...on the way out the door.

The rub: I don't know if I embrace, fully, the implied homogeneity of class, the uniformity of class values, or the mysticism of dialectical materialism, especially following Engels' interpretation of the far less certain, and far more fluid Marx. Marx presages an awareness of the impact of material effort on material-chemical thought, and how culture and power develop in these ecologies. Engels prophesies a perfect future of crystalline harmony, and calls it science.

Historical materialism I can accept, but not the assumptions of the Dialectic. I think I've come to understand antagonism, contradiction and opposition, but I reject the religious assumption that all events and objects contain, somewhere, somehow, within themselves, and within aggregate sets of themselves, antitheses which must express as manichean divisions resulting in future syntheses, expressing thereafter self-contained antitheses, and so on and so on.

See comrade Rosa for a much better dismantling of Hegel's Mysticism than I can ever offer.

Marx provides an articulate (and often dryly humorous) set of analytical tools, which often require the user to extract them from the accretions of Engel's interpretations, redactions and resetting - as well as those of Lenin, Trotsky and subsequent schools of pro- and anti-Marxist thought.