Atnti Duhring- political economy

Anti DuhringPOLITICAL ECONOMY

SUBJECT MATTER AND METHOD

Political economy, in the widest sense, is the science of the laws governing the production and exchange of the material means of subsistence in human society. Production and exchange are two different functions. Production may occur without exchange, but exchange -- by the very fact that it is only an exchange of products -- cannot occur without production. Each of these two social functions is subject to the influence of what are for a large part special external factors, and consequently each has what are also for a large part its own special laws. But on the other hand, they constantly determine and influence each other to such an extent that they might be termed the abscissa and the ordinate of the economic curve.

The conditions under which men produce and exchange vary from country to country, and within each country again

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from generation to generation. Political economy, therefore, cannot be the same for all countries and for all historical epochs. A tremendous distance separates the bow and arrow, the stone knife and the exceptional occurrence of exchange transactions among savages from the steam-engine of a thousand horse power, the mechanical loom, the railways and the Bank of England. The inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego have not attained mass production and world trade, any more than they have bill-jobbing or a Stock Exchange crash. Anyone who attempted to bring the political economy of Tierra del Fuego under the same laws as are operative in present-day England would obviously produce nothing but the most banal commonplaces. Political economy is therefore essentially a historical science. It deals with material which is historical, that is, constantly changing; it first investigates the special laws of each individual stage in the development of production and exchange, and only when it has completed this investigation will it be able to establish the few quite general laws which hold good for production and exchange in all cases. At the same time it goes without saying that the laws which are valid for definite modes of production and forms of exchange also hold good for all historical periods to which these modes of production and forms of exchange are common. Thus, for example, the introduction of metallic money brought into operation a series of laws which remain valid for all countries and historical epochs in which metallic money is a medium of exchange.

The nature and mode of distribution of the products of a specific historical society are simultaneously given with the nature and mode of production and exchange in that society and with its historical preconditions. In the tribal or village community with common ownership of land, with which, or with the easily recognizable survivals of which, all civilized peoples enter history, a fairly equal distribution of products is altogether a matter of course; where a more marked inequality of distribution among the members of the community sets in, this is an indication that the community is already beginning to break up.

Both large- and small-scale agriculture admit of very diverse forms of distribution, according to the historical preconditions from which they developed. But it is clear that large-scale farming always entails a distribution which is quite different from that in small-scale farming; that the former presupposes or creates a class antagonism -- slave-owners and slaves, feudal lords and serfs, capitalists and wage-workers -- while the latter by no means entails class differences between the individuals engaged in agricultural production, and that on the contrary the mere existence of such differences indicates the incipient decline of small-holding economy.

The introduction and extensive use of metallic money in a country in which natural economy was hitherto universal or predominant is always associated with either a slower or a faster revolutionization of the previous mode of distribution, and this in such a way that the inequality of distribution among individuals and therefore the contrast between rich and poor becomes more and more pronounced.

The local, guild handicraft production of the Middle Ages precluded the existence of big capitalists and lifelong wage workers, just as these two categories are inevitably created by modern large-scale industry, the present-day credit system, and the form of exchange corresponding to the development of both the latter -- free competition.

But with the differences in distribution, class differences emerge. Society divides into classes, the privileged and the

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dispossessed, the exploiters and the exploited, the rulers and the ruled; and henceforward the state, which the primitive groups of communities of the same tribe had at first arrived at only in order to safeguard their common interests (e.g., irrigation in the East) and for protection against the outside world, has the equal purpose of maintaining by force the conditions of existence and domination of the ruling class against the subject class.

Distribution, however, is not a merely passive result of production and exchange; it reacts just as much on both. Each new mode of production or form of exchange is at first obstructed not only by the old forms and their corresponding political institutions, but also by the old mode of distribution. It must first secure the distribution which corresponds to it in the course of a long struggle. But the more mobile a given mode of production and exchange, the more capable it is of expansion and development, the more rapidly does distribution reach the stage at which it outgrows its progenitor, and in which it comes into conflict with the hitherto prevailing mode of production and exchange. The old primitive communities which have already been mentioned could remain in existence for thousands of years -- as in India and among the Slavs up to the present day -- before intercourse with the external world gave rise to the internal inequalities of property as a result of which they began to break up. On the other hand, modern capitalist production, which is hardly three hundred years old and has become predominant only since the introduction of large-scale industry, that is, only in the last hundred years, has in this short time brought about antagonisms in distribution -- concentration of capital in a few hands on the one side and concentration of the propertyless

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masses in the big towns on the other -- which must of necessity bring about its downfall.

The connection between distribution and the material conditions of existence of society in any period lies so much in the nature of things that it is regularly reflected in popular instinct. So long as a mode of production is still in its rising phase of development, it is enthusiastically welcomed even by those who come off badly from its corresponding mode of distribution. This was the case with the English workers during the emergence of large-scale industry. So long as this mode of production remains the social norm, on the whole there is contentment with distribution, and if objections begin to be raised, they come from within the ruling class itself (Saint-Simon, Fourier, Owen) and find no response at all among the exploited masses. Only when the mode of production in question is already well into its declining phase, when it has half outlived its day, when the conditions of its existence have to a large extent disappeared and its successor is already knocking at the door -- only then does the constantly increasing inequality of distribution appear unjust, only then is appeal made from the facts which have had their day to so-called eternal justice. From a scientific standpoint, this appeal to morals and law does not help us an inch further; economic science can regard moral indignation, however justifiable, not as an argument, but only as a symptom. Its task is rather to show that the social abuses coming to the fore are necessary consequences of the existing mode of production, but at the same time also indications of its impending dissolution; and to reveal, within the already dissolving form of economic motion, the elements of the future new organization of production and exchange which will put an end to those abuses. The wrath which makes the poet is totally in

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place in describing these abuses as well as in attacking those apostles of harmony in the service of the ruling class who deny or prettify them; but how little it proves in any particular case is evident from the fact that there has been no lack of material for such wrath in every historical epoch up to now.

But political economy as the science of the conditions and forms under which the various human societies have produced and exchanged and have always correspondingly distributed their products -- political economy in this wider sense has still to be brought into being. Such economic science as we possess up to the present is almost exclusively limited to the genesis and development of the capitalist mode of production: it begins with the critique of the survivals of the feudal forms of production and exchange, shows the necessity of their replacement by capitalist forms, then develops the laws of the capitalist mode of production and its corresponding forms of exchange in their positive aspects, that is, the aspects in which they further the general aims of society, and ends with the socialist critique of the capitalist mode of production, that is, with the exposition of its laws in their negative aspects, with the demonstration that by virtue of its own development this mode of production is being driven towards the point at which it makes itself impossible. This critique proves that the capitalist forms of production and exchange increasingly become an intolerable fetter on production itself; that the mode of distribution necessarily determined by these forms has produced a class situation which is growing daily more intolerable, has produced the daily sharpening antagonism between ever fewer and ever richer capitalists and ever more numerous and -- by and large -- ever more badly situated propertyless wage-workers; and finally, that the colossal

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productive forces, which are created within the capitalist mode of production and which the latter can no longer tame, are only waiting to be taken possession of by a society organized for co-operative work on a planned basis to ensure to all members of society in constantly increasing measure the means of existence and of the free development of their capacities.

In order to carry out this critique of bourgeois economics completely, it was not enough to be acquainted with the capitalist form of production, exchange and distribution. The forms preceding it or still existing alongside it in less developed countries had also to be examined and compared, at least in their main features. By and large, this kind of investigation and comparison has as yet been undertaken only by Marx, and so we owe almost exclusively to his researches all that has so far been established concerning pre-bourgeois theoretical economics.

Although it first took shape in the minds of a few men of genius towards the end of the seventeenth century, political economy in the narrower sense, in its positive formulation by the Physiocrats and Adam Smith, is nevertheless essentially a child of the eighteenth century, and ranks with the achievements of the great contemporary French philosophers of the Enlightenment, with all the merits and defects of that period. What we have said of the philosophers* is also true of the economists of that time. To them, the new science was not the expression of the conditions and needs of their epoch but the expression of eternal reason; the laws of production and exchange it discovered were not laws of a historically determined form of those activities, but eternal

* See pp. 18-20 above. --Ed.

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laws of nature; they were deduced from the nature of man. But when examined more closely, this man proved to be the middle burgher of the time in the process of becoming a bourgeois, and his nature consisted in manufacturing and trading in accordance with the historically determined conditions of that period.

Now that we have acquired sufficient knowledge of our "builder of critical foundations", Herr Dühring, and his method in the philosophical field, we can easily foretell how he will handle political economy. In philosophy, in so far as his writings were not just drivel (as in his philosophy of nature), his outlook was a distortion of that of the eighteenth century. It was not a question of historical laws of development, but of laws of nature, eternal truths. Social relations such as morality and law were determined, not by the actual historical conditions of the age, but by the famous twosome, one of whom either oppresses or does not oppress the other, the latter, sad to say, never having yet come to pass. We are therefore hardly likely to go astray if we conclude that Herr Dühring will also trace political economy back to final and ultimate truths, eternal laws of nature, and the most empty and dreary tautological axioms; that nevertheless he will again smuggle in by the backdoor the whole positive content of political economy, so far as this is known to him; and that he will not evolve distribution, as a social phenomenon, out of production and exchange, but will hand it over to his glorious twosome for final solution.<"p193"> Since these are all old familiar tricks to us, we can be that much briefer here. In fact, Herr Dühring tells us already on [58] that

his economics links up with what has been "established " in his "philosophy", and "in certain essential points depends on truths of a higher order which have already been put out in a higher field of investigation".

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Everywhere the same importunate self-praise. Everywhere Herr Dühring is gloating over what Herr Dühring has established and put out. Put out, yes, we have seen it to surfeit -- but put out in the way that people put out a sputtering candle.[*]

Immediately afterwards we find "the most general laws of nature governing every economy" -- so our forecast was right.

But these natural laws permit of a correct understanding of past history only if they are "investigated in that more precise determination which their results have experienced through the political forms of subjection and grouping. Institutions such as slavery and wage bondage, with which their twin-brother, property based on force, is associated, must be regarded as socio-economic constitutional forms of a purely political nature, and have hitherto constituted the frame within which the consequences of the economic laws of nature could alone manifest themselves."

This sentence is the fanfare which, like a leitmotif in Wagner's operas, announces the approach of the famous two some. But it is still more, it is the basic theme of Herr Dühring's whole book. In the sphere of law, Herr Dühring could offer us nothing save a bad translation of Rousseau's theory of equality into the language of socialism,** such as one has long been able to hear on a far higher level in any workers' tavern in Paris. Now he gives us an equally bad socialist translation of the economists' laments over the distortion of the eternal economic laws of nature and of their effects through the intervention of the state, of force. In this Herr Dühring deservedly stands quite alone among socialists. Every socialist worker of whatever nationality knows quite well that force only protects exploitation, but does not cause <"fnp194">

* An untranslatable play on words: ausmachen means to settle and also to put out. --Ed.
** See pp. 121-29 above. --Ed.

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it; that the relation between capital and wage-labour is the basis of his exploitation, and that this arose from purely economic causes and not at all by means of force.

Then we are further told that

in all economic questions "two processes, that of production and that of distribution, can be distinguished". Also that the notoriously superficial J. B. Say added yet a third process, that of use, of consumption, but that he was unable to say anything sensible about it, any more than his successors; but that exchange or circulation is only a department of production, which comprises all the operations required for the products to reach the final and actual consumers.

By confounding the two processes of production and circulation, which though conditioning each other are essentially different, and unblushingly asserting that the avoidance of this confusion can only "give rise to confusion", Herr Dühring merely shows that he either does not know or does not under stand the colossal development which this very process of circulation has undergone during the last fifty years, as indeed is further borne out by the rest of his book. But this is not all. After lumping production and exchange together into production as such, he puts distribution alongside production, as a second, wholly external process which has nothing what ever to do with the first. Now we have seen that in its decisive features distribution is always the necessary result of the relations of production and exchange in a particular society, as well as of the historical preconditions of this society; so much so that when we know these relations and preconditions, we can definitely infer the prevailing mode of distribution in this society. But we see too that if Herr Dühring does not want to be unfaithful to the basic principles "established" by him in his interpretation of morals, law and history, he must deny this elementary economic fact,

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especially if he is to smuggle his indispensable twosome into economics. This great event can come to pass once distribution has been happily released from all connection with production and exchange.

But let us first recall how things went in morals and law. Herr Dühring started originally with one man, saying:

"One man conceived as being alone, or, which comes to the same thing, out of all connection with other men, can have no obligations ; for him there is no duty but only will."

But what is this man without obligations and conceived as being alone but the fateful "original Jew Adam" in paradise, where he is without sin precisely because he can't commit any?

But original sin is impending even for this philosophy-of reality Adam. By the side of this Adam there suddenly appears -- not, it is true, an Eve with rippling tresses, but still a second Adam. And Adam instantly acquires obligations and -- breaks them. Instead of clasping his brother to his bosom as his equal in rights, he subjects him to his domination, he enslaves him -- and it is the consequence of this first sin, the original sin of enslavement, from which the whole of world history has suffered down to the present day, which is also why according to Herr Dühring it is not worth threepence.

Incidentally, Herr Dühring believed that he had brought the "negation of the negation" sufficiently into contempt by characterizing it as a feeble imitation of the old fable of original sin and redemption. But what are we to say of his latest version of the same story? (For, in due course, we shall, to use an expression of the government-bought press, "get down to brass tacks" on redemption as well.) In any case,

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we prefer the old Semitic tribal legend, according to which it was worth while for the good little man and woman to abandon the state of innocence, and we leave to Herr Dühring the uncontested glory of having constructed his original sin with two men.

Let us now see how he translates this original sin into economic terms:

"If need be, we can get an appropriate conceptual schema for the idea of production from the conception of a Robinson Crusoe who is facing nature alone with his own resources and has nobody else to share anything with, . . . The conceptual schema of two persons, who combine their economic forces and must evidently come to some form of mutual understanding as to their respective shares, is equally appropriate for the illustration of what is most essential for the idea of distribution. In fact nothing more than this simple dualism is required to enable us to portray some of the most important relations of distribution in all their rigour and to study their laws embryonically in their logical necessity. . . . Co-operative work on an equal footing is here just as conceivable as the combination of forces through the complete subjection of one party, who is then compelled to render economic service as a slave or as a mere tool and is also only maintained as a tool. . . . Between the state of equality and that of nullity on the one hand and of omnipotence and sole active participation on the other, there is a range of stages which the events of world history have filled in rich variety. A universal survey of the various historical institutions of justice and injustice is here an essential presupposition". . . .

and in conclusion the whole question of distribution is transformed into an "economic right of distribution".

Now at last Herr Dühring has firm ground under his feet again. Arm in arm with his two men, he can issue his challenge to his age. But behind this trinity stands yet another, an unnamed man.

"Capital has not invented surplus-labour. Wherever a part of society possesses the monopoly of the means of production, the labourer, free or not free, must add to the working-time necessary for his own maintenance an extra working-time in

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order to produce the means of subsistence for the owners of the means of production, whether this proprietor be the Athenian kalos kagathos,[*] Etruscan theocrat, civis Romanus (Roman citizen), Norman baron, American slave-owner, Wallachian Boyard, modern landlord or capitalist" (Marx, Capital, Vol. I, 2nd edition, p. 227).[**]

When Herr Dühring had thus learned what the basic form of exploitation common to all forms of production up to the present is -- so far as they move in class antagonisms -- all he had to do was to apply his two men to it, and the deep-rooted foundation of the economics of reality was completed. He did not hesitate for a moment to carry out this "system-creating idea". Labour without compensation, beyond the labour-time necessary for the maintenance of the worker himself -- that is the point. The Adam, who is here called Robinson Crusoe, makes his second Adam, Man Friday, drudge for all he is worth. But why does Friday drudge more than is necessary for his own subsistence? To this question, too, Marx provides a partial answer. But it is far too long-winded for the two men. The matter is settled in a trice: Crusoe "oppresses" Friday, compels him "to render economic service as a slave or a tool" and maintains him, but "only as a tool". With this latest "creative turn" of his, Herr Dühring kills two birds with one stone. Firstly, he saves himself the trouble of explaining the various forms of distribution up to now, their differences and their causes; the whole lot are simply worthless, they rest on oppression, on force. We shall have to deal with this before long. Secondly, he in this way trans- <"fnp198">

* Aristocrat. --Ed.
** Capital, English ed., Vol. I, p. 235. --Ed.

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fers the whole theory of distribution from the sphere of economics to that of morals and law, that is, from the sphere of established material facts to that of more or less fluctuating opinions and sentiments. Therefore he no longer needs to investigate or to prove things, but can just go on merrily declaiming and demand that the distribution of the products of labour should be regulated, not in accordance with its real causes, but in accordance with what seems ethical and just to him, Herr Dühring. But what seems just to Herr Dühring is not at all immutable, and hence very far from being a genuine truth. For genuine truths, according to Herr Dühring himself, are "absolutely immutable". In 1868 Herr Dühring asserted in Die Schicksale meiner sozialen Denkschrift, etc.[*] that it is

"a tendency of all higher civilization to put more and more emphasis on property, and that the essence and the future of modern development lie in this, not in the confusion of rights and spheres of sovereignty".

Furthermore, he was quite unable to see

"how a transformation of wage-labour into another manner of gaining a livelihood is ever to be reconciled with the laws of human nature and the naturally necessary structure of the body social". <"p199">

Thus in 1868, private property and wage-labour are naturally necessary and therefore just; in 1876, both are the emanation of force and "robbery" and therefore unjust.[59] As we cannot possibly tell what may well seem ethical and just to such a mighty and impetuous genius in a few years' time, we should in any case do better to stick to genuine, objective, economic laws in considering the distribution of wealth and not to <"fnp199">

* The Fate of My Memorandum on the Social Problem for the Prussian Ministry of State. -- Ed.

depend on Herr Dühring's momentary, changeable, subjective conceptions of what is just or unjust.

We should be in a pretty bad way and might have a long time to wait for the impending overthrow of the present mode of distribution of the products of labour with its crying contrasts of misery and luxury and of famine and feasting, if we had no better guarantee than the consciousness that this mode of distribution is unjust and that justice must eventually triumph. The mediaeval mystics who dreamed of the coming millennium were already conscious of the injustice of class antagonisms. On the threshold of modern history, three hundred and fifty years ago, Thomas Münzer loudly proclaimed it to the world. In the English and the French bourgeois revolutions the same call resounded -- and died away. If today the same call for the abolition of class antagonisms and class distinctions, which had left the working and suffering classes cold up to 1830, if today this call is re-echoed a million-fold, if it takes hold of one country after another in the same order and in the same degree of intensity that large-scale industry develops in each country, if in one generation it has gained a strength that enables it to defy all the forces combined against it and to be sure of victory in the near future -- what is the reason for this? The reason is that modern large-scale industry has on the one hand created a proletariat, a class which for the first time in history can demand the abolition, not of this or that particular class organization or of this or that particular class privilege but of classes themselves, and which is so situated that it must carry through this demand on pain of sinking to the level of the Chinese coolie. And that this same large-scale industry has on the other hand created in the bourgeoisie a class which has the monopoly of all the instruments of production and

means of subsistence, but which in each speculative boom period and in each ensuing crash proves that it has become incapable of any longer governing the productive forces which have grown beyond its power; a class under whose leadership society is racing to ruin like a locomotive whose jammed safety-valve the driver is too weak to open. In other words, the reason is that both the productive forces engendered by the modern capitalist mode of production and the system of distribution of goods established by it have come into crying contradiction with that mode of production itself, so much so that if the whole of modern society is not to perish, a revolution in the mode of production and distribution must take place, a revolution which will put an end to all class distinctions. It is on this palpable material fact which is more or less clearly impressing itself with irresistible necessity on the minds of the exploited proletarians -- it is on this fact, and not on any armchair philosopher's conceptions of justice and injustice, that the sure confidence of modern socialism in victory is founded.