Engels asks how the method of Duhring, then, constructs the system of morals, and laws of society. He does not start from the real relations in society, and so the material available for such a construction consists of two kinds.
“... first, the meagre residue of real content which may possibly survive in the abstractions from which he starts and, second, the content which our ideologist reintroduces from his own consciousness.” (p 121)
That is, essentially, the same approach taken by Proudhon, and discussed by Marx in The Poverty of Philosophy.
“And what does he find in his consciousness? For the most part, moral and legal notions which are a more or less accurate expression (positive or negative, corroborative or antagonistic) of the social and political relations amidst which he lives; perhaps also ideas drawn from the literature on the subject; and finally maybe some personal idiosyncrasies. Our ideologist may twist and turn as he likes, but the historical reality which he cast out at the door comes in again at the window, and while he thinks he is framing a doctrine of morals and law for all times and for all worlds, he is only fashioning an image of the conservative or revolutionary tendencies of his day — an image which is distorted because it has been torn from its real basis and, like a reflection in a concave mirror, is standing on its head.” (p 121)
Proudhon believed that the guiding principle, the nirvana to which all contradictions lead, via a process of, at each stage, choosing the lesser of two-evils, was equality. But, Marx indicated that others may choose some other guiding principle to fulfil that role.
“... we refer him to the Histoire de l’économie politique of M. de Villeneuve-Bargemont, who likewise goes in pursuit of a providential aim. This aim, however, is not equality, but Catholicism.”
As I have noted, elsewhere, today's petty-bourgeois moral socialists of the Third Camp operate on the same basis. One section of that trend identifies “imperialism” as the greater evil, to be opposed, and so the “lesser-evil” set against it is “anti-imperialism”, even where that “anti-imperialism” takes the form of reactionary, anti-working class forces and regimes, as, for example, Iranian mullahs, Islamists and jihadists, and so on. The SWP and its splinters are the representatives of that trend.
Another section of the Third Camp of the petty-bourgeoisie, as Trotsky called them, takes the opposite moral stance. It sees authoritarianism in its many guises as the greater evil, be it that first identified by the founders of that trend, Burnham and Shachtman, i.e. Stalinism, or those later forms of authoritarianism and reaction in the shape of the clerical-fascists. They consequently, as did Burnham and Shachtman, posit bourgeois-democracy and “democratic imperialism”, as the lesser-evil to be supported against it. In both cases, it amounts to renouncing the independent, and historic role of the working-class as agent of revolutionary change, and, instead, subordinating it, via some form of Popular Front, to one or other section of the bourgeoisie or petty-bourgeoisie.
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