Foreword
“Anti-Duhring”, or to give it its correct title, “Herr Eugen Dühring's Revolution in Science”, was published in Engels' name, but is actually the work of both Engels and Marx. Chapter X of Part II - “From The Critical History” - was entirely the work of Marx, but, as Engels states, in his prefaces, he read the whole work to Marx prior to its submission for publication.
The work first appeared as a series of articles in the German socialist paper Vorwarts, between January 1877, and July 1878, being published in book form in 1878. The reason for its publication was what Marx and Engels saw as the danger of a split in the recently unified German workers' movement. That unification, between the Lassalleans and Eisenachers was cemented in The Gotha Programme.
As Marx notes in his Critique of The Gotha Programme, the theoretical and ideological basis of that unification, as manifest in The Gotha Programme, was seriously flawed. Marx and Engels believed that it would have been better had no such an agreed programme been issued until such time as these theoretical issues had been resolved. However, Marx also notes that, despite these flaws, the actual unity brought about was much more significant.
“Every step of real movement is more important than a dozen programmes. If, therefore, it was not possible — and the conditions of the time did not permit it — to go beyond the Eisenach programme, one should simply have concluded an agreement for action against the common enemy. But by drawing up a programme of principles (instead of postponing this until it has been prepared for by a considerable period of common activity) one sets up before the whole world landmarks by which it measures the level of the Party movement.”
Engels makes the same point in writing to US socialists.
“Had we from 1864, to 1873 insisted on working together only with those who openly adopted our platform where should we be to-day? I think that all our practice has shown that it is possible to work along with the general movement of the working class at every one of its stages without giving up or hiding our own distinct position and even organisation, and I am afraid that if the German Americans choose a different line they will commit a great mistake.”
In both these extracts can also be seen the later concept of the workers' United Front in action.
So, when a new threat of ideological and sectarian division arose, in the form of Duhring's new “system”, Marx and Engels, whilst reluctant to fuel such division, found themselves pressed by their supporters, in Germany, to address it, and to cut it down, before it had time to grow into a bigger problem.
In fact, as Engels says, in his Preface, a decade later, the name of Duhring, and his system, which was only one of many new such systems that sprang up at the time, had been all but forgotten. Duhring, who had been a university professor and teacher, had himself fallen foul of the authorities, a fact that earned him some regard from Engels in his later editions of the work.
Though the work was first written as a response to Duhring, it, necessarily, as Engels notes, required him to set out the system that he and Marx had themselves developed, in a manner that they had, previously, not done, in a single work. For that reason, particularly in its later editions, it acts as a summary of the theoretical system of Marxism, of historical materialism, as the means of analysing the evolution of social organisms, in the same way that Darwin's theory had done for biological evolution. It does so, not only in respect of the evolution of past social formations, up to an including capitalism, but in respect of capitalism itself, and its own transformation into socialism, most notably as set out in Part III, and in “Socialism, Utopian and Scientific”.
It forms a theoretical bedrock, based on the materialist and dialectical method of Marxism, as against the idealist and subjectivist theories of liberals, social-democrats, and petty-bourgeois, moral socialists.
I am working form the 1976, Foreign Languages Press (Peking) Edition, and all page numbers refer to it.
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