Similarly, capitalism itself arises because the private property of large numbers of independent commodity producers becomes centralised and concentrated in the hands of a small number of capitalist producers. Firstly, therefore, the private property of the former already exists, or it could not fall into the hands of the capitalist producers. The process by which it does become centralised and concentrated in their hand, again has nothing to do with force, but is the direct result of the competition that is inherent in commodity production and exchange. It produces winners and losers – who become bourgeois and proletarians.
“In other words, even if we exclude all possibility of robbery, any act of violence and any fraud, if we assume that all private property was originally based on the owner's own labour, and that throughout the whole subsequent process there was only exchange of equal values for equal values, the progressive evolution of production and exchange nevertheless brings us of necessity to the present capitalist mode of production, to the monopolisation of the means of production and the means of subsistence in the hands of the one, numerically small, class, to the degradation into propertyless proletarians of the immense majority forming the other class, to the periodic alternation of speculative production booms and commercial crises and to the whole of the present anarchy of production. The entire process is explained by purely economic causes; without the necessity for recourse even in a single instance to robbery, force, the state or political interference of any kind.” (p 208)
Indeed, far from the sequence being that the bourgeoisie became the ruling class, and able, thereby, to mobilise the state to subjugate the proletariat, and so establish the economic relations of bourgeois society, it is the bourgeoisie that faces the entrenched position of the political domination of the feudal aristocracy and its state. In Duhring's theory, we must see the ruling class as some kind of eternal social formation that simply changes its spots with every new mode of production, but whose personnel remains basically unchanged. It is a good v evil morality play, in which there are a bunch of evil exploiters, who simply change their stage costumes, with each new act of the play.
I have noted that this same subjectivist, and moralistic, historical account is adopted, today, by even some who call themselves “Marxists”. (See: Michael Roberts and Historical Materialism). As Engels notes,
“If “political conditions are the decisive cause of the economic situation”, then the modern bourgeoisie cannot have developed in struggle with feudalism, but must be the latter's voluntarily begotten pet child. Everyone knows that it was the opposite which occurred. Originally an oppressed estate tributary to the ruling feudal nobility, recruited from all manner of serfs and villeins, the burghers conquered one position after another in their constant struggle with the nobility, and finally took power in its stead in the most highly developed countries”. (p 2089-9)
But, how did it do that? Firstly, the bourgeoisie, itself, must exist as a class in itself, separate from the ruling landlord class, and the working-class. In Duhring's account, and in the subjectivist account of today's moralists, the bourgeoisie arises, somehow, as just a continuation of the existing, ruling feudal class, as Engels notes, as its pet or protege, which is quite in contrast to the actual historical reality. The moralist conception is idealist and subjectivist. It takes the form that capitalism begins in agriculture, with the existing landlords, forcibly evicting peasants from the land, in order to turn the land over to sheep, so as to increase the supply of wool to meet a large increase in demand from the towns.
The flaws in this account, and argument, are fairly obvious. Firstly, what was the basis of this large rise for wool in the towns? It was precisely that, in those towns, commodity production and exchange had already become well established, creating large, centralised markets, and that this had, then, resulted in the establishment of capitalist production. In other words, capitalist production, in the towns, and its greater level of output (at lower unit values/prices, which expands the market) had to come before the increased demand for wool, and, so, before any basis for landlords to turn the land over to sheep.
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