Engels and the Systematization of Dialectical Materialism

Friedrich Engels, Marx's lifelong collaborator and, after 1883, editor of Marx's unfinished manuscripts for Capital, Volumes 2 and 3, also undertook a project distinct from Marx's own economic writings: the systematic extension of the materialist dialectic into a general philosophy encompassing nature as well as history, a project later Marxist orthodoxy would call "dialectical materialism" (Dialektischer Materialismus), though neither Marx nor Engels himself used that exact phrase, which was coined instead by the Russian Marxist theorist Georgi Plekhanov in the 1890s. Engels's Anti-Dühring (1878), a polemic against the German socialist philosopher Eugen Dühring, offered the most systematic popular exposition of this worldview, and its middle section was later excerpted and republished separately as Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (1880), which became one of the best-selling and most widely translated introductions to Marxist theory in the socialist movement's history.