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
(After some invective and satire hurled at Duehring Engels proceeds:)
Let us examine with regard to equality of value a little more closely.
All labor time is of equal value, that of the barrow pusher and that
of the architect. Therefore labor time and consequently labor itself
has a value. But labor is the creator of all values. It is the only
thing which gives the original products of nature a value in the
economic sense. Value in itself is nothing but the expression in a
given object of necessary, social, human labor. One might just as well
speak of and fix a value to labor as speak of the value of value, of
the weight, not of a specific body, but of gravity itself. Herr
Duehring calls people like Owen, St. Simon and Fourier, social
alchemists. When he invents a value for labor time, that is for labor,
he shows that he is far below these same alchemists.
For Socialism, which will emancipate human labor force from its place
as a commodity, the understanding that labor has no value and can have
none is a matter of the greatest importance. With an understanding of
it, all attempts made by Herr Duehring by means of his crude
worker-socialism (Arbeitersozialismus) to regulate the division of the
means of existence, as a kind of higher wages, fall to the ground.
From it there follows the broader view, since it is controlled by
purely economic motives, that distribution regulates itself in the
interests of production, and production is advanced in the greatest
degree by a method of distribution which permits all the social
departments to develop, maintain, and express their capacities to the
fullest possible extent. To the ideas of the intellectuals which have
come into Herr Duehring's possession, it must always seem to be an
enormity that it will abolish barrow pushing and architecture
simultaneously as professions, and that the man who has given half an
hour to architecture will also push the cart a little until his work
as architect is again in demand. It would be a pretty sort of
socialism which perpetuated the business of barrow-pushing.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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