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LANDMARKS OF SCIENTIFIC SOCIALISM
"Anti-Duehring"
by
FREDERICK ENGELS
Translated and Edited by Austin Lewis
Chicago
Charles H. Kerr & Company
Co-Operative
Copyright, 1907
by Charles H. Kerr & Company
John F. Higgins
Printer and Binder
376-382 Monroe Street
Chicago, Illinois
TABLE OF CONTENTS
CHAPTER I PAGE
TRANSLATOR'S INTRODUCTION 7
CHAPTER II
PREFACES 23
Part I 23
Part II 27
Part III 35
CHAPTER III
INTRODUCTION 36
I. In General 36
II. What Herr Duehring Has to Say 50
PART I
CHAPTER IV
Apriorism 54
The Scheme of the Universe 63
CHAPTER V
NATURAL PHILOSOPHY 70
Time and Space 70
Cosmogony, Physics, and Chemistry 82
The Organic World 94
The Organic World (conclusion) 107
CHAPTER VI
MORAL AND LAW 116
Eternal Truths 116
Equality 130
Freedom and Necessity 146
CHAPTER VII
THE DIALECTIC 150
Quantity 150
Negation of the Negation 159
Conclusion 175
PART II
CHAPTER VIII
POLITICAL ECONOMY 176
I. Objects and Methods 176
II. The Force Theory 184
III. Force Theory (continued) 193
IV. Force Theory (conclusion) 203
V. Theory of Value 214
VI. Simple and Compound Labor 219
VII. Capital and Surplus Value 223
VIII. Capital and Surplus Value (conclusion) 227
IX. Natural Economic Laws--Ground Rent 232
X. With Respect to the "Critical History" 235
PART III
CHAPTER IX
SOCIALISM 236
Production 236
Distribution 245
The State, The Family, and Education 256
APPENDIX 261
LANDMARKS OF SCIENTIFIC SOCIALISM
CHAPTER I
TRANSLATOR'S INTRODUCTION
When Dr. Eugene Duehring, privat docent at Berlin University, in 1875,
proclaimed the fact that he had become converted to Socialism, he was
not content to take the socialist movement as he found it, but set out
forthwith to promulgate a theory of his own. His was a most elaborate
and self-conscious mission. He stood forth as the propagandist not
only of certain specific and peculiar views of socialism but as the
originator of a new philosophy, and the propounder of strange and
wonderful theories with regard to the universe in general. The taunt
as to his all-comprehensiveness of intellect, with which Engels
pursues him somewhat too closely and much too bitterly, could not have
affected Herr Duehring very greatly. He had his own convictions with
respect to that comprehensive intellect of his and few will be found
to deny that he had the courage of his convictions.
Thirty years have gone since Duehring published the fact of his
conversion to socialism. The word "conversion" contains in itself the
distinction between the socialism of thirty years ago and that of
to-day. What was then a peculiar creed has now become a very
widespread notion. Men are not now individually converted to
socialism but whole groups and classes are driven into the socialist
ranks by the pressure of circumstances. The movement springs up
continually in new and unexpected places. Here it may languish
apparently, there it gives every indication of strong, new and
vigorous life.
The proletariat of the various countries race as it were towards the
socialist goal and, as they change in their respective positions, the
economic and political fields on which they operate furnish all the
surprises and fascinations of a race course. In 1892 Engels wrote that
the German Empire would in all probability be the scene of the first
great victory of the European proletariat. But thirteen years have
sufficed to bog the German movement in the swamps of Parliamentarianism.
Great Britain, whose Chartist movement was expected to provide the
British proletariat with a tradition, has furnished few examples of
skill in the management of proletarian politics, but existing society in
Great Britain has none the less been thoroughly undermined. The year
before that in which Herr Duehring made his statement of conversion, the
British Liberals had suffered a defeat which, in spite of an apparent
recuperation in 1880, proved the downfall of modern Liberalism in Great
Britain, and showed that the Liberal Party could no longer claim to be
the party of the working class. Not only that, but the British
philosophic outlook has become completely changed. The nonconformist
conscience grows less and less the final court of appeal in matters
political. A temporary but fierce attack of militant imperialism coupled
with the very general acceptance of an empiric collectivism has sufficed
to destroy old ideas and to make the road to victory easier for a
determined and relentless working class movement.
But if thirty years have worked wonders in Europe, and disintegration
can be plainly detected in the social fabric, the course of social and
political development in the United States has been still more
remarkable. In 1875 the country was still a farming community living
on the edge of a vast wilderness through which the railroad was just
beginning to open a path. Thirty years have been sufficient to convert
it into the greatest of manufacturing and commercial states. The
occupation of the public lands, the establishment of industry on an
hitherto undreamed of scale, the marvellous, almost overnight creation
of enormous cities, all these have resulted in the production of a
proletariat, cosmopolitan in its character, and with no traditions of
other than cash relations with the class which employs it. The purity
of the economic fact is unobscured. Hence a socialistic agitation has
arisen in the United States, the enthusiasm of which vies with that in
any of the European countries and the practical results of which bid
fair to be even more striking. This movement has arisen almost
spontaneously as the result of economic conditions. It is a natural
growth not the result of the preaching of abstract doctrines or the
picturing of an ideal state. The modern American proletariat is, as a
matter of fact, given neither to philosophic speculation nor to the
imagination which is necessary to idealism. Such socialism as it has
adopted it has taken up because it has felt impelled thereto by
economic pressure.
Hence, apart from all socialistic propaganda, a distinct
disintegration-process has been proceeding in modern society. Each
epoch carries within itself the seeds of its own dissolution. Things
have just this much value, they are transitory, says Engels in his
paraphrase of Hegel, and this is in fact the central idea of his
dialectic philosophy.
He criticises the work of Duehring from this standpoint. He labors not
so much to show that Duehring is mistaken in certain conclusions as to
prove that the whole method of his argument is wrong. His diatribes,
though the subject matter of his argument requires him to attack the
Berlin tutor, are directed chiefly against all absolute theories.
"Eternal truth," in the realm of science, equally with that of
philosophy, he scouts as absurd. To interpret the history of the time
in terms of the spirit of the time, to discover the actual beneath the
crust of the conventional, to analyse the content of the formulae which
the majority are always ready to take on trust, and to face the fact
with a mind clear of preconceived notions is what Engels set out to
do. It cannot be said that he altogether succeeded. No man can succeed
in such a task. The prejudices and animosities created by incessant
controversy warped his judgment in some respects, and tended on more
than one occasion to destroy his love of fair play. The spirit which
is occasionally shown in his controversial writing is to be deplored
but it may be said in extenuation that all controversies of that time
were disfigured in the same way. He pays the penalty for the fault.
Much of the work is valueless to-day because of Engels' eagerness to
score a point off his adversary rather than to state his own case. But
where the philosopher lays the controversialist on one side for a
brief period, and takes the trouble to elucidate his own ideas we
discover what has been lost by these defects of temperament. He
possesses in a marked degree the gift of clear analysis and of keen
and subtle statement.
The socialist movement everywhere arrives some time or other at what
may be called the Duehring stage of controversy. There are two very
distinct impulses towards socialism. The individuals who are
influenced by these impulses must sooner or later come into collision,
and as a result of the impact the movement is for a time divided into
hostile parties and a war of pamphleteering and oratory supervenes.
This period has just ended in France. For the last few years the
French movement has been divided upon the question of the
philosophical foundation of the movement, and the parties to the
controversy may be divided into those who sought to justify the
movement upon ethical grounds and those who have regarded it as a
modern political phenomenon dependent alone upon economic conditions.
The former of these parties based its claims to the suffrages of the
French people upon the justice of the socialistic demands. It
proclaimed socialism to be the logical result of the Revolution, the
necessary conclusion from the teachings of the revolutionary
philosophers. Justice was the word in which they summed up the claims
of socialism, that and Equality, for which latter term as Engels
points out in the present work, the French have a fondness which
amounts almost to a mania. Hence one party of the French socialist
movement chose as a platform those very "eternal truths" which Engels
ridicules and which it is the sole purpose of the present work to
attack.
To kill "eternal truths" is however by no means an easy matter. Years
of habit have made them part of the mental structure of the citizens
of the modern democratic or semi-democratic states. Not only in France
but to an even greater degree in the English speaking countries these
"eternal truths" persist, they form the stock in trade of the
clergyman and the ordinary politician. Bernard Shaw directs the
shafts of his ridicule against these "eternal truths" and smites with
a sarcasm which is more fatal than all the solemn German philosophy
which Engels has at his command. But Shaw is not appreciated by the
British socialist. The latter cannot imagine that the writer is really
poking fun at things so exceedingly serious and so essential to any
well constituted man, to a well-constituted Briton in particular. The
British socialist is as much in love with "eternal truths" as is the
stiffest and most unregenerate of his bourgeois opponents. He
therefore toploftily declares that Mr. Shaw is an unbalanced person, a
licensed jester. Precisely the same results would attend the efforts
of an American iconoclast who would venture to ridicule the "eternal
truths" which have been handed down to us in documents of
unimpeachable respectability, like the Declaration of Independence,
and by Fourth of July orators, portly of person and of phrase.
The "eternal truth" phase of socialist controversy seems to be as
eternal as the truth, and must necessarily be so as long as the
movement is recruited by men who bring into it the ideas which they
have derived from the ordinary training of the American citizen.
The other side of the controversy to which reference has been made
derived its philosophy from the experience of the proletariat. This
modern proletariat, trained to, the machine, is a distinct product of
the occupation by which it lives. The organisation of industry in the
grasp of which the workman is held during all his working hours and
manufacture by the machine-process, the motions of which he is
compelled to follow have produced in him a mental condition which does
not readily respond to any sentimental stimulus. The incessant process
from cause to effect endows him with a sort of logical sense in
accordance with which he works out the problems of life independent of
the preconceptions and prejudices which have so great a hold upon the
reason of his fellow citizens who are not of the industrial
proletariat. Without knowing why he arrives by dint of the experience
of his daily toil at the same conclusions as Engels attained as the
result of philosophic training and much erudition. The Church is well
aware of this fact to her sorrow for the industrial proletarian seldom
darkens her portals. He has no hatred of religion, as the atheistic
radical bourgeois had, but with a good-natured "non possumus" says by
his actions what Engels says by his philosophy.
Revolution is an every day occurrence with the industrial proletarian.
He sees processes transformed in the twinkling of an eye. He wakes up
one morning to find that the trade which he has learned laboriously
has overnight become a drug on the market. He is used to seeing the
machine whose energy has enchained him flung on the scrap heap and
contemptuously disowned, in favor of a more competent successor whose
motions he must learn to follow or be himself flung on the scrap heap
also. This constant revolution in the industrial process enters into
his blood. He becomes a revolutionist by force of habit. There is no
need to preach the dialectic to him. It is continually preached. The
transitoriness of phenomena is impressed upon him by the changes in
industrial combinations, by the constant substitution of new modes of
production for those to which he has been accustomed, substitutions
which may make "an aristocrat of labor" of him to-day, and send him
tramping to-morrow.
The industrial proletarian therefore knows practically what Engels has
taught philosophically. So that when in the course of his political
peregrinations he strays into the socialist movement and there finds
those who profess a socialism based upon abstract conceptions and
"eternal truths" his contempt is as outspoken as that of a Friedrich
Engels who chances upon a certain Eugen Duehring spouting paraphrases
of Rousseau by the socialistic wayside. Engels simply anticipated by
the way of books the point of view reached by the industrial
proletarian of to-day by the way of experience, and by the American
machine-made proletarian in particular. This is a matter of no mean
importance. In the following pages we can detect if we can look beyond
and beneath the mere criticism of Duehring, an attitude of mind, not
of one controversialist to another merely but of an entire class, the
class upon which modern society is driven more and more to rely, to
the class which relies upon it.
For their popular support classes and governments rely upon formulae.
When the cry of "Down with the Tsar" takes the place of the humbly
spoken "Little Father" what becomes of the Tsardom? When the terms
"Liberty" and "Equality" become the jest of the workshop, upon what
basis can a modern democratic state depend? This criticism of "eternal
truths" is destructive criticism, and destructive of much more than
the "truths." It is more destructive than sedition itself. Sedition
may be suppressed cheaply in these days of quick-firing guns and open
streets. But society crumbles away almost insensibly beneath the
mordant acid of contemptuous analysis. So to-day goaded on the one
side by the gibes of the machine-made proletariat, and on the other,
by the raillery of the philosophic jester, society staggers along like
a wounded giant and is only too glad to creep into its cave and to
forget its sorrows in drink.
As for 1875, "Many things have happened since then" as Beaconsfield
used to say, but of all that has happened nothing could have given
more cynical pleasure to the "Old Jew" than the lack of faith in its
own shibboleths which has seized the cocksure pompous society in which
he disported himself. The rhetoric of a Gladstone based upon the
"eternal truths" which constituted always the foundations of his
political appeals would fail to affect the masses to-day with any
other feeling than that of ridicule. We have already arrived at the
"Twilight of the Idols" at least so far as "eternal truths" are
concerned. They still find however an insecure roosting place in the
pulpits of the protestant sects.
If blows have been showered upon the political "eternal truths" in the
name of which the present epoch came into existence social and ethical
ideals have by no means escaped attack. Revolt has been the watchword
of artist and theologian alike. The pre-Rafaelite school, a not
altogether unworthy child of the Chartist movement, raised the cry of
artistic revolt against absolutism and the revolt spread in ever
widening circles until it has exhausted itself in the sickly egotism
of the "art nouveau." Even Engels, with all his independence and
glorification of change as a philosophy, can find an opportunity to
fling a sneer at Wagner and the "music of the future." The remnants of
early Victorianism cling persistently to Engels. He cannot release
himself altogether from the bonds of the bourgeois doctrine which he
is so anxious to despise. He is in many respects the revolutionist of
'48, a bourgeois politician possessed at intervals by a proletarian
ghost, such as he says himself ever haunts the bourgeois. The younger
generation without any claims to revolutionism has gone further than
he in the denunciation of authority and without the same self
consciousness. The scorn of Bernard Shaw for the moguls of the
academies and for social ideals is greater than the scorn of Engels
for "eternal truths." Says Mr. Shaw, "The great musician accepted by
his unskilled listener is vilified by his fellow musician. It was the
musical culture of Europe that pronounced Wagner the inferior of
Mendelssohn and Meyerbeer. The great artist finds his foes among the
painters and not among the men in the street. It is the Royal Academy
that places Mr. Marcus Stone above Mr. Burne Jones. It is not rational
that it should be so but it is so for all that. The realist at last
loses patience with ideals altogether and finds in them only something
to blind us, something to numb us, something to murder self in us.
Something whereby instead of resisting death we disarm it by
committing suicide." Here is a note of modernity which Engels was
hardly modern enough to appreciate and yet it was written before he
died.
Nietzsche, Tolstoy and a host of minor writers have all had their
fling at "eternal truths" and modern ideals. The battle has long since
rolled away from the ground on which Engels fought. His arguments on
the dialectic are commonplaces to-day which it would be a work of
supererogation to explain to anyone except the persistent victim of
Little Bethel. The world has come to accept them with the equanimity
with which it always accepts long disputed truths.
The sacred right of nationality for which men contended in Engels'
youth, as a direct consequence of political "eternal truths" has been
ruthlessly brushed aside. The philosopher talks of the shameful
spoliation of the smaller by the larger nations, a moral view of
commercial progress, which an age, grown more impatient of "eternal
truths" than Engels himself simply ignores, and moves on without a
qualm to the destruction of free governments in South Africa. Backward
and unprogressive peoples jeer, it is true, and thereby show their
political ineptitude, for even the American Republic, having freed the
negro under the banner of "eternal truth" annexes the Philippines and
raids Panama in defiance of it.
And so since the days of 1875 the world has come to accept the general
correctness of Engels' point of view.
The enemy which Engels was most anxious to dislodge was "mechanical
socialism," a naive invention of a perfect system capable of
withstanding the ravages of time, because founded upon eternal
principles of truth and justice. That enemy has now obeyed the law of
the dialectic and passed away. Nobody builds such systems, nowadays.
They have ceased their building however not in obedience to the
commands of Friedrich Engels but because the lapse of time and the
change in conditions have proved the dialectic to the revolutionist.
With the annihilation of "eternal truths," system building ceased to
be even an amusing pastime. The revolutionist has been revolutionized.
He no longer fancies that he can make revolutions. He knows better. He
is content to see that the road is kept clear so that revolutions may
develop themselves. Your real revolutionist, for example, puts no
obstacle in the path of the Trust, he is much too wise. He leaves that
to the corrosion of time and the development of his pet dialectic. He
sees the contradiction concealed in the system which apparently
triumphs, and in the triumph of the system he sees also the triumph of
the contradiction. He waits until that shadowy proletariat which
haunts the system takes on itself flesh and blood and shakes the
system with which it has grown up. But this waiting for the
development of the inevitable is weary work to those who want to
realise forthwith, so they, unable to confound the logic of Engels,
attack the "abstractions" on which his theory is founded. They still
oppose their "eternal truths" to the dialectic.
Thus in England, where the strife between the two parties in the
socialist movement has lately been waged with a somewhat amusing
ferocity, Engels is charged with a wholesale borrowing from Hegel. In
any other country than England this would not be laid up against a
writer, but the Englishman is so averse to philosophy that the
association of one's name with that of a philosopher, and a German
philosopher in particular, is tantamount to an accusation of keeping
bad company. But a glance at the following pages should tend to
dispose of so romantic a statement which could, in fact, only have
been made by those who know neither Hegel nor Engels.
That Hegel furnished the original philosophic impetus to both Marx and
Engels is true beyond question, but the impetus once given, the course
of the founders of modern socialism tended ever further from the
opinions of the idealistic philosopher. In fact Engels says somewhat
self consciously, not to say boasts, that he and his followers were
pioneers in applying the dialectic to materialism. Whatever accusation
may be made against Engels, this much is certain that he was no
Hegelian. In fact both in the present work and in "Feuerbach" he is at
great pains to show the relation of the socialist philosophy as
conceived by himself and Marx to that of the great man for whom he
always kept a somewhat exaggerated respect, but from whom he differed
fundamentally. Engels' attack upon the philosophy of Duehring is based
upon dislike of its idealism, the fundamental thesis upon which the
work depends being entirely speculative. Duehring insisted that his
philosophy was a realist philosophy and Engels' serious arguments,
apart from the elaborate ridicule with which he covers his opponent
and which is by no means a recommendation to the book, is directed to
show that it is not realist, that it depends upon certain preconceived
notions. Of these notions some are axiomatic, as Duehring claims, that
is they are propositions which are self evident to Herr Duehring but
which will not stand investigation. Others again are untrue and are
preconceptions so far as they are out of harmony with established
facts.
Much of Engels' work is out of date judged by recent biological and
other discoveries, but the essential argument respecting the
interdependence of all departments of knowledge, and the impossibility
of making rigid classifications holds good to-day in a wider sense
than when Engels wrote. Scientific truths which have been considered
absolute, theories which have produced approximately correct results,
have all been discredited. The dogmas of science against which the
dogmatic ecclesiastics have directed their scornful contempt have
shared the same fate as the ecclesiastical dogmas. Nothing remains
certain save the certainty of change. There are no ultimates. Even the
atom is suspect and the claims of the elements to be elementary are
rejected wholesale with something as closely resembling scorn as the
scientist is ever able to attain. A scientific writer has recently
said "What is undeniable is that the Daltonian atom has within a
century of its acceptance as a fundamental reality suffered
disruption. Its proper place in nature is not that formerly assigned
to it. No longer 'in seipso totus, teres, atque rotundus' its
reputation for inviolability and indestructibility is gone for ever.
Each of these supposed 'ultimates' is now known to be the scene of
indescribable activities, a complex piece of mechanism composed of
thousands of parts, a star-cluster in miniature, subject to all kinds
of dynamical vicissitudes, to perturbations, accelerations, internal
friction, total or partial disruption. And to each is appointed a
fixed term of existence. Sooner or later the balance of equilibrium is
tilted, disturbance eventuates in overthrow; the tiny exquisite system
finally breaks up. Of atoms, as of men, it may be said with truth
'Quisque suos patitur manes.'"
The discovery of radium was in itself sufficient to revolutionise the
heretofore existing scientific theories and the revolution thereby
effected has been enough to cause Sir William Crookes to say, "There
has been a vivid new start, our physicists have remodelled their views
as to the constitution of matter." In his address to the physicists at
Berlin the same scientist said, "This fatal quality of atomic
dissociation appears to be universal, and operates whenever we brush a
piece of glass with silk; it works in the sunshine and raindrops in
lightnings and flame; it prevails in the waterfall and the stormy sea"
and a writer in the Edinburgh Review (December, 1903) remarks in this
connection "Matter he (Sir William Crookes) consequently regards as
doomed to destruction. Sooner or later it will have dissolved into the
'formless mist' of protyle and 'the hour hand of eternity will have
completed one revolution.' The 'dissipation of energy' has then found
its correlative in the 'dissolution of Matter.'"
The scope of this revolution may only be gauged by the fact that one
writer ("The Alchemy of the Sea," London "Outlook," Feb. 11, 1905) has
ventured to say, and this is but one voice in a general chorus: "To-day
no one believes in the existence of elements; no one questions the
possibility of a new alchemy; and the actual evolution of one element
from another has been observed in the laboratory--observed by Sir
William Ramsey in London, and confirmed by a chemist in St. Petersburg."
Helium being an evolution of radium and it is expected furthermore that
radium will prove to be an evolution of uranium and so there is a
constant process as the writer points out of what was formerly called
alchemy the transmutation of one metal into another.
It is clear that in face of these facts the arguments of Engels
possess even greater force at the present day than when they were
enunciated and that the old hard and fast method of arguing from
absolute truths is dead and done for.
Only statesmen see fit to still harp on the same phrases which have
become as it were a part of the popular mental structure and by
constant appeals to the old watchwords to obscure the fact of change.
Were one not acquainted with the essential stupidity of the political
mind and the lack of grasp which is the characteristic of statesmen,
it might be imagined that all this was done with malice aforethought
and that there was a sort of tacit conspiracy on the part of the
politicians to delude the people. But experience of the inexcusable
blunders and the inexplicable errors into which statesmen are
continually driven forces the conclusion that they are in reality no
whit in advance of the electorate and that only now and then a
Beaconsfield appears who can understand the drift of events. Such a
man is the "revolutionist" which Beaconsfield claimed himself to be.
But what shall we say of the President of the country that has
attained the highest place in industrial progress among the nations,
whose whole history is a verification of the truth of the dialectic
and who can still appeal to "individualism" as a guiding principle of
political action? It is a wanton flying in the face of the experience
of the last quarter of a century and such rashness will require its
penalty. "Back to Kant" appears to be the hope of reactionary
politicians as well as of reactionary philosophers.