I’m reading through some of our literature (namely Socialism, Utopian and Scientific) and I really get the sense that many of our intellectual forebears think that everything important in philosophy happened in Europe. Granted, European philosophy is necessarily of primary relevance in a critique of early capitalism, but when Engels traces the history of these strains of thought (materialism, dialectics, etc.), they all go back to ancient Greece. I find this suspicious.
Is this a consequence of lopsided education, either of the target audience or of Engels himself? Have non-western Marxists grafted dialectical materialism onto Asian or African philosophy? Are there analogous movements within these cultures that dovetail nicely with Dialectical Materialism? Or do they more or less take Engels at his word here? Maybe I’m misinterpreting something.
I mean, first I should say, does the method used to describe scientific principles actually matter? Does Dialectics create Marxism, or was Dialectics just the common base in which Marx was able to describe to his peers his observations of reality? I don’t think there’s a correct language to describe concepts which are theories of reality, all cultures will express universal concepts in their own terms.
I also think we may be putting too much attention onto philosophy here. Marx’s theories are useless in whatever form they take, as long as they cannot reliably make predictions. This is why Marxism must be scientific, we must test our theories against reality, and alter our theories when reality shows them to be wrong.