For Duhring,
“Domination over things is quite all right, but domination over men is an evil; and as Herr Dühring has forbidden himself to explain domination over men by domination over things, he can once again do an audacious trick and explain domination over men offhand by his beloved force. Wealth, as domination over men, is “robbery” —so we return to a corrupted version of Proudhon's ancient formula: “Property is theft.”” (p 239)
Engels sets out the way Duhring's formulation, also, echoes the approach of Proudhon, and dismantled by Marx in The Poverty of Philosophy. As Marx sets out, the “dialectic” used by Proudhon, and which can also be seen in the method of all petty-bourgeois moralists, is not the idealist dialectic of Hegel, nor the materialist dialectic developed by Marx and Engels, but is, rather, the moral dualism of Kant, in which everything is separable into a “good” and “bad” aspect, requiring, then, a choice of the “good” over the “bad”, which amounts, in practice, to “lesser-evilism”,
“Thus we have now fortunately brought wealth under the two essential aspects of production and distribution: wealth as domination over things—production wealth, the good side; wealth as domination over men—distribution wealth up to the present day, the bad side away with it! Applied to the present day conditions, this means: the capitalist mode of production is quite all right and may remain, but the capitalist mode of distribution is no good and must be abolished. Such is the nonsense which comes of writing on economics without so much as having grasped the connection between production and distribution.” (p 239)
As Marx sets out in The Critique of The Gotha Programme, this was the state that “vulgar socialism” had reached, in the 19th century. But, it is, also, the basis of social-democracy, and Left reformism. Social-democracy, at least, has the advantage over the petty-bourgeois socialism of Sismondi that it recognises that its precisely the accumulation of capital, and consequent rise in production and productivity that makes possible the rise in living standards, including those of workers, and so, as Marx sets out, in Wage-Labour and Capital, provides the best conditions for workers.
“The interests of the capitalist and those of the worker are, therefore, one and the same, assert the bourgeois and their economists. Indeed! The worker perishes if capital does not employ him. Capital perishes if it does not exploit labour-power and, in order to exploit it, it must buy it. The faster capital intended for production, productive capital, increases, the more, therefore, industry prospers, the more the bourgeoisie enriches itself and the better business is, the more workers does the capitalist need, the more dearly does the worker sell himself.
The indispensable condition for a tolerable situation of the worker is, therefore, the fastest possible growth of productive-capital.”
(Wage Labour and Capital, p 30-31)
Consequently, the attempt to resist that development, proposed by Ssmondi, and the moral socialists, is reactionary. However, what Mill, Ricardo, J.S. Mill and others failed to recognise, but which Sismondi did, is that this revolutionary aspect of capitalist development is itself contradictory, leading to crises and periods of sharp reductions in production, and so of poverty, as part of an overall more rapid increase in production and living standards. As Marx puts it, speaking of Ricardo,
“He wants production for the sake of production and this with good reason. To assert, as sentimental opponents of Ricardo’s did, that production as such is not the object, is to forget that production for its own sake means nothing but the development of human productive forces, in other words the development of the richness of human nature as an end in itself. To oppose the welfare of the individual to this end, as Sismondi does, is to assert that the development of the species must be arrested in order to safeguard the welfare of the individual, so that, for instance, no war may be waged in which at all events some individuals perish. Sismondi is only right as against the economists who conceal or deny this contradiction.)”
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