ANTI-DÜHRING

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    In short, the social and political institutions born of the "triumph of reason" were bitterly disappointing caricatures of the splendid promises of the philosophers of the Enlightenment. All that was wanting was the men to formulate this disappointment, and they came with the turn of the century. Saint-Simon's Letters from Geneva appeared in 1802; Fourier's first book appeared in 1808, although the groundwork of his theory dated from 1799; Robert Owen took over the direction of New Lanark on January 1, 1800.[102]

    At this time, however, the capitalist mode of production, and with it the antagonism between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, was still very undeveloped. Large-scale industry, which had only just arisen in England, was still unknown in France. But, on the one hand, large-scale industry promotes the conflicts which make a revolution in the mode of production [and the abolition of its capitalist character] absolutely necessary -- conflicts not only between the classes begotten of it, but also between precisely the productive forces and the forms of exchange created by it. On the other hand, it is in these gigantic productive forces themselves that it promotes the means of resolving these conflicts. If, therefore, the conflicts arising from the new social order were only just beginning to take shape around 1800, this is even truer for the means of resolving them. During the Reign of Terror, the propertyless masses of Paris were able to gain the mastery for a moment [, and thus to lead the bourgeois revolution to victory against the bourgeoisie itself]. But in doing so they

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only proved how impossible [it] was [for] their domination [to last] under the conditions then obtaining. The proletariat, which was only just separating itself from these propertyless masses as the nucleus of a new class and was as yet quite incapable of independent political action, appeared as an oppressed, suffering estate, to which, in its incapacity to help itself, help could, at best, be brought in from without, from above down.

    This historical situation also dominated the founders of socialism. Their immature theories corresponded to the immature state of capitalist production and the immature class situation. The solution of the social problems which as yet lay hidden in undeveloped economic relations was to spring from the human brain. Society presented nothing but abuses; to remove them was the task of reflective reason. It was a question of inventing a new and more perfect social order and of imposing it on society from without, by propaganda and wherever possible by the example of model experiments. These new social systems were foredoomed to be Utopias; the more they were worked out in detail, the more inevitably they became lost in pure fantasy.

    Having established this, we shall not dwell a moment longer on this aspect, now belonging wholly to the past. We can leave it to the literary small fry à la Dühring to quibble solemnly over these fantasies, which today only make us smile, and to crow over the superiority of their own sober reasoning over such "insanity". For ourselves, we delight in the inspired thoughts and germs of thought that everywhere break out through their fantastic covering and to which these philistines are blind.

    [Saint-Simon was a son of the great French Revolution, at the outbreak of which he was not yet thirty. The Revolu-

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tion was the victory of the third estate, i.e., of the great masses of the nation, who were active in production and in trade, over the thus far privileged idle estates, the nobility and the clergy. But the victory of the third estate soon revealed itself as exclusively the victory of a small part of this estate, as the conquest of political power by its socially privileged stratum, i.e., the propertied bourgeoisie. To be sure, the bourgeoisie had already developed rapidly during the Revolution, partly by speculation in the lands of the nobility and of the Church which had been confiscated and then sold, and partly by frauds on the nation by means of army contracts. It was precisely the domination of these swindlers that brought France and the Revolution to the verge of ruin under the Directorate, and thus gave Napoleon the pretext for his coup d'état.

    Hence in Saint-Simon's mind the antagonism between the third estate and the privileged estates took the form of an antagonism between "workers" and "idlers". The idlers were not merely the old privileged persons, but also all who lived on their incomes without taking any part in production or distribution. The "workers" were not only the wage workers, but also the manufacturers, the merchants, the bankers. That the idlers had lost the capacity for intellectual leadership and political supremacy had been proved and finally settled by the Revolution. That the non-possessing classes lacked this capacity seemed to Saint-Simon proved by the experiences of the Reign of Terror. Who then was to lead and command? According to Saint-Simon, science and industry, both united by a new religious bond destined to restore that unity of religious ideas which had been broken since the Reformation -- a necessarily mystical and rigidly hierarchical "new Christianity". But science was the scholars;

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and industry was, in the first place, the active bourgeois, manufacturers, merchants, bankers. Of course, these bourgeois were to transform themselves into public officials, into trustees of society, of a sort; but they were still to hold a commanding and even economically privileged position vis-à-vis the workers. The bankers especially were to be called upon to direct the whole of social production by the regulation of credit. This conception was in exact keeping with a time when large-scale industry and with it the chasm be tween bourgeoisie and proletariat were only just coming into existence in France. But what Saint-Simon especially lays stress on is this: what interests him first and above all other things is the lot of "the largest and poorest class" (la classe la plus nombreuse et la plus pauvre ).]

    In his Letters from Geneva, Saint-Simon already laid down the principle that "all men ought to work". In the same work he also recognized that the Reign of Terror was the reign of the propertyless masses.

    "See," he calls out to them, "what happened in France at the time when your comrades held sway there; they brought about a famine."[103]

    But to recognize the French Revolution as a class struggle [and not simply as one between nobility and bourgeoisie, but] between nobility, bourgeoisie, and those without any property,* was, in the year 1802, a discovery of the greatest genius. In 1816 he declared that politics was the science of production and foretold the complete absorption of politics by economics.[104] Although the knowledge that economic conditions are the basis of political institutions appears here only

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in embryo, what is already very plainly expressed is the transition from political rule over men to the administration of things and the guidance of the processes of production -- that is to say, the abolition of the state,[*] about which there has recently been so much noise. Saint-Simon showed the same superiority over his contemporaries, when in 1814, immediately after the entry of the allies into Paris, and again in 1815, during the Hundred Days' War, he proclaimed the alliance of France with England, and then of both these countries with Germany, as the only guarantee for the prosperous development and peace of Europe.[105] To preach an alliance with the victors of Waterloo to the French in 1815 undoubtedly required somewhat more courage than to declare a war of tittle-tattle on German professors.**[106]

    If in Saint-Simon we find a masterly breadth of view, by virtue of which almost all the ideas of later socialists that are not strictly economic are found in him in embryo, we find in Fourier a criticism of the existing conditions of society which, while genuinely French and witty, is none the less penetrating. Fourier takes the bourgeoisie, their inspired prophets before the Revolution and their mercenary sycophants after it, at their own word. He mercilessly lays bare the material and moral misery of the bourgeois world. He confronts it with the [earlier] philosophers' dazzling promises of a society ruled solely by reason, of a civilization yielding universal happiness, of an illimitable human perfectibility, as

    Fourier is not only a critic; his eternal sprightliness makes him a satirist, and assuredly one of the greatest satirists of all time. He depicts with equal virtuosity and wit the swindling speculation that blossomed out on the downfall of the Revolution and the universal shopkeeping spirit of the French commerce of the time. Still more masterly is his criticism of the bourgeois form of the relations between the sexes and of the position of woman in bourgeois society. He was the first to declare that in any given society the degree of woman's emancipation is the natural measure of the general emancipation.[107]

    But it is in his conception of the history of society that Fourier appears at his greatest. He divides its whole course thus far into four stages of development, savagery, the patriarchy, barbarism, and civilization, the last coinciding with what is now called bourgeois society [ -- i.e., with the social order that came in with the sixteenth century].[108] He proves

    "that the civilized order gives every vice practised by barbarism in a simple fashion a complex, ambiguous, equivocal, hypocritical form";

    that civilization moves in "a vicious circle", in contradictions which it constantly reproduces without being able to solve, so that it constantly attains the opposite of what it wants to achieve, or pretends it wants to achieve. So that, for example, "under civilization poverty is born of abundance itself ".[109]

    Fourier, as we see, handles dialectics with the same mastery as his contemporary Hegel. Using these same dialectics, he

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points out in opposition to the talk about illimitable human perfectibility that every historical era has its downward as well as upward phase, and he applies this way of looking at things to the future of the whole human race.[110] Just as Kant introduced the idea of the ultimate destruction of the earth into natural science, Fourier introduced that of the ultimate destruction of the human race into historical thought.

    Whilst in France the hurricane of the Revolution swept over the land, in England a quieter but on that account no less mighty upheaval was taking place. Steam and the new tool-making machinery were transforming manufacture into modern large-scale industry and thus revolutionizing the whole foundation of bourgeois society. The sluggish pace of development of the manufacturing period changed into a veritable period of storm and stress in production. The division of society into big capitalists and propertyless proletarians went on with ever-increasing rapidity; between these, instead of the former stable middle estate, an unstable mass of artisans and small shopkeepers, which constituted the most fluctuating section of the population, now led a precarious existence.

    The new mode of production was still only at the beginning of its upward phase; it was still the normal [, regular] mode of production -- the only possible one under existing conditions. Nevertheless, even then it was producing crying social abuses -- the herding together of a homeless population in the worst quarters of the large towns; the dissolution of all traditional bonds of descent, of patriarchal subordination, of the family; overwork, especially of women and children, on an appalling scale; massive demoralization of the working class, suddenly flung into altogether new conditions [from the country into the town, from agriculture into industry,

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from stable conditions of existence into insecure ones changing from day to day].

    At this juncture a 29-year-old manufacturer came forward as a reformer -- a man of almost sublime, child-like simplicity of character, and at the same time a born leader of men such as is rarely seen. Robert Owen had adopted the teaching of the materialist philosophers of the Enlightenment: that man's character is the product of his inherited constitution on the one hand, and of his environment during his lifetime, especially during his period of growth, on the other. In the Industrial Revolution most of his class saw only chaos and confusion, and the opportunity of fishing in troubled waters and getting rich quickly. He saw in it the opportunity of putting his favourite theory into practice, and so of bringing order out of chaos. He had already tried it out with success in Manchester, as the manager of a factory with 500 workers. From 1800 to 1829 he directed the great cotton-spinning mill of New Lanark in Scotland as managing partner, along the same lines but with greater freedom of action, and with a success which won him a European reputation. He transformed a population, which originally consisted of the most diverse and for the most part very demoralized elements and which gradually grew to 2,500, into a model colony, in which drunkenness, police, magistrates, lawsuits, poor law relief and any need for charity were unknown. All this simply by placing the people in conditions more worthy of human beings, and especially by having the rising generation carefully brought up. He was the inventor of infant schools, and first introduced them at New Lanark. From the age of two the children came to school, where they enjoyed themselves so much that they could scarcely be got home again. Whilst his competitors worked their people thirteen to four-

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teen hours a day, in New Lanark the working-day was only ten and a half hours. When a crisis in cotton stopped work for four months, his unemployed workers received their full wages all the time. Yet the business more than doubled in value, and to the last yielded large profits to its proprietors.

    In spite of all this, Owen was not content. The existence he had contrived for his workers was, in his eyes, still far from being worthy of human beings. "The people were slaves at my mercy." The relatively favourable conditions in which he had placed them were still far from allowing an all-round rational development of the character and of the intellect, much less the free exercise of all their faculties.

    "And yet, the working part of this population of 2,500 persons was daily producing as much real wealth for society as, less than half a century before, it would have required the working part of a population of 600,000 to create. I asked myself, what became of the difference between the wealth consumed by 2,500 persons and that which would have been consumed by 600,000?"[111]

    The answer was clear. It had been used to pay the proprietors of the establishment 5 per cent on their invested capital and in addition a profit of over £300,000. And that which held for New Lanark held to a still greater extent for all the factories in England.

    "If this new wealth had not been created by machinery, . . . the wars . . . in opposition to Napoleon and to support the aristocratic principles of society, could not have been maintained. And yet this new power was the creation of the working class."[*]

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    To the working class, therefore, the fruits belonged too. To Owen the newly created gigantic productive forces, which had hitherto served only to enrich individuals and to enslave the masses, offered the foundations for a reconstruction of society and were destined, as the common property of all, solely to work for the common good of all.

    Owenite communism arose in this purely business way, as the outcome, so to speak, of commercial calculation. Throughout, it maintained this practical character. Thus, in 1823, Owen proposed the relief of the distress in Ireland by communist colonies, and drew up complete estimates of initial costs, yearly expenditure, and probable revenue.[112] Similarly, in his definitive plan for the future, the technical working out of details is managed with such practical knowledge [ -- plan, elevation and bird's-eye view all included -- ] that, once the Owenite method of social reform is accepted, there is little to be said against the actual arrangement of details even from a specialist's point of view.

    His advance in the direction of communism was the turning-point in Owen's life. As long as he was simply a philanthropist, he was rewarded with nothing but wealth, applause, honour, and glory. He was the most popular man in Europe. Not only men of his own class, but statesmen and princes listened to him approvingly. But when he came out with his communist theories, it was quite a different story. Three great obstacles seemed to him especially to block the path to social reform, private property, religion, and marriage in its present form. He knew what confronted him if he attacked them -- universal ostracism by official society and the loss of his whole social standing. But nothing of this prevented him from attacking them without fear of the consequences, and what he had foreseen came

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to pass. Banished from official society, with a conspiracy of silence against him in the press, and ruined by his unsuccessful communist experiments in America in which he sacrificed all his fortune, he turned directly to the working class and continued working in their midst for thirty years. Every social movement, every real advance in England on behalf of the workers is linked with Owen's name. Thus in 1819, after five years' effort, he pushed through the first law limiting the labour of women and children in factories.[113] He presided over the first congress at which all the Trade Unions of England united in a single great trade union association.[114] He introduced as transition measures to the complete communist organization of society, on the one hand, co-operative societies (both consumers' and producers'), which have since at least given practical proof that the merchant and the manufacturer are quite superfluous personages. On the other hand, he introduced labour bazaars for the exchange of the products of labour through the medium of labour-notes with the labour-hour as the unit; institutions necessarily doomed to failure, but completely anticipating the much later Proudhon exchange bank, and differing only from the latter in that they did not claim to be the panacea for all social ills, but just a first step towards a much more radical transformation of society.[115]

    These are the men on whom the sovereign Herr Dühring looks down from the height of his "final and ultimate truth", with a contempt of which we have given a few examples in the "Introduction".* In one respect at least this contempt is not without sufficient reason: for its basis is, in essence, a really frightful ignorance of the works of the

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three Utopians. Thus Herr Dühring says of Saint-Simon

"his basic idea was essentially correct, and apart from a few one-sided aspects, provides the guiding impulse towards real changes even today".

But although Herr Dühring does actually seem to have had some of Saint-Simon's works in his hands, our search through the twenty-seven relevant pages of print for Saint-Simon's "basic idea" is just as fruitless as our earlier search for what Quesnay's Tableau "meant in Quesnay himself", and in the end we have to allow ourselves to be put off with the phrase

    "that imagination and philanthropic fervour . . . together with the extravagant fantasy that goes with it dominated the whole of Saint-Simon's intellectual horizon"!

As for Fourier, all Herr Dühring knows or takes into account is his fantasies of the future, painted in romantic detail. This of course "is far more important" for establishing Herr Dühring's infinite superiority to Fourier than an examination of how the latter "occasionally attempts to criticize actual conditions". Occasionally! In fact, almost every page of his works scintillates with sparkling satire and criticism aimed at the wretchedness of our vaunted civilization. It is like saying that Herr Dühring only "occasionally" declares Herr Dühring to be the greatest thinker of all time. As far as the twelve pages devoted to Robert Owen are concerned, Herr Dühring has absolutely no other source than the miserable biography of the philistine Sargant, who likewise did not know Owen's most important works -- on marriage and the communist system.[116] Herr Dühring can therefore go the length of boldly asserting that we should not "assume any clear-cut communism" in Owen. Had Herr Dühring ever even fingered Owen's Book of the New Moral World,

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he would most assuredly have found clearly expressed in it not only the most clear-cut communism, with equal obligation to labour and equal rights in the product -- equal according to age, as Owen always adds -- but also the complete elaboration of the architecture of the future communist community, with its plan, elevation and bird's-eye view. But if one limits one's "first-hand study of the actual writings of the representatives of socialist systems of thought" to a knowledge of the titles and at most the epigraphs of a few of these works, as Herr Dühring does here, there is obviously nothing else left but to make such a stupid and purely fanciful assertion. Owen not only preached "clear-cut communism"; for five years (at the end of the thirties and beginning of the forties) he put it into practice in the Harmony Hall Colony in Hampshire, the clear-cut quality of whose communism left nothing to be desired.[117] I myself was acquainted with several former members of this communist model experiment. But Sargant knew absolutely nothing of all this or of any of Owen's activities between 1836 and 1850, and so Herr Dühring's "more profound historical work", too, is left in pitch-black ignorance. Herr Dühring calls Owen "in every respect a veritable monster of importunate philanthropy". But when this same Herr Dühring starts to give us information about the contents of books whose titles and epigraphs he hardly knows, we must on no account say that he is "in every respect a veritable monster of importunate ignorance", for on our lips this would certainly be "abuse".

    The Utopians, we saw, were Utopians because they could be nothing else at a time when capitalist production was as yet so little developed. They necessarily had to construct the elements of a new society out of their own heads,

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because these elements were not as yet generally apparent within the old society; for the basic plan of the new edifice they could only appeal to reason, just because they could not as yet appeal to contemporary history. But when now, almost eighty years after their time, Herr Dühring steps on to the stage and puts forward his claim to an "authoritative" system for a new social order -- not one evolved out of the historically developed material at his disposal, as its necessary result -- oh, no! -- but constructed in his sovereign head, in his mind pregnant with ultimate truths -- then he, who scents epigoni everywhere, is himself nothing but the epigone of the Utopians, the latest Utopian. He calls the great Utopians "social alchemists". That may be so. Alchemy was necessary in its epoch. But since that time large-scale industry has developed the contradictions lying dormant in the capitalist mode of production into such crying antagonisms that the approaching collapse of this mode of production is, so to speak, palpable; that the new productive forces themselves can only be maintained and further developed by the introduction of a new mode of production corresponding to their present stage of development; that the struggle between the two classes engendered by the hitherto prevailing mode of production and constantly reproduced in ever sharper antagonism has gripped all civilized countries and is daily becoming more violent; and that this historical chain of connections, the conditions of the social transformation which it makes necessary, and the basic features of this transformation likewise determined by it have already been apprehended. And if Herr Dühring now manufactures a new utopian social order not from the economic material at his disposal but from His Highness's numskull, not only is he practising "social alchemy". Rather

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is he acting like a person who, after the discovery and establishment of the laws of modern chemistry, attempts to restore the old alchemy and to use atomic weights, molecular formulas, the valency of atoms, crystallography and spectral analysis for the sole purpose of discovering -- the philosopher's stone.

own wants and the payments in kind due to the feudal lord -- it was only at this stage that it also produced commodities; this surplus thrown into social exchange and offered for sale became a commodity. The town artisans, it is true, had to produce for exchange from the very beginning. But they too covered the greatest part of their own wants themselves; they had gardens and small fields; they sent their cattle out into the communal woodland, which also provided them with timber and firewood; the women spun flax, wool, etc. Production for the purpose of exchange, the production of commodities, was only just coming into being. Hence, restricted exchange, restricted market, stable mode of production, local isolation from the outside world, and local unity within: the Mark[118] in the countryside, the guild in the town.

    But with the extension of commodity production and especially with the emergence of the capitalist mode of production, the previously dormant laws of commodity production began to operate more openly and more potently. The old bonds were loosened, the old dividing barriers were broken through, the producers were more and more transformed into independent, isolated producers of commodities. The anarchy of social production became obvious and was carried to further and further extremes. But the chief means by which the capitalist mode of production accentuated this anarchy in social production was the exact opposite of anarchy -- the increasing organization of production as social production in each individual productive establishment. With this lever it put an end to the old peaceful stability. In whatever branch of industry it was introduced, it suffered no older method of operation alongside it; wherever it laid hold of a handicraft, it wiped the old handicraft out. The field of labour became a field of battle. The great geographical discoveries and the

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colonization which followed on them multiplied markets and hastened the transformation of handicraft into manufacture. The struggle broke out not only between the individual local producers; in turn the local struggles grew into national struggles, the commercial wars of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.[119] Finally, large-scale industry and the creation of the world market have made the struggle universal and at the same time given it an unparalleled virulence. Between individual capitalists, as between whole industries and whole countries, advantages in natural or artificial conditions of production decide life or death. The vanquished are relentlessly cast aside. It is the Darwinian struggle for individual existence, transferred from nature to society with a fury raised to the nth power. The brutish state of nature appears as the peak of human development. The contradiction between social production and capitalist appropriation reproduces itself as the antagonism between the organization of production in the individual factory and the anarchy of production in society as a whole.

    The capitalist mode of production moves in these two phenomenal forms of the contradiction immanent in it by its very origin, it relentlessly describes that "vicious circle" which Fourier had already discovered. But what Fourier in his day was as yet unable to see is that this circle is gradually narrowing, that the motion is rather in the form of a spiral and must come to an end, like the motion of the planets, by collision with the centre. It is the motive force of the social anarchy of production which increasingly transforms the great majority of men into proletarians, and it is the proletarian masses in their turn who will ultimately put an end to the anarchy of production. It is the motive force of the social anarchy of production which transforms the infinite perfecti-

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bility of the machine in large-scale industry into a compulsory commandment for each individual industrial capitalist to make his machinery more and more perfect, under penalty of ruin.

    But the perfecting of machinery means rendering human labour superfluous. If the introduction and increase of machinery meant the displacement of millions of hand workers by a few machine workers, the improvement of machinery means the displacement of larger and larger numbers of machine workers themselves, and ultimately the creation of a mass of available wage-workers exceeding the average employment needs of capital, a complete industrial reserve army, as I called it as long ago as 1845,* an army available at times when industry is working at high pressure, to be thrown out onto the streets by the inevitable ensuing crash, a constant dead weight on the feet of the working class in its struggle for existence with capital, a regulator to keep wages down to the low level which suits the needs of capital. Thus it comes about that machinery, to use Marx's phrase, becomes the most powerful weapon in the war of capital against the working class, that the instruments of labour constantly knock the means of subsistence out of the worker's hands, that the very product of the worker is turned into an instrument for his enslavement. Thus it comes about that from the very beginning economy in the instruments of labour becomes at once the most reckless squandering of labour-power and robbery committed against the normal conditions requisite for the labour function; that machinery, the most powerful

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means for shortening labour-time, is converted into the most unfailing means for transforming the entire span of life of the worker and his family into disposable labour-time for the purpose of expanding the value of capital.[*] Thus it comes about that the overwork of some becomes the precondition for the unemployment of others and that large-scale industry, which hunts the whole world over for new consumers, confines the consumption of the masses at home to a starvation minimum and thus undermines its own internal market. "The law that always equilibrates the relative surplus population, or industrial reserve army, to the extent and energy of accumulation, this law rivets the labourer to capital more firmly than the wedges of Vulcan did Prometheus to the rock. It involves an accumulation of misery corresponding to the accumulation of capital. Accumulation of wealth at one pole is, therefore, at the same time accumulation of misery, agony of toil, slavery, ignorance, bestialization, moral degradation, at the opposite pole, i.e., on the side of the class that produces its own product as capital. " (Marx, Capital, p. 671)** To expect any other distribution of the products from the capitalist mode of production is like expecting the electrodes of a battery not to decompose water, not to develop oxygen at the positive pole and hydrogen at the negative, so long as they are connected with the battery.

    We have seen how the capacity for improvement of modern machinery, which is pushed to a maximum, is transformed by the anarchy of social production into a compulsory command-

    If the crises revealed the bourgeoisie's incapacity to continue to administer the modern productive forces, the conversion of the large production and communication establishments into joint-stock companies [,trusts] and state property shows that the bourgeoisie can be dispensed with for this purpose. All the social functions of the capitalist are now conducted by salaried employees. The capitalist no longer has any social activity save the pocketing of revenues, the

bourgeoisie. When ultimately it becomes the real representative of the whole of society, it renders itself superfluous. As soon as there is no social class to be held in subjection any longer, as soon as class domination and the struggle for individual existence based on the anarchy of production existing up to now are eliminated together with the collisions and excesses arising from them, there is nothing more to repress, nothing necessitating a special repressive force, a state. The first act in which the state really comes forward as the representative of the whole of society -- the taking possession of the means of production in the name of society -- is at the same time its last independent act as a state. The interference of the state power in social relations becomes superfluous in one sphere after another, and then dies away of itself. The government of persons is replaced by the administration of things and the direction of the processes of production. The state is not "abolished", it withers away. It is by this that one must evaluate the phrase "a free people's state" with respect both to its temporary agitational justification and to its ultimate scientific inadequacy, and it is by this that we must also evaluate the demand of the so called anarchists that the state should be abolished overnight.[120]

    Since the historical emergence of the capitalist mode of production, the seizure of all the means of production by society has often been dreamed of, by individuals as well as by whole sects, more or less vaguely as an ideal of the future. But it could only become possible, it could only become a historical necessity, when the material conditions* for its

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realization were present. Like every other social advance, it is becoming realizable not through the acquisition of the understanding that the existence of classes is in contradiction with justice, equality, etc., not through the mere will to abolish these classes, but through certain new economic conditions. The cleavage of society into an exploiting and an exploited class, a ruling and an oppressed class, was the necessary outcome of the previous low development of production. Society is necessarily divided into classes as long as the total social labour only yields a product but slightly exceeding what is necessary for the bare existence of all, as long as labour therefore claims all or almost all the time of the great majority of the members of society. Side by side with this great majority exclusively enthralled in toil, a class freed from direct productive labour is formed which manages the general business of society: the direction of labour, affairs of state, justice, science, art, and so forth. It is therefore the law of the division of labour which lies at the root of the division into classes. However, this does not mean that this division into classes was not established by violence and robbery, by deception and fraud, or that the ruling class, once in the saddle, has ever failed to strengthen its domination at the cost of the working class and to convert its direction of society into [increased] exploitation of the masses.

    But if, upon this showing, division into classes has a certain historical justification, it does so only for a given period of time, for given social conditions. It was based on the insufficiency of production; it will be swept away by the full development of the modern productive forces. In fact the abolition of social classes presupposes a level of historical development at which the existence not merely of this or that particular ruling class but of any ruling class at all, and

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therefore of class distinction itself, has become an anachronism, is obsolete. It therefore presupposes that the development of production has reached a level at which the appropriation of the means of production and of the products, and consequently of political supremacy and of the monopoly of education and intellectual leadership by a special social class, has become not only superfluous but also a hindrance to development economically, politically and intellectually.

    This point has now been reached. Its political and intellectual bankruptcy is hardly a secret any longer to the bourgeoisie itself, and its economic bankruptcy recurs regularly every ten years. In each crisis society is suffocated beneath the weight of its own productive forces and products of which it can make no use, and stands helpless in face of the absurd contradiction that the producers have nothing to consume because consumers are lacking. The expansive force of the means of production bursts asunder the bonds imposed upon them by the capitalist mode of production. Their release from these bonds is the sole prerequisite for an unbroken, ever more rapidly advancing development of the productive forces, and thus of a practically unlimited growth of production itself. Nor is this all. The social appropriation of the means of production puts an end not only to the current artificial restrictions on production, but also to the positive waste and devastation of productive forces and products which are now the inevitable concomitants of production and which reach their zenith in crises. Further, it sets free for the community at large a mass of means of production and products by putting an end to the senseless luxury and extravagance of the present ruling classes and their political representatives. The possibility of securing for every member of society, through social production, an existence

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which is not only perfectly adequate materially and which becomes daily richer, but also guarantees him the completely free development and exercise of his physical and mental faculties -- this possibility is now present for the first time, but it is present.[*]

    The seizure of the means of production by society eliminates commodity production and with it the domination of the product over the producer. The anarchy within social production is replaced by consciously planned organization. The struggle for individual existence comes to an end. It is only at this point that man finally separates in a certain sense from the animal kingdom and that he passes from animal conditions of existence to really human ones. The conditions of existence environing and hitherto dominating humanity now pass under the dominion and control of humanity, which now for the first time becomes the real conscious master of nature, because and in so far as it becomes master of its own social organization. The laws of man's own social activity, which have hitherto confronted him as extraneous laws of nature dominating him, will then be applied by man with full knowledge and hence be dominated

    As for the squandering of means of production and products resulting from crises, the total loss to the German iron industry alone in the last crash was estimated at 455,000,000 marks [£22,750,000] at the Second German Industrial Congress (Berlin, February 21, 1878). [Note by Engels.]

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by him. Man's own social organization, which has hitherto confronted him as a process dictated by nature and history, now becomes a process resulting from his own voluntary action. The objective extraneous forces which have hitherto dominated history now pass under the control of man himself. It is only from this point that man will himself make his own history fully consciously, it is only from this point that the social causes he sets in motion will preponderantly and ever increasingly have the effects he wills. It is humanity's leap from the realm of necessity into the realm of freedom.

    [In conclusion, let us briefly sum up the course of our development:

    I. Mediaeval Society : Small-scale individual production. Means of production adapted to individual use, hence primitive, clumsy, petty, puny in effect. Production for immediate consumption, by the producer himself or by his feudal lord. Only where a surplus of production over this consumption occurs does this surplus get offered for sale and enter into exchange: production of commodities, therefore, only in its nascent state; but it already contains within itself, in embryo, the anarchy in social production.

    II. Capitalist Revolution : Transformation of industry, at first by means of simple co-operation and manufacture. Concentration of the previously scattered means of production into large workshops, and consequently their transformation from individual into social means of production, a transformation which by and large does not affect the form of exchange. The old forms of appropriation remain in force. The capitalist appears: in his character as owner of the means of production he also appropriates the products and turns

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them into commodities. Production has become a social act; exchange and with it appropriation remain individual acts, the acts of individuals: the social product is appropriated by the individual capitalist. Fundamental contradiction, from which there arise all the contradictions in which present-day society moves and which large-scale industry brings to light.

    A) Separation of the producer from the means of production. Condemnation of the worker to wage-labour for life. Antagonism of proletariat and bourgeoisie.
    B) Growing prominence and increasing effectiveness of the laws governing commodity production. Unbridled competitive struggle. Contradiction between social organization in the individual factory and social anarchy in production as a whole.
    C) On the one side, perfecting of machinery, which competition makes a compulsory commandment for each individual manufacturer, and which is equivalent to a constantly increasing displacement of workers: industrial reserve army. On the other, unlimited expansion of production, likewise a compulsory law of competition for every manufacturer. On both sides, unheard-of development of the productive forces, excess of supply over demand, over-production, glutting of markets, crises every ten years, vicious circle: here, superabundance of means of production and products -- there, superabundance of workers without employment and means of existence; but these two levers of production and of social well-being are unable to co-operate, because the capitalist form of production forbids the productive forces to function and the products to circulate unless they are first turned into capital -- which their very superabundance prevents. The contradiction

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has grown into an absurdity: the mode of production rebels against the form of exchange. The bourgeoisie is convicted of incapacity to manage its own social productive forces any further.
    D) Partial recognition of the social character of the productive forces imposed on the capitalists themselves. Appropriation of the large production and communication organizations, first by joint-stock companies, later by trusts, then by the state. The bourgeoisie proves itself a superfluous class; all its social functions are now performed by salaried employees.

    III. Proletarian Revolution, solution of the contradictions: the proletariat seizes the public power and by virtue of this power transforms the social means of production, which are slipping from the hands of the bourgeoisie, into public property. By this act, the proletariat frees the means of production from their previous character as capital, and gives their social character complete freedom to assert itself. Social production according to a predetermined plan now becomes possible. The development of production makes the further existence of different social classes an anachronism. In proportion as the anarchy of social production vanishes, the political authority of the state dies away. Men, at last masters of their own mode of social organization, consequently become at the same time masters of nature, masters of themselves -- free.]

    To accomplish this world-emancipating act is the historical mission of the modern proletariat. To grasp the historical conditions of this act and therefore its very nature, and thus to bring the conditions and character of its own action to the consciousness of the class that is destined to act, the

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class that is now oppressed -- this is the task of scientific socialism, the theoretical expression of the proletarian movement.

    The Utopians were already perfectly clear about the effects of the division of labour, about the stunting of the worker on the one hand and of working activity itself on the other, an activity which is restricted to the lifelong, uniform, mechanical repetition of one and the same operation. The abolition of the antithesis between town and country was demanded both by Fourier and by Owen as the first prerequisite for the abolition of the old division of labour in general. Both held that the population should be scattered through the country in groups of sixteen hundred to three thousand; each group was to occupy a gigantic palace run as a communal household in the centre of its area of land. It is true that Fourier occasionally refers to towns, but they

were to consist in turn of only four or five such palaces situated near each other. Both would have each member of society participating in agriculture as well as in industry; with Fourier, the latter covers handicrafts and manufacture, while Owen already assigns the main role to large-scale industry and already demands the introduction of steam-power and machinery into household work. But within agriculture as well as industry both of them demand the greatest possible variety of occupations for each individual and accordingly the training of the youth for the maximum all-round technical activity. They both consider that man should develop in a universal way through universal practical activity and that work should recover the lure and charm of which the division of labour has deprived it, in the first place through this variety and through the corresponding shortness of the "sitting" -- to use Fourier's expression[122] -- devoted to each particular kind of work. Both Fourier and Owen are far in advance of the exploiting classes' way of thinking inherited by Herr Dühring, according to which the antithesis between town and country is inevitable in the nature of things, which is steeped in the prejudice that a number of "persons" must under all circumstances be condemned to the production of a single article, and which would perpetuate the different "economic species" of men distinguished by their way of life -- people who take pleasure in the performance of precisely this and no other thing and so have sunk so low that they rejoice in their own enslavement and one-sidedness. Matched against the basic ideas of even the most reckless fantasies of that "idiot" Fourier or against the paltriest ideas of that "crude, flabby and paltry" Owen, Herr Dühring is no more than an impudent dwarf still abjectly enslaved by the division of labour.

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    By making itself the master of all the means of production in order to use them in a socially planned way, society puts an end to the former enslavement of men by their own means of production. It goes without saying that society cannot free itself unless each individual is freed. The old mode of production must therefore be revolutionized from the bottom up, and above all the old division of labour must disappear. Its place must be taken by an organization of production in which, on the one hand, no individual can throw on the shoulders of others his share in productive work, this natural condition of human existence; and in which, on the other hand, productive work will become the instrument emancipating men instead of the instrument enslaving them, offering each individual the opportunity to develop all his faculties, physical and mental, in all directions and exercise them to the full, and in which, therefore, productive work will become a delight instead of a blight.

    Today this is no longer a fantasy, no longer a pious wish. With the present development of the productive forces, the increase in production given by the very fact of their socialization and by the abolition of the barriers and disturbances and of the waste of products and means of production all resulting from the capitalist mode of production, will already suffice, given general participation in labour, to reduce the time needed for work to a point which will be small indeed in the light of our present conceptions.

    Nor is the abolition of the old division of labour a demand only to be carried through at the expense of the productivity of labour. On the contrary. Thanks to large-scale industry, it has become a condition of production itself. "The employment of machinery does away with the necessity of consolidating this distribution after the manner of manufacture

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by the constant annexation of the same worker to the same function. Since the whole motion of the factory proceeds not from the workers but from the machinery, a constant change of persons can take place without an interruption of the work process. . . . Lastly, the quickness with which machine-work is learnt by young people does away with the necessity of bringing up a special class of workers exclusively for work with machinery."[*] But while the capitalist mode of employing machinery necessarily perpetuates the old division of labour with its ossified specialization, although it has become superfluous from a technical standpoint, the machinery itself rebels against this anachronism. The technical basis of large-scale industry is revolutionary. "By means of machinery, chemical processes and other methods, it is continually transforming the worker's functions and the social combinations of the work process together with the technical basis of production. Therefore, it also revolutionizes the division of labour within society and incessantly hurls masses of capital and of work-people from one branch of production to another. By its very nature, modern industry consequently necessitates change of work, fluidity of function, universal mobility on the part of the worker. . . . We have seen how this absolute contradiction . . . vents its rage . . . in an uninterrupted sacrificial feast at the expense of the working class, in the most reckless squandering of labour-power, and in the ravages of social anarchy. This is the negative side. But if change of work at present imposes itself as an overpowering natural law and with the blindly destructive action of such a law meeting resistance at all points, large-scale industry itself through its catastrophes raises as a question of

life and death not only the recognition of change of work and consequently of the worker's maximum versatility as a general social law of production, but also the adaptation of the relations of production to the normal functioning of this law. Indeed, large-scale industry raises as a question of life and death not only the replacement of the horror of a miserable disposable population of workers, kept in reserve for the fluctuating exploitative needs of capital, by the absolute availability of human beings for the changing needs of work, but also the replacement of the detail-worker, the mere embodiment of a detail social function, by the fully developed individual, for whom different social functions are but so many modes of activity giving place to each other."[*]

    Large-scale industry has to a considerable extent freed industrial production from restrictions of locality by teaching us to convert the movement of molecules, which is more or less universally feasible, into the movement of masses for technical purposes. Water-power was local; steam-power is free. While water-power is necessarily rural, steam-power is by no means necessarily urban. It is its capitalist mode of utilization which concentrates it preponderantly in the towns and changes factory villages into factory towns. But in doing so it at the same time undermines the conditions under which it operates. The first requirement of the steam-engine, and a main requirement of almost all branches of production in large-scale industry, is relatively clean water. But the factory town transforms all water into stinking liquid manure. However much therefore urban concentration is a basic condition of capitalist production, each individual industrial capitalist is constantly striving to get away from the large

    Such is the content of exchange in the economic commune. What of its form? Exchange is effected through the medium of metallic money, and Herr Dühring is not a little proud of the "world-historic import" of this improvement. But in the trading between the commune and its members money is not money at all, it does not function as money in any way. It serves as a mere labour certificate; to use Marx's phrase, it "is merely evidence of the individual share of the producer in the common labour, and of his right to a certain portion of the common produce destined for consumption", and in this function it is "no more 'money' than a theatre pass-out check."[*] It can therefore be replaced by any other token, just as in Weitling, who replaces it by a "ledger" in which the labour hours worked are entered on one side and means of subsistence taken as compensation on the other. In a word, in the trade between the economic commune and its members it functions merely as Owen's "labour money", that "phantom" which Herr Dühring so loftily disdains but which he himself is compelled to introduce in his economy of the future. Whether the token indicating the measure of fulfilment of the "obligation to produce" and of the "right to consume" thus acquired is a scrap of paper, a counter, or a gold coin is absolutely of no consequence for this purpose. For other purposes, however, this is by no means the case, as we shall see.

    If, therefore, metallic money functions not as money but as a disguised labour certificate in an economic commune's trade with its members, still less does it function as money in

by explicitly recognizing the family's common property in the right of inheritance, from which there also follows the obligation of parents to maintain their children. But this makes a wide breach in quantitatively equal consumption. The bachelor lives happily like a lord on his eight or twelve shillings a day, while the widower with eight minor children subsists wretchedly on this sum. On the other hand, by accepting money in payment without any question, the commune leaves open the door to the possibility that this money may have been obtained otherwise than by the individual's own labour. Non olet.[*] The commune does not know where it comes from. But in this way all the conditions are given for metallic money, which hitherto played the role of a mere labour certificate, to exercise its real money function. The opportunity and the motive are present both to form a hoard and to run into debt. The needy individual borrows from the hoarder. The borrowed money accepted by the commune in payment for means of subsistence once more becomes what it is in present-day society, the social incarnation of human labour, the real measure of labour, the general medium of circulation. All the "laws and administrative regulations" in the world are as powerless against it as they are against the multiplication table or the chemical composition of water. And since the hoarder is in a position to extort interest from people in need, usury is restored along with metallic money functioning as money.

    Up to this point we have only considered the effects of the retention of metallic money within the field of operation of the Dühring economic commune. But beyond this field the wicked outside world meanwhile carries on contentedly in the old way. On the world market gold and silver remain world

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money, the general means of purchase and payment, the absolute social embodiment of wealth. This property of the precious metals gives the individual members of the economic communes a new motive for hoarding, enrichment and usury, the motive for operating freely and independently with regard to the commune and beyond its borders, and for realizing their accumulated private wealth on the world market. The usurers are transformed into dealers in the medium of circulation, bankers, controllers of the medium of circulation and of world money, and so into controllers of production, and so into controllers of the means of production, even though these may still be nominally registered for many years as the property of the economic and trading communes. Hence the hoarders and usurers, now become bankers, are also the masters of the economic and trading communes themselves. Herr Dühring's "socialitarian" system is indeed essentially different from the "nebulous notions" of the other socialists. It has no other purpose but the re-creation of high finance, under whose control and for whose coffers it will labour valiantly -- if it should ever happen to be pieced together and hold together. Its one hope of salvation would lie in the hoarders preferring to run away from the commune as fast as possible with the aid of their world money.

    Ignorance of earlier socialist thought is so widespread in Germany that an innocent youth might at this point raise the question whether, for example, Owen's labour-notes might not lead to a similar abuse. Although we are not concerned here with elaborating on the significance of these labour-notes, space should be given to the following in order to contrast Dühring's "comprehensive schematism" with Owen's "crude flabby and paltry ideas". First, such an abuse of Owen's labour-notes would require their conversion into real money,

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while Herr Dühring presupposes real money, though attempting to prohibit it from functioning otherwise than as mere labour certificates. While there would have to be real abuse in the former, the immanent nature of money, which is independent of human volition, asserts itself in the latter; the specific, correct use of money asserts itself in face of the misuse Herr Dühring tries to impose on it owing to his own ignorance of the nature of money. Second, with Owen the labour-notes are only a transitional form to the complete community and the free utilization of the resources of society, and incidentally at most a means designed to make communism plausible to the British public. If therefore any form of misuse should compel the Owenite society to do away with the labour-notes, it would be taking a step forward towards its goal, entering on a more perfect stage of its development. But if the Dühringian economic commune abolished money, it would be destroying its "world-historic import" in one blow, it would be putting an end to its most peculiar beauty, it would cease to be the Dühring economic commune and sink to the level of the nebulous notions, to raise it from which Herr Dühring has devoted so much of the hard labour of his rational imagination.*

    What, then, is the source of all the strange errors and entanglements amid which the Dühring economic commune meanders? Simply the fog in Herr Dühring's mind which envelops the concepts of value and money, and finally drives

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him to attempt to discover the value of labour. But since Herr Dühring doesn't enjoy the German monopoly on this kind of fog and in fact has plenty of competitors, we will "overcome our reluctance for a moment and unravel the knot" he has contrived to make here.

    The only value known in economics is the value of commodities. What are commodities? Products made in a society of more or less separate private producers, and therefore in the first place private products. But these private products become commodities only when they are made, not for consumption by their producers, but for consumption by others, that is, for social consumption; they enter into social consumption through exchange. Therefore, the private producers stand in a social relation to each other, constitute a society. Although they are the private products of each individual, their products are therefore simultaneously, but unintentionally and as it were involuntarily, also social products. In what, then, does the social character of these private products consist? Evidently in two characteristics: first, they all satisfy some human want, they all have a use-value not only for the producers but also for others; and second, although they are products of the most varied individual labour, they are at the same time products of human labour as such, of general human labour. In so far as they have a use-value for other persons too, they can generally enter into exchange; in so far as general human labour, the simple expenditure of human labour-power, is embodied in all of them, they can be compared with each other in exchange, be said to be equal or unequal, according to the quantity of this labour embodied in each. Social conditions remaining the same, two equal private products may embody an unequal quantity of individual labour, but they always embody only an equal quantity of general human labour. An unskilled

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smith may make five horseshoes in the same time as a skilful smith makes ten. But society does not make the accidental lack of skill of an individual the basis of valuation; it recognizes as general human labour only labour of a normal average degree of skill at the particular time. Therefore, one of the five horseshoes made by the first smith has no more value in exchange than one of the ten made by the other in the same time. Individual labour contains general human labour only in so far as it is socially necessary.

    Consequently, when I say that a commodity has a particular value, I say (1) that it is a socially useful product; (2) that it has been produced by a private individual for private account; (3) that, although it is a product of individual labour, it is at the same time and as it were unwittingly and involuntarily, also a product of social labour and, be it noted, of a definite quantity of this labour, established in a social way through exchange; and (4) that I express this quantity not in labour itself, in such and such a number of labour-hours, but in another commodity. If, therefore, I say that this clock is worth as much as that piece of cloth and each is worth fifty shillings, I say that an equal quantity of social labour is contained in the clock, the cloth and the money. I therefore assert that the social labour-time represented in them has been socially measured and found to be equal. But not directly, absolutely, as labour-time is usually measured, in labour-hours or days, etc., but in a roundabout way, through exchange, relatively. That is why I can express this definite quantity of labour-time not in labour-hours -- how many remains unknown to me -- but only in a roundabout way, relatively, in another commodity, which represents an equal quantity of social labour-time. The clock is worth as much as the piece of cloth.

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    But the production and exchange of commodities, while compelling the society based on them to take this roundabout way, likewise compel it to make the detour as short as possible. They single out from the commonalty of commodities one sovereign commodity in which the value of all other commodities can be expressed once and for all, a commodity which is recognized as the immediate incarnation of social labour and is therefore immediately and unconditionally exchangeable for all commodities -- money. Money is already contained in embryo in the concept of value, it is only value developed. But since the value of commodities, as against the commodities themselves, assumes an independent existence in money, a new factor appears in the society which produces and exchanges commodities, a factor with new social functions and effects. We need only state this point at the moment, without going more closely into it.

    The political economy of commodity production is by no means the only science which has to deal with factors known only relatively. In physics, too, we do not know how many separate gas molecules are contained in a given volume of gas, pressure and temperature also being given. But we do know that, so far as Boyle's Law is correct, such a given volume of any gas contains as many molecules as :3n equal volume of any other gas at the same pressure and temperature. We can therefore compare the molecular content of the most diverse volumes of the most diverse gases under the most diverse conditions of pressure and temperature; and if we take one litre of gas at 0ƒ C and 760 mm. pressure as the unit, we can measure the above molecular content by this unit.

    In chemistry the absolute atomic weights of the various elements are likewise unknown to us. But we know them

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relatively by knowing their reciprocal relations. Hence, just as commodity production and its economics obtain a relative expression for the quantities of labour contained in the various commodities -- quantities unknown to it -- by comparing these commodities on the basis of their relative labour content, so chemistry obtains a relative expression for the magnitude of the atomic weights unknown to it by comparing the various elements on the basis of their atomic weights and expressing the atomic weight of one element in multiples or fractions of the other (sulphur, oxygen, hydrogen). And just as commodity production elevates gold into the absolute commodity, the universal equivalent of all other commodities, the measure of all values, so chemistry elevates hydrogen into the chemical money commodity by fixing its atomic weight at I and reducing the atomic weights of all other elements to hydrogen, expressed in multiples of its atomic weight.

    Commodity production, however, is by no means the only form of social production. In the ancient Indian communities and in the family communities of the southern Slavs, products are not transformed into commodities. The members of the community are directly associated for production, the work is distributed according to tradition and needs, and so are the products to the extent that they are destined for consumption. Since direct social production and direct distribution preclude any exchange of commodities, they also preclude the transformation of the products into commodities (at any rate within the community) and consequently into values as well.

    From the moment society enters into possession of the means of production and uses them in direct association for production, the labour of each individual, however varied its specifically useful character, becomes social labour straight away and

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directly. The quantity of social labour contained in a product need not then be first established in a roundabout way; daily experience will show in a direct way how much is required on the average. Society will be able to calculate in a simple way how many hours of labour are contained in a steam-engine, a bushel of the last crop of wheat, or a hundred square yards of cloth of a specific quality. It could therefore never occur to it to go on expressing the quantities of labour put into the products, quantities which it will then know directly and absolutely, in yet a third product, in a measure which, moreover, is only relative, fluctuating and inadequate, though it was formerly unavoidable as an expedient, rather than express them in their natural, adequate and absolute measure, time. Just as little as it would occur to chemical science to go on expressing atomic weights relatively and in a roundabout way by means of the hydrogen atom, if it were able to express them absolutely in their adequate measure, namely in actual weights, in billionths or quadrillionths of a gramme. Hence, on the above assumptions, society will not assign values to products. It will not express the simple fact that the hundred square yards of cloth have required, say, a thousand hours of labour for their production in the oblique and meaningless way involved in stating that they are worth a thousand hours of labour. It is true that even then it will still be necessary for society to know how much labour each article of consumption requires for its production. It will have to arrange its plan of production in accordance with its means of production, which include, in particular, its labour-power. The useful effects of the various articles of consumption, compared with one another and with the quantities of labour required for their production, will in the end determine the plan. People will be able to manage

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everything very simply, without the intervention of the much-vaunted "value".[*]

    The concept of value is the most general and therefore the most comprehensive expression of the economic conditions of commodity production. Consequently, the concept of value contains the germ, not only of money, but also of all the more developed forms of the production and exchange of commodities. The very fact that value is the expression of the social labour contained in private products creates the possibility of a difference between this social labour and the individual labour contained in the same product. This difference will therefore become palpably evident to a private producer if he goes on producing in the old way with the advance of the social mode of production. The same thing happens as soon as all the private manufacturers of a particular kind of commodity produce it in an amount exceeding social needs. The fact that the value of a commodity is expressed only in terms of another commodity and can be realized only in exchange against it involves the possibility that the exchange will not take place at all, or at least will not realize the correct value. Finally, when the specific commodity labour-power appears on the market, its value is determined, like that of any other commodity, by the labour-time socially necessary for its production. The value form of products therefore already contains in embryo the whole capitalist form of production, the an-

    We have already seen above ("Political Economy", VI) that it is self-contradictory to speak of the value of labour. Since labour produces not only products but also value under certain social conditions, and since this value is measured by labour, the latter can no more have a separate value than weight, as such, can have a separate weight or heat a separate temperature. But it is the characteristic peculiarity of all social confusionists ruminating on "true value" to imagine that the worker does not receive the full "value" of his labour in existing society and that socialism is destined to redress this situation. Hence it is necessary in the first place to discover what the value of labour is, which is done by attempting to measure labour, not by its appropriate measure, time, but by its product. The worker should receive the "full proceeds of labour".[68] Not only the product of labour, but labour itself should be directly exchangeable for products, one hour's labour for the product of another hour's labour. But this at once gives rise to a very "serious" hitch. The whole product is distributed. Accumulation, the most important progressive function of society, is taken from society and put into the hands and at the arbitrary discretion of individuals. The individuals can do what they like with their "proceeds", but at best society remains as rich or poor as it was. The means of production accumulated in the past have therefore been centralized in the hands of society only in order that all means of production accumulated in the future may once again be dispersed in the hands of individuals. That is to slap one's own premises in the face and to arrive at a pure absurdity.

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    Fluid labour, active labour-power, is to be exchanged for the product of labour. Then labour-power is a commodity, just like the product for which it is to be exchanged. Then the value of this labour-power is in no wise determined by its product, but by the social labour embodied in it, and so is determined according to the present law of wages.

    But it is precisely this which must not be, we are told. Fluid labour, labour-power, should be exchangeable for its full product. That is to say, it should be exchangeable not for its value, but for its use-value ; the law of value is to apply to all other commodities, but must be repealed so far as labour-power is concerned. Such is the self-destructive confusion that lies concealed behind the "value of labour".

    The "exchange of labour for labour on the principle of equal valuation", in so far as it has any meaning, that is to say, the mutual exchangeability of products of equal social labour, hence the law of value, is the fundamental law precisely of commodity production, and hence also of its highest form, capitalist production. It asserts itself in present-day society in the only way in which economic laws can assert themselves in a society of private producers, as a blindly operating law of nature which is inherent in things and relations, which is independent of the will or actions of the producers. By elevating this law to be the basic law of his economic commune and demanding that the commune should carry it out in all consciousness, Herr Dühring makes the basic law of existing society into the basic law of his imaginary society. He wants existing society, but without its abuses. He is thus moving on the same ground as Proudhon. Like him, he wants to abolish the abuses which have arisen out of the development of commodity production into capitalist production by applying to them the basic law of commodity production, precisely to the operation of which these abuses are

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due. Like Proudhon, he wants to abolish the real consequences of the law of value by means of fantastic ones.

    How proudly our modern Don Quixote, perched on his noble Rosinante, "the universal principle of justice", and followed by his valiant Sancho Panza, Abraham Enss,[124] rides off on his knight errantry to win Mambrino's helmet, "the value of labour", but we are afraid, very much afraid, he will bring home nothing but the old familiar barber's basin.

    But Herr Dühring cannot wait until religion dies this, its natural, death. He proceeds more deep-rootedly. He out-Bismarcks Bismarck; he decrees sharper May laws not merely against catholicism, but against all religion whatsoever;[125] he incites his gendarmes of the future against religion and so helps it to obtain martyrdom and a prolonged lease on life. Wherever we turn, we find specifically Prussian socialism.

    After Herr Dühring has thus happily destroyed religion,

"relying solely on himself and nature and matured in the knowledge of his collective powers, man can boldly enter on all the roads which the course of events and his own nature open to him".

    By way of a diversion let us now consider what "course of events" the man relying solely on himself can boldly enter on under Herr Dühring's guidance.

    The first course of events in which man has to rely solely on himself is being born. After that, he remains

entrusted to his mother, "the natural governess of children", for the period of natural minority. "This period may last, as in ancient Roman law, until puberty, that is to say, until about the fourteenth year." Only when badly brought up older boys do not pay proper respect to their mother's authority

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will recourse be had to paternal assistance, and particularly to the public educational regulations, to make good this deficiency. At puberty the child becomes subject to "the natural guardianship of his father", if there is someone having "real and uncontested paternity"; otherwise the community appoints a guardian.

    Just as Herr Dühring imagined at an earlier point that the capitalist mode of production could be replaced by the social mode without transforming production itself, so now he fancies that the modern-bourgeois family can be torn from its whole economic basis without changing its entire form. To him, this form is so immutable that he even makes "ancient Roman law", albeit in a somewhat "improved" form, valid for the family for all time, and he can conceive a family only as a "bequeathing", which means a possessing, unit. Here the Utopians are far in advance of Herr Dühring. They considered that the socialization of the education of the younger generation, and with it real freedom in the mutual relations between the members of a family, would directly follow from the free association of men and the transformation of private housework into a public industry. Moreover, Marx has already shown that "large-scale industry, by assigning as it does an important part in the socially organized process of production, outside the domestic sphere, to women, to young persons, and to children of both sexes, creates a new economic foundation for a higher form of the family and of the relations between the sexes" (Capital Vol. I, p. 515 ff.).*

    "Every dreamer of social reforms," says Herr Dühring, "naturally has ready a pedagogy corresponding to his new social life."

    Judging by this thesis, Herr Dühring is a "veritable monster" among these dreamers. The school of the future occupies his

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attention at least as much as his authors' rights, and that is saying a lot. He has his curricula for school and university all ready and complete, not only for the whole "foreseeable future" but also for the transition period. But we will confine ourselves to what will be taught to the young people of both sexes in the final and ultimate socialitarian system.

    The compulsory primary school will provide

"everything which by itself and in principle can have any attraction for man", and therefore in particular "the foundations and main conclusions of all sciences touching on the understanding of the world and of life". In the first place, therefore, it teaches mathematics, and indeed to such effect that the field of all fundamental concepts and methods from simple numeration and addition to the integral calculus is "completely encompassed".

    But this does not mean that anyone will really integrate or differentiate in this school. On the contrary. What is to be taught there will be, rather, entirely new elements of general mathematics, which contain in embryo both ordinary elementary and higher mathematics. Although Herr Dühring asserts that he already has in his mind "schematically, in their main outlines", "the contents of the text-books" which the school of the future will use, he has unfortunately not as yet succeeded in discovering these "elements of general mathematics"; and what he cannot achieve "can only really be expected from the free and enhanced forces of the new social order".

    But if meanwhile the grapes of the mathematics of the future are still very sour, the astronomy, mechanics and physics of the future will present all the less difficulty and

will "provide the kernel of all schooling"; while "botany and zoology, which, in spite of all theories, are mainly of a descriptive character . . ." will serve "rather as a light form of diversion".

    There it is, in black and white, in the Philosophy, page 417. Right down to the present day Herr Dühring knows no other

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botany and zoology than those which are mainly descriptive. The whole of organic morphology, which embraces the comparative anatomy, embryology and palaeontology of the organic world, is entirely unknown to him even by name. While wholly new biological sciences are springing up almost by the dozen behind his back, his childish mind still goes to Raff's Natural History for Children for "the eminently modern educative elements provided by the natural-scientific mode of thought", and he likewise decrees this constitution of the organic world for the whole "foreseeable future". Here, too, as is his wont, he entirely forgets chemistry.

    As for the aesthetic side of education, Herr Dühring will have to fashion it all anew. The poetry of the past is worth less. Where all religion is banned, it goes without saying that the "mythological or other religious trimmings" characteristic of earlier poets cannot be tolerated in school. "Poetic mysticism", too, "such as, for example, Goethe was so addicted to", is to be condemned. Herr Dühring will therefore have to make up his mind to provide us by himself with those poetic masterpieces which correspond to "the higher claims of an imagination harmonized with reason" and represent the true ideal "denoting the consummation of the world". Let him not tarry! The economic commune can only conquer the world when it strolls in at the double to the rhythm of the Alexandrine harmonized with reason.

    The adolescent citizen of the future will be little plagued by philology.

    "The dead languages will be entirely discarded . . . but living foreign languages . . . will remain of secondary importance." Only where inter course between nations extends to the movement of the masses of the people themselves would these languages be made accessible to everyone, according to need and in an easy form. "Really educative study of language"

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will be provided by a kind of general grammar, and particularly by the "substance and form of one's own language".

    The narrow national horizon of modern man is still much too cosmopolitan for Herr Dühring. He also wants to do away with the two levers which at least give the opportunity of rising above the narrow national standpoint in the world as it is today: knowledge of the ancient languages, which opens a wider common horizon at least to those people of whatever nation who have had a classical education; and knowledge of modern languages, through which alone the people of different nations can communicate with one another and acquaint themselves with what is happening beyond their own borders. On the contrary, the grammar of the mother tongue is to be thoroughly drilled in. But the "substance and form of one's own language" become intelligible only when its origin and gradual development are traced, and this is impossible without taking into account, first, its own extinct forms, and secondly, cognate languages, both living and dead. But this brings us back to territory which has been expressly forbidden. If Herr Dühring strikes all modern historical grammar out of his curriculum, there is nothing left for his language studies but the old-fashioned technical grammar, cut to the old classical philological pattern, with all its casuistry and arbitrariness which are based on the absence of any historical foundation. His hatred of the old philology makes him elevate the very worst product of the old philology to "the central point of the really educative study of language". It is clear that we are dealing with a linguist who has never heard a word of the whole tremendous and successful development of the historical science of language during the last sixty years, and who therefore seeks "the eminently modern educative elements" of language training, not in Bopp, Grimm and Diez, but in Heyse and Becker of blessed memory.

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    But all this would still fall far short of making the young citizen of the future "rely solely on himself". For this purpose it is necessary here again to lay a deeper foundation by means of

    "the assimilation of the latest philosophical principles". "But such a deepening will not be . . . a gigantic task at all", now that Herr Dühring has broken the path. In fact, "if the small rigorous body of knowledge of which the general schematics of being can boast is purged of its false scholastic excrescences, and if it is decided to admit as ubiquitously valid only the reality authenticated" by Herr Dühring, elementary philosophy, too, becomes perfectly accessible to the youth of the future. "If the extremely simple methods by which we helped procure a hitherto unknown scope for the concepts of infinity and their critique are recalled", there is "no reason at all why the elements of the universal conception of space and time, which have been given so simple a form by their current deepening and sharpening, should not eventually pass into the ranks of elementary studies. . . . The most deep-rooted ideas" of Herr Dühring "should play no secondary role in the universal educational system of the new society". The self-identical state of matter and the counted uncountable are on the contrary destined "not merely to put man on his own feet but also to make him realize by himself that he has got the so-called Absolute underfoot ".

    The primary school of the future, as can be seen, is nothing but a somewhat "improved" Prussian grammar school, in which Greek and Latin are replaced by a little more pure and applied mathematics and in particular by the elements of the philosophy of reality, and in which the teaching of German is reduced to Becker, of blessed memory, that is, down to about a fourth-form level. In fact, now that we have demonstrated Herr Dühring's rudimentary schoolboy "knowledge" in all the spheres on which he has touched, "there is no reason at all" why it, or rather what is left of it after our previous thorough "purging", should not "eventually pass into the ranks of elementary studies" bag and baggage, since indeed it has never left these ranks. True, Herr Dühring has heard something about the combination of work and instruction in socialist

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society, which is to ensure an all-round technical education as well as a practical foundation for scientific training; this point, too, is therefore brought in to help the socialitarian scheme in the usual way. But because, as we have seen, the old division of labour is to remain essentially undisturbed in the Dühringian production of the future, this technical training at school is deprived of any later practical application or of any significance for production itself; it has a purpose only within the school: it is to replace gymnastics, which our deep-rooted revolutionizer wants to ignore altogether. So he can only offer us a few phrases, as for example, "young and old will work, in the serious sense of the word". This drivel without content and consistency is really pitiful compared to the passage in Capital, pages 508-515, in which Marx develops the thesis that "from the factory system there budded, as Robert Owen has shown us in detail, the germ of the education of the future, an education that will, in the case of every child over a given age, combine productive labour with instruction and gymnastics, not only as a method of increasing social production, but as the only method of producing fully developed human beings".*

    We must omit the university of the future, in which the philosophy of reality will be the kernel of all knowledge, and where, side by side with the faculty of Medicine, the Faculty of Law will continue in full bloom; we must also omit the "special vocational institutions", about which all we learn is that they will be only "for a few subjects". Let us assume that the young citizen of the future has passed all his educational courses and has at last become sufficiently "reliant on himself" to be able to look about for a wife. What prospect does Herr Dühring offer him here?

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    "In view of the importance of propagation for the conservation, elimination and blending of qualities as well as for their new creation and development, the ultimate roots of the human and non-human must to a great extent be sought in sexual union and selection, and furthermore in the care taken for or against getting certain results at birth. In practice it must be left to a later epoch to judge the chaos and stupidity now rife in this sphere. Nevertheless, we must at least make it clear from the outset, even in spite of the weight of prejudice, that success or failure in the quality of births, whether due to nature or human prudence, is far more important than the number of births. It is true that at all times and under all legal systems monstrosities have been destroyed; but there is a wide range of degrees between the normal human being and deformities which lack all resemblance to a human being. . . . It is obviously an advantage to prevent the birth of a human being who would only become a defective creature."

    Another passage runs:

    "Philosophic thought can find no difficulty . . . in comprehending the right of the unborn world to the best possible composition. . . . Conception and, if need be, also birth offer the opportunity for preventive, or in exceptional cases selective, care in this connection."

    Again:

    "Greek art, the idealization of man in marble, will be unable to retain its historical importance when the task of perfecting the human form in flesh and blood is taken in hand, the task which is no doubt less artistic but far more important for the fate of millions. This form of art does not deal with mere stone, and its aesthetic is not concerned with the contemplation of dead forms," and so on.

    Our budding citizen of the future is brought down to earth. Of course he knew without Herr Dühring that marriage is not an art which deals with mere stone or even with the contemplation of dead forms; but after all, Herr Dühring had promised him that he would be able to strike out along all roads which the course of events and his own nature opened up for him to find a sympathetic female soul together with the accompanying body. Nothing of the kind, the "deeper and sterner morality" now thunders at him. It is first a matter of

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casting off the chaos and stupidity now rife in the sphere of sexual union and selection, and taking into account the right of the new-born world to the best possible composition. At this solemn moment it is to him a matter of perfecting the human form in flesh and blood, of becoming a Phidias, so to speak, in flesh and blood. How is he to set about it? Herr Dühring's mysterious utterances quoted above give him not the slightest indication, although Herr Dühring himself says it is an "art". Does perhaps Herr Dühring already have a handbook on this art "in his mind's eye, schematically", the kind of handbook in sealed wrappers now circulating so widely in German bookshops? Indeed, we no longer find ourselves in socialitarian society but rather in the Magic Flute, the only difference being that Sarastro, the stout Masonic priest, would hardly rank as a "priest of the second order" against our deeper and sterner moralist. The tests to which Sarastro submitted his loving pair of adepts are child's play compared with the terrifying examination Herr Dühring imposes on his two sovereign individuals before he permits them to enter the state of "free and ethical marriage". So it may transpire that our Tamino of the future, "relying solely on himself", may indeed have the so-called Absolute underfoot, but one of his feet may be a couple of degrees off, so that malicious tongues call him a club-foot. It is also within the realm of the possible that his most dearly beloved Pamina of the future does not stand quite straight on the above-said Absolute, owing to a slight deviation in favour of her right shoulder which jealous tongues might call a little bit of a hump. What then? Will our deeper and sterner Sarastro forbid them to practise the art of perfecting humanity in flesh and blood? Will he exercise his "preventive care" at conception, or his "selective care" at birth? Ten to one, things will work out otherwise; the pair of

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lovers will leave Sarastro-Dühring standing and go off to the registry office.

    Hold on there! Herr Dühring cries. This is not at all what was meant. Give me a chance to explain!

    In the "higher, genuinely human motives of wholesome sexual union . . . the humanly perfected form of sexual excitement, which in its intense manifestation is passionate love, is when reciprocated the best guarantee of a union which will also be acceptable in its result. . . . It is only an effect of the second order that a relation which is in itself harmonious should also result in a harmoniously composed offspring. From this in turn it follows that any compulsion must have harmful effects," and so on.

    So all ends for the best in the best of all possible socialitarian worlds. Club-foot and hunchback love each other passionately, and therefore in their reciprocal relation offer the best guarantee for a harmonious "effect of the second order"; it is just like a novel -- they love each other, they get each other, and all the deeper and sterner morality turns out as usual to be harmonious twaddle.

    Herr Dühring's noble ideas about the female sex in general can be gathered from the following indictment of existing society:

    "In a society of oppression based on the sale of human being to human being, prostitution is accepted as the natural complement of compulsory marriage ties in the men's favour, and it is a most comprehensible but also most significant fact that nothing of the kind is possible for women ".

    Not for anything in the world would I care to garner the thanks which might accrue to Herr Dühring from women for this compliment. But has Herr Dühring never heard of the form of income known as a petticoat-pension (Schürzenstipendium ), which is no longer so exceptional nowadays? Herr Dühring himself was once a referendary[126] and he lives in Berlin, where even in my day thirty-six years ago, to say nothing

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of lieutenants, Referendarius used often enough to rhyme with Schürzenstipendarius!

    May the reader permit us to take leave of our subject, which has often been dry and gloomy enough, on a gay and conciliatory note. So long as we had to deal with the separate issues raised, our judgement was tied to the objective incontrovertible facts; often enough, it had to be sharp and even hard on the basis of these facts. Now, when philosophy, economics and sociality all lie behind us, when we have before us the picture of the author as a whole, whom we had previously to judge in detail -- now human considerations can come into the foreground; at this point we shall be permitted to trace back to personal causes many otherwise incomprehensible scientific errors and conceits, and to sum up our verdict on Herr Dühring in the words: mental incompetence due to megalomania.

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  [102] Lettres d'un habitant de Genève à ses contemporains (Letters of a Resident of Geneva to His Contemporaries ) is Saint-Simon's first work; it was written in Geneva in 1802 and published anonymously in Paris in 1803.
    The first work of importance by Charles Fourier was Théorie des quatre mouvements et des destinées générales (Theory of the Four Movements and Destinies in General ), written early in the 19th century and published anonymously in Lyons in 1808 (the title page gives Leipzig as the place of publication, apparently for censorship reasons).
    New Lanark -- a cotton mill with a workers' settlement near the town of Lanark, Scotland; it was founded in the early 1780s.    [p. 329]

  ^[103] "Lettres d'un habitant de Genève à ses contemporains" in OEuvres de Claude-Henri de Saint-Simon, Editions Anthropos, Paris, 1966, Vol. I, Book I, p. 55 and pp. 41-42.    [p. 332]

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  ^[104] The eighth letter in the series: "Lettres de Henri Saint-Simon à un Américain". Ibid., Vol. I, Book II, p. 186.    [p. 332]

  ^[105] Engels is referring to the two pamphlets co-authored by Saint Simon and A. Thierry: "De la réorganisation de la société Européenne. . ." and "Opinion sur les mesures à prendre contre la coalition de 1815". The first was written in October 1814, the second in May 1815. Ibid., Vol. I, Book I, pp. 153-218 and Vol. VI, pp. 353-79.    [p. 333]

  ^[106] Obviously an allusion to Dühring's conflict with certain Berlin University professors; (see Note 7).

    [Note 7:  Eugen Dühring was a lecturer at the University of Berlin from 1865 and a teacher at a private lyceum for girls from 1873. In 1872 he began to make sharp attacks on university professors and to criticize university practices. In 1876 he lost his job at the lyceum as a result of pressure from reactionary professors. He repeated his accusations in sharper language in 1877, whereupon the Department of Philosophy deprived him of the right to teach at the University. His dismissal sparked a vocifcrous protest campaign by his supporters and was condemned by broad democratic circles.

    E. Schweninger, Bismarck's personal physician from 1881, was appointed professor at Berlin University in 1884.]    [p. 333]

  ^[107] See Fourier's statement in his first book, Théorie des quatre mouvements : "As a general thesis, social progress and changes in a period take place by reason of the progress of women towards freedom, and the decay of the social system takes place by reason of the decrease in women's freedom." From this he draws the following conclusion: "The extension of the rights of women is the basic principle of all social progress." (Fourier, Textes choisis, edited by F. Armand, Editions Sociales, Paris, 1953, p. 124.)    [p. 334]

  ^[108] Ibid., pp. 64-65 and 70.    [p. 334]

  ^[109] Ibid., pp. 95 and 105. For the "vicious circle" of civilization, see pp. 104 and 129-30.    [p. 334]

  ^[110] Ibid., pp. 66-67.    [p. 335]

  ^[111] See A. L. Morton, The Life and Ideas of Robert Owen, Lawrence and Wishart, London, 1962, p. 80.    [p. 337]

  ^[112] Robert Owen, "Report of the Proceedings at the Several Public Meetings, Held in Dublin . . . on the 18th March, 12th April, 19th April and 3rd May," Dublin, 1823.    [p. 338]

  ^[113] An Act, introduced on Owen's initiative in June 1815, was passed by Parliament only in July 1819 after it had been emasculated. The Act regulating labour at cotton mills banned the employment of children under the age of nine and limited the working day to 12 hours for persons under 16. Since Owen's proposal to appoint salaried factory inspectors was defeated, the Act became a dead letter.    [p. 339]

  ^[114] In October 1833 Owen presided over a congress of co-operative societies and trade unions in London, which led to the formation of the Grand National Consolidated Trades Union in Fcbruary 1834. The Union's membership grew to half a million in a few weeks. It was Owen's intention that it would take over the management of production and remake society peacefully. This utopian plan collapsed very quickly.

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In face of powerful opposition from bourgeois society and the state, the Union ceased to exist in August 1834.    [p. 339]

  ^[115] Equitable Labour Exchange Bazaars were founded by workers' co-operatives in various parts of England; Owen opened the National Equitable Labour Exchange Bazaar in London in September 1832 and it existed until mid-1834.
    Proudhon made an attempt to organize the Banque du Peuple in Paris in January 1849. It existed for about two months, but only on paper, as it failed before it began to function.    [p. 339]

  ^[116] W. L. Sargant, Robert Owen and His Social Philosophy, London, 1860 Owen's major works on marriage and the communist system are: The Marriage System of the New Moral World (1838), The Book of the New Moral World (1836-44) and The Revolution in the Mind and Practice of the Human Race (1849). See also A. L. Morton, op. cit., pp. 161-68 and 132-48.    [p. 340]

  ^[117] Harmony Hall -- the name of the communist colony founded by English Utopian socialists led by Robert Owen at the close of 1839 in Hampshire, England. It existed until 1845.    [p. 341]

  ^[118] In Socialism: Utopian and Scientific Engels had a note here referring to his Appendix on the Mark, which deals with the history of landed property in Germany.    [p. 351]

  ^[119] The wars of the 17th and 18th century between the major European powers for hegemony in the trade with India, the East Indies and America and for the seizure of colonial markets. At first the principal rivals were England and Holland (the Anglo-Dutch wars of 1652-54, 1664-67 and 1672-74 were typical commercial wars), and later England and France. England won these wars, and towards the close of the 18th century almost the whole of world trade was concentrated in her hands.    [p. 352]

  ^[120] A "free people's state ": this slogan is criticized in Marx's Critique of the Gotha Programme (FLP, Peking, 1972, pp. 26-29), Engels' letter to Bebel of March 18-28, 1875 (ibid., pp. 42-43), and Lenin's The State and Revolution (FLP, Peking, 1970, pp. 21-22 and 76-79).    [p. 363]

  ^[121] Robert Giffen, "Recent Accumulations of Capital in the United Kingdom", Journal of the Statistical Society, London, Vol. 16, 1878.    [p. 366]

  ^[122] See Charles Fourier, Textes choisis, Editions Sociales, Paris, 1953, p. 140.    [p. 381]

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  ^[123] These words were spoken by the Roman Emperor Vespasian (A.D. 69-79) in reply to his son, who reproached him for introducing a tax on lavatories.    [p. 395]

  ^[68] Marx makes a detailed criticism of the Lassallean slogan of "full" or "undiminished proceeds of labour" in Section I, Critique of the Gotha Programme, Foreign Languages Press, Peking, 1972, pp. 10-14.    [p. 405]

  ^[124] Abraham Enss, a follower of Dühring and author of a lampoon of Marx and Engels written after the first chapters of Anti-Dühring appeared in Vorwärts in January-February 1877.    [p. 407]

  ^[125] The May laws adopted by the Reichstag in May 1873 established rigid state control over the Catholic Church and were the culminating point of the "cultural struggle". They were the most important link in the legislation of 1872-75 directed by Bismarck against the Catholic clergy as the mainstay of the "Centre" party, which represented the interests of the separatists in south and southwestern Germany. Police persecution evoked desperate resistance by the Catholics and gave them a halo of martyrdom. Between 1880 and 1887 the Bismarck Government was compelled first to relax and then repeal almost all the anti-Catholic laws, in order to unite all the reactionary forces against the working-class movement.    [p. 412]

  ^[126] Referendary -- in Germany a junior official, chiefly a jurist, who got his training as an apprentice at court or in a state office; usually he received no salary.    [p. 421]