Part I, Philosophy Dialectics, XII – Quantity and Quality
Engels quotes Duhring,
“The first and most important principle of the basic logical properties of being refers to the exclusion of contradiction. The contradictory is a category which can only appertain to a combination of thoughts, but not to reality. There are no contradictions in things, or, in other words, contradiction accepted as reality is itself the apex of absurdity ... The antagonism of forces measured against each other in opposite directions is in fact the basic form of all actions in the life of the world and its creatures. But this opposition of the directions taken by the forces of elements and individuals does not in the slightest degree coincide with the absurd idea of contradictions.” (p 150)
In other words, Duhring, much as with the TSSI, referred to previously, sees the world in terms of discrete units, be it of time or space, or of things existing within that time and space. These discrete units exist separated from one another (i.e. are each self-identical, and so static), and can only, thereby, be antagonistic to, or complementary to one another. In a different context, this same philosophical method, leads to “lesser-evilism”, and “campism”. In other words, the working-class may, indeed, be seen as such a discrete “self-identical” unit, but its role becomes one of being antagonistic to or complementary to some other, discrete, self-identical unit, such as the bourgeois state, “democratic imperialism”, or else “anti-capitalist”, or “anti-imperialist” forces, dependent upon a subjective determination of what represents the “lesser-evil”.
On this basis, the interests of the working-class can only be given primary consideration (though this is far from what those that operate on this basis say, abstractly, in their literature) when it, as such a self-identical static unit has, somehow, already become the dominating force in society. This is much like the way that Stalin argued that it was only legitimate to support and call for the creation of workers' soviets at the point that the proletarian revolution, and seizure of state power, i.e. the insurrection, was under way, as criticised by Trotsky in relation to the Chinese revolution, and Spanish Revolution.
It sees no connection between the two, of insisting, at all times, on the primacy of the interests of the working-class, and its independent activity, in support of those interests, and its own dynamic development, arising from that. It sees the working-class as just a static, self-identical thing, which is, now, not a dominating, but a dominated class, but which, at some other, “discrete” unit of time, in the future, may become, somehow, the dominating force, at which time, it becomes possible to agitate for, and insist on its interests being primary. The continuity, or as Duhring would call it, the “bridge” between these two, “self-identical” states is for them a mystery, just as Duhring could never identify, by his method, any such bridge between two “self-identical” static conditions, i.e. between stasis and motion.
The consequence of such a philosophical method is necessarily opportunism. It subordinates the working-class, in the here and now, to some other social-class, and its immediate interests. As Marx and Engels describe, in The Communist Manifesto, that is what various forms of reactionary socialists did, in the 19th century. Feudal Socialism, sought to attach the working-class to the old landed aristocracy, as it sought to protect its interests against the revolutionary bourgeoisie, by attacking the vicissitudes of industrial capital, and its effect on workers. That is what is still seen, today, in the shape of Toryism, Brexit protectionism and nationalism, and those sections of “the Left” that attach themselves to it.
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