In 1853, after marrying his wife Cordula Finke, he established his tannery business in Winterscheid (today part of Ruppichteroth), Germany.

Upon his first reading of the text, Marx forwarded a copy to Engels, remarking, "My opinion is that J. Dietzgen would do better to condense all his ideas into two printer's sheets and have them published under his own name as a tanner.

By 1870, Marx had embraced Dietzgen as a friend, and later praised him and his theory of dialectical materialism in the 2nd edition of the first volume of Das Kapital.

[4] In 1881 Joseph sent his son Eugene to the United States in order to avoid the Kaiser's upcoming army draft, to safeguard his articles and documents, as well as to secure a family home in the new world.

The company still exists today as a division of Nashua Paper, and its two buildings still stand in Chicago's now trendy Printer's Row and Lincoln Park areas.

According to his preface to Dietzgen's "The Positive Outcome of Philosophy", it seems the Communist Manifesto in particular was significantly influential on the development of his thought prior to his earliest philosophical works.

It belongs particularly to the general category of being and is an apparatus which produces a detailed picture of human experience by categorical classification or distinction.

After his death, Joseph's son Eugen gave the following view of the relevance of his father's philosophy: If the founders of historical materialism, and their followers, in a whole series of convincing historical investigations, proved the connection between economic and spiritual development, and the dependence of the latter, in the final analysis, on economic relations, nevertheless they did not prove that this dependence of the spirit is rooted in its nature and in the nature of the universe.

(p iv)This prompted a negative reaction Georgi Plekhanov, as one of the earliest Russian Marxists (as well as co-founder of the Iskra magazine and Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party, and himself the author of "The Monist View of History", an attempt at an interpretation of historical materialism, and "reconstruction" of the views of Karl Marx: Despite all our respect for the noble memory of the German worker-philosopher, and despite our personal sympathy for his son, we find ourselves compelled to protest resolutely against the main idea of the preface from which we have just quoted.

He had taken a stroll in Lincoln Park, and was having a political discussion in a "vivacious and excited" manner about the "imminent collapse of capitalist production".

Anton Pannekoek, the Dutch astronomer and council communist (a left-communist, belong to the group or position which Lenin called "Left-Wing" Communism: An Infantile Disorder[11] noted that, in "Materialism and Empirio-criticism", Lenin cited Dietzgen's penultimately composed work (the "Letters on Logic"), but not the final one to be composed ("The Positive Outcome of Philosophy").

In his 1938 book on Lenin, written after the work had already been given the status of a paradigm of philosophy in the USSR, Pannekoek included a highly critical response to the text.