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
In the second place if we limit ourselves to the exploitation of
private property in land in large amounts we come to the question as
to whom the land belongs. We find that in the beginnings of civilised
peoples the land was not owned by great landlords but was held in
common by tribal and village communities. From India to Ireland the
exploitation of land property in large tracts has proceeded from the
tribal and village communal ownership which was the original form.
Sometimes the land was cultivated in common for the benefit of the
common members, sometimes in separate pieces, parcelled by the
community to separate families from time to time with wood and willow
land retained for communal use.
It is pure imagination on the part of Herr Duehring to declare that
the exploitation of landed property is responsible for the existence
of master and servant. Who is the owner of private landed property in
the entire Orient where the land is possessed by the community or the
State and the word landlord is not to be found in the language? The
Turks first introduced a species of feudalism into the lands which
they conquered. The Greeks in heroic times had a classified system of
rank which itself bore witness to a long unknown preceding history,
but the land was then cultivated by an independent peasantry. The
large possessions of the nobles and leaders of the tribes were the
exception and had no permanence. Italy was originally cultivated by
small peasant farmers; when in the latter days of the Roman Republic
the great holdings, the _latifundia_ destroyed the small
farmer-holdings, cattle raising was substituted for agriculture, and
as Pliny points out Italy was ruined (_latifundia Italiam perdidere_).
In the whole of Europe during the Middle Ages small farming was the
rule and it is very appropriate to the above discussion to note what
tasks these peasants were obliged to perform for the feudal lords. The
Frisians, lower Saxons, Flemings and people from the lower Rhine who
invaded the lands of the Slavs to the east of the Elbe and cultivated
them did so under very favorable terms of rent but by no means under a
species of slavery. In North America, by far the greatest amount of
the land is cultivated by the labor of free small farmers, while the
great landed proprietors of the South with their slaves and
extravagant farming methods destroyed the soil until the land ceased
to be productive and the cultivation of cotton travelled ever
Westward. In Australia and New Zealand the attempts to artificially
establish an agrarian aristocracy by the British government have
failed. In short, if we except the tropical and sub-tropical colonies,
in which the climate is prohibitive of agriculture by Europeans, it
seems that the idea of a great land holding class originally
dominating nature by means of the employment of slaves and serfs is a
pure product of the imagination. Things are quite otherwise. If one
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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