Editing German philosophy (section)

===Dietzgen===
[[Joseph Dietzgen]] was a German leatherworker and social democrat, who independently developed a number of questions of philosophy and came to conclusions very close to the dialectical materialism of Marx and Engels. After the [[German revolutions of 1848–1849|revolution of 1848]] he emigrated to [[United States of America|America]] and in 1864 in search of work, he went to [[Russian Empire|Russia]]. Working in a [[Tanning (leather)|tannery]] in [[Saint Petersburg (Russia)|St. Petersburg]], Dietzgen devoted all his leisure time to works in the field of philosophy, [[political economy]] and [[socialism]]. In Russia he wrote a large philosophical treatise, ''The Essence of the Mental Labor of Man'', a review of the first volume of ''[[Das Kapital|Capital]]'' by [[Karl Marx]]. In 1869 Dietzgen returned to Germany, and then moved again to America, where he wrote his philosophical works ''Excursions of a Socialist in the Field of the Theory of Knowledge'' and ''Acquisition of Philosophy''.

Marx highly appreciated Dietzgen as a thinker. Noting a number of mistakes and confusion in his views, Marx wrote that Dietzgen expressed “many excellent thoughts, and as a product of the independent thinking of a worker, worthy of amazement.” Engels gave Dietzgen the same high assessment. “And it is remarkable,” wrote Engels, “that we were not alone in discovering this materialistic dialectic, which for many years now has been our best tool of labor and our sharpest weapon; the German worker Joseph Dietzgen rediscovered it independently of us and even independently of Hegel.”<ref>{{Cite book|title=A Short Philosophical Dictionary, fifth edition|last=Rosenthal, Mark & Yudin|first=Pavel|publisher=Gospolitizdat|year=1954|publication-place=Moscow|chapter=German Philosophy|chapter-url=https://www.marxists.org/glossary/people/soviet/german-philosophy.htm|translator-last=P.|translator-first=Anton}}</ref>