We therefore cannot avoid the conclusion that the strange commotion which Herr Dühring makes in the Kritische Geschichte over Capital , and the dust he raises with the famous question that comes up in connection with surplus-value (a question which he had better have left unasked, inasmuch as he cannot answer it himself) -- that all this is only a military ruse, a sly manoeuvre to cover up the gross plagiarism of Marx committed in the Cursus Herr Dühring had in fact every reason for warning his readers not to occupy themselves with "the intricate maze which Herr Marx calls Capital" {D. K. G. 497}, with the bastards of historical and logical fantasy, the confused and hazy Hegelian notions and jugglery {498}, etc. The Venus against whom this faithful Eckart warns the German youth had been taken by him stealthily from the Marxian preserves and brought to a safe place for his own use. We must congratulate him on these net proceeds derived from the utilisation of Marx's labour-power, and on the peculiar light thrown by his annexation of Marxian surplus-value under the name of rent of possession on the motives for his obstinate (repeated in two editions) and false assertion that by the term surplus-value Marx meant only profit or earnings of capital.
And so we have to portray Herr Dühring's achievements in Herr Dühring's own words as follows:
"In Herr" Dühring's "view wages represent only the payment of that labour-time during which the labourer is actually working to make his own existence possible. But only a small number of hours is required for this purpose; all the rest of the working-day, often so prolonged, yields a surplus in which is contained what our author calls" {500} --rent of possession. "If we leave out of account the labour-time which at each stage of production is already contained in the instruments of labour and in the pertinent raw material, this surplus part of the working-day is the share which falls to the capitalist entrepreneur. The prolongation of the working-day is consequently earnings of pure extortion for the benefit of the capitalist. The venomous hatred with which Herr" Dühring "presents this conception of the business of exploitation is only too understandable"{501}...
But what is less understandable is how he will now arrive once more at his "mightier wrath" {501}.
IX.
NATURAL LAWS OF THE ECONOMY.
RENT OF LAND T Up to this point we have been unable, despite our sincerest efforts, to discover how Herr Dühring, in the domain of economics, can "come forward with the claim to a new system which is not merely adequate for the epoch but authoritative for the epoch" {D. K. G.
1}.
However, what we have not been able to discern in his theory of force and his doctrine of value and of capital, may perhaps become as clear as daylight to us when we consider the "natural, laws of national economy" {D. C. 4}
put forward by Herr Dühring. For, as he puts it with his usual originality and in his trenchant way, "the triumph of the higher scientific method consists in passing beyond the mere description and classification of apparently static matter and attaining living intuitions which illumine the genesis of things. Knowledge of laws is therefore the most perfect knowledge, for it shows us how one process is conditioned by another" {59}.
The very first natural law of any economy has been specially discovered by Herr Dühring.
Adam Smith, "curiously enough, not only did not bring out the leading part played by the most important factor in all economic development, but even completely failed to give it distinctive formulation, and thus unintentionally reduced to a subordinate role the power which placed its stamp on the development of modern Europe" {64}. This "fundamental law, to which the leading role must be assigned, is that of the technical equipment, one might even say armament, of the natural economic energy of man" {63}.
This "fundamental law" {66} discovered by Herr Dühring reads as follows:
Law No. 1. "The productivity of the economic instruments, natural resources and human energy is increased by inventions and discoveries "{65}.
We are overcome with astonishment. Herr Dühring treats us as Molière's newly baked nobleman is treated by the wag who announces to him the news that all through his life he has been speaking prose without knowing it.
That in a good many cases the productive power of labour is increased by inventions and discoveries (but also that in very many cases it is not increased, as is proved by the mass of waste-paper in the archives of every patent office in the world) we knew long ago; but we owe to Herr Dühring the enlightening information that this banality, which is as old as the hills, is the fundamental law of all economics. If "the triumph of the higher scientific method" in economics, as in philosophy, consists only in giving a high-sounding name to the first commonplace that comes to one's mind, and trumpeting it forth as a natural law or even a fundamental law, then it becomes possible for anybody, even the editors of the Berlin Volks-Zeitung , to lay "deeper foundations" {11} and to revolutionise science. We should then "in all rigour" {9, 95} be forced to apply to Herr Dühring himself Herr Dühring's judgment on Plato:
"If however that is supposed to be political-economic wisdom, then the author of" the critical foundations "shares it with every person who ever had occasion to conceive an idea" or even only to babble "about anything that was obvious on the face of it" {D. K. G. 20}.
If, for example, we say animals eat, we are saying quite calmly, in our innocence, something of great import; for we only have to say that eating is the fundamental law of all animal life, and we have revolutionised the whole of zoology.
Law No. 2. Division of Labour: "The cleaving of trades and the dissection of activities raises the productivity of labour" {D. C. 73}.
