Dialectics of Nature is one of the classics of Marxist liturature. Engels, analysing the advances of science, demonstrates how dialectical materialism, the philosophy of Marxism, corresponds to the very way in which nature unfolds. The revolutionary advances of nineteenth century science, most notably the discovery of the cell, the law of conservation and transformation of energy, and Darwinian evolution, provided the material basis for a dialectical understanding of nature. For Engels, the dialectics of human history grew out of the dialectics of nature. Throughout the work, Engels battles with various unscientific schools of thought prevalent among scientists, especially idealism and vulgar materialism. Dialectics of Nature deals more fully than any other work of Marxism with such problems and categories of dialectics such as causality, chance (freedom) and necessity, relationship of induction and deduction, and many more. Even though unfinished, this outstanding work is amazing for its rich and profound theoretical content. Despite certain aspects being obsolete, notably some factual data and timescales, resulting from the prevailing state of natural science at that time, the general method and conception of the book remain valid today. The book also contains Engels' brilliant essay, The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man, which explains how and by what means our species originated. It has been described by Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin as capturing the essential feature of human evolution.
In the early-1870s, an ideological debate began to unfold in the German press on the shortage of affordable housing available to workers in major industrial areas. The rapid increase in industrial production necessitating an increase in industrial workers created a housing crisis.
From June 1872 to February 1873, Fredrick Engels contributed a series of articles to the publication The Volksstaat (The People's State) titled The Housing Question. Originally published as a booklet by the Co-Operative Publishing Society of Foreign Workers in the USSR and out of print for many years, INTERNATIONAL PUBLISHERS is proud to make this text available - as workers yet again face almost insurmountable obstacles to finding affordable housing.
As Engels wrote in 1872, What is meant today by housing shortage is the peculiar intensification of the bad housing conditions of the workers as the result of the sudden rush of population to the big towns; a colossal increase in rents, a still further aggravation of overcrowding in the individual houses, and, for some, the impossibility of finding a place to live in at all.
Fredrick Engels' essays collected here as The Housing Question are just as relevant today, roughly 150 years after first written.
Friedrich Engels takes you on a tour around the evolution of the human society into the current establishment we take for granted as the ever-existing standard. No doubt there are many holes left in this study of anthropology, it provides a systematic study into the transformation of an egalitarian society of humans in their primitive stages (savagery/barbarism) to a state-controlled monogamist society (civilization). (Varad Deshmukh)
Dialectics of Nature is one of the classics of Marxist liturature. Engels, analysing the advances of science, demonstrates how dialectical materialism, the philosophy of Marxism, corresponds to the very way in which nature unfolds. The revolutionary advances of nineteenth century science, most notably the discovery of the cell, the law of conservation and transformation of energy, and Darwinian evolution, provided the material basis for a dialectical understanding of nature. For Engels, the dialectics of human history grew out of the dialectics of nature. Throughout the work, Engels battles with various unscientific schools of thought prevalent among scientists, especially idealism and vulgar materialism. Dialectics of Nature deals more fully than any other work of Marxism with such problems and categories of dialectics such as causality, chance (freedom) and necessity, relationship of induction and deduction, and many more. Even though unfinished, this outstanding work is amazing for its rich and profound theoretical content. Despite certain aspects being obsolete, notably some factual data and timescales, resulting from the prevailing state of natural science at that time, the general method and conception of the book remain valid today. The book also contains Engels' brilliant essay, The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man, which explains how and by what means our species originated. It has been described by Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin as capturing the essential feature of human evolution.