As Marx and Engels noted, in The Communist Manifesto, the ruling ideas of any age are the ideas of its ruling class. It is, of course, natural for the ruling class and its ideologists, in every society, to see the features of that society that underpin the position of the ruling-class, and the social relations of that society, as entirely natural and applicable in every society. In slave societies, and in feudal societies, the concept of inequality of society stratified from God downwards was normal. But, such concepts were not taken as normal or eternal by bourgeois society. Yet, in overthrowing those previous eternal truths, bourgeois society established its own eternal truths that similarly were only specific to it, and its social relations.
In fact, bourgeois ideologists, when they look at past societies, through history, apply the categories of that bourgeois society. For example, they talk about labour and wages, capital and profit, land and rent, even though these categories are specific to capitalism.
“And then we can confidently rely on this same friend of humanity to assure us at the first opportunity that all previous fabricators of eternal truths have been to a greater or lesser extent asses and charlatans, that they were all entangled in error and made mistakes; but that their error and their fallibility are in accordance with nature’s laws, and prove the existence of truth and correctness precisely in his case; and that he, the prophet who has now arisen, has in his bag, all ready-made, final and ultimate truth, eternal morality and eternal justice.” (p 112-3)
This has occurred so many times that it is a wonder there is anyone credulous enough to believe it any longer, Engels says. But, of course, in every society, through history, the very working of society, and its method of reproduction of its social relations creates this impression that what exists, its rules and institutions are normal, the most rational that exist.
This was also true of the moral socialists who drew up schemas of how a model socialist society should work. Marx and Engels avoided such prescriptions.
“Truth and error, like all determinations of thought which move in polar opposites, have absolute validity only in an extremely limited field, as we have just seen, and as even Herr Dühring would realise if he had any acquaintance with the first elements of dialectics, for it is precisely with the inadequacy of all polar opposites that they deal. As soon as we apply the antithesis between truth and error outside that narrow field referred to above, it becomes relative and therefore unserviceable for exact scientific modes of expression, but if we try to apply it as absolutely valid outside that field, then we really come a cropper: both poles of the antithesis become transformed into their opposites, truth becomes error and error truth.” (p 114)
So, as with the examples cited previously, once we move from the abstract to the concrete, 2 + 2 = 4, being true, becomes false, when it is applied to two drops of water and so on. Engels gives the example of Boyle's Law that the volume of a gas decreases proportional to pressure, at constant temperature. Regnault had found that it did not hold, in some cases. Using Duhring's method, this would have meant declaring Boyle's Law untrue.
“However, Regnault, being a man of science, did not indulge in such childishness, but continued his investigations and discovered that in general Boyle’s law is only approximately true, and in particular loses its validity in the case of gases which can be liquefied by pressure, i.e. as soon as the pressure approaches the point at which liquefaction begins. Therefore, Boyle’s law was proved to be true only within definite limits. But is it absolutely and finally true within those limits? No physicist would assert that. He would say that it holds good within certain limits of pressure and temperature and for certain gases; and even within these more restricted limits he would not exclude the possibility of a still narrower limitation or of an altered formulation as the result of future investigations.” (p 115)
In a note, Engels sets out that, since writing that, it had been confirmed, because it had been shown that there are no true gases, as all had been liquefied.
“So Boyle's law, which has hitherto always been usable in practice, will have to be supplemented by a whole series of special laws.” ( Note *, p 115)
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