"Capital has not invented surplus-labour. Wherever a part of society possesses the monopoly of the means of production, the labourer, free or not free, must add to the working-time necessary for his own maintenance an extra working-time in order to produce the means of subsistence for the owners of the means of production, whether this proprietor be the Athenian [aristocrat], Etruscan theocrat, civis Romanus [Roman citizen], Norman baron, American slave-owner, Wallachian Boyard, modern landlord or capitalist"(Marx, Das Kapital , Vol. I, 2nd edition, p. 227).
When Herr Dühring had thus learned what the basic form of exploitation common to all forms of production up to the present day is -- so far as these forms move in class antagonisms -- all he had to do was to apply his two men to it, and the deep-rooted foundation of the economics of reality was completed. He did not hesitate for a moment to carry out this "system-creating idea" {D. Ph. 525}. Labour without compensation, beyond the labour-time necessary for the maintenance of the labourer himself -- that is the point.
The Adam, who is here called Robinson Crusoe, makes his second Adam --Man Friday -- drudge for all he is worth. But why does Friday toil more than is necessary for his own maintenance? To this question, too, Marx step by step provides an answer. But this answer is far too long-winded for the two men. The matter is settled in a trice: Crusoe "oppresses" Friday, compels him "to render economic service as a slave or a tool" and maintains him "also only as a tool". With these latest "creative turns" {D. K. G.
462} of his, Herr Dühring kills as it were two birds with one stone.
Firstly, he saves himself the trouble of explaining the various forms of distribution which have hitherto existed, their differences and their causes;taken in the lump, they are simply of no account -- they rest on oppression, on force. We shall have to deal with this before long. Secondly, he thereby transfers the whole theory of distribution from the sphere of economics to that of morality and law, that is, from the sphere of established material facts to that of more or less vacillating opinions and sentiments. He therefore no longer has any need to investigate or to prove things; he can go on declaiming to his heart's content and demand that the distribution of the products of labour should be regulated, not in accordance with its real causes, but in accordance with what seems ethical and just to him, Herr Dühring. But what seems just to Herr Dühring is not at all immutable, and hence very far from being a genuine truth. For genuine truths {D. Ph.
196}, according to Herr Dühring himself, are "absolutely immutable".
In 1868 Herr Dühring asserted -- Die Schicksale meiner sozialen Denkschrift etc. -- that it was "a tendency of all higher civilisation to put more and more emphasis on property , and in this, not in confusion of rights and spheres of sovereignty, lies the essence and the future of modern development".
And furthermore, he was quite unable to see "how a transformation of wage-labour into another manner of gaining a livelihood is ever to be reconciled with the laws of human nature and the naturally necessary structure of the body social".
Thus in 1868, private property and wage-labour are naturally necessary and therefore just; in 1876 both of these are the emanation of force and "robbery" and therefore unjust. And as we cannot possibly tell what in a few years' time may seem ethical and just to such a mighty and impetuous genius, we should in any case do better, in considering the distribution of wealth, to stick to the real, objective, economic laws and not to depend on the momentary, changeable, subjective conceptions of Herr Dühring as to what is just or unjust.
