Engels quotes, at length, a passage from Duhring in which he asserts that Man's domination over Nature, first required the domination of Man over Man. As with other premises of Duhring's theory, no evidence for this assertion is provided. Duhring justifies the claim solely by asserting that, in order to cultivate large tracts of land, this requires landed property, and the existence of slaves, because no single person, or family, could do so on their own.
Engels notes,
“In the first place "domination over nature" and the "cultivation of landed property" are by no means the same thing. In industry, domination over nature is exercised on quite another and more gigantic scale than in agriculture, which must still submit to the command of weather conditions instead of commanding them.” (p 224)
Indeed, as Marx describes, in Capital III, it is in capitalist industry that develops in the towns that command over nature is established by the use of science and technology. The consequence of this capitalistic industrial production, in the towns, is, then, to continually and rapidly increase the demand, by that industry, for raw materials and food that a still pre-capitalist agriculture cannot keep pace with. A first consequence of that is the clearing of lands to give over to sheep, to meet the demand for wool, but a second consequence is the increasing degradation of the soil. As Marx notes, its only when capital, itself, then, enters agriculture that this despoliation is ended, as it applies the same scientific methods to this primary production that it had done in the towns with industrial production.
“Secondly, if we confine ourselves to the cultivation of landed property in extensive tracts, what it boils down to is whose landed property it is. We find in the early history of all civilised peoples, not the “large landed proprietors” whom Herr Dühring interpolates here with the usual sleight of hand, he calls "natural dialectics", but tribal and village communities with common ownership of the land.” (p 224)
As Engels set out, in The Origin of The Family, Private Property and The State, and Marx details, in Capital III, and elsewhere, across the globe, from India to Ireland, it is common ownership of the land, whether by clans or village communities, that can be seen, and the cultivation of this land is then undertaken by various means, depending on the given geographical and historical conditions.
“... sometimes the arable land was tilled jointly for account of the community, and sometimes in separate parcels of land temporarily allotted to families by the community, while woodland and pastureland continued to be used in common.” (p 224)
Engels notes that, again, as in the case of Duhring's knowledge of the law, he seemed to have no knowledge of these extensive studies of land ownership, for example, even in respect of that of “Maurer’s epoch-making writings on the primitive constitution of the German Mark, the basis of all German law, and of the ever-increasing mass of literature, chiefly stimulated by Maurer, which is devoted to proving the primitive common ownership of the land among all civilised peoples of Europe and Asia, and to showing the various forms of its existence and dissolution.” (p 225)
The Asiatic Mode of Production, which writers such as Adam Smith had analysed, arose, not on the back of individual landed property, but on the basis of a requirement for a collective ownership, because of a requirement for large-scale civil engineering projects, related, usually, to hydraulics, but, also, the need for land terracing.
“... the very term landlord is not to be found in the various languages...” (p 225)
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