Atnti Duhring- socialism

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.