(In this chapter Engels proceeds to examine what Herr Duehring called the "fundamental laws" of his theory of economic science.)
Law No. I."The productivity of economic instruments, natural resources and human force are capable of being increased by invention and discovery."
We are amazed. Herr Duehring treats us like that joke of Moliere on the parvenu who was informed that he had talked prose all his life without being aware of it. That inventions and discoveries increase the productive force of labor in many cases (but in many cases not, as the patent records everywhere show) we have been for a long time aware.
Law No. II."Division of Labor. The formation of branches of work and the splitting up of activities increases the productivity of labor."
As far as this is true it is a mere commonplace since the time of Adam Smith. How far it is true will appear in the third division of this work.
Law No. III."Distance and transportation are the most important causes of the advance or hindrance of the organization of productive forces."
Law No. IV."The industrial state has incomparably greater capacity for population than the agricultural state."
Law No. V."In economics only material interests count."
These are the natural laws on which Herr Duehring founds his new economics. He remains true to his philosophic methods.
(Hereupon Engels proceeds to the discussion of Duehring's opinions on ground-rent.)
Herr Duehring defines ground-rent as "that income which the landowner as such derives from ground and land." The economic idea of ground-rent, which Herr Duehring undertakes to explain to us, is transformed right away into the juristic concept so that we are no further than at first. He compares the leasing of a piece of land with the loan of capital to an entrepreneur but finds, as is so often the case, that the comparison will not hold. Then he says "to pursue the analogy the profit which remains to the lessee after the payment of ground-rent, answers to that portion of the profit on capital which remains to the entrepreneur who operates with borrowed capital after the interest on the borrowed capital has been paid."
(To these arguments Engels replies:)
The theory of ground-rent is a special English economic matter, and this of necessity because only in England does a mode of production exist by which rent is separated from profit and interest. In England there prevail the greater landlordism and the greater agriculture. The individual landlords lease their lands in great farms to lessees who are able to cultivate them in a capitalistic fashion and do not, like our peasants, work with their own hands, but employ laborers just like capitalistic entrepreneurs. We have here then the three classes of bourgeois society, and the income which each receives—the private landlord in the form of ground-rent, the capitalist in that of profit and the laborer in the form of wages. No English economist has ever regarded the profit of the lessee as Herr Duehring does and still less would he have to explain that the profit of the lessee is what it indubitably is, profit on capital. In England there is no use to discuss this question for the question as well as its answer are obvious from the factsand, since the time of Adam Smith, there has been no doubt at all about it.
The case in which the lessee cultivates his own land, as the rule in Germany, for the profit of the ground landlord does not make any difference in this respect. If the landlord cultivates the land for his own profit and furnishes the capital he puts the profit on capital in his pocket as well as the ground-rent for it cannot be otherwise under existing conditions. And if Herr Duehring thinks that rent is something different when the lessee cultivates the land for himself it is not so and only shows his ignorance of the matter.
For example:—
"The revenue derived from labor is called wages; that derived from stock by the person who manages or employs it is called profit. The revenue which proceeds from land is called rent and belongs altogether to the landlord. The revenue of the farmer is derived partly from his labor and partly from his stock.... When those three different sorts of labor belong to different persons they are readily distinguished, but when they belong to the same they are sometimes confounded with one another at least in common language. A gentleman who farms part of his own estate, after paying the expenses of cultivation, should gain both the rent of the landlord and the profit of the farmer. He is apt to denominate, however, his whole gain, profit, and thus confounds rent with profit, at least in common language. The greater part of our North American and West Indian planters are in this situation. They farm, the greater part of them, their own estates, and accordingly we seldom hear of the rent of a plantation but frequently of its profit.... A gardener who cultivates his own garden with his own hands, unites in his ownperson the three different characters of landlord, farmer, and laborer. His produce, therefore, should pay him the rent of the first, the profit of the second and the wages of the third. The whole, however, is commonly considered as the wages of his labor. Both rent and profit are in this case confounded with wages."
This passage is in the sixth chapter of the first book of Adam Smith. The case of the landholder who tills his own land has been examined a hundred years ago and the doubts which perplex Herr Duehring so much are caused entirely by his own ignorance.
This which is the concluding portion of the Second Division of the work and which deals with Herr Duehring's estimates of economic writers is omitted as being of too limited and polemic a character for general interest.
The first two chapters of this Division, which deal respectively with the historical and the theoretical sides of Socialism, are omitted. They have been already translated. The well known pamphlet "Socialism, Utopian and Scientific" contains both of them. The second has also been translated by R.C.K. Ensor and published in his "Modern Socialism."
For him (Herr Duehring) socialism is by no means a necessary product of economic development, and, still less, a development of the purely economic conditions of the present day. He knows better than that. His socialism is a final truth of the last instance, it is "the natural system of society." He finds its root in a "universal system of justice." And if he cannot take notice of the existing conditions which are the product of the sinful history of man up to the present time in order to improve them that is so much the worse, we must look upon it as a misfortune for the true principles of justice. Herr Duehring forms his socialism as he does everything else on the basis of his two famous men. Instead of these two marionnetes, as heretofore, playing the game of lord and slave they are converted to that of equality and justice and the Duehring socialism is already founded.
Clearly in the view of Herr Duehring the periodic industrial crises have by no means the same significance as we must attribute to them. According to Herr Duehring they are only occasional departures from normality and furnish a splendid motive for the institution of a properly regulated system.
(Duehring attributes crises to underconsumption; to which Engels replies:)
It is unfortunately true that the underconsumption of the masses and the limitation of the expenditures of the great majority to the necessities of life and the reproduction thereof is not by any means a new phenomenon. It has existed as long as the appropriating and the plundered classes have existed. Even in those historic periods where the condition of the masses was exceptionally prosperous, as in England in the fifteenth century, there was underconsumption; men were very far from having their entire yearly product at their own disposal. Although underconsumption has been a constant historical phenomenon for a thousand years, the general break down in trade, due to overproduction, has appeared, for the first time, within the last fifteen years. Yet the vulgar political economy of Herr Duehring attempts to explain the new phenomenon, not by means of the new factor of overproduction, but by means of the exceedingly old factor of underconsumption. It is just as if one were to try and explain a change in the relation of two mathematical quantities, one of which is constant and the other variable, not from the fact that the variable quantity has varied, but that the constant has remained constant. The underconsumption of the masses is a necessary condition of all forms of society in which robbers and robbed exist, and therefore of the capitalist system. But it is the capitalist system whichfirst brings about the economic crisis. Underconsumption is a prerequisite of crises and plays a very conspicuous role in them, but it has no more to do with the economic crisis of the present day than it had with the former absence of such crises.
In every society in which production has developed naturally, to which class that of to-day belongs, the producers do not master the means of production but the means of production dominate the producers.
In such a society every new leverage of production is converted into a new means of subduing the producers beneath the means of production. This was the cause of that instrument of production, the mightiest up to the time of the introduction of the greater industry, the division of labor. The first great division of labor, the separation of the city and country, doomed the inhabitants of the rural districts to a thousand years of stupidity and the people of the towns to be the slaves of their own handiwork. It denied the chance of intellectual development to the one and of physical development to the other. If the peasant had his land and the town dweller his handiwork, it is just as true to say that the land had the peasant and the handiwork the townsman. As far as there was a division of labor there was also a division of man. The rise of one single fact slaughtered all former intellectual and bodily capacities. This annexation of man grew in proportion as the division of labor developed and reached its culmination in manufacture. Manufacture distributes production into its separate operations, makes one of these operations the function of the individual worker, and imprisons the worker for his whole life to a given function and to a given tool. "It forces the workingman to become an abnormality,since it makes him concentrate his efforts on detail at the expense of the sacrifice of a world of forces and capacities.... The individual himself becomes subdivided, he is transformed into the automatic tool of the division of labor" (Marx). This tool in many cases finds its perfection in the literal crippling of the worker, body and soul. The machinery of the greater industry degrades the workingman from a machine to being the mere appendage of a machine. "From the lifelong specialization of looking after a machine there comes the lifelong specialization of serving a part of a machine. The abuse of machinery transforms the worker from childhood into a portion of a part of a machine" (Marx). And not only the workingman but the classes which indirectly or directly plunder the workingman are also themselves involved in the division of labor and become the slaves of their own tools. The spiritually-barren bourgeois is the slave of his own capital and his own profit-getting, the jurist is dominated by his ossified notions of justice which rule him as a self-contained force; the "refined classes" are dominated by the local limitations and prejudices, by their own physical and spiritual astigmatism, by their specialised education and their lifelong bondage to this specialty, even though the specialty be doing nothing.
The Utopists were thoroughly aware of the effects of the division of labor, of the effect on the one hand of crippling the worker and on the other of crippling the work, the unavoidable result of the lifelong, monotonous repetition of one and the same act. The rise of the antagonism between town and country was regarded by Fourier as well as Owen as the beginning of the rise of the old division of labor. According to both of them the population should be divided into groups offrom six hundred to three thousand each, distributed over the country. Each group has an enormous house in the midst of its territory and the housekeeping is done in common. Fourier occasionally speaks of towns but these only consist of four or five of the big communal houses in close proximity to each other. By both of them the work of society is divided into agriculture and industry. According to Fourier, handwork and machine manufacture were both included in the latter while Owen made the great industry play the most important part, and the steam engine and machinery performed the work of the community. But both in agriculture and manufacture the two writers named gave the greatest possible variety of occupation to individuals, and accordingly the education of the young provided for the most universal technical training. Both of them think that there will be a universal development of the human race as a result of a universal practical participation in practical work, and that work will recover its old attractiveness, which has been lost as a result of the division of labor, by virtue of this variety and the shortening of the time expended upon it.
Just as far as society obtains the domination of the social means of production in order to organize them socially it abolishes the existing servitude of man to his own means of production. Society cannot be free without every member of society being free. The old methods of production must be completely revolutionized and the old form of the division of labor must be done away with above all. In its place an organization of production will have to be made in which, on the one hand, no single individual will be able to shift his share in productive labor, in providing the essentials of humanexistence, upon another, and on the other hand productive labor instead of being a means of slavery will be a means towards human freedom, in that it offers an opportunity to everyone to develop his full powers, physical and intellectual, in every direction and to exercise them so that it makes a pleasure out of a burden.
This is no longer at the present time a phantasy, a pious wish. Owing to the present development of the powers of production, production has proceeded far enough, provided that society endows itself with the possession of the social forces and abolishes the checks and impediments, as well as the waste of products and productive forces, which springs from the capitalistic methods, to make a general reduction of labor time, to an amount, small as compared with present day ideas.
The abolition of the old method of division of labor is not an advance which would not be possible except at the expense of the productivity of labor, quite otherwise. It is a condition of production which has come about spontaneously through the great industry. "The machine industry does away with the necessity of constantly distributing groups of workmen at the different machines by keeping the worker constantly at the same task. Since the total product of the factory, proceeds not from the worker but from the machine, a continual changing about of individuals could not exist, without an interruption of the labor-process. Finally the speed with which work at the machine is learnt even by children does away with the necessity of training a distinct class of workmen exclusively as machine laborers." But while the capitalistic method of use of machinery does away with the old limited particularity of labor, and, in spite of the fact, that technique is rendered superfluous, machinery itself rebels against the anachronism.The technical basis of the greater industry is revolutionary. "Through machinery, chemical processes and other methods, the functions of the working class and the social labor process are revolutionized along with the technical basis of production. The division of labor is also revolutionized and masses of capital and labor are hurled incontinently from one branch of industry to another. The nature of the greater industry demands mobility of labor, a fluidity of functions and a complete adaptibility on the part of the laborers. We have seen how this absolute contradiction shows itself in the continual sacrifice of the working class, the most complete waste of labor force, and the dominance of social anarchy. But if the mobility of labor now appears to be a law of nature beyond human control which realizes itself, in spite of all obstacles, it also becomes a matter of life and death for the greater industry, owing to its catastrophic character, to recognise the mobility of labor and hence the greatest possible adaptibility of the working class, as a universal law of social production, and to accommodate circumstances to its normal development. It becomes a question of life and death for the greater industry to keep an enormous number of people on the edge of starvation always in reserve, in order that they may be able to be placed at the disposal of the needs of capital as these vary."
While the greater industry has taught us how to transform molecular movement into mass movement in order to fulfill technical needs, it has, in the same measure, freed industrial production from local limits. Water power was local, steam power is free. If water power belongs to the country, steam power is by no means limited to the town. It is capitalistic practice which causes concentration into cities and which makesmanufacturing towns of manufacturing villages. But thereby at the same time it undermines the essentials of its own motive force. The first requisite of the steam engine and a prime requisite of all branches of motive power is a sufficient quantity of pure water. The factory town transforms all water into evil smelling sewage. Therefore, in proportion as the concentration into cities is the foundation of capitalistic production, each individual capitalist tries to get away from the towns which have been necessarily produced to the motive forces of the country. This process may be individually observed in the textile districts of Lancashire and Yorkshire. The greater industry creates new towns in the course of its progress from the town to the country. The same phenomenon was to be observed in the districts of the metal industry where somewhat different causes produce identical results.
The capitalistic character of the greater industry is responsible for this aimless blundering and these new contradictions. Only a society which organizes its industrial forces according to a single great harmonious plan, can permit industry to settle itself in such a manner throughout the land as to secure its own development and the retention and development of the most important elements of production.
The abolition of the antagonism between town and country is now not only possible, it has become an absolute necessity for industrial production itself. It has also become a necessity for agricultural production, and is, above all, essential to the maintenance of the public health. Only through the amalgamation of city and country can the present poisoning of air, water, and localities, be put at an end and the waste filth of thecities be used for the cultivation of vegetation rather than the spreading of disease.
The capitalistic industry has made itself relatively independent of local limitations for its raw materials. The textile industry works with imported raw materials for the most part. Spanish iron ores are worked up in England and Germany, and South American copper ores in England. Every coal field supplies a yearly increasing number of places beyond its own confines. The whole coast of Europe has steam engines driven by English and, occasionally German and Belgian, coal. A society freed from the limits of capitalistic production could make still further advances. While it makes a sort of all round skilled producers, who are acquainted with the scientific requirements of general industrial production, and by whom every new succession of branches of production is completely developed from beginning to end, it creates a new productive force which undertakes the transportation of a superabundance of raw material or fuel.
The abolition of the separation between town and country is no Utopia, it is an essential condition of the proportionate distribution of the greater industry throughout the country. Civilization has left us a number of large cities, as an inheritance, which it will take much time and trouble to abolish. But they must and will be done away with, however much time and trouble it may take. Whatever fate may be in store for the German nation, Bismarck may have the proud consciousness that his dearest wish, the downfall of the great city, will be fulfilled.
And now we can see the childishness of Herr Duehring's notion that society can obtain possession of the means of production without revolutionizing the oldmethods of production from the ground up and above all doing away with the old form of the division of labor.
It is easy to see that the revolutionary elements which will abolish the old division of labor together with the separation of town and country and will revolutionize production as a whole are already in embryo in the methods of production of the modern great industry and their unfolding is only hindered by the capitalistic methods of production of to-day. But to see all this, it is necessary to have a broader outlook than the mere limitations of the Prussian Code, the country where schnapps and beet sugar are the staple industries, and you have to study industrial crises by way of the book-trade. (This is a sneer at one of Duehring's illustrations: Ed.) One has to understand the history and the present manifestations of the greater industry particularly in that land where it has its home and where it has had its classic development. It must not be imagined that modern scientific socialism can be done away with by the specific Prussian Socialism of Herr Duehring.
We have seen that Duehring's economics depend upon the statement that the capitalistic method of production is good enough and can be kept up, but that the capitalistic method of distribution is bad and must be done away with. We now discover that the "sociality" of Herr Duehring is merely the imaginary putting into force of this statement. In fact it appears that Herr Duehring has nothing to declare respecting the method of production as such in a capitalistic society, and that he will maintain the old division of labor in allits essential features. So he has hardly a word to say about production in his social state. Production is too dangerous a ground for him to tread on. On the other hand, in his estimation, distribution is not bound up with production but can be settled by an act of the will.
Let us consider all the ideas of Herr Duehring as realized. Let us then assume that the society pays each of its members for his work a sum in gold in which are incorporated six hours of labor, say twelve marks. Let us now imagine that prices and values are in full accord, so that under our hypothesis only the cost of raw materials, the wear and tear of machinery, the use of tools and wages are comprehended. A society then of a hundred working members produces daily goods of the value of 1200 marks, and in a year of three hundred working days three hundred and sixty thousand marks and expends the entire amount on its working members and thus each member has his share of three thousand six hundred marks a year. At the end of the year and at the end of a hundred years the society is no better off than it was at the beginning. Accumulation is entirely overlooked. Worse than that, since accumulation is a social necessity and the hoarding of gold is an elementary form of accumulation, the organization of a society on this basis will necessitate private accumulation on the part of its members and consequently the destruction of the society.
How can this difficulty with respect to the economic society be overcome? Refuge might be taken in a forcible raising of proceeds and the produce of the society sold at four hundred and eighty thousand marks instead of for three hundred and sixty thousand. But all othereconomic societies would be in the same fix and each would have to make it out of the other with the result that they would only be extorting tribute from their own members.
Or it might find an easy way out by paying for six hours work less than the product of six hours work, eight marks a day instead of twelve, prices remaining the same. It accomplishes in this way plainly and openly what formerly it did secretly, it adopts the Marx surplus value notion to the amount of one hundred and twenty thousand marks a year, since it pays the members under the value of their work and reckons the goods which they are only able to buy by its means at their full value. His economic society therefore can only get a reserve fund by adopting the truck system. Therefore one of two things is certain, either the economic society practices "equal work for equal work" and then it can get no funds for the maintenance and development of industry except through private sources, or it does create such a fund and ceases to practice "equal work for equal work."
This is the fact about the exchange in the economic society, but what about the form of it? According to Herr Duehring in his economic society money does not function as money between the members of the society. It serves merely as a labor certificate; it corresponds with the expression of Marx "only the share of the individual of the common labor, and his individual claim to the consumption of a certain portion of the common product" and in this function, says Herr Duehring, it is just as little money as a theater ticket. In short it functions in exchange like Owens "labor-time money." As far as the mere calculating between amount due for production and the amount to be expended inconsumption of the individual member of the society is concerned, paper markers or gold would serve the purpose equally well. But it would not do for other purposes as will appear.
If the specie does not function as money among the members of a given society, but as a mark of labor, it functions still less as money in the exchange between different economic societies. According to the theory of Herr Duehring, therefore, specie as money is entirely superfluous. In fact it would be mere bookkeeping to set off the products of equal labor against the products of equal labor, according to the natural measure of labor-time, taking the labor-hour as a unit—if the labor hours are first translated into terms of money. Exchange is in reality only simple exchange; all surpluses are easily and simply equalized by means of bills of exchange on other societies. But when one community has a deficit in its dealings with another community it can only make it up by increasing its labor output, if it is not to suffer disgrace in the eyes of other communities. The reader will notice here that this is no attempt at social reconstruction. We are simply taking the notions of Herr Duehring and showing their unavoidable conclusions.
Therefore neither in exchange among the individual members of a society nor in exchange between different economic societies can gold realize itself as money. Yet Herr Duehring says that the function of money is carried out even in his "sociality." We must therefore discover another field of activity for this money function. Herr Duehring predicates a quantitatively equal consumption. But he cannot compel that. On the other hand, he prides himself that in his community one can do with his money as he will. He cannot prevent oneman, therefore, from saving money and another from not making his wages sufficient. This is indisputable, for he recognises the common property of the family in inheritance and talks about the duty of parents to provide for their children. Thereby his quantitatively equal consumption comes a cropper. The young unmarried man can get along splendidly on twelve marks a day, but the widower with eight young children has a hard time of it. On the other hand the community, since it takes money in payment without ceremony, lets money be acquired otherwise than by individual labor when the opportunity offers.Non olet.It does not know whence it comes. But now arises the chance for money which has up to now played the role of a standard of work performed to operate as real money. The opportunities and the motives arise for saving money on the one hand and squandering it on the other. The needy borrows from the saver. The borrowed money taken by the community in payment for means of living becomes again, what it is in present day society, the social incarnation of human labor, the real measure of labor, the universal means of circulation. All the laws in the world are powerless against it, just as powerless as they are against the multiplication table or the chemical composition of water. And the saver of money is in a position to demand interest so that specie functioning as money again becomes a breeder of interest.
So far as we have only dealt with the operation of specie inside of Herr Duehring's economic society. But beyond the confines of that society the world goes peacefully along its old way. Gold and silver remain in the world-market, as world money, as the universal means of purchase and payment, as the absolute social incorporation of wealth. And in this ownership of theprecious metals the individual societies find a new motive for saving, for getting rich, for increasing their supply,—the motive of becoming free and independent of the communities beyond their borders and of converting into money their piled up wealth in the world market. The profit hunters transform themselves into traders in the means of circulation, into bankers, into controllers of the means of production, though these may remain forever as the property of the economic and trading communities in name. Therewith the savers and profit mongers who have been converted into bankers become the lords of the economic and trading communes. The "sociality" of Herr Duehring is very distinct from the "cloudy ideas" of the earlier socialists. It has no other end than the resurrection of the high finance.
The only value with which political economy is acquainted is the value of commodities. What are commodities? Products produced in a society composed of more or less separated private producers and therefore private products. But these private products first become commodities when they are made not for private use but for the use of someone else, that is for social use. They are converted into objects of social use by means of exchange. The private producers are therefore in a social relationship, they constitute a society. Their private products, while the private products of each individual, are at the same time, unconsciously and indeed involuntarily, social products also. Wherein does the social character of these private products consist? Plainly in two properties, in the first place because they satisfy human needs but have no use-value for the producers, and in the second place that, while they are the products of individual private producers, they are at the same time plainly the products of human labor,of human labor in general. In so far as they have a use-value for other people they can be exchanged; in so far as they all possess the common quality of human labor in general, they can be mutually compared in exchange by means of this labor. In two similar products under identical social conditions there may be unequal amounts of private labor, but equal amounts of human labor in general. An unskillful smith might take as long to make five horseshoes as it would take a skillful smith to make ten. But society does not fix the price according to accidental lack of skill of the one, it recognises only human labor in general, the human labor of the ordinary normal skilled smith. Each of the five horseshoes then made by the first does not have any more value than each of the other ten which were made in the same time as the five. Only so far as is socially necessary does private labor comprehend human labor in general.
Therefore I maintain that a commodity has a certain value, 1st. because it is a socially useful product, 2nd. because it is produced by a private individual for private profit, 3d. because while it is a product of private labor, it is, at the same time, unconsciously and involuntarily a social product and exchanges socially according to a definite social standard, 4th. this standard is not expressed in terms of labor, in so many hours, but in another commodity. If, therefore, I say that this clock is worth this piece of cloth and that they are both worth fifty marks, I say that in the clock, the cloth and the gold there is an equal amount of social labor. I also affirm that the amounts of social labor time in them are socially measured and found to be equal, not directly and absolutely however, as one measures labor time in hours or days, but in a round about fashion, relatively, bymeans of exchange. I cannot therefore express this certain amount of labor-time in labor hours, since their number is not known to me, but I can express it relatively in terms of another commodity, which has the same amount of labor time incorporated in it. The clock is worth as much as the piece of cloth.
But while the production of commodities and the exchange of commodities compel the society resting upon them to take this roundabout course, they are impelled to a shortening of the process. They separate from the mass of commodities one sovereign commodity, in which the value of all other commodities can be universally expressed, a commodity which is the complete incarnation of social labor, and, against which, all other commodities may be set in direct comparison—gold. Gold already germinates in the idea of value, it is only developed value. But since the commodity value exists in gold also, itself being a commodity, a new factor arises in the society which produces and exchanges commodities, a factor with new social functions and operations. We can now examine this a little more closely.
The economy of the production of commodities is by no means the only science which has to reckon with relatively known factors. Even in physics, we do not know how many single gas molecules there are in a given volume of gas, pressure and temperature being given. But we know, as far as Boyle's law is correct, that a given volume of that gas has as many molecules as a similar volume of another selected gas at the same pressure and the same temperature. We can therefore compare the different volumes of different gases with respect to their molecular content, and, if we take one litre of gas at 0° Fahrenheit as the unit we can refer the molecular content of each to this standard. Inchemistry the absolute atomic weights of separate elements is unknown to us. But we know them relatively when we know their mutual conditions. And just as the production of commodities and their economy has a relative expression for the unknown quantities of labor existing in commodities, since it compares these commodities according to the relative amounts of labor which they contain, so chemistry makes a relative expression for the amounts of atomic weights unknown to it, since it compares the separate elements according to their atomic weights and expresses the weight of the one as multiples or factors of the other. And just as the production of commodities elevates gold to the position of an absolute commodity, to the universal equivalent for other commodities, the measure of values, so chemistry elevates hydrogen to the position of a chemical gold-commodity, since it fixes the atomic weight of hydrogen at 1 and reduces the atomic weights of all the other elements in terms of hydrogen and expresses them as multiples of its atomic weight.
The production of commodities is by no means the exclusive form of social production. In the ancient Indian communities and the family communities of the Southern Slavs products were not transformed into commodities. The members of the community were directly engaged in social production, the work was distributed as custom and circumstances required as were the products as they came into the realm of consumption. Direct social production and direct social consumption exclude all exchange of commodities and hence the transformation of products into commodities (at least within the confines of the society) and therewith their transformation into value.
As soon as society comes into direct possession of themeans of production and undertakes production as a society, the labor of each, however distinctive its special useful character may be, becomes direct social labor. The amount of social labor existing in a product does not then have to be established in a roundabout way, daily experience shows the average amount of human labor necessary. Society can easily determine how many hours of labor there are in a steam engine, how many in a hectolitre of wheat of last harvest, how many in a hundred square yards of cloth of a given quality. It cannot therefore happen that the quantities of labor embodied in commodities, which will then be absolutely and directly known, will be expressed in terms of a measure which is only relative, fluctuating, inadequate and absolute, in a third product, and not in their natural, adequate and absolute measure, time. This would not happen any more than in chemistry. One would express the atomic weights indirectly by means of hydrogen if it were possible to express them absolutely in their adequate measure, that is in real weight, that is in billions or quadrillions of grammes. Under the foregoing conditions, then, society ascribes no value to products. The simple fact that a hundred yards of cloth have taken a thousand hours in their production need not be expressed in any distorted or foolish fashion, they would be worth a thousand labor hours. Society would then know how much labor each object of use required for its creation. It would have to direct the plan of production in accordance with the means of production to which labor-force also belongs. The advantageous effects of the different objects of use and their relations to each other and the creation of the necessary means of labor would be the sole determinants of the plan of production. People make thingsvery easily without any interference on the part of the much discussed "value."
The value idea is the most universal and the most comprehensive expression of the economic conditions of the production of commodities. In the idea of value there is not only the germ of gold but also of those more highly developed forms of commodity production and exchange. Since value is the expression of the social labor incorporated in individual products, there lies the possibility of a difference between this and the individual labor embodied in the same product. This difference becomes very apparent to a private producer who abides by an old fashioned method of production while the social method of production has taken a step forward. It then appears that the sum of all the private manufacturers of a given commodity produce an amount in excess of the social needs. Then, since the value of a commodity is expressed only in terms of other commodities and can only be realised in exchange with them, the possibility arises that either exchange will cease or that the commodity will not realise its full value. Finally, the specific commodity labor-force finds its value like that of other wares in the social labor time necessary for its production. In the value form of the product there is already in embryo the entire capitalistic form of production, the antagonism between the capitalists and the wage-workers, the industrial reserve army, the crisis. The capitalistic system will be abolished by the restoration of true value (just as Catholicism will be abolished by the restoration of the true Pope), or by the restoration of a society in which the producer finally dominates his product, by the doing away of an economic category which is the mostcomprehensive expression of the slavery of the producer to his own product.
When the society producing commodities has developed the inherent value form of the commodities, as such, to the gold-form, various germs of value hitherto hidden thereupon begin to sprout. The next substantial step is the generalising of commodity forms. Gold makes objects directly produced for use into commodities by driving them into exchange. Thereupon the commodity and the gold smite the community which is engaged in social production, break one social tie after another and finally dissolve the society into a mass of private producers. Gold establishes, as in India, individual cultivation of the land in the place of communal cultivation, then it destroys the system of regular distribution of communal lands among individuals and makes ownership final, and lastly it leads to the division of the communal wood land. Whatever other causes arising from the industrial development may work along with it, gold is always the most powerful instrument for the destruction of the communal society.
(Herr Duehring says "In the free society there will be no religion, since, in all its degrees, it tends to destroy the originality of the child, in that it places something above nature or behind it, which may be affected by means of works or prayers" also "a properly constituted socialist state will do away with all the paraphernalia of spiritualistic magic, and all the actual forms of religion." Engels proceeds—)
Religion will be forbidden. Now, religion is nothing but the fantastic reflection in men's minds of the external forces which dominate their every day existence, areflection in which earthly forces take the form of the super-natural. In the beginning of history it is the forces of nature which first produce this reflection and in the course of development of different peoples give rise to manifold and various personification. This first process is capable of being traced, at least as far as the Indo-European peoples are concerned, by comparative mythology, to its source in the Indian Vedas and its advance can be shown among the Indians, Greeks, Persian, Romans, and Germans, and, as far as the material is available, also among the Celts, Lithuanians, and Slavs. But, besides the forces of nature, the social forces dominated men by their apparent necessity, for these forces were, in reality, just as strange and unaccountable to men as were the forces of nature. The imaginary forms in which, at first, only the secret forces of nature were reflected, became possessed of social attributes, became the representatives of historical forces. By a still further development the natural and social attributes of a number of gods were transformed to one all-powerful god, who is, on his part, only the reflection of man in the abstract. So arose monotheism, which was historically the latest product of the Greek vulgar philosophy, and found its impersonation in the Hebrew exclusively national god, Jahve. In this convenient, handy and adaptible form religion can continue to exist as the direct, that is, the emotional form of the relations of man to the dominating outside, natural, and social forces, as long as man is under the power of these forces. But we have seen over and over again in modern bourgeois society that man is dominated by the conditions which he has himself created and that he is controlled by the same means of production which he himself has made. The fundamental facts which give riseto the reflection by religion therefore still persist and with them the reflection persists also. And just because bourgeois economy has a certain insight into the relations of the original causes of this phenomenon, it does not alter it a particle. Bourgeois economy can neither prevent crises, on the whole, nor can it stop the greed of the individual capitalists, their disgrace and bankruptcy, nor can it prevent the individual laborers from suffering deprivation of employment and poverty. Man proposes and God (to wit, the outside force of the capitalistic method of production) disposes. Mere knowledge even though it be broader and deeper than bourgeois economics is of no avail to upset the social forces of the master of society. That is fundamentally a social act. Let us suppose that this act is accomplished and society in all its grades freed from the slavery to the means of production which it has made but which now dominate it as an outside force. Let us suppose that man no longer merely proposes but that he also disposes. Under such conditions the last vestiges of the external force which now dominates man are destroyed, that force which is now reflected in religion. Therewith, the religious reflection itself is destroyed owing to the simple fact that there is nothing more to reflect.
But Herr Duehring cannot wait until religion dies a natural death. He treats it after a radical fashion. He out Bismarcks Bismarck, he makes severe "May laws" not only against Catholicism but against all religion. He sets his gendarmes of the future on religion and thereby gives it a longer lease of life by martyrdom. Wherever we look we find that Duehring's socialism has the Prussian brand.
After Herr Duehring has blithely got rid of religion he says "Man can now, since he is dependent uponhimself and nature alone, intelligently direct the social forces in every way which open to him the course of things and his own existence." Let us look for a little while at that course of things to which the self-reliant human can give direction.
The first in the course of things by which man becomes self-reliant is being born. Then during the time of his immaturity his education is in the hands of his mother. "This period may, as in the old Roman law, reach to the age of puberty, that is to about fourteen years of age." Only where the older boys do not respect the authority of the mother does the father's assistance play a part and the public method of education robs this of all harm. With puberty the boy comes under the natural care of his father, where this is exercised in a truly fatherly manner, in other cases society takes charge of his education.
As Herr Duehring has already maintained the position that it is possible to convert the capitalistic methods of production into social methods without disturbing the mode of production itself, so he here seems to think that one can separate the modern bourgeois family from its entire economic foundations without any change in the whole form of the family. This form is so permanent in his estimation that he thinks of the old Roman jurisprudence, in an "improved" form, as the model of the family for ever, and he does not conceive of the family otherwise than as a permanent unit. The Utopists have the superiority over Herr Duehring here. In their estimation a really free mutual condition would arise in all the family relations as a result of the free association and the public ownership of the instruments of production together with the institution of a system of public education. And Marx has shown furthermorein his "Capital" how "the greater industry, which takes widows, young persons and children of both sexes from the home, and employs them in organized social productive processes, lays the foundation for a higher form of the family and better conditions for people of both sexes."