1. Subject Matter and Method¶
Core Argument¶
In the opening chapter of Anti-Dühring, Engels establishes political economy as a historical science, fundamentally opposed to the notion of eternal natural laws governing economic life. Production and exchange, though distinct, are interdependent functions that vary across countries and epochs; distribution is determined by the prevailing mode of production and the historical conditions that produced it. Class divisions emerge from differences in distribution, which in turn reacts back upon production and exchange. A new mode of production initially struggles against the old mode of distribution, but eventually the new distribution outgrows and conflicts with its progenitor. Modern capitalist production, a mere three centuries old, has rapidly generated class antagonisms that must lead to its own downfall. Existing economic science is limited to capitalism, tracing its rise, its positive laws, and the eventual socialist critique that reveals it has become a fetter on production. Pre-bourgeois economics has been established almost solely by Marx. Bourgeois economists, by contrast, wrongly treat the laws of capitalist production as eternal, deducing them from an abstract ‘human nature’ that is in fact merely that of the eighteenth-century burgher.
Engels then turns to a polemic against Dühring, who reduces distribution to a matter of force and oppression between two men, exemplified by Crusoe compelling Friday to labour beyond his own needs. This allows Dühring to avoid explaining the actual historical variety of distribution forms, shifting the entire theory from economics into morality and law. Distribution is thus to be regulated according to what seems ethical and just to Dühring, not according to real, objective economic causes. Yet Dühring’s own conceptions of justice are mutable: in 1868 he held private property and wage-labour to be naturally necessary and just; by 1876 he denounces them as force and robbery. Such subjective notions cannot ground a reliable theory. Engels argues that confidence in the overthrow of the present mode of distribution rests not on abstract justice but on a tangible material fact: modern large-scale industry has created a proletariat that must abolish all class distinctions, and a bourgeoisie incapable of controlling the productive forces it has unleashed. The contradiction between these productive forces and the existing mode of production and distribution makes revolution a necessity if society is not to perish.