ANTI-DÜHRING

    We saw in the Introduction* how the French philosophers of the eighteenth century, the forerunners of the Revolution, appealed to reason as the sole judge of everything in existence. A rational state, a rational society, were to be founded; everything running counter to eternal reason was to be remorselessly done away with. We saw also that this eternal reason was in reality nothing but the idealized under standing of the middle burgher, who was just then evolving into the bourgeois. But when the French Revolution had realized this rational society and state, the new order of things, however rational as compared with earlier conditions, proved to be by no means absolutely rational. The state

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based upon reason completely collapsed. Rousseau's Social Contract had found its realization in the Reign of Terror, from which the bourgeoisie, after losing faith in its own political capacity, had taken refuge first in the corruption of the Directorate and finally under the wing of the Napoleonic despotism. The promised eternal peace was turned into an endless war of conquest. The society based on reason had fared no better. Instead of dissolving into general prosperity, the antagonism between rich and poor had become sharpened by the elimination of the guild and other privileges, which had bridged it over, and of the charitable institutions of the Church, which had mitigated it. [As far as the small capitalists and small peasants were concerned, the "freedom of property" from feudal fetters, which had now become a reality, proved to be the freedom to sell their small property, which was being crushed under the overpowering competition of big capital and big landed property, to these very lords, so that freedom of property turned into "freedom from property" for the small capitalists and peasant proprietors.] The rapid growth of industry on a capitalist basis raised the poverty and misery of the working masses to a condition of existence of society. [Cash payment increasingly became, in Carlyle's phrase, the sole social nexus.] The number of crimes increased from year to year. Though not eradicated, the feudal vices which had previously been flaunted in broad daylight were now at any rate thrust into the background. In their stead, the bourgeois vices, hitherto nursed in secret, began to blossom all the more luxuriantly. Trade developed more and more into swindling. The "fraternity" of the revolutionary slogan was realized in the chicanery and envy of the battle of competition. Oppression by force was replaced by corruption, the sword as the prime social lever by money.

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"The right of the first night" passed from the feudal lords to the bourgeois manufacturers. Prostitution assumed hitherto unheard of proportions. Marriage itself remained as before the legally recognized form, the official cloak of prostitution, and, moreover, was copiously supplemented by adultery.

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well as with the rose-coloured phraseology of the bourgeois ideologists of his time. He shows how everywhere the most pitiful reality corresponds with the most high-sounding phrases, and he overwhelms this hopeless fiasco of phrases with his mordant sarcasm.

    The materialist conception of history starts from the principle that production and, next to production, the exchange of things produced, is the basis of every social order; that in every society that has appeared in history, the distribution of wealth and with it the division of society into classes or estates are dependent upon what is produced, how it is produced, and how the products are exchanged. Accordingly, the ultimate causes of all social changes and political revolutions are to be sought, not in men's brains, not in their growing insight into eternal truth and justice, but in changes in the modes of production and exchange. They are to be sought, not in the philosophy, but in the economics of each particular epoch. The growing recognition that existing social institutions are irrational and unjust, that reason has become unreason, and kindness a scourge, is only a sign that changes in the modes of production and exchange have silently been taking place with which the social order adapted to earlier economic conditions is no longer in keeping. From this it also follows that the means of eliminating the abuses that have been brought to light must also be

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present, in a more or less developed condition, within the changed relations of production themselves. These means are not to be invented out of one's brain, but discovered by the brain in the existing material facts of production.

    Where, then, does modern socialism stand?

    It is now pretty generally conceded that the existing social order is the creation of the ruling class of today, of the bourgeoisie. The mode of production peculiar to the bourgeoisie, which since Marx has been called the capitalist mode of production, was incompatible with the local privileges and the privileges of estate as well as with the reciprocal personal ties of the feudal system. The bourgeoisie shattered the feudal system and on its ruins built the bourgeois social order, the realm of free competition, of freedom of movement, of equal rights for commodity owners and all the glories of capitalism. The capitalist mode of production could now develop freely. Since steam and the new tool making machinery transformed the older manufacture into large-scale industry, the productive forces evolved under the guidance of the bourgeoisie developed with a rapidity and on a scale unheard of before. But just as manufacture and the handicraft industries, which had experienced a further growth under its influence, had come into conflict with the feudal trammels of the guilds in their time, so large-scale industry, in its more complete development, now comes into conflict with the barriers within which the capitalistic mode of production holds it confined. The new productive forces have already outgrown the bourgeois form of using them; and this conflict between productive forces and mode of production is not a conflict engendered in men's heads, like that between original sin and divine justice, but it exists in the facts, objectively, outside us, independently of the will

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and even actions of the men who have brought it on. Modern socialism is nothing but the reflex in thought of this actual conflict, its ideal reflection in the minds of above all the class directly suffering under it, the working class.

    Now, in what does this conflict consist?

    Prior to capitalist production, i.e., in the Middle Ages, small-scale production generally prevailed, based upon the workers' private ownership of their means of production: the agriculture of the small peasant, freeman or serf, and the handicrafts in the towns. The instruments of labour -- land, agricultural implements, the workshop, the hand tool -- were the instruments of labour of single individuals, adapted for individual use, and, therefore, of necessity puny, dwarfish, circumscribed. But for this very reason they normally belonged to the producer himself. To concentrate these scattered, limited means of production, to enlarge them, to turn them into the powerful levers of production of the present day was precisely the historic role of the capitalist mode of production and of its upholder, the bourgeoisie. In Part IV of Capital Marx gives a detailed account of how the bourgeoisie has historically accomplished this since the fifteenth century through the three phases of simple co-operation, manufacture and large-scale industry. But as is also shown there, the bourgeoisie could not transform these limited means of production into mighty productive forces without at the same time transforming them from individual means of production into social means of production only workable by a collectivity of men. The spinning wheel, the hand-loom and the blacksmith's hammer were replaced by the spinning machine, the power loom and the steam hammer, and the individual workshop by the factory commanding the co-operation of hundreds

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and thousands of workmen. Like the means of production, production itself changed from a series of individual operations into a series of social acts, and the products from individual into social products. The yarn, the cloth and the metal goods that now came out of the factory were the common product of many workers, through whose hands they had successively to pass before they were ready. No one person could say of them: "I made that, this is my product."

    But where the spontaneous division of labour within society [a division of labour which arose gradually and planlessly] is the fundamental form of production, it imprints on the products the form of commodities, the mutual exchange, purchase and sale of which enable the individual producers to satisfy their manifold wants. This was the case in the Middle Ages. The peasant, for example, sold the artisan agricultural products and bought from him the products of his craft. The new mode of production infiltrated this society of individual producers, of commodity producers. It set up the planned division of labour, as it was organized in the individual factory, in the midst of the spontaneous, planless division of labour such as then prevailed throughout society; side by side with individual production, social production made its appearance. The products of both were sold in the same market, and, consequently, at the same prices, at least approximately. But planned organization was stronger than the spontaneous division of labour; the factories working socially produced their commodities more cheaply than the isolated small producers. Individual production succumbed in one field after another. Social production totally revolutionized the old mode of production. But this, its revolutionary, character was so little recognized that it was, on the contrary,

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introduced as a means of increasing and promoting commodity production. In its origin, it was directly tied up with certain already existing levers of commodity production and exchange: merchant's capital, handicrafts, wage-labour. Since social production itself appeared as a new form of commodity production, the old forms of appropriation characteristic of commodity production remained in full force for it too.

    In commodity production as it had developed in the Middle Ages, any question concerning the identity of the owner of the product of labour just couldn't arise. The individual producer had generally produced it from his own raw material, which was often his own handiwork, with his own instruments of labour, and by his own or his family's manual labour. There was no need whatever for him to appropriate the product to begin with, it belonged to him wholly as a matter of course. His ownership of the product was therefore based upon his own labour. Even where outside help was used, it was generally of little importance, and often received other compensation in addition to wages; the guild apprentice and journeyman worked less for board and wages than for training to become master craftsmen themselves.

    Then came the concentration of the means of production in large workshops and manufactories, their transformation into actual social means of production. But the social means of production and products were treated as if they were still the means of production and the products of individuals they had been before. Hitherto, the owner of the instruments of labour had appropriated the product, because it was normally his own product and the auxiliary labour of others was the exception. Now the owner of the instruments

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of labour continued to appropriate the product, although it was no longer his product, but exclusively the product of the labour of others. Thus, the products which were now turned out socially were not appropriated by those who had actually set the means of production in motion and actually turned out the products, but by the capitalists. The means of production and production itself have become social in essence. But they are subjected to a form of appropriation which presupposes private production by individuals, and under which, therefore, everyone owns his own product and brings it to market. The mode of production is subjected to this form of appropriation, although it removes the presupposition on which the latter rests.* The whole conflict of today is already present in embryo in this contradiction which gives the new mode of production its capitalist character. The more the new mode of production became dominant in all decisive fields of production and in all economically decisive countries, and the more it reduced individual production to an insignificant residue, the more glaring did the incompatibility of social production with capitalist appropriation necessarily become.

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    As we have said, the first capitalists found the form of wage-labour already in existence. But wage-labour as the exception, as a side-occupation, as an auxiliary, as a transitory phase. The agricultural labourer who occasionally went to work as a day labourer had a few acres of his own land, from which alone he could get his living in a pinch. The regulations of the guilds ensured that the journeyman of today became the master-craftsman of tomorrow. But this changed as soon as the means of production became social and were concentrated in the hands of capitalists. Both the means of production and the products of the small individual producer increasingly depreciated in value; there was nothing left for him to do but to go to the capitalist and work for wages. From being an exception and an auxiliary, wage-labour became the rule and the basic form of all production; from being a side-occupation, it now became the worker's exclusive activity. The occasional wage-worker was transformed into the wage-worker for life. Furthermore, the number of lifelong wage-workers was enormously increased by the simultaneous collapse of the feudal system, the disbanding of the feudal lords' retainers, the eviction of peasants from their homesteads, etc. The separation of the means of production concentrated in the hands of the capitalists, on the one side, from the producers now possessing nothing but their labour-power, on the other, was accomplished. The contradiction between social production and capitalist appropriation became manifest as the antagonism between proletariat and bourgeoisie.

    We have seen that the capitalist mode of production infiltrated a society of commodity producers, individual producers, whose social nexus was mediated through the exchange of their products. But every society based on commodity

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production has the peculiarity that the producers in it have lost command over their own social relations. Each produces for himself with the means of production which happen to be at his disposal and in order to satisfy his individual needs through exchange. No one knows how much of the article he produces is coming onto the market or how much will be wanted, no one knows whether his individual product will meet a real need, whether he will cover his costs or even be able to sell it at all. Anarchy of social production prevails. But like all other forms of production commodity production has its own peculiar laws, which are inherent in and inseparable from it; and these laws assert themselves despite anarchy, in and through anarchy. They are manifested in the only persistent form of the social nexus, in exchange, and impose themselves on the individual producers as compulsory laws of competition. At first, therefore, they are unknown to these producers themselves and have to be discovered by them gradually, only through long experience. Thus they assert themselves without the producers and against the producers, as the natural laws of their form of production, working blindly. The product dominates the producers.

    In mediaeval society, especially in the earlier centuries, production was essentially for the producer's own use. In the main it only satisfied the wants of the producer and his family. Where personal relations of dependence existed as in the countryside, it also contributed towards satisfying the wants of the feudal lord. No exchange was involved here, and consequently the products did not assume the character of commodities. The peasant family produced almost everything it required -- utensils and clothing as well as food. It was only when it succeeded in producing a surplus beyond its

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ment for the individual industrial capitalist constantly to improve his machinery, constantly to increase its productive power. The bare factual possibility of extending his field of production is transformed into a similar compulsory commandment for him. The enormous expansive force of large-scale industry, compared to which that of gases is mere child's play, now appears to us as a need for qualitative and quantitative expansion that laughs at all counteracting pressure. Such counteracting pressure is formed by consumption, by sales, by markets for the products of large-scale industry. But the capacity of the market to expand, both extensively and intensively, is primarily governed by quite different laws which operate far less energetically. The expansion of the market cannot keep pace with the expansion of production. The collision becomes inevitable, and since it can yield no solution so long as it does not burst the capitalist mode of production itself, it becomes periodic. Capitalist production generates a new "vicious circle".

    In fact, since 1825, when the first general crisis erupted, the whole industrial and commercial world, production and exchange among all civilized peoples and their more or less barbarian appendages, have broken down about once every ten years. Trade comes to a standstill, markets are glutted, products lie around in piles as massive as they are unsaleable, hard cash disappears, credit vanishes, factories are idle, the working masses lack the means of subsistence because they have produced too much of them, bankruptcy follows upon bankruptcy, forced sale upon forced sale. The stagnation lasts for years and both productive forces and products are squandered and destroyed wholesale, until the accumulated masses of commodities are finally run down at a more or less considerable depreciation and until production and exchange

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gradually begin to move again. By degrees the pace quickens, it becomes a trot, the industrial trot passes into a gallop, and the gallop in turn passes into the unbridled onrush of a complete industrial, commercial, credit and speculative steeple chase, only to end up again, after the most breakneck jumps -- in the ditch of a crash. And so on over and over again. We have now experienced it fully five times since 1825, and at this moment (1877) we are experiencing it for the sixth time. The character of these crises is so clearly marked that Fourier hit them all off when he described the first as a crise pléthorique, a crisis of superabundance.

    In these crises, the contradiction between social production and capitalist appropriation ends in a violent explosion. The circulation of commodities is for the moment reduced to nothing; money, the means of circulation, becomes an obstacle to circulation; all the laws of commodity production and commodity circulation are turned upside down. The economic collision has reached its culminating point: the mode of production rebels against the mode of exchange, the productive forces rebel against the mode of production, which they have outgrown.

    The fact that the social organization of production within the factory has developed to the point at which it has become incompatible with the anarchy of production in society which exists side by side with and above it -- this fact is made palpable to the capitalists themselves by the forcible concentration of capitals which takes place during crises through the ruin of many big and even more small capitalists. The whole mechanism of the capitalist mode of production breaks down under the pressure of the productive forces which it itself has created. It is no longer able to transform the whole of

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this mass of means of production into capital; they lie idle, and for this very reason the industrial reserve army must also lie idle. Means of production, means of subsistence, available workers, all the elements of production and of general wealth are there in abundance. But "abundance becomes the source of distress and want" (Fourier), because it is precisely abundance that prevents the conversion of the means of production and subsistence into capital. For in capitalist society the means of production cannot begin to function unless they have first been converted into capital, into means for the exploitation of human labour-power. The necessity for the means of production and subsistence to take the character of capital stands like a ghost between them and the workers. It alone prevents the coming together of the material and personal levers of production; it alone forbids the means of production to function and the workers to work and to live. Thus on the one hand the capitalist mode of production stands convicted of its own incapacity to continue the administration of these productive forces. On the other hand, these productive forces themselves press forward with increasing power towards the abolition of the contradiction, to their deliverance from their character as capital, towards the actual recognition of their character as social productive forces.

    It is this counterpressure of the productive forces, in their mighty upgrowth, against their character as capital, this increasingly compulsive drive for the recognition of their social nature, which forces the capitalist class itself to treat them more and more as social productive forces, as far as this is at all possible within the framework of capitalist relations. The period of industrial boom with its unlimited credit inflation no less than the crash itself operating through the

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collapse of large capitalist establishments, drives towards that form of the socialization of larger masses of means of production which we find in the various kinds of joint-stock companies. Many of these means of production and communication are so colossal from the outset that, like the railways, they exclude all other forms of capitalist exploitation. At a certain stage of development this form, too, no longer suffices; [the large-scale producers in one and the same branch of industry in a country unite in a "trust", an association for the purpose of regulating production. They determine the total amount to be produced, parcel it out among themselves and thus enforce the selling price fixed beforehand. Since such trusts usually go to pieces as soon as business becomes bad, for this very reason they push towards a still more concentrated socialization. The whole branch of industry is converted into one big joint-stock company, and internal competition gives place to the internal monopoly of this one company; this happened as early as 1890 with English alkali production, which, after the fusion of all the forty-eight large works, is now carried on by a single company, under centralized direction, with a capital of £6 million.

    In the trusts, free competition changes into monopoly and the planless production of capitalist society capitulates before the planned production of the invading socialist society. Of course, this is initially still to the benefit of the capitalists. But the exploitation becomes so palpable here that it must break down. No nation would put up with production directed by trusts, with such a barefaced exploitation of the community by a small band of coupon-clippers.

    In one way or another, with trusts or without,] the state, the official representative of capitalist society, is [finally] con-

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strained to take over the direction of production.* This necessity for conversion into state property first appears in the big communication organizations: the postal service, telegraphs and railways.

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clipping of coupons and gambling on the Stock Exchange, where the different capitalists fleece each other of their capital. Just as at first the capitalist mode of production displaced the workers, so now it is displacing the capitalists, relegating them, just as it did the workers, to the superfluous population, although not immediately to the industrial reserve army.

    But neither conversion into joint-stock companies [and trusts] nor conversion into state property deprives the productive forces of their character as capital. This is obvious in the case of joint-stock companies [and trusts]. But the modern state, too, is only the organization with which bourgeois society provides itself in order to maintain the general external conditions of the capitalist mode of production against encroachments either by the workers or by individual capitalists. The modern state, whatever its form, is an essentially capitalist machine, the state of the capitalists, the ideal aggregate capitalist. The more productive forces it takes over into its possession, the more it becomes a real aggregate capitalist, the more citizens it exploits. The workers remain wage-workers, proletarians. The capitalist relationship is not abolished, rather it is pushed to the limit. But at this limit it changes into its opposite. State ownership of the productive forces is not the solution of the conflict, but it contains within itself the formal means, the handle to the solution.

    This solution can only consist in actually recognizing the social nature of the modern productive forces and in therefore bringing the mode of production, appropriation and exchange into harmony with the social character of the means of production. This can only be brought about by society's openly and straightforwardly taking possession of the pro-

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ductive forces, which have outgrown all guidance other than that of society itself. Thus the social character of the means of production and of the products, which today reacts against the producers themselves, periodically ruptures the mode of production and exchange, and enforces itself only as a law of nature working blindly, violently and destructively, will be quite consciously asserted by the producers, and instead of being a source of disorder and periodic collapse will change into the most powerful lever of production itself.

    The forces operating in society work exactly like the forces of nature -- blindly, violently and destructively, so long as we fail to understand them and take them into account. But once we have recognized them and understood their action, their trend and their effects, it depends solely on ourselves to increasingly subject them to our will and to attain our ends through them. This is especially true of the mighty productive forces of the present day. As long as we obstinately refuse to understand their nature and their character -- and the capitalist mode of production and its defenders resist such understanding with might and main -- these forces operate in spite of us and against us, dominate us, as we have shown in detail. But once their nature is grasped, they can be transformed from demoniacal masters into willing servants in the hands of the producers working in association. It is the difference between the destructive force of electricity in the lightning of a thunderstorm and the tamed electricity of the telegraph and the arc light, the difference between a conflagration and fire working in the service of man. With this treatment of the present-day productive forces according to their nature, which is now at last understood, a socially planned regulation of production in accordance with the needs of the community and of each individual takes

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the place of the anarchy of social production. The capitalist mode of appropriation, in which the product enslaves first the producer and then the appropriator as well, will thus be replaced by the mode of appropriation of the product based on the nature of the modern means of production themselves: on the one hand, direct social appropriation as a means of maintaining and extending production, and on the other direct individual appropriation as a means of existence and enjoyment.

    By increasingly transforming the great majority of the population into proletarians, the capitalist mode of production creates the force which, under penalty of its own destruction, is compelled to accomplish this revolution. By increasingly driving towards the transformation of the vast socialized means of production into state property, it itself points the way to the accomplishment of this revolution. The proletariat seizes state power and to begin with transforms the means of production into state property. But it thus puts an end to itself as proletariat, it thus puts an end to all class differences and class antagonisms, and thus also to the state as state. Moving in class antagonisms, society up to now had need of the state, that is, an organization of the exploiting class at each period for the maintenance of its external conditions of production, that is, particularly for the forcible holding down of the exploited class in the conditions of oppression (slavery, villeinage or serfdom, wage-labour) given by the existing mode of production. The state was the official representative of the whole of society, its concentration in a visible body, but it was so only in so far as it was the state of that class which in its time represented the whole of society: in antiquity, the state of the slave-owning citizens, in the Middle Ages of the feudal nobility, in our time, of the

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    After all that has been said above, the reader will not be surprised to learn that the development of the principal features of socialism described in the last chapter is not at all in accordance with Herr Dühring's views. On the contrary. He must hurl them into the abyss of the damned with all the other "bastards of historical and logical fantasy", "barren conceptions", "confused and nebulous notions", etc. For him socialism is in no way a necessary product of historical development and still less of the grossly material economic conditions of today, which are solely oriented towards getting grub. He is much better off. His socialism is a final and ultimate truth;

it is "the natural system of society", whose roots are to be found in a "universal principle of justice":

and although he cannot avoid taking notice of the existing situation if only in order to remedy it, a situation which has been created by the sinful history of the past, this must be regarded rather as a misfortune for the pure principle of justice. Herr Dühring creates his socialism, like everything else, through the medium of his famous twosome. Instead of these two puppets playing the part of master and servant as in the past, they act out the drama of equal rights for

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a change -- and, hey presto, we are all set for Dühringian socialism.

    Therefore, it goes without saying that to Herr Dühring periodical industrial crises are completely devoid of the historical significance we had to ascribe to them.

    For him crises are only occasional deviations from "normalcy" and at most serve to promote "the development of a more regulated order". The "common method" of explaining crises by over-production is in no wise adequate for his "more exact conception". Of course this "may be permissible for specific crises in particular areas". As for example, "a swamping of the book market with works suddenly released for republication and suitable for mass sale".

    At any rate Herr Dühring can go to bed with the gratifying knowledge that his immortal works will never bring on any such world disaster.

    But in big crises, it is not over-production, but rather "the lagging behind of popular consumption. . . artificially produced under-consumption. . . interference with the natural growth of the needs of the people (!), which ultimately widen the gulf between supply and demand so critically".

    And he has even the good luck to find a disciple for this theory of crisis of his.

    But unfortunately the under-consumption of the masses, the restriction of the consumption of the masses to what is necessary for their subsistence and reproduction, is not a new phenomenon. It has existed as long as there have been exploiting and exploited classes. Even in those periods of history when the situation of the masses was particularly favourable, as for example in England in the fifteenth century, they under-consumed. They were very far from having their own annual total product at their disposal for consumption. Therefore, while under-consumption has been a constant feature in history for thousands of years, the general

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stagnation of the market which breaks out in crises as the result of excessive production is a phenomenon only of the last fifty years; and so it needs all the shallowness of Herr Dühring's vulgar economics to explain the new collision not by the new phenomenon of over-production but by the thousands of years old phenomenon of under-consumption. It is like a mathematician attempting to explain the variation in the ratio between two quantities, one of which is constant and the other variable, not by the variation of the variable but by the constant's remaining unchanged. The under-consumption of the masses is a necessary condition of all forms of society based on exploitation, and consequently of the capitalist form too; but it is only the capitalist form of production which brings about crises. The under-consumption of the masses is therefore a precondition of crises, and plays a role in them which has long been recognized. But it tells us just as little about the cause of present-day crises as about their previous absence.

    Herr Dühring's notions of the world market are altogether curious. We saw how, like a typical German man of letters, he seeks to explain real industrial specific crises by imaginary crises on the Leipzig book market -- the storm on the ocean by the storm in a teacup. He also imagines that present-day entrepreneurial production must

"depend for its market mainly on the circles of the possessing classes themselves";

which does not prevent him, only sixteen pages later, from presenting, in the accepted way, the iron and cotton industries as the decisive modern industries -- that is, precisely the two branches of production whose products are consumed

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only to an infinitesimally small degree within the circles of the possessing classes and are more than any other dependent on mass consumption. Wherever we turn in Herr Dühring's works, there is nothing but empty and self-contradictory chatter. But let us take an example from the cotton industry. In the relatively small town of Oldham alone -- one of a dozen towns round Manchester with fifty to a hundred thousand inhabitants engaged in the cotton industry -- in this town alone, in the four years 1872 to 1875, the number of spindles spinning only Number 32 yarn increased from two and a half to five million; so that in one medium-sized English town there are as many spindles spinning one single count as in the whole cotton industry of Germany, including Alsace. The expansion in the other branches and areas of the cotton industry in England and Scotland has taken place in approximately the same proportion. In view of these facts, it requires a strong dose of deep-rooted effrontery to explain the present complete stagnation in the yarn and cloth markets by the English masses' under-consumption and not by the English cotton-mill owners' over-production.*

    Enough. One does not argue with people who are so ignorant of economics that they consider the Leipzig book market a market in the modern industrial sense. Let us therefore merely note that Herr Dühring has only one more piece of information for us on the subject of crises, namely, that in crises we have nothing

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but "the ordinary interplay of overstrain and relaxation"; that over-speculation "is not only due to the planless multiplication of private enterprises", but "the rashness of individual entrepreneurs and private imprudence must also be reckoned among the causes giving rise to oversupply".

    What, once again, is the "cause giving rise" to this rashness and private imprudence? Precisely this very planlessness of capitalist production, which is manifested in the planless multiplication of private enterprises. And it is also an act of inordinate "rashness" to mistake the translation of an economic fact into moral reproach for the discovery of a new cause.

    With this we can leave the question of crises. In the previous chapter we showed that they were necessarily engendered by the capitalist mode of production, and explained their significance as crises of this mode of production itself, as means of compelling the social revolution, and it is not necessary to say another word in reply to Herr Dühring's superficialities on this subject. Let us pass on to his positive creations, to the "natural system of society".

    This system, which is built on a "universal principle of justice" and is therefore free from all consideration of troublesome material facts, consists of a federation of economic communes among which there is

"freedom of movement and obligatory acceptance of new members on the basis of fixed laws and administrative regulations."

    The economic commune itself is above all

"a comprehensive schematism of great import in human history" which is far superior to the "erroneous half-measures", for example, of a certain Marx. It implies "a community of persons bound together by their publicistic right to dispose of a definite area of land and a group of productive establishments for their common activity and their common participation in the product". The public right is "a right to the object . . . in the sense of a purely publicistic relation to nature and to productive institutions".

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    We leave it to the future jurists of the economic commune to cudgel their brains as to what this means; we give it up completely. All we gather is

that it is not at all the same thing as the "corporative ownership of workers' associations", which would not exclude mutual competition and even the exploitation of wage-labour.

    Here he drops the remark that

the conception of a "collective ownership", such as is also found in Marx, is, "to say the least, obscure and open to question, as this conception of the future always gives the impression that it means nothing more than corporative ownership by groups of workers".

    This is one more instance of the many "scurrilous ways" of making innuendoes so customary with Herr Dühring, "for whose vulgar nature" -- to use his own words -- "only the vulgar word scurvy would be quite apt"; it is just as baseless a lie as Herr Dühring's other invention that by collective ownership Marx means "ownership which is at once both individual and social".

    In any case this much seems clear. The publicistic right of an economic commune in its instruments of labour is an exclusive property right at least as against every other economic commune as well as against society and the state.

    But this right is not to empower the commune "to cut itself off . . . from the outside world, for as between the various economic communes there is freedom of movement and obligatory acceptance of new members on the basis of fixed laws and administrative norms . . . Iike . . . belonging to a political organization at the present time, or participation in the economic affairs of the community".

    There will therefore be rich and poor economic communes, and the levelling out takes place through the population crowding into the rich communes and leaving the poor ones. Thus although Herr Dühring wants to eliminate competition

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in products between the individual communes by means of the national organization of trade, he calmly allows competition among the producers to continue. Things are removed from the sphere of competition, but men remain subject to it.

    But we are still very far from clear on the question of "publicistic right". Two pages later Herr Dühring tells us:

    The trade commune "will at first cover the politico-social area whose members constitute a single legal entity and in this character have at their disposal the whole of the land, the dwellings and productive institutions".

    So after all it is not the individual commune which has the disposal, but the whole nation. The "publicistic right", "right to the object", "publicistic relation to nature" and so forth is therefore not merely "at least obscure and open to question", it is in direct contradiction with itself. At any rate, in so far as each individual economic commune is likewise a legal entity, it is in fact "an ownership which is at once both individual and social", and this latter "nebulous hybrid" is thus once again to be met with in Herr Dühring himself.

    In any case the economic commune has instruments of labour at its disposal for the purpose of production. How is this production carried on? Judging by all Herr Dühring has told us, precisely as in the past, except that the commune takes the place of the capitalists. The most we are told is that for the first time everyone will be free to choose his occupation, and that there will be equal obligation to work.

    The basic form of all production hitherto has been the division of labour, on the one hand, within society, and on the other, within each separate productive establishment. How does the Dühringian "sociality" stand on this question?

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    The first great division of labour in society is the separation of town and country.

    According to Herr Dühring, this antagonism is "inevitable in the nature of things". But "it is on the whole dubious to regard the gulf between agriculture and industry . . . as unbridgeable. In fact, a certain degree of constant movement between the two already exists which promises to increase considerably in the future". Already, we learn, two industries have penetrated agriculture and rural enterprise: "in the first place, distilling, and in the second, beet-sugar manufacture. . . . The production of spirits is already of such importance that it is more likely to be under- than over-estimated." And "if it were possible, as a result of some inventions, for a large number of industries to grow in such a way that they would be compelled to localize their operations in the countryside in direct association with the production of raw materials", this would weaken the antithesis between town and country and "provide the broadest possible basis for the development of civilization". Moreover, "a similar result might be attained in yet another way. Apart from technical requirements, social needs are increasingly coming to the fore, and if the latter become the decisive consideration in the grouping of human activities, it will no longer be possible to neglect those advantages which ensue from a close and systematic connection between occupations in the open country and the technical operations of working up raw materials."

    Now it is precisely social needs which come to the fore in the economic commune; and so won't it hasten to appropriate the above advantages of the union of agriculture and industry to the fullest extent? Won't Herr Dühring seize the opportunity to impart to us, with the verbosity he is so fond of, his "more exact conceptions" concerning the economic commune's attitude to this question? The reader who expected this would be sadly duped. The old threadbare, embarrassed commonplaces, once again revolving in the orbit of the schnapps-distilling and the beet-sugar manufacturing jurisdiction of the Prussian Landrecht, are the sum total of what Herr Dühring has to say about the antithesis between town and country in the present and in the future.

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    Let us pass on to the division of labour in detail. Here Herr Dühring is already a little "more exact". He speaks of

"a person who has to devote himself exclusively to one kind of occupation". If the point at issue is the introduction of a new branch of production, the problem simply hinges on whether a certain number of persons, who are to devote themselves to the production of one single article, can some how be provided with the consumption (!) they require. In the socialitarian system no branch of production would "require many people ", and there, too, there would be "economic species " of men "distinguished by their way of life".

    Accordingly, within the sphere of production everything remains much the same as before. To be sure, an "erroneous division of labour" has obtained in society so far; but as to what this is and by what it is to be replaced in the economic commune, we are only told:

    "With regard to the division of labour itself, we have already said above that this question can be considered settled as soon as account is taken of the various natural aptitudes and personal capabilities."

    In addition to capabilities, personal inclination is taken into account:

    "The attractiveness of rising to activities which call additional capabilities and training into play would depend exclusively on the inclination felt for the occupation in question and on the joy produced in the exercise of precisely this and no other thing " (exercise of a thing!).

    This will stimulate competition within the socialitarian system, so that

"production itself will become interesting, and the dull pursuit of it, which sees in it nothing but a means of gain, will no longer put its heavy imprint on conditions".

    In every society in which production has developed spontaneously -- and our present society is of this type -- it is not the producers who dominate the means of production,

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but the means of production which dominate the producers. In such a society each new lever of production is necessarily transformed into a new means for the enslavement of the producers by the means of production. This is above all true of that lever of production which, prior to the introduction of large-scale industry, was far the most powerful -- the division of labour. The very first great division of labour, the separation of town and country, condemned the rural population to thousands of years of mental torpor and the townspeople each to subjection to his own individual trade. It destroyed the basis of the intellectual development of the former and of the physical development of the latter. When the peasant appropriates his land and the townsman his trade, his land appropriates the peasant and his trade the townsman to just the same extent. When labour is divided, man is also divided. All other physical and mental faculties are sacrificed to the development of one single activity. This stunting of man grows in the same measure as the division of labour, which attains its highest development in manufacture. Manufacture splits up each trade into its separate partial operations, allots each of these to an individual worker as his life calling, and thus chains him for life to a particular detail function and a particular tool. "It converts the labourer into a crippled monstrosity, by forcing his detail dexterity at the expense of a world of productive capabilities and instincts. . . . The individual himself is made the automatic motor of a fractional operation" (Marx)* -- a motor which in many cases is perfected only by literally crippling the labourer physically and mentally. The machinery of large-scale industry degrades the worker from a machine to

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the mere appendage of a machine. "The lifelong speciality of handling one detail-tool now becomes the lifelong speciality of serving one detail-machine. Machinery is put to a wrong use, with the object of transforming the workman from his very childhood into a detail of a detail-machine" (Marx).* And not only the workers, but also the classes directly or indirectly exploiting the workers are enslaved by the instrument of their activity through the division of labour; the empty-minded bourgeois by his own capital and his own mania for profit, the lawyer by his ossified legal conceptions, which dominate him as an independent power; the "educated classes" in general by their manifold manifestations of parochial narrow-mindedness and one-sidedness, by their own physical and mental myopia, by their mutilation as a result of an education tailored to their speciality and of their being chained for life to this speciality alone -- even when this speciality is just doing nothing.

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towns necessarily created by this concentration and to transfer his plant to the countryside. This process can be studied in detail in the textile industry districts of Lancashire and Yorkshire; large-scale capitalist industry is constantly bringing new large towns into being there by constant flight from the towns into the country. The situation is similar in the metal industry districts where partially different causes produce the same effects.

    Once more, only the abolition of the capitalist character of modern industry can abolish this new vicious circle, this contradiction in modern industry which is constantly reproducing itself. Only a society which enables its productive forces to mesh harmoniously on the basis of one single vast plan can allow industry to be dispersed over the whole country in the way best adapted to its own development and to the maintenance and development of the other elements of production.

    Accordingly, the abolition of the antithesis between town and country is not merely possible. It has become a direct necessity of industrial production itself, just as it has become a necessity of agricultural production and of public health to boot. Only the fusion of town and country can eliminate the present poisoning of air, water and land, only such fusion will change the situation of the masses now languishing in the towns, and enable their excrement to be used for the production of plants instead of for the production of disease.

    Capitalist industry has already made itself relatively independent of the local limitations of production at the places of origin of its raw materials. In the main the textile industry works up imported raw materials. Spanish iron ore is worked up in England and Germany, and Spanish and South American copper ores in England. Every coal-field now

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supplies fuel to an industrial area beyond its own borders, an area which is widening every year. Along the whole of the European coast steam-engines are driven by English and to some extent by German and Belgian coal. Society liberated from the barriers of capitalist production can go much further still. By generating a race of producers with an all-round training who understand the scientific basis of the totality of industrial production and each of whom has had practical experience in a whole series of branches of production from start to finish, this society will create a new productive force which will abundantly compensate for the labour required to transport raw materials and fuel from great distances.

    The abolition of the separation of town and country is therefore not utopian in so far as it is conditioned on the most equal distribution possible of large-scale industry over the whole country. It is true that civilization has bequeathed us a heritage in the form of large towns which it will take much time and trouble to eliminate. But they must and will be eliminated, however protracted a process it may be. Whatever destiny may be in store for the German Empire of the Prussian nation, Bismarck can go to his grave proudly aware that his heart's desire, the end of the large town, is sure to be fulfilled.

    Now see how puerile Herr Dühring's notions are -- as though society could take possession of the totality of the means of production without revolutionizing the old mode of production from the bottom up and above all without abolishing the old division of labour; as though everything would be in order once "natural aptitudes and personal capabilities are taken into account" -- so that as in the past large numbers of people would remain subjected to the production of a single article, whole "populations" would be

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engaged in a single branch of production, and as in the past humanity would continue to be divided into a number of different crippled "economic species", for there would still be "porters" and "architects". Society is to become master of the means of production as a whole in order that each individual may remain the slave of his means of production and have only the choice of which means of production is to enslave him. See too how Herr Dühring considers the separation of town and country as "inevitable in the nature of things", and can find only a tiny palliative in schnapps-distilling and beet-sugar manufacturing -- two branches of industry which are specifically Prussian in their conjunction; how he makes the dispersal of industry over the country dependent on certain future discoveries and on the compelling necessity of associating industry directly with the extraction of raw materials, raw materials which are already used at an ever increasing distance from their place of origin! Finally Herr Dühring tries to cover his retreat by assuring us that in the long run social wants will achieve the union between agriculture and industry despite economic considerations, as if this would entail some economic sacrifice!

    Certainly, it is necessary to have a somewhat wider horizon than the jurisdiction of the Prussian Landrecht, than the country in which the production of schnapps and beet-sugar are the key industries and commercial crises can be studied on the book market, in order to see that the revolutionary elements, which will do away with the old division of labour together with the separation of town and country and will revolutionize the whole of production, that these elements are already contained in embryo in the conditions of production of modern large-scale industry and that their development is hindered by the existing capitalist mode of production.

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For this it is necessary to have some knowledge of real large-scale industry in its past and in its present actual form, especially in the one country where it has its home and where alone it has attained its classical development. Then no one will think of attempting to vulgarize modern scientific socialism and to degrade it into Herr Dühring's specifically Prussia socialism.

    We have already seen that Dühringian economics comes down to the following proposition: the capitalist mode of production is quite good and can remain in existence, but the capitalist mode of distribution is evil and must disappear.* We now find that Herr Dühring's "socialitarian" system is nothing more than the application of this principle in fantasy. In fact, it turned out that Herr Dühring has practically nothing to take exception to in the mode of production -- as such -- of capitalist society, that he wants to retain the old division of labour in all its essentials, and that he consequently has hardly a word to say in regard to production within his economic commune. Production is indeed a sphere in which sturdy facts are dealt with and in which, consequently, "rational fantasy" should give but little scope to the winged soaring of its free soul, because the risk of disgrace is too great. It is quite otherwise with distribution, which in Herr Dühring's view has no connection whatever

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with production and is determined not by production but by a pure act of the will -- distribution is the predestined field of his "social alchemy".

    To the equal obligation to produce there corresponds the equal right to consume, exercised in an organized way in the economic commune and in the trading commune embracing a large number of economic communes. Here "labour . . . is exchanged for other labour on the basis of equal valuation. . . . Here service and counter-service represent real equality between quantities of labour." This "equalization of human energies" applies "whether the individuals have in fact done more or less, or perhaps even nothing at all ", for all activities, in so far as they involve time and energy -- therefore even playing bowls or going for a walk -- can be regarded as labour performed. But this exchange does not take place between individuals, as the community is the owner of all means of production and consequently of all products; on the one hand, it takes place between each economic commune and its individual members and, on the other, between the various economic and trading communes themselves. "The individual economic communes in particular will replace retail trade within their own areas by completely planned sales." Wholesale trade will be organized on the same lines: "The system of the free economic society . . . consequently remains a vast exchange institution whose operations are carried out on the monetary basis provided by the precious metals. It is insight into the inevitable necessity of this fundamental property which distinguishes our scheme from all those nebulous notions which cling even to the most rational forms of current socialist ideals."
    For the purpose of this exchange, the economic commune, as the first appropriator of the social products, has to determine "a uniform price for each type of article", based on the average costs of production. "The significance which the so-called costs of production have for value and price today will be provided" (in the socialitarian system) "by the estimates of the quantity of labour to be employed. By virtue of the principle of equal rights for each individual applying in the economic sphere too, these estimates can, in the last analysis, be traced back to consideration of the number of participants; they will give the relation of prices corresponding both to the natural relations of production and to the social right of realization of value. The output of the precious metals will continue, as now, to determine the value of money. . . . It can be seen from this not only that the basis of the determination and the measure of value and thus the exchange relations between products are not lost in the changed constitution of society but that they are properly won for the first time,"

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    The famous "absolute value" is finally realized.

    But on the other hand, the commune must also put its individual members in a position to buy from it the articles produced, by paying to each, in compensation for his labour, a certain sum of money, daily, weekly or monthly, but necessarily the same for all. "From the socialitarian standpoint it is consequently a matter of indifference whether we say that wages must disappear, or that they must become the exclusive form of economic income." Now equal wages and equal prices establish "quantitative, if not qualitative, equality of consumption", and thus the "universal principle of justice" is realized in the economic sphere.

    As to how the level of these wages of the future is to be determined, Herr Dühring tells us only

that here too, as in all other cases, there will be an exchange of "equal labour for equal labour". For six hours of labour, therefore, a sum of money will be paid which also embodies in itself six hours of labour.

    Nevertheless, the "universal principle of justice" must in no way be confounded with that crude equalitarianism which makes the bourgeois so indignantly oppose all communism, and especially the spontaneous communism of the workers. It is by no means so inexorable as it would like to appear.

    The "equality in principle of economic rights does not exclude the voluntary addition of an expression of special recognition and honour to what justice requires. . . . Society honours itself by conferring distinction on the higher types of work by a modest additional allocation for consumption."

    And Herr Dühring is also honouring himself, when, combining the innocence of a dove with the wisdom of a serpent, he displays such touching concern for the modest additional consumption of the Dührings of the future.

    This will finally do away with the capitalist mode of distribution. For

"supposing someone actually had a surplus of private means at his disposal under such conditions, he would be unable to find any use for it as capital.

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No individual or group would acquire it from him for