Atnti Duhring state family education

Anti Duhring 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.