But, how is that at all reducible to Duhring's conclusion from it that, for Marx, “everything is all the same in the end.”?
Engels notes,
“Thus this insight of his into the well-known philosophical prejudice also enables Herr Dühring to prophesy with assurance what will be the “end” of Marx's economic philosophising, that is, what the following volumes of Capital will contain, and this he does exactly seven lines after he has declared that
“speaking in plain human language it is really impossible to divine what is still to come in the two” (final) “volumes””. (p 155)
Engels quotes Duhring's further rant against Marx and dialectics, which he calls “these deformities of thought and style” (p 156). A similar phrase, “Science and Style”, was used by the ideologist of the petty-bourgeois, Third Camp, James Burnham, as he launched his attack on Marxism and dialectics, and set himself, and that ideological trend, on its right-wing course into the camp of imperialism, as described by Trotsky, whose manifestation, today, is seen in the role of these social-imperialists.
“For the moment, we are concerned in no way with the correctness or incorrectness of the economic results of Marx's researches, but only with the dialectical method applied by Marx. But this much is certain: most readers of Capital will have learnt for the first time from Herr Dühring what it is that they have really read.” (p 156)
Engels notes that, in 1867, Duhring had written what was a relatively rational review of Capital I, and did so without translating it into the Duhringian language he now claimed was “indispensable”.
“Though he even then committed the blunder of identifying Marxist with Hegelian dialectics, he had not quite lost the capacity to distinguish between the method and the results obtained by using it, and to understand that the latter are not refuted in particular by vilifying the former in general.” (p 156)
What, then, of Duhring's conclusion that from the Marxist standpoint “everything is all the same in the end.”? Duhring objects to Marx's method of starting from the whole, and breaking it down into its component parts, in “micrological detail” as Marx does at the start of Capital, by examining the commodity as the basic cell from which the entire structure of capital is erected. Instead, Duhring proceeds “in the grand manner”, in other words, to base himself on a sweeping description of the superficial appearance of things. As Trotsky sets out, this was the same approach taken by Burnham and Shachtman, in relation to their own methodology, when characterising the USSR, so as to relieve themselves of the requirement to defend it as a workers' state, albeit a deformed version.
“Indeed historical treatment in the grand manner and the summary settlement with genus and type are very convenient for Herr Dühring, since he can neglect all known facts as micrological and equate them to zero by this means, so that instead of proving anything he need only use general phrases, make assertions and thunder his denunciations.” (p 157)
That same approach was used by Burnham and Shachtman, in relation to the USSR, and involved moralistic condemnations of the, undeniably, vile nature of Stalin's regime, which, for Burnham and Shachtman, and the petty-bourgeois Third Camp, became beyond the pale with the Hitler-Stalin Pact. This same superficial, subjectivist and moralistic approach, which focuses on the political regime/superstructure, rather than the underlying class nature of the state, has characterised the methodology and practice of that Third Camp of the petty-bourgeoisie every since. On the one side, it bowdlerises the arguments of Trotsky against Stalinism, in the Third Period, to justify support for bourgeois-democracy and “democratic imperialism”, against fascism/authoritarianism; on the other side, it bowdlerises the arguments of Lenin on imperialism, to justify its support for assorted anti-working class movements and regimes, solely on the basis of their “anti-imperialism”.
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