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
Value is defined as follows by Herr Duehring "Value is what economic
goods and activities will fetch in exchange." What they will fetch is
shown "by the price or some other equivalent, wages for example." In
other words Value is price. Or not to do Herr Duehring an injury and
to show the absolute absurdity of his definition in his own language,
"Value is prices." On page 19 he says "Value and its prices expressed
in money" and he also affirms that the same value has very different
prices and therefore has different values. If Hegel had not died long
ago he would hang himself out of pure jealousy, for, with all his
theology, he could not have produced this value which has as many
different values as it has prices. One would have to possess the
confidence of Herr Duehring to begin a new and more profound treatment
of political economy with the declaration that there is no difference
between value and price except that one is expressed in terms of money
and the other is not.
(After gentle raillery of Duehring's statements Engels proceeds.)
The actual, practical value of an object according to Herr Duehring
consists in two things, first in the amount of human labor contained
in it and secondly in a forcibly imposed tax. In other words value as
it exists to-day is a monopoly price. If all wares have this monopoly
price, as according to this theory, only two things are possible.
Either every buyer, as buyer, loses what he made as seller, for prices
have only changed their names, they are really the same, everything
remains as it was and the much talked of exchange value is merely
imaginary, or the imposed cost represents real values, values
produced by the working value-making class, but taken by the
monopolising class, and this sum of values is simply unpaid labor. In
this latter case we come, in spite of the force theory, and the
compulsory taxation theory and the special exchange value theory back
again to the Marxian theory of value.
The fixing of the value of a commodity by wages which is frequently
confused by Adam Smith with the fixing of value by the time expended
in labor has been, since the time of Ricardo, denounced by political
economists and only to-day persists in popular economics. It is now
the sycophants of the existing capitalistic system who declare that
value is fixed by wages and therefore declare the profits of the
capitalists to be higher kind of wages, wages of abstinence, in that
the capitalist has not dissipated his capital, wages of
superintendence, premiums on risks, etc. Herr Duehring only differs
from them in that he calls profits robbery. In other words Herr
Duehring founds his socialism on the worst teachings of the popular
economists. His popular economics and his socialism stand or fall
together.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account