9. Natural Laws of the Economy. Rent of Land¶
Core Argument¶
In this chapter, Engels demolishes Dühring’s pretensions to have discovered the “natural laws” of the economy, exposing them as a string of banalities dressed up as revolutionary science. Dühring’s first and “fundamental” law — that inventions and discoveries increase productivity — is dismissed as a truism as old as the hills, no more profound than saying animals eat. His subsequent “laws” on division of labour, transport, population capacity, and material interest are similarly vacuous: self-evident statements, often ineptly expressed, which Dühring uses as pretexts for a wordy stream of economic twaddle, seasoned only with oracular grandiloquence and casuistical hair-splitting. Engels notes with contempt that Dühring’s method in economics mirrors his philosophical one: elevating the most obvious commonplaces into axioms requiring no proof.
The chapter then turns to Dühring’s conception of rent of land, which he defines juridically as “that income which the proprietor as such draws from the land” — a definition that explains nothing. Engels shows that Dühring’s confusion arises from his ignorance of classical political economy, particularly the English school. In England, where large-scale capitalist farming predominates, the surplus-product of agriculture is remorselessly divided into three distinct forms of income: rent (to the landlord), profit (to the capitalist farmer), and wages (to the labourer). Dühring, however, flees from this clarity to the patriarchal conditions of Prussia, where self-management by Junkers blurs the categories. He pretends the question of what constitutes the farmer’s earnings has never been properly raised, when in fact Adam Smith had already analysed the case of self-management a century earlier, showing how rent, profit, and wages can be confounded when they belong to the same person.
Dühring’s own solution is an audacious trick: he asserts that the farmer’s earnings come from exploiting rural labour-power and are therefore a “part of the rent” which the landowner would otherwise pocket. This implies, absurdly, that it is the landowner who pays rent to the farmer, not the reverse. For Dühring, rent is simply the whole surplus-product extracted in agriculture through any form of subjugated labour, with no distinction between rent and profit. Engels concludes that Dühring’s view is not merely confused but uncritical, collapsing the very distinction that classical political economy had rigorously established. The polemic is directed squarely at Dühring’s ignorance, his provincialism, and his method of substituting bombast for analysis.