In other words, for Duhring, history consists of nothing but a succession of different legal and constitutional forms of such slavery and oppression, resting upon nothing other than this ability to use force for that subjugation. It is true that, in each society, an exploiting ruling-class subjugates the labouring class, and appropriates surplus labour. Engels quotes Marx.
““Capital has not invented surplus-labour. Wherever a part of society possesses the monopoly of the means of production, the labourer, free or not free, must add to the working-time necessary for his own maintenance an extra working-time in order to produce the means of subsistence for the owners of the means of production, whether this proprietor be the Athenian kalos kagathos [aristocrat], Etruscan theocrat, civis Romanus [Roman citizen], Norman baron, American slave-owner, Wallachian Boyard, modern landlord or capitalist” (Marx, Das Kapital, Vol. I, 2nd edition, p. 227).
But, what is significant, in each of these societies is not the fact of this common factor of the production of surplus labour/value, and its appropriation by the ruling-class, but the specific way in which that surplus labour is produced in each of these societies, and the corresponding specific way in which it is appropriated, which, in turn, determines the specific form of distribution.
For Duhring, all of these specifics are irrelevant, and simply superficial gloss to the underlying reality of subjugation based on force.
“Therefore he no longer needs to investigate or to prove things, but can just go on merrily declaiming and demand that the distribution of the products of labour should be regulated, not in accordance with its real causes, but in accordance with what seems ethical and just to him, Herr Dühring. But what seems just to Herr Dühring is not at all immutable, and hence very far from being a genuine truth. For genuine truths, according to Herr Dühring himself, are “absolutely immutable”.” (p 199)
Even for Duhring, what was just and rational became unjust and robbery, in less than ten years. Engels notes that, in 1868, Duhring had written, it is
“... “a tendency of all higher civilisation to put more and more emphasis on property, and that the essence and the future of modern development lie in this, not in the confusion of rights and spheres of sovereignty,”.” (p 199)
And could not see,
“how a transformation of wage-labour into another manner of gaining a livelihood is ever to be reconciled with the laws of human nature and the naturally necessary structure of the body social”. (p 199)
Better, then, Engels says, to stick with “genuine, objective economic laws”, when analysing the distribution of wealth and income.
“We should be in a pretty bad way, and might have a long time to wait for the impending overthrow of the present mode of distribution of the products of labour, with its crying contrasts of misery and luxury, and of famine and feasting, if we had no better guarantee than the consciousness that this mode of distribution is unjust, and that justice must eventually triumph.” (p 200)
Yet, that is the kind of moralising approach of most of the “Left”, today, whether it comes to inequality within capitalist societies, or between the developed and less developed economies. It fits with the reformist, economistic, essentially trades union consciousness they limit their horizons to. The recognition and proclamation of inequality was made more than 400 years ago, but its recognition was not enough to change anything. It was resumed in the bourgeois revolutions of the 18th and 19th century, but disappeared once the bourgeoisie became ruling-class.
But, that outcry against inequality had resumed in the latter half of the 19th century, because, Engels says, capitalism had created an industrial proletariat below which there can be no additional exploited class. By liberating itself, it liberates the whole of society. At the same time, this development of the productive forces expands to an extent that it outgrows the limits of the monopoly ownership of private capital, leading to its dissolution by socialised capital, and also expands faster than the market, making necessary, first the planning and regulation of production, and second the expansion of the market across national borders.
“In other words, the reason is that both the productive forces engendered by the modern capitalist mode of production and the system of distribution of goods established by it have come into crying contradiction with that mode of production itself, so much so that, if the whole of modern society is not to perish, a revolution in the mode of production and distribution must take place, a revolution which will put an end to all class distinctions. It is on this palpable material fact which is more or less clearly impressing itself with irresistible necessity on the minds of the exploited proletarians—it is on this fact, and not on any armchair philosopher's conceptions of justice and injustice that the sure confidence of modern socialism in victory is founded.” (p 201)
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