The Force Theory of Herr Eugene DühringChapters two, three and four of Part Two of Anti-Dühring "Political Economy" deal with Dühring's theory that political systems and power are PRIMARY and economic relations are SECONDARY-- both historically and in the present day. Engels says Dühring gives no evidence or arguments in favor of this theory (which he claims is ORIGINAL) but simply asserts it as a given. Engels says this is old hash and has been the way history has been seen since the beginning. The true history of mankind has actually taken place behind the scenes and is the real basis for the pompous doings of the kings and presidents, popes and generals that strut the stage and are memorialized in the history books. Dühring's idea that all the previous history of mankind is based on man's enslavement of man-- i.e., on force-- and that this is the only way we can explain it is exemplified by his example of Robinson Crusoe and Friday. Crusoe enslaves Friday. But why does he do this? Engels says "only in order that Friday should work for Crusoe's benefit." That is for an ECONOMIC MOTIVE. Dühring has reversed the true relation between political order and economic order and does not see "that force is only the means and that the aim is economic advantage." Slavery, by the way, the condition from which Dühring starts out his "political force is the basis of history" nonsense is itself the result of prior historical and economic developments. Slavery requires two preconditions: tools and material for the slave to work upon and a food supply to provide a basic subsistence for the slave. This means that a prior historical period in which distribution of social wealth has developed must have preceded the introduction of slavery. Engels gives as examples primitive societies with common land ownership where there was no slavery or it "played only a very subordinate role." This is also true of ancient Rome before it became an imperial power. Even in the US, Engels says, the cotton industry of England was more important than force in maintaining slavery in the South so that "in those districts where no cotton was grown or which, unlike the border states, did not breed slaves for the cotton growing states, it died out of itself without any force being used, simply because it did not pay." But wait a minute. Doesn't this sound right about the world we live in? Dühring says capitalist property today is the result of the use of force in the past and in fact all past property accumulations are also based on force (Rome, Egypt, etc.,) and force is, in Dühring's words, "that form of domination AT THE ROOT OF WHICH LIES not merely the exclusion of fellow-men from the use of the natural means of subsistence, but also... the subjection of man to make him do servile work." It sounds right. Big business and the oil giants use force to take over natural resources (Niger Delta, Iraq, the Amazon), they force masses of third world workers into sweat shops at low wages, etc. Why isn't Dühring right on? Well, Engels says he is not: "Private property by no means makes it appearance in history as the result of robbery [so much for 'property is theft'] or force. On the contrary, it already existed... in the ancient primitive communes of all civilized peoples." Engels gives many examples of the development of private property by trade, individual labor, and the accumulation of wealth in the form of domestication of animals-- none of which involved force or robbery. His logical argument is, however, that before you can use force to take someone's property or to steal it from him, it (i.e., property) must already exist "therefore force may be able to change the possession of, but cannot create, private property as such." If Dühring had meant this he would have been correct but force is NOT at the root of the domination of man by private property. Nor is force the cause of the "subjection of man to make him do servile work" at least with respect to modern capitalism. At this point Engels gives a long quote from DAS KAPITAL [from Vol. 1: Section One of Chapter XXIV "Conversion of Surplus Value Into Capital"] the upshot of which is that economies based on commodity production where property is based on the labor put into it evolve into capitalist economies where surplus value develops and labor becomes separated from property and "property," Marx writes, "turns out to be the right, on the part of the capitalist, to appropriate the unpaid labour of others or its product, and to be the impossibility on the part of the labourer, of appropriating his own product. The separation of property from labour has become the necessary consequence of a law that apparently originated in their identity." Engels points out that Dühring never mentions Marx's arguments (since they would demolish his own) and that the whole structure of modern exploitation and servitude "can be explained by purely economic causes; at no point whatever are robbery, force, the state, or political interference of any kind necessary." Again, Dühring is totally wrong when he writes "political conditions are the decisive cause of the economic situation." If that were the case, Engels says, then capitalism would have been voluntarily brought about by the feudal system; but that didn't happen. In the struggle to overthrow feudalism "the decisive weapon" was the ECONOMIC power of the bourgeoisie. An example being the great French Revolution of 1789 which broke out because the capitalist system had become the dominant economic power but, "The 'political conditions' in France remained unaltered, while the 'economic situation' had outgrown them." As a result the nobles no longer had an important social function but they nevertheless tried to keep control of the social wealth "in the revenues that came to" them. This is not unlike today. We have a socialized economy in that the large industries and banks etc., could be kept running by their workers alone if the capitalist class vanished overnight-- they too have no important social function. Even though they are useless they still fight to control the social wealth and increase their revenues. When the workers finally wake up to this fact, and their living conditions are as desperate as the French in 1789, the game will be up for the capitalists. A few more depressions will suffice one hopes. While the living standards of the world's working class approaches, day by day, the level of the French in 1789 we find, as Engels says, "the bourgeoisie has already come close to occupying the position held by the nobility in 1789 [in our day they are no longer "close" they have equaled the position of the old nobility -tr]: it is becoming more and more not only socially superfluous, but a social hindrance; it is more and more becoming separated from productive activity, and like the nobility in the past, becoming more and more a class merely drawing revenues...." All this not only points to a socialist future but decisively shows that Dühring's view that politics determines economics is a "delusion." Next: Engels on the Theory of Value About the Author:
Thomas Riggins is a retired philosophy teacher (NYU, The New School of Social Research, among others) who received a PhD from the CUNY Graduate Center (1983). He has been active in the civil rights and peace movements since the 1960s when he was chairman of the Young People's Socialist League at Florida State University and also worked for CORE in voter registration in north Florida (Leon County). He has written for many online publications such as People's World and Political Affairs where he was an associate editor. He also served on the board of the Bertrand Russell Society and was president of the Corliss Lamont chapter in New York City of the American Humanist Association.
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The Method of Political Economy and the Coming RevolutionWhat is the subject matter and method of political economy according to Engels? First, though, what is political economy? Today we tend to teach economics as a special discipline and political science as another separate subject. This is an attempt by the bourgeoisie to keep politics and economics independent of one another. Marx and Engels, as did most nineteenth century thinkers, thought they were closely interrelated. Political economy for Engels was the study of the laws governing the PRODUCTION and EXCHANGE “of the material means of subsistence in human society.” While production and exchange are human functions they are intimately related to each other and have a reciprocal causative relationship. However, there are many different ways to carry out production and exchange and they vary from society to society and culture to culture. Thus: “Political economy is therefore essentially a HISTORICAL science.” By which Engels means its laws are not like those of physics-- the same for all-- but conditioned by historical circumstances. Nevertheless there are some general statements that can made. For example, Engels thinks it doesn’t matter what society you are dealing with the modes of production and exchange will CONDITION the way the society distributes its social product. He says large and small scale farming always have very different distribution patterns. This is because the former is associated with class struggle (masters and slaves, lords and serfs, capitalists and wage slaves) while the latter can exist without class struggle (i.e., without classes). Modern large scale industry can be contrasted with Medieval local handicraft production controlled by guilds. The latter lacks large capitalists and permanent wage slaves and the former is, along with the modern credit system and "free competition" (the exchange form of modern industry and credit) responsible for both these new classes. Differences in distribution leads to CLASS DIFFERENCES and the development of the STATE which originally came about to defend small groups from external aggression and to protect the common interests (irrigation systems in the East according to Engels). As classes begin to develop the state takes on another function, that "of maintaining by force the conditions of existence and domination of the ruling class against the subject class." New forms of distribution are not simply neutral developments of the interaction of the MODE OF PRODUCTION and the FORM OF EXCHANGE. In fact as new modes of production and exchange develop the old forms of distribution, the state, and the laws act as drags trying to maintain the older forms of distribution. The new mode production and exchange faces a long struggle before it can cast off the older forms of distribution. Engels thought that capitalism, in his time about three hundred years old, was undergoing just such an antithesis in its forms of distribution which was leading to its downfall. He described the antithesis as follows: on the one hand CONCENTRATION OF CAPITAL at one pole of society (that of the bourgeoisie) and at the other pole CONCENTRATION OF THE PROPERTYLESS MASSES without much capital into cities and towns. He thought that as far a capitalism goes this double concentration "must of necessity bring about its downfall." Well, Engels' timing was a bit off and the development of monopoly capitalism (modern imperialism), two world wars, premature revolutions in underdeveloped regions of the world, and the development of vast new markets in the third world have postponed the day of reckoning. Capitalism is now over four hundred fifty years old and the CONCENTRATIONS Engels spoke of are even greater and more unstable. Capitalism has, in fact, run out of places to go and can no longer rely on the expansion of new markets to pull it out of the disruptions and market collapse caused by cyclical overproduction. The DOWNFALL expected by Engels is once again on the agenda and the current inability of the US, Europe, Japan, and much of the rest of the world to overcome the present world wide capitalist crisis means that the final conflict may be closer than any of us thinks. As long as capitalist production is on the rise everyone, Engels says, welcomes it, even the victims of its way of distributing its products. Capitalism just seems to be the way economics works. The first hints that something is wrong with the system does NOT come from "the exploited masses themselves"-- it comes from "within the ruling class itself." Engels gives as examples the great utopians Saint-Simon, Fourier and Owen. The appearance of these early objectors indicates that the system has reached the top of its curve and is just beginning to decline. The utopians became aware of the horrible conditions of living the system was forcing upon its wage slaves and were full of moral indignation. But, Engels says, "moral indignation, however justifiable, cannot serve economic science as an argument, but only as a symptom." If capitalist horrors became more and more manifest in Engels' day just think what they are like today. Millions around the world are unemployed or living in poverty and even slavery (or should I say billions)-- armed conflicts on every continent save Australia and Antarctica over resources and land, and the very oceans as well as the atmosphere, is in the process of being destroyed in the pursuit of capitalist profits. The duty of economists is to explain how all of this is the consequence of the capitalist mode of production (although many economists prostitute themselves in the service of the system for the rewards of position and money at the cost of truth) and beyond that "to reveal, within the already dissolving economic form of motion, the elements of the future new organisation of production and exchange which will put an end to those abuses." Today only the communist , socialist, and workers parties are able to do this on a grand scale. In his day, Engels pointed out that political economy had concentrated on the analysis of the capitalist system and had not yet described other modes of production from the past. In the century or so since his death this has been remedied by Marxist historians, archaeologists, anthropologists, linguists and others. In the meantime capitalism has developed even greater productive capacities than Engels imagined-- but these "colossal productive forces" the capitalists can no longer control-- they can't control their exploitation of the earth without destroying it-- Exxon, BP, and other giant oil companies, they can't mine it without polluting its water and air, blowing off the tops of its mountains, creating huge rivers of toxic sludge, cutting down its rain forests and melting its glaciers and driving thousands of species toward extinction. It only remains for us to show that all the vast powers of production the capitalists can no longer control "are only waiting to be taken possession of by a society organized for co-operative work on a planned basis to ensure to all members of society the means of existence and the free development of their capacities and indeed in constantly increasing measure." We should be yelling this from the roof tops: "We're mad as Hell and we're not going to take it anymore!" Put that in your tea bag and brew it. If the BP oil "spill" in the Gulf of Mexico doesn't convince you that the power of modern industry cannot be safely left in the control of for profit corporations, I'm afraid nothing will. The science of political economy can be traced back to the beginnings of capitalism. Its most famous proponent was Adam Smith (The Wealth of Nations) but it was also advanced by the great French thinkers of the Enlightenment. However, Engels points out, these thinkers thought they were dealing with universal laws of economics, just as physical scientists propose universal laws of nature. "To them," Engels says, "the new science was not the expression of the conditions and requirements of their epoch, but the expression of eternal reason; the laws of production and exchange discovered by this science were not the laws of a historically determined form of those activities, but eternal laws of nature; they were deduced from the nature of man." It was the work of Marx and Engels that really matured this science and saw that rather than eternal laws of nature economic laws of production and distribution were relative to economic systems-- feudalism, capitalism, etc. This is one reason Engels, in his book Anti-Dühring, could hold Dühring in such disdain who could write, after Das Kapital, that he would, in his own words, explain "the most general LAWS OF NATURE governing all economics...." There are a few more ideas exposited by Herr Dühring that Engels wants to correct. First, Dühring thinks that capitalists, for instance, use FORCE as a means to exploit working people. Engels says this is wrong. Engels maintains that EVERY socialist worker KNOWS that force does not cause exploitation it only PROTECTS it: "the relation between capital and wage labour is the basis of" exploitation and this relation is an economic one not one based on force. Engels says Dühring also confounds the difference between PRODUCTION and CIRCULATION (i.e., exchange) by lumping them together under and heading of production and then adds DISTRIBUTION as a second and INDEPENDENT department of the economy. Far from this being the case, Engels tells us, distribution is in fact DEPENDENT on the production and exchange relations of any given society. In fact, if we know these two relations for any given historical society we can "infer the mode of distribution" in it. So, Engels point is that, after a rough start in the seventeenth century and blooming forth in the Enlightenment, the science of political economy became fully scientific in the last half of the nineteenth century with the theories of Marx and the work of those economists who were influenced by him. Through their work working people of the world slowly became aware of their true role in production and distribution (the creation of surplus value) and how it is the exploitation of their labor power that is the basis of the capitalist system. It is important to note that, for Marxists, it is not the idea that capitalism is somehow unjust and immoral (á la Dühring) that is the key point. Engels writes: "If for the impending overthrow of the present mode of distribution of the products of labour, with its crying contrasts of want and luxury, starvation and surfeit, we had no better guarantee than the consciousness that this mode of distribution is unjust, and that justice must eventually triumph, we should be in a pretty bad way, and we might have a long time to wait." Engels appears to be a bit too optimistic. We are still waiting for the "impending overthrow" of capitalism. It has been overthrown in a few places but it has also been restored in large areas where it was previously overthrown. So, I think we are still waiting for a general overthrow-- which is long overdue. We should be impatient, but not unduly so. We have been waiting a hundred years or so while many of our fellows have been waiting over two thousand years for the overthrow of this earthly order with even less likelihood of being gratified. But we still "might have a long time to wait." Well, just why did Engels think we would have a short wait? The reason was that unlike previous centuries when the only forces opposed to the exploitation of the masses of people by the few were based on appeals to morality or ethics, the nineteenth century saw the creation of a MATERIAL FORCE, not an ideal or religious one, that could actually contest and overthrow the existing economic order based on exploitation. Two great revolutions had recently created movements calling for the end of class exploitation and for the equality of the people-- the English and French bourgeois revolutions. But these movements, Engels says "up to 1830 had left the working and suffering classes cold." But in Engels' day this call and this movement has in one generation "gained a strength that enables it to defy all the forces combined against it and to be confident of victory in the near future." What made Engels so confident? There were two factors. First, modern industrial capitalism had created a working class ("called into being" a proletariat) that not only had the power to overthrow class privilege but the class system itself and further this is something it must do "on pain of sinking to the level of the Chinese coolie." Second, the bourgeoisie "has become incapable of any longer controlling the productive forces" created by modern industry. The bourgeoisie is "a class under whose leadership society is racing to ruin like a locomotive whose jammed safety-valve the driver is to weak to open." History has a way of sometimes frustrating our expectations. To the working people of the generation following that of Engels, Lenin and the Russian Revolution represented the promise of the socialist victory. The bourgeois locomotive went off the rails and the resulting crash created two world wars and brought down the colonial empires of the Western Powers (at least de jure.) However, unbeknownst to Engels, another engine was waiting in the roundhouse. This was the engine of US Imperialism which reconstructed the failed bourgeois system after the Second World War and brought about the downfall of the Russian Revolution. For a generation the call for the abolition of the classes left the workers of the US and it allies once again cold. Meanwhile, against all expectations, the "Chinese coolies" had liberated themselves and created their own working class and are now creating a modern society based on a mixed economy. However, Engels was not too far off the mark. The advanced workers (in terms of pay scales) of the West are seeing their incomes sinking to the level of the Chinese. This will continue unless they "warm up" to the idea of socialism. What are the future chances of socialism? Engels two factors are still at work. Capitalism is ripe for overthrow. As far as factor one is concerned. The class consciousness of the workers directed towards this end does not seem to be as developed as in Engels' day. This is due to the massive pro capitalist propaganda both in the educational system and the mass media. But this hold is weakening and working people around the world are slowly beginning to wake up from their long sleep and see capitalism for what it really is. A naked system of human exploitation that can and must be replaced. As for the second factor. The bourgeoisie is out of control! The rain forests, the oceans and the atmosphere are being destroyed by their run away system. These words of Engels are absolutely true today: "both the productive forces created by the modern capitalist mode of production and the system of distribution of goods established by it have come into crying contradiction with that mode of production itself, and in fact to such a degree that, if the whole of modern society is not to perish, a revolution in the mode of production and distribution must take place, a revolution that will put an end to all class distinctions." Unfortunately, I cannot agree with Engels that these two factors give me confidence that the Revolution will soon arrive. But that our society will perish if it doesn't seems all too apparent. Coming up: The Force Theory of Herr Eugen Dühring. About the Author:
Thomas Riggins is a retired philosophy teacher (NYU, The New School of Social Research, among others) who received a PhD from the CUNY Graduate Center (1983). He has been active in the civil rights and peace movements since the 1960s when he was chairman of the Young People's Socialist League at Florida State University and also worked for CORE in voter registration in north Florida (Leon County). He has written for many online publications such as People's World and Political Affairs where he was an associate editor. He also served on the board of the Bertrand Russell Society and was president of the Corliss Lamont chapter in New York City of the American Humanist Association. Chapter XIII [On Philosophy]: Engels on the Negation of the NegationIt seems that Herr Dühring approves of Marx's discussion of primitive accumulation at the end of Vol. I of Das Kapital: he calls it "relatively the best part of Marx's book." However, he has one big objection, viz., that Marx uses the "dialectical crutch" of "Hegelian verbal jugglery" to explain how private property will become social property. That verbal jugglery consists of the Hegelian concept of "the negation of the negation." Herr Dühring thinks Marx ends up spouting nonsense since that is what "must necessarily spring" from using "Hegelian dialectics as the scientific basis" of one's discussion. This upsets Engels, but Dühring could take comfort from the fact that most bourgeois economists today would agree with him. In fact, it is because they agree with him that most of them themselves spout nonsense. Before getting down to the nitty-gritty of the negation of the negation, Engels wants to take Dühring to task for thinking Marx was spouting nonsense when he spoke of property being both individual AND social at the same time. Engels now explains the meaning of Marx's notion of property being both individually and socially owned at the same time. This problem comes up in Chapter 32 of volume one of DAS KAPITAL ("Historical Tendency of Capitalist Accumulation"). In this chapter Marx details how the growth of capitalism led to the concentration of workers into factories and their loss of their own tools (which as individual craftsmen they formerly owned) resulting in their dependence on the capitalists not only for employment but also for the tools with which to work. This development of capitalism is the FIRST NEGATION , with respect to the workers, of private property-- i.e., they lose their means of production to the capitalists (their tools and handicraft properties. But capitalism brings about its own negation (the SECOND NEGATION). This means that it gives birth to socialism as a result of its own internal contradictions ("with the inexorability of a law of Nature"). Thus Marx says: "It is the negation of the negation." [The "It" is socialism.] "This does not, " Marx writes, "re-establish private property for the producer, but gives him individual property based on the acquisitions of the capitalist era: i.e., on co-operation and the possession in common of the land and of the means of production." So, Engels maintains, Herr Dühring is way off the mark by calling that notion of Marx's a lot of contradictory Hegelian nonsense. Engels says, "To anyone who understands plain talk this means that social ownership extends to the land and other means of production, and individual ownership to the products, that is, the articles of consumption." How can Dühring be so confused with regard to Marx's meaning? He misquotes Marx's words over and over again. Engels decides it is either because Dühring can't understand Marx, or he is quoting him from memory and getting it wrong. It is important to realize that Marx is not using dialects in a mechanical fashion to construct his description of capitalism. Marx's famous observation, in this chapter of Das Kapital, that "One capitalist always kills many" and that capitalism should lead to socialism, is the result of an EMPIRICAL investigation of the capitalist mode of production. Due to competition and monopoly, capitalist concentration leads to the domination of a few big corporations, over production and to the relative impoverishment of the working masses. These masses, however, have been trained to work in large socialized industrial enterprises which run on principles of specialization of functions and cooperation of labor. It is a small step from this capitalist set up to socialism. Only the private ownership of these effectively socialized means of production needs to be replaced by public ownership. Only eleven years ago, in the Spring of 2010, General Motors Corporation was already a virtually socialized enterprise (60% owned by the American people due to the government bail out). It was only the lack of a socialist consciousness in the working class that allowed GM to remain under capitalist control and still allows representatives of the capitalist class to be elected to positions of governance in the US. What Marx showed was that this process of change by which the petty producers were eliminated and replaced by the capitalist enterprises has now developed to the point where capitalism has, as Engels says, "likewise itself created the material conditions from which it must perish." [It's taking its sweet time about it.] The point is that this is an HISTORICAL PROCESS, and Engels says "if it is at the same time a dialectical process, this is not Marx's fault, however annoying it may be to Herr Dühring." This means that Marx is not appealing to the NEGATION OF THE NEGATION to demonstrate the historical necessity of the transformation of capitalism into socialism. He is doing just the opposite according to Engels. He is showing, by an appeal to history, that such a transformation is already under way and that this is the trend of future development. Only after doing this does Marx also point out this development can be described as well "in accordance with a definite dialectical law." He is NOT saying the law determines this development. E=mc2 does not determine that mass and energy are interchangeable, but that they are allows us to discover that E=mc2. Failure to realize this shows "Herr Dühring's total lack of understanding of the nature of dialectics." Engels proceeds to give several examples of dialectical thinking that exemplify the negation of the negation. For example, in olden times there was common ownership of land which was negated by private property and all the attendant evils of that negation are currently manifest in our time and can only be eliminated by a negation of the negation (socialism). Engels discusses how this was seen by Rousseau as far back as the middle of the 18th century, and although he did not know the "Hegelian jargon" he nevertheless developed "a line of thought which corresponds exactly to the one developed in Marx's CAPITAL." Let's look at the work Engels refers to. Rousseau wrote the DISCOURSE ON THE ORIGIN OF INEQUALITY in 1755. Unlike most of the thinkers of the Enlightenment Rousseau thinks that the development of civilization, the growth of private property and individualism have led to the intensification of human inequality rather than being forces for the growth of liberty, equality and fraternity. The invention of agriculture brought about the concept of property and the idea of justice to ensure the rights of people with respect to it. It is not possible, Rousseau says, “to conceive how property can come from anything but manual labor.” But once property in land and its products was introduced, greed, competition, the desire to accumulate the produce and labors of others was also introduced. “All these evils were the first effects of property, and the inseparable attendants of growing inequality.” We must remember that in the state of nature there is no “right” to property other than what a person, by his/her own labor can extract for the necessities of life. The growth of private property, the development of classes, the foundation of the state and laws to protect private property represent a negation of the original existential condition of humanity vis a vis nature. Now, under the rule of law and living in a state, how do the rich and powerful few prevent the many, the poor and oppressed, from asserting their rights to their own labor and the natural use of the products of nature? That is, how do they keep their negation of the natural state from being negated? Rousseau says “the rich man, thus urged by necessity, conceived at length the profoundest plan that ever entered the mind of man: this was to employ in his favor the forces of those who attacked him, to make allies of his adversaries, to inspire them with different maxims and to give them other institutions as favorable to himself as the law of nature was unfavorable.” This was done by appealing to all to join together in forming a society based on laws designed to protect everyone from everyone. Here is what we should do, said the first usurpers of the common property of humanity: “Let us, in a word, instead of turning our forces against ourselves, collect them in a supreme power which may govern us by wise laws, protect and defend all the members of the association, repulse their common enemies, and maintain eternal harmony among us.” Well this certainly sounds good. Liberty and Justice for All-- who could be against that. Throw in motherhood and apple pie and you have an unbeatable formula. Thus, Rousseau says, “All ran headlong to their chains, in hope of securing their liberty.” This was, "or may have been," Rousseau says, "the origin of society and law." This was a clever set up pulled off by the rich. Engels would suggest, I am sure, that it was probably not consciously done. This scenario is a retroactive description based on a rational analysis of the consequences of the agricultural revolution. Rousseau lacked the vocabulary, as did Enlightenment intellectuals in general, to describe these historical developments as purely objective developments. This vocabulary would have to await Hegel, Feuerbach and Marx. The result of the negation of individuals living in a state of nature was the appearance of civilization and the existence of numerous independent political organizations which recreated the conditions of the state of nature but now, on a higher level, between states and peoples. One need only turn to the daily press to read about the outrages in Afghanistan, the rape of Iraq for its oil, or the constant bullying of small states by powerful ones to see the truth of Rousseau's words that this change is responsible for "national wars, battles, murders, and reprisals, which shock nature and outrage reason; together with all those horrible prejudices which class among the virtues the honor of shedding human blood. The most distinguished men hence learned to consider cutting each other's throats a duty; at length men massacred their fellow-creatures by thousands without so much as knowing why, and committed more murders in a single day's fighting, and more violent outrages in the sack of a single town, than were committed in the state of nature during whole ages over the whole earth." Well, this is where we find ourselves today. I hope left-center unity will get us out of here to a better place but the center usually does not hold. The remedy to this state of affairs, the negation of the negation, is the abolition of private property and the establishment of a world socialist order. The heroic attempt, and temporary defeat, to establish this order in the last century reminds us of the immense difficulty involved in this task, but it in no way diminishes the need to do it. Maybe China will succeed where the Soviet Union failed. Engels gives several other examples of the negation of the negation for the edification of Herr Dühring but I think his point is sufficiently clear. He concludes his discussion of philosophy (part one of Anti-Dühring) with a brief conclusion (Chapter XIV) which is that Herr Dühring has absolutely nothing of importance to say about philosophy. Nevertheless, as we have seen, he served as a useful foil for Engels to give a fine presentation of Marxist philosophy. Next week we will look at Chapter I Part II of Anti-Dühring (Political Economy About the Author:
Thomas Riggins is a retired philosophy teacher (NYU, The New School of Social Research, among others) who received a PhD from the CUNY Graduate Center (1983). He has been active in the civil rights and peace movements since the 1960s when he was chairman of the Young People's Socialist League at Florida State University and also worked for CORE in voter registration in north Florida (Leon County). He has written for many online publications such as People's World and Political Affairs where he was an associate editor. He also served on the board of the Bertrand Russell Society and was president of the Corliss Lamont chapter in New York City of the American Humanist Association. Dialectics: Quantity to QualityEngels discusses the dialectics of quantity and quality in chapter 12 of part one of Anti-Dühring. In this chapter Engels takes on Dühring's anti-dialectical approach to philosophy. Not having understood Hegel, Dühring thinks that since a contradiction appears to be absurd (how can you have A and not-A at the same time?) there can be no contradictions in reality. Engels sets himself the task of clearing up Dühring confusions. Examples of contradictions in nature, according to Engels are, for example, MOTION, where a body is "in one and the same place and also not in it" and LIFE, where a being "is at each moment itself and yet something else." This, I must admit, sounds a bit like Sartre's existentialism and is perhaps for our time a bit more metaphorical than scientific. What Engels means by motion being a contradiction is perhaps best expressed in the following quote from the article "Motion" in the Great Soviet Encyclopedia. "The contradictory nature of motion consists in the unbroken unity of two opposing factors --- changeability and stability, motion and rest. In fact, the concept of change makes sense only in connection with the idea of a relatively stable, continuously fixed state. This very change, however, is at the same time also a fixed state, which continues and maintains itself; that is, it also possesses stability. In this contradictory unity of changeability and stability the leading role is played by changeability, for everything new in the world first appears by means of it, whereas stability and rest merely fix what has been attained through this process" (from the article by V.I. Sviderskii). Dühring also makes fun of Das Kapital because of Marx's use of dialectics. Marx's book, Dühring writes , is an example of the "absence of natural and intelligible logic" resulting in "dialectical frills and mazes and conceptual arabesques." As an example of Dühring’s complete misunderstanding of Marx's Das Kapital, Engels focuses on his attack on Marx's use of the dialectical notion that quantitative changes bring about qualitative changes. Here is what Dühring himself has to say about this: "What a comical effect is produced by the reference to the confused, hazy Hegelian notion that quantity changes into quality, and that therefore an advance, when it reaches a certain size, becomes capital by this quantitative increase alone!" By adding the word "alone" Dühring falsifies both the Hegelian law and Marx's understanding of it. This is what Marx wrote in Vol. 1 of Das Kapital when he discussed how a sum of exchange values, after reaching a certain quantity could become capital. "Here, as in natural science, IS SHOWN the correctness of the law discovered by Hegel (in his LOGIC) that merely quantitative differences beyond a certain point pass into qualitative changes." Engels says Marx held a sum of exchange values can become capital only when it reaches a definite minimum size, depending on the conditions, "this fact is a PROOF OF THE CORRECTNESS of the Hegelian law." Dühring says Marx held BECAUSE quantity changes into quality THEREFORE at a certain sum of exchange values will become capital. The part about "depending on the conditions" is left out so "the very opposite" of what Marx meant [ i.e., an effect is taken as a cause] is put forth as his meaning. This is typical of what Dühring calls his "philosophy of reality." And, Engels adds, "he has the cheek to describe as COMIC the nonsense which he himself has fabricated." One of the most obvious examples of the dialectical law under discussion is that of H2O. Water in the solid state becomes a liquid with the quantitative addition of heat and with even more heat the liquid state qualitatively changes into a gas. Engels also points out that all of Part IV of Das Kapital (where Marx discusses the production of relative surplus value and modern industry, etc.) "deals with innumerable cases in which quantitative change alters the quality, and also qualitative changes alter the quantity, of the things under consideration." The molecular theory of modern [1880s] chemistry is also based on this law. Thus, Engels maintains, in both the social world and the natural world around us we "can see how 'quantity changes into quality,' and this allegedly confused, hazy Hegelian notion appears in so to speak corporeal form in things and processes--- and no one but Herr Dühring is confused and befogged by it." Next we will deal with the last chapter on Engels' discussion of philosophy in Anti-Dühring-- the chapter on the negation of the negation. About the Author:
Thomas Riggins is a retired philosophy teacher (NYU, The New School of Social Research, among others) who received a PhD from the CUNY Graduate Center (1983). He has been active in the civil rights and peace movements since the 1960s when he was chairman of the Young People's Socialist League at Florida State University and also worked for CORE in voter registration in north Florida (Leon County). He has written for many online publications such as People's World and Political Affairs where he was an associate editor. He also served on the board of the Bertrand Russell Society and was president of the Corliss Lamont chapter in New York City of the American Humanist Association. Engels on Freedom and Necessity (8/22)Engels discusses this topic in Chapter XI, Part I of Anti-Dühring (Morality and Law. Freedom and Necessity). Dühring claims to discuss the problems of law and politics with knowledge gained from "the MOST EXHAUSTIVE SPECIALIZED STUDIES." And he contrasts his own in depth studies with the "admittedly neglected legal studies of Herr Marx." Well, if Thomas Henry Huxley was Darwin's Bulldog, Engels was Marx's and nothing sets him off more that Dühring's propensity to portray himself in a favorable light at the expense of Marx, especially when Marx's knowledge of the subject matter under review was many magnitudes greater than the paltry speculations put forth by Dühring. In his discussion on law and politics Dühring begins by making sweeping generalizations about the law in general, such as that "revenge" is the basis of criminal law, and then moves on to comparisons of French law with the Prussian 'Landrecht'-- all of which reveals that Herr Dühring knows very little about these matters. He seems ignorant of the fact that French law, that is, modern civil law [outside of England] "rests on the social achievements of the Great French Revolution" as embodied in the Code Napoléon. Dühring puts himself forward as a great student of the law, but Engels points out that he is not only ignorant with regard to French law, but that his ignorance carries over to Roman law and even Germanic law (especially its English version "which is the only Germanic law which has developed independently of Roman authority up to the present day and spread to all parts of the world....") Dühring's form of socialism has another great defect and that is his rampant anti-Semitism. Engels says "his hatred of the Jews" is carried "to ridiculous extremes" which he "exhibits on every possible occasion." Engels really takes Dühring to task over this issue. Dühring thinks that hatred of Jews is based on "natural grounds" and is a "natural judgment" while Engels says it is a wide spread prejudice "inherited from the bigotry of the Middle Ages." What is worse is that Dühring thinks one of the arguments in favor of "socialism" is that it will lead to better methods of Jew control. These are Dühring's words: "socialism is the only power which can oppose population conditions with a rather strong Jewish admixture." Engels sums up his view of Dühring's opinions as those of a man full of "grandiloquent boasts" and exhibiting "the crassest ignorance." At this point Engels remarks that when dealing with questions of morality and law it is hard to ignore the question of "free will." Are all our actions predetermined or can we be held responsible for them? Herr Dühring gives two, conflicting, answers to this problem. His first answer is that there is a tug of war in the mind (brain) between instincts and reason. Our instincts pull us one way and reason another. The more rational we are, the more educated and subject to reason, the less we will be subject to the irrational emotions driven by our instinctual impulses. Dühring thinks this explanation will do away with the silly notion of "inner freedom." Each individual's behavior will be determined by his or her proportion of rational to irrational "drives". Engels does not really evaluate this first answer, but says it is blown out of the water by Dühring's second answer. Engels quotes Dühring: "We base moral responsibility on freedom, which however means nothing more to us than susceptibility to conscious motives in accordance with out natural and acquired intelligence. All such motives operate with the inevitability of natural law, notwithstanding an awareness of possible contrary actions; but it is precisely on this unavoidable compulsion that we rely when we apply the moral levers." I think the problem is this second answer ends up with "unavoidable compulsion." Yet the first answer also says about the same thing. The tug of war between reason and unreason will be resolved by the preponderance of the strength of each force within the individual. Engels calls it a "parallelogram of forces" resulting in the action taken being a mean between them. So perhaps Engels overstates the case that Dühring's two answers contradict each other. Be that as it may, Engels is really interested in the second answer. It is not, he says, the result of any original thinking on the part of Dühring. It is a dumbed down version of Hegel, as is so often the case with Dühring's views. It was Hegel who "was the first to state correctly the relation between freedom and necessity". "Necessity," Hegel wrote, " is BLIND only IN SO FAR AS IT IS NOT UNDERSTOOD." Engels explains that. FREEDOM is knowing what the laws of nature are and how we can use them "towards definite ends." This is true both for the natural [or external] realm (physics, chemistry, etc.,) and for the inner or mental realm. These two sets of laws can be separated conceptually (the physical and mental) but they are actually one set in reality. "Freedom of the will therefore means nothing but the capacity to make decisions with knowledge of the subject." This means the more knowledge you have, the more educated you are about the things you are dealing with the FREER you are in dealing with them and at the same time the more NECESSITY comes into play-- i.e., of knowing what necessary actions must be done to attain the goal sought. Engels says, with respect to the will, "the uncertainty, founded on ignorance, which seems to make an arbitrary choice among many different and conflicting possible decisions, shows precisely by this that it is not free, that is is controlled by the very object it should it self control. And since freedom increases with knowledge of the world it, like equality, and law and morality, is "necessarily a product of historical development." The greatest liberation from natural necessity of humankind on record, yet still strictly determined by physical laws, was the discovery of how to make FIRE: "the generation of fire from friction." Engels says that in our [his] age we might think the greatest advance in human control of nature, and thus in freedom, was the invention of the STEAM ENGINE and the modern world that it has made possible. We would be wrong. Fire was the very first of the forces of nature that humans began to learn how to control and it was this feat of "man" that "thereby separated him for ever from the animal kingdom." Nevertheless, the invention of the steam engine was a great leap forward. Engels thought that the steam engine had so increased the productive forces of humankind that we could, in the age of steam, solve the social problem. For the increase in the PRODUCTIVE FORCES "alone make possible a state of society in which there are no longer class distinctions" in which there be will enough socially created product for all and "for the first time there can be talk of real human freedom"-- that is, "of an existence in harmony with the laws of nature that have become known." Well, if we are threatening to destroy our environment, killing the oceans, and destroying the last of the oxygen producing rain forests (the lungs of the planet) and billions of people are facing starvation and famine, something has gone amiss in the last century and a half and we are definitely out of sync with the laws of nature while the increase in the productive forces is bringing servitude not freedom to masses of humanity. Engels vision is on hold. Engels, however, was no utopian socialist, and would not have been shocked if he had been told that the human race was still many generations away from his musings on the attainment of "real human freedom." He had a longer time frame than many of his erstwhile followers who throw in the towel whenever there is a major setback. "But how young the whole of human history still is," he wrote, "and how ridiculous it would be to attempt to ascribe any absolute validity to our present views, is evident from the simple fact that all past history can be characterized as the history of the epoch from the practical discovery of the transformation of mechanical motion into heat up to that of the transformation of heat into mechanical motion." Engels' views are, of course, not absolutely valid, but I see nothing that has happened in the miniscule slice of time that has expired since he expressed them and the present day which would lead one to think they are out of date. Next Week: Engels on Dialectics: Quantity & Quality About the Author:
Thomas Riggins is a retired philosophy teacher (NYU, The New School of Social Research, among others) who received a PhD from the CUNY Graduate Center (1983). He has been active in the civil rights and peace movements since the 1960s when he was chairman of the Young People's Socialist League at Florida State University and also worked for CORE in voter registration in north Florida (Leon County). He has written for many online publications such as People's World and Political Affairs where he was an associate editor. He also served on the board of the Bertrand Russell Society and was president of the Corliss Lamont chapter in New York City of the American Humanist Association. |
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