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
What attitude did Marx take to the negation of the negation? On page
761 and following he states the conclusion with respect to his
economic and historical investigations into the so-called accumulation
of original capital, extending over the fifty preceding pages. Before
the capitalistic era in England, at least, small production existed,
based upon the private property of the worker in his tools. The
so-called accumulation of capital consists in the expropriation of
these immediate producers, that is in the abolition of private
property resting on the labor of individuals. This was possible
because the aforesaid small production is only compatible with a
narrow and primitive stage of production and of society and at a
certain grade of development furnishes the means of its own suicide.
This suicide, the transformation of individual and divided modes of
production into social production, constitutes the early history of
capitalism. As soon as the workers are transformed into proletarians
and their means of labor into capital, as soon as the capitalistic
methods of production are firmly established, the growing association
of labor and the further transformation of the land and other means of
production and hence the further expropriation of the owners of
private property takes on a new form, "there is no longer the
self-employing worker to expropriate, but the capitalist who
expropriates many workers. This expropriation fulfils itself through
the play of laws immanent in capitalistic production itself, through
the concentration of capital. One capitalist kills many. Hand in hand
with this concentration, or the expropriation of many capitalists by a
few, there develop continually the conscious technical application of
science, the deliberate organised exploitation of the soil, the
transformation of the instruments of labor into instruments of labor
which can only be employed collectively, and the economising of all
means of production through their employment as the common means of
production of combined social labor. With the constantly diminishing
numbers of capitalist magnates who usurp and monopolise all the
advantages of this process of transformation, grows the mass of
misery, pressure, slavery, degradation and robbery but there grows
also revolt and the constant progress in union and organisation of the
working class brought about through the mechanism of the capitalistic
process of production. Capitalism becomes an impediment to the methods
of production developed with and under it. The concentration of the
means of production and the organisation of labor reach a point where
it comes into collision with its capitalistic covering. It is broken.
The hour of capitalistic private property strikes. The expropriators
are expropriated."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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