FREDERICK ENGELS

ANTI-DÜHRING

(Herr Eugen Dühring's Revolution in Science)

-- Section 3 --
Part III: Socialism

FOREIGN LANGUAGES PRESS
PEKING 1976

First Edition 1976

Prepared © for the Internet by David J. Romagnolo, djr@marx2mao.org (July 1998)

HISTORICAL

We saw in the Introduction* how the French philosophers of the eighteenth century, the forerunners of the Revolution, appealed to reason as the sole judge of everything in existence. A rational state, a rational society, were to be founded; everything running counter to eternal reason was to be remorselessly done away with. We saw also that this eternal reason was in reality nothing but the idealized under standing of the middle burgher, who was just then evolving into the bourgeois. But when the French Revolution had realized this rational society and state, the new order of things, however rational as compared with earlier conditions, proved to be by no means absolutely rational. The state

* See Philosophy I. [Note by Engels.] What originally was Chapter I of "Philosophy" was later placed by Engels under the heading, "General", in the "Introduction". For the passage referred to, see pp. 19-20 above. --Ed.

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based upon reason completely collapsed. Rousseau's Social Contract had found its realization in the Reign of Terror, from which the bourgeoisie, after losing faith in its own political capacity, had taken refuge first in the corruption of the Directorate and finally under the wing of the Napoleonic despotism. The promised eternal peace was turned into an endless war of conquest. The society based on reason had fared no better. Instead of dissolving into general prosperity, the antagonism between rich and poor had become sharpened by the elimination of the guild and other privileges, which had bridged it over, and of the charitable institutions of the Church, which had mitigated it. [As far as the small capitalists and small peasants were concerned, the "freedom of property" from feudal fetters, which had now become a reality, proved to be the freedom to sell their small property, which was being crushed under the overpowering competition of big capital and big landed property, to these very lords, so that freedom of property turned into "freedom from property" for the small capitalists and peasant proprietors.] The rapid growth of industry on a capitalist basis raised the poverty and misery of the working masses to a condition of existence of society. [Cash payment increasingly became, in Carlyle's phrase, the sole social nexus.] The number of crimes increased from year to year. Though not eradicated, the feudal vices which had previously been flaunted in broad daylight were now at any rate thrust into the background. In their stead, the bourgeois vices, hitherto nursed in secret, began to blossom all the more luxuriantly. Trade developed more and more into swindling. The "fraternity" of the revolutionary slogan was realized in the chicanery and envy of the battle of competition. Oppression by force was replaced by corruption, the sword as the prime social lever by money.

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"The right of the first night" passed from the feudal lords to the bourgeois manufacturers. Prostitution assumed hitherto unheard of proportions. Marriage itself remained as before the legally recognized form, the official cloak of prostitution, and, moreover, was copiously supplemented by adultery.

In short, the social and political institutions born of the "triumph of reason" were bitterly disappointing caricatures of the splendid promises of the philosophers of the Enlightenment. All that was wanting was the men to formulate this disappointment, and they came with the turn of the century. Saint-Simon's Letters from Geneva appeared in 1802; Fourier's first book appeared in 1808,<"p329"> although the groundwork of his theory dated from 1799; Robert Owen took over the direction of New Lanark on January 1, 1800.[102]

At this time, however, the capitalist mode of production, and with it the antagonism between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, was still very undeveloped. Large-scale industry, which had only just arisen in England, was still unknown in France. But, on the one hand, large-scale industry promotes the conflicts which make a revolution in the mode of production [and the abolition of its capitalist character] absolutely necessary -- conflicts not only between the classes begotten of it, but also between precisely the productive forces and the forms of exchange created by it. On the other hand, it is in these gigantic productive forces themselves that it promotes the means of resolving these conflicts. If, therefore, the conflicts arising from the new social order were only just beginning to take shape around 1800, this is even truer for the means of resolving them. During the Reign of Terror, the propertyless masses of Paris were able to gain the mastery for a moment [, and thus to lead the bourgeois revolution to victory against the bourgeoisie itself]. But in doing so they

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only proved how impossible [it] was [for] their domination [to last] under the conditions then obtaining. The proletariat, which was only just separating itself from these propertyless masses as the nucleus of a new class and was as yet quite incapable of independent political action, appeared as an oppressed, suffering estate, to which, in its incapacity to help itself, help could, at best, be brought in from without, from above down.

This historical situation also dominated the founders of socialism. Their immature theories corresponded to the immature state of capitalist production and the immature class situation. The solution of the social problems which as yet lay hidden in undeveloped economic relations was to spring from the human brain. Society presented nothing but abuses; to remove them was the task of reflective reason. It was a question of inventing a new and more perfect social order and of imposing it on society from without, by propaganda and wherever possible by the example of model experiments. These new social systems were foredoomed to be Utopias; the more they were worked out in detail, the more inevitably they became lost in pure fantasy.

Having established this, we shall not dwell a moment longer on this aspect, now belonging wholly to the past. We can leave it to the literary small fry à la Dühring to quibble solemnly over these fantasies, which today only make us smile, and to crow over the superiority of their own sober reasoning over such "insanity". For ourselves, we delight in the inspired thoughts and germs of thought that everywhere break out through their fantastic covering and to which these philistines are blind.

[Saint-Simon was a son of the great French Revolution, at the outbreak of which he was not yet thirty. The Revolu-

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tion was the victory of the third estate, i.e., of the great masses of the nation, who were active in production and in trade, over the thus far privileged idle estates, the nobility and the clergy. But the victory of the third estate soon revealed itself as exclusively the victory of a small part of this estate, as the conquest of political power by its socially privileged stratum, i.e., the propertied bourgeoisie. To be sure, the bourgeoisie had already developed rapidly during the Revolution, partly by speculation in the lands of the nobility and of the Church which had been confiscated and then sold, and partly by frauds on the nation by means of army contracts. It was precisely the domination of these swindlers that brought France and the Revolution to the verge of ruin under the Directorate, and thus gave Napoleon the pretext for his coup d'état.

Hence in Saint-Simon's mind the antagonism between the third estate and the privileged estates took the form of an antagonism between "workers" and "idlers". The idlers were not merely the old privileged persons, but also all who lived on their incomes without taking any part in production or distribution. The "workers" were not only the wage workers, but also the manufacturers, the merchants, the bankers. That the idlers had lost the capacity for intellectual leadership and political supremacy had been proved and finally settled by the Revolution. That the non-possessing classes lacked this capacity seemed to Saint-Simon proved by the experiences of the Reign of Terror. Who then was to lead and command? According to Saint-Simon, science and industry, both united by a new religious bond destined to restore that unity of religious ideas which had been broken since the Reformation -- a necessarily mystical and rigidly hierarchical "new Christianity". But science was the scholars;

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and industry was, in the first place, the active bourgeois, manufacturers, merchants, bankers. Of course, these bourgeois were to transform themselves into public officials, into trustees of society, of a sort; but they were still to hold a commanding and even economically privileged position vis-à-vis the workers. The bankers especially were to be called upon to direct the whole of social production by the regulation of credit. This conception was in exact keeping with a time when large-scale industry and with it the chasm be tween bourgeoisie and proletariat were only just coming into existence in France. But what Saint-Simon especially lays stress on is this: what interests him first and above all other things is the lot of "the largest and poorest class" (la classe la plus nombreuse et la plus pauvre ).]

In his Letters from Geneva, Saint-Simon already laid down the principle that "all men ought to work". In the same work he also recognized that the Reign of Terror was the reign of the propertyless masses. <"p332">

"See," he calls out to them, "what happened in France at the time when your comrades held sway there; they brought about a famine."[103]

But to recognize the French Revolution as a class struggle [and not simply as one between nobility and bourgeoisie, but] between nobility, bourgeoisie, and those without any property,* was, in the year 1802, a discovery of the greatest genius.<"p332a"> In 1816 he declared that politics was the science of production and foretold the complete absorption of politics by economics.[104] Although the knowledge that economic conditions are the basis of political institutions appears here only

* In Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, "and those without any property" is italicized. --Ed.

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in embryo, what is already very plainly expressed is the transition from political rule over men to the administration of things and the guidance of the processes of production -- that is to say, the abolition of the state,[*] about which there has recently been so much noise. Saint-Simon showed the same superiority over his contemporaries, when in 1814, immediately after the entry of the allies into Paris, and again in 1815, during the Hundred Days' War, he proclaimed the alliance of France with England,<"p333"> and then of both these countries with Germany, as the only guarantee for the prosperous development and peace of Europe.[105] To preach an alliance with the victors of Waterloo to the French in 1815 undoubtedly<"p333a"> required somewhat more courage than to declare a war of tittle-tattle on German professors.**[106]

If in Saint-Simon we find a masterly breadth of view, by virtue of which almost all the ideas of later socialists that are not strictly economic are found in him in embryo, we find in Fourier a criticism of the existing conditions of society which, while genuinely French and witty, is none the less penetrating. Fourier takes the bourgeoisie, their inspired prophets before the Revolution and their mercenary sycophants after it, at their own word. He mercilessly lays bare the material and moral misery of the bourgeois world. He confronts it with the [earlier] philosophers' dazzling promises of a society ruled solely by reason, of a civilization yielding universal happiness, of an illimitable human perfectibility, as <"fnp333">

* In Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, "abolition of the state" is in quotes. --Ed.
** In Socialism: Utopian and Scientific this passage reads: "To preach an alliance with the victors of Waterloo to the French in 1815 required as much courage as historical foresight." --Ed.

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well as with the rose-coloured phraseology of the bourgeois ideologists of his time. He shows how everywhere the most pitiful reality corresponds with the most high-sounding phrases, and he overwhelms this hopeless fiasco of phrases with his mordant sarcasm.

Fourier is not only a critic; his eternal sprightliness makes him a satirist, and assuredly one of the greatest satirists of all time. He depicts with equal virtuosity and wit the swindling speculation that blossomed out on the downfall of the Revolution and the universal shopkeeping spirit of the French commerce of the time. Still more masterly is his criticism of the bourgeois form of the relations between the sexes and of the position of woman in bourgeois society. He was the first to declare<"p334"> that in any given society the degree of woman's emancipation is the natural measure of the general emancipation.[107]

But it is in his conception of the history of society that Fourier appears at his greatest. He divides its whole course thus far into four stages of development, savagery, the patriarchy, barbarism, and civilization, the last coinciding with what is now<"p334a"> called bourgeois society [ -- i.e., with the social order that came in with the sixteenth century].[108] He proves

"that the civilized order gives every vice practised by barbarism in a simple fashion a complex, ambiguous, equivocal, hypocritical form";

that civilization moves in "a vicious circle", in contradictions which it constantly reproduces without being able to solve, so that it constantly attains the opposite of what it wants<"p334b"> to achieve, or pretends it wants to achieve. So that, for example, "under civilization poverty is born of abundance itself ".[109]

Fourier, as we see, handles dialectics with the same mastery as his contemporary Hegel. Using these same dialectics, he

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points out in opposition to the talk about illimitable human perfectibility that every historical era has its downward<"p335"> as well as upward phase, and he applies this way of looking at things to the future of the whole human race.[110] Just as Kant introduced the idea of the ultimate destruction of the earth into natural science, Fourier introduced that of the ultimate destruction of the human race into historical thought.

Whilst in France the hurricane of the Revolution swept over the land, in England a quieter but on that account no less mighty upheaval was taking place. Steam and the new tool-making machinery were transforming manufacture into modern large-scale industry and thus revolutionizing the whole foundation of bourgeois society. The sluggish pace of development of the manufacturing period changed into a veritable period of storm and stress in production. The division of society into big capitalists and propertyless proletarians went on with ever-increasing rapidity; between these, instead of the former stable middle estate, an unstable mass of artisans and small shopkeepers, which constituted the most fluctuating section of the population, now led a precarious existence.

The new mode of production was still only at the beginning of its upward phase; it was still the normal [, regular] mode of production -- the only possible one under existing conditions. Nevertheless, even then it was producing crying social abuses -- the herding together of a homeless population in the worst quarters of the large towns; the dissolution of all traditional bonds of descent, of patriarchal subordination, of the family; overwork, especially of women and children, on an appalling scale; massive demoralization of the working class, suddenly flung into altogether new conditions [from the country into the town, from agriculture into industry,

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from stable conditions of existence into insecure ones changing from day to day].

At this juncture a 29-year-old manufacturer came forward as a reformer -- a man of almost sublime, child-like simplicity of character, and at the same time a born leader of men such as is rarely seen. Robert Owen had adopted the teaching of the materialist philosophers of the Enlightenment: that man's character is the product of his inherited constitution on the one hand, and of his environment during his lifetime, especially during his period of growth, on the other. In the Industrial Revolution most of his class saw only chaos and confusion, and the opportunity of fishing in troubled waters and getting rich quickly. He saw in it the opportunity of putting his favourite theory into practice, and so of bringing order out of chaos. He had already tried it out with success in Manchester, as the manager of a factory with 500 workers. From 1800 to 1829 he directed the great cotton-spinning mill of New Lanark in Scotland as managing partner, along the same lines but with greater freedom of action, and with a success which won him a European reputation. He transformed a population, which originally consisted of the most diverse and for the most part very demoralized elements and which gradually grew to 2,500, into a model colony, in which drunkenness, police, magistrates, lawsuits, poor law relief and any need for charity were unknown. All this simply by placing the people in conditions more worthy of human beings, and especially by having the rising generation carefully brought up. He was the inventor of infant schools, and first introduced them at New Lanark. From the age of two the children came to school, where they enjoyed themselves so much that they could scarcely be got home again. Whilst his competitors worked their people thirteen to four-

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teen hours a day, in New Lanark the working-day was only ten and a half hours. When a crisis in cotton stopped work for four months, his unemployed workers received their full wages all the time. Yet the business more than doubled in value, and to the last yielded large profits to its proprietors.

In spite of all this, Owen was not content. The existence he had contrived for his workers was, in his eyes, still far from being worthy of human beings. "The people were slaves at my mercy." The relatively favourable conditions in which he had placed them were still far from allowing an all-round rational development of the character and of the intellect, much less the free exercise of all their faculties. <"p337">

"And yet, the working part of this population of 2,500 persons was daily producing as much real wealth for society as, less than half a century before, it would have required the working part of a population of 600,000 to create. I asked myself, what became of the difference between the wealth consumed by 2,500 persons and that which would have been consumed by 600,000?"[111]

The answer was clear. It had been used to pay the proprietors of the establishment 5 per cent on their invested capital and in addition a profit of over �300,000. And that which held for New Lanark held to a still greater extent for all the factories in England.

"If this new wealth had not been created by machinery, . . . the wars . . . in opposition to Napoleon and to support the aristocratic principles of society, could not have been maintained. And yet this new power was the creation of the working class."[*]

[* From "The Revolution in the Mind and Practice of the Human Race", a memorial addressed to all the "red Republicans, Communists and Socialists of Europe", and sent to the provisional government of France, 1848, and also "to Queen Victoria and her responsible advisers".] [Note by Engels.]

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To the working class, therefore, the fruits belonged too. To Owen the newly created gigantic productive forces, which had hitherto served only to enrich individuals and to enslave the masses, offered the foundations for a reconstruction of society and were destined, as the common property of all, solely to work for the common good of all.

Owenite communism arose in this purely business way, as the outcome, so to speak, of commercial calculation. Throughout, it maintained this practical character. Thus, in 1823, Owen proposed the relief of the distress in Ireland by communist colonies,<"p338"> and drew up complete estimates of initial costs, yearly expenditure, and probable revenue.[112] Similarly, in his definitive plan for the future, the technical working out of details is managed with such practical knowledge [ -- plan, elevation and bird's-eye view all included -- ] that, once the Owenite method of social reform is accepted, there is little to be said against the actual arrangement of details even from a specialist's point of view.

His advance in the direction of communism was the turning-point in Owen's life. As long as he was simply a philanthropist, he was rewarded with nothing but wealth, applause, honour, and glory. He was the most popular man in Europe. Not only men of his own class, but statesmen and princes listened to him approvingly. But when he came out with his communist theories, it was quite a different story. Three great obstacles seemed to him especially to block the path to social reform, private property, religion, and marriage in its present form. He knew what confronted him if he attacked them -- universal ostracism by official society and the loss of his whole social standing. But nothing of this prevented him from attacking them without fear of the consequences, and what he had foreseen came

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to pass. Banished from official society, with a conspiracy of silence against him in the press, and ruined by his unsuccessful communist experiments in America in which he sacrificed all his fortune, he turned directly to the working class and continued working in their midst for thirty years. Every social movement, every real advance in England on behalf of the workers is linked with Owen's name. Thus in 1819, after five years' effort, he pushed through<"p339"> the first law limiting the labour of women and children in factories.[113] He presided over the first congress at which all the Trade Unions of England united in a single great trade union association.[114] He introduced as transition measures to the complete communist organization of society, on the one hand, co-operative societies (both consumers' and producers'), which have since at least given practical proof that the merchant and the manufacturer are quite superfluous personages. On the other hand, he introduced labour bazaars for the exchange of the products of labour through the medium of labour-notes with the labour-hour as the unit; institutions necessarily doomed to failure, but completely anticipating the much later Proudhon exchange bank, and differing only from the latter in that they did not claim to be the panacea for all social ills,<"p339a"> but just a first step towards a much more radical transformation of society.[115]

These are the men on whom the sovereign Herr Dühring looks down from the height of his "final and ultimate truth", with a contempt of which we have given a few examples in the "Introduction".* In one respect at least this contempt is not without sufficient reason: for its basis is, in essence, a really frightful ignorance of the works of the

* See pp. 38-40 above. --Ed.

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three Utopians. Thus Herr Dühring says of Saint-Simon

"his basic idea was essentially correct, and apart from a few one-sided aspects, provides the guiding impulse towards real changes even today".

But although Herr Dühring does actually seem to have had some of Saint-Simon's works in his hands, our search through the twenty-seven relevant pages of print for Saint-Simon's "basic idea" is just as fruitless as our earlier search for what Quesnay's Tableau "meant in Quesnay himself", and in the end we have to allow ourselves to be put off with the phrase

"that imagination and philanthropic fervour . . . together with the extravagant fantasy that goes with it dominated the whole of Saint-Simon's intellectual horizon"!

As for Fourier, all Herr Dühring knows or takes into account is his fantasies of the future, painted in romantic detail. This of course "is far more important" for establishing Herr Dühring's infinite superiority to Fourier than an examination of how the latter "occasionally attempts to criticize actual conditions". Occasionally! In fact, almost every page of his works scintillates with sparkling satire and criticism aimed at the wretchedness of our vaunted civilization. It is like saying that Herr Dühring only "occasionally" declares Herr Dühring to be the greatest thinker of all time. As far as the twelve pages devoted to Robert Owen are concerned, Herr Dühring has absolutely no other source than the miserable biography<"p340"> of the philistine Sargant, who likewise did not know Owen's most important works -- on marriage and the communist system.[116] Herr Dühring can therefore go the length of boldly asserting that we should not "assume any clear-cut communism" in Owen. Had Herr Dühring ever even fingered Owen's Book of the New Moral World,

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he would most assuredly have found clearly expressed in it not only the most clear-cut communism, with equal obligation to labour and equal rights in the product -- equal according to age, as Owen always adds -- but also the complete elaboration of the architecture of the future communist community, with its plan, elevation and bird's-eye view. But if one limits one's "first-hand study of the actual writings of the representatives of socialist systems of thought" to a knowledge of the titles and at most the epigraphs of a few of these works, as Herr Dühring does here, there is obviously nothing else left but to make such a stupid and purely fanciful assertion. Owen not only preached "clear-cut communism"; for five years (at the end of the thirties and beginning of the forties) he put it into practice<"p341"> in the Harmony Hall Colony in Hampshire, the clear-cut quality of whose communism left nothing to be desired.[117] I myself was acquainted with several former members of this communist model experiment. But Sargant knew absolutely nothing of all this or of any of Owen's activities between 1836 and 1850, and so Herr Dühring's "more profound historical work", too, is left in pitch-black ignorance. Herr Dühring calls Owen "in every respect a veritable monster of importunate philanthropy". But when this same Herr Dühring starts to give us information about the contents of books whose titles and epigraphs he hardly knows, we must on no account say that he is "in every respect a veritable monster of importunate ignorance", for on our lips this would certainly be "abuse".

The Utopians, we saw, were Utopians because they could be nothing else at a time when capitalist production was as yet so little developed. They necessarily had to construct the elements of a new society out of their own heads,

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because these elements were not as yet generally apparent within the old society; for the basic plan of the new edifice they could only appeal to reason, just because they could not as yet appeal to contemporary history. But when now, almost eighty years after their time, Herr Dühring steps on to the stage and puts forward his claim to an "authoritative" system for a new social order -- not one evolved out of the historically developed material at his disposal, as its necessary result -- oh, no! -- but constructed in his sovereign head, in his mind pregnant with ultimate truths -- then he, who scents epigoni everywhere, is himself nothing but the epigone of the Utopians, the latest Utopian. He calls the great Utopians "social alchemists". That may be so. Alchemy was necessary in its epoch. But since that time large-scale industry has developed the contradictions lying dormant in the capitalist mode of production into such crying antagonisms that the approaching collapse of this mode of production is, so to speak, palpable; that the new productive forces themselves can only be maintained and further developed by the introduction of a new mode of production corresponding to their present stage of development; that the struggle between the two classes engendered by the hitherto prevailing mode of production and constantly reproduced in ever sharper antagonism has gripped all civilized countries and is daily becoming more violent; and that this historical chain of connections, the conditions of the social transformation which it makes necessary, and the basic features of this transformation likewise determined by it have already been apprehended. And if Herr Dühring now manufactures a new utopian social order not from the economic material at his disposal but from His Highness's numskull, not only is he practising "social alchemy". Rather

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is he acting like a person who, after the discovery and establishment of the laws of modern chemistry, attempts to restore the old alchemy and to use atomic weights, molecular formulas, the valency of atoms, crystallography and spectral analysis for the sole purpose of discovering -- the philosopher's stone.

<"p3s2">

THEORETICAL

The materialist conception of history starts from the principle that production and, next to production, the exchange of things produced, is the basis of every social order; that in every society that has appeared in history, the distribution of wealth and with it the division of society into classes or estates are dependent upon what is produced, how it is produced, and how the products are exchanged. Accordingly, the ultimate causes of all social changes and political revolutions are to be sought, not in men's brains, not in their growing insight into eternal truth and justice, but in changes in the modes of production and exchange. They are to be sought, not in the philosophy, but in the economics of each particular epoch. The growing recognition that existing social institutions are irrational and unjust, that reason has become unreason, and kindness a scourge, is only a sign that changes in the modes of production and exchange have silently been taking place with which the social order adapted to earlier economic conditions is no longer in keeping. From this it also follows that the means of eliminating the abuses that have been brought to light must also be

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present, in a more or less developed condition, within the changed relations of production themselves. These means are not to be invented out of one's brain, but discovered by the brain in the existing material facts of production.

Where, then, does modern socialism stand?

It is now pretty generally conceded that the existing social order is the creation of the ruling class of today, of the bourgeoisie. The mode of production peculiar to the bourgeoisie, which since Marx has been called the capitalist mode of production, was incompatible with the local privileges and the privileges of estate as well as with the reciprocal personal ties of the feudal system. The bourgeoisie shattered the feudal system and on its ruins built the bourgeois social order, the realm of free competition, of freedom of movement, of equal rights for commodity owners and all the glories of capitalism. The capitalist mode of production could now develop freely. Since steam and the new tool making machinery transformed the older manufacture into large-scale industry, the productive forces evolved under the guidance of the bourgeoisie developed with a rapidity and on a scale unheard of before. But just as manufacture and the handicraft industries, which had experienced a further growth under its influence, had come into conflict with the feudal trammels of the guilds in their time, so large-scale industry, in its more complete development, now comes into conflict with the barriers within which the capitalistic mode of production holds it confined. The new productive forces have already outgrown the bourgeois form of using them; and this conflict between productive forces and mode of production is not a conflict engendered in men's heads, like that between original sin and divine justice, but it exists in the facts, objectively, outside us, independently of the will

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and even actions of the men who have brought it on. Modern socialism is nothing but the reflex in thought of this actual conflict, its ideal reflection in the minds of above all the class directly suffering under it, the working class.

Now, in what does this conflict consist?

Prior to capitalist production, i.e., in the Middle Ages, small-scale production generally prevailed, based upon the workers' private ownership of their means of production: the agriculture of the small peasant, freeman or serf, and the handicrafts in the towns. The instruments of labour -- land, agricultural implements, the workshop, the hand tool -- were the instruments of labour of single individuals, adapted for individual use, and, therefore, of necessity puny, dwarfish, circumscribed. But for this very reason they normally belonged to the producer himself. To concentrate these scattered, limited means of production, to enlarge them, to turn them into the powerful levers of production of the present day was precisely the historic role of the capitalist mode of production and of its upholder, the bourgeoisie. In Part IV of Capital Marx gives a detailed account of how the bourgeoisie has historically accomplished this since the fifteenth century through the three phases of simple co-operation, manufacture and large-scale industry. But as is also shown there, the bourgeoisie could not transform these limited means of production into mighty productive forces without at the same time transforming them from individual means of production into social means of production only workable by a collectivity of men. The spinning wheel, the hand-loom and the blacksmith's hammer were replaced by the spinning machine, the power loom and the steam hammer, and the individual workshop by the factory commanding the co-operation of hundreds

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and thousands of workmen. Like the means of production, production itself changed from a series of individual operations into a series of social acts, and the products from individual into social products. The yarn, the cloth and the metal goods that now came out of the factory were the common product of many workers, through whose hands they had successively to pass before they were ready. No one person could say of them: "I made that, this is my product."

But where the spontaneous division of labour within society [a division of labour which arose gradually and planlessly] is the fundamental form of production, it imprints on the products the form of commodities, the mutual exchange, purchase and sale of which enable the individual producers to satisfy their manifold wants. This was the case in the Middle Ages. The peasant, for example, sold the artisan agricultural products and bought from him the products of his craft. The new mode of production infiltrated this society of individual producers, of commodity producers. It set up the planned division of labour, as it was organized in the individual factory, in the midst of the spontaneous, planless division of labour such as then prevailed throughout society; side by side with individual production, social production made its appearance. The products of both were sold in the same market, and, consequently, at the same prices, at least approximately. But planned organization was stronger than the spontaneous division of labour; the factories working socially produced their commodities more cheaply than the isolated small producers. Individual production succumbed in one field after another. Social production totally revolutionized the old mode of production. But this, its revolutionary, character was so little recognized that it was, on the contrary,

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introduced as a means of increasing and promoting commodity production. In its origin, it was directly tied up with certain already existing levers of commodity production and exchange: merchant's capital, handicrafts, wage-labour. Since social production itself appeared as a new form of commodity production, the old forms of appropriation characteristic of commodity production remained in full force for it too.

In commodity production as it had developed in the Middle Ages, any question concerning the identity of the owner of the product of labour just couldn't arise. The individual producer had generally produced it from his own raw material, which was often his own handiwork, with his own instruments of labour, and by his own or his family's manual labour. There was no need whatever for him to appropriate the product to begin with, it belonged to him wholly as a matter of course. His ownership of the product was therefore based upon his own labour. Even where outside help was used, it was generally of little importance, and often received other compensation in addition to wages; the guild apprentice and journeyman worked less for board and wages than for training to become master craftsmen themselves.

Then came the concentration of the means of production in large workshops and manufactories, their transformation into actual social means of production. But the social means of production and products were treated as if they were still the means of production and the products of individuals they had been before. Hitherto, the owner of the instruments of labour had appropriated the product, because it was normally his own product and the auxiliary labour of others was the exception. Now the owner of the instruments

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of labour continued to appropriate the product, although it was no longer his product, but exclusively the product of the labour of others. Thus, the products which were now turned out socially were not appropriated by those who had actually set the means of production in motion and actually turned out the products, but by the capitalists. The means of production and production itself have become social in essence. But they are subjected to a form of appropriation which presupposes private production by individuals, and under which, therefore, everyone owns his own product and brings it to market. The mode of production is subjected to this form of appropriation, although it removes the presupposition on which the latter rests.* The whole conflict of today is already present in embryo in this contradiction which gives the new mode of production its capitalist character. The more the new mode of production became dominant in all decisive fields of production and in all economically decisive countries, and the more it reduced individual production to an insignificant residue, the more glaring did the incompatibility of social production with capitalist appropriation necessarily become.

* There is no need to explain here that, even if the form of appropriation remains the same, the character of the appropriation is just as much revolutionized as production by the process described above. Of course two very different kinds of appropriation are involved in whether I appropriate my own product or that of another person. It may be noted in passing that wage-labour, in which the whole capitalist mode of production is to be already found in embryo, is very ancient; in a sporadic, scattered form it existed for centuries alongside slave-labour. But the embryo could develop into the capitalist mode of production only when the necessary historical preconditions had been established. [Note by Engels.]

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As we have said, the first capitalists found the form of wage-labour already in existence. But wage-labour as the exception, as a side-occupation, as an auxiliary, as a transitory phase. The agricultural labourer who occasionally went to work as a day labourer had a few acres of his own land, from which alone he could get his living in a pinch. The regulations of the guilds ensured that the journeyman of today became the master-craftsman of tomorrow. But this changed as soon as the means of production became social and were concentrated in the hands of capitalists. Both the means of production and the products of the small individual producer increasingly depreciated in value; there was nothing left for him to do but to go to the capitalist and work for wages. From being an exception and an auxiliary, wage-labour became the rule and the basic form of all production; from being a side-occupation, it now became the worker's exclusive activity. The occasional wage-worker was transformed into the wage-worker for life. Furthermore, the number of lifelong wage-workers was enormously increased by the simultaneous collapse of the feudal system, the disbanding of the feudal lords' retainers, the eviction of peasants from their homesteads, etc. The separation of the means of production concentrated in the hands of the capitalists, on the one side, from the producers now possessing nothing but their labour-power, on the other, was accomplished. The contradiction between social production and capitalist appropriation became manifest as the antagonism between proletariat and bourgeoisie.

We have seen that the capitalist mode of production infiltrated a society of commodity producers, individual producers, whose social nexus was mediated through the exchange of their products. But every society based on commodity

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production has the peculiarity that the producers in it have lost command over their own social relations. Each produces for himself with the means of production which happen to be at his disposal and in order to satisfy his individual needs through exchange. No one knows how much of the article he produces is coming onto the market or how much will be wanted, no one knows whether his individual product will meet a real need, whether he will cover his costs or even be able to sell it at all. Anarchy of social production prevails. But like all other forms of production commodity production has its own peculiar laws, which are inherent in and inseparable from it; and these laws assert themselves despite anarchy, in and through anarchy. They are manifested in the only persistent form of the social nexus, in exchange, and impose themselves on the individual producers as compulsory laws of competition. At first, therefore, they are unknown to these producers themselves and have to be discovered by them gradually, only through long experience. Thus they assert themselves without the producers and against the producers, as the natural laws of their form of production, working blindly. The product dominates the producers.

In mediaeval society, especially in the earlier centuries, production was essentially for the producer's own use. In the main it only satisfied the wants of the producer and his family. Where personal relations of dependence existed as in the countryside, it also contributed towards satisfying the wants of the feudal lord. No exchange was involved here, and consequently the products did not assume the character of commodities. The peasant family produced almost everything it required -- utensils and clothing as well as food. It was only when it succeeded in producing a surplus beyond its

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own wants and the payments in kind due to the feudal lord -- it was only at this stage that it also produced commodities; this surplus thrown into social exchange and offered for sale became a commodity. The town artisans, it is true, had to produce for exchange from the very beginning. But they too covered the greatest part of their own wants themselves; they had gardens and small fields; they sent their cattle out into the communal woodland, which also provided them with timber and firewood; the women spun flax, wool, etc. Production for the purpose of exchange, the production of commodities, was only just coming into being. Hence, restricted exchange, restricted<"p351"> market, stable mode of production, local isolation from the outside world, and local unity within: the Mark[118] in the countryside, the guild in the town.

But with the extension of commodity production and especially with the emergence of the capitalist mode of production, the previously dormant laws of commodity production began to operate more openly and more potently. The old bonds were loosened, the old dividing barriers were broken through, the producers were more and more transformed into independent, isolated producers of commodities. The anarchy of social production became obvious and was carried to further and further extremes. But the chief means by which the capitalist mode of production accentuated this anarchy in social production was the exact opposite of anarchy -- the increasing organization of production as social production in each individual productive establishment. With this lever it put an end to the old peaceful stability. In whatever branch of industry it was introduced, it suffered no older method of operation alongside it; wherever it laid hold of a handicraft, it wiped the old handicraft out. The field of labour became a field of battle. The great geographical discoveries and the

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colonization which followed on them multiplied markets and hastened the transformation of handicraft into manufacture. The struggle broke out not only between the individual local producers;<"p352"> in turn the local struggles grew into national struggles, the commercial wars of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.[119] Finally, large-scale industry and the creation of the world market have made the struggle universal and at the same time given it an unparalleled virulence. Between individual capitalists, as between whole industries and whole countries, advantages in natural or artificial conditions of production decide life or death. The vanquished are relentlessly cast aside. It is the Darwinian struggle for individual existence, transferred from nature to society with a fury raised to the nth power. The brutish state of nature appears as the peak of human development. The contradiction between social production and capitalist appropriation reproduces itself as the antagonism between the organization of production in the individual factory and the anarchy of production in society as a whole.

The capitalist mode of production moves in these two phenomenal forms of the contradiction immanent in it by its very origin, it relentlessly describes that "vicious circle" which Fourier had already discovered. But what Fourier in his day was as yet unable to see is that this circle is gradually narrowing, that the motion is rather in the form of a spiral and must come to an end, like the motion of the planets, by collision with the centre. It is the motive force of the social anarchy of production which increasingly transforms the great majority of men into proletarians, and it is the proletarian masses in their turn who will ultimately put an end to the anarchy of production. It is the motive force of the social anarchy of production which transforms the infinite perfecti-

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bility of the machine in large-scale industry into a compulsory commandment for each individual industrial capitalist to make his machinery more and more perfect, under penalty of ruin.

But the perfecting of machinery means rendering human labour superfluous. If the introduction and increase of machinery meant the displacement of millions of hand workers by a few machine workers, the improvement of machinery means the displacement of larger and larger numbers of machine workers themselves, and ultimately the creation of a mass of available wage-workers exceeding the average employment needs of capital, a complete industrial reserve army, as I called it as long ago as 1845,* an army available at times when industry is working at high pressure, to be thrown out onto the streets by the inevitable ensuing crash, a constant dead weight on the feet of the working class in its struggle for existence with capital, a regulator to keep wages down to the low level which suits the needs of capital. Thus it comes about that machinery, to use Marx's phrase, becomes the most powerful weapon in the war of capital against the working class, that the instruments of labour constantly knock the means of subsistence out of the worker's hands, that the very product of the worker is turned into an instrument for his enslavement. Thus it comes about that from the very beginning economy in the instruments of labour becomes at once the most reckless squandering of labour-power and robbery committed against the normal conditions requisite for the labour function; that machinery, the most powerful

* The Condition of the Working Class in England, p. 109. [Note by Engels, referring to the German edition]; Marx and Engels, On Britain, Moscow, 1953, p. 119. --Ed.

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means for shortening labour-time, is converted into the most unfailing means for transforming the entire span of life of the worker and his family into disposable labour-time for the purpose of expanding the value of capital.[*] Thus it comes about that the overwork of some becomes the precondition for the unemployment of others and that large-scale industry, which hunts the whole world over for new consumers, confines the consumption of the masses at home to a starvation minimum and thus undermines its own internal market. "The law that always equilibrates the relative surplus population, or industrial reserve army, to the extent and energy of accumulation, this law rivets the labourer to capital more firmly than the wedges of Vulcan did Prometheus to the rock. It involves an accumulation of misery corresponding to the accumulation of capital. Accumulation of wealth at one pole is, therefore, at the same time accumulation of misery, agony of toil, slavery, ignorance, bestialization, moral degradation, at the opposite pole, i.e., on the side of the class that produces its own product as capital. " (Marx, Capital, p. 671)** To expect any other distribution of the products from the capitalist mode of production is like expecting the electrodes of a battery not to decompose water, not to develop oxygen at the positive pole and hydrogen at the negative, so long as they are connected with the battery.

We have seen how the capacity for improvement of modern machinery, which is pushed to a maximum, is transformed by the anarchy of social production into a compulsory command- <"fnp354">

* See Marx, Capital, Vol. I, pp. 435-36 and 487, and pp. 408 and 462. --Ed.
** Ibid., p. 645, translation revised, Engels' italics; see p. 166 above, first footnote. --Ed.

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ment for the individual industrial capitalist constantly to improve his machinery, constantly to increase its productive power. The bare factual possibility of extending his field of production is transformed into a similar compulsory commandment for him. The enormous expansive force of large-scale industry, compared to which that of gases is mere child's play, now appears to us as a need for qualitative and quantitative expansion that laughs at all counteracting pressure. Such counteracting pressure is formed by consumption, by sales, by markets for the products of large-scale industry. But the capacity of the market to expand, both extensively and intensively, is primarily governed by quite different laws which operate far less energetically. The expansion of the market cannot keep pace with the expansion of production. The collision becomes inevitable, and since it can yield no solution so long as it does not burst the capitalist mode of production itself, it becomes periodic. Capitalist production generates a new "vicious circle".

In fact, since 1825, when the first general crisis erupted, the whole industrial and commercial world, production and exchange among all civilized peoples and their more or less barbarian appendages, have broken down about once every ten years. Trade comes to a standstill, markets are glutted, products lie around in piles as massive as they are unsaleable, hard cash disappears, credit vanishes, factories are idle, the working masses lack the means of subsistence because they have produced too much of them, bankruptcy follows upon bankruptcy, forced sale upon forced sale. The stagnation lasts for years and both productive forces and products are squandered and destroyed wholesale, until the accumulated masses of commodities are finally run down at a more or less considerable depreciation and until production and exchange

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gradually begin to move again. By degrees the pace quickens, it becomes a trot, the industrial trot passes into a gallop, and the gallop in turn passes into the unbridled onrush of a complete industrial, commercial, credit and speculative steeple chase, only to end up again, after the most breakneck jumps -- in the ditch of a crash. And so on over and over again. We have now experienced it fully five times since 1825, and at this moment (1877) we are experiencing it for the sixth time. The character of these crises is so clearly marked that Fourier hit them all off when he described the first as a crise pléthorique, a crisis of superabundance.

In these crises, the contradiction between social production and capitalist appropriation ends in a violent explosion. The circulation of commodities is for the moment reduced to nothing; money, the means of circulation, becomes an obstacle to circulation; all the laws of commodity production and commodity circulation are turned upside down. The economic collision has reached its culminating point: the mode of production rebels against the mode of exchange, the productive forces rebel against the mode of production, which they have outgrown.

The fact that the social organization of production within the factory has developed to the point at which it has become incompatible with the anarchy of production in society which exists side by side with and above it -- this fact is made palpable to the capitalists themselves by the forcible concentration of capitals which takes place during crises through the ruin of many big and even more small capitalists. The whole mechanism of the capitalist mode of production breaks down under the pressure of the productive forces which it itself has created. It is no longer able to transform the whole of

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this mass of means of production into capital; they lie idle, and for this very reason the industrial reserve army must also lie idle. Means of production, means of subsistence, available workers, all the elements of production and of general wealth are there in abundance. But "abundance becomes the source of distress and want" (Fourier), because it is precisely abundance that prevents the conversion of the means of production and subsistence into capital. For in capitalist society the means of production cannot begin to function unless they have first been converted into capital, into means for the exploitation of human labour-power. The necessity for the means of production and subsistence to take the character of capital stands like a ghost between them and the workers. It alone prevents the coming together of the material and personal levers of production; it alone forbids the means of production to function and the workers to work and to live. Thus on the one hand the capitalist mode of production stands convicted of its own incapacity to continue the administration of these productive forces. On the other hand, these productive forces themselves press forward with increasing power towards the abolition of the contradiction, to their deliverance from their character as capital, towards the actual recognition of their character as social productive forces.

It is this counterpressure of the productive forces, in their mighty upgrowth, against their character as capital, this increasingly compulsive drive for the recognition of their social nature, which forces the capitalist class itself to treat them more and more as social productive forces, as far as this is at all possible within the framework of capitalist relations. The period of industrial boom with its unlimited credit inflation no less than the crash itself operating through the

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collapse of large capitalist establishments, drives towards that form of the socialization of larger masses of means of production which we find in the various kinds of joint-stock companies. Many of these means of production and communication are so colossal from the outset that, like the railways, they exclude all other forms of capitalist exploitation. At a certain stage of development this form, too, no longer suffices; [the large-scale producers in one and the same branch of industry in a country unite in a "trust", an association for the purpose of regulating production. They determine the total amount to be produced, parcel it out among themselves and thus enforce the selling price fixed beforehand. Since such trusts usually go to pieces as soon as business becomes bad, for this very reason they push towards a still more concentrated socialization. The whole branch of industry is converted into one big joint-stock company, and internal competition gives place to the internal monopoly of this one company; this happened as early as 1890 with English alkali production, which, after the fusion of all the forty-eight large works, is now carried on by a single company, under centralized direction, with a capital of �6 million.

In the trusts, free competition changes into monopoly and the planless production of capitalist society capitulates before the planned production of the invading socialist society. Of course, this is initially still to the benefit of the capitalists. But the exploitation becomes so palpable here that it must break down. No nation would put up with production directed by trusts, with such a barefaced exploitation of the community by a small band of coupon-clippers.

In one way or another, with trusts or without,] the state, the official representative of capitalist society, is [finally] con-

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strained to take over the direction of production.* This necessity for conversion into state property first appears in the big communication organizations: the postal service, telegraphs and railways.

If the crises revealed the bourgeoisie's incapacity to continue to administer the modern productive forces, the conversion of the large production and communication establishments into joint-stock companies [,trusts] and state property shows that the bourgeoisie can be dispensed with for this purpose. All the social functions of the capitalist are now conducted by salaried employees. The capitalist no longer has any social activity save the pocketing of revenues, the <"fnp">

* I say is constrained to. For it is only when the means of production or communication have actually outgrown direction by joint-stock companies and therefore their nationalization has become economically inevitable -- it is only then that this nationalization, even when carried out by the state of today, represents an economic advance, the attainment of another preliminary step towards the seizure of all the productive forces by society itself. But since Bismarck became keen on nationalizing, a certain spurious socialism has recently made its appearance -- here and there even degenerating into a kind of Qunkeyism -- which without more ado declares all nationalization, even the Bismarckian kind, to be socialistic. To be sure, if the nationalization of the tobacco trade were socialistic, Napoleon and Metternich would rank among the founders of socialism. If the Belgian state, for quite ordinary political and financial reasons, constructed its own main railway lines, if Bismarck, without any economic compulsion, nationalized the main Prussian railway lines simply in order to be better able to organize and use them in face of war, in order to train the railway officials as the government's voting cattle, and especially in order to secure a new source of revenue independent of parliamentary votes, such actions were in no sense socialistic measures, whether direct or indirect, conscious or unconscious. Otherwise, the Royal Maritime Company, the Royal Porcelain Manufacture, and even the regimental tailors in the army would be socialist institutions [or even, as was seriously proposed by a sly dog in the thirties during the reign of Frederick William III, the nationalization of the -- brothels]. [Note by Engels.]

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clipping of coupons and gambling on the Stock Exchange, where the different capitalists fleece each other of their capital. Just as at first the capitalist mode of production displaced the workers, so now it is displacing the capitalists, relegating them, just as it did the workers, to the superfluous population, although not immediately to the industrial reserve army.

But neither conversion into joint-stock companies [and trusts] nor conversion into state property deprives the productive forces of their character as capital. This is obvious in the case of joint-stock companies [and trusts]. But the modern state, too, is only the organization with which bourgeois society provides itself in order to maintain the general external conditions of the capitalist mode of production against encroachments either by the workers or by individual capitalists. The modern state, whatever its form, is an essentially capitalist machine, the state of the capitalists, the ideal aggregate capitalist. The more productive forces it takes over into its possession, the more it becomes a real aggregate capitalist, the more citizens it exploits. The workers remain wage-workers, proletarians. The capitalist relationship is not abolished, rather it is pushed to the limit. But at this limit it changes into its opposite. State ownership of the productive forces is not the solution of the conflict, but it contains within itself the formal means, the handle to the solution.

This solution can only consist in actually recognizing the social nature of the modern productive forces and in therefore bringing the mode of production, appropriation and exchange into harmony with the social character of the means of production. This can only be brought about by society's openly and straightforwardly taking possession of the pro-

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ductive forces, which have outgrown all guidance other than that of society itself. Thus the social character of the means of production and of the products, which today reacts against the producers themselves, periodically ruptures the mode of production and exchange, and enforces itself only as a law of nature working blindly, violently and destructively, will be quite consciously asserted by the producers, and instead of being a source of disorder and periodic collapse will change into the most powerful lever of production itself.

The forces operating in society work exactly like the forces of nature -- blindly, violently and destructively, so long as we fail to understand them and take them into account. But once we have recognized them and understood their action, their trend and their effects, it depends solely on ourselves to increasingly subject them to our will and to attain our ends through them. This is especially true of the mighty productive forces of the present day. As long as we obstinately refuse to understand their nature and their character -- and the capitalist mode of production and its defenders resist such understanding with might and main -- these forces operate in spite of us and against us, dominate us, as we have shown in detail. But once their nature is grasped, they can be transformed from demoniacal masters into willing servants in the hands of the producers working in association. It is the difference between the destructive force of electricity in the lightning of a thunderstorm and the tamed electricity of the telegraph and the arc light, the difference between a conflagration and fire working in the service of man. With this treatment of the present-day productive forces according to their nature, which is now at last understood, a socially planned regulation of production in accordance with the needs of the community and of each individual takes

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the place of the anarchy of social production. The capitalist mode of appropriation, in which the product enslaves first the producer and then the appropriator as well, will thus be replaced by the mode of appropriation of the product based on the nature of the modern means of production themselves: on the one hand, direct social appropriation as a means of maintaining and extending production, and on the other direct individual appropriation as a means of existence and enjoyment.

By increasingly transforming the great majority of the population into proletarians, the capitalist mode of production creates the force which, under penalty of its own destruction, is compelled to accomplish this revolution. By increasingly driving towards the transformation of the vast socialized means of production into state property, it itself points the way to the accomplishment of this revolution. The proletariat seizes state power and to begin with transforms the means of production into state property. But it thus puts an end to itself as proletariat, it thus puts an end to all class differences and class antagonisms, and thus also to the state as state. Moving in class antagonisms, society up to now had need of the state, that is, an organization of the exploiting class at each period for the maintenance of its external conditions of production, that is, particularly for the forcible holding down of the exploited class in the conditions of oppression (slavery, villeinage or serfdom, wage-labour) given by the existing mode of production. The state was the official representative of the whole of society, its concentration in a visible body, but it was so only in so far as it was the state of that class which in its time represented the whole of society: in antiquity, the state of the slave-owning citizens, in the Middle Ages of the feudal nobility, in our time, of the

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bourgeoisie. When ultimately it becomes the real representative of the whole of society, it renders itself superfluous. As soon as there is no social class to be held in subjection any longer, as soon as class domination and the struggle for individual existence based on the anarchy of production existing up to now are eliminated together with the collisions and excesses arising from them, there is nothing more to repress, nothing necessitating a special repressive force, a state. The first act in which the state really comes forward as the representative of the whole of society -- the taking possession of the means of production in the name of society -- is at the same time its last independent act as a state. The interference of the state power in social relations becomes superfluous in one sphere after another, and then dies away of itself. The government of persons is replaced by the administration of things and the direction of the processes of production. The state is not "abolished", it withers away. It is by this that one must evaluate the phrase "a free people's state" with respect both to its temporary agitational justification and to its ultimate scientific inadequacy, and it is by this that we must also evaluate<"p363"> the demand of the so called anarchists that the state should be abolished overnight.[120]

Since the historical emergence of the capitalist mode of production, the seizure of all the means of production by society has often been dreamed of, by individuals as well as by whole sects, more or less vaguely as an ideal of the future. But it could only become possible, it could only become a historical necessity, when the material conditions* for its

* Socialism: Utopian and Scientific has "actual conditions" instead of "material conditions". --Ed.

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realization were present. Like every other social advance, it is becoming realizable not through the acquisition of the understanding that the existence of classes is in contradiction with justice, equality, etc., not through the mere will to abolish these classes, but through certain new economic conditions. The cleavage of society into an exploiting and an exploited class, a ruling and an oppressed class, was the necessary outcome of the previous low development of production. Society is necessarily divided into classes as long as the total social labour only yields a product but slightly exceeding what is necessary for the bare existence of all, as long as labour therefore claims all or almost all the time of the great majority of the members of society. Side by side with this great majority exclusively enthralled in toil, a class freed from direct productive labour is formed which manages the general business of society: the direction of labour, affairs of state, justice, science, art, and so forth. It is therefore the law of the division of labour which lies at the root of the division into classes. However, this does not mean that this division into classes was not established by violence and robbery, by deception and fraud, or that the ruling class, once in the saddle, has ever failed to strengthen its domination at the cost of the working class and to convert its direction of society into [increased] exploitation of the masses.

But if, upon this showing, division into classes has a certain historical justification, it does so only for a given period of time, for given social conditions. It was based on the insufficiency of production; it will be swept away by the full development of the modern productive forces. In fact the abolition of social classes presupposes a level of historical development at which the existence not merely of this or that particular ruling class but of any ruling class at all, and

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therefore of class distinction itself, has become an anachronism, is obsolete. It therefore presupposes that the development of production has reached a level at which the appropriation of the means of production and of the products, and consequently of political supremacy and of the monopoly of education and intellectual leadership by a special social class, has become not only superfluous but also a hindrance to development economically, politically and intellectually.

This point has now been reached. Its political and intellectual bankruptcy is hardly a secret any longer to the bourgeoisie itself, and its economic bankruptcy recurs regularly every ten years. In each crisis society is suffocated beneath the weight of its own productive forces and products of which it can make no use, and stands helpless in face of the absurd contradiction that the producers have nothing to consume because consumers are lacking. The expansive force of the means of production bursts asunder the bonds imposed upon them by the capitalist mode of production. Their release from these bonds is the sole prerequisite for an unbroken, ever more rapidly advancing development of the productive forces, and thus of a practically unlimited growth of production itself. Nor is this all. The social appropriation of the means of production puts an end not only to the current artificial restrictions on production, but also to the positive waste and devastation of productive forces and products which are now the inevitable concomitants of production and which reach their zenith in crises. Further, it sets free for the community at large a mass of means of production and products by putting an end to the senseless luxury and extravagance of the present ruling classes and their political representatives. The possibility of securing for every member of society, through social production, an existence

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which is not only perfectly adequate materially and which becomes daily richer, but also guarantees him the completely free development and exercise of his physical and mental faculties -- this possibility is now present for the first time, but it is present.[*]

The seizure of the means of production by society eliminates commodity production and with it the domination of the product over the producer. The anarchy within social production is replaced by consciously planned organization. The struggle for individual existence comes to an end. It is only at this point that man finally separates in a certain sense from the animal kingdom and that he passes from animal conditions of existence to really human ones. The conditions of existence environing and hitherto dominating humanity now pass under the dominion and control of humanity, which now for the first time becomes the real conscious master of nature, because and in so far as it becomes master of its own social organization. The laws of man's own social activity, which have hitherto confronted him as extraneous laws of nature dominating him, will then be applied by man with full knowledge and hence be dominated <"fnp366">

* A few figures may give an approximate idea of the enormous expansive force of the modern means of production even under the weight of capitalism. According to Giffen's latest estimates,[121] the total wealth of Great Britain and Ireland was, in round figures:

1814 �2,200,000,000
1865 �6,100,000,000
1875 �8,500,000,000

As for the squandering of means of production and products resulting from crises, the total loss to the German iron industry alone in the last crash was estimated at 455,000,000 marks [�22,750,000] at the Second German Industrial Congress (Berlin, February 21, 1878). [Note by Engels.]

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by him. Man's own social organization, which has hitherto confronted him as a process dictated by nature and history, now becomes a process resulting from his own voluntary action. The objective extraneous forces which have hitherto dominated history now pass under the control of man himself. It is only from this point that man will himself make his own history fully consciously, it is only from this point that the social causes he sets in motion will preponderantly and ever increasingly have the effects he wills. It is humanity's leap from the realm of necessity into the realm of freedom.

[In conclusion, let us briefly sum up the course of our development:

I. Mediaeval Society : Small-scale individual production. Means of production adapted to individual use, hence primitive, clumsy, petty, puny in effect. Production for immediate consumption, by the producer himself or by his feudal lord. Only where a surplus of production over this consumption occurs does this surplus get offered for sale and enter into exchange: production of commodities, therefore, only in its nascent state; but it already contains within itself, in embryo, the anarchy in social production.

II. Capitalist Revolution : Transformation of industry, at first by means of simple co-operation and manufacture. Concentration of the previously scattered means of production into large workshops, and consequently their transformation from individual into social means of production, a transformation which by and large does not affect the form of exchange. The old forms of appropriation remain in force. The capitalist appears: in his character as owner of the means of production he also appropriates the products and turns

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them into commodities. Production has become a social act; exchange and with it appropriation remain individual acts, the acts of individuals: the social product is appropriated by the individual capitalist. Fundamental contradiction, from which there arise all the contradictions in which present-day society moves and which large-scale industry brings to light.

Antagonism of proletariat and bourgeoisie.

Contradiction between social organization in the individual factory and social anarchy in production as a whole.

industrial reserve army.

here

superabundance of means of production and products -- there

superabundance of workers

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has grown into an absurdity: the mode of production rebels against the form of exchange. The bourgeoisie is convicted of incapacity to manage its own social productive forces any further.
D) Partial recognition of the social character of the productive forces imposed on the capitalists themselves. Appropriation of the large production and communication organizations, first by joint-stock companies, later by trusts, then by the state. The bourgeoisie proves itself a superfluous class; all its social functions are now performed by salaried employees.

III. Proletarian Revolution, solution of the contradictions: the proletariat seizes the public power and by virtue of this power transforms the social means of production, which are slipping from the hands of the bourgeoisie, into public property. By this act, the proletariat frees the means of production from their previous character as capital, and gives their social character complete freedom to assert itself. Social production according to a predetermined plan now becomes possible. The development of production makes the further existence of different social classes an anachronism. In proportion as the anarchy of social production vanishes, the political authority of the state dies away. Men, at last masters of their own mode of social organization, consequently become at the same time masters of nature, masters of themselves -- free.]

To accomplish this world-emancipating act is the historical mission of the modern proletariat. To grasp the historical conditions of this act and therefore its very nature, and thus to bring the conditions and character of its own action to the consciousness of the class that is destined to act, the

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class that is now oppressed -- this is the task of scientific socialism, the theoretical expression of the proletarian movement.

<"p3s3">

III

PRODUCTION

After all that has been said above, the reader will not be surprised to learn that the development of the principal features of socialism described in the last chapter is not at all in accordance with Herr Dühring's views. On the contrary. He must hurl them into the abyss of the damned with all the other "bastards of historical and logical fantasy", "barren conceptions", "confused and nebulous notions", etc. For him socialism is in no way a necessary product of historical development and still less of the grossly material economic conditions of today, which are solely oriented towards getting grub. He is much better off. His socialism is a final and ultimate truth;

it is "the natural system of society", whose roots are to be found in a "universal principle of justice":

and although he cannot avoid taking notice of the existing situation if only in order to remedy it, a situation which has been created by the sinful history of the past, this must be regarded rather as a misfortune for the pure principle of justice. Herr Dühring creates his socialism, like everything else, through the medium of his famous twosome. Instead of these two puppets playing the part of master and servant as in the past, they act out the drama of equal rights for

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a change -- and, hey presto, we are all set for Dühringian socialism.

Therefore, it goes without saying that to Herr Dühring periodical industrial crises are completely devoid of the historical significance we had to ascribe to them.

For him crises are only occasional deviations from "normalcy" and at most serve to promote "the development of a more regulated order". The "common method" of explaining crises by over-production is in no wise adequate for his "more exact conception". Of course this "may be permissible for specific crises in particular areas". As for example, "a swamping of the book market with works suddenly released for republication and suitable for mass sale".

At any rate Herr Dühring can go to bed with the gratifying knowledge that his immortal works will never bring on any such world disaster.

But in big crises, it is not over-production, but rather "the lagging behind of popular consumption. . . artificially produced under-consumption. . . interference with the natural growth of the needs of the people (!), which ultimately widen the gulf between supply and demand so critically".

And he has even the good luck to find a disciple for this theory of crisis of his.

But unfortunately the under-consumption of the masses, the restriction of the consumption of the masses to what is necessary for their subsistence and reproduction, is not a new phenomenon. It has existed as long as there have been exploiting and exploited classes. Even in those periods of history when the situation of the masses was particularly favourable, as for example in England in the fifteenth century, they under-consumed. They were very far from having their own annual total product at their disposal for consumption. Therefore, while under-consumption has been a constant feature in history for thousands of years, the general

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stagnation of the market which breaks out in crises as the result of excessive production is a phenomenon only of the last fifty years; and so it needs all the shallowness of Herr Dühring's vulgar economics to explain the new collision not by the new phenomenon of over-production but by the thousands of years old phenomenon of under-consumption. It is like a mathematician attempting to explain the variation in the ratio between two quantities, one of which is constant and the other variable, not by the variation of the variable but by the constant's remaining unchanged. The under-consumption of the masses is a necessary condition of all forms of society based on exploitation, and consequently of the capitalist form too; but it is only the capitalist form of production which brings about crises. The under-consumption of the masses is therefore a precondition of crises, and plays a role in them which has long been recognized. But it tells us just as little about the cause of present-day crises as about their previous absence.

Herr Dühring's notions of the world market are altogether curious. We saw how, like a typical German man of letters, he seeks to explain real industrial specific crises by imaginary crises on the Leipzig book market -- the storm on the ocean by the storm in a teacup. He also imagines that present-day entrepreneurial production must

"depend for its market mainly on the circles of the possessing classes themselves";

which does not prevent him, only sixteen pages later, from presenting, in the accepted way, the iron and cotton industries as the decisive modern industries -- that is, precisely the two branches of production whose products are consumed

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only to an infinitesimally small degree within the circles of the possessing classes and are more than any other dependent on mass consumption. Wherever we turn in Herr Dühring's works, there is nothing but empty and self-contradictory chatter. But let us take an example from the cotton industry. In the relatively small town of Oldham alone -- one of a dozen towns round Manchester with fifty to a hundred thousand inhabitants engaged in the cotton industry -- in this town alone, in the four years 1872 to 1875, the number of spindles spinning only Number 32 yarn increased from two and a half to five million; so that in one medium-sized English town there are as many spindles spinning one single count as in the whole cotton industry of Germany, including Alsace. The expansion in the other branches and areas of the cotton industry in England and Scotland has taken place in approximately the same proportion. In view of these facts, it requires a strong dose of deep-rooted effrontery to explain the present complete stagnation in the yarn and cloth markets by the English masses' under-consumption and not by the English cotton-mill owners' over-production.*

Enough. One does not argue with people who are so ignorant of economics that they consider the Leipzig book market a market in the modern industrial sense. Let us therefore merely note that Herr Dühring has only one more piece of information for us on the subject of crises, namely, that in crises we have nothing

* The "under-consumption" explanation of crises originated with Sismondi, and it still makes some sense in him. Rodbertus took it over from Sismondi, and Herr Dühring has in turn copied it, in his usual vulgarizing fashion, from Rodbertus. [Note by Engels.]

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but "the ordinary interplay of overstrain and relaxation"; that over-speculation "is not only due to the planless multiplication of private enterprises", but "the rashness of individual entrepreneurs and private imprudence must also be reckoned among the causes giving rise to oversupply".

What, once again, is the "cause giving rise" to this rashness and private imprudence? Precisely this very planlessness of capitalist production, which is manifested in the planless multiplication of private enterprises. And it is also an act of inordinate "rashness" to mistake the translation of an economic fact into moral reproach for the discovery of a new cause.

With this we can leave the question of crises. In the previous chapter we showed that they were necessarily engendered by the capitalist mode of production, and explained their significance as crises of this mode of production itself, as means of compelling the social revolution, and it is not necessary to say another word in reply to Herr Dühring's superficialities on this subject. Let us pass on to his positive creations, to the "natural system of society".

This system, which is built on a "universal principle of justice" and is therefore free from all consideration of troublesome material facts, consists of a federation of economic communes among which there is

"freedom of movement and obligatory acceptance of new members on the basis of fixed laws and administrative regulations."

The economic commune itself is above all

"a comprehensive schematism of great import in human history" which is far superior to the "erroneous half-measures", for example, of a certain Marx. It implies "a community of persons bound together by their publicistic right to dispose of a definite area of land and a group of productive establishments for their common activity and their common participation in the product". The public right is "a right to the object . . . in the sense of a purely publicistic relation to nature and to productive institutions".

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We leave it to the future jurists of the economic commune to cudgel their brains as to what this means; we give it up completely. All we gather is

that it is not at all the same thing as the "corporative ownership of workers' associations", which would not exclude mutual competition and even the exploitation of wage-labour.

Here he drops the remark that

the conception of a "collective ownership", such as is also found in Marx, is, "to say the least, obscure and open to question, as this conception of the future always gives the impression that it means nothing more than corporative ownership by groups of workers".

This is one more instance of the many "scurrilous ways" of making innuendoes so customary with Herr Dühring, "for whose vulgar nature" -- to use his own words -- "only the vulgar word scurvy would be quite apt"; it is just as baseless a lie as Herr Dühring's other invention that by collective ownership Marx means "ownership which is at once both individual and social".

In any case this much seems clear. The publicistic right of an economic commune in its instruments of labour is an exclusive property right at least as against every other economic commune as well as against society and the state.

But this right is not to empower the commune "to cut itself off . . . from the outside world, for as between the various economic communes there is freedom of movement and obligatory acceptance of new members on the basis of fixed laws and administrative norms . . . Iike . . . belonging to a political organization at the present time, or participation in the economic affairs of the community".

There will therefore be rich and poor economic communes, and the levelling out takes place through the population crowding into the rich communes and leaving the poor ones. Thus although Herr Dühring wants to eliminate competition

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in products between the individual communes by means of the national organization of trade, he calmly allows competition among the producers to continue. Things are removed from the sphere of competition, but men remain subject to it.

But we are still very far from clear on the question of "publicistic right". Two pages later Herr Dühring tells us:

The trade commune "will at first cover the politico-social area whose members constitute a single legal entity and in this character have at their disposal the whole of the land, the dwellings and productive institutions".

So after all it is not the individual commune which has the disposal, but the whole nation. The "publicistic right", "right to the object", "publicistic relation to nature" and so forth is therefore not merely "at least obscure and open to question", it is in direct contradiction with itself. At any rate, in so far as each individual economic commune is likewise a legal entity, it is in fact "an ownership which is at once both individual and social", and this latter "nebulous hybrid" is thus once again to be met with in Herr Dühring himself.

In any case the economic commune has instruments of labour at its disposal for the purpose of production. How is this production carried on? Judging by all Herr Dühring has told us, precisely as in the past, except that the commune takes the place of the capitalists. The most we are told is that for the first time everyone will be free to choose his occupation, and that there will be equal obligation to work.

The basic form of all production hitherto has been the division of labour, on the one hand, within society, and on the other, within each separate productive establishment. How does the Dühringian "sociality" stand on this question?

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The first great division of labour in society is the separation of town and country.

According to Herr Dühring, this antagonism is "inevitable in the nature of things". But "it is on the whole dubious to regard the gulf between agriculture and industry . . . as unbridgeable. In fact, a certain degree of constant movement between the two already exists which promises to increase considerably in the future". Already, we learn, two industries have penetrated agriculture and rural enterprise: "in the first place, distilling, and in the second, beet-sugar manufacture. . . . The production of spirits is already of such importance that it is more likely to be under- than over-estimated." And "if it were possible, as a result of some inventions, for a large number of industries to grow in such a way that they would be compelled to localize their operations in the countryside in direct association with the production of raw materials", this would weaken the antithesis between town and country and "provide the broadest possible basis for the development of civilization". Moreover, "a similar result might be attained in yet another way. Apart from technical requirements, social needs are increasingly coming to the fore, and if the latter become the decisive consideration in the grouping of human activities, it will no longer be possible to neglect those advantages which ensue from a close and systematic connection between occupations in the open country and the technical operations of working up raw materials."

Now it is precisely social needs which come to the fore in the economic commune; and so won't it hasten to appropriate the above advantages of the union of agriculture and industry to the fullest extent? Won't Herr Dühring seize the opportunity to impart to us, with the verbosity he is so fond of, his "more exact conceptions" concerning the economic commune's attitude to this question? The reader who expected this would be sadly duped. The old threadbare, embarrassed commonplaces, once again revolving in the orbit of the schnapps-distilling and the beet-sugar manufacturing jurisdiction of the Prussian Landrecht, are the sum total of what Herr Dühring has to say about the antithesis between town and country in the present and in the future.

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Let us pass on to the division of labour in detail. Here Herr Dühring is already a little "more exact". He speaks of

"a person who has to devote himself exclusively to one kind of occupation". If the point at issue is the introduction of a new branch of production, the problem simply hinges on whether a certain number of persons, who are to devote themselves to the production of one single article, can some how be provided with the consumption (!) they require. In the socialitarian system no branch of production would "require many people ", and there, too, there would be "economic species " of men "distinguished by their way of life".

Accordingly, within the sphere of production everything remains much the same as before. To be sure, an "erroneous division of labour" has obtained in society so far; but as to what this is and by what it is to be replaced in the economic commune, we are only told:

"With regard to the division of labour itself, we have already said above that this question can be considered settled as soon as account is taken of the various natural aptitudes and personal capabilities."

In addition to capabilities, personal inclination is taken into account:

"The attractiveness of rising to activities which call additional capabilities and training into play would depend exclusively on the inclination felt for the occupation in question and on the joy produced in the exercise of precisely this and no other thing " (exercise of a thing!).

This will stimulate competition within the socialitarian system, so that

"production itself will become interesting, and the dull pursuit of it, which sees in it nothing but a means of gain, will no longer put its heavy imprint on conditions".

In every society in which production has developed spontaneously -- and our present society is of this type -- it is not the producers who dominate the means of production,

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but the means of production which dominate the producers. In such a society each new lever of production is necessarily transformed into a new means for the enslavement of the producers by the means of production. This is above all true of that lever of production which, prior to the introduction of large-scale industry, was far the most powerful -- the division of labour. The very first great division of labour, the separation of town and country, condemned the rural population to thousands of years of mental torpor and the townspeople each to subjection to his own individual trade. It destroyed the basis of the intellectual development of the former and of the physical development of the latter. When the peasant appropriates his land and the townsman his trade, his land appropriates the peasant and his trade the townsman to just the same extent. When labour is divided, man is also divided. All other physical and mental faculties are sacrificed to the development of one single activity. This stunting of man grows in the same measure as the division of labour, which attains its highest development in manufacture. Manufacture splits up each trade into its separate partial operations, allots each of these to an individual worker as his life calling, and thus chains him for life to a particular detail function and a particular tool. "It converts the labourer into a crippled monstrosity, by forcing his detail dexterity at the expense of a world of productive capabilities and instincts. . . . The individual himself is made the automatic motor of a fractional operation" (Marx)* -- a motor which in many cases is perfected only by literally crippling the labourer physically and mentally. The machinery of large-scale industry degrades the worker from a machine to

* Capital, Vol. I, p. 360. --Ed.

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the mere appendage of a machine. "The lifelong speciality of handling one detail-tool now becomes the lifelong speciality of serving one detail-machine. Machinery is put to a wrong use, with the object of transforming the workman from his very childhood into a detail of a detail-machine" (Marx).* And not only the workers, but also the classes directly or indirectly exploiting the workers are enslaved by the instrument of their activity through the division of labour; the empty-minded bourgeois by his own capital and his own mania for profit, the lawyer by his ossified legal conceptions, which dominate him as an independent power; the "educated classes" in general by their manifold manifestations of parochial narrow-mindedness and one-sidedness, by their own physical and mental myopia, by their mutilation as a result of an education tailored to their speciality and of their being chained for life to this speciality alone -- even when this speciality is just doing nothing.

The Utopians were already perfectly clear about the effects of the division of labour, about the stunting of the worker on the one hand and of working activity itself on the other, an activity which is restricted to the lifelong, uniform, mechanical repetition of one and the same operation. The abolition of the antithesis between town and country was demanded both by Fourier and by Owen as the first prerequisite for the abolition of the old division of labour in general. Both held that the population should be scattered through the country in groups of sixteen hundred to three thousand; each group was to occupy a gigantic palace run as a communal household in the centre of its area of land. It is true that Fourier occasionally refers to towns, but they <"fnp380">

* Ibid., p. 422, translation revised. --Ed.

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were to consist in turn of only four or five such palaces situated near each other. Both would have each member of society participating in agriculture as well as in industry; with Fourier, the latter covers handicrafts and manufacture, while Owen already assigns the main role to large-scale industry and already demands the introduction of steam-power and machinery into household work. But within agriculture as well as industry both of them demand the greatest possible variety of occupations for each individual and accordingly the training of the youth for the maximum all-round technical activity. They both consider that man should develop in a universal way through universal practical activity and that work should recover the lure and charm of which the division of labour has deprived it,<"p381"> in the first place through this variety and through the corresponding shortness of the "sitting" -- to use Fourier's expression[122] -- devoted to each particular kind of work. Both Fourier and Owen are far in advance of the exploiting classes' way of thinking inherited by Herr Dühring, according to which the antithesis between town and country is inevitable in the nature of things, which is steeped in the prejudice that a number of "persons" must under all circumstances be condemned to the production of a single article, and which would perpetuate the different "economic species" of men distinguished by their way of life -- people who take pleasure in the performance of precisely this and no other thing and so have sunk so low that they rejoice in their own enslavement and one-sidedness. Matched against the basic ideas of even the most reckless fantasies of that "idiot" Fourier or against the paltriest ideas of that "crude, flabby and paltry" Owen, Herr Dühring is no more than an impudent dwarf still abjectly enslaved by the division of labour.

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By making itself the master of all the means of production in order to use them in a socially planned way, society puts an end to the former enslavement of men by their own means of production. It goes without saying that society cannot free itself unless each individual is freed. The old mode of production must therefore be revolutionized from the bottom up, and above all the old division of labour must disappear. Its place must be taken by an organization of production in which, on the one hand, no individual can throw on the shoulders of others his share in productive work, this natural condition of human existence; and in which, on the other hand, productive work will become the instrument emancipating men instead of the instrument enslaving them, offering each individual the opportunity to develop all his faculties, physical and mental, in all directions and exercise them to the full, and in which, therefore, productive work will become a delight instead of a blight.

Today this is no longer a fantasy, no longer a pious wish. With the present development of the productive forces, the increase in production given by the very fact of their socialization and by the abolition of the barriers and disturbances and of the waste of products and means of production all resulting from the capitalist mode of production, will already suffice, given general participation in labour, to reduce the time needed for work to a point which will be small indeed in the light of our present conceptions.

Nor is the abolition of the old division of labour a demand only to be carried through at the expense of the productivity of labour. On the contrary. Thanks to large-scale industry, it has become a condition of production itself. "The employment of machinery does away with the necessity of consolidating this distribution after the manner of manufacture

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by the constant annexation of the same worker to the same function. Since the whole motion of the factory proceeds not from the workers but from the machinery, a constant change of persons can take place without an interruption of the work process. . . . Lastly, the quickness with which machine-work is learnt by young people does away with the necessity of bringing up a special class of workers exclusively for work with machinery."[*] But while the capitalist mode of employing machinery necessarily perpetuates the old division of labour with its ossified specialization, although it has become superfluous from a technical standpoint, the machinery itself rebels against this anachronism. The technical basis of large-scale industry is revolutionary. "By means of machinery, chemical processes and other methods, it is continually transforming the worker's functions and the social combinations of the work process together with the technical basis of production. Therefore, it also revolutionizes the division of labour within society and incessantly hurls masses of capital and of work-people from one branch of production to another. By its very nature, modern industry consequently necessitates change of work, fluidity of function, universal mobility on the part of the worker. . . . We have seen how this absolute contradiction . . . vents its rage . . . in an uninterrupted sacrificial feast at the expense of the working class, in the most reckless squandering of labour-power, and in the ravages of social anarchy. This is the negative side. But if change of work at present imposes itself as an overpowering natural law and with the blindly destructive action of such a law meeting resistance at all points, large-scale industry itself through its catastrophes raises as a question of <"fnp383">

* Capital, Vol. I, p. 421, translation revised. --Ed.

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life and death not only the recognition of change of work and consequently of the worker's maximum versatility as a general social law of production, but also the adaptation of the relations of production to the normal functioning of this law. Indeed, large-scale industry raises as a question of life and death not only the replacement of the horror of a miserable disposable population of workers, kept in reserve for the fluctuating exploitative needs of capital, by the absolute availability of human beings for the changing needs of work, but also the replacement of the detail-worker, the mere embodiment of a detail social function, by the fully developed individual, for whom different social functions are but so many modes of activity giving place to each other."[*]

Large-scale industry has to a considerable extent freed industrial production from restrictions of locality by teaching us to convert the movement of molecules, which is more or less universally feasible, into the movement of masses for technical purposes. Water-power was local; steam-power is free. While water-power is necessarily rural, steam-power is by no means necessarily urban. It is its capitalist mode of utilization which concentrates it preponderantly in the towns and changes factory villages into factory towns. But in doing so it at the same time undermines the conditions under which it operates. The first requirement of the steam-engine, and a main requirement of almost all branches of production in large-scale industry, is relatively clean water. But the factory town transforms all water into stinking liquid manure. However much therefore urban concentration is a basic condition of capitalist production, each individual industrial capitalist is constantly striving to get away from the large <"fnp384">

* Capital, Vol. I, pp. 486-88, translation drastically revised. --Ed.

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towns necessarily created by this concentration and to transfer his plant to the countryside. This process can be studied in detail in the textile industry districts of Lancashire and Yorkshire; large-scale capitalist industry is constantly bringing new large towns into being there by constant flight from the towns into the country. The situation is similar in the metal industry districts where partially different causes produce the same effects.

Once more, only the abolition of the capitalist character of modern industry can abolish this new vicious circle, this contradiction in modern industry which is constantly reproducing itself. Only a society which enables its productive forces to mesh harmoniously on the basis of one single vast plan can allow industry to be dispersed over the whole country in the way best adapted to its own development and to the maintenance and development of the other elements of production.

Accordingly, the abolition of the antithesis between town and country is not merely possible. It has become a direct necessity of industrial production itself, just as it has become a necessity of agricultural production and of public health to boot. Only the fusion of town and country can eliminate the present poisoning of air, water and land, only such fusion will change the situation of the masses now languishing in the towns, and enable their excrement to be used for the production of plants instead of for the production of disease.

Capitalist industry has already made itself relatively independent of the local limitations of production at the places of origin of its raw materials. In the main the textile industry works up imported raw materials. Spanish iron ore is worked up in England and Germany, and Spanish and South American copper ores in England. Every coal-field now

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supplies fuel to an industrial area beyond its own borders, an area which is widening every year. Along the whole of the European coast steam-engines are driven by English and to some extent by German and Belgian coal. Society liberated from the barriers of capitalist production can go much further still. By generating a race of producers with an all-round training who understand the scientific basis of the totality of industrial production and each of whom has had practical experience in a whole series of branches of production from start to finish, this society will create a new productive force which will abundantly compensate for the labour required to transport raw materials and fuel from great distances.

The abolition of the separation of town and country is therefore not utopian in so far as it is conditioned on the most equal distribution possible of large-scale industry over the whole country. It is true that civilization has bequeathed us a heritage in the form of large towns which it will take much time and trouble to eliminate. But they must and will be eliminated, however protracted a process it may be. Whatever destiny may be in store for the German Empire of the Prussian nation, Bismarck can go to his grave proudly aware that his heart's desire, the end of the large town, is sure to be fulfilled.

Now see how puerile Herr Dühring's notions are -- as though society could take possession of the totality of the means of production without revolutionizing the old mode of production from the bottom up and above all without abolishing the old division of labour; as though everything would be in order once "natural aptitudes and personal capabilities are taken into account" -- so that as in the past large numbers of people would remain subjected to the production of a single article, whole "populations" would be

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engaged in a single branch of production, and as in the past humanity would continue to be divided into a number of different crippled "economic species", for there would still be "porters" and "architects". Society is to become master of the means of production as a whole in order that each individual may remain the slave of his means of production and have only the choice of which means of production is to enslave him. See too how Herr Dühring considers the separation of town and country as "inevitable in the nature of things", and can find only a tiny palliative in schnapps-distilling and beet-sugar manufacturing -- two branches of industry which are specifically Prussian in their conjunction; how he makes the dispersal of industry over the country dependent on certain future discoveries and on the compelling necessity of associating industry directly with the extraction of raw materials, raw materials which are already used at an ever increasing distance from their place of origin! Finally Herr Dühring tries to cover his retreat by assuring us that in the long run social wants will achieve the union between agriculture and industry despite economic considerations, as if this would entail some economic sacrifice!

Certainly, it is necessary to have a somewhat wider horizon than the jurisdiction of the Prussian Landrecht, than the country in which the production of schnapps and beet-sugar are the key industries and commercial crises can be studied on the book market, in order to see that the revolutionary elements, which will do away with the old division of labour together with the separation of town and country and will revolutionize the whole of production, that these elements are already contained in embryo in the conditions of production of modern large-scale industry and that their development is hindered by the existing capitalist mode of production.

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For this it is necessary to have some knowledge of real large-scale industry in its past and in its present actual form, especially in the one country where it has its home and where alone it has attained its classical development. Then no one will think of attempting to vulgarize modern scientific socialism and to degrade it into Herr Dühring's specifically Prussia socialism.

<"p3s4">

DISTRIBUTION

We have already seen that Dühringian economics comes down to the following proposition: the capitalist mode of production is quite good and can remain in existence, but the capitalist mode of distribution is evil and must disappear.* We now find that Herr Dühring's "socialitarian" system is nothing more than the application of this principle in fantasy. In fact, it turned out that Herr Dühring has practically nothing to take exception to in the mode of production -- as such -- of capitalist society, that he wants to retain the old division of labour in all its essentials, and that he consequently has hardly a word to say in regard to production within his economic commune. Production is indeed a sphere in which sturdy facts are dealt with and in which, consequently, "rational fantasy" should give but little scope to the winged soaring of its free soul, because the risk of disgrace is too great. It is quite otherwise with distribution, which in Herr Dühring's view has no connection whatever

* See p. 239 above. --Ed.

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with production and is determined not by production but by a pure act of the will -- distribution is the predestined field of his "social alchemy".

To the equal obligation to produce there corresponds the equal right to consume, exercised in an organized way in the economic commune and in the trading commune embracing a large number of economic communes. Here "labour . . . is exchanged for other labour on the basis of equal valuation. . . . Here service and counter-service represent real equality between quantities of labour." This "equalization of human energies" applies "whether the individuals have in fact done more or less, or perhaps even nothing at all ", for all activities, in so far as they involve time and energy -- therefore even playing bowls or going for a walk -- can be regarded as labour performed. But this exchange does not take place between individuals, as the community is the owner of all means of production and consequently of all products; on the one hand, it takes place between each economic commune and its individual members and, on the other, between the various economic and trading communes themselves. "The individual economic communes in particular will replace retail trade within their own areas by completely planned sales." Wholesale trade will be organized on the same lines: "The system of the free economic society . . . consequently remains a vast exchange institution whose operations are carried out on the monetary basis provided by the precious metals. It is insight into the inevitable necessity of this fundamental property which distinguishes our scheme from all those nebulous notions which cling even to the most rational forms of current socialist ideals."
For the purpose of this exchange, the economic commune, as the first appropriator of the social products, has to determine "a uniform price for each type of article", based on the average costs of production. "The significance which the so-called costs of production have for value and price today will be provided" (in the socialitarian system) "by the estimates of the quantity of labour to be employed. By virtue of the principle of equal rights for each individual applying in the economic sphere too, these estimates can, in the last analysis, be traced back to consideration of the number of participants; they will give the relation of prices corresponding both to the natural relations of production and to the social right of realization of value. The output of the precious metals will continue, as now, to determine the value of money. . . . It can be seen from this not only that the basis of the determination and the measure of value and thus the exchange relations between products are not lost in the changed constitution of society but that they are properly won for the first time,"

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The famous "absolute value" is finally realized.

But on the other hand, the commune must also put its individual members in a position to buy from it the articles produced, by paying to each, in compensation for his labour, a certain sum of money, daily, weekly or monthly, but necessarily the same for all. "From the socialitarian standpoint it is consequently a matter of indifference whether we say that wages must disappear, or that they must become the exclusive form of economic income." Now equal wages and equal prices establish "quantitative, if not qualitative, equality of consumption", and thus the "universal principle of justice" is realized in the economic sphere.

As to how the level of these wages of the future is to be determined, Herr Dühring tells us only

that here too, as in all other cases, there will be an exchange of "equal labour for equal labour". For six hours of labour, therefore, a sum of money will be paid which also embodies in itself six hours of labour.

Nevertheless, the "universal principle of justice" must in no way be confounded with that crude equalitarianism which makes the bourgeois so indignantly oppose all communism, and especially the spontaneous communism of the workers. It is by no means so inexorable as it would like to appear.

The "equality in principle of economic rights does not exclude the voluntary addition of an expression of special recognition and honour to what justice requires. . . . Society honours itself by conferring distinction on the higher types of work by a modest additional allocation for consumption."

And Herr Dühring is also honouring himself, when, combining the innocence of a dove with the wisdom of a serpent, he displays such touching concern for the modest additional consumption of the Dührings of the future.

This will finally do away with the capitalist mode of distribution. For

"supposing someone actually had a surplus of private means at his disposal under such conditions, he would be unable to find any use for it as capital.

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No individual or group would acquire it from him for production except by way of exchange or purchase, but neither would ever have occasion to pay him interest or profit." Hence "inheritance conforming to the principle of equality" would be permissible. It cannot be dispensed with, for "a certain amount of transmission by inheritance will always be a necessary concomitant of the family principle." But the right of inheritance "will not be able to lead to any amassing of considerable wealth, as the building up of property . . . can never again aim at the creation of means of production and purely rentier existences."

Thus the economic commune is happily established. Let us now have a look at how it works.

We grant the complete realization of all Herr Dühring's hypotheses; we therefore assume that the economic commune pays each of its members, for six hours of labour a day, a sum of money, say twelve shillings, in which six hours of labour are likewise embodied. We grant further that prices exactly correspond to values, and therefore, on our assumptions, cover only the costs of raw materials, the wear and tear of machinery, the consumption of instruments of labour and the wages paid. An economic commune of a hundred working members would then produce commodities to the value of twelve hundred shillings, �60, in a day and �18,000 in a year of 300 working-days. It pays the same sum to its members, each of whom does as he likes with his share, which is twelve shillings a day or �180 a year. At the end of the year, and at the end of a hundred years, the commune is no richer than it was at the beginning. During this period it will never once be in a position to provide that modest additional allocation for Herr Dühring's consumption, unless it cuts into its stock of means of production. Accumulation has been totally forgotten. Even worse. Since accumulation is a social necessity and the retention of money provides a convenient form of accumulation, the organization of the

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economic commune directly requires its members to accumulate privately and consequently leads to its own destruction.

How can this cleavage in the nature of the economic commune be avoided? It might take refuge in his beloved "tax", the price surcharge, and sell its annual production for �24,000 instead of �18,000. But as all other economic communes are in the same position and must therefore act in the same way, each would have to pay just as much "tax" in its exchanges with the others as it pockets itself, and the "tribute" would thus have to fall only on its own members.

Or the economic commune might settle the matter without more ado by paying each member for his six hours of labour the product of less than six hours, say, of four hours, of labour, that is, only eight shillings instead of twelve shillings a day, but leaving the prices of commodities at their former level. In this case it does directly and openly what it strove to do in a hidden and indirect way in the former case: it forms Marxian surplus-value to the amount of �6,000 annually by paying its members, on outright capitalist lines, less than the value of what they produce, and, moreover, by selling them at their full value commodities, which they can buy from it alone. Therefore, the economic commune can only secure a reserve fund by exposing itself as a "refined" truck system* on the broadest communist basis.

So take your choice: either the economic commune exchanges "equal labour for equal labour", in which case it cannot accumulate a fund for the maintenance and extension of pro-

* The truck system in England, also well known in Germany, is that system under which the manufacturers themselves run shops and compel their workers to buy their goods there. [Note by Engels.]

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duction, but only the individual members can do so; or it does form such a fund, in which case it does not exchange "equal labour for equal labour".

Such is the content of exchange in the economic commune. What of its form? Exchange is effected through the medium of metallic money, and Herr Dühring is not a little proud of the "world-historic import" of this improvement. But in the trading between the commune and its members money is not money at all, it does not function as money in any way. It serves as a mere labour certificate; to use Marx's phrase, it "is merely evidence of the individual share of the producer in the common labour, and of his right to a certain portion of the common produce destined for consumption", and in this function it is "no more 'money' than a theatre pass-out check."[*] It can therefore be replaced by any other token, just as in Weitling, who replaces it by a "ledger" in which the labour hours worked are entered on one side and means of subsistence taken as compensation on the other. In a word, in the trade between the economic commune and its members it functions merely as Owen's "labour money", that "phantom" which Herr Dühring so loftily disdains but which he himself is compelled to introduce in his economy of the future. Whether the token indicating the measure of fulfilment of the "obligation to produce" and of the "right to consume" thus acquired is a scrap of paper, a counter, or a gold coin is absolutely of no consequence for this purpose. For other purposes, however, this is by no means the case, as we shall see.

If, therefore, metallic money functions not as money but as a disguised labour certificate in an economic commune's trade with its members, still less does it function as money in <"fnp393">

* Capital, Vol. I, p. 94, footnote, translation revised. --Ed.

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exchange between the different economic communes. Here metallic money is totally superfluous on Herr Dühring's assumptions. In fact, mere book-keeping would suffice, which would effect the exchange of products of equal labour for products of equal labour far more simply if it used the natural measure of labour -- time, with the labour-hour as unit -- than if it first converted the labour-hours into money. The exchange is in reality simple exchange in kind; all balances are easily and simply settled by drafts on other communes. But should a commune really have a deficit with other communes, all "the gold on hand in the universe", however much it may be "money by nature", could not save this commune from the fate of having to make good this deficit by increasing the quantity of its own labour, if it does not want to be reduced to dependence on other communes by its debt. But let the reader always bear in mind that we are in no way constructing any edifice of the future. We are merely accepting Herr Dühring's assumptions and drawing the inevitable conclusions from them.

Thus neither in exchange between the economic commune and its members nor in exchange between the different communes can gold, which is "money by nature", get to realize this its nature. Nevertheless, Herr Dühring commands it to fulfil the function of money even in the "socialitarian" system. Hence, we must look for another field of action for its monetary function. And there is one. Herr Dühring gives everyone a right to "quantitatively equal consumption", but he cannot compel anyone to exercise it. On the contrary, he is proud that in his world everyone can do what he likes with his money. So he cannot prevent some from setting aside a small money hoard, while others are unable to make ends meet on the wages paid them. He even makes this inevitable

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by explicitly recognizing the family's common property in the right of inheritance, from which there also follows the obligation of parents to maintain their children. But this makes a wide breach in quantitatively equal consumption. The bachelor lives happily like a lord on his eight or twelve shillings a day, while the widower with eight minor children subsists wretchedly on this sum. On the other hand, by accepting money in payment without any question, the commune leaves open the door to the possibility that this money may have been obtained otherwise than by the individual's own labour. Non olet.[*] The commune does not know where it comes from. But in this way all the conditions are given for metallic money, which hitherto played the role of a mere labour certificate, to exercise its real money function. The opportunity and the motive are present both to form a hoard and to run into debt. The needy individual borrows from the hoarder. The borrowed money accepted by the commune in payment for means of subsistence once more becomes what it is in present-day society, the social incarnation of human labour, the real measure of labour, the general medium of circulation. All the "laws and administrative regulations" in the world are as powerless against it as they are against the multiplication table or the chemical composition of water. And since the hoarder is in a position to extort interest from people in need, usury is restored along with metallic money functioning as money.

Up to this point we have only considered the effects of the retention of metallic money within the field of operation of the Dühring economic commune. But beyond this field the wicked outside world meanwhile carries on contentedly in the old way. On the world market gold and silver remain world <"fnp395">

* It (money) does not smell.[123] --Ed.

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money, the general means of purchase and payment, the absolute social embodiment of wealth. This property of the precious metals gives the individual members of the economic communes a new motive for hoarding, enrichment and usury, the motive for operating freely and independently with regard to the commune and beyond its borders, and for realizing their accumulated private wealth on the world market. The usurers are transformed into dealers in the medium of circulation, bankers, controllers of the medium of circulation and of world money, and so into controllers of production, and so into controllers of the means of production, even though these may still be nominally registered for many years as the property of the economic and trading communes. Hence the hoarders and usurers, now become bankers, are also the masters of the economic and trading communes themselves. Herr Dühring's "socialitarian" system is indeed essentially different from the "nebulous notions" of the other socialists. It has no other purpose but the re-creation of high finance, under whose control and for whose coffers it will labour valiantly -- if it should ever happen to be pieced together and hold together. Its one hope of salvation would lie in the hoarders preferring to run away from the commune as fast as possible with the aid of their world money.

Ignorance of earlier socialist thought is so widespread in Germany that an innocent youth might at this point raise the question whether, for example, Owen's labour-notes might not lead to a similar abuse. Although we are not concerned here with elaborating on the significance of these labour-notes, space should be given to the following in order to contrast Dühring's "comprehensive schematism" with Owen's "crude flabby and paltry ideas". First, such an abuse of Owen's labour-notes would require their conversion into real money,

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while Herr Dühring presupposes real money, though attempting to prohibit it from functioning otherwise than as mere labour certificates. While there would have to be real abuse in the former, the immanent nature of money, which is independent of human volition, asserts itself in the latter; the specific, correct use of money asserts itself in face of the misuse Herr Dühring tries to impose on it owing to his own ignorance of the nature of money. Second, with Owen the labour-notes are only a transitional form to the complete community and the free utilization of the resources of society, and incidentally at most a means designed to make communism plausible to the British public. If therefore any form of misuse should compel the Owenite society to do away with the labour-notes, it would be taking a step forward towards its goal, entering on a more perfect stage of its development. But if the Dühringian economic commune abolished money, it would be destroying its "world-historic import" in one blow, it would be putting an end to its most peculiar beauty, it would cease to be the Dühring economic commune and sink to the level of the nebulous notions, to raise it from which Herr Dühring has devoted so much of the hard labour of his rational imagination.*

What, then, is the source of all the strange errors and entanglements amid which the Dühring economic commune meanders? Simply the fog in Herr Dühring's mind which envelops the concepts of value and money, and finally drives

* It may be noted in passing that the part played by labour-notes in Owen's communist society is completely unknown to Herr Dühring. He knows these notes -- from Sargant -- only in so far as they figure in the Labour Exchange Bazaars, which of course were failures, attempts to pass from existing society into communist society by means of the direct exchange of labour. [Note by Engels.]

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him to attempt to discover the value of labour. But since Herr Dühring doesn't enjoy the German monopoly on this kind of fog and in fact has plenty of competitors, we will "overcome our reluctance for a moment and unravel the knot" he has contrived to make here.

The only value known in economics is the value of commodities. What are commodities? Products made in a society of more or less separate private producers, and therefore in the first place private products. But these private products become commodities only when they are made, not for consumption by their producers, but for consumption by others, that is, for social consumption; they enter into social consumption through exchange. Therefore, the private producers stand in a social relation to each other, constitute a society. Although they are the private products of each individual, their products are therefore simultaneously, but unintentionally and as it were involuntarily, also social products. In what, then, does the social character of these private products consist? Evidently in two characteristics: first, they all satisfy some human want, they all have a use-value not only for the producers but also for others; and second, although they are products of the most varied individual labour, they are at the same time products of human labour as such, of general human labour. In so far as they have a use-value for other persons too, they can generally enter into exchange; in so far as general human labour, the simple expenditure of human labour-power, is embodied in all of them, they can be compared with each other in exchange, be said to be equal or unequal, according to the quantity of this labour embodied in each. Social conditions remaining the same, two equal private products may embody an unequal quantity of individual labour, but they always embody only an equal quantity of general human labour. An unskilled

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smith may make five horseshoes in the same time as a skilful smith makes ten. But society does not make the accidental lack of skill of an individual the basis of valuation; it recognizes as general human labour only labour of a normal average degree of skill at the particular time. Therefore, one of the five horseshoes made by the first smith has no more value in exchange than one of the ten made by the other in the same time. Individual labour contains general human labour only in so far as it is socially necessary.

Consequently, when I say that a commodity has a particular value, I say (1) that it is a socially useful product; (2) that it has been produced by a private individual for private account; (3) that, although it is a product of individual labour, it is at the same time and as it were unwittingly and involuntarily, also a product of social labour and, be it noted, of a definite quantity of this labour, established in a social way through exchange; and (4) that I express this quantity not in labour itself, in such and such a number of labour-hours, but in another commodity. If, therefore, I say that this clock is worth as much as that piece of cloth and each is worth fifty shillings, I say that an equal quantity of social labour is contained in the clock, the cloth and the money. I therefore assert that the social labour-time represented in them has been socially measured and found to be equal. But not directly, absolutely, as labour-time is usually measured, in labour-hours or days, etc., but in a roundabout way, through exchange, relatively. That is why I can express this definite quantity of labour-time not in labour-hours -- how many remains unknown to me -- but only in a roundabout way, relatively, in another commodity, which represents an equal quantity of social labour-time. The clock is worth as much as the piece of cloth.

But the production and exchange of commodities, while compelling the society based on them to take this roundabout way, likewise compel it to make the detour as short as possible. They single out from the commonalty of commodities one sovereign commodity in which the value of all other commodities can be expressed once and for all, a commodity which is recognized as the immediate incarnation of social labour and is therefore immediately and unconditionally exchangeable for all commodities -- money. Money is already contained in embryo in the concept of value, it is only value developed. But since the value of commodities, as against the commodities themselves, assumes an independent existence in money, a new factor appears in the society which produces and exchanges commodities, a factor with new social functions and effects. We need only state this point at the moment, without going more closely into it.

The political economy of commodity production is by no means the only science which has to deal with factors known only relatively. In physics, too, we do not know how many separate gas molecules are contained in a given volume of gas, pressure and temperature also being given. But we do know that, so far as Boyle's Law is correct, such a given volume of any gas contains as many molecules as :3n equal volume of any other gas at the same pressure and temperature. We can therefore compare the molecular content of the most diverse volumes of the most diverse gases under the most diverse conditions of pressure and temperature; and if we take one litre of gas at 0� C and 760 mm. pressure as the unit, we can measure the above molecular content by this unit.

In chemistry the absolute atomic weights of the various elements are likewise unknown to us. But we know them

relatively by knowing their reciprocal relations. Hence, just as commodity production and its economics obtain a relative expression for the quantities of labour contained in the various commodities -- quantities unknown to it -- by comparing these commodities on the basis of their relative labour content, so chemistry obtains a relative expression for the magnitude of the atomic weights unknown to it by comparing the various elements on the basis of their atomic weights and expressing the atomic weight of one element in multiples or fractions of the other (sulphur, oxygen, hydrogen). And just as commodity production elevates gold into the absolute commodity, the universal equivalent of all other commodities, the measure of all values, so chemistry elevates hydrogen into the chemical money commodity by fixing its atomic weight at I and reducing the atomic weights of all other elements to hydrogen, expressed in multiples of its atomic weight.

Commodity production, however, is by no means the only form of social production. In the ancient Indian communities and in the family communities of the southern Slavs, products are not transformed into commodities. The members of the community are directly associated for production, the work is distributed according to tradition and needs, and so are the products to the extent that they are destined for consumption. Since direct social production and direct distribution preclude any exchange of commodities, they also preclude the transformation of the products into commodities (at any rate within the community) and consequently into values as well.

From the moment society enters into possession of the means of production and uses them in direct association for production, the labour of each individual, however varied its specifically useful character, becomes social labour straight away and

directly. The quantity of social labour contained in a product need not then be first established in a roundabout way; daily experience will show in a direct way how much is required on the average. Society will be able to calculate in a simple way how many hours of labour are contained in a steam-engine, a bushel of the last crop of wheat, or a hundred square yards of cloth of a specific quality. It could therefore never occur to it to go on expressing the quantities of labour put into the products, quantities which it will then know directly and absolutely, in yet a third product, in a measure which, moreover, is only relative, fluctuating and inadequate, though it was formerly unavoidable as an expedient, rather than express them in their natural, adequate and absolute measure, time. Just as little as it would occur to chemical science to go on expressing atomic weights relatively and in a roundabout way by means of the hydrogen atom, if it were able to express them absolutely in their adequate measure, namely in actual weights, in billionths or quadrillionths of a gramme. Hence, on the above assumptions, society will not assign values to products. It will not express the simple fact that the hundred square yards of cloth have required, say, a thousand hours of labour for their production in the oblique and meaningless way involved in stating that they are worth a thousand hours of labour. It is true that even then it will still be necessary for society to know how much labour each article of consumption requires for its production. It will have to arrange its plan of production in accordance with its means of production, which include, in particular, its labour-power. The useful effects of the various articles of consumption, compared with one another and with the quantities of labour required for their production, will in the end determine the plan. People will be able to manage

everything very simply, without the intervention of the much-vaunted "value".[*]

The concept of value is the most general and therefore the most comprehensive expression of the economic conditions of commodity production. Consequently, the concept of value contains the germ, not only of money, but also of all the more developed forms of the production and exchange of commodities. The very fact that value is the expression of the social labour contained in private products creates the possibility of a difference between this social labour and the individual labour contained in the same product. This difference will therefore become palpably evident to a private producer if he goes on producing in the old way with the advance of the social mode of production. The same thing happens as soon as all the private manufacturers of a particular kind of commodity produce it in an amount exceeding social needs. The fact that the value of a commodity is expressed only in terms of another commodity and can be realized only in exchange against it involves the possibility that the exchange will not take place at all, or at least will not realize the correct value. Finally, when the specific commodity labour-power appears on the market, its value is determined, like that of any other commodity, by the labour-time socially necessary for its production. The value form of products therefore already contains in embryo the whole capitalist form of production, the an- <"fnp403">

* As long ago as 1844 I stated that this balancing of useful effects and expenditures of labour on making decisions concerning production was all that would be left of the politico-economic concept of value in a communist society. [See Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Appendix, "Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy" by Engels, Lawrence and Wishart, London, 1969, pp. 175-209. --Ed.] But the scientific justification for this statement, as can be seen, only became possible with Marx's Capital. [Note by Engels.]

tagonism between capitalists and wage-workers, the industrial reserve army and crises. Seeking to abolish the capitalist form of production by establishing "true value" is therefore tantamount to attempting to abolish catholicism by establishing the "true" Pope, or to setting up a society in which one day at last the producers exercise mastery over their products by consistently applying an economic category which is the most comprehensive expression of the enslavement of the producers by their own product.

Once the commodity-producing society has further developed the value form, which is inherent in commodities as such, to the money form, various seeds still hidden in value break through to the light of day. The first and most essential effect is the generalization of the commodity form. Money forces the commodity form even on the objects which have hitherto been produced directly for self-consumption, and drags them into exchange. As a result the commodity form and money penetrate the internal economy of communities which are directly associated for production, they break one communal tie after another and dissolve the community into a mass of private producers. At first, money replaces joint tillage of the soil by individual tillage, as can be seen in India; at a later stage it puts an end to the common ownership of the tillage area, which was still being manifested in periodical redistribution, by a definitive division (for example, in the village communities on the Moselle, and now also in the initial phase in the Russian village communes); finally, it forces the dividing-up of the remaining woodland and pasturage still owned in common. Whatever other causes arising in the development of production are contributing here, money always remains the most powerful medium for their influence on the communities. And if ever the Dühring economic commune came into ex-

istence, money would inevitably break it up with the same natural necessity, despite all "laws and administrative regulations".

We have already seen above ("Political Economy", VI) that it is self-contradictory to speak of the value of labour. Since labour produces not only products but also value under certain social conditions, and since this value is measured by labour, the latter can no more have a separate value than weight, as such, can have a separate weight or heat a separate temperature. But it is the characteristic peculiarity of all social confusionists ruminating on "true value" to imagine that the worker does not receive the full "value" of his labour in existing society and that socialism is destined to redress this situation. Hence it is necessary in the first place to discover what the value of labour is, which is done by attempting to measure labour, not by its appropriate measure,<"p505"> time, but by its product. The worker should receive the "full proceeds of labour".[68] Not only the product of labour, but labour itself should be directly exchangeable for products, one hour's labour for the product of another hour's labour. But this at once gives rise to a very "serious" hitch. The whole product is distributed. Accumulation, the most important progressive function of society, is taken from society and put into the hands and at the arbitrary discretion of individuals. The individuals can do what they like with their "proceeds", but at best society remains as rich or poor as it was. The means of production accumulated in the past have therefore been centralized in the hands of society only in order that all means of production accumulated in the future may once again be dispersed in the hands of individuals. That is to slap one's own premises in the face and to arrive at a pure absurdity.

Fluid labour, active labour-power, is to be exchanged for the product of labour. Then labour-power is a commodity, just like the product for which it is to be exchanged. Then the value of this labour-power is in no wise determined by its product, but by the social labour embodied in it, and so is determined according to the present law of wages.

But it is precisely this which must not be, we are told. Fluid labour, labour-power, should be exchangeable for its full product. That is to say, it should be exchangeable not for its value, but for its use-value ; the law of value is to apply to all other commodities, but must be repealed so far as labour-power is concerned. Such is the self-destructive confusion that lies concealed behind the "value of labour".

The "exchange of labour for labour on the principle of equal valuation", in so far as it has any meaning, that is to say, the mutual exchangeability of products of equal social labour, hence the law of value, is the fundamental law precisely of commodity production, and hence also of its highest form, capitalist production. It asserts itself in present-day society in the only way in which economic laws can assert themselves in a society of private producers, as a blindly operating law of nature which is inherent in things and relations, which is independent of the will or actions of the producers. By elevating this law to be the basic law of his economic commune and demanding that the commune should carry it out in all consciousness, Herr Dühring makes the basic law of existing society into the basic law of his imaginary society. He wants existing society, but without its abuses. He is thus moving on the same ground as Proudhon. Like him, he wants to abolish the abuses which have arisen out of the development of commodity production into capitalist production by applying to them the basic law of commodity production, precisely to the operation of which these abuses are

due. Like Proudhon, he wants to abolish the real consequences of the law of value by means of fantastic ones. <"p407">

How proudly our modern Don Quixote, perched on his noble Rosinante, "the universal principle of justice", and followed by his valiant Sancho Panza, Abraham Enss,[124] rides off on his knight errantry to win Mambrino's helmet, "the value of labour", but we are afraid, very much afraid, he will bring home nothing but the old familiar barber's basin.

<"p3s5">

STATE, FAMILY, EDUCATION

With the two last chapters we have just about exhausted the economic content of Herr Dühring's "new socialitarian edifice". At most, it might be added that the "universal range of the historical survey" does not in the least prevent him from looking after his special interests, even apart from his well-known modest extra consumption. As the old division of labour continues to exist in the socialitarian system, the economic commune will have to reckon not only with architects and porters but also with professional men of letters, and the question will then arise how authors' rights are to be dealt with. This question is one which occupies Herr Dühring's attention more than any other. Everywhere, for example, apropos of Louis Blanc and Proudhon, the question of authors' rights gets in the reader's way, until, after an exhaustive and exhausting discussion occupying nine full pages of the Course, it is finally brought safely into the haven of "sociality", in the form of a mysterious "remuneration of labour" -- whether with or without a modest extra consumption is not stated. A chapter

on the position of fleas in the natural system of society would have been just as appropriate and in any case less tedious.

The Philosophy gives detailed prescriptions for the political set-up of the future. Here, although he was Herr Dühring's "sole important forerunner", Rousseau did not lay the foundations deeply enough; his deeper successor corrects this by completely watering down Rousseau and mixing in leavings from the Hegelian philosophy of right boiled in a pauper's broth. "The sovereignty of the individual" forms the basis of the Dühringian state of the future; it is not to be suppressed by the rule of the majority, but to find its real culmination in it. How does this work? Very simply.

"If agreements are assumed between each individual and everyone else in all directions, and if the object of these agreements is mutual aid against unjust offences -- then the power required for the maintenance of right is only strengthened, and right is not deduced from the mere superior strength of the many as against the individual or of the majority as against the minority."

Such is the ease with which the living force of the hocus pocus of the philosophy of reality surmounts the most impassable obstacles, and if the reader thinks that he is still no wiser than before, Herr Dühring replies that he really must not think it is such a simple matter, for

"the slightest error in the conception of the role of the general will would destroy the sovereignty of the individual, and it is from this sovereignty alone that real rights can be deduced".

Herr Dühring treats his public as it deserves when he mocks it. He could have laid it on much thicker; the students of the philosophy of reality would not have noticed it anyhow.

Now the sovereignty of the individual consists essentially in this, that

"the individual is subject to absolute compulsion by the state", but this compulsion can only be justified in so far as it "really serves natural justice". For this purpose there will be "legislation and a judiciary", which, however, "must remain in the hands of the community"; there will also be a union for defence, which will find expression in "association in the army or in an executive section for internal security" --

that is to say, there will also be an army, police, and a gendarmerie. Herr Dühring has so often proved a good Prussian; here he proves himself a peer of that model Prussian, who, as the late Minister von Rochow put it, "carries his gendarme in his breast". But this gendarmerie of the future will not be as dangerous as the police thugs of the present. Whatever the sovereign individual may suffer at their hands, he will always have one consolation,

"the right or wrong which befalls him according to circumstances at the hands of the free society can never be any worse than that which the state of nature would have brought with it!"

Then, after Herr Dühring has once again tripped us up on those inescapable authors' rights of his, he assures us that his world of the future will have, "it goes without saying, an absolutely free Bar available to all".

"The free society as it is conceived today" gets more and more mixed. Architects, porters, men of letters, gendarmes, and now barristers as well! This "sober and critical realm of thought" is exactly like the various heavenly kingdoms of the different religions, in which the believer always finds in a transfigured form the very things which have sweetened his earthly existence. And Herr Dühring is a citizen of the state where "everyone can find salvation in his own way". What more do we want?

But what we want doesn't matter. What matters is what Herr Dühring wants. He differs from Frederick II in this, that

it will be definitely impossible for everyone to find salvation in his own way in the Dühringian state of the future. The constitution of this future state provides:

"In the free society there can be no religious worship: for each of its members has got beyond the primitive childish superstition that there are beings behind or above nature who can be propitiated by sacrifice or prayer." A "socialitarian system, rightly conceived, has therefore . . . to abolish all the paraphernalia of religious magic and consequently all the essential elements of religious worship".

Religion is being banned.

Now all religion is nothing but the fantastic reflection in men's minds of those external forces which dominate their daily life, a reflection in which terrestrial forces assume the form of supernatural ones. In the beginnings of history it was the forces of nature which were first so reflected, and which in the course of further development underwent the most manifold and motley personifications among the various peoples. Comparative mythology has traced back this first process, at least in the case of the Indo-European peoples, to its origin in the Indian Vedas, and in its progress 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 side by side with the forces of nature, it is not long before 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 very forces of nature. 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 development,

* This subsequent dual character of the divinities is one reason for the subsequent widespread confusion of mythologies, a reason which compara-[cont. onto p. 411. -- DJR] tive mythology has overlooked because it pays attention exclusively to their character as reflections of the forces of nature. Thus in some Germanic tribes the god of war is called Tyr (Old Nordic) or Zio (Old High German), thus corresponding to the Greek Zeus and to the Latin Jupiter for Diu-piter; in other Germanic tribes, he is called Er, Eor, and thus corresponds to the Greek Arcs and the Latin Mars. [Note by Engels.]

all the natural and social attributes of the numerous gods are transferred to one almighty god, who in turn is himself only the reflection of the abstract man. Such was the origin of monotheism, which was historically the last product of the vulgarized philosophy of the later Greeks and which found its incarnation in Jehovah, the exclusively national god of the Jews. Religion can continue to exist in this convenient, handy and universally adaptable form as the immediate, that is, the sentimental, form of men's relation to the alien, natural and social powers which dominate them, so long as men remain under the domination of these powers. However, we have repeatedly seen that in present-day bourgeois society men are dominated by the economic conditions they themselves have created and by the means of production they themselves have produced, as though by an alien power. The actual basis of the religious reflex action therefore continues to exist, and with it the religious reflection itself. Although bourgeois political economy has opened up a certain insight into the causal connection of this alien domination, this in no way changes the matter. Bourgeois economics can neither prevent crises as such, nor protect the individual capitalist from losses, bad debts and bankruptcy, nor secure the individual worker against unemployment and poverty. 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 further and deeper than that of bourgeois economic science, does not suffice

to bring social forces under the domination of society. What is above all necessary for this is a social act. When this act has been accomplished, when society, by seizing all the means of production and using them on a planned basis, has freed itself and all its members from the bondage they are now kept in by these means of production which they themselves have produced but which confront them as an overpowering alien force; when man no longer merely proposes, but also disposes -- it is only then that the last alien force which is still reflected in religion will vanish and that the religious reflection itself will also vanish with it, for the simple reason that there will be nothing left to reflect.

But Herr Dühring cannot wait until religion dies this, its natural, death. He proceeds more deep-rootedly. He out-Bismarcks Bismarck;<"p412"> he decrees sharper May laws not merely against catholicism, but against all religion whatsoever;[125] he incites his gendarmes of the future against religion and so helps it to obtain martyrdom and a prolonged lease on life. Wherever we turn, we find specifically Prussian socialism.

After Herr Dühring has thus happily destroyed religion,

"relying solely on himself and nature and matured in the knowledge of his collective powers, man can boldly enter on all the roads which the course of events and his own nature open to him".

By way of a diversion let us now consider what "course of events" the man relying solely on himself can boldly enter on under Herr Dühring's guidance.

The first course of events in which man has to rely solely on himself is being born. After that, he remains

entrusted to his mother, "the natural governess of children", for the period of natural minority. "This period may last, as in ancient Roman law, until puberty, that is to say, until about the fourteenth year." Only when badly brought up older boys do not pay proper respect to their mother's authority

will recourse be had to paternal assistance, and particularly to the public educational regulations, to make good this deficiency. At puberty the child becomes subject to "the natural guardianship of his father", if there is someone having "real and uncontested paternity"; otherwise the community appoints a guardian.

Just as Herr Dühring imagined at an earlier point that the capitalist mode of production could be replaced by the social mode without transforming production itself, so now he fancies that the modern-bourgeois family can be torn from its whole economic basis without changing its entire form. To him, this form is so immutable that he even makes "ancient Roman law", albeit in a somewhat "improved" form, valid for the family for all time, and he can conceive a family only as a "bequeathing", which means a possessing, unit. Here the Utopians are far in advance of Herr Dühring. They considered that the socialization of the education of the younger generation, and with it real freedom in the mutual relations between the members of a family, would directly follow from the free association of men and the transformation of private housework into a public industry. Moreover, Marx has already shown that "large-scale industry, by assigning as it does an important part in the socially organized process of production, outside the domestic sphere, to women, to young persons, and to children of both sexes, creates a new economic foundation for a higher form of the family and of the relations between the sexes" (Capital Vol. I, p. 515 ff.).*

"Every dreamer of social reforms," says Herr Dühring, "naturally has ready a pedagogy corresponding to his new social life."

Judging by this thesis, Herr Dühring is a "veritable monster" among these dreamers. The school of the future occupies his

* Capital, English ed., Vol. I, pp. 489-90, translation revised. --Ed.

attention at least as much as his authors' rights, and that is saying a lot. He has his curricula for school and university all ready and complete, not only for the whole "foreseeable future" but also for the transition period. But we will confine ourselves to what will be taught to the young people of both sexes in the final and ultimate socialitarian system.

The compulsory primary school will provide

"everything which by itself and in principle can have any attraction for man", and therefore in particular "the foundations and main conclusions of all sciences touching on the understanding of the world and of life". In the first place, therefore, it teaches mathematics, and indeed to such effect that the field of all fundamental concepts and methods from simple numeration and addition to the integral calculus is "completely encompassed".

But this does not mean that anyone will really integrate or differentiate in this school. On the contrary. What is to be taught there will be, rather, entirely new elements of general mathematics, which contain in embryo both ordinary elementary and higher mathematics. Although Herr Dühring asserts that he already has in his mind "schematically, in their main outlines", "the contents of the text-books" which the school of the future will use, he has unfortunately not as yet succeeded in discovering these "elements of general mathematics"; and what he cannot achieve "can only really be expected from the free and enhanced forces of the new social order".

But if meanwhile the grapes of the mathematics of the future are still very sour, the astronomy, mechanics and physics of the future will present all the less difficulty and

will "provide the kernel of all schooling"; while "botany and zoology, which, in spite of all theories, are mainly of a descriptive character . . ." will serve "rather as a light form of diversion".

There it is, in black and white, in the Philosophy, 17. Right down to the present day Herr Dühring knows no other

botany and zoology than those which are mainly descriptive. The whole of organic morphology, which embraces the comparative anatomy, embryology and palaeontology of the organic world, is entirely unknown to him even by name. While wholly new biological sciences are springing up almost by the dozen behind his back, his childish mind still goes to Raff's Natural History for Children for "the eminently modern educative elements provided by the natural-scientific mode of thought", and he likewise decrees this constitution of the organic world for the whole "foreseeable future". Here, too, as is his wont, he entirely forgets chemistry.

As for the aesthetic side of education, Herr Dühring will have to fashion it all anew. The poetry of the past is worth less. Where all religion is banned, it goes without saying that the "mythological or other religious trimmings" characteristic of earlier poets cannot be tolerated in school. "Poetic mysticism", too, "such as, for example, Goethe was so addicted to", is to be condemned. Herr Dühring will therefore have to make up his mind to provide us by himself with those poetic masterpieces which correspond to "the higher claims of an imagination harmonized with reason" and represent the true ideal "denoting the consummation of the world". Let him not tarry! The economic commune can only conquer the world when it strolls in at the double to the rhythm of the Alexandrine harmonized with reason.

The adolescent citizen of the future will be little plagued by philology.

"The dead languages will be entirely discarded . . . but living foreign languages . . . will remain of secondary importance." Only where inter course between nations extends to the movement of the masses of the people themselves would these languages be made accessible to everyone, according to need and in an easy form. "Really educative study of language"

will be provided by a kind of general grammar, and particularly by the "substance and form of one's own language".

The narrow national horizon of modern man is still much too cosmopolitan for Herr Dühring. He also wants to do away with the two levers which at least give the opportunity of rising above the narrow national standpoint in the world as it is today: knowledge of the ancient languages, which opens a wider common horizon at least to those people of whatever nation who have had a classical education; and knowledge of modern languages, through which alone the people of different nations can communicate with one another and acquaint themselves with what is happening beyond their own borders. On the contrary, the grammar of the mother tongue is to be thoroughly drilled in. But the "substance and form of one's own language" become intelligible only when its origin and gradual development are traced, and this is impossible without taking into account, first, its own extinct forms, and secondly, cognate languages, both living and dead. But this brings us back to territory which has been expressly forbidden. If Herr Dühring strikes all modern historical grammar out of his curriculum, there is nothing left for his language studies but the old-fashioned technical grammar, cut to the old classical philological pattern, with all its casuistry and arbitrariness which are based on the absence of any historical foundation. His hatred of the old philology makes him elevate the very worst product of the old philology to "the central point of the really educative study of language". It is clear that we are dealing with a linguist who has never heard a word of the whole tremendous and successful development of the historical science of language during the last sixty years, and who therefore seeks "the eminently modern educative elements" of language training, not in Bopp, Grimm and Diez, but in Heyse and Becker of blessed memory.

But all this would still fall far short of making the young citizen of the future "rely solely on himself". For this purpose it is necessary here again to lay a deeper foundation by means of

"the assimilation of the latest philosophical principles". "But such a deepening will not be . . . a gigantic task at all", now that Herr Dühring has broken the path. In fact, "if the small rigorous body of knowledge of which the general schematics of being can boast is purged of its false scholastic excrescences, and if it is decided to admit as ubiquitously valid only the reality authenticated" by Herr Dühring, elementary philosophy, too, becomes perfectly accessible to the youth of the future. "If the extremely simple methods by which we helped procure a hitherto unknown scope for the concepts of infinity and their critique are recalled", there is "no reason at all why the elements of the universal conception of space and time, which have been given so simple a form by their current deepening and sharpening, should not eventually pass into the ranks of elementary studies. . . . The most deep-rooted ideas" of Herr Dühring "should play no secondary role in the universal educational system of the new society". The self-identical state of matter and the counted uncountable are on the contrary destined "not merely to put man on his own feet but also to make him realize by himself that he has got the so-called Absolute underfoot ".

The primary school of the future, as can be seen, is nothing but a somewhat "improved" Prussian grammar school, in which Greek and Latin are replaced by a little more pure and applied mathematics and in particular by the elements of the philosophy of reality, and in which the teaching of German is reduced to Becker, of blessed memory, that is, down to about a fourth-form level. In fact, now that we have demonstrated Herr Dühring's rudimentary schoolboy "knowledge" in all the spheres on which he has touched, "there is no reason at all" why it, or rather what is left of it after our previous thorough "purging", should not "eventually pass into the ranks of elementary studies" bag and baggage, since indeed it has never left these ranks. True, Herr Dühring has heard something about the combination of work and instruction in socialist

society, which is to ensure an all-round technical education as well as a practical foundation for scientific training; this point, too, is therefore brought in to help the socialitarian scheme in the usual way. But because, as we have seen, the old division of labour is to remain essentially undisturbed in the Dühringian production of the future, this technical training at school is deprived of any later practical application or of any significance for production itself; it has a purpose only within the school: it is to replace gymnastics, which our deep-rooted revolutionizer wants to ignore altogether. So he can only offer us a few phrases, as for example, "young and old will work, in the serious sense of the word". This drivel without content and consistency is really pitiful compared to the passage in Capital, pages 508-515, in which Marx develops the thesis that "from the factory system there budded, as Robert Owen has shown us in detail, the germ of the education of the future, an education that will, in the case of every child over a given age, combine productive labour with instruction and gymnastics, not only as a method of increasing social production, but as the only method of producing fully developed human beings".*

We must omit the university of the future, in which the philosophy of reality will be the kernel of all knowledge, and where, side by side with the faculty of Medicine, the Faculty of Law will continue in full bloom; we must also omit the "special vocational institutions", about which all we learn is that they will be only "for a few subjects". Let us assume that the young citizen of the future has passed all his educational courses and has at last become sufficiently "reliant on himself" to be able to look about for a wife. What prospect does Herr Dühring offer him here?

* Capital, Vol. I, pp. 483-84, translation revised. --Ed.

"In view of the importance of propagation for the conservation, elimination and blending of qualities as well as for their new creation and development, the ultimate roots of the human and non-human must to a great extent be sought in sexual union and selection, and furthermore in the care taken for or against getting certain results at birth. In practice it must be left to a later epoch to judge the chaos and stupidity now rife in this sphere. Nevertheless, we must at least make it clear from the outset, even in spite of the weight of prejudice, that success or failure in the quality of births, whether due to nature or human prudence, is far more important than the number of births. It is true that at all times and under all legal systems monstrosities have been destroyed; but there is a wide range of degrees between the normal human being and deformities which lack all resemblance to a human being. . . . It is obviously an advantage to prevent the birth of a human being who would only become a defective creature."

Another passage runs:

"Philosophic thought can find no difficulty . . . in comprehending the right of the unborn world to the best possible composition. . . . Conception and, if need be, also birth offer the opportunity for preventive, or in exceptional cases selective, care in this connection."

Again:

"Greek art, the idealization of man in marble, will be unable to retain its historical importance when the task of perfecting the human form in flesh and blood is taken in hand, the task which is no doubt less artistic but far more important for the fate of millions. This form of art does not deal with mere stone, and its aesthetic is not concerned with the contemplation of dead forms," and so on.

Our budding citizen of the future is brought down to earth. Of course he knew without Herr Dühring that marriage is not an art which deals with mere stone or even with the contemplation of dead forms; but after all, Herr Dühring had promised him that he would be able to strike out along all roads which the course of events and his own nature opened up for him to find a sympathetic female soul together with the accompanying body. Nothing of the kind, the "deeper and sterner morality" now thunders at him. It is first a matter of

casting off the chaos and stupidity now rife in the sphere of sexual union and selection, and taking into account the right of the new-born world to the best possible composition. At this solemn moment it is to him a matter of perfecting the human form in flesh and blood, of becoming a Phidias, so to speak, in flesh and blood. How is he to set about it? Herr Dühring's mysterious utterances quoted above give him not the slightest indication, although Herr Dühring himself says it is an "art". Does perhaps Herr Dühring already have a handbook on this art "in his mind's eye, schematically", the kind of handbook in sealed wrappers now circulating so widely in German bookshops? Indeed, we no longer find ourselves in socialitarian society but rather in the Magic Flute, the only difference being that Sarastro, the stout Masonic priest, would hardly rank as a "priest of the second order" against our deeper and sterner moralist. The tests to which Sarastro submitted his loving pair of adepts are child's play compared with the terrifying examination Herr Dühring imposes on his two sovereign individuals before he permits them to enter the state of "free and ethical marriage". So it may transpire that our Tamino of the future, "relying solely on himself", may indeed have the so-called Absolute underfoot, but one of his feet may be a couple of degrees off, so that malicious tongues call him a club-foot. It is also within the realm of the possible that his most dearly beloved Pamina of the future does not stand quite straight on the above-said Absolute, owing to a slight deviation in favour of her right shoulder which jealous tongues might call a little bit of a hump. What then? Will our deeper and sterner Sarastro forbid them to practise the art of perfecting humanity in flesh and blood? Will he exercise his "preventive care" at conception, or his "selective care" at birth? Ten to one, things will work out otherwise; the pair of

lovers will leave Sarastro-Dühring standing and go off to the registry office.

Hold on there! Herr Dühring cries. This is not at all what was meant. Give me a chance to explain!

In the "higher, genuinely human motives of wholesome sexual union . . . the humanly perfected form of sexual excitement, which in its intense manifestation is passionate love, is when reciprocated the best guarantee of a union which will also be acceptable in its result. . . . It is only an effect of the second order that a relation which is in itself harmonious should also result in a harmoniously composed offspring. From this in turn it follows that any compulsion must have harmful effects," and so on.

So all ends for the best in the best of all possible socialitarian worlds. Club-foot and hunchback love each other passionately, and therefore in their reciprocal relation offer the best guarantee for a harmonious "effect of the second order"; it is just like a novel -- they love each other, they get each other, and all the deeper and sterner morality turns out as usual to be harmonious twaddle.

Herr Dühring's noble ideas about the female sex in general can be gathered from the following indictment of existing society:

"In a society of oppression based on the sale of human being to human being, prostitution is accepted as the natural complement of compulsory marriage ties in the men's favour, and it is a most comprehensible but also most significant fact that nothing of the kind is possible for women ".

Not for anything in the world would I care to garner the thanks which might accrue to Herr Dühring from women for this compliment. But has Herr Dühring never heard of the form of income known as a petticoat-pension (Schürzenstipendium ), which is no<"p421"> longer so exceptional nowadays? Herr Dühring himself was once a referendary[126] and he lives in Berlin, where even in my day thirty-six years ago, to say nothing

of lieutenants, Referendarius used often enough to rhyme with Schürzenstipendarius!

* * *

May the reader permit us to take leave of our subject, which has often been dry and gloomy enough, on a gay and conciliatory note. So long as we had to deal with the separate issues raised, our judgement was tied to the objective incontrovertible facts; often enough, it had to be sharp and even hard on the basis of these facts. Now, when philosophy, economics and sociality all lie behind us, when we have before us the picture of the author as a whole, whom we had previously to judge in detail -- now human considerations can come into the foreground; at this point we shall be permitted to trace back to personal causes many otherwise incomprehensible scientific errors and conceits, and to sum up our verdict on Herr Dühring in the words: mental incompetence due to megalomania.

NOTES

^{<"en102">[102]} Lettres d'un habitant de Genève à ses contemporains (Letters of a Resident of Geneva to His Contemporaries ) is Saint-Simon's first work; it was written in Geneva in 1802 and published anonymously in Paris in 1803.
The first work of importance by Charles Fourier was Théorie des quatre mouvements et des destinées générales (Theory of the Four Movements and Destinies in General ), written early in the 19th century and published anonymously in Lyons in 1808 (the title page gives Leipzig as the place of publication, apparently for censorship reasons).
New Lanark -- a cotton mill with a workers' settlement near the town of Lanark, Scotland; it was founded in the early 1780s. [p. 329]

^{<"en103">[103]} "Lettres d'un habitant de Genève à ses contemporains" in OEuvres de Claude-Henri de Saint-Simon, Editions Anthropos, Paris, 1966, Vol. I, Book I, p. 55 and pp. 41-42. [p. 332]

^{<"en104">[104]} The eighth letter in the series: "Lettres de Henri Saint-Simon à un Américain". Ibid., Vol. I, Book II, p. 186. [p. 332]

^{<"en105">[105]} Engels is referring to the two pamphlets co-authored by Saint Simon and A. Thierry: "De la réorganisation de la société Européenne. . ." and "Opinion sur les mesures à prendre contre la coalition de 1815". The first was written in October 1814, the second in May 1815. Ibid., Vol. I, Book I, pp. 153-218 and Vol. VI, pp. 353-79. [p. 333]

^{<"en106">[106]} Obviously an allusion to Dühring's conflict with certain Berlin University professors; (see Note 7).

[Note 7: Eugen Dühring was a lecturer at the University of Berlin from 1865 and a teacher at a private lyceum for girls from 1873. In 1872 he began to make sharp attacks on university professors and to criticize university practices. In 1876 he lost his job at the lyceum as a result of pressure from reactionary professors. He repeated his accusations in sharper language in 1877, whereupon the Department of Philosophy deprived him of the right to teach at the University. His dismissal sparked a vocifcrous protest campaign by his supporters and was condemned by broad democratic circles.

E. Schweninger, Bismarck's personal physician from 1881, was appointed professor at Berlin University in 1884.] [p. 333]

^{<"en107">[107]} See Fourier's statement in his first book, Théorie des quatre mouvements : "As a general thesis, social progress and changes in a period take place by reason of the progress of women towards freedom, and the decay of the social system takes place by reason of the decrease in women's freedom." From this he draws the following conclusion: "The extension of the rights of women is the basic principle of all social progress." (Fourier, Textes choisis, edited by F. Armand, Editions Sociales, Paris, 1953, p. 124.) [p. 334]

^{<"en108">[108]} Ibid., pp. 64-65 and 70. [p. 334]

^{<"en109">[109]} Ibid., pp. 95 and 105. For the "vicious circle" of civilization, see pp. 104 and 129-30. [p. 334]

^{<"en110">[110]} Ibid., pp. 66-67. [p. 335]

^{<"en111">[111]} See A. L. Morton, The Life and Ideas of Robert Owen, Lawrence and Wishart, London, 1962, p. 80. [p. 337]

^{<"en112">[112]} Robert Owen, "Report of the Proceedings at the Several Public Meetings, Held in Dublin . . . on the 18th March, 12th April, 19th April and 3rd May," Dublin, 1823. [p. 338]

^{<"en113">[113]} An Act, introduced on Owen's initiative in June 1815, was passed by Parliament only in July 1819 after it had been emasculated. The Act regulating labour at cotton mills banned the employment of children under the age of nine and limited the working day to 12 hours for persons under 16. Since Owen's proposal to appoint salaried factory inspectors was defeated, the Act became a dead letter. [p. 339]

^{<"en114">[114]} In October 1833 Owen presided over a congress of co-operative societies and trade unions in London, which led to the formation of the Grand National Consolidated Trades Union in Fcbruary 1834. The Union's membership grew to half a million in a few weeks. It was Owen's intention that it would take over the management of production and remake society peacefully. This utopian plan collapsed very quickly.

In face of powerful opposition from bourgeois society and the state, the Union ceased to exist in August 1834. [p. 339]

^{<"en115">[115]} Equitable Labour Exchange Bazaars were founded by workers' co-operatives in various parts of England; Owen opened the National Equitable Labour Exchange Bazaar in London in September 1832 and it existed until mid-1834.
Proudhon made an attempt to organize the Banque du Peuple in Paris in January 1849. It existed for about two months, but only on paper, as it failed before it began to function. [p. 339]

^{<"en116">[116]} W. L. Sargant, Robert Owen and His Social Philosophy, London, 1860 Owen's major works on marriage and the communist system are: The Marriage System of the New Moral World (1838), The Book of the New Moral World (1836-44) and The Revolution in the Mind and Practice of the Human Race (1849). See also A. L. Morton, op. cit., pp. 161-68 and 132-48. [p. 340]

^{<"en117">[117]} Harmony Hall -- the name of the communist colony founded by English Utopian socialists led by Robert Owen at the close of 1839 in Hampshire, England. It existed until 1845. [p. 341]

^{<"en118">[118]} In Socialism: Utopian and Scientific Engels had a note here referring to his Appendix on the Mark, which deals with the history of landed property in Germany. [p. 351]

^{<"en119">[119]} The wars of the 17th and 18th century between the major European powers for hegemony in the trade with India, the East Indies and America and for the seizure of colonial markets. At first the principal rivals were England and Holland (the Anglo-Dutch wars of 1652-54, 1664-67 and 1672-74 were typical commercial wars), and later England and France. England won these wars, and towards the close of the 18th century almost the whole of world trade was concentrated in her hands. [p. 352]

^{<"en120">[120]} A "free people's state ": this slogan is criticized in Marx's Critique of the Gotha Programme (FLP, Peking, 1972, pp. 26-29), Engels' letter to Bebel of March 18-28, 1875 (ibid., pp. 42-43), and Lenin's The State and Revolution (FLP, Peking, 1970, pp. 21-22 and 76-79). [p. 363]

^{<"en121">[121]} Robert Giffen, "Recent Accumulations of Capital in the United Kingdom", Journal of the Statistical Society, London, Vol. 16, 1878. [p. 366]

^{<"en122">[122]} See Charles Fourier, Textes choisis, Editions Sociales, Paris, 1953, p. 140. [p. 381]

^{<"en123">[123]} These words were spoken by the Roman Emperor Vespasian (A.D. 69-79) in reply to his son, who reproached him for introducing a tax on lavatories. [p. 395]

^<"en68">[68] Marx makes a detailed criticism of the Lassallean slogan of "full" or "undiminished proceeds of labour" in Section I, Critique of the Gotha Programme, Foreign Languages Press, Peking, 1972, pp. 10-14. [p. 405]

^{<"en124">[124]} Abraham Enss, a follower of Dühring and author of a lampoon of Marx and Engels written after the first chapters of Anti-Dühring appeared in Vorwärts in January-February 1877. [p. 407]

^{<"en125">[125]} The May laws adopted by the Reichstag in May 1873 established rigid state control over the Catholic Church and were the culminating point of the "cultural struggle". They were the most important link in the legislation of 1872-75 directed by Bismarck against the Catholic clergy as the mainstay of the "Centre" party, which represented the interests of the separatists in south and southwestern Germany. Police persecution evoked desperate resistance by the Catholics and gave them a halo of martyrdom. Between 1880 and 1887 the Bismarck Government was compelled first to relax and then repeal almost all the anti-Catholic laws, in order to unite all the reactionary forces against the working-class movement. [p. 412]

^{<"en126">[126]} Referendary -- in Germany a junior official, chiefly a jurist, who got his training as an apprentice at court or in a state office; usually he received no salary. [p. 421]

FREDERICK ENGELS

ANTI-DÜHRING

(Herr Eugen Dühring's Revolution in Science)

-- Section 3 --Part III: Socialism

-- Section 3 --
Part III: Socialism