Anti-Duhring, Introduction, I - General - Part 15 of 17

But, in terms of social science, and the conception of history, events themselves created the conditions for a revolution in understanding.

“In 1831, the first working-class rising took place in Lyons; between 1838 and 1842, the first national working-class movement, that of the English Chartists, reached its height. The class struggle between proletariat and bourgeoisie came to the front in the history of the most advanced countries in Europe, in proportion to the development, on the one hand, of modern industry, and on the other, of the recently acquired political supremacy of the bourgeoisie.” (p 32)

These were, themselves, two entirely new classes. There had been a proletariat, a small number of wage-workers, for example, paid retainers, but these were people paid out of the revenues of others, not industrial workers employed by capital. There had been merchant capitalists, and money lending capitalists, but they made their profits from those activities not from employing and exploiting industrial workers.

So, although bourgeois ideology still tries to pretend that these classes have always existed, that nothing has really changed, in that respect, and that it is only in the realm of distribution, and political democracy that there has been a change, this is not true, and was clearly seen not to be true. The industrial bourgeoisie arose as an entirely new class, based upon its ownership of industrial capital, and the industrial working-class, likewise, arose as an entirely new class, based upon its loss of its own means of production, and dependence, thereby, upon capital, for employment.

“Facts more and more strenuously gave the lie to the teachings of bourgeois economics on the identity of the interests of capital and labour, on the general harmony and general prosperity flowing from free competition. None of these things could be ignored, any longer, any more than the French and English Socialism, which was their theoretical, though extremely imperfect, expression.” (p 32)

History is always presented as the history of great people, and of the development of ideas, of a gradual upward movement of civilisation, occasionally disrupted by bad actors, as a kind of morality play, and a struggle between good and evil, today, again, as in the 1930's, a fight between “democracy” and “totalitarianism”. In The Poverty of Philosophy, Marx demolished the application of that method by Proudhon, presented, by him, as a movement towards “equality”. Marx showed that this evolution of ideas was nothing more than a reflection of the development of the productive forces, and of the social classes that arose on them.

The early utopian socialists sought a new world based upon these ideas of equality and democracy, partly on the basis of morality, of a Kantian moral imperative, often deriving from religious conviction, but, also, as with Owen, stemming from a rational belief and understanding that productivity rose. But, what they could not see was that these same material conditions resulted in an antagonism between capital and labour. Taken from the standpoint of society as a whole, the ideas of the utopians might be entirely rational, and lead to a better society, including, higher productivity and so on, but why, here and now, would an individual capitalist be concerned with that rather than their own profits?

“But the old idealist conception of history, which was not yet dislodged, knew nothing of class struggles based upon material interests, indeed knew nothing at all of material interests; production and all economic relations appeared in it only as incidental, subordinate elements in the "history of civilization".” (p 32)

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