CHAPTER VII

THE DIALECTIC

_Quantity and Quality._

(Here Herr Duehring contends "The first and most important statement

with respect to the foundation logical properties of existence points

to the exclusion of contradiction. Contradiction is a category which

can belong to thought alone but which can pertain to nothing real.

There are no contradictions in things; in other words the law of

contradiction is itself the crowning point of absurdity." To which

Engels replies as follows):

The thought content of the foregoing passages is contained in the

statement that contradiction is an absurdity and cannot occur in the

actual world. This statement will have for people of average common

sense the same self-evident truth as to say that straight cannot be

crooked nor crooked straight. But the differential calculus shows in

spite of all the protests of common sense that under certain

conditions straight and crooked are identical, and reaches thereby a

conclusion which is not in harmony with the common sense view of the

absurdity of there being any identity between straight and crooked.

Considering moreover the significant role which the so called

Dialectic of the Contradiction played in the ancient Greek philosophy,

a stronger opponent than Herr Duehring would be obliged to meet it

with better arguments than a mere affirmation and a number of

epithets.

As long as we regard things as static and without life, each by

itself, separately, we do not run against any contradictions in them.

We find certain qualities sometimes common, sometimes distinctive,

occasionally contradictory, but in this last case they belong to

different objects and are hence not self contradictory. While we

follow this method we pursue the ordinary metaphysical method of

thought. But it is quite different when we consider things in their

movement, in their change, their life and their mutually reciprocal

relations. Then we come at once upon contradictions. Motion is itself

a contradiction since simple mechanical movement from place to place

can only accomplish itself by a body being at one and the same moment

in one place and simultaneously in another place by being in one and

the same place and yet not there. And motion is just the continuous

establishing and dissolving the contradiction.

Here we have a contradiction which is "objective, and so to speak

corporeal in things and events." And what does Herr Duehring say about

it? He affirms that "in rational mechanics there is no bridge between

the strictly static and the dynamic." Finally the reader is able to

see that there is behind this pretty little phrase of Herr Duehring

nothing more than this--that the metaphysical mode of thought can

absolutely not pass from the idea of rest to that of motion because

the aforesaid contradiction intervenes. Motion is absolutely

inconceivable to the metaphysician, because a contradiction. And as he

affirms the inconceivability of motion he admits the existence of this

contradiction against his will and therefore admits that it

constitutes an objective contradiction in actual facts and events, and

is moreover an actual fact.

But if simple mechanical motion contains a contradiction in itself

still more so do the higher forms of motion of matter and to a high

degree organic life and its development. We saw above that life

consists chiefly in this that a being is at one and the same time

itself and something different. Life itself then is likewise a

contradiction contained in things and events, always establishing and

dissolving itself, and as soon as the contradiction ceases life also

ceases, death comes on the scene. Thus we saw also that we cannot put

an end to the Contradictions in the realm of thought, and how for

example the contradiction between the intrinsically unlimited

possibilities of human knowledge and its actual existence in the

persons of human beings with limited faculties and powers of

knowledge, is dissolved in the, for us at least, practically endless

progression of the race, in unending progress.

We stated just now that higher mathematics holds as one of its basic

principles that straight and crooked may be identical under certain

circumstances. It shows another contradiction, that lines which

apparently intersect yet are parallel from five to six centimeters

from the point of intersection, should be such as should never

intersect although indefinitely produced, and yet, notwithstanding

these and even greater contradictions, it produces not only correct

results but results which are unattainable by lower mathematics.

But even in the latter there is a host of contradictions. It is a

contradiction, for example, that a root of A should be and actually is

a power of A. A to the power of one-half equals the square root of A.

It is contradiction that a negative magnitude should be the square of

anything, since every negative magnitude multiplied by itself gives a

positive square. The square root of minus one is therefore not only a

contradiction but an absurd contradiction, a veritable absurdity. And

yet the square root of minus one is in many instances the necessary

result of correct mathematical operations, nay further, where would

mathematics higher or lower be if one were forbidden to operate with

the square root of minus one.

Mathematics itself enters the realm of the dialectic and significantly

enough it was a dialectic philosopher, Descartes, who introduced this

progressiveness into mathematics. As is the relation of the

mathematics of variable magnitudes to that of invariable quantities,

so is the relation of the dialectic method of thought to the

metaphysical. This does not prevent the great majority of

mathematicians from only recognising the dialectic in the realms of

mathematics, a condition of things satisfactory to those who operate

in the antiquated, limited, metaphysical fashion by methods attained

by means of the dialectic.

* * * * *

(Duehring having made an attack upon Marx's "Capital" because of its

reliance upon the dialectic, and having indulged in the epithets to

which he is too prone with respect to this work, Engels takes up its

defence in that respect as follows):

It is not our business to concern ourselves at this point with the

correctness or incorrectness of the investigations of Marx as regards

economics, but only with the application which he makes of the

dialectic method. So much is certain, that it is only now that the

readers of "Capital" will by the aid of Herr Duehring understand what

they have read properly, and among them Herr Duehring himself, who in

the year 1867 was still in a position, as far as possible to a man of

his calibre, to review the book rationally. He did not then, it may be

noted, first translate the arguments of Marx into Duehringese, as now

seems indispensable to him. Even if he at that time made the blunder

of identifying the Marxian dialectic with that of Hegel he had not

altogether lost the ability to distinguish methods from the results

attained by them and to comprehend that an abuse of the former is no

contradiction of the latter.

Herr Duehring's most astonishing observation is that from the Marxian

standpoint, "in the last analysis everything is identical," that

therefore in the eyes of Marx, for example, capitalists and wage

workers, feudal, capitalistic and social methods of production are

"all one." In order to show the possibility of such sheer stupidity it

only remains to point out that the mere word "dialectic" makes Herr

Duehring mentally irresponsible and makes what he says and does so

inaccurate and confused as to be in the last analysis "all one."

* * * * *

(Herr Duehring remarks, "How comical for example is the declaration

based upon Hegel's confused notions that quantity becomes lost in

quality and that money advanced [i.e. for productive purposes. Ed.]

becomes capital when it reaches a certain limit merely through

quantitative increase." To which Engels replies thus):

This seems peculiar when presented in this washed out fashion by Herr

Duehring. On page 313 (2nd ed. "Capital") Marx, after an investigation

of fixed and variable capital and surplus value, derives from his

investigations the conclusion that "not every amount of gold or value

capable of being transformed into capital is so transformed; rather a

certain minimum of gold or of exchange value is presupposed to be in

the possession of the individual owner of gold or goods." He thereupon

gives an example, thus, in a branch of industry the worker works eight

hours per day for himself, i.e. in order to produce the value of his

wages, and the following four hours for the capitalist in producing

surplus value to go into their pockets. One must have sufficient

values to permit of the setting up of two workmen with raw material,

means of labor and wages, in order to live as well as a workman. But

since capitalistic production is not undertaken for mere livelihood

but for increase of wealth, our individual with his two workmen would

still be no capitalist. If he lives twice as well as an ordinary

workman and transforms half of the surplus value produced into capital

he will have to employ eight workmen and possess four times the

aforementioned amount of value, and only after this and other examples

for the purpose of illustrating and establishing the fact that not

every small amount of value can effect a transformation of itself into

capital, but that each period of industrial development and each

branch of industry has its own minimum, fixed, Marx remarks "Here, as

in nature, the correctness of the law of logic, as discovered by

Hegel, is established--that mere quantitative changes at a certain

point suddenly take on qualitative differences."

One may remark the elevated and dignified fashion in which Duehring

makes Marx say the exact opposite of what he did say. Marx says "The

fact that a given amount of value can only transform itself into

capital as soon as it has attained a definite minimum, varying with

circumstances, in each individual case,--this fact is proof of the

correctness of the law of Hegel. Herr Duehring makes him say "Because,

according to the law of Hegel, quantity is transformed into quality

therefore 'a sum of money when it has reached a certain amount becomes

capital.'" He says just the opposite.

We have seen above in the Scheme of the Universe that Herr Duehring

had the misfortune to acknowledge and apply, in a weak moment, this

Hegelian system of calculation, according to which at a given point

quantitative changes suddenly become qualitative. We then gave one of

the best known examples, that of the transformation of the form of

water which at 0 deg. C. changes from a liquid to solid and at 100 deg. C.

from liquid to gaseous, where thus at both these points of departure a

mere quantitative change in temperature produces a qualitative change

in the water.

We might have cited from nature and human society a hundred more such

facts in proof of this law, thus the whole fourth section of Marx's

"Capital" entitled "Production of Relative Surplus Value in the realm

of co-operative industry, the Division of Labor, and Manufacture,

Machinery and the Great Industry," goes to show innumerable instances

in which qualitative change alters the quantity of the thing, and

where also, to use Herr Duehring's exceedingly odious expression,

quantity is converted and transformed into quality. So also the mere

cooperation of large numbers, the melting of several diverse crafts

into one united craft, to use Marx's expression, produces a new

"industrial power" which is substantially different from the sum of

the individual crafts.

Marx, in the interest of the entire truth, has remarked, in complete

contrast to the perverted style of Herr Duehring "The molecular theory

employed in modern chemistry, first scientifically developed by

Laurent and Gerhardt, rests upon no other law." But what does Herr

Duehring care for that? He knows that "the eminently modern

constructive elements of scientific thought make just the same mistake

as was made by Marx and his rival Lassalle; half-knowledge and a touch

of pseudo-philosophy furnish the tools necessary for a display of

learning." While with Herr Duehring "elevated notions of exact

knowledge in mechanics, physics and chemistry" are, as we have seen,

the foundations. But that the public may be in a position to decide we

shall examine somewhat more closely the example cited by Marx in his

note.

Here we have, for example, the homologous series of compounds of

carbon of which many are known and each has its own algebraic formula.

If we, for example, according to the practice of chemistry, represent

an atom of carbon by C, an atom of hydrogen by H, an atom of oxygen by

O and the number of atoms contained in each combination of carbon by

n, we can express the molecular formula of each one of this series

thus,

C_{n}H_{2n+2}--Series of normal paraffin.

C_{n}H_{2n+2}O--Series of primary alcohol.

C_{n}H_{2n}O_{2}--Series of the monobasic oleic acids.

Let us take, for example, the last of this series and set one after

the other n = 1, n = 2, etc., we get the following results omitting

the compounds.

CH_{2}O_{2}--Formic Acid--boiling point 100 deg.--melting point 1 deg.

C_{2}H_{4}O_{2}--Acetic Acid--boiling point 118 deg.--melting point

17 deg.

C_{3}H_{6}O_{2}--Propionic Acid--boiling point 140 deg.--melting point--.

C_{4}H_{8}O_{2}--Butyric Acid--boiling point 162 deg.--melting point--.

C_{5}H_{10}O_{2}--Valerianic Acid--boiling point 175 deg.--melting

point--.

And so on to C_{30}H_{60}O_{2}, Melissic Acid, which melts first at

180 deg., and which has no boiling point, because it does not evaporate

without splitting up.

Here we see therefore a whole series of qualitatively different

bodies, produced by single quantitative additions of the elements and

always in the same proportions. This occurs absolutely where all

elements of the combinations change their quantity in the same

proportions, so with normal paraffin, C_{n}H_{2n} + 2: the lowest is

CH_{4} a gas, the highest known is C_{16}H_{34}, a body forming a hard

colorless crystal which melts at 21 deg. and boils at 278 deg. In both the

series each new step is reached through the introduction of CH_{2}, an

atom of carbon and two atoms of hydrogen, to the molecular form of the

preceding step, and this quantitative change in the molecular form

brings about a qualitatively different body.

These series are merely obvious examples. Almost universally in

chemistry, particularly in the different oxides of nitrogen, in the

oxi-acids of phosphorus or sulphur, one can see how "quantity suddenly

changes into quality" and how this so called "confused Hegelianism"

is, so to speak, inherent in things and events, and no one is ever

confused or beclouded by it, except Herr Duehring. If Marx is the

first to observe this, and if Herr Duehring points this out, without

understanding it (since he could not let so unheard of a crime pass),

he should explain which of the two, Marx or Duehring, is without

elementary conceptions of natural science and the established

principles of chemistry, and do it without boasting about his own

ideas on natural philosophy.

In conclusion, let us call attention to a witness on the change of

quantity into quality, namely Napoleon. He describes the conflicts

between the French cavalry, bad riders but disciplined, with the

Mamelukes who, as regards single combat were better horsemen but

undisciplined, as follows--"Two Mamelukes were a match for three

Frenchmen, one hundred Mamelukes were equal to one hundred Frenchmen,

three hundred Frenchmen could beat three hundred Mamelukes and a

thousand Frenchmen invariably defeated fifteen hundred Mamelukes."

Just as in the statement of Marx, that a certain amount of money,

variable in amount, is necessary as a minimum, to make its

transformation into capital possible, so, according to Napoleon, a

certain minimum number of cavalrymen is required to bring into being

the force of discipline inherent in military organisation, to make

them evidently superior to greater numbers of individually better

riders and fighters, cavalry at least as brave, though irregular. But

what effect has this argument on Herr Duehring? Was not Napoleon

utterly defeated in his conflict with Europe? Did he not suffer defeat

after defeat? And why? Simply as a result of his introduction of

confused Hegelian ideas into cavalry tactics.

_Negation of the Negation._

"The historical sketch (of the so called original accumulation of

capital in England) is comparatively the best part of Marx's book and

it would be even better if it had been developed scientifically and

not by means of the Dialectic. The Hegelian negation of the negation

is called upon to serve here as a midwife, in default of anything

better and clearer, and by means of it the future is brought into

existence from the present. The abolition of private property which is

shown to have been going on since the sixteenth century is the first

negation. Another negation must follow which is characterised as the

negation of the negation and therefore the restoration of individual

private property, but in a higher form, founded on the common

ownership of land and instruments of labor. If this new 'individual

private property' is called also 'social property' by Herr Marx, the

higher Hegelian unity is here manifested in which the contradiction

will be destroyed, that is, in accordance with this juggling of words,

be destroyed and preserved.... The dispossession of the dispossessor

is, as it were, in this case the automatic product of historical

reality in its material external form.... It would be difficult for a

cautious man to convince himself of the necessity of communism in land

and property on the credit of Hegel's shiftiness, of which the

negation of the negation is an example.... The confusion of the

Marxian philosophic notions will not be strange to him who knows what

can be done by means of the Hegelian dialectic or rather what cannot

be done. For those who do not know the trick, it must be noted that

the first negation of Hegel is the teaching of the catechism with

respect to the Fall, and the second is a higher unity leading to the

Redemption. On these analogies, which pertain to religion no logic of

facts can be established.... Herr Marx consoles himself in the midst

of his simultaneously individual and social property and leaves his

disciples to solve his profound dialectic puzzle." (Thus far Herr

Duehring is quoted.)

So Marx cannot prove the necessity of the social revolution, the

restoration of a common property in land and the means of production,

except by a reliance upon Hegel's negation of the negation. And, since

he founds his socialistic theories upon analogies pertaining to

religion, he comes to the conclusion that in future society a

simultaneously individual and social property will prevail, as the

Hegelian higher unity of the contradiction destroyed.

Let us leave the negation of the negation for a little and look at

"the coexistent individual and social property." This will be called

by Herr Duehring a "cloud realm," and, strange to say he is really

right in this regard. But sad to say it is not Marx who is found to be

in the cloud realm but on the contrary Herr Duehring himself. Since by

virtue of his wonderful versatility in the vagaries of Hegel he does

not experience any difficulty in telling us the necessary contents of

the as yet unpublished volume of "Capital," so, after setting Hegel

right, he is able to correct Marx without any trouble in that he

ascribes to him a higher unity of a private property of which Marx has

not said a word.

Marx says "It is the negation of the negation. This reestablishes

private property but on the basis of the acquisitions of the

capitalistic era, of the cooperation of free laborers and their common

ownership of the land and the means of production. The transformation

of the private property of individuals, depending upon the labor of

individuals, into capitalistic property is naturally a process much

more tedious, hard and difficult than the transformation of

capitalistic private property, as it now exists, resting upon social

production, into social property." That is all. The condition attained

by the dispossession of the dispossessor is here shown as the

restoration of individual private property resting however on a basis

of social property in the land and means of production. For people who

can understand English, the meaning of this is that social property

extends to the land and means of production, and private property to

the products, therefore to consumption. And that the matter should be

evident even to infants Marx shows on page 56. "A society of free men

who labor with social means of production, and consciously expend

their individual labor power as social labor power," therefore a

socialistically organised society, and he says further "The total

product of the society is a social product. A portion of this product

serves again as a means of production. It remains social. But another

portion is consumed by the members of the society. It must therefore

be distributed among them." And that ought to be clear, even to Herr

Duehring, in spite of his having Hegel on the brain. The coexistent

individual and social property, this confused and indefinite thing,

this nonsense proceeding from the Hegelian dialectic, this misty

world, this deep dialectic puzzle which Marx leaves his pupils to

solve is merely a creation of Herr Duehring's imagination. Marx, as a

so-called Hegelian, is obliged, as a result of the negation of the

negation, to furnish a correct higher unity, and since he does not do

this in accordance with the taste of Herr Duehring, the latter has to

take a lofty stand and to smite Marx in the interests of the full

truth of things upon which Herr Duehring holds a patent.

What attitude did Marx take to the negation of the negation? On page

761 and following he states the conclusion with respect to his

economic and historical investigations into the so-called accumulation

of original capital, extending over the fifty preceding pages. Before

the capitalistic era in England, at least, small production existed,

based upon the private property of the worker in his tools. The

so-called accumulation of capital consists in the expropriation of

these immediate producers, that is in the abolition of private

property resting on the labor of individuals. This was possible

because the aforesaid small production is only compatible with a

narrow and primitive stage of production and of society and at a

certain grade of development furnishes the means of its own suicide.

This suicide, the transformation of individual and divided modes of

production into social production, constitutes the early history of

capitalism. As soon as the workers are transformed into proletarians

and their means of labor into capital, as soon as the capitalistic

methods of production are firmly established, the growing association

of labor and the further transformation of the land and other means of

production and hence the further expropriation of the owners of

private property takes on a new form, "there is no longer the

self-employing worker to expropriate, but the capitalist who

expropriates many workers. This expropriation fulfils itself through

the play of laws immanent in capitalistic production itself, through

the concentration of capital. One capitalist kills many. Hand in hand

with this concentration, or the expropriation of many capitalists by a

few, there develop continually the conscious technical application of

science, the deliberate organised exploitation of the soil, the

transformation of the instruments of labor into instruments of labor

which can only be employed collectively, and the economising of all

means of production through their employment as the common means of

production of combined social labor. With the constantly diminishing

numbers of capitalist magnates who usurp and monopolise all the

advantages of this process of transformation, grows the mass of

misery, pressure, slavery, degradation and robbery but there grows

also revolt and the constant progress in union and organisation of the

working class brought about through the mechanism of the capitalistic

process of production. Capitalism becomes an impediment to the methods

of production developed with and under it. The concentration of the

means of production and the organisation of labor reach a point where

it comes into collision with its capitalistic covering. It is broken.

The hour of capitalistic private property strikes. The expropriators

are expropriated."

And now I ask the reader, where are the dialectic twists and twirls,

the intellectual arabesques, where the confused thought the result of

which is the identity of everything, where the dialectic mystery for

the faithful, where the dialectic hocus pocus, and the Hegelian

intricacies, without which, Marx, according to Herr Duehring, cannot

develop his own ideas? Marx simply pointed to history and showed

briefly that just as the small industry necessarily produced the

conditions of its own downfall, by its own development, that is to say

by the expropriation of the small holders of private property so now

the capitalistic method of production has itself developed likewise

the material circumstances which must cause its downfall. The process

is a historical one and, if it is at the same time dialectic, it is

not to the discredit of Marx, that it happens to be so fatal to Herr

Duehring.

In the first place, since Marx is ready with his historical economic

proof, he proceeds "The capitalistic method of production and method

of appropriation, that is to say capitalistic private property is the

first negation of individual private property founded on labor of

individuals, the negation of capitalistic production will be

self-produced with the necessity of a natural process, etc." (as

quoted above).

Although Marx therefore shows the occurrence of this event as negation

of the negation, he has no intention of proving by this means that it

is a historical necessity. On the contrary "After he has shown that

the actual fact has partially declared itself, and has, as yet

partially to declare itself, he shows it also as a fact which fulfils

itself in accordance with a certain dialectic law." That is all. It is

therefore again merely supposition on Herr Duehring's part to assert

that the negation of the negation must act as a midwife by whose

means the future is brought out of the womb of the present, or that

Marx wants to convince anyone of the necessity of social ownership of

land and capital upon the credit of the negation of the negation.

It shows a complete lack of comprehension of the nature of the

dialectic to regard it as Herr Duehring does, as an instrument of mere

proof, just as one can after a limited fashion employ formal logic or

elementary mathematics. Formal logic is itself more than anything else

a method for the discovery of new results, for advancing from the

known to the unknown, and so, but in a much more distinguished sense,

is the dialectic, which, since it transcends the narrow limits of

formal logic, attains a more comprehensive philosophical position. It

is the same with mathematics. Elementary mathematics, the mathematics

of constant quantities, proceeds within the limits of formal logic, at

least as a rule: the mathematics of variable quantities which is

peculiarly concerned with calculations running to the infinite, is

substantially nothing but the application of the dialectic in

mathematics. Mere proof becomes secondary before the manifold

application of the method to new fields of investigation. But nearly

all the proofs of higher mathematics from the first of the

differential calculus, are, strictly speaking, false from the

standpoint of elementary mathematics. This cannot be otherwise, if

one, as is here the case, wishes to establish results won in the realm

of dialectics by means of formal logic. For a crass metaphysician like

Herr Duehring to want to prove anything by means of the dialectic

would be the same wasted labor as Leibnitz and his pupils went through

when they tried to establish the thesis of calculation to infinity by

means of the mathematics of their time. The differential gave them

the same spasms as the negation of the negation gives Herr Duehring

and it played a role in it as we shall see. They admitted it at last,

at least as many as did not die first, not because they were convinced

but because it always worked out right. Herr Duehring, is, as he says,

just in his forties, and if he attains old age, as we hope he will, he

may also experience the same.

But what is this dreadful negation of the negation which makes life so

bitter to Herr Duehring and which is to him what the unpardonable sin,

the sin against the Holy Ghost, is to Christianity? It is a very

simple process, and one, moreover, which fulfils itself every day,

which any child can understand when it is deprived of mystery, under

which the old idealistic philosophy found a refuge, and beneath which

it will pay unprotected metaphysicians to take refuge from the stroke

of Herr Duehring. Let us take a grain of barley. Millions of such

grains of barley will be ground, cooked and brewed and then consumed.

But let such a grain of barley fall on suitable soil under normal

conditions; a complete individual change at once takes place in it

under the influence of heat and moisture, it germinates. The grain, as

such disappears, is negated, in its place arises the plant, the

negation of the grain. But what is the normal course of life of this

plant? It grows, blossoms, bears fruit and finally produces other

grains of barley and as soon as these are ripe the stalk dies, and

becomes negated in its turn. As the result of this negation of the

negation, we have the original grains of barley again, not singly,

however, but ten, twenty or thirty fold. Forms of grain change very

slowly and so the grain of barley remains practically the same as a

hundred years ago. But let us take a cultivated ornamental plant, like

the dahlia or orchid. Let us consider the seed and the plants

developed from it by the skill of the gardener, and we have in

testimony of this negation of the negation, no longer the same seeds

but qualitatively improved seed which produces more beautiful flowers,

and every repetition of this process, every new negation of the

negation, increases the tendency to perfection. Similarly this process

is gone through by most insects, butterflies, for example. They come

out of the egg by a negation of the egg, they go through certain

transformations till they reach sex maturity, they copulate and are

again negated, since they die as soon as the process of copulation is

completed, and the female has laid her innumerable eggs. That the

matter is not so plainly obvious in the case of other plants and

animals, seeing that they produce seeds, plants, and animals not once

but oftener, does not affect us in this case, we are now only

concerned in showing that the negation of the negation actually does

occur in both kingdoms of the organic world. Besides, all geology is a

series of negated negations, one layer after another following the

destruction of old and the establishment of new rock foundations.

First, the original crust of the earth, through the cooling of the

fluid mass, and through oceanic, meteorological, and chemical

atmospheric action, being broken up into small parts, these broken

masses form layers in the seas. Local elevations of the seas, through

the ebb and flow of the waters, bring portions of these layers afresh

under the influence of rain, the warmth of the seasons, and the oxygen

and carbon in the atmosphere: melted and almost cooled masses of rock

from the interior of the earth underlie these and break through the

layers. Through millions of centuries new layers are continually being

formed, always to a large extent destroyed and serving again as

building materials for new layers. But the result of the process is

always positive, the restoration of a piece of ground made up of

exceedingly diverse chemical elements to a condition of mechanical

pulverisation, which is the cause of a most abundant and diverse

vegetation.

It is the same also in mathematics. Let us take an ordinary algebraic

quantity a. Let us negate it, then we have-a (minus a). Let us negate

this negation, that is let us multiply --a by --a and we have + a^2,

that is the original positive quantity but in a higher form that is to

the second power. It does not matter that we can attain the same a^2

by the multiplication of a positive by itself. The negated negation is

established so completely in a^2 that under all circumstances it has

two square roots a and --a. And this impossibility, the negated

negation, the getting rid of the negative root in the square has much

significance in quadratic equations. The negation of the negation is

more evident in the higher analyses, in those "unlimited summations of

small quantities," which Herr Duehring himself explains as being the

highest operations of mathematics and which are usually called the

differential and integral calculus. How do these forms of calculation

fulfil themselves? I have for example in a given problem two variable

quantities x and y, of which one cannot vary without causing the other

to vary also under fixed conditions. I differentiate x and y, that is

I consider x and y as being so infinitesimally small that they do not

represent any real quantities, even the smallest, so that, of x and y

nothing remains, except their reciprocal relations, a quantitative

relation without any quantity; therefore dx/dy, the relation of the

two differentials of x and y, is 0/0 but 0/0 is fixed as the

expression of y/x. That this relation between two vanished quantities,

the fixed moment of their vanishing, is a contradiction I merely

mention in passing, it should give us as little uneasiness as it has

given mathematics for the two hundred or so years past. What have I

done except to negate x and y; not as in metaphysics so as not to

trouble myself any further about them, but in a manner demanded by the

problem? Instead of x and y, I have therefore their negation dx and dy

in the formulae or equations before me. I now calculate further with

these formulae. I treat dx and dy as real quantities, as quantities

subject to certain exceptional laws, and at a certain point I negate

the negation, that is, I integrate the differential formula. I get

instead of dx and dy the real quantities x and y again, and am thereby

no further forward than at the beginning, but I have thereby solved

the problem over which ordinary geometry and algebra would probably

have gnashed their teeth in vain.

It is not otherwise in history. All civilised peoples began with

common property in land. Among all peoples which pass beyond a certain

primitive stage the common property in land becomes a fetter upon

production in the process of agricultural development. It is cast

aside, negated, and, after shorter or longer intervening periods, is

transformed into private property. But at a higher stage, through the

development still further of agriculture, private property becomes in

its turn a bar to production, as is to-day the case with both large

and small land proprietorship. The next step, to negate it in turn,

to transform it into social property, necessarily follows. This

advance however does not signify the restoration of the old primitive

common property, but the establishment of a far higher better

developed form of communal proprietorship, which, far from being an

impediment to production, rather, for the first time is bound to put

an end to its limitations and to give it the full benefit of modern

discoveries in chemistry and mechanical inventions.

But again; ancient philosophy was primitive naturalistic materialism.

In the state of thought at that period it was, as such, incapable of

clear conceptions of matter. But the necessity of clearness on this

point led to the doctrine of a soul which could leave the body, then

to the idea of the immortality of the soul, finally, to monotheism.

The old materialism was therefore negated by idealism. But in the

further development of philosophy idealism became untenable, and is

negated by modern materialism. This, the negation of negation, is not

the mere reestablishment of the old, but unites, with the surviving

foundations, the whole thought content of a two thousand years'

development of philosophy and science, as well as the history of these

two thousand years. It is in a special sense no philosophy but a

single concept of the universe which has to prove and realise itself

not in a science of sciences apart, but in actual science. Philosophy

is here also cast aside, that is "destroyed and preserved," destroyed

as to its form, preserved as to its real content. Where Herr Duehring

only sees word-jugglery a more real content is brought to light by the

newer point of view.

Finally, even the Rousseau doctrine of equality, of which that of Herr

Duehring is only a feeble and false plagiarism, has no existence

unless the Hegelian negation of the negation serve it as a midwife,

although it originated twenty years prior to the birth of Hegel. Far

from being ashamed of this it bears in plain sight the stamp of its

dialectic derivation in its earliest manifestation. In a state of

nature and savagery men were equal, and, since Rousseau regards speech

as a falsifying of natural conditions, he is quite right in

predicating equality of animals of one species as far as this reaches,

and the same also with regard to those speechless animal-men, recently

hypothetically classified by Haeckel as Alali. But these equal animal

men had one quality beyond the other animals,--perfectibility, the

power of further development and this was the reason of inequality.

Rousseau sees therefore in the existence of equality a step forward.

But this advance was self contradictory, it was at the same time a

retrogression. "All further advances (beyond the primitive stage) were

so many steps, seemingly in the development of individual men, but

actually in the decay of the species. Working in metals and

agriculture were the two arts whose discovery brought about this great

revolution" (the transformation of the primitive forests into

cultivated lands, but also the introduction of poverty and slavery

together with private property). "The poets hold that gold and silver,

the philosophers that iron and corn have civilised men and ruined the

human race." Each new advance of civilisation is at the same time an

advance of inequality. All contrivances with which society endows

itself by means of civilisation are in direct opposition to their

original purpose. "It is beyond question and a foundation principle of

the entire public law that people made rulers to defend their

liberties, not to destroy them." And yet these rulers become of

necessity the oppressors of the people and they carry the oppression

to the point where inequality is brought to a climax and, then,

transformed into its opposite, again becomes the reason of equality,

for to despots all are equal, that is equally of no account. Here is

the extreme of inequality, the crowning point which closes the circle,

and touches the point from which we have proceeded; here all private

individuals are equal, since they are of no account, and subjects have

no law other than the will of their master. "But the despot is master

only as long as he has the power, and for this reason he cannot

complain of the use of force if he is banished.... Force upholds him,

force throws him down, everything goes according to a straight and

naturally appointed path." And thus again inequality is transformed

into equality, but not into the old materialistic equality of

speechless, primitive men, but into the higher equality of organised

society. The oppressor is oppressed, it is negation of the negation.

We have then, as regards Rousseau, not merely a method of thought

which is quite analogous to that pursued in Marx's "Capital," but also

a whole series of single dialectic turns of which Marx avails himself:

Processes, which are antagonistic in their nature, containing a

contradiction in themselves, are transformed from one extreme to its

opposite, finally, as the quintessence of the whole, negation of the

negation. Although Rousseau in 1754 could not speak the jargon of

Hegel, he was then, at a period twenty-three years before the birth of

Hegel, deeply infected with the Hegel contagion, the dialectic of

contradiction, doctrine of logic, theology, etc. And if Duehring in

his misapplication of Rousseau's theory of equality, operates with his

two victorious men, he having lost his feet, falls, of necessity into

the arms of the negation of the negation.

The conditions under which the equality of the two men flourishes and

which is set forth as an ideal condition is shown on page 271 of the

Philosophy as the original condition. This original condition on page

279 is of necessity destroyed by the "robber system"--first negation.

But we have now, thanks to the philosophy of reality, arrived at the

point of abolishing the "robber system" and substituting for it the

economic commune discovered by Herr Duehring--negation of the

negation, equality on a higher plane.

What is the negation of the negation, therefore? It is a very far

reaching, and, just, for this reason, a very important law of

development of nature, human history and thought, a law which we see

realised in the animal and vegetable kingdoms, in geology, in

mathematics, in history, and philosophy, and which Herr Duehring

himself, in spite of his opposition and resistance, must follow, after

his own fashion. It is evident that I say nothing of the special

development of the grain of barley from the germ to the crop bearing

plant, if I say it is negation of the negation. Since the integral

calculus is likewise negation of the negation, with the other

assertion I should only affirm that the life process of a grain of

barley is integral calculus or even socialism. But that is just the

kind of thing which the metaphysicians push off on the dialectic. If I

say that all these processes constitute negation of the negation, I

embrace them all under this one law of progress, and leave the

distinctive features of each special process without particular

notice. The dialectic is, as a matter of fact, nothing but the science

of the universal laws of motion, and evolution in nature, human

society and thought.

At this point, however, the objection may be urged that the final

negation is no true negation, I negate a grain of barley also when I

grind it, an insect when I crush it, a positive quantity when I

eliminate it, etc. Or I negate the statement "the rose is a rose" if I

say "the rose is no rose" and what happens if I negate this negation

again and say "but the rose is a rose"? These objection are, in fact,

the chief arguments of the metaphysicians against the dialectic and

are quite worthy of this idiotic method of reasoning. To negate in the

dialectic is not simply to say "No," or to describe a thing as

non-existent, or to destroy it after any fashion that you may choose.

Spinoza says "omnis determinatio est negatio," every limitation or

determination is at the same time a negation. Furthermore, the sort of

negation here is shown first by means of the universal and in the

second place by means of the distinctive nature of the process. I must

not only negate but I must also restore the negation again. I must

therefore so direct the first negation that the second remains

possible or shall be so. How? Just according to the peculiar nature of

each particular case. I grind a grain of barley, I crush an insect, I

have certainly fulfilled the first act but have made the second

impossible. Every species of things has therefore its own peculiar

properties to be negated in order that a progression may proceed, and

every species of properties and ideas is precisely the same in this

regard. In infinitesimal calculations the negation is brought about

after a different fashion than in the restoration of positive powers

from negative roots. That has to be learnt like everything else. With

the mere knowledge that the stalk of barley and infinitesimal

calculation fall under the principle of the negation of the negation,

I cannot cultivate more barley nor can I differentiate and integrate,

just as I cannot play the violin by virtue of a mere knowledge of the

laws of harmony. But it is evident that a merely childish negation of

the negation such as writing down a and erasing it, or by affirming

that a rose is a rose and that it is not a rose leads to no conclusion

other than to show the silliness of the people who undertake processes

so tedious. And yet metaphysicians would inform us that that is the

right way to carry out the negation of the negation.

Herr Duehring is therefore a mystifier when he asserts that the

negation of the negation was an analogy made by Hegel derived from

religion and built up on the story of the Fall and the Redemption. Men

thought dialectically a long time before they knew what the dialectic

really was, just as they spoke prose a long time before the term

"prose" was used. The law of the negation of the negation which

operates in history and which until it is once learned goes on in our

brains unconsciously to ourselves, was first clearly formulated by

Hegel, and if Herr Duehring desires to employ it in secret but cannot

stand the name, he should discover a better name. But if he insist on

expelling it from the processes of thought, he must first be good

enough to expel it from nature and from history, and find a system of

mathematics in which --a multiplied by --a does not give us + a^2 and

where the differential and integral calculus are both forbidden by

law.

_Conclusion._

In this short section Engels leaves the general discussion in order to

again pay his respects to the shortcomings and deficiencies of Herr

Duehring. The matter possesses no general interest for Engels merely

teases his opponent upon the magnificence of his claims and the

slightness of his performances.

PART II

CHAPTER VIII

POLITICAL ECONOMY

_I. Objects and Methods._

Political economy is, in the widest sense, the science of the laws

controlling the production and exchange of the material necessities of

life in human society. Production and exchange are two entirely

different functions. Production may exist without exchange,

exchange--since there can only be exchange of products--cannot exist

without production. Each of the two social functions is controlled by

entirely different external influences and thus has, generally

speaking, its own peculiar laws. But on the other hand they become so

mutually involved at a given time and react one upon the other that

they might be designated the abscisses and ordinates of the economic

curve.

The conditions under which men produce and exchange develop from land

to land, and in the same land from generation to generation. Political

economy cannot be the same for all lands and for all historical

epochs. From the bow and arrow, from the stone knife and the

exceptional and occasional trading intercourse of the barbarian to the

steam engine with its thousands of horse-power, to the mechanical

weaving machine, to the railway and the Bank of England is a

tremendous leap. The Patagonians do not have production on a large

scale and world-commerce any more than they have swindling or

bankruptcy. Anyone who should attempt to apply the same laws of

political economy to Patagonia as to present-day England would only

succeed in producing stupid commonplaces. Political economy is thus

really a historical science. It is engaged with historical material,

that is, material which is always in course of development. At the

close of this investigation it can, for the first time, show the few

(especially as regards production and exchange) general laws which

apply universally. In this way it is made evident that the laws which

are common to certain methods of production or forms of exchange are

common to all historical periods in which these methods of production

and forms of exchange are the same. Thus for example with the

introduction of specie, there came into being a series of laws which

holds good for all lands and historical epochs in which specie is a

means of exchange.

The method of distributing the product is in accordance with the

method of production and exchange of a given society at a given time.

In the tribal or village community with communal ownership of land, of

which there are obvious survivals in the history of all civilized

peoples, there is practically an equal distribution; where a greater

inequality of distribution of the product has been introduced among

the members of a society, it is a sign of the coming dissolution of

the community--large and small farming have very different modes of

distribution according to the historical circumstances from which they

have developed. But it is apparent that large farming requires a

different mode of distribution than small farming; that the large

farming shows the existence of class antagonism--slave-holders and

slaves, landlords and tenants, capitalists and wage workers,--but

that, on the contrary, in small farming, class distinction does not

arise from the farming operations of separate individuals but from the

mere beginnings of farming on a large scale. The introduction and

development of the use of gold into a country where formerly exchange

of actual goods was the exclusive or general practice, is closely

associated with a slow or rapid revolution of the mode of distribution

hitherto prevailing, and to such an extent that inequality of

distribution among individuals and, so, antagonism between rich and

poor becomes more and more apparent. Local gild hand-production as it

prevailed in the Middle Ages made great capitalists and life-long

wage-workers just as impossible as the great modern industry, the

credit system of to-day, and form of exchange, corresponding with the

development of these, free competition, render them inevitable.

With the difference in distribution however class differences are

introduced. Society becomes divided into upper and lower classes, into

plunderers and plundered, into master and servant classes, and the

state which the original groups composed of societies claiming the

same ancestry only regarded as a means of protection of the common

interests (remnants of which remain in the Orient, e.g.) and against

foreign force, takes upon itself the duty of maintaining the economic

and political supremacy of the dominant class against the dominated

class by means of force.

So distribution is not a mere passive witness of production and

exchange; it has an immediate influence on both. Every new method of

production and form of exchange is impeded, not only through the old

forms and their particular forms of political development, but also

through the old method of distribution. It can only bring about its own

method of distribution as the result of long conflict. But just in

proportion as a given method of production and exchange is built up and

develops, distribution all the more rapidly reaches a point where it

outstrips its predecessor and where it comes into collision with the

system of production and exchange existing up to that time. The old

tribal communistic forms of which we have already spoken may last

thousands of years, as is seen in the case of the Indians and Slavs of

to-day, until intercourse with the outside world develops causes of

disruption within them as a conclusion of which their dissolution comes

about. Modern capitalistic production on the other hand which is hardly

three hundred years old and which first became dominant with the

introduction of the greater industry about one hundred years ago, has,

in this short time, developed antagonisms in distribution--concentration

of capital on the one hand in the possession of a few persons and, on

the other, concentration of propertyless masses in the great

cities--which must of necessity bring it to an end.

The connection between the form of distribution and the material

economic conditions of a society is so much in the nature of things

that it is generally reflected in the popular instinct. As long as a

method of production is in the course of development, even those whose

interests are against it, who are getting the worst of the particular

method of production, are highly satisfied. It was just so with the

English working class at the introduction of the greater industry. As

long as this method of production remained the normal social method,

satisfaction with the methods of distribution was, on the whole,

prevalent; and when a protest against it rose even in the bosom of the

dominant class itself (Saint-Simon, Fourier, Owen) it found at first

practically no sympathy among the masses of the exploited. But

directly the method of production has travelled a good portion of its

upward progress, when half of its life was over, when its destiny was

in a great measure accomplished and its successor was knocking at the

door--then for the first time the ever increasingly unequal

distribution appeared as unjust. Then was the first appeal made from

actual facts to so-called eternal justice. This appeal to morality and

justice does not bring us a step further scientifically. Economic

science can find no grounds of proof in moral indignation, however

justifiable, but merely a symptom. Its task is to show the newly

developing social wrongs as the necessary results of existing methods

of production and, at the same time, as signs of its approaching

dissolution, and to point out, amid the break up of the existing

economic system, the elements of the new organization of production

and exchange which will abolish those social wrongs. The feeling

stirred up by the poets whether in the picturing of these social

wrongs or by attack upon them or, on the other hand, by denial of them

and the glorification of harmony in the interests of the dominant

class, is quite timely, but its slight value as furnishing proof for a

given period is shown by the fact that one finds an abundance of it in

every epoch.

Political economy, as the science of the conditions and forms under

which various human societies have produced and exchanged and

according to which they have distributed the products of their

labor,--political economy, in this broad sense, has yet to be planned

for the first time. All that we have so far of political economic

science is almost entirely limited to the beginning and development of

the capitalistic mode of production. It begins with the genesis and

growth of the capitalistic mode of production, and exchange,

recognises the necessity of the disappearance of these by means of the

capitalistic forms, then develops the laws of the capitalistic

methods of production and their corresponding forms of exchange on the

positive side, that is on the side on which they further the objects

of society, as a whole and closes with the socialist criticism of the

capitalistic methods of production, that is, with the exhibition of

its laws on the negative side, with the proof that this method of

production arrives at the point, by its own development, where it is

no longer possible. This criticism proves that the capitalistic

methods of production and exchange constitute more and more an

insufferable fetter upon production itself. The mode of distribution

which is necessarily associated with this form of production has

brought about a class condition which grows daily more unbearable. It

has produced the daily sharpening antagonism between the continually

less numerous but constantly richer capitalists and the more numerous,

but on the whole, continually poorer propertyless wage-workers.

Finally the tremendous productive forces of the capitalistic methods

of production, which are practically unlimited, are only awaiting

their seizure at the hands of an organized co-operative society to

secure for all the members of that society the means of existence and

the fuller development of their faculties in an ever increasing

degree.

In order to fully accomplish this criticism of the bourgeois economy

acquaintance with the capitalistic form of production of exchange and

of distribution was not enough. Preceding forms and others, existing

side by side with the capitalistic mode in a few highly developed

countries, had to be examined and compared at least in their chief

features. Such an investigation and comparision has been undertaken as

a whole by Marx alone and we consider that this investigation

practically sums up all that has been established respecting

theoretical economy prior to that of the bourgeois.

While political economy in a narrow sense arose in the minds of a few

geniuses of the seventeenth century, it is, in its positive

formulation by the physiocrats and Adam Smith, substantially a child

of the eighteenth century, and expresses itself in the acquisitions of

the great contemporary French philosophers with all the excellencies

and defects of that time. What we have said of the French philosophers

applies also to the economists of that day. The new science was with

them not the expression of the condition and needs of the time but the

expression of eternal reason; the laws of production and exchange

discovered by them were not the laws of a given historical form of

those facts but were eternal natural laws; they derived them from the

nature of man. But this man, seen clearly, was a burgher of the Middle

Ages on the high road to becoming a modern bourgeois, and his nature

consisted in this that he had to manufacture commodities and carry on

his trade according to the given historical conditions of that period.

(Herr Duehring having applied the two man theory to political economic

conditions and having decided that such conditions are unjust, upon

which conclusion he bases his revolutionary attitude, Engels remarks

as follows):

"If we have no better security for the revolution in the present

methods of distribution of the products of labor with all their crying

antagonisms of misery and luxury, of poverty and ostentation, than the

consciousness that this method of distribution is unjust and that

justice must finally prevail, we should be in evil plight and would

have to stay there a long time. The mystics of the Middle Ages who

dreamed of an approaching thousand years kingdom of righteousness had

the consciousness of the injustice of class antagonisms. At the

beginning of modern history three hundred years ago, Thomas Muenzer

shouted it aloud to all the world. In the English and French bourgeois

revolutions the same cry was heard and died away ineffectually. And if

the same cry, after the formation of class antagonisms and class

distinctions left the working, suffering classes cold until 1830, if

it now takes hold of one land after another with the same results and

the same intensity, in proportion as the greater industry has

developed in the individual countries if, in one generation, it has

acquired a force which defies all the powers opposed to it and can be

sure of victory in the near future--how comes it about? From this,

that the greater industry has created the modern proletariat, a class,

which for the first time in history can set about the abolition not of

this or that particular class organization or of this or that

particular class privilege but of classes in general, and it is in the

position that it must carry out this line of action on the penalty of

sinking to the Chinese coolie level. And that the same greater

industry has on the other hand produced a class which is in possession

of all the tools of production and the means of life but in every

period of prosperity (Schwindelperiode) and in each succeeding panic

shows that it is incapable of controlling in the future the growing

productive forces; a class under whose leadership society runs

headlong to ruin like a locomotive whose closed safety valve the

engine driver is too weak to open. In other words it has come about

that the productive forces of the modern capitalistic mode of

production as well as the system of distribution based upon it are in

glaring contradiction to the mode of production itself and to such a

degree that a revolution in the modes of production and distribution

must take place which will abolish all class differences or the whole

of modern society will fall. It is in these actual material facts,

which are necessarily becoming more and more evident to the exploited

proletariat, that the confidence in the victory of modern socialism

finds its foundation and not in this or that bookworm's notions of

justice and injustice.

_II. The Force Theory._

(Herr Duehring argues that the causes of class subjection are to be

sought in political conditions and that political force is the

primary, and economic conditions merely the secondary, cause of class

distinctions Engels makes the following reply to these arguments):

* * * * *

This is Herr Duehring's theory. It is set out, decreed so to say, here

and in several other places. But we cannot find the slightest attempt

to prove it or to disprove the opposite theory in the three thick

volumes. Moreover if there was an abundance of proof we should get

none from Herr Duehring, for the matter is proven by the famous fall

of man in that Robinson Crusoe made Friday his slave. That was an act

of force and so a political act. And this slavery constitutes the

point of departure and fundamental fact of history up to the present

time and inoculates the heirs of sin with injustice so certainly that

only lately it has become milder and "transformed into the more

indirect forms of economic dependency." Since the whole of the

remaining actual "force-possession" rests upon this original

enslavement, it is clear that all economic phenomena can be explained

from original political causes, that is from force. And whoever is not

satisfied with this is a secret reactionary.

Let us first remark that one has to be as much in love with himself as

Herr Duehring is to consider this idea as "original" since it is not

so by any means. The idea that the political doings of monarch and

states are decisive events in history is as old as the writing of

history itself and is the reason why we are so little aware of the

real and quietly developing progress of the peoples which goes on

behind these noisy and spectacular activities. This idea has dominated

the whole of history in the past and got its first shock at the hands

of the French bourgeois historians of the Restoration period.

To proceed, let us grant for the present that Herr Duehring is correct

when he says that all history up to now has been the slavery of man by

men, and we are still a long way from the root of the matter. Let us

ask now how it was that Robinson came to enslave Friday. Was it merely

for the pleasure of doing so? Surely not. On the contrary we are

informed that Friday "was subjugated as a slave or mere tool for

economic service and was kept in subjection merely as a tool."

Robinson only enslaved Friday that he might work for the benefit of

Robinson. And how could Robinson derive benefit from the labor of

Friday? Only by virtue of the fact that Friday produced more means of

livelihood by his labor than Robinson had to give him to keep him able

to work. Robinson has therefore, contrary to Herr Duehring's pretty

prescription, made, by the enslavement of Friday, a political

organization, not just because he wanted to, but simply as a means of

providing himself with food, and he ought to see how little he has in

common with his lord and master Herr Duehring.

The childish example therefore which Herr Duehring has discovered in

order to show that force is the "historical fundamental" proves that

force is only a means to further an economic interest, and in history

the economic side is likewise more fundamental than the political. The

example therefore proves just the opposite of what it ought to prove.

And, as with Robinson and Friday, so it is also with all the examples

of lordship and slavery up to now. Slavery, to use Duehring's own

elegant expression, always implies a means for supplying sustenance

(using the term in its broadest sense) and never merely implies a

political organization which has been developed by its own will. One

would have to be a Herr Duehring to venture to call taxes only a

secondary feature of government, or, to say that the political

groupings of the dominant bourgeois of to-day and the subjugated

proletariat are purely voluntary and not made to serve the material

interests of the bourgeois, namely profit making and the accumulation

of capital.

Let us give our attention again to our two men. Robinson "sword in

hand" makes Friday his slave. But to do this Robinson uses something

else besides his sword. A slave is not made by that means solely. In

order to be able to keep a slave one has to be superior to him in two

respects, one must first have control over the tools and objects of

labor of the slave and over his means of subsistence also. Therefore,

before slavery is possible, a certain point in production has to be

reached and a certain degree of inequality in distribution attained.

And when slave labor becomes the dominant mode of production of an

entire society a higher development of the powers of production, of

trade and of wealth, accumulation occurs. In early tribal communities

which had common ownership of the soil, slavery is either nonexistent

or its role is very subordinate. So it was at first in Rome, as a

state of farmers, but when Rome became the capital city of the world

and the soil of Italy came more and more to be owned by a numerically

small class of enormously wealthy property owners, the population of

farmers perished in front of the slave population. When at the time

of the Persian War, the number of slaves in Corinth was 460,000, and

in Aegina 470,000, and there were ten slaves to every freeman in the

population, the explanation must be sought in something other than

force; there were a highly developed art and handicraft and foreign

commerce. Slavery in the United States of America was much less due to

force than to the English cotton industry; where there was not cotton

grown or where slaves were not raised, as in the border states, for

the cotton producing states, it perished of its own accord and without

any employment of force simply because it did not pay.

When Herr Duehring therefore calls the property of the present day

property resting on force and designates it as "that form of

domination which does not merely signify the exclusion of one's fellow

beings from the use of the natural means of sustenance, but implies in

addition that the subjection of man has lain at the foundation of

human slavery" he puts the matter upside down. The subjection of

humanity to slavery in all its forms means the control by the master

of the means of labor by virtue of which alone he can employ his

slaves upon them and the disposal of the means of livelihood by which

he can keep his slaves alive. In all cases therefore it implies a

certain power of possession which transcends the ordinary? How did

this arise? Occasionally it is clear that it was seized and can

therefore be said to rest upon force but this is by no means

essential. It can be got by labor, be robbed, be obtained by trade, or

taken by fraud. It must be worked for generally before it can be

stolen.

Private property does not historically come into existence by any

means as a rule as the product of robbery and violence. On the

contrary. It arises from the limitation of certain things in the

early tribal communes. It develops in the first place within the tribe

and afterwards in exchange with peoples outside of the tribe in the

form of wares. In proportion as the products of the tribe assume the

form of commodities, i.e., the less they are produced for the use of

the producer and the more for the purpose of exchange, the exchange

destroys the original form of distribution in the commune itself, and

the more unequal become the shares of the individual members of the

community with respect to material possessions. So the old communal

ownership of land becomes more and more invaded, the communal property

is rapidly converted into a village of farmers, each tilling his own

piece of ground. Oriental despotism and the changing government of

conquering nomads had no power to alter the old form of communal

ownership for a thousand years. But the continual destruction of the

primitive domestic industry through the competition of the products of

the great industry is bringing about its dissolution. The thing has

little to do with force as has lately appeared in the matter of the

division of the communal property of the feudal societies on the

Moselle and in Hochwald. The peasants are finding the substitution of

individual for communal holdings to their interests. Even the growth

of a primitive aristocracy as among the Celts, the Germans, and in

Mesopotamia, is a result of the communal ownership of landed property,

and does not depend upon force in the slightest degree but upon free

will and custom. Especially where private property arises it appears

as the result of a change in the methods of production and exchange in

the interests of the increase of production and the development of

commerce and therefore arises from economic causes. Force plays no

role in this. It is clear that the institution of private property

must have already existed before the robber is able to possess himself

of other people's goods and that force may change the possession but

cannot alter private property as such.

But to explain the "subjection of men to slavery" in its modern form,

in wage-labor, we can make no use of either force or property acquired

by force. We have already mentioned the part which the transformation

of the products of labor into commodities, their production not for

use alone, but for exchange, plays in the destruction of the primitive

communal property and therefore in the bringing into existence

directly or indirectly the universality of private property. But Marx

has proved in his "Capital"--and Herr Duehring does not venture to

intrude upon the matter--that at a certain stage in economic

development the production of commodities is transformed into

capitalistic production and that at this point "the law of

appropriation resting upon the production and circulation of

commodities, the law of private property, by its own inevitable

dialectic becomes changed into its opposite, the exchange of

equivalents, which appeared as its original mode of operation, but has

now become so twisted that there is only an appearance of exchange

since. In the first place, the portion of capital exchanged for

labor-force is itself only a portion of the product of another's labor

taken without an equivalent, and in the second place, it is not only

supplied by its producers, the workers, but it must be supplied also

with a new surplus. Originally property seemed to us to be established

on labor only--property now appears (as a conclusion of the Marxian

argument), on the side of the capitalist, as the right to unpaid labor

and, on the side of the workingman, as an impossibility, the ownership

of his own product. The difference between property and labor is the

result of a law which apparently proceeded from their identity." In

other words if we exclude the possibility of force, robbery, and

cheating absolutely, if we take the position that all private property

originally depended upon the personal labor of its possessor and that

equivalents are always exchanged we nevertheless come, in the course

of the development of production and exchange, of necessity, to the

modern capitalistic methods of production, to the monopolisation of

the means of production and livelihood in the hands of a single class

few in numbers, to the degradation of the other consisting of the

immense majority of producers to the position of propertyless

proletarians, to the periodical alternations of swindling operations

and trade crises and to the whole of the present anarchy in

production. The entire result rests on purely economic grounds without

robbery, force, or any intervention of politics or the government

being necessary. Property resting on force becomes a mere phrase which

merely serves to obscure the understanding of the real development of

things.

This course, historically expressed, is the story of the development

of the bourgeoisie. If "political conditions are the decisive causes

of economic conditions," the modern bourgeoisie would necessarily not

have progressed as the result of a fight with feudalism, but would be

the darling child of its womb. Everybody knows that the opposite is

the case. The bourgeoisie, originally bound to pay feudal dues to the

dominant feudal nobility, recruited from bond slaves and thralls, in a

subject state, has, in the course of its conflict with the nobility

captured position after position, and finally has come into possession

of the power in civilized countries. In France it directly attacked

the nobility, in England it made the aristocracy more and more

bourgeois and finally incorporated it with itself as a sort of

ornament. And how did this come about? Entirely through the

transformation of economic conditions which was sooner or later

followed either by the voluntary or compulsory transformation of

political conditions. The fight of the bourgeoisie against the feudal

nobility is the fight of the city against the country, of industry

against landlordism, of economy based on money against economy based

on natural products. The distinctive weapons of the bourgeois in this

fight were those which came into existence through the development of

increasing economic force by reason of the growth at first of hand

manufacture and afterwards machine-manufacture and through the

extension of trade. During the whole of this conflict the political

power was in the hands of the nobility, with the exception of a period

when the king employed the bourgeoisie against the nobility in order

to hold one in check by means of the other. From the very moment,

however, in which the bourgeoisie still deprived of political power

began to be dangerous because of the development of its economic power

the monarchy again turned to the nobility and thereby brought about

the revolution of the bourgeois first in England and then in France.

The political conditions in France remained unaltered until the

economic conditions outgrew them. In politics the noble was

everything, the bourgeois nothing. As a social factor the bourgeoisie

was of the highest importance while the nobility had abandoned all its

social functions and yet pocketed revenues, social services which it

did not any longer perform. Even this is not sufficient. Bourgeois

society was, as far as the whole matter of production is concerned,

tied and bound in the political feudal forms of the Middle Ages, which

this production, not only as regards manufacture but as regards

handwork also had long transcended amid all the thousandfold

gild-privileges and local and provincial tax impositions which had

become mere obstacles and fetters to production. The bourgeois

revolution put an end to them. But the economic condition did not, as

Herr Duehring would imply, forthwith adapt itself to the political

circumstances,--that the king and the nobility spent a long time in

trying to effect--but it threw all the mouldy old political rubbish

aside and shaped new political conditions in which the new economic

conditions might come into existence and develop. And it has developed

splendidly in this suitable political and legal atmosphere, so

splendidly that the bourgeoisie is now not very far from the position

which the nobility occupied in 1789. It is becoming more and more not

alone a social superfluity but a social impediment. It takes an ever

diminishing part in the work of production and becomes more and more,

as the noble did, a mere revenue consuming class. And this revolution

in its position and the creation of a new class, that of the

proletariat, came about without any force-nonsense but by purely

economic means. Further more, it has by no means accomplished it by

its own willful act. On the other hand it has accomplished itself

irresistibly against the wish and intentions of the bourgeoisie. Its

own productive forces have taken the management of affairs and are

driving modern bourgeois society to the necessity of revolution or

destruction. And if the bourgeoisie now appeals to force to ward off

the ruin arising from the decrepit economic condition it proves

thereby that it suffers from the same error as Herr Duehring, in that

it thinks that "political conditions are the distinctive causes of

economic condition" and that by the use of the prime factor of mere

political force it can manufacture the secondary factor of economic

conditions. It thinks that it can shape economic conditions and their

inevitable development, and therefore eliminate the economic effects

of the steam engine, and the modern industry which has proceeded from

it. It thinks that it can abolish the world commerce and the bank

credit development of to-day from the universe by means of Krupp guns

and Mauser rifles.

_III. Force Theory (Continued)._

Let us look at this omnipotent "force" of Herr Duehring a little more

closely. Robinson enslaved Friday "sword in hand." How did he get the

sword? Robinson's imaginary island never grew swords on trees and some

answer to this question is due from Herr Duehring. We might just as

well assume that as Robinson became possessed of a sword so, one fine

morning, Friday appeared with a loaded revolver in his hand. Thereupon

the "force" is entirely reversed. Friday takes command and Robinson

must submit. We beg pardon of the reader for returning to the story of

Robinson Crusoe, which is more appropriate to the nursery than to an

economic discussion, but what can we do about it? We are compelled to

pursue Herr Duehring's axiomatic scientific methods and it is not our

fault if we always find ourselves in the realms of childishness. The

revolver then triumphs over the sword and it should be apparent even

to the maker of childish axioms that superior force is no mere act of

the will but requires very real preliminary conditions for the

carrying out of its purposes, especially mechanical instruments, the

more highly developed of which have the superiority over the less

highly developed. Furthermore these tools must be produced, whence it

appears that the producer of the more highly developed tool of force,

commonly called weapon, triumphs over the producer of the less highly

developed tool. In a word, the triumph of force depends upon the

production of weapons, therefore upon economic power, on economic

conditions, on the ability to organize actual material instruments.

Force at the present day implies the army and the navy, and the two of

them cost, to our sorrow, a heap of money. But force cannot make

money, on the contrary it gets away very fast with what is made, and

it does not make good use of it as we have just discovered painfully

with respect to the French indemnity. Money must therefore finally be

provided by means of economic production, force is thus again limited

by the economic conditions which shape the means of making and

maintaining the instruments of production. But that is not all by any

means. Nothing is more dependent upon economic conditions than armies

and fleets. Arming, concentration, organization, tactics, strategy,

depend before anything else upon the degree of development in

production and transportation. In the trade of war the free

inventiveness of liberal-minded generals has never worked a

revolution, but the discovery of better weapons and the change in

military equipment have never failed to do so. The inventiveness of

the general under the most favorable conditions finds its limitations

in the adaptation of methods of warfare to the new weapons and the new

soldiers.

At the beginning of the fourteenth century gunpowder was brought from

the Arabs to Western Europe and, as every schoolboy knows, entirely

revolutionized warfare. The introduction of gunpowder and firearms was

however by no means an act of force but an industrial and therefore

economic advance. Industry is still industry whether its object in

the creation or the destruction of material things. The introduction

of firearms not only produced a revolution in the methods of warfare

but also in the relations of master and subject. Trade and money are

concomitants of gunpowder and firearms and these former imply the

bourgeoisie. Firearms from the first were bourgeois instruments of

warfare employed on behalf of the rising monarchy against the feudal

nobility. The hitherto unassailable stone castles of the nobles

submitted to the cannon of the burghers, the fire of their guns

pierced the mail armor of the knights. The supremacy of the nobility

fell with the heavily armed cavalry of the nobility. With the

development of the bourgeoisie, infantry and artillery became more and

more the important arms of the service and because of artillery the

trade of war had to create another industrial subdivision, to-wit,

engineering.

The development of firearms proceeded very slowly. Shooting remained

clumsy and small arms were ineffective in spite of many individual

inventions. Three hundred years elapsed before a musket was produced

which sufficed for the arming of a complete infantry. First at the

beginning of the eighteenth century, a musket with a bayonet attached,

which discharged a stone superseded the pike as an infantry weapon.

The infantry of that day was exceedingly unreliable, only kept

together by physical force, composed of the basest elements of

society, frequently made up of men picked up by the press gang and

prisoners of war intermingled with soldiers recruited by the various

princes. The only fighting formation in which these soldiers could be

made to use the new weapon was the linear tactic, which reached its

highest development under Frederick II. The whole infantry of an army

was drawn up in a very long hollow square three files deep and

advanced in battle array en masse. It was usually permitted to one of

the two wings to be a little in advance or a little in the rear. This

helpless body could only advance and keep its formation on perfectly

level ground and then only at a slow marching time (seventy-five steps

to the minute) a change of formation during the fight was impossible

and victory or defeat was determined rapidly at a stroke as soon as

the infantry came under fire.

These helpless lines in the American Revolutionary War came into

collision with the rebel troops, which certainly could not drill but

could shoot so much the better in that they were fighting for their

own interests and therefore did not desert like the enlisted soldiers.

These did not, like the English, deploy in massed bodies on the open

field, but in rapidly moving bodies of sharpshooters in the thick

woods. The organised lines were here powerless and had to contend

against invisible and unapproachable foes. The sharpshooters thereupon

were brought into existence as a part of the army organization--a new

method of fighting arising from a change in the military material.

What the American Revolution began the French completed in the

military realm. To the drilled troops of the Coalition the French

Revolution opposed soldiers who were badly drilled but who constituted

large masses, the product of the whole nation. Some means had to be

discovered of protecting Paris with these masses. That could not be

done without victory in the open field. A mere musketry engagement

would not suffice, a form would have to be discovered by which the

masses could be utilized and this was found in the column. The column

formation allowed slightly drilled troops to keep better order and by

means of a better marching speed (one hundred steps to the minute)

allowed it to break through the stiff old-fashioned line arrangement.

It was possible by this formation to fight in country unsuitable to

the line formation, to mass troops in places suitable, to associate

scattered sharpshooters with the columns, to keep back, occupy and

wear the lines of the enemy, until the decisive movement came when a

charge could be made by the troops held in reserve. This new method of

combining riflemen and columns and making a complete army corps

consisting of all arms, which was fully developed on its tactical and

strategic side by Napoleon, was only rendered possible by the change

in military material brought about by the French Revolution. There

were still two very important technical preliminaries, first the

making of light carriages for field pieces which were constructed by

Gribevaul by means of which alone the required quick advance was

rendered possible, and making the army rifle a more precise weapon by

adapting to it some of the features of the hunting rifle. Without

these improvements military sharpshooting would have been impossible.

The revolutionary method of arming the entire population was subjected

to certain limitations and chiefly as regards the excusing of the well

to do, and in this form became common to most of the great continental

countries. Prussia alone sought by its militia system to make the

entire force of its people available for military purposes. Prussia

was the first state to provide its entire infantry with the latest

weapons, and to place officers in the rear, since between 1830 and

1860 trained officers leading their troops had played an unimportant

part. The results of 1866 were largely due to these innovations.

In the Franco Prussian War two armies came into contact both of which

had their officers in the rear and which both used substantially the

same tactics as in the time of the old smooth bore flintlocks. The

Prussians however by the introduction of company columns had made an

attempt to discover a method of fighting more suitable to the new

system of arming. But on the 18th of August at St. Privat the Prussian

guard which employed the company column formation lost the most part

of five regiments, over a third of its strength in two hours (176

officers and 5114 men) after which the company column form of battle

order came in for no less criticism than the battalion column form and

the line formation. Every attempt to oppose a solid formation to the

fire of the enemy was thereafter abandoned. The battle was thereafter,

on the German side, carried on by dense swarms of riflemen into which

the columns dissolved under the fire of the enemy spontaneously,

without orders from the superior officers, and this was, in fact, the

only possible method of advance under fire. The private soldier was

again cleverer than his officer; he had discovered the only form of

fighting formation, and set himself to follow it in spite of the

resistance of his leaders.

In the Franco-German war there is a point of departure of entirely

different significance from all preceding wars. In the first place the

weapons are now so complete that a new revolutionary departure in this

respect is no longer possible. When you have cannon with which you can

decimate a battalion as far as your eye can make it out, and when you

have rifles by which you can aim at individuals, and which take less

time to load than to aim, all further advances as far as battle in the

field goes are immaterial. The era of progress on this side is

substantially closed. In the second place, however, this war has

induced all the great states of the continent to adopt the highly

developed Prussian militia system and thus to take up a military

burden which will ruin them in a few years. The army has become the

main object of the state, it has become an object in itself. The

people only exist to furnish and maintain soldiers. Militarism

dominates and devours Europe. But this militarism has in it the seeds

of its own destruction. The competition of the various states with

each other necessitates the spending of more money every year on the

army, the fleet, weapons of destruction, etc., and thus accelerates

financial breakdown. On the other hand, with the increasingly rigid

military service, the whole people becomes familiar with the use of

military weapons. It therefore becomes able at some time to impose its

will upon the dominating military authority. And this time arrives as

soon as the mass of the people--country and city workers and

farmers--has the will. At this point the army of the classes becomes

the army of the masses, the machine refuses to do the work, militarism

goes under in the dialectic of its own development. What the bourgeois

democrats of 1848 could not accomplish, just because they were

bourgeois and not proletarian, namely the endowment of the laboring

masses with a will, the content of which corresponded with their class

condition, socialism will certainly accomplish. And that means the

destruction of militarism and with it of all standing armies

absolutely and entirely.

That is the moral of our history of modern infantry. The second moral

which brings us back to Herr Duehring is that the entire organization

and methods of warfare of modern armies and, with them, victory and

defeat, are dependent upon material things, that is upon economic

conditions, upon soldier material and upon weapon material and

therefore upon the quality of a population and upon technique. Only a

hunting people like the Americans could rediscover the sharpshooter.

Now the Yankees of the old States have, from purely economic causes,

become transformed into farmers, industrialists, sailors and

merchants, who no longer shoot in the primeval forests and on that

account have become all the more successful in the field of

speculation where they have developed into colossal appropriators.

Only a Revolution like the French which emancipated the burghers and

still more the peasants could discover the simultaneously massed

armies and free advance by which they overcame the stiff old line

formation, the military product of the absolutism against which they

fought. And as for the advances in technique as soon as they were

applicable and were applied, forthwith changes, nay revolutions, in

the methods of warfare were at once made, often against the will of

the military leaders as we have seen over and over again to be the

case. A diligent subaltern could explain to Herr Duehring how at the

present day the making of war is dependent upon the productivity and

means of communication of the back country as well as of the theatre

of war. In short, economic conditions and means of power are always

the things which help "force" to victory, and without them "force"

comes to an end. So that he who would reform the art of war according

to the axioms of Herr Duehring would only get a flogging for his

pains.

If we go from the land to the sea we shall discover a complete

revolution, even within the last twenty years. The warship of the

Crimean War was the wooden three decker, with from sixty to a hundred

guns, which depended upon its sailing power and had only a weak

auxiliary steam engine. It carried in general thirty-two pounders of

about sixty hundred weight and only a few sixty-eight pounders of

ninety-five hundred weight. At the end of the war ironclad floating

batteries were used, clumsy and slow but impregnable to the artillery

of that time. Very soon iron plates were placed on the warships, at

first thin, four inches thickness of iron was then considered to

constitute a remarkably great thickness. But the progress in artillery

soon discounted the thickness of armour, for every addition to the

armour there was a new and more powerful artillery which pierced it

with the greatest ease. So now we have warships with ten, twelve,

fourteen, twenty-four inches of armour plate (the Italians are going

to build a warship with armourplate three feet thick) on the one hand

and on the other hand guns which reach to a hundred tons and which

hurl projectiles amounting to two thousand pounds in weight to unheard

of distances. The modern war vessel is a rapid travelling armoured

screw steamer of eight to ten thousand tons and of from six to eight

thousand horse power provided with turrets and four or six very

powerful big guns, together with a ram at the bow below the water line

for the purpose of destroying the ship of the enemy. It is a colossal

machine in which steam not only furnishes the driving power but also

steers, raises the anchor, moves the towers, aims and loads the guns,

works the pumps, takes in and lowers the boats, which are frequently

steamers, and so forth. And the contest between the armour plate and

the projectile is so far from having been settled that a ship is

to-day practically obsolete as soon as it has left the ways. The

modern warship is not only a product of modern industry but a

masterpiece, a product of the dissipation of wealth. The country in

which the greater industry has developed the most completely has a

monopoly of shipbuilding. All the Turkish, almost all the Russian and

the greater part of the German warships are built in England. Armour

plate of the best type is made almost exclusively in Germany. Of the

three iron foundries which are alone in the position to turn out the

heaviest artillery, two of them, Woolwich and Elswick, are in England,

the third Krupp's is in Germany. Here it may be seen that the pure

political power which Herr Duehring maintains to be the original

reason for economic conditions is on the contrary inseparable from

economic conditions and that not only the existence but the very

management of the tool of force on the sea, the warship, is in itself

a branch of modern industry. And that this is so gives nobody more

trouble than just that force, the state, which has now to pay more for

one ship than it had formerly for a small fleet and sees that these

expensive ships are obsolete as soon as they are launched. And the

state is just as much upset as Herr Duehring would be over the fact

that the controller of the economic force of the ship, the engineer,

is a much more important person than the man of pure force, the

captain. On the other hand we have no further grounds for annoyance

when we see that how as a result of this contest between armour plate

and projectile the battle ship has arrived at the point when it is as

expensive as it is unfit for fighting and that this contest shows the

dialectic law of progress at work in naval warfare according to which

militarism like every other historical phenomenon must come to an end

as a result of its own development.

We can thus see as plain as noonday that it is not true that "the

original reason must be sought in pure political force and not in

indirect economic force." Quite the contrary. Economic force is the

control of the power of the great industry. Political force in naval

matters which is dependent upon modern ships of war is by no means

"pure force" but is involved in economic force, in the advanced

development of metallurgy, in the mastery of historical technique and

the possession of rich coal-fields.

_IV. Force Theory (Conclusion)._

(Herr Duehring makes an argument which is briefly summarised by Engels

as follows and which may be said to involve the notion that the

monopolization of land is the cause of human slavery and is the

product of force. Engels proceeds):

Thesis--The domination of nature by man is the reason of the

domination of man by man.

Proof--The existence of landlordism on a large scale cannot be carried

on anywhere except by means of slavery.

Proof of proof--Landlordism on a large scale cannot exist without

slavery because the great landlord with his own family without the

help of slaves can only cultivate a small piece of his property.

Therefore, in order to show that man cannot subdue nature without the

subjugation of his fellowman, Herr Duehring transforms "nature"

forthwith into "private ownership of large tracts of land" and this

indefinite private ownership into the ownership exercised by a great

landlord, who naturally cannot cultivate his land without slaves.

In the first place the domination of nature and the cultivation of

private landed property do not imply the same thing. The domination of

nature in industrial affairs is displayed in a manner altogether

different from that in agricultural affairs, for these latter are

always at the mercy of the climate instead of being supreme over the

climate.

In the second place if we limit ourselves to the exploitation of

private property in land in large amounts we come to the question as

to whom the land belongs. We find that in the beginnings of civilised

peoples the land was not owned by great landlords but was held in

common by tribal and village communities. From India to Ireland the

exploitation of land property in large tracts has proceeded from the

tribal and village communal ownership which was the original form.

Sometimes the land was cultivated in common for the benefit of the

common members, sometimes in separate pieces, parcelled by the

community to separate families from time to time with wood and willow

land retained for communal use.

It is pure imagination on the part of Herr Duehring to declare that

the exploitation of landed property is responsible for the existence

of master and servant. Who is the owner of private landed property in

the entire Orient where the land is possessed by the community or the

State and the word landlord is not to be found in the language? The

Turks first introduced a species of feudalism into the lands which

they conquered. The Greeks in heroic times had a classified system of

rank which itself bore witness to a long unknown preceding history,

but the land was then cultivated by an independent peasantry. The

large possessions of the nobles and leaders of the tribes were the

exception and had no permanence. Italy was originally cultivated by

small peasant farmers; when in the latter days of the Roman Republic

the great holdings, the _latifundia_ destroyed the small

farmer-holdings, cattle raising was substituted for agriculture, and

as Pliny points out Italy was ruined (_latifundia Italiam perdidere_).

In the whole of Europe during the Middle Ages small farming was the

rule and it is very appropriate to the above discussion to note what

tasks these peasants were obliged to perform for the feudal lords. The

Frisians, lower Saxons, Flemings and people from the lower Rhine who

invaded the lands of the Slavs to the east of the Elbe and cultivated

them did so under very favorable terms of rent but by no means under a

species of slavery. In North America, by far the greatest amount of

the land is cultivated by the labor of free small farmers, while the

great landed proprietors of the South with their slaves and

extravagant farming methods destroyed the soil until the land ceased

to be productive and the cultivation of cotton travelled ever

Westward. In Australia and New Zealand the attempts to artificially

establish an agrarian aristocracy by the British government have

failed. In short, if we except the tropical and sub-tropical colonies,

in which the climate is prohibitive of agriculture by Europeans, it

seems that the idea of a great land holding class originally

dominating nature by means of the employment of slaves and serfs is a

pure product of the imagination. Things are quite otherwise. If one

goes to the older countries like Italy the land was not waste

originally but the transformation of the agricultural land cultivated

by the small farmers into cattle-land utterly ruined the country.

Latterly, for the first time since the growth in the intensity of the

population has increased the value of land and especially since the

progress in agriculture has made possible the reclamation of poor

lands, the greater landlordism has begun to obtain possession of waste

and pasture lands and has stolen the old communal lands of the

peasants in this country, as well in England as in Germany. And this

has not happened without a counter-poise. For every acre of common

land which the great landlords in England converted into arable land

they have made at least three acres of arable land in Scotland into

shooting preserves and mere places for the hunting of wild animals.

We have to consider the declaration of Herr Duehring to the effect

that the cultivation of large parcels of land has not come into

existence otherwise than through great landlords and their slaves, a

declaration which we have seen implies an entire ignorance of history.

We have now to see how far at different epochs the cultivation of the

soil has been carried on by means of slaves, as in the palmy days of

Greece, or by means of tenants, like the socage tenure, since the

Middle Ages, and then what has been the social function of the greater

landlordism at different periods of history.

If Herr Duehring means that the mastery of man by men as a preliminary

to the mastery of nature by man is a universal law, that our present

economic condition, the stage attained to-day in agriculture and

industry, is the result of a society which has developed itself in

class antagonisms, in mastership on the one hand and in slavery on the

other hand, he says something which is a mere commonplace since the

publication of the Communist Manifesto. We have thus to explain the

existence of these classes and when Herr Duehring has no further

explanation to give than "force" we are right back at the beginning

again. The mere fact that the subject and the plundered have always

been more numerous and that therefore the actual force has rested with

them is enough to show the stupidity of the entire force theory. We

have therefore still to explain the origin of master and subject

classes. They have come into being in two ways.