Engels could not halt Marxism’s absorption into crude economic determinism

Evidence

Marx had established that the economy is determinant in the last instant, but that the superstructures had their own “effectivity” which could not be simply reduced to their base. But “the precise structural mechanism connecting the two is always left unclear by Marx” (Stedman Jones). The clarification of this problem was one of Engels’s most urgent and important tasks: the more so since Marxism was fast becoming absorbed into the dominant field of “positive science,” which reduced it to a simple economic determinism in which the superstructures were a pale and automatic reflex of the base—a tendency which was destined to be disastrously installed as the official version in the Second International. Engels struggled vainly to combat this reductionism. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 499

Categorization

• XREF: Explains the reductionist Marxism the reader will meet in Second International debates; links to Althusser’s overdetermination project.