Engels notes that at least Kaufman had not been so cruel as to claim that he was slaughtering the Yomuds to respect them and return them to the true path.
“Once again in this conflict it is the elect, those who claim to be acting in accordance with truth and science and therefore in the last resort the philosophers of reality, who have to decide what are superstition, prejudice, brutality and perversity of character and when force and subjection are necessary for purposes of equalisation. Equality, therefore, is now — equalisation by force; and the second will is recognised by the first to have equal rights through subjection.” (p 128)
As I have set out, elsewhere, in the same way, the subjectivism and petty-bourgeois moralism of the petty-bourgeois Third Camp is also manifest in the fact that one section of it sets as their guiding principle their categorical imperative, the opposition to imperialism, and the other their opposition to authoritarianism, and, in each case, to will the end is to will the means. It means politics determined by lesser-evilism.
Engels notes that this concept expressed by Duhring, essentially meaning being forced to be free, or here, “forcible equalisation is only a distortion of the Hegelian theory, according to which punishment is the right of the criminal” (p 128) For Hegel, it means recognising the criminal as also being a rational being, who, as Kant described, in the Categorical Imperative, must recognise that their actions were irrational.
From the basis of two equal, sovereign wills, Duhring concludes the requirement for a third, because otherwise, there is no means of arriving at majority decisions, and it is this which, then, forms the basis of the state to enforce those majority decisions. Duhring, then, proceeds from this basis to elaborate his schema for “the construction of his socialitarian state of the future where one fine morning we shall have the honour to look him up.” (p 129)
As with the pure mathematical abstraction of the point, which cannot exist in the real world, Duhring's pure human will, as an abstraction, cannot exist in the real world. As soon as we examine real human wills, even Duhring is led to set up a series of exceptions in which they are not equal.
“... that childhood, madness, so-called bestiality, alleged superstition, assumed prejudice and putative incapacity on the one hand, and pretensions to humanity and knowledge of truth and science on the other — that therefore every difference in the quality of the two wills and in that of the intelligence associated with them justifies an inequality which may go as far as subjection.” (p 129)
Individuals, clearly, are not equal/the same, as Engels, here, and Marx, in The Critique of The Gotha Programme, establish. Some are strong, others weak, some clever, some not, some have children others do not. As Marx sets out in The Critique of the Gotha Programme, therefore, to treat them as though they are all equal/the same is actually to treat them differently. It is to expect the weak individual to work as hard as the strong, in manual labour, the not so clever as hard as the clever in mental labour, and for the individual with children to be able to live on the same wages as the individual with no children.
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