Anti-Duhring, Part II, Political Economy, VII – Capital and Surplus Value - Part 7 of 7

For Classical Political Economy, Engels notes, capital and profit or interest are inseparable. Hence its distinction with simply means of production.

“But the word “capital” in its modern economic meaning is first met with at the time when the thing itself makes its appearance, when movable wealth increasingly acquires the function of capital by exploiting the surplus-labour of free workers for the production of commodities; and in fact it was introduced by the first nation of capitalists in history, the Italians of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.” (p 268)

Marx's analysis of capital and its evolution was not sucked from his thumb, but “brought the concept of capital into harmony with the historical facts from which, in the last analysis, it had been abstracted, and to which it owed its existence; if Marx thus cleared this economic concept of those obscure and fluctuating ideas which still clung to it even in classical bourgeois political economy and among socialists up to now — then it was Marx who applied that “definitive and most strictly scientific treatment“ which Herr Dühring is so constantly talking about and which we so painfully miss in his works.”" (p 268)

The barren and subjective nature of Duhring's theory is contained, as seen earlier, in his reliance on the idea of force to explain the evolution of class society. Unfortunately, this same vulgarity and subjectivism carries through, as Marx noted in The Critique of The Gotha Programme, to vulgar economics and vulgar socialism. As Engels demonstrated earlier, it fails to explain the material foundations upon which the superior force of one part of society arises as against the rest. It is also lacking any justification in history itself. It is undoubtedly the case that ruling classes do obtain superior force over the majority, but this is a consequence of them becoming the ruling class, not the cause of it.

For Duhring, Engels says,

“This one sentence contains the complete constitution of the economic world up to the present day. It is extremely short, and runs:

Article One: Labour produces.

Article Two: Force distributes.

“In plain human language”, this sums up the whole of Herr Dühring's economic wisdom.” (p 270)

Unfortunately, the same vulgar socialism persists, today, in the ideas of he welfarists and redistributionists, as well as in the Stalinoid concepts of “unequal exchange” and “super-exploitation” imposed by the superior force of imperialism.

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