Duhring proceeds on his previous basis of setting out a series of principles upon which his theory of value is erected.
“This is all the more convenient because it immediately enables him to contrive his definitions in such a way that what is to be proved with their help is already partially contained in them. Thus we learn at the outset that
“the governing concept in all prior political economy has been wealth and that wealth, as it really has been understood in world history hitherto and as it has developed its sway, is “economic power over men and things”.” (p 238)
Engels points out that this is “doubly wrong”, because, as discussed in relation to the force theory, even if we go back to the first instances of the capture of other humans for the purpose of using them as slaves, as against just killing them, or eating them, this requires a measure of economic development to be able to capture them, but also to be able to use them as slaves. The slave owner must have means of subsistence for the slave, until the slave has produced themselves, and to produce more than required for their own subsistence, the slave must be provided with means of production by the slave owner. Nor is that all, because, quickly, a division arises between those who make a living by specialising in the physical capture of slaves, and those who, subsequently, put these slaves to work. That was seen in the later slave trade, and also, in the US, some states specialised in the provision of slaves and others in the employment of those slaves.
“... the exploiters of slave labour had to buy the slaves, acquiring domination over men only through their prior domination over things, over the slave's purchase price, means of subsistence and instruments of labour. Throughout the Middle Ages large landed property was the precondition through which the feudal nobility obtained peasants paying dues and performing corvée.” (p 238)
The reason Duhring concocts this false definition of wealth, Engels says, is to take it out of the sphere of political economy, and to place it in the sphere of morals. The same is true of most of the petty-bourgeois, moral socialists of today, and they, also, like many before, fall into a corresponding catastrophism. As Marx described in The Critique of The Gotha Programme, the Lassalleans had a similar approach, in the Iron Law of Wages. In the period after WWII, as Stalinism had repeatedly talked about capitalism being in terminal decline, and even the Trotskyists had echoed it in talk of its “Death Agony”, the fact that global capitalism/imperialism entered its most dynamic, expansive and productive phase ever, posed a direct challenge to that analysis.
Not only was capitalism introducing revolutionary productive technologies, at a faster rate than ever, but those technologies were, also, being incorporated into ever-expanding ranges of consumption goods, as, indeed, Marx, in the Grundrisse, had described was inevitable, as part of The Civilising Mission of Capital. Stalinism that had, basically, taken over the Lassallean Iron Law of Wages, and predicted, in the form of Varga's Law, the rapid immiseration of the workers in the West, was left performing all sorts of acrobatics and distortions to try to prove that was happening, even while every worker could see with their own eyes the rapid improvement in their real wages, and vast new ranges of consumer goods and services available to them, including, as Marx had described in relation to The Civilising Mission of Capital, the creation of the welfare state, and its public provision of education, health and social care, etc. The Stalinists continued to try to hold their line, even after Varga himself had abandoned it.
But, the majority of "Trotskyists", themselves, increasingly, influenced by the weight of Stalinism in the labour movement, and drawn into their own petty-bourgeois moralism and catastrophism, were little better. Eventually, Mandel, as their leading economic theorist, had to face the reality of the continued vitality of capitalism/imperialism, and, along with Stalinism, which had collapsed into social-democracy, adopted a Left Keynesian position of the possibility of a more or less “crisis-free capitalism”, based upon the role of an interventionist state.
Almost no sooner was that stance adopted than it was also disproved, as the very post-war expansion it sought to explain led inevitably to rising relative wages, and a crisis of overproduction of capital, relative to labour, as described by Glyn and Sutcliffe in “Workers and The Profits Squeeze”.
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