Engels sets out the way Duhring, again, misrepresents what Marx says, so as to turn it into nonsense, consistent with his characterisation of Marx as simply fitting history into the context of the Hegelian dialectic. He has Marx saying that the private property of the individual commodity producer, i.e. their means of production, which were expropriated from them, in the first negation, are restored to them in the second negation, but, now, in the form of collective property. In other words, he has Marx saying that this private property is preserved, and, at the same time negated.
But, that is not what Marx says. What Marx says, as Engels sets out, is that the means of production become socialised, collective property – not individual property – whilst the product – means of consumption – is private property, once it has been distributed. Marx is not saying that the worker, who is paid their wages by the cooperative, for example, must treat the food they buy, their clothes, or even their car and house, as also, collective communal property. This line of attack on communism has been common for bourgeois ideologists, and can be seen in Marx and Engels response in The Communist Manifesto, to the charge that the communists would introduce “the community of women”.
That is certainly true, currently, in relation to this socialised capital, but, as Marx, also, sets out, in The Critique of the Gotha Programme, even when we move beyond this transitional phase, when the working-class ceases being a class in itself, and become a class for itself, consciously taking control of all of that socialised capital and the state, it will still bear all the scars of such a society, as it emerges from capitalism.
“What we have to deal with here is a communist society, not as it has developed on its own foundations, but, on the contrary, just as it emerges from capitalist society; which is thus in every respect, economically, morally, and intellectually, still stamped with the birthmarks of the old society from whose womb it emerges. Accordingly, the individual producer receives back from society – after the deductions have been made – exactly what he gives to it. What he has given to it is his individual quantum of labour. For example, the social working day consists of the sum of the individual hours of work; the individual labour time of the individual producer is the part of the social working day contributed by him, his share in it. He receives a certificate from society that he has furnished such-and-such an amount of labour (after deducting his labour for the common funds); and with this certificate, he draws from the social stock of means of consumption as much as the same amount of labour cost. The same amount of labour which he has given to society in one form, he receives back in another.
Here, obviously, the same principle prevails as that which regulates the exchange of commodities, as far as this is exchange of equal values. Content and form are changed, because under the altered circumstances no one can give anything except his labour, and because, on the other hand, nothing can pass to the ownership of individuals, except individual means of consumption. But as far as the distribution of the latter among the individual producers is concerned, the same principle prevails as in the exchange of commodity equivalents: a given amount of labour in one form is exchanged for an equal amount of labour in another form.”
To begin with, workers will still be paid what, for all intents and purposes, appear to be wages, in return for the sale of their labour power, as the means of distributing the products of their labour.
“Marx says: “It is the negation of negation. This re-establishes individual property, for the producer, but based on the acquisitions of the capitalist era, on the co-operation of free workers and on their common property in land and in the means of production produced by labour itself. The transformation of the scattered private property of individuals, arising from their own labour, into capitalist private property is, naturally, a process, incomparably more protracted, violent, and difficult, than the transformation of capitalistic private property, already actually resting on socialised production, into socialised property.”” (p 165-6)
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