Engels: Anti-Duhring

Anti-Duhring
• Written in response to Eugene Duhring, who nobody reads anymore
partially because this book as a whole systematically demolished his
theory
• “Historical Materialism”, the supposed “science” of revolution
(initiated by Marx and Engels) had become the de-facto theory in
Europe for the working-class movement
• Duhring was proposing another theory
• Marx didn’t have the time to write a response to Duhring’s work, so
Engels did
• In doing so, he wrote a book that, ostensibly written to attack Duhring,
was called by Marx “the best summation of our work to date.”
• Was also edited by Marx
 Relation to Aristotle
• An implicit assumption of what it means to be human as the basis of
understanding ethics
• Elsewhere in Anti-Duhring Engels will mention Marx’s argument that the
human is the zo’on politikon (the definition of species-being in Aristotle’s
Politics), and this will connect with much of what Engels says about values
and morals
• At the same time, however, for Engels (and Marx) beginning simply with this
core understanding, as universal as it may be, does not allow us to
understand ethics and morality
• While it may be the case that what is “good” and “bad” may be connected to
what makes us human, the very fact that we are social-historical beings,
embedded in different class societies, mediates our morality
• We should think of Engels providing a “dialectic” of ethical universality and
ethical particularity.
 Good and Evil
• Considered to be the foundation of morality
• We are taught that we should not confuse the
two concepts, or at least understand their
absolute status, because everyone would be able
to do what they please
• we need, it is argued, unqualified conceptions of
“good” and “evil”
• But Engels begins his examination of ethics by
asking: “what morality is preached to us today?”
 Moralities?
• Engels argues that there are various moralities rather than a single
morality. In his time ad place these are:
• 1) Feudal morality: represented by variants of Christianity in
Engels’ Europe, inherited from feudalism, which in turn inherited it
from pre-feudal times
• 2) Bourgeois morality: the “common sense” moral order of his day
• 3) Proletarian morality: what he claims is the rising morality of the
future
• Each one of these moral orders serves a different class of people
and is, Engels argues, primarily the expression of each class’ way
of seeing itself and the world
• Note that Engels does not believe the lines
between these different moral orders are strict:
certain religious values find their way into
bourgeois morality; certain bourgeois values find
their way into proletarian morality
• Also, for the moment, ignore these old class
definitions and just think about what he’s trying to
say about the morality as a whole
• There is an element of social construction,
emerging from our history/society-building nature
as human beings, where our moralities are
determined by the social position we occupy
• “But when we see that the three classes of
modern society, the feudal aristocracy, the
bourgeoisie and the proletariat, each have a
morality of their own, we can only draw the
one conclusion: that men, consciously or
unconsciously, derive their ethical ideas in the
last resort from the practical relations on
which their class position is based — from the
economic relations in which they carry on
production and exchange.”
 Commonality
• Engels then asks whether or not we can find anything common in these different moral
orders that can provide a conception of good/evil that is not mediated by society and history
• In the three types of morality he lists he claims there can be common elements, if we really
work to find them, but this simply has to do with the fact that they are all currently
connected to a similar stage of historical development
• Moreover certain moral injunctions that appear in different moralities mean something
different.
• “From the moment when private ownership of movable property developed, all societies in
which this private ownership existed had to have this moral injunction in common: Thou shalt
not steal. [Exodus 20:15; Deuteronomy 5:19. — Ed.] Does this injunction thereby become an
eternal moral injunction? By no means. In a society in which all motives for stealing have
been done away with, in which therefore at the very most only lunatics would ever steal, how
the preacher of morals would be laughed at who tried solemnly to proclaim the eternal truth:
Thou shalt not steal!”
• The only thing common is that we develop moral concepts according to an ethical axiom of
being social-historical animals, so as to work out our freedom throughout time.
 Whose morality and what interests does it
serve?
• “We therefore reject every attempt to impose on us
any moral dogma whatsoever as an eternal,
ultimate and for ever immutable ethical law on the
pretext that the moral world, too, has its
permanent principles which stand above history
and the differences between nations. We maintain
on the contrary that all moral theories have been
hitherto the product, in the last analysis, of the
economic conditions of society obtaining at the
time.”
• Moral values are the result of class
antagonisms
• Morality has so far always been “class
morality”
• A moral order either justifies the domination
of the ruling class or challenges this
domination
• Many moral concepts that are “common
sense” are in some sense connected to the
values of the class in power
 Moral Relativism?
• Is Engels arguing, here, for moral relativism?
• How can we gauge what is good/bad if it all breaks
down to different class values?
• How can we know what values are better than other
values if there is no outside point upon which to make
a moral judgment about the quality of one set of
values over another
• Engels wants to argue that “proletarian morality” is
superior, but how can he do that if there is no moral
reason to accept this morality over other moralities?
• It may be a bit more complex than simple moral relativism, though we
should keep this critique in mind
• Again, there are assumptions of a universal ethical dimension, found
in what it means to be human, behind this talk of “class morality”
• There is a long-standing division between morality and ethics in
philosophy
• Engels speaks of moral progress, so he is making some kind of ethical
judgment about morality
• Judgment based on human function perhaps: “A really human morality
which stands above class antagonisms and above any recollection of
them becomes possible only at a stage of society which has not only
overcome class antagonisms but has even forgotten them in practical
life.”
• Also, as we shall see: Engels thinks the value of proletarian morality
and socialist revolution is not found in moral/philosophical arguments
but in its scientific veracity.
 The problem of moral judgments
• When we try to make moral judgments, deciding
what is good or bad for society, we cannot escape
the fact we are embedded in this society
• Engels would say the Kantian agent is impossible
insofar as one cannot be a rational, abstract moral
judge who can figure out what is universalizable
• We do not exist outside of history and society; such
abstract moral judgments are actually irrational
• The moment we think we are making completely objective and
“unbiased” decisions, implementing trume moral judgments, is
often the moment where we are simply expressing the ruling
morality of the ruling class
• Most moral philosophy, Engels argues, pretends it somehow
rationally stands outside of classes but is unaware that it usually
ends up articulating values connected to the dominant social
relations
• “Our ideologist may turn and twist as he likes, but the historical
reality which he cast out at the door comes in again at the window,
and while he thinks he is framing a doctrine of morals and law for
all times and for all worlds, he is in fact only fashioning an image of
the conservative or revolutionary tendencies of his day — an image
which is distorted because it has been torn from its real basis and,
like a reflection in a concave mirror, is standing on its head.”
• The implicit point here is that we should begin by
assessing, scientifically, the social/historical context in
which we live and then figuring out, through this
assessment, the basis of certain values
• Engels does not think he is outside of this problematic of
class morality, and would be the first to admit that his
bourgeois socialization affects his way of seeing the world
• But the deeper argument here is that if you aren’t aware
of what moral order is hegemonic, and what its primary
values are, and if you haven’t actively chosen a moral
order for the ethical reason of human freedom (which can
be gauged, for Engels following Marx, “scientifically”),
then morals will speak through you and you won’t
understand their origin or how they operate.
 The Example of Equality
• Engels examines the historical mediation of
the moral value of “equality” that most of us
today would probably think is good, just as
Engels thought it was good
• He wants to demonstrate that even this
concept, to which he himself is committed in
some sense, is exhibits a level of
social/historical contingency
• It was common in Engels’ time for people to talk about
“equality”, and liberal philosophers were all about balancing
“equality” with “liberty” (as we shall see in Mill’s On Liberty
later)
• But how could such a value be considered “moral” in a society
where the social/economic structure depended on inequality
• The value of equality, though Engels believes it is important and
“good”, would not have been considered wholly good by
Aristotle, for example, who lived in a society that perpetuated
itself through inequality––a democracy based on slaves and the
banishment of women to the private sphere
• The term only emerged as morally important through class
revolution, particularly the French Revolution (the bourgeois
revolution)
• “Before that original conception of relative equality could lead to the conclusion that
men should have equal rights in the state and in society, before that conclusion could
even appear to be something natural and self-evident, thousands of years had to pass
and did pass. In the most ancient, primitive communities, equality of rights could
apply at most to members of the community; women, slaves and foreigners were
excluded from this equality as a matter of course. Among the Greeks and Romans the
inequalities of men were of much greater importance than their equality in any
respect. It would necessarily have seemed insanity to the ancients that Greeks and
barbarians, freemen and slaves, citizens and peregrines, Roman citizens and Roman
subjects (to use a comprehensive term) should have a claim to equal political status.
Under the Roman Empire all these distinctions gradually disappeared, except the
distinction between freemen and slaves, and in this way there arose, for the freemen
at least, that equality as between private individuals on the basis of which Roman law
developed — the completest elaboration of law based on private property which we
know. But so long as the antithesis between freemen and slaves existed, there could
be no talk of drawing legal conclusions from general equality of men; we saw this even
recently, in the slave- owning states of the North American Union.”
• So even RECENT talk of “equality” in Engels time has what we may consider an ethical
problem since it was a moral order that was built upon the inequality of the slave
trade (which Engels, along with Marx, opposed)
• Of course we can find glimmers of modern notions of
morality in previous historical periods, but they are
always mediated by the time and place
• Christianity’s concept of equality was one of original sin:
we are all equal insofar as we are sinners
• There was perhaps something initially revolutionary in
Christianity’s conception of equality, despite finding this
equality in original sin, because it was the result of
Christianity initially being the religion of the oppressed,
of slaves and the excluded
• As soon as Christianity became the religion of the elite,
as soon as it was legalized by Constantine, it abandoned
any notion of equality it once possessed
• Engels believes it is a scientific fact (this is the
basis of the theory of “historical materialism”)
that the slaves make history through class
revolution, so he will be drawn to ideas that
emerge from oppressed groups since it is upon
them that every society is ultimately dependent.
• But he is primarily interested, here, in the
historical development of a moral concept
• If morality is class morality, then moral progress
mirrors, rightly or wrongly, the procession of
history through various revolutions
• Rise of bourgeois order, and hence capitalism,
produces the emergence of something called
“rights”
• The demand for “rights”, particularly the concept
of “equal rights”, was connected to the necessity
for the rising bourgeois order in Europe to
overthrow the “feudal fetters”, the social
relations that were obsolete and holding back
human development (as, we should note, Engels
and Marx argue capitalism is doing now)
• But what sort of “equality” does this rights-based
conception of morality mean?
• “And as people were no longer living in a world empire
such as the Roman Empire had been, but in a system of
independent states dealing with each other on an equal
footing and at approximately the same level of bourgeois
development, it was a matter of course that the demand
for equality should assume a general character reaching
out beyond the individual state, that freedom and
equality should be proclaimed human rights. And it is
significant of the specifically bourgeois character of these
human rights that the American constitution, the first to
recognise the rights of man, in the same breath confirms
the slavery of the coloured races existing in America:
class privileges are proscribed, race privileges sanctified.”
• But Engels argues we can learn something about even
this limited concept of equality we have now
• Despite the limitation of this concept, its
contradictions, the fact it is connected primarily to
being an equal and competing individual under
capitalism, it also permits further development
• Why should equality be limited to the political sphere?
• The moral order that emerges from today’s
lower/ruled/exploited/oppressed class (i.e. the
proletariat), according to Engels, is one that by
necessity has a class interest in seeing equality applied
to the economic sphere as well
• “this demand has arisen as a reaction against the bourgeois
demand for equality, drawing more or less correct and more
far-reaching demands from this bourgeois demand, and
serving as an agitational means in order to stir up the
workers against the capitalists with the aid of the capitalists’
own assertions; and in this case it stands or falls with
bourgeois equality itself. In both cases the real content of
the proletarian demand for equality is the demand for the
abolition of classes. Any demand for equality which goes
beyond that, of necessity passes into absurdity.”
• It seems that according to Engels, there is a level of historical
development that a moral concept cannot go beyond
without becoming meaningless  does this also provide us
with a rational standard with which to understand morality,
even if it is “classed”?
 Some More Potential Problems
• Leads to statements such as this:

• “We start by not ascribing to either the Universal Declaration of Human Rights or the
Costa Rica [Convention on Human Rights], but we have used their legal devices to unmask
and denounce the old Peruvian state. . . . For us, human rights are contradictory to the
rights of the people, because we base rights in man as a social product, not man as an
abstract with innate rights. "Human rights" do not exist except for the bourgeois man, a
position that was at the forefront of feudalism, like liberty, equality, and fraternity were
advanced for the bourgeoisie of the past. But today, since the appearance of the
proletariat as an organized class in the Communist Party, with the experience of
triumphant revolutions, with the construction of socialism, new democracy and the
dictatorship of the proletariat, it has been proven that human rights serve the oppressor
class and the exploiters who run the imperialist and landowner-bureaucratic states.
Bourgeois states in general... Our position is very clear. We reject and condemn human
rights because they are bourgeois, reactionary, counterrevolutionary rights, and are today
a weapon of revisionists and imperialists, principally Yankee imperialists”
• Seems to echo what Engels says about “rights”
and “equal rights”, and yet caused serious
problems for this organization
• On the one hand it was taken by their detractors
to mean that they were actively involved in the
violation of “human rights”
• On the other other hand, when they wanted
international support for their members in
prison, they could not appeal to organizations
based on “universal human rights” for help since
they had shown disdain for these organizations.
 Discussion of People’s March article
• What is the position of the Independent Citizens
Initiative, what does it argue?
• What is the counter-argument of the CPI(Maoist)?
• What sort of value theory might the letter written
by the Independent Citizens Initiative represent?
• How does the CPI(Maoist) use the theory of class
morality we discussed today to counter this
letter’s claims?
• What are the moral stakes?