Anti-Duhring, Part I, Philosophy Dialectics, XII – Quantity and Quality - Part 4 of 14

As Marx notes, Ricardo's conclusion, drawn from Mill, and Say's Law, is wrong, because, unlike a small-scale commodity producer, who basically exchanges their surplus products for others they desire, the commodity producer, under generalised commodity production, only produces in order to sell, to obtain money, and must sell in order to obtain the money required to buy the commodities required for their personal consumption, and to buy the commodities required to continue their own production.

The peasant household that produces the food it requires to consume engages in cottage industry, producing yarn, cloth, clothing and maybe produces its own beer or wine, to consume, can exchange any surplus production for other commodities. If it can't find any takers for its surplus production it won't threaten its existence. It can consume some of this surplus itself, if it can't be exchanged, and may decide to use its available time, in the next year, in other production. But, that is not the case with a commodity producer whose main activity is producing, say, beer, to sell. They may, in the initial stages of generalised commodity production, in the towns, still have a small plot of land to provide some of their needs for food, but they must, now, also, buy clothes and other industrial commodities for personal consumption, as well as paying rents and taxes in money, and finally, to buy the malt, hops and so on required to produce beer. The brewer cannot say I will not sell beer because the current market price is too low, due to an excess of supply. Nor can they say I'll switch to producing wine or furniture!

As Marx notes, by excluding the possibility of contradiction within what is, indeed, the unity of production and consumption, Say's Law inevitably saw generalised overproduction of commodities as impossible. Yet, as Marx notes, the huge expansion of production capacity arising from the introduction of large-scale, machine production, powered by steam engines, made the potential for such overproduction, inherent in commodity production, into an inevitability, as seen in the first such crisis that occurred in 1825.

In his Critical History, Duhring, however, had more to say on dialectics and Hegel. Engels quotes his statement,

“Contradiction, according to the Hegelian logic, or rather the doctrine of the Logos, is objectively present not in thought, which by its nature can only be conceived as subjective and conscious, but in things and processes themselves and can be met with in so to speak corporeal form, so that absurdity does not remain an impossible combination of thought but becomes an actual force. The reality of the absurd is the first article of faith in the Hegelian unity of the logical and the illogical.... The more contradictory a thing the truer it is, or in other words, the more absurd the more credible it is. This maxim, which is not even newly invented but is borrowed from the theology of the Revelation and from mysticism, is the naked expression of the so-called dialectical principle” (p 151)

In short, Duhring asserts that contradiction is equal to “contra-sense”, and so cannot exist in the real world. Everything real that exists, exists in a static, self-identical state, a discrete unit that can only be compared with some other such discrete unit, and only in that context can there be antagonism between these units. Of course, the problem Duhring faces, here, as from the start, is how any of these static, discrete, self-identical, units then become some other, future, static, discrete,, self-identical unit. It only allows for external action upon them to bring about change, and not change from within. Of course, its obvious why nationalists and imperialists like such an idea, as it facilitates notions such as the only way to overthrow a tyrant, or to defend or install democracy, in a given state, is by some other state to go to war with it!

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