Landmarks of Scientific Socialism (Anti-Dühring, abridged)

Contents

1. Translator’s Introduction (Austin Lewis, 1907) 30 min 5

   Austin Lewis introduces his abridged translation (1907). Thirty years after Dühring’s “conversion” to socialism, he argues, socialism has become a mass movement, and Engels’s attack on “eternal truths” and on a socialism of abstract justice is more relevant than ever to American socialists recruited from democratic idealism; the dialectic has been confirmed by science (radium) and by the industrial worker’s daily experience of constant change.

2. I Engels’s Prefaces 25 min 5

   Engels’s three prefaces (1878, 1885, 1894). He undertook the polemic reluctantly, but Dühring’s all-embracing “system” forced him to set out his and Marx’s views across philosophy, natural science, economics and socialism; Marx read the whole manuscript and wrote the chapter on the history of economics. In 1885 he reflects on his studies of natural science and the dialectic in nature.

3. II Introduction 36 min 5

   Modern socialism arises from class antagonisms and from the anarchy of production, but took its first form from the French Enlightenment, whose “kingdom of reason” proved to be the kingdom of the bourgeoisie. Engels contrasts metaphysical and dialectical thinking, credits Hegel with seeing the world as a process, and Marx with the two discoveries that made socialism a science: the materialist conception of history and surplus value. Then he introduces Dühring’s grandiose claims and insults.

4. III Philosophy 32 min 4

   Engels attacks Dühring’s apriorism — deriving the world from principles in the head — including his view of mathematics as independent of experience, and his “scheme of the universe,” whose axioms turn out to be tautologies or borrowings from Hegel’s Logic. The unity of the world lies not in its being but in its materiality.

5. IV Natural Philosophy 1 h 31 min 7

   Dühring’s proof that the world began in time copies Kant’s antinomy; Engels treats infinity as a real contradiction. He defends the Kant–Laplace nebular hypothesis, the mechanical theory of heat and the inseparability of matter and motion; defends Darwin against Dühring’s misreadings; and defines life as the mode of existence of protein (albuminous) bodies, consisting in metabolism.

6. V Morals and Law 1 h 6 min 8

   Against Dühring’s “final truths of the last instance,” Engels argues that human knowledge is sovereign in its potential but limited in every individual and epoch, and least final in the historical sciences. Morality has always been class morality; a truly human morality requires the abolition of classes. Dühring’s equality of “two men” collapses into justifications of inequality; the modern idea of equality is a historical product, whose proletarian content is the abolition of classes. Freedom, following Hegel, is the recognition of necessity.

7. VI Dialectics 55 min 8

   Engels defends the dialectic: contradiction is real in motion and life; quantity turns into quality (capital, water, carbon compounds, Napoleon’s cavalry); and the negation of the negation — the grain of barley, the algebraic −a, the return of common property at a higher level in Marx’s Capital — is a general law of development in nature, history and thought. Marx did not prove the coming of socialism by the formula but described a historical process dialectically.

8. VII Political Economy 2 h 0 min 11

   Political economy is a historical science; distribution follows from production. Against Dühring’s “force theory,” Engels argues that political force serves economic interests and rests on economic means — as the history of weapons and warships shows — and that private property and class rule arose from economic development. He defends slavery’s historical role, quotes Marx on force as the midwife of history, and expounds value, simple and compound labour, capital and surplus value, and ground rent against Dühring’s criticisms.

9. VIII Socialism 47 min 6

   (The historical and theoretical chapters, published as Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, are omitted.) Crises do not come from underconsumption; socialism will abolish the old division of labour and the antagonism of town and country; in a planned society labour time can be reckoned directly without money; Dühring’s “economic commune” would reproduce commodity production. Religion, the fantastic reflection of alien forces, will die out when society masters them, not by being banned.

10. Translator’s Appendix (Austin Lewis) 10 min 2

    Lewis concludes that Engels’s key to history made the founders’ predictions come true, while noting that much of the science is dated and that Engels kept the “forty-eight” expectation of imminent revolution; the working class remains the decisive factor.