Engels compares Duhring's statements, in relation to value, to the paternalistic apologism for the exploitation of the masses contained in Rochow's “Children's Friend”, circulated by the authorities a century earlier. That tract, which, like many others, was based on the old ideas about everyone in society knowing their station and status, including the routine acceptance of floggings and rape by their “betters”, also presented this as being really beneficial for those that suffered it.
“To this end the youth of the towns and of the countryside was admonished how wisely nature had ordained that man must win his livelihood and his pleasures by labour, and how happy therefore the peasant or artisan should feel that it was granted to him to season his meal with bitter labour, instead of suffering the pangs of indigestion or constipation, and having to gulp down the choicest tidbits with repugnance, like the rich glutton. These same commonplaces, which old Rochow thought good enough for the peasant youth of the Electorate of Saxony of his time, are served up to us by Herr Dühring on page 14 and the following pages of his Cursus as the "absolutely fundamental" teaching of the most up-to-date political economy.” (p 237)
In fact, bourgeois political economy, as presented by Ricardo, started from the diametrically opposite perspective, as Marx notes in Theories of Surplus Value. For Ricardo, the position of the labourer was abysmal, and to be avoided if possible. He thought that any civilised society would seek to minimise the proportion of the population that were placed in that position. Indeed, Adam Smith had a similar opinion, believing that labourers did not obtain the value of their “labour”, as wages, because labour was plentiful and capital scarce, a condition he believed would be reversed as capital expanded faster than the supply of labour. Indeed, as Marx explains in Theories of Surplus Value, Chapter 17, this was Smith's explanation of a long-term, falling rate of profit, leading to an eventual collapse of capitalism itself, a view that Marx showed was completely false, both in relation to this catastrophism, and as an explanation of the long-term tendency for the rate of profit to fall.
Bourgeois liberals continue this view about the lack of desirability of being a labourer, but do so from the opposite, petty-bourgeois perspective, of the desirability of everyone being an employer, without recognising the fundamental flaw in that idea, i.e. for anyone to be an employer there must be someone to employ, and so, if everyone is an employer, rather than an employee, only self-employment is possible! That is the perspective, of course, of the peasant, or small-scale, independent commodity producer. It was the perspective put forward by Sismondi and Proudhon, and those like William Morris, and the Arts and Crafts Movement, as well as the Narodniks. Indeed, Morris himself is much like the Narodnik Engelhardt discussed by Lenin, whose literary works advocated Narodnik utopian socialist ideas, but who ran his own farm along strictly capitalistic lines.
It is utopian, because it implies a huge reduction in the productive capacity of society, and so, of the average standard of living. That is countered, today, by the argument of such petty-bourgeois reactionaries, that economic growth is really bad, rather than good. In other words, a version of the arguments of Rochow or Malthus, but wrapped in a radical verbiage of “anti-capitalism”, or environmentalism etc. But, it is reactionary for the same reasons, because it is that growth of capital, and its concomitant, of the industrial proletariat, the growth in productive potential that is the fundamental basis of Socialism, of humanity liberating itself from the compulsion to produce solely to live.
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