondhand and little Moritz is a dangerous
friend. The materialist conception of history has a lot of them nowadays,
to whom it serves as an excuse for not studying history. Just as Marx used
to say, commenting on the French "Marxists" of the late [18]70s: "All I
know is that I am not a Marxist."