In recent years a host of Western Marxists have tried to emancipate Marx from responsibility for various unsavory doctrines. Political theorists have argued that Marx can avoid the weight of Stalinism and also the various theories, such as positivism, naturalism, Darwinism, technological determinism and the dialectics of nature that support Marxism. In the course of building up their defense of Marx, these modern critics have developed an elaborate but often confusing rationale whose premise consists of attributing many of the nefarious tendencies of Marxism to Engels, particularly the...