Landmarks of Scientific Socialism: "Anti-Duehring". Friedrich Engels
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with the most important manuscripts on mathematics left behind by Marx.
But the advance of theoretical science makes my work in all probability, in a great measure, or altogether, superfluous. Since the revolution which overturned theoretical science the necessity of arranging the accumulation of purely empirical discoveries has caused the opposing empiricists to pay more and more attention to the dialectical character of the operations of nature. The old stiff antagonisms, the sharp impassable frontier lines are becoming more and more abolished. Since the last "true" gases have been liquefied, since the proof that a body can be put in a condition in which liquid and gaseous forms cannot be differentiated, aggregate conditions have to the last remnant lost their earlier absolute character. With the statement of the kinetic theory of gases that, in gases, the squares of the speeds with which the separate gas molecules move are in inverse ratio to the molecular weights, under the same temperature, heat takes its place directly in the series of such measurable forms of motion. Ten years ago the newly discovered great fundamental law of motion was still understood as a mere law of the conservation of energy, as a mere expression of the indestructibility and uncreatibility of motion, and therefore merely on its quantitative side. That narrow negative expression has been more and more subordinated to the transformation of energy, in which the qualitative content of the process is duly recognised and the last notion of an extramundane Creator is destroyed. That the quantity of motion (of energy, so called) is not changed when it is transformed into kinetic energy (mechanical force, so called), into electricity, heat, potential static energy need not now be preached any longer as something new, it served as the foundation, once attained, of many valuable investigations of the process of transformation itself, of the great fundamental process, in the knowledge of which is comprehended the knowledge of all nature. And since biology has been treated in the light of the theory of evolution it has abolished one stiff line of classification after another in the realm of organic nature. The entirely unclassified intermediate conditions increase in number every day. Later investigations throw organisms out of one class into another, and marks of distinction which have become articles of faith lose their individual reality. We have now mammals which lay eggs and, if the news is established, birds also which go on all fours. It was already observed, before the time of Virchow, as a conclusion of the discovery of the cell, that the identity of the individual creature is lost, scientifically and dialectically speaking, in a federation of cells, so the idea of animal (and therefore human) individuality is still further complicated by the discovery of the amœba in the bodies of the higher animals constituting the white blood corpuscles. And these are just the things which were considered polar opposites, irreconcilable and insoluble, the fixed boundaries and differences of classification, which have given modern theoretical science its limited and metaphysical character. The knowledge that these distinctions and antagonisms actually do occur in nature, but only relatively, and that on the other hand that fixity and absoluteness are the products of our own minds—this knowledge constitutes the kernel of the dialectic view of nature. The view is reached under the compulsion of the mass of scientific facts, and one reaches it the more easily by bringing to the dialectic character of these facts a consciousness of the laws of dialectic thought. At all events, the scope of science is now so great that it no longer escapes the dialectic comprehension. But it will simplify the process if it is remembered that the results in which these discoveries are comprehended are ideas, that the art of operating with ideas is not inborn, moreover, and is not vouchsafed every day to the ordinary mind, but requires actual thought, and this thought has a long history crammed with experiences, neither more nor less than the accumulated experiences of investigation into nature. By these means, then, it learns how to appropriate the results of fifteen hundred years development of philosophy, it gets rid of any separate natural philosophy which stands above or alongside of it and the limited method of thought brought over from English empiricism.
London, 22nd September, 1885.
III
The following new edition is, with the exception of a very few changes in form of expression, a reproduction of the former. Only in one chapter, namely in the Xth. of the Second Section (that on Critical History) I have allowed some important emendations, for the following reasons. As has been stated already in the preface to the second edition, this chapter is in all its essentials, the work of Marx. In its first form, which was intended as an article in a review, I was compelled to abbreviate the manuscript of Marx very much, particularly in those points in which the criticism of Herr Duehring's propositions is subordinate to the particular development of the history of economics. But these are just the portions of the manuscript which constitute the greatest and most important of, as regards its permanent interest, part of the work. The places in which Marx gives their appropriate place in the genesis of political economy to such writers as Petty, North, Locke and Hume, I consider myself obliged to give as literally and completely as possible, and still more so, his explanation of the "economic tableaux" by Quesnay, the insoluble riddle of the sphinx to all economists. I have omitted however that part which dealt solely with the writings of Herr Duehring as far as the connection permitted. For the rest, I am perfectly well satisfied with the extent to which the views represented in this work, have made their way into the minds of the working class and the scientists throughout the world since the publication of the former edition.
F. Engels.
London, 23d May, 1894.
CHAPTER IIIToC
INTRODUCTION
I. In General.
Modern socialism is in its essence the product of the existence on the one hand of the class antagonisms which are dominant in modern society, between the property possessors and those who have no property and between the wage workers and the bourgeois; and, on the other, of the anarchy which is prevalent in modern production. In its theoretical form however it appears as a development of the fundamental ideas of the great French philosophers of the eighteenth century. Like every new theory it was obliged to attach itself to the existing philosophy however deeply its roots were embedded in the economic fact.
The great men in France who cleared the minds of the people for the coming revolution were themselves uncompromisingly revolutionary. They did not recognise outside authority of any kind whatsoever. Religion, natural science, society, the state, all were subjected to the most unsparing criticism, and everything was compelled to justify its existence before the judgment seat of reason or perish. Reason was established as the one and universal measure. It was the time when, as Hegel said, the world was turned upside down, first in the sense that the human mind and the principles arrived at by process of thought were claimed as the foundations of all human actions and social relations, but later also, in the wider sense, that the reality which contradicted these theories had indeed to be turned upside down. All forms of society and the state existent heretofore, all survivals of old notions, were thrown into the lumber room as unreasonable. Up to that time the world had only allowed itself to be led by prejudice. All that had been done deserved merely pity and contempt. Now for the first time day broke: from now on, superstition, injustice, tyranny and privilege should be replaced by eternal truth, eternal justice, equality founded on natural rights and the inalienable rights of man.
We now know that the rule of reason was nothing more than the rule of the bourgeoisie idealised, that eternal right found its realisation in bourgeois justice, that equality was materialised in bourgeois equality before the law, that when the rights of man were proclaimed bourgeois rights of property were proclaimed at one and the same time, and that the state of reason, Rousseau's Social Contract, could only come into existence as the bourgeois democratic republic. To such a slight extent could the great thinkers of the eighteenth century, just as their predecessors, prevail over the limits which their own epoch had placed upon them.
But besides the antagonism between feudal baron and bourgeois there existed the general antagonism between the robbers and the robbed, between the rich idlers and the toiling poor.