Atnti Duhring- production

Anti Duhring 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.