[92] F inally, let us take a glance at the Kritische Geschichte der Nationalökonomie , at "that enterprise" of Herr Dühring's which, as he says, "is absolutely without precedent" {9}.
It may be that here at last we shall find the definitive and most strictly scientific treatment which he has so often promised us.
Herr Dühring makes a great deal of noise over his discovery that "economic science" is "an enormously modern phenomenon" (p. 12).
In fact, Marx says in Capital : "Political economy ... as an independent science, first sprang into being during the period of manufacture"; and in Zur Kritik der politischen Oekonomie , page 29, that "classical political economy ... dates from William Petty in England and Boisguillebert in France, and closes with Ricardo in the former country and Sismondi in the latter". Herr Dühring follows the path thus laid down for him, except that in his view higher economics begins only with the wretched abortions brought into existence by bourgeois science after the close of its classical period. On the other hand, he is fully justified in triumphantly proclaiming at the end of his introduction:
"But if this enterprise, in its externally appreciable peculiarities and in the more novel portion of its content, is absolutely without precedent, in its inner critical approaches and its general standpoint, it is even more peculiarly mine" (p. 9).
It is a fact that, on the basis of both its external and its internal features, he might very well have announced his "enterprise" (the industrial term is not badly chosen) as: The Ego and His Own .
Since political economy, as it made its appearance in history, is in fact nothing but the scientific insight into the economy in the period of capitalist production, principles and theorems relating to it, for example, in the writers of ancient Greek society, can only be found in so far as certain phenomena -- commodity production, trade, money, interest-bearing capital, etc. -- are common to both societies. In so far as the Greeks make occasional excursions into this sphere, they show the same genius and originality as in all other spheres. Because of this, their views form, historically, the theoretical starting-points of the modern science. Let us now listen to what the world-historic Herr Dühring has to say.
"We have, strictly speaking, really" (!) "absolutely nothing positive to report of antiquity concerning scientific economic theory, and the completely unscientific Middle Ages give still less occasion for this" (for this --for reporting nothing!). "As however the fashion of vaingloriously displaying a semblance of erudition ... has defaced the true character of modern science, notice must be taken of at least a few examples" {17}.
And Herr Dühring then produces examples of a criticism which is in truth free from even the "semblance of erudition".
Aristotle's thesis, that "twofold is the use of every object... The one is peculiar to the object as such, the other is not, as a sandal which may be worn, and is also exchangeable.
Both are uses of the sandal, for even he who exchanges the sandal for the money or food he is in want of, makes use of the sandal as a sandal. But not in its natural way. For it has not been made for the sake of being exchanged" -- this thesis, Herr Dühring maintains, is "not only expressed in a really platitudinous and scholastic way" {18}; but those who see in it a "differentiation between use-value and exchange-value" fall besides into the "ridiculous frame of mind" {19} of forgetting that "in the most recent period" and "in the framework of the most advanced system" -- which of course is Herr Dühring's own system -- nothing has been left of use-value and exchange-value.
"In Plato's work on the state, people ... claim to have found the modern doctrine of the national-economic division of labour" {20}.
This was apparently meant to refer to the passage in Capital , Ch.
XII, 5 (p. 369 of the third edition), where the views of classical antiquity on the division of labour are on the contrary shown to have been "in most striking contrast" with the modern view. Herr Dühring has nothing but sneers for Plato's presentation -- one which, for his time, was full of genius -- of the division of labour as the natural basis of the city (which for the Greeks was identical with the state); and this on the ground that he did not mention -- though the Greek Xenophon did, Herr Dühring -- the "limit""set by the given dimensions of the market to the further differentiation of professions and the technical subdivision of special operations... Only the conception of this limit constitutes the knowledge with the aid of which this idea, otherwise hardly fit to be called scientific, becomes a major economic truth" {20}.
It was in fact "Professor" Roscher {14}, of whom Herr Dühring is so contemptuous, who set up this "limit" at which the idea of the division of labour is supposed first to become "scientific", and who therefore expressly pointed to Adam Smith as the discoverer of the law of the division of labour.
In a society in which commodity production is the dominant form of production, "the market" -- to adopt Herr Dühring's style for once -- was always a "limit" very well known to "business people" {18}. But more than "the knowledge and instinct of routine" is needed to realise that it was not the market that created the capitalist division of labour, but that, on the contrary, it was the dissolution of former social connections, and the division of labour resulting from this, that created the market (see Capital , Vol. I, Ch. XXIV, 5: "Creation of the Home-Market for Industrial Capital").
