Anti-Duhring, Part III – Socialism, II – Theoretical - Part 1

Part III – Socialism, II – Theoretical

“The materialist conception of history starts from the principle that production and, next to production, the exchange of things produced, is the basis of every social order; that in every society that has appeared in history, the distribution of wealth and with it the division of society into classes or estates are dependent upon what is produced, how it is produced, and how the products are exchanged. Accordingly, the ultimate causes of all social changes and political revolutions are to be sought, not in men's brains, not in their growing insight into eternal truth and justice, but in changes in the modes of production and exchange.” (p 343)

In other words, as I set out a long time ago, and contrary to the statist/idealist interpretations of Marxism that became dominant in the last century, the “social revolution” precedes the political revolution. The social revolution, the transformation of the way society produces and exchanges, and so creates new social classes – new forms of property – and new social relations between them, takes place purposively, but unconsciously, behind society's back.

Societies did not, one morning, wake up and decide to produce commodities rather than engage in direct production, any more than, one morning, a plant decides to grow towards the sun, or develops spikes to protect itself from being eaten. There is purpose in the evolution of such characteristics, but not conscious action by the plant or “Nature”. Similarly, a moth does not consciously decide to become darker or lighter, in order to be better camouflaged when it settles on trees, but there is definite purpose in an evolution, over time of such adaptation.  Its not random or inexplicable.

Of course, what makes humans and human societies different to plants or moths is that they do not simply adapt to the given environment, but also do, consciously, change that environment. They do not have to simply accept what Nature provides for them gratis. They learned to utilise fire, for example. That one thing enabled them to cook food, which has been identified as a major factor in enabling humans to more easily obtain the nutrition required to develop larger brains. Fire, also, enabled humans to make pottery, and to smelt metals.

The fact that humans established settled agriculture, rather than remaining as hunter-gatherers, has, also, been mentioned in enabling a large rise in agricultural production, which, also, facilitated the release of labour for other activities, not just for the production of new use-values, such as the pottery and metals referred to above, but, also, to engage in mental labour. It creates the material basis for a social division of labour, and specialisation, which, in turn, creates the conditions for new forms of property, private property, rather than communal property, and new social relations arising from it.

In order to consolidate itself into a new ruling-class, however, the section of society – inevitably a small minority – must become actually conscious of this change in social relations that has occurred, and draw the necessary conclusions from it. It must take the social revolution that has already taken place behind its back, which, objectively transformed it into the ruling-class, the personification of this new mode of production, and complete it, by carrying through a political revolution, the bringing into line of the ideological, juridical and political superstructure with the new economic and social base on which it rests.

Nor is this simply a matter of a single event, a storming of the Bastille, Winter Palace, and so on, which represents only the final insurrectionary act. In previous revolutions, the functionaries of the state change over a long period of time, reflecting, themselves, the new social relations and ideas, which these relations engender. Only in static modes of production, in which no new social relations, and so no new ideas, develop is that not the case. In the AMP, for example, there is no real political revolution only changes of dynasty, changes of personnel, but representing the same forms of property, and sets of ideas.

The bourgeoisie developed, across Europe, in the pores of the existing feudal society. At first, the bourgeoisie is a commercial class, which expands rapidly, along with the towns, as trade expands, and the world is opened up by the merchant adventurers – privateers and pirates like Drake, Raleigh and Columbus. Its material basis is the expansion of trade. Necessarily, as Marx describes in Theories of Surplus Value, this development finds a reflection in the realm of ideas – Monetary School and Mercantilism. These are the ideas that guide the academics in the universities, and, as this becomes clearly seen as the means by which the existing state, and its ruling-class prosper, it is these ideas that the state itself pursues to that end.

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Anti-Duhring, Part III – Socialism, I – Historical - Part 21

In other words, Engels argues, the cooperatives were to be developed, not as islands of socialism within a sea of of capitalism, but as workers' bastions and bulwarks, used to provide practical examples to workers of the way they could organise society, encouraging the workers to extend them throughout the economy, as Marx had noted in Capital III, Chapter 27.

“The co-operative factories of the labourers themselves represent within the old form the first sprouts of the new, although they naturally reproduce, and must reproduce, everywhere in their actual organisation all the shortcomings of the prevailing system. But the antithesis between capital and labour is overcome within them, if at first only by way of making the associated labourers into their own capitalist, i.e., by enabling them to use the means of production for the employment of their own labour. They show how a new mode of production naturally grows out of an old one, when the development of the material forces of production and of the corresponding forms of social production have reached a particular stage. Without the factory system arising out of the capitalist mode of production there could have been no co-operative factories. Nor could these have developed without the credit system arising out of the same mode of production. The credit system is not only the principal basis for the gradual transformation of capitalist private enterprises into capitalist stock companies, but equally offers the means for the gradual extension of co-operative enterprises on a more or less national scale. The capitalist stock companies, as much as the co-operative factories, should be considered as transitional forms from the capitalist mode of production to the associated one, with the only distinction that the antagonism is resolved negatively in the one and positively in the other.”

So, also, when Duhring wrote 80 years after the time of the utopians, setting out his own schema, differing only in it being based upon his revelation of absolute truths, he became “the latest utopian”.

In fact, as Marx had set out in Capital III, Chapter 27, and, as he and Engels set out later in this book, the worker cooperatives, by the end of the 19th century, were not the only, or even main, form of socialised capital, the transitional form of property between capitalism and socialism. The joint stock companies, today's giant multinational corporations are, also, the collective property of “the associated producers”.

Engels criticism of Duhring was that he sought to draw up this schema of the future society out of his head, rather than evolving it “out of the historically developed material at his disposal, as its necessary result”. (p 342)

By the end of the 19th century, and start of the 20th century, those material conditions, reflected in the development o those huge corporations, with their long-term plans, their need for the planning and regulation of the whole economy, by the state, and the need to ever increase the size of the market – imperialism – and so to move beyond the fetters of the nation state, were clear. Yet, so much of the focus of “socialist” organisations, in the last century, has been to oppose those same large corporations, to cling to the reactionary notions of the nation state, and to fail to recognise the nature of of that socialised capital, as the collective property of the workers. Instead of demanding that workers be given their rightful democratic control over their own property, they have instead demanded that the capitalist state be granted that control, via policies of nationalisation.

“... large-scale industry has developed the contradictions lying dormant in the capitalist mode of production into such crying antagonisms that the approaching collapse of this mode of production is, so to speak, palpable; that the new productive forces themselves can only be maintained and further developed by the introduction of a new mode of production corresponding to their present stage of development; that the struggle between the two classes engendered by the hitherto prevailing mode of production and constantly reproduced in ever sharper antagonism has gripped all civilised countries and is daily becoming more violent; and that this historical chain of connections, the conditions of the social transformation which it makes necessary, and the basic features of this transformation likewise determined by it, have already been apprehended.” (p 342)

Note that Engels does not say, here, that these sharpening contradictions are economic contradictions leading to some economic collapse, but are sharpening contradictions between the two classes – proletariat and bourgeoisie. The point is detailed further, later in the book. Those sharpening contradictions are heightened even more, when the bourgeoisie, as ruling class, becomes almost exclusively a rentier class, living off its interest/dividends and rent, as deductions from profit, and does so whilst denying the workers the right to control their own collective property, which produces those profits.

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Anti-Duhring, Part III – Socialism, I – Historical - Part 20

These utopians tower above the likes of Duhring, and yet, as with his attitude to all those scientists, philosophers and economists that preceded him, he looks down on them with contempt. That contempt, Engels notes, is based on his “frightful ignorance” of their works. He quotes Duhring's comment in relation to Saint-Simon.

“his basic idea was essentially correct, and apart from some one-sided aspects, provides the directing impulse towards real changes even today”. (p 340)

But, nowhere does Duhring say what this “basic idea” is. The same had been true in relation to Duhring's treatment of Quesnay.

“... in the end we have to allow ourselves to be put off with the phrase

“that imagination and philanthropic fervour ... together with the extravagant fantasy that goes with it dominated the whole of Saint-Simon's intellectual horizon”. (p 340)

Similarly, Duhring focuses on Fourier's futurist fantasies, the better to criticise him, whilst minimising his role in acidly critiquing the nature of capitalist society. The same with Duhring's treatment of Owen, for which he relied on “the miserable biography of the philistine Sargant, who likewise did not know Owen’s most important works — on marriage and the communist system.” (p 340)

Engels refers to Owen's “Book of The New Moral World”, in which can be found, “not only the most clear-cut communism, with equal obligation to labour and equal rights in the product — equal according to age, as Owen always adds — but also the complete elaboration of the architecture of the future communist community, with its plan, elevation and bird's-eye view.” (p 341)

Engels notes that Owen put these ideas into practice in the Harmony Hall Colony, in Hampshire, during the late 1830's, and early 40's.

“I myself was acquainted with several former members of this communist model experiment. But Sargant knew absolutely nothing of all this, or of any of Owen's activities between 1836 and 1850, and so Herr Dühring's “more profound historical work”, too, is left in pitch-black ignorance. Herr Dühring calls Owen “in every respect a veritable monster of importunate philanthropy”. (p 341)

The failure of these experiments was not only a consequence of the utopian nature of creating islands of socialism in a sea of capitalism, which also blights the notion of creating Socialism In One Country. It was, also, a consequence of the immature development of industrial capitalism at that time.

“They necessarily had to construct the elements of a new society out of their own heads, because these elements were not as yet generally apparent within the old society; for the basic plan of the new edifice they could only appeal to reason, just because they could not as yet appeal to contemporary history.” (p 341-2)

Later, Engels was to write in support of the development of German worker cooperatives that, as part of the SPD's programme, they should be developed within the existing structure, and not as some separate development.

“The matter has nothing to do with either Schulze-Delitzsch or with Lassalle. Both propagated small cooperatives, the one with, the other without state help; however, in both cases the cooperatives were not meant to come under the ownership of already existing means of production, but create alongside the existing capitalist production a new cooperative one. My suggestion requires the entry of the cooperatives into the existing production. One should give them land which otherwise would be exploited by capitalist means: as demanded by the Paris Commune, the workers should operate the factories shut down by the factory-owners on a cooperative basis. That is the great difference. And Marx and I never doubted that in the transition to the full communist economy we will have to use the cooperative system as an intermediate stage on a large scale. It must only be so organised that society, initially the state, retains the ownership of the means of production so that the private interests of the cooperative vis-a-vis society as a whole cannot establish themselves.”

(Engels To August Bebel, January 23, 1886)

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Anti-Duhring, Part III – Socialism, I – Historical - Part 19

This aspect of Owen's political role is usually passed over by the statists, who lump him together with the utopians. But, the significance of this political role of Owen, well understood by Marx and Engels, is that it acts as a historical bridge between the ideas of the utopians and the revolutionary strategy of Marxism.

“Every social movement, every real advance in England on behalf of the workers is linked with Owen's name. Thus in 1819, after five years’ effort, he forced through the first law limiting the labour of women and children in factories. He presided over the first congress at which all the Trade Unions of England united in a single great trade union association. He introduced as transition measures to the complete communist organisation of society, on the one hand, co-operative societies (both consumers' and producers'), which have since at least given practical proof that the merchant and the manufacturer are quite superfluous personages. On the other hand, he introduced labour bazaars for the exchange of the products of labour through the medium of labour-notes with the labour-hour as the unit; institutions necessarily doomed to failure, but completely anticipating the much later Proudhon exchange bank, and differing only from the latter in that they did not claim to be the panacea for all social ills, but just a first step towards a much more radical revolution of society.” (p 339)

In the early 1840's, as the Chartists grew as the first mass, working-class political movement, closely linked to the trades unions, Owen promoted not only his ideas on the creation of workers' cooperatives, but also that trades union and political struggle too. When the Chartists engaged in a General Strike, in pursuit of their political demands, Owen toured the country speaking in support of their actions. That was in stark contrast to the opposition to strikes and trades unions by Proudhon, and others, who, later, claimed to be followers of Owen.

The bridge is, also, reflected in Marx's Inaugural Address to The First International.

“After a 30 years’ struggle, fought with almost admirable perseverance, the English working classes, improving a momentaneous split between the landlords and money lords, succeeded in carrying the Ten Hours’ Bill. The immense physical, moral, and intellectual benefits hence accruing to the factory operatives, half-yearly chronicled in the reports of the inspectors of factories, are now acknowledged on all sides. Most of the continental governments had to accept the English Factory Act in more or less modified forms, and the English Parliament itself is every year compelled to enlarge its sphere of action... This struggle about the legal restriction of the hours of labour raged the more fiercely since, apart from frightened avarice, it told indeed upon the great contest between the blind rule of the supply and demand laws which form the political economy of the middle class, and social production controlled by social foresight, which forms the political economy of the working class. Hence the Ten Hours’ Bill was not only a great practical success; it was the victory of a principle; it was the first time that in broad daylight the political economy of the middle class succumbed to the political economy of the working class.

But there was in store a still greater victory of the political economy of labour over the political economy of property. We speak of the co-operative movement, especially the co-operative factories raised by the unassisted efforts of a few bold “hands”. The value of these great social experiments cannot be overrated. By deed instead of by argument, they have shown that production on a large scale, and in accord with the behests of modern science, may be carried on without the existence of a class of masters employing a class of hands; that to bear fruit, the means of labour need not be monopolized as a means of dominion over, and of extortion against, the labouring man himself; and that, like slave labour, like serf labour, hired labour is but a transitory and inferior form, destined to disappear before associated labour plying its toil with a willing hand, a ready mind, and a joyous heart. In England, the seeds of the co-operative system were sown by Robert Owen; the workingmen’s experiments tried on the Continent were, in fact, the practical upshot of the theories, not invented, but loudly proclaimed, in 1848.”

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