Engels concludes Part I, by noting that it has shown that everything that Duhring promised, in the realm of philosophy, had failed to materialise.
““The elements of a philosophy which is real and accordingly directed to the reality of nature and of life”, the “strictly scientific conception of the world”, the “system-creating ideas”, and all Herr Dühring's other achievements, trumpeted forth to the world by Herr Dühring in high-sounding phrases, turned out, to be a pure swindle, wherever we laid hold of them,.” (p 182)
The reason for that was Duhring's own failure to understand science, and, despite his claims to the contrary, to begin by trying to identify “absolute truths”, and then fit reality into an abstract scheme, built up from them.
“The world schematism which, “without the slightest detraction from the profundity of thought, securely established the basic forms of being”, proved to be an infinitely vulgarised copy of Hegelian logic, and with the latter shares the superstition that these “basic forms” or logical categories have led a mysterious existence somewhere prior to and outside of the world, to which they are “to be applied”.” (p 182-3)
This is the method of the idealist and moralist. It is seen in the works of Sismondi, Proudhon, the Narodniks, and of today's “anti-capitalists”, “anti-imperialists”, and other such petty-bourgeois moral socialists. Concepts such as “basic human rights”, “national rights”, as sweeping, abstract generalisations, fall into that category, as well as their even more abstract, and, thereby, ridiculous, particular forms, such as a right to education, a right to work, and so on.
No socialist, of course, doubts that many of these “rights” are desirable aspirations, but removed from material reality, they amount to nothing but pious wishes, as Lenin described such demands made by the Narodniks. In The Critique of the Gotha Programme, Marx wrote,
“Right can never be higher than the economic structure of society and its cultural development conditioned thereby.”
And, applied outside the context of that material reality, they become not just utopian, but reactionary. As Marx sets out in The Poverty of Philosophy, slavery was the first form of class society, without which the further development of the forces of production, and subsequent forms of class society, each raising humanity to a higher level, would have been impossible. In short, slavery played a progressive role in history. Even when these higher forms of society had arisen, Marx sets out that, without slavery in the Southern US, its development of the supply of cotton, which fed textile production in Britain, would not have been possible, and without that textile industry, in Britain, the Industrial Revolution would not have occurred.
“Without slavery North America, the most progressive of countries, would be transformed into a patriarchal country. Wipe North America off the map of the world, and you will have anarchy – the complete decay of modern commerce and civilization. Cause slavery to disappear and you will have wiped America off the map of nations.”
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