Atnti Duhring- the force theory

Anti Duhring THE FORCE THEORY

"In my system, the relation between general politics and the forms of economic rights is determined in so decisive and at the same time so original a way that it would not be superfluous to make special reference to this point in order to facilitate study. The formation of political relationships is the historically fundamental factor, and instances of economic dependence are only effects or special cases and are consequently always facts of a second order. Some of the newer socialist systems take as their guiding principle the striking semblance of a completely reverse relationship by making the political infrastructures as it were grow out of economic conditions. It is true that these second order effects do exist as such and are

most elearly perceptible at the present time; but the primary factor must be sought in direct political force and not in any indirect economic power."

This is also asserted in another passage, in which Herr Dühring

"starts from the principle that political conditions are the decisive cause of the economic situation and that the reverse relationship represents only a second order reaction . . . so long as anyone takes the political grouping not as the starting point for its own sake, but merely as a means of getting grub, he must be harbouring a hidden dose of reaction in his mind, however radical a socialist and revolutionary he may seem to be".

That is Herr Dühring's theory. In this and in many other passages it is simply set up, decreed, so to speak. Nowhere in the three fat tomes is there the slightest attempt to prove it or to disprove the opposite point of view. Even if the arguments for it were as cheap as blackberries, Herr Dühring wouldn't give us any. For the whole affair has already been proved through the famous original sin when Robinson Crusoe made Friday his slave. That was an act of force, hence a political act. Since this enslavement was the starting-point and the basic fact for all past history and inoculated it with the original sin of injustice, so much so that in later periods it was only softened down and "transformed into the more indirect forms of economic dependence", and since all "property founded on force" which has maintained its legality right up to the present day is likewise based on this original act of enslavement, it is clear that all economic phenomena must be explained by political causes, that is, by force. Anyone who is not satisfied with that is a reactionary in disguise.

We must first point out that only someone as self-infatuated as Herr Dühring could regard this view as so very "original", which it is not in the least. The idea that the political ac-

tions of leaders and states are decisive in history is as old as written history itself, and is the main reason why so little has been preserved for us concerning the development of the peoples, which occurs quietly, in the background, behind these noisy scenes on the stage, and which really pushes things forward. This idea dominated the whole conception of history<"p203"> in the past and only received its first blow from the French bourgeois historians of the Restoration period;[60] the only "original" thing about it is that Herr Dühring once again knows nothing of all this.

Furthermore, even if we assume for the moment that Herr Dühring is right in saying that all past history can be traced back to the enslavement of man by man, we are still very far from having got to the bottom of the matter. For the question immediately arises, how did Crusoe come to enslave Friday? Just for the fun of it? No such thing. On the contrary, we see that Friday "is compelled to render economic service as a slave or as a mere tool and is maintained only as a tool". Crusoe enslaved Friday only in order that Friday should work for Crusoe's benefit. And how can he derive any benefit for himself from Friday's labour? Only through Friday's producing by his labour more of the necessaries of life than Crusoe has to give him to keep him fit to work. Therefore, in violation of Herr Dühring's express orders, Crusoe "takes the political grouping" arising out of Friday's enslavement "not as the starting-point for its own sake, but exclusively as a means of getting grub "; and now let him see to it that he gets along with his lord and master, Dühring.

Thus the childish example expressly selected by Herr Dühring in order to prove that force is "the historically fundamental factor" proves that force is only the means, and that the end is economic advantage. In proportion as the

end is "more fundamental" than the means, so the economic side of the relationship is more fundamental in history than the political. The example therefore proves precisely the opposite of what it was supposed to prove. And as in the case of Crusoe and Friday, so in all cases of domination and enslavement up to the present. Subjugation has always been -- to use Herr Dühring's elegant expression -- a "means of getting grub" (taking getting grub in its widest sense), but never and nowhere a political grouping established "for its own sake". It takes a Herr Dühring to be able to imagine that state taxes are only "second order effects", or that the present-day political grouping of the dominant bourgeoisie and the dominated proletariat has come into existence "for its own sake", and not as a "means of getting grub" for the dominant capitalists, that is to say, for the sake of making profits and accumulating capital.

However, let us get back to our twosome. Crusoe, "sword in hand", makes Friday his slave. But in order to pull this off, Crusoe needs something else besides his sword. Not every one is served by a slave. To be able to make use of a slave, one must possess two things: first, the instruments and material for the slave's labour, and second, the means of bare subsistence for him. Therefore, a certain level of production must have already been reached and a certain inequality of distribution must have already occurred before slavery becomes possible. For slave-labour to become the dominant mode of production in a whole society, a far higher increase in production, trade and accumulation of wealth is needed. In the ancient primitive communities with common ownership of the land, slavery either does not exist at all or plays only a very subordinate role. It was the same in the originally peasant city of Rome; but when Rome became a

"world city" and Italic landownership increasingly fell into the hands of a numerically small class of enormously rich proprietors, the peasant population was squeezed out by a population of slaves. If the number of slaves in Corinth rose to 460,000 and in Aegina to 470,000 at the time of the Persian wars and there were ten slaves to every freeman, something else besides "force" was required, namely, a highly developed arts and handicraft industry and an extensive commerce. Slavery in the United States of America was based far less on force than on the English cotton industry; in those areas where no cotton was grown or which, unlike the border states, did not breed slaves for the cotton-growing states, it died out of itself without any force being used, simply because it did not pay.

Hence, Herr Dühring is standing the whole relationship on its head when he calls property as it exists today property founded on force and characterizes it as

"that form of domination at the root of which there lies not merely the exclusion of fellow-men from the use of the natural means of subsistence. but also, and what is far more important, the subjugation of man to menial service".

The subjugation of a man to menial service in all its forms presupposes that the subjugator has at his disposal the means of labour through which alone he can employ the person placed in bondage, and in the case of slavery, in addition, the means of subsistence which enable him to keep the slave alive. In all cases, therefore, it already presupposes the possession of a certain amount of property in excess of the average. How did this property come into existence? In any case it is clear that it may have been robbed and therefore may be based on force, but that this is by no means necessary. It may have been obtained by labour, by theft, by trade

or by fraud. Nevertheless, it must have been obtained by labour before there was any possibility of its being robbed.

Private property by no means makes its appearance in history as the result of robbery or force. On the contrary. It already existed, though limited to certain objects, in the ancient primitive communes of all civilized peoples. It developed into the form of commodities already within these communes, at first through barter with foreigners. The more the products of the commune assumed the commodity form, that is, the less they were produced for the producers' own use and the more for the purpose of exchange, and the more the original natural division of labour was supplanted by exchange within the commune as well, the more unequal became the property status of the individual commune members, the more deeply was the ancient common ownership of the land undermined, and the more rapidly did the commune move towards its dissolution and transformation into a village of small-holding peasants. For thousands of years Oriental despotism and the changing rule of conquering nomad peoples were unable to injure these old communities; the gradual destruction of their primitive home industry by the competition of the products of large-scale industry brought them nearer and nearer to dissolution. Force was as little involved in this process as in the dividing up of the land held in common by the village communities (Gehöferschaften ) on the Moselle and in the Hochwald, which is still taking place today; the peasants simply find it to their advantage that the private ownership of land should take the place of common ownership. Even the formation of a primitive aristocracy, as in the case of the Celts, the Germans and the Indian Punjab, took place on the basis of common ownership of the land, and was not at first based in any way on force,

but on voluntariness and custom. Wherever private property was instituted, it was the result of altered relations of production and exchange, in the interest of increased production and of the furtherance of trade -- hence as a result of economic causes. Force plays no part in this at all. Indeed, it is clear that the institution of private property must already be in existence before a robber can appropriate another person's property, and that therefore force may be able to change the possession of, but cannot create, private property as such.

Nor can we use either force or property founded on force to explain the "subjugation of man to menial service" in its most modern form, wage-labour. We have already mentioned the role played in the dissolution of the ancient communities, that is, in the direct or indirect general spread of private property, by the transformation of the products of labour into commodities, by their production not for one's own consumption but for exchange. Now in Capital, Marx proved to the hilt -- and Herr Dühring carefully avoids the slightest reference to this -- that at a certain stage of development, the production of commodities becomes transformed into capitalist production, and that at this stage "the laws of appropriation or of private property, laws that are based on the production and circulation of commodities, become by their own inner and inexorable dialectic changed into their very opposite. The exchange of equivalents, which appeared as the original operation, has now become turned round in such a way that there is only an ostensible exchange. This is owing to the fact, first, that the portion of capital which is exchanged for labour-power is itself but a portion of the product of others' labour appropriated without an equivalent; and, secondly, that this capital must not only be replaced by its producer, the worker, but replaced together with an added

surplus. . . . At first property seemed to us to be based on a man's own labour. . . . Now (at the end of the Marxist analysis) property turns out to be the right, on the part of the capitalist, to appropriate the unpaid labour of others, and to be the impossibility, on the part of the worker, of appropriating his own product. The separation of property from labour becomes the necessary consequence of a law that ostensibly originated in their identity."[*] In other words, even if we exclude the possibility of any robbery, any act of violence and any fraud, if we assume that all private property was originally based on the owner's own labour, and that throughout the whole subsequent process there was only exchange of equal values for equal values, the progressive evolution of production and exchange nevertheless brings us of necessity to the present capitalist mode of production, to the monopolization of the means of production and the means of subsistence in the hands of the one, numerically small, class, to the degradation into propertyless proletarians of the immense majority forming the other class, to the periodic alternation of speculative production booms and commercial crises, and to the whole of the present anarchy of production. The entire process is explained by purely economic causes, without the necessity for recourse even in a single instance to robbery, force, the state, or political interference of any kind. Here also "property founded on force" proves to be nothing but the phrase of a braggart designed to cover up his lack of understanding of the real course of things.

Expressed historically, this course of events is the story of the development of the bourgeoisie. If "political condi- <"fnp208">

* Capital, Vol. I, pp. 583-84, translation revised. --Ed.

tions are the decisive cause of the economic situation", then the modern bourgeoisie cannot have developed in the struggle with feudalism, but must be the latter's voluntarily be gotten pet child. Everyone knows that it was the opposite which occurred. Originally an oppressed estate tributary to the ruling feudal nobility, recruited from all manner of serfs and villeins, the burghers conquered one position after another in their constant struggle with the nobility, and finally took power in its stead in the most highly developed countries: in France, by directly overthrowing the nobility, in England, by increasingly bourgeoisifying it and incorporating it as their own ornamental head. How did they accomplish this? Simply through a change in the "economic situation", which whether sooner or later, whether voluntarily or as the out come of combat, was followed by a change in the political conditions. The struggle of the bourgeoisie against the feudal nobility is the struggle of town against country, industry against landed property, money economy against natural economy; and the decisive weapon of the burghers in this struggle was their resources of economic power, which were constantly expanding through the development of industry, at first handicraft and progressing at a later stage to manufacture, and through the spread of commerce. Throughout this struggle political force was on the side of the nobility, except for a period when the crown played the burghers against the nobility in order to keep one estate in check by means of the other; but from the moment when the as yet politically powerless bourgeoisie began to grow dangerous owing to its increasing economic power, the crown resumed its alliance with the nobility and by so doing called forth the bourgeois revolution, first in England and then in France. The "political conditions" in France had remained unaltered, while the

"economic situation" had outgrown them. In terms of political status, the nobleman was everything, the burgher nothing; but in terms of the social situation the burgher now formed the most important class in the state, while the nobleman had been shorn of all his social functions and was now only pocketing his revenues in payment for these vanished functions. Nor was that all. Throughout the whole range of their productive activity, the burghers were still hemmed in by the feudal political forms of the Middle Ages, which this production -- not only manufacture, but even handicraft industry -- had long outgrown, hemmed in by the thousand-fold guild privileges and local and provincial customs barriers which had become mere devices against and fetters on production.

The burghers' revolution put an end to this. Not, however, by adapting the economic situation to the political conditions, in accordance with Herr Dühring's principle -- this was precisely what the nobility and the crown had been vainly trying to do for years -- but, on the contrary, by casting aside the old mouldering political rubbish and creating political conditions in which the new "economic situation" could continue and develop. And it did develop brilliantly in this political and legal atmosphere suited to its needs, so brilliantly that the bourgeoisie has already approached the position held by the nobility in 1789: it is increasingly becoming not only socially superfluous, but a social hindrance; it is increasingly abandoning productive activity, and, like the nobility in the past, increasingly becoming a merely revenue-pocketing class; and it has accomplished this revolution in its own position and the creation of a new class, the proletariat, without any hocus-pocus of force whatever, in a purely economic way. Even more. In no wise did it will this result

of its own doings and actions -- on the contrary, this result established itself with irresistible force, against the will and contrary to the intentions of the bourgeoisie; its own productive forces have grown beyond its control, and, as if by a necessity of nature, are driving the whole of bourgeois society towards ruin or towards revolution. If the bourgeoisie now appeals to force in order to save the collapsing "economic situation" from collapse, it is only showing that it is labouring under the same delusion as Herr Dühring, the delusion that "political conditions are the decisive cause of the economic situation"; that, just like Herr Dühring, it imagines that it can regenerate those "second order facts", the economic situation and its inevitable development, by means of the "primary factor", of "direct political force", and that it can shoot and kill with Krupp guns and Mauser rifles the economic consequences of the steam-engine and the modern machinery driven by it, and of world trade and the present-day development of banking and credit.

Let us look a little more closely at this almighty "force" of Herr Dühring's. Crusoe enslaved Man Friday "sword in hand". Where did he get the sword? Even on the imaginary islands of the Robinson Crusoe epic, swords have not up to now been known to grow on trees, and Herr Dühring provides no answer to this question. If Crusoe could procure a sword for himself, we are equally entitled to assume that one fine

morning Friday may appear with a loaded revolver in his hand, and then the whole "force" relationship is inverted. Friday is in command, and it is Crusoe who has to drudge. We apologize to the reader for returning with such insistence to the Robinson Crusoe and Man Friday story, which properly belongs to the nursery and not to the field of science, but how can we help it? We are obliged to apply Herr Dühring's axiomatic method conscientiously, and it is not our fault if in doing so we are continually moving within the sphere of pure puerility. So the revolver triumphs over the sword; and this will probably make even the most puerile lover of axioms comprehend that force is no mere act of the will, but requires the existence of very real preconditions for its functioning, especially, instruments, the more perfect of which vanquishes the less perfect; that further these instruments have to be produced, which at the same time implies that the producer of more perfect instruments of force, commonly called arms, vanquishes the producer of the less perfect instruments, and that, in a word, the triumph of force is based on the production of arms, and this in turn on production in general -- therefore, on "economic power", on the "economic situation", on the material means which force has at its disposal.

Force, nowadays, is the army and navy, and both, as we all know to our cost, are "devilishly expensive". But force cannot make any money; at most it can take away money that has already<"p212"> been made, and this does not help much either, as we have seen, also to our cost, in the case of the French milliards.[61] In the last analysis, therefore, money must be provided through the medium of economic production; and so once more force is conditioned by the economic situation, which furnishes the means for the equipment and mainte-

nance of its instruments. But that is not all. It is precisely the army and navy that are most dependent on economic preconditions. Armament, composition, organization, tactics and strategy depend above all on the stage reached in production at any particular time as well as on communications. It is not the "free creations of the mind" of generals of genius that have had a revolutionizing effect here, but the invention of better weapons and the change in the human material, the soldiers; in the best of cases, the part played by generals of genius is limited to adapting methods of fighting to the new weapons and combatants.

At the beginning of the fourteenth century, gunpowder came from the Arabs to Western Europe, and, as every school child knows, completely revolutionized the methods of warfare. The introduction of gunpowder and fire-arms, however, was not at all an act of force, but an industrial, and therefore an economic, advance. Industry remains industry, whether it is oriented towards the production or the destruction of things. The introduction of fire-arms had a revolutionizing effect not only on the conduct of war itself, but also on the political relationships of domination and subjection. The procurement of powder and fire-arms required industry and money, both of which were in the hands of the burghers in the towns. From the outset, therefore, fire-arms were the weapons of the towns and of the rising monarchy, which was supported by the towns, against the feudal nobility. The stone walls of the noblemen's castles, which had hitherto been unapproachable, fell before the cannon of the burghers, the bullets of whose arquebuses pierced the armour of the knights. With the defeat of the armour-clad cavalry of the nobility, the latter's supremacy was broken; with the development of the burghers, infantry and artillery increasingly became the

decisive types of armed power; artillery compelled the military profession to provide itself with a new and entirely industrial subsection, the corps of engineers.

The development of fire-arms was a very slow process. Ordnance remained ponderous and, despite many inventions in detail, the musket was crude. Over three hundred years were needed for the construction of a weapon that was suitable for the equipment of the whole body of infantry. It was not until the start of the eighteenth century that the flint-lock musket with a bayonet finally displaced the pike in the equipment of the infantry. The foot soldiers were then the mercenaries of princes; they were rigorously drilled but quite unreliable and only held together by the rod; they were recruited from among the most demoralized elements in society and often from enemy prisoners of war who had been pressed into service. The only type of fighting in which these soldiers could apply the new weapon was the tactics of the line, which reached its highest perfection under Frederick II. All the infantry of an army was drawn up in triple ranks in the form of a very long, hollow square, and moved in battle order only as a whole; at the very most, either of the two wings might advance or hold back a little. This cumbrous mass could move in formation only on completely level ground, and even then only very slowly (seventy-five paces a minute); a change of formation in battle was impossible, and once the infantry was engaged, victory or defeat was decided rapidly and at one blow.

In the American War of Independence, these unwieldy lines were met by bands of rebels, who although undrilled were for that very reason better able to shoot from their rifled guns; they were fighting for their own interests and therefore did not desert like the mercenaries; they did not

do the English the favour of encountering them in line and across the open plain, but fought in scattered groups of rapidly moving sharpshooters, under cover of the woods. Here the line was powerless and succumbed to its invisible and inaccessible opponents. Skirmishing was re-invented -- a new method of warfare which was the result of a change in the human war material.

The French Revolution completed and in the military sphere too what the American Revolution had begun. It too could oppose to the well-trained mercenary armies of the Coalition only poorly trained masses but in large numbers, the levy of the entire nation. But these masses had to protect Paris, that is, to hold a definite area, and for this purpose victory in open mass battle was essential. Mere skirmishes were not enough; a form had to be found to make use of large masses and this form was discovered in the column. Column formation made it possible for even poorly trained troops to move in passable order and yet with greater speed (a hundred paces and more a minute); it made it possible to break through the rigid forms of the old line formation and therefore to fight on any ground, even on ground which was most unfavourable to the line formation; to group the troops in any appropriate way; and, in conjunction with skirmishes by scattered bands of sharpshooters, to contain the enemy's lines, keep them engaged and wear them out until the moment came for masses held in reserve to break through them at the decisive point in the position. This new method of warfare, based on the combined action of skirmishers and columns and on the partitioning of the army into independent divisions or army corps, composed of all arms of the service -- a method brought to full perfection by Napoleon in both its tactical and strategic aspects -- had become necessary pri-

marily because of the changed combat personnel of the French Revolution. But it also had two very important technical prerequisites: first, the lighter carriages for field guns constructed by Gribeauval, which alone made possible the more rapid movement now required of them; and second, the slanting of the rifle butt, which had hitherto been quite straight, continuing the line of the barrel. Introduced in France in 1777, it was borrowed from hunting guns and made it possible to shoot at a particular individual without the odds being on missing him. But for this improvement, it would have been impossible to skirmish with the old weapons.

The revolutionary system of arming the whole people was soon restricted to conscription (with substitution for the rich, who paid for their release) and in this form was adopted by most of the large states on the Continent. Only Prussia attempted,<"p216"> through its Landwehr system, to draw to a greater extent on the military strength of the nation.[62] Prussia was also the first state to equip its whole infantry -- after the rifled muzzle-loader, which had been improved between 1830 and 1860 and found fit for use in war, had played a brief role<"p216a"> -- with the most up-to-date weapon, the rifled breech loader. Its successes in 1866 were due to these two innovations.[63]

The Franco-German War was the first in which two armies faced each other, with each equipped with breech-loading rifles and with each fundamentally in the same tactical formations as in the time of the old smoothbore flint-locks. The only difference was that the Prussians had introduced the company column formation in an attempt to find a form of fighting better adapted to the new type of arms. But when the Prussian Guard tried to apply the company column formation seriously at St.-Privat on August 18, the five regi-

<"p217"> ments which were chiefly engaged lost more than a third of their strength (176 officers and 5,114 men) in less than two hours.[64] Henceforward, the company column, too, was condemned as a battle formation, no less than the battalion column and the line; all idea of further exposing troops in any kind of close formation to enemy gun-fire was abandoned, and all subsequent fighting on the German side was conducted only in those compact bodies of skirmishers into which the columns had so far regularly dissolved of themselves under a deadly hail of bullets, although this had been opposed by the higher commands as contrary to order; and in the same way the only form of movement when under fire from enemy rifles became the double. Once again the soldier had proved shrewder than the officer; it was he who instinctively found the only way of fighting which has so far proved of service under the fire of breech-loading rifles, and in spite of his officers' resistance he carried it through successfully.

The Franco-German War marked a turning-point quite different in significance from all previous ones. In the first place weapons are now so perfected that further progress which would have any revolutionizing influence is no longer possible. Once armies have guns capable of hitting a battalion at any range at which the eye can distinguish it and rifles which are equally effective against individual men and with which loading takes less time than aiming, all further improvements are more or less unimportant for field warfare. The era of development is therefore, in essentials, closed in this direction. But secondly, this war has compelled all continental powers to introduce the Prussian Landwehr system in a stricter form, and with it a military burden which must bring them to ruin within a few years. The army has become the main purpose of the state, an end in itself; the

peoples are there only to provide soldiers and feed them. Militarism dominates and is swallowing Europe. But this militarism also bears within itself the seed of its own destruction. Competition among the individual states forces them, on the one hand, to spend more money each year on the army and navy, artillery, etc., thus increasingly hastening their financial collapse, and, on the other, to resort to universal compulsory military service more and more seriously, thus in the long run making the whole people familiar with the use of arms, and therefore enabling them at a certain point to make their will prevail against the top military command in all its glory. This point will be reached as soon as the mass of the people -- town and country workers and peasants -- has a will. At this point the armies of the princes become transformed into armies of the people; the machine refuses to work, and militarism collapses by the dialectic of its own development. What the bourgeois democracy of 1848 could not accomplish, precisely because it was bourgeois and not proletarian, namely, to give the labouring masses a will whose content corresponds with their class position -- socialism will secure without fail. And this will mean the bursting asunder from within of militarism and with it of all standing armies.

That is the first moral of our history of modern infantry. The second moral, which brings us back again to Herr Dühring, is that the army's whole organization and method of warfare, and with them victory or defeat, prove to be dependent on material, that is, on economic conditions, on the human material and the war material, and therefore on the quality and quantity of the population and on technical development. Only a hunting people like the Americans could rediscover skirmishing tactics -- and they were hunters as a result of purely economic causes, just as now it is as a

result of purely economic causes that these same Yankees of the old States have transformed themselves into farmers, industrialists, seamen and merchants who no longer skirmish in the primeval forests, but instead skirmish all the more effectively in the field of speculation, where they have likewise made great advances in utilizing masses.

Only a revolution such as the French, which brought about the economic emancipation of the burghers and, especially, of the peasantry, could simultaneously discover the mass armies and the free forms of movement which shattered the old rigid lines -- the military counterparts of the absolutism which they were defending. We have seen in case after case how, as soon as advances in technique became militarily applicable -- and applied they were -- they immediately and almost forcibly produced changes and even revolutions in the methods of warfare, often, what is more, against the will of the army command. Nowadays any go-ahead NCO could explain to Herr Dühring how greatly the conduct of a war depends on the productivity and means of communication of the army's own hinterland as well as of the theatre of war. In short, always and everywhere it is the economic conditions and instruments of power which help "force" to victory and without which force ceases to be force, and anyone who tried to reform methods of warfare from the opposite standpoint, according to Dühringian principles, would certainly earn nothing but a beating.*

* This is already perfectly well known to the Prussian General Staff. Herr Max Jahns, a captain of the General Staff, says in a scientific lecture, "The basis of warfare is primarily the economic way of life of the peoples in general." (Kölnische Zeitung, April 20, 1876, p. 3.) [Note and italics by Engels.]

If we now pass from land to sea, the last twenty years alone show an even more sweeping revolution. The battleship of the Crimean War was the wooden two- and three-decker of 60 to 100 guns which was still mainly propelled by sail, with a low-powered auxiliary steam-engine only for emergencies. The guns on these warships were for the most part 32-pounders, weighing approximately 2 1/2 tons, with only a few 68-pounders weighing 4 3/4 tons. Towards the end of the war, ironclad floating batteries appeared on the scene, clumsy and almost immobile, but invulnerable monsters to the guns of that period. Soon, iron armour-plating was applied to battleships, too; at first the plates were still thin, a thickness of four inches being regarded as extremely heavy armour. But soon the progress made with artillery outstripped the armour-plating; each successive increase in the strength of the armour used was countered by a new and heavier gun which easily pierced the plates. So we have already reached armour-plating ten, twelve, fourteen and twenty-four inches thick (Italy proposes to have a ship built with plates three feet thick) on the one hand, and on the other, rifled guns weighing 25, 35, 80 and even 100 tons, which can hurl projectiles weighing 300, 400, 1,700 and up to 2,000 pounds to distances never dreamed of before. The battleship of the present day is a gigantic armoured screw-driven steamer of 8,000 to 9,000 tons displacement and 6,000 to 8,000 horse power, with revolving turrets and four or at most six heavy guns, the bow being extended under the water line into a ram for running down enemy vessels. It is a single colossal machine, in which steam not only drives the ship at a high speed, but also works the steering-gear, raises the anchor, swings the turrets, changes the elevation of the guns and loads

them, pumps out water, hoists and lowers the boats -- some of which are themselves steam-driven -- and so forth. And the rivalry between armour-plating and the fire power of guns is so far from being at an end that nowadays a ship is almost always not up to requirements, already out of date, before it is launched. The modern battleship is not only a product, but at the same time a specimen, of modern large-scale industry, a floating factory, mainly producing -- a lavish waste of money. The country in which large-scale industry is most highly developed has almost a monopoly in the construction of these ships. All Turkish, almost all Russian and most German armoured vessels have been built in England; armour-plates that are at all serviceable are made almost solely in Sheffield; of the three steel-works in Europe which alone are able to make the heaviest guns, two (Woolwich and Elswick) are in England, and the third (Krupp) in Germany. In this sphere it is most palpably evident that the "direct political force" which, according to Herr Dühring, is the "decisive cause of the economic situation", is on the contrary completely subordinate to the economic situation, that not only the construction but also the manipulation of the marine instrument of force, the battleship, has itself become a branch of modern large-scale industry. That this is so distresses no one more than force itself, that is, the state, which has now to pay for a single ship as much as a whole small fleet used to cost; which must resign itself to seeing these expensive vessels become obsolete, and therefore worthless, even before they slide into the water; and which must certainly be just as disgusted as Herr Dühring that the man of the "economic situation", the engineer, is now of far greater importance on

board than the man of "direct force", the captain. On the other hand, we have absolutely no cause for annoyance when we see that, in this competitive struggle between armour-plating and guns, the battleship is being developed to a pitch of perfection which is making it both outrageously costly and unusable in war,[*] and that this struggle makes manifest in the sphere of naval warfare too those immanent dialectical laws of motion according to which militarism, like every other historical phenomenon, is perishing in consequence of its own development.

Here too, therefore, we see absolutely clearly that it is in no wise true that "the primary factor must be sought in direct political force and not in any indirect economic power". On the contrary. For what precisely does "the primary factor" in force itself prove to be? Economic power, the disposal over the means of power of large-scale industry. Naval political force, which reposes on modern battleships, proves to be not "direct" at all, but on the contrary mediated by economic power, highly developed metallurgy, command of skilled technicians and productive coal-mines.

But it's all no good anyhow. If we put Herr Dühring in supreme command in the next naval war, without torpedoes or any other artifices he will destroy all fleets of armoured ships, slaves as they are of the economic situation, solely by virtue of his "direct force". <"fnp222">

* The perfecting of the latest product of large-scale industry for use in naval warfare, the self-propelled torpedo. seems likely to bring this to pass; it would mean that the smallest torpedo boat would be superior to the most powerful armoured battleship. (It should be borne in mind that the above was written in 1878.)[65] [Note by Engels.]

"It is a circumstance of great importance that in fact domination over nature, generally speaking(!), only proceeded" (a domination proceeded!) "through domination over man. The cultivation of landed property in tracts of considerable size never took place anywhere without the prior subjection of man in some form of slave-labour or corvée. The establishment of an economic domination over things has presupposed the political, social and economic domination of man over man. How could a large landed proprietor even be conceived without at the same time including in this idea his domination over slaves, serfs, or indirectly unfree men? What could the efforts of an individual, at most supplemented by those of his family, have signified or signify in large-scale agriculture? The exploitation of the land, or the extension of economic control over it on a scale exceeding the natural capacities of the individual, was only made possible in previous history by the establishment, either before or simultaneously with the introduction of domination over land, of the enslavement of man which this involves. In the later periods of development this servitude was mitigated, . . . its present form in the more highly civilized states is wage-labour, to a greater or lesser degree carried on under police rule. Thus wage-labour provides the practical possibility of that form of contemporary wealth which is represented by domination over wide areas of land and (!) large-scale landed property. It goes without saying that all other types of distributed wealth must be explained historically in a similar way, and the indirect dependence of man on man, which is now the essential feature of economically speaking the most fully developed situations, cannot he understood and explained by their own nature, but only as a somewhat transformed heritage of an earlier direct subjugation and expropriation."

Thus says Herr Dühring.

Thesis: The domination of nature (by man) presupposes the domination of man (by man).

Proof: The cultivation of landed property in tracts of considerable size never took place anywhere except by the use of serfs.

Proof of the proof: How can there be large landowners without serfs, since the large landowner, even with his family, could cultivate only a tiny part of his property in the absence of serfs?

Therefore, in order to prove that man first had to subjugate man before he could bring nature under his control, Herr Dühring transforms "nature" without further ado into "landed property in tracts of considerable size", and then this landed property -- ownership unspecified -- is immediately transformed again into the property of a large landed proprietor, who naturally cannot cultivate his land without serfs.

In the first place, "domination over nature" and the "cultivation of landed property" are by no means the same thing. In industry, domination over nature is exercised on quite another and more gigantic scale than in agriculture, which must still submit to the command of weather conditions instead of commanding them.

Secondly, if we confine ourselves to the cultivation of landed property in extensive tracts, what it boils down to is whose landed property it is. We find in the early history of all civilized peoples, not the "large landed proprietors" whom Herr Dühring interpolates here with the usual sleight of hand he calls "natural dialectics", but tribal and village communities with common ownership of the land. From India to Ireland the cultivation of landed property in extensive tracts was originally carried on by such tribal and village communities; sometimes the arable land was tilled jointly for account of the community, and sometimes in separate plots temporarily allotted to families by the community, while woodland and pasture-land continued to be used in common. It is once again characteristic of Herr Dühring's "most exhaustive specialized studies in the domain of politics and

<"p225"> law" that he knows nothing of all this; that all his works breathe total ignorance of Maurer's epoch-making writings on the primitive constitution of the German Mark,[66] the basis of all German law, and of the ever-increasing mass of literature, chiefly stimulated by Maurer, which is devoted to proving the primitive common ownership of the land among all the civilized peoples of Europe and Asia, and to showing the various forms of its existence and dissolution. Just as in the domain of French and English law Herr Dühring "acquired all his ignorance himself", great as it was, so it is with his even greater ignorance in the domain of German law. In this domain the man who flies into such a violent rage over the limited horizon of university professors is today, at the very most, still where the professors were twenty years ago.

It is purely a "free creation and imagination" on Herr Dühring's part when he asserts that landed proprietors and serfs were required for the cultivation of landed property in extensive tracts. In the whole of the Orient, where the village community or the state owns the land, the very term landed proprietor is not to be found in the various languages, a point on which Herr Dühring can consult the English jurists, whose efforts in India to solve the question, who is the owner of the land? -- were as vain as those of the late Prince Heinrich LXXII of Reuss-Greiz-Schleitz-Lobenstein-Eberswalde in his attempts to solve the question of who was the night-watchman. The Turks were the first to introduce a sort of feudal ownership of land in the countries conquered by them in the Orient. As far back as the heroic epoch, Greece made its entry into history with a system of social estates which was itself evidently the product of a long but unknown prehistory; even there, however, the land was mainly cultivated by independent peasants; the larger do

mains of the nobles and tribal chiefs were the exception, and they disappeared soon after. Italy was brought under cultivation chiefly by peasants; when, in the final period of the Roman Republic, the great complexes of estates, the latifundia, displaced the small peasants and replaced them by slaves, they also replaced tillage by stock-raising, and, as Pliny already realized, brought Italy to ruin (latifundia Italiam perdidere ). During the Middle Ages, peasant farming was predominant throughout Europe (especially in bringing virgin soil into cultivation); and in relation to the question we are now considering it is of no importance whether these peasants had to pay dues, and if so what dues, to any feudal lords. The colonists from Friesland, Lower Saxony, Flanders and the Lower Rhine, who brought under cultivation the land east of the Elbe which had been wrested from the Slavs, did this as free peasants under very favourable rentals, and not at all under "some form of corvée".

In North America, by far the largest portion of the land was opened for cultivation by the labour of free farmers, while the big landed proprietors of the South, with their slaves and their rapacious tilling of the land, exhausted the soil until it could only grow firs, so that the cultivation of cotton was forced further and further west. In Australia and New Zealand, all attempts of the British government artificially to establish a landed aristocracy came to nothing. In short, if we except the tropical and subtropical colonies, where the climate makes agricultural labour impossible for Europeans, the big landed proprietor who subjugates nature by means of his slaves or serfs and brings the land under cultivation proves to be a pure figment of the imagination. The very reverse is the case. Where he makes his appearance in antiquity, as in Italy, he does not bring wasteland into cul-

tivation, but transforms arable land brought under cultivation by peasants into stock pastures, depopulating and ruining whole countries. Only in a more recent period, when the in creasing density of population raised the value of land, and particularly after the development of agricultural science made even poorer land more cultivable -- it is only from this period that large landowners began to participate on an extensive scale in bringing wasteland and grassland under cultivation, and this mainly through the robbery of common land from the peasants, both in England and in Germany. But there was another side even to this. For every acre of common land which the large landowners brought into cultivation in England, they transformed at least three acres of arable land in Scotland into sheepruns and eventually into mere grounds for deer-hunting.

We are concerned here only with Herr Dühring's assertion that the bringing into cultivation of extensive tracts of land, and therefore of practically the whole area now cultivated, "never and nowhere" took place except through the agency of big landed proprietors and their serfs -- an assertion which, as we have seen, "presupposes" a really unprecedented ignorance of history. It is not necessary, therefore, for us to examine here to what extent areas which were already made entirely or mainly cultivable were cultivated at different periods by slaves (as in the heyday of Greece) or serfs (as in the manors of the Middle Ages), or what the social function of the large landowners was at various periods.

After Herr Dühring has shown us this masterpiece of the imagination, in which we do not know whether the conjuring trick of deduction or the falsification of history is more to be admired, he crows:

"It goes without saying that all other types of distributed wealth must be explained historically in a similar way !"

Which of course saves him the trouble of wasting a single word more on the origin of capital for example.

If, with his domination of man by man as a prior condition for the domination of nature by man, Herr Dühring only wanted to state in a general way that the whole of our present economic order, the level of development now attained by agriculture and industry, is the result of a social history which evolved in class antagonisms, in relationships of domination and subjection, he is saying something which has become a commonplace ever since The Communist Manifesto. But the question at issue is how we are to explain the origin of classes and relations based on domination, and if Herr Dühring's only answer is always the single word "force", we are left exactly where we were at the start. The mere fact that the ruled and exploited have at all times been far more numerous than the rulers and the exploiters, and that therefore the real force has reposed in the hands of the former, is enough to demonstrate the absurdity of the whole force theory. The relations of domination and subjection have therefore still to be explained.

They arose in two ways.

As men originally made their exit from the animal world -- in the narrower sense -- so they made their entry into history: still half animal, brutish, still impotent in face of the forces of nature, still ignorant of their own; and consequently as poor as the animals and hardly more productive than they. There prevailed a certain equality in the conditions of existence, and also a kind of equality of social position for the heads of families -- at least an absence of social classes -- which continued among the primitive agricultural com-

munities of the civilized peoples of a later period. In each such community there were from the beginning certain common interests the safeguarding of which had to be handed over to individuals, true, under the control of the community as a whole: adjudication of disputes; repression of encroachments by individuals beyond their rights; control of water supplies, especially in hot countries; and finally, when conditions were still very primitive, religious functions. Such offices are found in native communities in every period -- thus in the oldest German Marks and even today in India. It goes without saying that they are endowed with a certain measure of authority and constitute the beginnings of state power. The productive forces gradually increase; the greater density of the population creates common interests at one point and conflicting interests at another between the separate communities, whose grouping into larger units again brings about a new division of labour, the setting up of organs to defend common interests and guard against conflicting interests. These organs, which as representatives of the common interests of the whole group, already occupy a special position in relation to each individual community -- in certain circumstances even one of opposition -- soon make themselves still more independent, partly through heredity of functions, which comes about almost as a matter of course in a world where everything occurs spontaneously, and partly through their growing indispensability with the increase in conflicts with other groups. It is not necessary for us to examine here how this independence of social functions as against society increased with time until it developed into domination over society; how, where conditions were favourable, the original servant gradually changed into the master; how this master emerged as an Oriental despot or satrap, the dynast of a

Greek tribe, the chieftain of a Celtic clan, and so on, according to the conditions; how far he finally made use of force in the course of this transformation; and how the individual rulers ultimately united into a ruling class. Here we are only concerned with establishing the fact that the exercise of a social function was everywhere the basis of political domination; and further that political domination has existed for any length of time only when it discharged this, its social, function. However many the despotisms which rose and fell in Persia and India, each was fully aware that it was above all the general entrepreneur for the maintenance of irrigation throughout the river valleys, without which no agriculture was possible. It was reserved for the enlightened English to lose sight of this in India; they let the irrigation canals and sluices fall into decay, and are now at last discovering as a result of the regularly recurring famines that they have neglected the one activity which might have made their rule in India at least as legitimate as that of their predecessors.

But side by side with this formation of classes another was taking place. At a certain level of well-being, the natural division of labour within the family cultivating the soil made possible the introduction of one or more strangers as units of labour-power. This was especially the case in countries where the old common ownership of the land had already disintegrated or at least the former joint cultivation had given place to the separate cultivation of plots by the respective families. Production had developed so far that human labour-power could now produce more than was necessary for its maintenance; the means of maintaining additional units of labour-power were present; likewise the means of employing them; labour-power acquired a value. But the community itself and the association to which it belonged yielded no available,

superfluous labour-power. On the other hand, the latter was furnished by war, and war was as old as the coexistence of several groups of juxtaposed communities. Hitherto they had not known what to do with prisoners of war and had therefore simply killed them, at a still earlier period, eaten them. But at the stage of the "economic order" which had now been attained the prisoners acquired a value; they were therefore allowed to live and their labour was made use of. Thus, instead of dominating the economic situation, force was on the contrary pressed into the service of the economic situation. Slavery had been invented. It soon became the dominant form of production among all peoples who were developing beyond the old community, but in the end it also became one of the chief causes of their decline. It was slavery that first made possible the division of labour between agriculture and industry on a larger scale, and with it the glory of the ancient world, Hellenism. Without slavery, no Greek state, no Greek art and science; without slavery, no Roman Empire. But without the basis laid by Hellenism and the Roman Empire, no modern Europe either. We should never forget that our whole economic, political and intellectual development presupposes a state of things in which slavery was as necessary as it was universally recognized. In this sense we are entitled to say: Without the slavery of antiquity, no modern socialism.

It is very easy to inveigh against slavery and the like in general terms and pour out the vials of one's lofty moral wrath on such infamies. Unfortunately all this conveys is merely what everyone knows, namely, that these institutions of antiquity are no longer in accord with our present conditions and our sentiments, which these conditions determine. But it does not tell us one word as to how these institutions arose, why they existed, and what role they have played in

history. When we examine these questions, we are compelled to say -- however contradictory and heretical it may sound -- that the introduction of slavery under the then prevailing conditions was a great step forward. For it is an established fact that man sprang from the beasts and consequently had to use barbaric and almost bestial means in his efforts to extricate himself from barbarism. Where the ancient communes have continued to exist, they have for thousands of years formed the basis of the crudest form of state, Oriental despotism, from India to Russia. It was only where these communities dissolved that the peoples made further progress of themselves, and their next economic advance consisted in the increase and development of production by means of slave labour. It is clear that so long as human labour was still so little productive that it provided but a small surplus over and above the necessary means of subsistence, the increase in the productive forces, the extension of trade, the development of the state and of law, the founding of art and science were possible only by means of an increased division of labour, the necessary basis for which was the great division of labour between the masses providing simple manual labour and the few privileged persons directing labour, conducting trade and affairs of state, and, later on, occupying themselves with art and science. The simplest and most natural form of this division of labour was actually slavery. Given the historical antecedents of the ancient world, and particularly of Greece, the advance to a society based on class antagonisms could only be accomplished in the form of slavery. This was an advance even for the slaves; the prisoners of war, from whom the mass of the slaves was recruited, now at least saved their lives, instead of being killed as they had been before, or even roasted, as at a still earlier period.

We may add at this point that all historical antagonisms between exploiting and exploited, ruling and oppressed classes to this very day find their explanation in this same relatively undeveloped productivity of human labour. So long as the effective working population were so much occupied with their necessary labour that they had no time left for looking after the common affairs of society -- the direction of labour, affairs of state, legal matters, art, science, etc. -- the concomitant existence of a special class freed from actual labour to manage these affairs was always necessary; by this means it never failed to saddle the working masses with a greater and greater burden of labour to its own advantage. Only the immense increase of the productive forces attained by large-scale industry has made it possible to distribute labour among all members of society without exception, and thus to limit the labour-time of each individual member to such an extent that all have enough free time left to take part in the general affairs of society, whether theoretical or practical. It is only now, therefore, that every ruling and exploiting class has become superfluous and indeed a hindrance to social development, and it is only now, too, that it will be inexorably abolished, however much it may be in possession of "direct force".

When, therefore, Herr Dühring turns up his nose at Hellenism because it was founded on slavery, he might with equal justice reproach the Greeks for having had no steam-engines or electric telegraphs. And when he asserts that our modern wage bondage can only be explained as a somewhat transformed and mitigated heritage of slavery and not by its own nature (that is, by the economic laws of modern society), either this means only that both wage-labour and slavery are forms of bondage and class domination, as every child knows,

or it is false. For we might as well say that wage-labour can only be explained as a mitigated form of cannibalism, which, it is now universally established, was the primitive form of using defeated enemies.

The role played in history by force as contrasted with economic development is therefore clear. Firstly, all political power is originally based on an economic and social function, and increases in proportion as the members of society become transformed into private producers through the dissolution of the primitive community, and thus become more and more alienated from the administrators of the common functions of society. Secondly, after the political force has made itself independent as against society and has transformed itself from its servant into its master, it can work in two different directions. Either it works in the sense and in the direction of normal economic development. In this case no conflict arises between them, and economic development is accelerated. Or it works against economic development, in which case, with but few exceptions, force succumbs to it. These few exceptions are isolated cases of conquest, in which the more barbarian conquerors exterminated or drove out the population of a country and laid waste or allowed to go to ruin productive forces they did not know how to use. This was what the Christians in Moorish Spain did with the major part of the irrigation works on which the Moors' highly developed agriculture and horticulture depended. Of course, every conquest by a more barbarian people disturbs economic development and extensively destroys productive forces. But in the immense majority of cases where the conquest is permanent, the more barbarian conqueror has to adapt himself to the higher "economic order" as it emerges from the conquest; he is assimilated by the vanquished and in most cases

he has even to adopt their language. But where -- apart from cases of conquest -- the internal state power of a country becomes antagonistic to its economic development, as occurred at a certain stage with almost every political power in the past, the contest always ended with the downfall of the political power. Inexorably and without exception economic development has forced its way through -- we have already mentioned the latest and most striking example of this, the great French Revolution. If, following Herr Dühring's theory, the economic situation and with it the economic structure of a given country were dependent simply on political force, it is absolutely impossible to understand why Frederick William IV after 1848 could not succeed, in spite of his "magnificent army", in grafting the mediaeval guilds and other romantic oddities on to the railways, the steam-engines and the large-scale industry which was just then developing in his country; or why the tsar of Russia, who is certainly still more powerful, is not only unable to pay his debts, but cannot even maintain his "force" without continually borrowing from the "economic order" of Western Europe.

For Herr Dühring force is the absolute evil; for him the first act of force is the original sin; his whole exposition is a jeremiad on the contamination of all subsequent history consummated by this original sin, a jeremiad on the shameful perversion of all natural and social laws by this diabolical power, force. That force, however, plays yet another role in history, a revolutionary role; that, in the words of Marx, it is the midwife of every old society pregnant with a new one,* that it is the instrument by means of which social movement

* Capital, Vol I, p. 751. --Ed.

forces its way through and shatters the dead, fossilized political forms -- of this there is not a word in Herr Dühring. It is only with sighs and groans that he admits the possibility that force will perhaps be necessary for the overthrow of the economy based on exploitation -- alas! because all use of force, forsooth, demoralizes the person who uses it. And this in spite of the immense moral and spiritual advance which has been the result of every victorious revolution! And this too in Germany, where a violent collision -- which may after all be forced on the people -- would at least have the advantage of wiping out the servility which has penetrated the national consciousness as a result of the humiliation of the Thirty Years' War. It is this preachers' mentality, dull, insipid and impotent, that claims the right to impose itself on the most revolutionary party history has known!