Landmarks of Scientific Socialism: "Anti-Duehring"Engels, Friedrich
Philosophy
Landmarks of Scientific Socialism: "Anti-Duehring"
Engels, Friedrich
Dialectical materialism; Dühring, E. (Eugen), 1833-1921; Economics; Philosophy; Socialism
Let us leave the negation of the negation for a little and look at
"the coexistent individual and social property." This will be called
by Herr Duehring a "cloud realm," and, strange to say he is really
right in this regard. But sad to say it is not Marx who is found to be
in the cloud realm but on the contrary Herr Duehring himself. Since by
virtue of his wonderful versatility in the vagaries of Hegel he does
not experience any difficulty in telling us the necessary contents of
the as yet unpublished volume of "Capital," so, after setting Hegel
right, he is able to correct Marx without any trouble in that he
ascribes to him a higher unity of a private property of which Marx has
not said a word.
Marx says "It is the negation of the negation. This reestablishes
private property but on the basis of the acquisitions of the
capitalistic era, of the cooperation of free laborers and their common
ownership of the land and the means of production. The transformation
of the private property of individuals, depending upon the labor of
individuals, into capitalistic property is naturally a process much
more tedious, hard and difficult than the transformation of
capitalistic private property, as it now exists, resting upon social
production, into social property." That is all. The condition attained
by the dispossession of the dispossessor is here shown as the
restoration of individual private property resting however on a basis
of social property in the land and means of production. For people who
can understand English, the meaning of this is that social property
extends to the land and means of production, and private property to
the products, therefore to consumption. And that the matter should be
evident even to infants Marx shows on page 56. "A society of free men
who labor with social means of production, and consciously expend
their individual labor power as social labor power," therefore a
socialistically organised society, and he says further "The total
product of the society is a social product. A portion of this product
serves again as a means of production. It remains social. But another
portion is consumed by the members of the society. It must therefore
be distributed among them." And that ought to be clear, even to Herr
Duehring, in spite of his having Hegel on the brain. The coexistent
individual and social property, this confused and indefinite thing,
this nonsense proceeding from the Hegelian dialectic, this misty
world, this deep dialectic puzzle which Marx leaves his pupils to
solve is merely a creation of Herr Duehring's imagination. Marx, as a
so-called Hegelian, is obliged, as a result of the negation of the
negation, to furnish a correct higher unity, and since he does not do
this in accordance with the taste of Herr Duehring, the latter has to
take a lofty stand and to smite Marx in the interests of the full
truth of things upon which Herr Duehring holds a patent.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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