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
According to Herr Duehring force is the absolute evil. The first act
of force is to him the first fall into sin. His whole conception is a
preachment over the infection of all history up to the present time
with the original sin. He talks about the disgraceful falsifying of
all natural and social laws by the invention of the devil, force. That
force plays another role in history, a revolutionary role, that it is
in the words of Marx, the midwife of the old society which is pregnant
with the new, that it is the tool by the means of which social
progress is forwarded, and foolish, dead political forms
destroyed,--of that Herr Duehring has no word to say, only with sighs
and groans does he admit the possibility that force may be necessary
for the overthrow of a thievish economic system. He simply declares
that every application of force demoralizes him who uses it. And this
in spite of the moral and intellectual uplift which has followed every
victorious revolution. He says this in Germany, too, where a powerful
and necessary uprising would at least have the advantage of abolishing
the slavish snobbery of the national mind which has prevailed since
the humiliation of the Thirty Years War. And this foolish and
senseless sort of preaching is set up in opposition to the most
revolutionary party known to history.
_V. Theory of Value._
It is now about a hundred years since a book appeared in Leipsic which
by the beginning of this century had gone through thirty-one editions
and which was distributed throughout the towns and the country
districts by officials, preachers and humanitarians, of all sorts, and
which was universally adopted in the schools as a reader. This book
was called, "The Children's Friend" by Rochow. It had the object of
teaching the children of the peasant and laboring classes their
vocation in life and their duties to their social and political
superiors, and making them satisfied with their lot in life, with
black bread and potatoes, compulsory servitude, low wages, fatherly
beatings and other similar agreeable things. In pursuit of this end,
the youth in town and country was informed what a wise provision of
nature it was that man was obliged to get his food and enjoyment by
means of his labor, and how fortunate the peasant and handworker ought
to feel that they were able to spice their food with hard labor while
the spendthrift and the picture suffered the pangs of indigestion or
lack of appetite. These commonplaces which old Rochow thought good
enough for the peasant children of his day have been elevated into
the "absolute fundamental" of the newest political economy by Herr
Duehring.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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