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Frederick Engles
Anti-Dühring; Part II: Political Economy
Abstract from:
Chapter 1: Subject Matter and Method
Political economy, in the widest sense, is the
science of the laws governing the production and exchange of the material
means of subsistence in human society. Production and exchange are two
different functions. Production may occur without exchange, but exchange
-- being necessarily an exchange of products -- cannot occur without production.
Each of these two social functions is subject to the action of external
influences which to a great extent are peculiar to it and for this reason
each has, also to a great extent, its own special laws. But on the other
hand, they constantly determine and influence each other to such an extent
that they might be termed the abscissa and ordinate of the economic curve.
The conditions under which men produce and exchange vary from
country to country, and within each country again from generation to generation.
Political economy, therefore, cannot be the same for all countries and
for all historical epochs. A tremendous distance separates the bow and
arrow, the stone knife and the acts of exchange among savages occurring
only by way of exception, from the steam-engine of a thousand horse power,
the mechanical loom, the railways and the Bank of England. The inhabitants
of Tierra del Fuego have not got so far as mass production and world trade,
any more than they have experience of bill-jobbing or a Stock Exchange
crash. Anyone who attempted to bring the political economy of Tierra del
Fuego under the same laws as are operative in present-day England would
obviously produce nothing but the most banal commonplaces. Political economy
is therefore essentially a historical science. It deals with material
which is historical, that is, constantly changing; it must first investigate
the special laws of each individual stage in the evolution of production
and exchange, and only when it has completed this investigation will it
be able to establish the few quite general laws which hold good for production
and exchange in general. At the same time it goes without saying that the
laws which are valid for definite modes of production and forms of exchange
hold good for all historical periods in which these modes of production
and forms of exchange prevail. Thus, for example, the introduction of metallic
money brought into operation a series of laws which remain valid for all
countries and historical epochs in which metallic money is a medium of
exchange.
The mode of production and exchange in a definite historical society,
and the historical conditions which have given birth to this society, determine
the mode of distribution of its products. In the tribal or village community
with common ownership of land -- with which, or with the easily recognisable
survivals of which, all civilised peoples enter history -- a fairly equal
distribution of products is a matter of course; where considerable inequality
of distribution among the members of the community sets in, this is an
indication that the community is already beginning to break up. -- Both
large- and small-scale agriculture admit of very diverse forms of distribution,
depending upon the historical conditions from which they developed. But
it is obvious that large-scale farming always gives rise to a distribution
which is quite different from that of small-scale farming; that large-scale
agriculture presupposes or creates a class antagonism -- slave-owners and
slaves, feudal lords and serfs, capitalists and wage-workers -- while small-scale
agriculture does not necessarily involve class differences between the
individuals engaged in agricultural production, and that on the contrary
the mere existence of such differences indicates the incipient dissolution
of smallholding economy. -- The introduction and extensive use of metallic
money in a country in which hitherto natural economy was universal or predominant
is always associated with a more or less rapid revolutionisation of the
former mode of distribution, and this takes place in such a way that the
inequality of distribution among the individuals and therefore the opposition
between rich and poor becomes more and more pronounced. -- The local guild-controlled
handicraft production of the Middle Ages precluded the existence of big
capitalists and lifelong wage-workers just as these are inevitably brought
into existence by modern large-scale industry, the credit system of the
present day, and the form of exchange corresponding to the development
of both of them -- free competition.
But with the differences in distribution, class differences
emerge. Society divides into classes: the privileged and the dispossessed,
the exploiters and the exploited, the rulers and the ruled; and the state,
which the natural groups of communities of the same tribe had at first
arrived at only in order to safeguard their common interests (e.g., irrigation
in the East) and for protection against external enemies, from this stage
onwards acquires just as much the function of maintaining by force the
conditions of existence and domination of the ruling class against the
subject class.
Distribution, however, is not a merely passive result of production
and exchange; it in its turn reacts upon both of these. Each new mode of
production or form of exchange is at first retarded not only by the old
forms and the political institutions which correspond to them, but also
by the old mode of distribution; it can secure the distribution which is
suitable to it only in the course of a long struggle. But the more mobile
a given mode of production and exchange, the more capable it is of perfection
and development, the more rapidly does distribution reach the stage at
which it outgrows its progenitor, the hitherto prevailing mode of production
and exchange, and comes into conflict with it. The old primitive communities
which have already been mentioned could remain in existence for thousands
of years -- as in India and among the Slavs up to the present day -- before
intercourse with the outside world gave rise in their midst to the inequalities
of property as a result of which they began to break up. On the contrary,
modern capitalist production, which is hardly three hundred years old and
has become predominant only since the introduction of modern industry,
that is, only in the last hundred years, has in this short time brought
about antitheses in distribution -- concentration of capital in a few hands
on the one side and concentration of the propertyless masses in the big
towns on the other -- which must of necessity bring about its downfall.
The connection between distribution and the material conditions
of existence of society at any period lies so much in the nature of things
that it is always reflected in popular instinct. So long as a mode of production
still describes an ascending curve of development, it is enthusiastically
welcomed even by those who come off worst from its corresponding mode of
distribution. This was the case with the English workers in the beginnings
of modern industry. And even while this mode of production remains normal
for society, there is, in general, contentment with the distribution, and
if objections to it begin to be raised, these come from within the ruling
class itself (Saint-Simon, Fourier, Owen) and find no response whatever
among the exploited masses. Only when the mode of production in question
has already described a good part of its descending curve, when it has
half outlived its day, when the conditions of its existence have to a large
extent disappeared, and its successor is already knocking at the door --
it is only at this stage that the constantly increasing inequality of distribution
appears as unjust, it is only then that appeal is made from the facts which
have had their day to so-called eternal justice. From a scientific standpoint,
this appeal to morality and justice does not help us an inch further; moral
indignation, however justifiable, cannot serve economic science as an argument,
but only as a symptom. The task of economic science is rather to show that
the social abuses which have recently been developing are necessary consequences
of the existing mode of production, but at the same time also indications
of its approaching dissolution,-and to reveal within the already dissolving
economic form of motion, the elements of the future new organisation of
production and exchange which will put an end to those abuses. The wrath
which creates the poet [Juvenalis, Satirae, 1, 79 (si nature negat,
facit indignatio versum). -- Ed.] is absolutely in place in describing
these abuses, and also in attacking those apostles of harmony in the service
of the ruling class who either deny or palliate them; but how little it
proves in any particular case is evident from the fact that in every
epoch of past history there has been no lack of material for such wrath.
Political economy, however, as the science of the conditions and
forms under which the various human societies have produced and exchanged
and on this basis have distributed their products -- political economy
in this wider sense has still to be brought into being. Such economic science
as we possess up to the present is limited almost exclusively to the genesis
and development of the capitalist mode of production: it begins with a
critique of the survivals of the feudal forms of production and exchange,
shows the necessity of their replacement by capitalist forms, then develops
the laws of the capitalist mode of production and its corresponding forms
of exchange in their positive aspects, that is the aspects in which they
further the general aims of society, and ends with a socialist critique
of the capitalist mode of production, that is, with an exposition of its
laws in their negative aspects, with a demonstration that this mode of
production, by virtue of its own development, drives towards the point
at which it makes itself impossible. This critique proves that the capitalist
forms of production and exchange become more and more an intolerable fetter
on production itself, that the mode of distribution necessarily determined
by those forms has produced a situation among the classes which is daily
becoming more intolerable -- the antagonism, sharpening from day to day,
between capitalists, constantly decreasing in number but constantly growing
richer, and propertyless wage-workers, whose number is constantly increasing
and whose conditions, taken as a whole, are steadily deteriorating; and
finally, that the colossal productive forces created within the capitalist
mode of production which the latter can no longer master, are only waiting
to be taken possession of by a society organised for co-operative work
on a planned basis to ensure to all members of society the means of existence
and of the free development of their capacities, and indeed in constantly
increasing measure.
In order to complete this critique of bourgeois economics, an
acquaintance with the capitalist form of production, exchange and distribution
did not suffice. The forms which had preceded it or those which still exist
alongside it in less developed countries, had also, at least in their main
features, to be examined and compared. Such an investigation and comparison
has up to the present been undertaken, in general outline, only by Marx,
and we therefore owe almost exclusively to his researches [65]
all that has so far been established concerning pre-bourgeois theoretical
economics.
Abstract from:
Chapter 2: Theory of Force
Private property by no means makes its appearance in history as
the result of robbery or force. On the contrary. It already existed, though
limited to certain objects, in the ancient primitive communities of all
civilised peoples. It developed into the form of commodities within these
communities, at first through barter with foreigners. The more the products
of the community assumed the commodity form, that is, the less they were
produced for their producers' own use and the more for the purpose of exchange,
and the more the original spontaneously evolved division of labour was
superseded by exchange also within the community, the more did inequality
develop in the property owned by the individual members of the community,
the more deeply was the ancient common ownership of the land undermined,
and the more rapidly did the commune develop towards its dissolution and
transformation into a village of smallholding peasants. For thousands of
years Oriental despotism and the changing rule of conquering nomad peoples
were unable to injure these old communities; the gradual destruction of
their primitive home industry by the competition of products of large-scale
industry brought these communities nearer and nearer to dissolution. Force
was as little involved in this process as in the dividing up, still taking
place now, of the land held in common by the village communities [Gegoferschaften]
on the Mosel and in the Hochwald; the peasants simply find it to their
advantage that the private ownership of land should take the place of common
ownership. Even the formation of a primitive aristocracy, as in the case
of the Celts, the Germans and the Indian Punjab, took place on the basis
of common ownership of the land, and at first was not based in any way
on force, but on voluntariness and custom. Wherever private property evolved
it was the result of altered relations of production and exchange, in the
interest of increased production and in furtherance of intercourse -- hence
as a result of economic causes. Force plays no part in this at all. Indeed,
it is clear that the institution of private property must already be in
existence for a robber to be able to appropriate another person's
property, and that therefore force may be able to change the possession
of, but cannot create, private property as such.
Nor can we use either force or property founded on force in explanation
of the "subjugation of man to make him do servile work" in its most modern
form -- wage-labour. We have already mentioned the role played in the dissolution
of the ancient communities, that is, in the direct or indirect general
spread of private property, by the transformation of the products of labour
into commodities, their production not for consumption by those who produced
them, but for exchange. Now in Capital, Marx proved with absolute
clarity -- and Herr Dühring carefully avoids even the slightest reference
to this -- that at a certain stage of development, the production of commodities
becomes transformed into capitalist production, and that at this stage
"the laws of appropriation or of private property, laws that are based
on the production and circulation of commodities, become by their own inner
and inexorable dialectic changed into their opposite. The exchange of equivalents,
the original operation with which we started, has now become turned round
in such a way that there is only an apparent exchange. This is owing to
the fact, first, that the capital which is exchanged for labour-power is
itself but a portion of the product of others' labour appropriated without
an equivalent; and, secondly, that this capital must not only be replaced
by its producer, but replaced together with an added surplus... At first
property seemed to us to be based on a man's own labour... Now, however"
(at the end of Marx's analysis) "property turns out to be the right, on
the part of the capitalist, to appropriate the unpaid labour of others,
and to be the impossibility, on the part of the labourer, of appropriating
his own product. The separation of property from labour has become the
necessary consequence of a law that apparently originated in their identity."
In other words, even if we exclude all possibility of robbery, force and
fraud, even if we assume that all private property was originally based
on the owner's own labour, and that throughout the whole subsequent process
there was only exchange of equal values for equal values, the progressive
development of production and exchange nevertheless brings us of necessity
to the present capitalist mode of production, to the monopolisation of
the means of production and the means of subsistence in the hands of the
one, numerically small, class, to the degradation into propertyless proletarians
of the other class, constituting the immense majority, to the periodic
alternation of speculative production booms and commercial crises and to
the whole of the present anarchy of production. The whole process can be
explained by purely economic causes; at no point whatever are robbery,
force, the state or political interference of any kind necessary. "Property
founded on force" {D. C. 4} proves here also to be nothing but the phrase
of a braggart intended to cover up his lack of understanding of the real
course of things.
This course of things, expressed historically, is the history
of the development of the bourgeoisie. If "political conditions are the
decisive cause of the economic situation" {D. K. G. 230-31}, then the modern
bourgeoisie cannot have developed in struggle with feudalism, but must
be the latter's voluntarily begotten pet child. Everyone knows that what
took place was the opposite. Originally an oppressed estate liable to pay
dues to the ruling feudal nobility, recruited from all manner of serfs
and villains, the burghers conquered one position after another in their
continuous struggle with the nobility, and finally, in the most highly
developed countries, took power in its stead; in France, by directly overthrowing
the nobility; in England, by making it more and more bourgeois and incorporating
it as their own ornamental head. And how did they accomplish this? Simply
through a change in the "economic situation", which sooner or later, voluntarily
or as the outcome of combat, was followed by a change in the political
conditions. The struggle of the bourgeoisie against the feudal nobility
is the struggle of town against country, industry against landed property,
money economy against natural economy; and the decisive weapon of the bourgeoisie
in this struggle was its means of economic power, constantly increasing
through the development of industry, first handicraft, and then, at a later
stage, progressing to manufacture, and through the expansion of commerce.
During the whole of this struggle political force was on the side of the
nobility, except for a period when the Crown played the bourgeoisie against
the nobility, in order to keep one estate in check by means of the other
[71]; but
from the moment when the bourgeoisie, still politically powerless, began
to grow dangerous owing to its increasing economic power, the Crown resumed
its alliance with the nobility, and by so doing called forth the bourgeois
revolution, first in England and then in France. The "political conditions"
in France had remained unaltered, while the "economic situation" had outgrown
them. Judged by his political status the nobleman was everything, the burgher
nothing; but judged by his social position the burgher now formed the most
important class in the state, while the nobleman had been shorn of all
his social functions and was now only drawing payment, in the revenues
that came to him, for these functions which had disappeared. Nor was that
all. Bourgeois production in its entirety was still hemmed in by the feudal
political forms of the Middle Ages, which this production -- not only manufacture,
but even handicraft industry -- had long outgrown; it had remained hemmed
in by all the thousandfold guild privileges and local and provincial customs
barriers which had become mere irritants and fetters on production. The
bourgeois revolution put an end to this. Not, however, by adjusting the
economic situation to suit the political conditions, in accordance with
Herr Dühring's precept -- this was precisely what the nobles and the
Crown had been vainly trying to do for years -- but by doing the opposite,
by casting aside the old mouldering political rubbish and creating political
conditions in which the new "economic situation" could exist and develop.
And in this political and legal atmosphere which was suited to its needs
it developed brilliantly, so brilliantly that the bourgeoisie has already
come close to occupying the position held by the nobility in 1789: it is
becoming more and more not only socially superfluous, but a social hindrance;
it is more and more becoming separated from productive activity, and, like
the nobility in the past, becoming more and more a class merely drawing
revenues; and it has accomplished this revolution in its own position and
the creation of a new class, the proletariat, without any hocus-pocus of
force whatever, in a purely economic way. Even more: it did not in any
way will this result of its own actions land activities -- on the contrary,
this result established itself with irresistible force, against the will
and contrary to the intentions of the bourgeoisie; its own productive forces
have grown beyond its control, and, as if necessitated by a law of nature,
are driving the whole of bourgeois society towards ruin, or revolution.
And if the bourgeois now make their appeal to force in order to save the
collapsing "economic situation" from the final crash, this only shows that
they are labouring under the same delusion as Herr Dühring: the delusion
that "political conditions are the decisive cause of the economic situation";
this only shows that they imagine, just as Herr Dühring does, that
by making use of "the primary", "the direct political force", they can
remodel those "facts of the second order" {D. Ph. 538}, the economic situation
and its inevitable development; and that therefore the economic consequences
of the steam-engine and the modern machinery driven by it, of world trade
and the banking and credit developments of the present day, can be blown
out of existence by them with Krupp guns and Mauser rifles. [72]
Abstract from:
Chapter 4: Theory of Force
If, with his domination of man by man as a prior condition for
the domination of nature by man, Herr Dühring only wanted to state
in a general way that the whole of our present economic order, the level
of development now attained by agriculture and industry, is the result
of a social history which evolved in class antagonisms, in relationships
of domination and subjection, he is saying something which long ago, ever
since the Communist Manifesto, became a commonplace. But the question
at issue is how we are to explain the origin of classes and relations based
on domination, and if Herr Dühring's only answer is the one word "force",
we are left exactly where we were at the start. The mere fact that the
ruled and exploited have at all times been far more numerous than the rulers
and the exploiters, and that therefore it is in the hands of the former
that the real force has reposed, is enough to demonstrate the absurdity
of the whole force theory. The relationships based on domination and subjection
have therefore still to be explained.
They arose in two ways.
As men originally made their exit from the animal world -- in
the narrower sense of the term -- so they made their entry into history:
still half animal, brutal, still helpless in face of the forces of nature,
still ignorant of their own strength; and consequently as poor as the animals
and hardly more productive than they. There prevailed a certain equality
in the conditions of existence, and for the heads of families also a kind
of equality of social position -- at least an absence of social classes
-- which continued among the primitive agricultural communities of the
civilised peoples of a later period. In each such community there were
from the beginning certain common interests the safeguarding of which had
to be handed over to individuals, true, under the control of the community
as a whole: adjudication of disputes; repression of abuse of authority
by individuals; control of water supplies, especially in hot countries;
and finally when conditions were still absolutely primitive, religious
functions. Such offices are found in aboriginal communities of every period
-- in the oldest German marks and even today in India. They are naturally
endowed with a certain measure of authority and are the beginnings of state
power. The productive forces gradually increase; the increasing density
of the population creates at one point common interests, at another conflicting
interests, between the separate communities, whose grouping into larger
units brings about in turn a new division of labour, the setting up of
organs to safeguard common interests and combat conflicting interests.
These organs which, if only because they represent the common interests
of the whole group, hold a special position in relation to each individual
community -- in certain circumstances even one of opposition -- soon make
themselves still more independent, partly through heredity of functions,
which comes about almost as a matter of course in a world where everything
occurs spontaneously, and partly because they become increasingly indispensable
owing to the growing number of conflicts with other groups. It is not necessary
for us to examine here how this independence of social functions in relation
to society increased with time until it developed into domination over
society; how he who was originally the servant, where conditions were favourable,
changed gradually into the lord; how this lord, depending on the conditions,
emerged as an Oriental despot or satrap, the dynast of a Greek tribe, chieftain
of a Celtic clan, and so on; to what extent he subsequently had recourse
to force in the course of this transformation; and how finally the individual
rulers united into a ruling class. Here we are only concerned with establishing
the fact that the exercise of a social function was everywhere the basis
of political supremacy; and further that political supremacy has existed
for any length of time only when it discharged its social functions. However
great the number of despotisms which rose and fell in Persia and India,
each was fully aware that above all it was the entrepreneur responsible
for the collective maintenance of irrigation throughout the river valleys,
without which no agriculture was possible there. It was reserved for the
enlightened English to lose sight of this in India; they let the irrigation
canals and sluices fall into decay, and are now at last discovering, through
the regularly recurring famines, that they have neglected the one activity
which might have made their rule in India at least as legitimate as that
of their predecessors.
But alongside this process of formation of classes another was
also taking place. The spontaneously evolved division of labour within
the family cultivating the soil made possible, at a certain level of well-being,
the incorporation of one or more strangers as additional labour forces.
This was especially the case in countries where the old common ownership
of the land had already disintegrated or at least the former joint cultivation
had given place to the separate cultivation of parcels of land by the respective
families. Production had developed so far that the labour-power of a man
could now produce more than was necessary for its mere maintenance; the
means of maintaining additional labour forces existed; likewise the means
of employing them; labour-power acquired a value. But the community
itself and the association to which it belonged yielded no available, superfluous
labour forces. On the other hand, such forces were provided by war, and
war was as old as the simultaneous existence alongside each other of several
groups of communities. Up to that time one had not known what to do with
prisoners of war, and had therefore simply killed them; at an even earlier
period, eaten them. But at the stage of "economic situation" which had
now been attained, the prisoners acquired value; one therefore let them
live and made use of their labour. Thus force, instead of controlling the
economic situation, was on the contrary pressed into the service of the
economic situation. Slavery had been invented. It soon became the
dominant form of production among all peoples who were developing beyond
the old community, but in the end was also one of the chief causes of their
decay. It was slavery that first made possible the division of labour between
agriculture and industry on a larger scale, and thereby also Hellenism,
the flowering of the ancient world. Without slavery, no Greek state, no
Greek art and science, without slavery, no Roman Empire. But without the
basis laid by Hellenism and the Roman Empire, also no modern Europe. We
should never forget that our whole economic, political and intellectual
development presupposes a state of things in which slavery was as necessary
as it was universally recognised. In this sense we are entitled to say:
Without the slavery of antiquity no modern socialism.
It is very easy to inveigh against slavery and similar things
in general terms, and to give vent to high moral indignation at such infamies.
Unfortunately all that this conveys is only what everyone knows, namely,
that these institutions of antiquity are no longer in accord with our present
conditions and our sentiments, which these conditions determine. But it
does not tell us one word as to how these institutions arose, why they
existed, and what role they played in history. And when we examine these
questions, we are compelled to say -- however contradictory and heretical
it may sound -- that the introduction of slavery under the conditions prevailing
at that time was a great step forward. For it is a fact that man sprang
from the beasts, and had consequently to use barbaric and almost bestial
means to extricate himself from barbarism. Where the ancient communities
have continued to exist, they have for thousands of years formed the basis
of the cruellest form of state, Oriental despotism, from India to Russia.
It was only where these communities dissolved that the peoples made progress
of themselves, and their next economic advance consisted in the increase
and development of production by means of slave labour. It is clear that
so long as human labour was still so little productive that it provided
but a small surplus over and above the necessary means of subsistence,
any increase of the productive forces, extension of trade, development
of the state and of law, or foundation of art and science, was possible
only by means of a greater division of labour. And the necessary basis
for this was the great division of labour between the masses discharging
simple manual labour and the few privileged persons directing labour, conducting
trade and public affairs, and, at a later stage, occupying themselves with
art and science. The simplest and most natural form of this division of
labour was in fact slavery. In the historical conditions of the ancient
world, and particularly of Greece, the advance to a society based on class
antagonisms could be accomplished only in the form of slavery. This was
an advance even for the slaves; the prisoners of war, from whom the mass
of the slaves was recruited, now at least saved their lives, instead of
being killed as they had been before, or even roasted, as at a still earlier
period.
We may add at this point that all historical antagonisms between
exploiting and exploited, ruling and oppressed classes to this very day
find their explanation in this same relatively undeveloped human labour.
So long as the really working population were so much occupied with their
necessary labour that they had no time left for looking after the common
affairs of society -- the direction of labour, affairs of state, legal
matters, art, science, etc. -- so long was it necessary that there should
constantly exist a special class, freed from actual labour, to manage these
affairs; and this class never failed, for its own advantage, to impose
a greater and greater burden of labour on the working masses. Only the
immense increase of the productive forces attained by modern industry has
made it possible to distribute labour among all members of society without
exception, and thereby to limit the labour-time of each individual member
to such an extent that all have enough free time left to take part in the
general -- both theoretical and practical -- affairs of society. It is
only now, therefore, that every ruling and exploiting class has become
superfluous and indeed a hindrance to social development, and it is only
now, too, that it will be inexorably abolished, however much it may be
in possession of "direct force".
When, therefore, Herr Dühring turns up his nose at Hellenism
because it was founded on slavery, he might with equal justice reproach
the Greeks with having had no steam-engines or electric telegraphs. And
when he asserts that our modern wage bondage can only be explained as a
somewhat transformed and mitigated heritage of slavery, and not by its
own nature (that is, by the economic laws of modern society), this either
means only that both wage-labour and slavery are forms of bondage and class
domination, which every child knows to be so, or is false. For with equal
justice we might say that wage-labour could only be explained as a mitigated
form of cannibalism, which, it is now established, was the universal primitive
form of utilisation of defeated enemies.
The role played in history by force as contrasted with economic
development is therefore clear. In the first place, all political power
is organically based on an economic, social function, and increases in
proportion as the members of society, through the dissolution of the primitive
community, become transformed into private producers, and thus become more
and more divorced from the administrators of the common functions of society.
Secondly, after the political force has made itself independent in relation
to society, and has transformed itself from its servant into its master,
it can work in two different directions. Either it works in the sense and
in the direction of the natural economic development, in which case no
conflict arises between them, the economic development being accelerated.
Or it works against economic development, in which case, as a rule, with
but few exceptions, force succumbs to it. These few exceptions are isolated
cases of conquest, in which the more barbarian conquerors exterminated
or drove out the population of a country and laid waste or allowed to go
to ruin productive forces which they did not know how to use. This was
what the Christians in Moorish Spain did with the major part of the irrigation
works on which the highly developed agriculture and horticulture of the
Moors depended. Every conquest by a more barbarian people disturbs of course
the economic development and destroys numerous productive forces. But in
the immense majority of cases where the conquest is permanent, the more
barbarian conqueror has to adapt himself to the higher "economic situation"
{D. K. G. 231} as it emerges from the conquest; he is assimilated by the
vanquished and in most cases he has even to adopt their language. But where
-- apart from cases of conquest -- the internal state power of a country
becomes antagonistic to its economic development as at a certain stage
occurred with almost every political power in the past, the contest always
ended with the downfall of the political power. Inexorably and without
exception the economic development has forced its way through -- we have
already mentioned the latest and most striking example of this: the great
French Revolution. If, in accordance with Herr Dühring's theory, the
economic situation and with it the economic structure of a given country
were dependent simply on political force, it is absolutely impossible to
understand why Frederick William IV after 1848 could not succeed, in spite
of his "magnificent army", [85]
ingrafting the mediaeval guilds and other romantic oddities on to the railways,
the steam-engines and the large-scale industry which was just then developing
in his country; or why the tsar of Russia, who is possessed of even much
more forcible means, is not only unable to pay his debts, but cannot even
maintain his "force" without continually borrowing from the "economic situation"
of Western Europe.
To Herr Dühring force is the absolute evil; the first act
of force is to him the original sin; his whole exposition is a jeremiad
on the contamination of all subsequent history consummated by this original
sin; a jeremiad on the shameful perversion of all natural and social laws
by this diabolical power, force. That force, however, plays yet another
role in history, a revolutionary role; that, in the words of Marx, it is
the midwife of every old society pregnant with a new one, that it is the
instrument with the aid of which social movement forces its way through
and shatters the dead, fossilised political forms -- of this there is not
a word in Herr Dühring. It is only with sighs and groans that he admits
the possibility that force will perhaps be necessary for the overthrow
of an economic system of exploitation -- unfortunately, because all use
of force demoralises the person who uses it. And this in spite of the immense
moral and spiritual impetus which has been given by every victorious revolution!
And this in Germany, where a violent collision -- which may, after all,
be forced on the people -- would at least have the advantage of wiping
out the servility which has penetrated the nation's mentality following
the humiliation of the Thirty Years' War. And this parson's mode of thought
-- dull, insipid and impotent -- presumes to impose itself on the most
revolutionary party that history has known!
Abstract from:
Part III, Chapter 5: State, Family, Education
[The socialist Herr Dühring writes:]"In the free society
there can be no religious worship; for
every member of it has got beyond the primitive childish superstition that
there are beings, behind nature or above it, who can be influenced by sacrifices
or prayers" {D. Ph. 286}. A "socialitarian system, rightly conceived, has
therefore ... to abolish all the paraphernalia of religious magic,
and therewith all the essential elements of religious worship" {D. C. 345}.
Religion is being prohibited.
All religion, however, is nothing but the fantastic reflection
in men's minds of those external forces which control their
daily life, a reflection in which the terrestrial forces assume
the form of supernatural forces. In the beginnings of history it
was the forces of nature which were first so reflected, and
which in the course of further evolution underwent the most
manifold and varied personifications among the various peoples.
This early process has been traced back by comparative
mythology, at least in the case of the Indo-European peoples, to
its origin in the Indian Vedas, and in its further evolution it
has been demonstrated in detail among the Indians, Persians,
Greeks, Romans, Germans and, so far as material is available,
also among the Celts, Lithuanians and Slavs. But it is not long
before, side by side with the forces of nature, social forces
begin to be active -- forces which confront man as equally alien
and at first equally inexplicable, dominating him with the same
apparent natural necessity as the forces of nature
themselves. The fantastic figures, which at first only reflected
the mysterious forces of nature, at this point acquire social
attributes, become representatives of the forces of history.
At a still further stage of evolution, all the natural and
social attributes of the numerous gods are transferred to one
almighty god, who is but a reflection of the abstract man. Such
was the origin of monotheism, which was historically the last
product of the vulgarised philosophy of the later Greeks and
found its incarnation in the exclusively national god of the
Jews, Jehovah. In this convenient, handy and universally
adaptable form, religion can continue to exist as the immediate,
that is, the sentimental form of men's relation to the alien,
natural and social, forces which dominate them, so long as men
remain under the control of these forces.
However, we have seen repeatedly that in existing bourgeois
society men are dominated by the economic conditions created by
themselves, by the means of production which they themselves
have produced, as if by an alien force. The actual basis of the
religious reflective activity therefore continues to exist, and
with it the religious reflection itself. And although bourgeois
political economy has given a certain insight into the causal
connection of this alien domination, this makes no essential
difference. Bourgeois economics can neither prevent crises in
general, nor protect the individual capitalists from losses, bad
debts and bankruptcy, nor secure the individual workers against
unemployment and destitution. It is still true that man proposes
and God (that is, the alien domination of the capitalist mode of
production) disposes. Mere knowledge, even if it went much
further and deeper than that of bourgeois economic science, is
not enough to bring social forces under the domination of
society. What is above all necessary for this, is a social
act. And when this act has been accomplished, when society, by
taking possession of all means of production and using them on a
planned basis, has freed itself and all its members from the
bondage in which they are now held by these means of production
which they themselves have produced but which confront them as
an irresistible alien force, when therefore man no longer merely
proposes, but also disposes -- only then will the last alien
force which is still reflected in religion vanish; and with it
will also vanish the religious reflection itself, for the simple
reason that then there will be nothing left to reflect.
Herr Dühring, however, cannot wait until religion dies this,
its natural, death. He proceeds in more deep-rooted fashion. He
out-Bismarcks Bismarck; he decrees sharper May laws [127] not
merely against Catholicism, but against all religion whatsoever;
he incites his gendarmes of the future against religion, and
thereby helps it to martyrdom and a prolonged lease of
life. Wherever we turn, we find specifically Prussian
socialism.
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