INTRODUCTION
_I. In General._
Modern socialism is in its essence the product of the existence on the
one hand of the class antagonisms which are dominant in modern
society, between the property possessors and those who have no
property and between the wage workers and the bourgeois; and, on the
other, of the anarchy which is prevalent in modern production. In its
theoretical form however it appears as a development of the
fundamental ideas of the great French philosophers of the eighteenth
century. Like every new theory it was obliged to attach itself to the
existing philosophy however deeply its roots were embedded in the
economic fact.
The great men in France who cleared the minds of the people for the
coming revolution were themselves uncompromisingly revolutionary. They
did not recognise outside authority of any kind whatsoever. Religion,
natural science, society, the state, all were subjected to the most
unsparing criticism, and everything was compelled to justify its
existence before the judgment seat of reason or perish. Reason was
established as the one and universal measure. It was the time when, as
Hegel said, the world was turned upside down, first in the sense that
the human mind and the principles arrived at by process of thought
were claimed as the foundations of all human actions and social
relations, but later also, in the wider sense, that the reality which
contradicted these theories had indeed to be turned upside down. All
forms of society and the state existent heretofore, all survivals of
old notions, were thrown into the lumber room as unreasonable. Up to
that time the world had only allowed itself to be led by prejudice.
All that had been done deserved merely pity and contempt. Now for the
first time day broke: from now on, superstition, injustice, tyranny
and privilege should be replaced by eternal truth, eternal justice,
equality founded on natural rights and the inalienable rights of man.
We now know that the rule of reason was nothing more than the rule of
the bourgeoisie idealised, that eternal right found its realisation in
bourgeois justice, that equality was materialised in bourgeois
equality before the law, that when the rights of man were proclaimed
bourgeois rights of property were proclaimed at one and the same time,
and that the state of reason, Rousseau's Social Contract, could only
come into existence as the bourgeois democratic republic. To such a
slight extent could the great thinkers of the eighteenth century, just
as their predecessors, prevail over the limits which their own epoch
had placed upon them.
But besides the antagonism between feudal baron and bourgeois there
existed the general antagonism between the robbers and the robbed,
between the rich idlers and the toiling poor. It was just this
antagonism which made it possible for the leaders of the bourgeoisie
to pose as the representatives not merely of a special class but of
the whole of suffering humanity. Furthermore the bourgeoisie was
saddled with an antithesis right from the start. Capitalists cannot
exist without laborers, and, in proportion, as the members of the
gilds in the Middle Ages developed into the modern bourgeois, the
journeymen of the gilds and the day laborers, on their part, developed
into the proletariat. And though the bourgeois, as a general rule,
might claim to represent also the interests of the different working
classes of the period, still, independent movements of the latter
classes broke out in connection with each great movement on the part
of the bourgeoisie; such working classes being the more or less
developed predecessors of the modern proletariat. Thus there came into
being at the time of the German Reformation and the Peasant War the
party of Thomas Munzer, in the great English Revolution the Levellers,
and in the great French Revolution, Baboeuf.
Besides these revolutionary demonstrations of a class still
undeveloped, occurred certain theoretical manifestations of a
corresponding nature. Thus in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,
utopian pictures of an ideal social condition, in the eighteenth
century, absolutely communistic theories (Morelly and Mably). The
demand for equality was confined no longer to political rights, it had
to be extended to the social condition of individuals; the demand was
made for the abolition not merely of class privileges but of class
distinctions also. An ascetic communism patterned on that of Sparta
was the first form which the new teachings assumed. Then came the
three great utopians--Saint Simon, in whose eyes bourgeois aims
possessed a certain merit as well as those of the proletariat: then
Fourier and Owen, who, in the land of the most highly developed
capitalistic production, and under the influence of the antagonisms
which arise therefrom, developed in direct relation to French
materialism their proposals which tended to the abolition of class
distinctions.
One common feature pertaining to all the three is the fact that they
did not appear as the representatives of the interests of the
proletariat which had been in the meantime developed through the
historical process. Like the philosophers, their ambition is not to
free a particular class but the whole world. Like them they wish to
introduce the government of reason and eternal justice. But there is a
world of difference between their government and that of the
philosophers. According to the philosophers, the bourgeois world as it
exists is unreasonable and unjust and is destined for the rubbish
heap, just as feudalism and all other earlier forms of society. The
reason that true justice and reason have not dominated the world is
because up to the present man has not properly comprehended them. That
a man of genius has appeared and that the truth concerning these
things should have now been made clear are not results arising from a
combination of historical progress and necessity, but a mere piece of
luck. He might just as well have been born five hundred years earlier
and saved mankind the mistakes, conflicts and sorrows of five hundred
years.
This is actually the idea of all English and French socialists and of
the earlier German socialists, Weitling included. According to this
view, socialism is the expression of absolute truth, reason, and
justice, and only has to be perceived in order to vanquish the world
by reason of its truth. Hence, absolute truth, reason, and justice
vary according to each founder of a school, and therefore with each
one, the variety of absolute truth, reason and justice is dependent,
in turn, upon the subjective temperament of that founder, his
conditions of life, the extent of his knowledge and mental discipline,
so that in this conflict of absolute truths there is no possible
solution save that they rub each other smooth by mutual contact. Hence
nothing could result from it except a sort of eclectic, average
socialism, which is, as a matter of fact, up to the present, the
prevailing notion in the minds of the great majority of socialist
agitators in France and England--a mixture admitting of manifold
shades, of a few notable critical utterances, economic teachings and
pictures of a future state of society by leaders of different sects, a
mixture which flows all the easier in proportion as the sharp precise
corners are rubbed off the separate notions in the stream of debates,
just as pebbles become round in a brook.
In order that a science can be made out of socialism it is first
necessary that it be placed on a sound basis.
Meanwhile, close to and just after the French philosophy of the
eighteenth century, the new German philosophy arose and culminated in
Hegel. Its greatest service was the restoration of the dialectic as
the highest form of thought. The old Greek philosophers were all
natural dialecticians, and the most universal intellect among them,
Aristotle, was already the discoverer of the essential forms of
dialectic thought. On the other hand, subsequent philosophy although
in it there were brilliant exponents of the dialectic (e.g. Descartes
and Spinoza), was more and more involved in the so-called metaphysical
mode of thought, chiefly owing to English influence which completely
mastered the French philosophers, at least of the eighteenth century.
Outside of the strict frontiers of philosophy, masterpieces of the
dialectic might be found occasionally of which I can only recall
"Rameau's Nephew" by Diderot, and the treatise upon the origin of
human inequality by Rousseau.
We now give briefly the essential features of the two modes of
thought: we will return to them more fully later.
If we examine nature, the history of man or our own intellectual
activities, we have presented to us an endless coil of interrelations
and changes in which nothing is constant whatever be its nature, time
or position, but every thing is in motion, suffers change, and passes
away. This original, naive and very nearly correct philosophy of the
world is that of the old Greek philosophers and was first put in a
very clear form by Heraclitus. Everything is and yet is not, since
everything is in a state of flux, is comprehended as undergoing
constant modification, as eternally existing and disappearing. But
this philosophy, correct as it is as regards phenomena in general,
viewed as a picture, is insufficient to explain the individual
phenomena of which the picture of the universe is composed, and as
long as we cannot do that we are not clear about the general picture.
In order to study these individual phenomena we are obliged to take
them out of their natural or social connection, and examine each of
them by itself according to its own form and its particular origin and
development. This is the task of natural science and historical
investigation, branches of discovery to which the Greeks of classical
times assigned a subordinate place for very good reasons, since they,
first of all, had to collect the material. The beginning of an exact
observation of nature was made first by the Greeks of the Alexandrine
period, and was later developed further by the Arabs in the Middle
Ages. True natural science hence dates from the second half of the
fifteenth century, and from then on has advanced at a constantly
growing rate. The dissection of nature into its separate parts, the
separation of different natural events and natural conditions into
certain classes, the examination of the interiors of organic bodies
with respect to their manifold anatomical forms, furnished the
fundamental reasons for the progress in a knowledge of nature which
the last four hundred years have brought in their train. But it has
caused us occasionally to drop into the habit of regarding natural
phenomena and events as entities, apart from the great universal
interrelations, and therefore not as moving but quiescent, not as
changeable in their essence but fixed and constant, not in their life
but in their death. And hence, just as happened with Bacon and Locke,
this point of view has been carried over from science into philosophy,
and has constituted the specially narrow view of the last century, the
metaphysical mode of thought.
For the metaphysician, things and their pictures in the minds,
concepts, are separate entities, one following the other without any
regard to each other, stable, rigid, eternally fixed objects of
investigation. The metaphysician thinks in antitheses. His
conversation is "Yea, yea; Nay, nay" and whatsoever is more than these
cometh of evil. For him a thing exists or it does not exist, a thing
can never be itself and something else at the same time; positive and
negative are mutually exclusive, cause and effect stand in stiff
antagonism to each other. This method of thought seems at the first
glance to be quite plausible because it is in accordance with sound
common sense. But sound common sense, respectable fellow though he may
be in his own home surrounded by his four walls, meets with strange
adventures when he betakes himself into the wide world of
investigation; and the metaphysical way of looking at things, sound
and useful as it is, under given conditions, runs sooner or later into
a stone wall, beyond which it is one-sided, stupid and abstract, and
loses itself in insoluble contradictions. Because it omits to notice
the interrelations of the individual phenomena, their existence, their
coming and their going, their static and mobile conditions, and so to
speak does not see the forest for trees. We know for example, with
sufficient certainty for every day affairs, whether an animal is alive
or dead, but, on closer examination, we find that this is sometimes no
easy matter to decide, as jurists know very well and have gone indeed
to great pains to discover a rational border line beyond which the
killing of a child in the womb of its mother is murder. It is just as
impossible too to fix the precise moment of death, for physiology
shows that death is not a single and sudden event but a very slow
process. Just so is every organic being at the same moment itself and
not itself. Every moment it takes up matter coming to it from the
outside and throws off other matter, every moment its body-cells die
and are recreated. Indeed after a longer or shorter period the whole
material of the body is renewed through the taking up of other
particles of matter so that each organic being is at the same time
itself and something else. We find also if we look at the matter more
closely that the two poles of an antithesis, positive and negative,
are just as inseparable as they are antagonistic, and that they, in
spite of all their fixed antagonisms permeate each other, also that
the cause and effect are concepts which can only realise themselves in
relation to a particular case. However when we come to examine the
separate case in its general relation to the world at large they come
together and dissolve themselves in face of the working out of the
universal problem, for, here, cause and effect exchange places, what
was at one time and place effect becoming cause and vice versa.
All these phenomena and thought-concepts do not fit into the frame of
metaphysical philosophy. According to the dialectic method of thinking
which regards things and their concepts in relation to their
connection with each other, their concatenation, their coming into
being and passing away, phenomena, like the preceding, are so many
confirmations of its own philosophy. Nature is the proof of the
dialectic, and we must give to modern science the credit of having
furnished an extraordinary wealth and daily increasing store of
material towards this proof, and thereby showing in the last instance
things proceed dialectically and not in accordance with metaphysical
notions. But as the scientists who have learned to think dialectically
may be still easily counted, the chaos arising from the confusion
between actual results and an antiquated mode of thought is thus
explained, and this confusion is to-day dominant in theoretical
science, and drives teachers and pupils, writers and readers to
despair.
A correct notion of the universe, of the human race, as well as of the
reflection of this progress in the human mind can only be had by means
of the dialectic method, together with a steady observation of the
change and interchange which goes on in the universe, the coming into
existence and passing away, progressive and retrogressive
modification.
And the later German philosophy has proceeded from this standpoint.
Kant began his career in this way by abolishing Newton's conception of
a stable solar system which persisted after receiving its first
impulse, in favor of a historical process, to wit, the origin of the
sun and all the planets from a rotating mass of nebulae. From this
concept he drew the conclusion that, granted this origin, the future
dissolution of the solar system is inevitable. His theory was
mathematically proved by Laplace half a century later, and half a
century later still the spectroscope discovered the existence of such
glowing masses of gas in space in different stages of condensation.
This later German philosophy found its conclusion in the philosophy of
Hegel where for the first time, and this is his greatest service, the
entire natural, historical and spiritual universe was regarded as a
process, that is, as in constant progress, change, transformation and
development, and the attempt was made to show the more subtle
relations of this process and development. From this historical point
of view the history of mankind no longer appeared as a barren
confusion of mindless forces, all alike subject to rejection before
the judgment seat of the most recently ripened philosophy, and which,
at the very best, man puts out of his mind as soon as possible, but as
the development-process of humanity itself, to follow the process of
which, little by little, through all its ramifications, and to
establish the essential laws of which, in spite of all apparent
accidents, is now the task of philosophic thought.
It is immaterial at this place that Hegel did not solve this problem.
His epoch-making service was to have proposed it. It is a problem,
moreover, which no individual can solve. Though Hegel, next to Saint
Simon, was the most universal intellect of his time he was still
limited, in the first place, through the necessarily narrow grasp of
his own knowledge and in addition through the limitations of the
contemporary conditions of knowledge. There was a third reason, too.
Hegel was an idealist, that is he regarded thought not as a mere
abstract representation of real phenomena, but, on the contrary,
phenomena and their development appeared to him as the representations
of the Idea which existed before the world. The result was an
inversion of everything, the actual interrelations of the universe
were turned completely upside down, and though of these
interrelations, many single ones were set out justly and correctly by
Hegel, much of the detail is patched, labored, made up, in short,
incorrect. The Hegelian system was, to speak briefly, a colossal
miscarriage, and the last of its kind. It rested on an incurable
contradiction; on the other hand, it actually proclaimed the
historical conception according to which human history is a process of
development, which, in its very nature, cannot find its intellectual
conclusion in the discovery of a so-called absolute truth, on the
other hand it declared itself to be the central idea of just such an
absolute truth. An all embracing and determined knowledge of nature
and history is in absolute contradiction with the foundations of
dialectic thought, but it is not denied, on the contrary, it is
strongly affirmed, that the systematic knowledge of the entire
external world may from age to age make giant strides.
The total perversion of modern German idealism of necessity drove men
to materialism, but not, and this is well worth noting, to the mere
metaphysical mechanical materialism of the eighteenth century. In
contradiction to the naively simple revolutionary pushing on one side
of all earlier history, modern materialism sees in history the process
of the development of society, to discover the laws of whose
development is its task. In contradistinction to the conception of
nature which prevailed among the French philosophers, as well as with
Hegel, as something moving in a narrow circle with an eternal and
unchangeable substantial form, as Newton conceived it, and with
invariable species of organic beings, as Linnaeus thought, materialism
embraces the more recent discoveries of natural science, according to
which nature has also a history in time. For the forms of the worlds,
like the species of organisms by which they are inhabited under
suitable conditions, come into being and pass away, and the cycles of
their progress, in so far as it is permissible to use the term, take
on eternally more magnificent dimensions. In either case it is
entirely dialectic and no longer forces a static philosophy upon the
other sciences. As soon as the demand is made upon each separate
branch of science that it make clear its relation to things in
general, and science as a whole, the individual science thereupon
becomes superfluous. Of all philosophy up to the present time the only
peculiar property which remains as its characteristic is the study of
thought and the formal laws of thought--logic and the dialectic. All
else belongs to the positive sciences of nature and history.
While the revolution in natural science was only able to be completely
carried out in proportion as investigation furnished the necessary
positive material, there were known a multitude of earlier historical
facts which gave a distinct bias to the philosophy of history. In 1831
in Lyons the first purely working class revolt occurred. The first
national working class movement, that of the English Chartists,
reached its height between 1838 and 1842. The class war between the
proletariat and the bourgeoisie proceeded historically in the most
advanced European countries just in proportion as the newly developed
greater industry has progressed, on the one hand, and the political
power of the bourgeoisie on the other. The teachings of the bourgeois
economists with respect to the identity of the interests of capital
and labor and with respect to the universal peace and well being which
would follow as a matter of course from the adoption of free trade
were more and more contradicted by facts. All these things could be as
little ignored as the French and English socialism which was their
theoretical though very insufficient expression. But the old
idealistic philosophy of history which was as yet by no means laid
aside knew nothing of class wars dependent upon material interests,
and nothing of material interests, specially. Production, like all
economic phenomena only occupied a subordinate position as a secondary
element of the "history of civilisation." The new facts, moreover
rendered necessary a new investigation of all preceding history and
then it became evident that all history up to then had been a history
of class struggles and that these mutually conflicting classes are the
results of a given method of production and distribution at a given
period, in a word, of the economic conditions of that epoch. Hence,
that the economic structure of society at a given time furnishes the
real foundations upon which the entire superstructure of political and
juristic institutions as well as the religious, philosophical and
other abstract notions of a given period are to be explained in the
last instance. Idealism was thereupon driven from its last refuge, the
philosophy of history; a materialistic philosophy of history was set
up, and the path was discovered by which the consciousness of man
could be shown as springing from his existence rather than his
existence from his consciousness.
But the socialism which had existed so far was just as incompatible
with the materialistic conception of history as was the naturalistic
French materialism with the dialectic and the modern discoveries in
natural science. The then existing socialism criticised the prevailing
capitalistic methods of production and their results but it could not
explain them and thus could not match itself against them, it could
only brush them on one side as being bad. But it was necessary to
show, on the one hand, the capitalistic methods of production in their
historical connection, and their necessity at a given historical epoch
and therefore the necessity of their ultimate disappearance. On the
other hand their inner character had to be explained and this was all
the more concealed for criticism had up to then been chiefly engaged
in pointing out the evil results flowing from them rather than in
destroying the thing itself. This was made clear by the discovery of
surplus value.
It was shown that the appropriation of unpaid labor is the basis of
the capitalistic mode of production and the robbery of the worker is
carried out by its means; that the capitalist, although he buys the
labor-force of the worker at the full value which it possesses in the
market as a commodity, yet derives more from it than he has paid for
it, and that in the last instance this surplus creates the total
amount of value from which the capital steadily increasing in the
hands of the capitalistic class is amassed. The phenomenon not only of
capitalistic production but of the creation of capital has thus been
explained.
For these two great discoveries, the materialistic conception of
history and the disclosure of the mystery of capitalistic production
we must thank Marx. Granted these, socialism became a science, which
thereupon had to busy itself in the working out of these ideas in
their individual aspects and connections.
Thus matters stood in the realm of theoretical socialism and the dead
philosophy (of metaphysics Ed.) when Herr Eugene Duehring, with no
slight impressement sprang up before the public and announced that he
had accomplished a complete revolution in political economy and
socialism.
Let us now see what Herr Duehring promises and--how he keeps his
promises.
_II. What Herr Duehring Has to Say._
Up to now, the notable writings of Herr Duehring are his "Course of
Philosophy," his "Course of Political and Social Science" and his
"Critical History of Political Economy and Socialism." The first work
is the one which particularly claims our attention.
Right on the first page Herr Duehring announces himself as "one who
claims to represent this power (of philosophy) at the present time and
its unfolding in the undiscoverable future." He discovers himself,
therefore, as the one true philosopher for the present and the hidden
future. Whoso differs from him differs from truth. Many people even
before Herr Duehring, have thought this about themselves or something
like it, but, with the exception of Richard Wagner, he is the first
who has allowed himself to say it right out. And, as a matter of fact,
the truth, as it is handled by him is "a final truth of the last
instance." Herr Duehring's philosophy is "the natural system, or the
philosophy of reality.... Reality is so understood as to exclude every
sudden impulse towards an unreal and subjectively limited
comprehension of the universe." The philosophy is therefore so shaped
as to exclude Herr Duehring himself from the somewhat obvious
limitations of his own personal, subjective narrowness. It is quite
necessary to explain how this miracle is worked, if he is in a
position to lay down unquestionable truths of the last instance,
though, for our part, we cannot discover any particular merit in them.
This "natural system of valuable knowledge" has "with great profundity
established the foundation forms of existence." Out of his real
critical attitude proceed the elements of a real critical philosophy,
based on the realities of nature and life, which does not allow of any
merely imaginary horizon but in its mighty revolutionary progress
opens up the earth and heaven of external and inner nature; it is a
"new method of thought" and its results are "from the bottom up,
peculiar results and philosophies ... system-shaping ideas ... fixed
truths." We have in it before us "a work which must seek its force in
the concentrated initiative," whatever that may mean; an
"investigation reaching to the roots ... a rooted science ... a
severely scientific conception of things and men ... a comprehensive
thorough effort of the mind ... a creative sketch of suppositions and
conclusions from overmastering ideas ... the absolute fundamental." In
the realm of political economy he gives us not only "historical and
systematic comprehensive efforts" of which the historical are moreover
distinguished by "my presentation of history in the grand style" and
those in political economy have produced "creative movements," but
closes with a special completely elaborated scientific scheme for a
future society which is "the actual fruit of a clear and basic
theory," and is therefore just as free from the possibility of error
and as individual as Duehring's philosophy ... for "only in that
socialistic structure which I have disclosed in my "Course of
Political and Social Science" can a true ownership arise in place of
the present apparent private property which rests on force such an
ownership as must be recognised in the future."
These flowers of rhetoric from the praises of Herr Duehring by Herr
Duehring might be increased tenfold with ease. They must cause a doubt
to arise in the mind of the reader whether he is reading the words of
a philosopher or of a--but we must ask him to withhold his judgment
until he shall have learnt the aforesaid grasp of the root of things
by a closer acquaintance. We only quote the foregoing flowery remarks
to show that we have to do with no ordinary philosopher and socialist
who simply speaks what he thinks and leaves the future to decide with
respect to their value, but with an extraordinary personality like the
Pope whose individual teachings must be received if the damnable sin
of heresy is to be avoided. We have not by any means to deal with the
kind of work which abounds in all the socialist writings, and the
later German ones, in particular, works in which people of varying
calibre seek to explain in the most naive fashion their notions of
things in general and for an answer to whom there is more or less
material available. But whatever may be the literary or scientific
deficiencies of these works their goodwill towards socialism is always
manifest. On the other hand, Herr Duehring presents us with statements
which he declares to be final truths of the last instance, exclusive
truths, according to which any other opinion is absolutely false. Thus
he owns the only scientific methods of investigation, and all others
are unscientific in comparison. Either he is right and we are face to
face with the greatest genius of our time, the first superhuman,
because infallible, man; or he is wrong, and then, since our judgment
may always be at fault, benevolent regard for his possible good
intentions would be the deadliest insult to Herr Duehring.
When one is in possession of final truths of the last instance and the
only absolutely scientific knowledge one must have a certain contempt
for the rest of erring and unscientific humanity. We cannot therefore
be surprised that Herr Duehring employs very abusive terms with regard
to his predecessors, and that only a few exceptional people,
recognised by him as great men, find favor in face of his
comprehension of fundamental truths.
(Then follows a list of the epithets applied by Duehring to
philosophers, naturalists, Darwin, in particular, and to the socialist
writers. This list has been omitted as it contributes nothing of value
to the general discussion and is only useful for the particular
controversial matter in hand. Ed.)
And so on--and this is only a hastily gathered bouquet of flowers from
Herr Duehring's rose garden. It will be understood that if these
amiable insults which should be forbidden Herr Duehring on any grounds
of politeness, are found somewhat disreputable and unpleasant, they
are, still, final truths of the last instance. Even now we shall guard
against any doubt of his profundity because we might otherwise be
forbidden to discover the particular category of idiots to which we
belong. We have but considered it our duty on the one hand to give
what Herr Duehring calls "The quintessence of a modest mode of
expression," and on the other hand, to show that in Herr Duehring's
eyes the objectionableness of his predecessors is no less firmly
established than his own infallibility. Accordingly if all this is
actually true we bow in reverence humbly before the mighty genius of
modern times.