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Classics Anti-Dühring

Marxist Theory · 2026-05-13

Core Argument

Anti-Dühring is not merely a polemic against a forgotten academic. It is the first systematic exposition of Marxism as a unified theoretical whole — philosophy, political economy, and socialism — and a demonstration that these three domains are not separate disciplines but expressions of a single materialist and dialectical method. Engels's central thesis is that Dühring's "system" of eternal truths, aprioristic reasoning, and moralistic socialism represents a regression to pre-Marxist idealism, and that only dialectical materialism — grounded in the actual movement of history and the real contradictions of capitalism — can provide a scientific basis for the working-class struggle. The claim is that Marxism is not one more "system" among others but the theoretical expression of the real movement of class society toward its own transcendence.

Theoretical Grounding

The analysis draws on the core of the Marxist tradition as it stood in the 1870s. Engels deploys:

  • Dialectical materialism as a method of understanding nature, history, and thought — not as a set of mechanical laws imposed on reality, but as the logical reflection of real processes of contradiction, quantitative change becoming qualitative, and negation of the negation.
  • Historical materialism — the proposition that the mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political, and intellectual life. Engels uses this to demolish Dühring's claim that "force" (political power) is the fundamental category of economics.
  • The labour theory of value and surplus-value — drawn from Marx's then-recent work — to show that Dühring's "economic commune" is a utopian fantasy that misunderstands the real source of exploitation.
  • The critique of utopian socialism — Engels situates Marxism as the heir to the great utopians (Saint-Simon, Fourier, Owen) but insists that socialism must be grounded in the actual contradictions of capitalism, not in abstract moral appeals.

The work sits squarely in the tradition of Marxist orthodoxy as later defended by Lenin, Kautsky, and Plekhanov. It is the first text to present Marxism as a "world outlook" (Weltanschauung) rather than a set of economic doctrines, and it establishes the polemical form — rigorous, combative, and pedagogical — that would become characteristic of the Marxist tradition.

Conjunctural Relevance

The article is a summary and guide to a text written in 1876–78, but its relevance to the current conjuncture is argued implicitly through the structure of the piece itself. The conjuncture that produced Anti-Dühring was the unification of the German workers' movement and the rise of reformist and academic socialism within the Social Democratic Party. Dühring's ideas — a mishmash of positivism, moralism, and petty-bourgeois radicalism — threatened to divert the movement from revolutionary Marxism at a critical moment of growth.

The contemporary conjuncture is not directly addressed in this summary, but the parallel is clear: the working-class movement today faces similar pressures from reformism, academic Marxism, and moralistic "left" critiques that substitute ethical appeals for class analysis. The article's relevance lies in its demonstration that Marxism must be defended as a totality — that concessions on method (idealism, apriorism) inevitably lead to concessions on politics (reformism, utopianism).

Where the Argument Continues

This article is a summary of a classic text, not an original contribution. The argument continues in several directions:

  • In the full text of Anti-Dühring itself, which contains the detailed polemic against Dühring's specific claims about economics, philosophy, and socialism.
  • In Engels's Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, which extracts the third part of Anti-Dühring and became the most widely circulated Marxist pamphlet.
  • In Lenin's Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, which defends the materialist epistemology Engels establishes here against later positivist and idealist currents.
  • In the ongoing work of the RCI — particularly in Against the Stream episodes and IDOM articles that defend dialectical materialism against postmodernism, academic Marxism, and reformist currents that attempt to "update" Marxism by abandoning its foundations.

Connections

  • Marx, Capital (especially Volume 1) — the economic sections of Anti-Dühring are a popularisation of Marx's value theory and theory of surplus-value.
  • Engels, Dialectics of Nature — extends the philosophical method of Anti-Dühring into the natural sciences.
  • Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy — situates Marxism in relation to its philosophical predecessors.
  • Lenin, The State and Revolution — continues the critique of utopian and reformist socialism that Engels begins here.
  • Trotsky, In Defence of Marxism — defends dialectical materialism against positivist and mechanical interpretations in a later conjuncture.
  • IDOM articles on reformism and the crisis of Marxism — contemporary applications of the same polemical method.

Key Quotes

  1. "The materialist conception of history starts from the proposition that the production of the means to support human life and, next to production, the exchange of things produced, is the basis of all social structure."

  2. "The final causes of all social changes and political revolutions are to be sought, not in the minds of men, in their increasing insight into eternal truth and justice, but in changes in the mode of production and exchange."

  3. "Force (that is, state power) is also an economic power."

  4. "The whole of Dühring's 'revolution in science' reduces itself to the demand that we should accept as eternal truths the last word of the present-day mode of thought — a demand which is itself a piece of the most vulgar metaphysics."

  5. "The negation of the negation is not a mere formal operation, but the actual process of development of all things, in which the old is destroyed and the new arises out of its contradictions."

  6. "Socialism is not a system to be imposed on society from without, but the necessary outcome of the struggle of classes, which is itself the product of the contradictions of the capitalist mode of production."