# The Life and Work of Friedrich Engels/Chapter 15

​ Anti-Dühring or The Scientific Basis of Socialism
In 1875 Engels published his famous Anti-Dühring as a scientific supplement to the Vorwaerts. The following year it was published in book form, and later, a popular edition was issued under the title—​The Development of Socialism from Utopia to Science. This edition met with great success, and was translated in a large number of languages. In the early seventies, the growth and success of the German Social Democracy tended to attract to a greater and greater extent the more discontented and liberal sections of the bourgeoisie. Now there is no objection whatever to welcoming members of the middle and upper classes in our Socialist organisations, providing these elements have completely freed themselves from their own class modes of thought and ideals, and have completely adopted the proletarian revolutionary standpoint. But the stampede of the bourgeoisie to the Socialist camp by no means conformed to this rule. On the contrary, the new bourgeois elements sought to deprive it of its proletarian character, to make it acceptable to the middle classes, in short, to make Socialism "respectable." Amongst the most talented of these new bourgeois leaders was Eugene Dühring, who was beginning to have great influence, especially over the younger men of the party. He was a man of undoubted great abilities who had overcome many great difficulties in the circumstances of his early life. He wrote on, and knew a fair amount of, a very large number of subjects, but he lacked thoroughness in them all, and, above all, he had no unifying principle, no fundamental conception of the relations existing between the various branches of knowledge and their development. Nevertheless, on account particularly of his growing influence in the party, he was not an unworthy opponent, and Engels, with his own encyclopedic knowledge and his incomparable mastery of the dialectic method, followed Dühring into the subjects touched on by him, and not merely made short work of him, but what was of far greater importance, produced a work of enduring value, forming a brilliant exposition of scientific Communism, and treating the whole of modern science from the Marxian materialistic point of view; whilst in its treatment of practical questions, arising from the social revolution, it is as valuable to us as a guide at the present day as it was when first written.
In the first place, it forms a searching investigation into the sources of historic materialism, and elucidates the dialectic method of investigation employed by himself and Marx, and gives it its rightful place in science and philosophy. It illustrates the dialectic principle—that is, the growth of the new within the old, and, indeed, as a result of it, until the new at a certain stage of development or maturity inevitably replaces the old—Engels illustrates this principle in the various physical, natural, and biological sciences as well as in the realms of history, philosophy, and so forth.
"According to the dialectic method of thinking," says Engels, "which regards things and their concepts in relation to their connection with each other, their concatenation, their coming into being and passing away, phenomena like the preceding (various natural occurrences), are so many confirmations of its own philosophy. Nature is ​the proof of the dialectic. … "A correct notion of the universe, of the human race, as well as of the reflection of this progress in the human mind, can only be obtained by the dialectic method together with a steady observation of the change and interchange which goes on in the universe, the coming into existence and passing away, progressive and retrogressive modification." The dialectic is, as a matter of fact, nothing but "the science of the universal law of motion and evolution in nature, human society, and thought." He castigates with all the scorn of which he is such a master those pseudo-Socialists (and we have them in our midst still) who would have us believe in and act according to "eternal laws of morality, truth, and justice." "We here call attention to the attempt to force a sort of moral dogmatism upon us as eternal, final, immutable, moral law, upon the pretext that the moral law is possessed of fixed principles which transcend history and the variations of individual peoples. We affirm, on the contrary, that, so far, all ethical theory is, in the last instance, a testimony to the existence of certain economic conditions prevailing in any community at any particular time. And in proportion as society developed class-antagonisms, morality became a class morality and either justified the interests and domination of the ruling class, or as soon as a subject class became strong enough, justified revolt against the domination of the ruling class"; or, again, "If we have no better security for the revolution in the present methods of distribution of the products of labour with all their crying antagonisms of misery and luxury, of poverty and ostentation, than the consciousness that this method of distribution is unjust and that Justice must finally prevail, we should be in evil plight and would have to stay there a long time. … In other words, it has come about that the productive forces of the modern capitalist mode of production, as well as the system of distribution based upon it, are in glaring contradiction to the mode of production itself, and to such a degree that a revolution in the modes of production and distribution must take place which will abolish all class differences, or the whole of modern society will fall. It is in these actual material facts, which are necessarily becoming more and more evident to the exploited proletariat, that the confidence in the victory of modern Socialism finds its foundation, and not in this or that bookworm's notions of justice and injustice."
Refuting Dühring's arguments that the course of class subjection is to be sought in political conditions, and that political force is the primary and economic conditions merely the secondary cause of class distinctions, Engels shows how private property arose amongst primitive peoples, not by forcible robberies as a rule, but because of a limitation of certain things in the early tribal communes—hence arises the necessity for exchange and the production of wares for exchange instead of for use.
The modes of distribution are also altered thereby, and there arise ​inequalities in the possessions by individuals. Primitive Communism persists for centuries in spite of external violent despotisms, but competition by the products of great industry kills it in a comparatively short time. With regard to the bourgeois revolution, it put an end to all feudal fetters, "but the economic conditions did not, as Dühring would imply, forthwith adapt itself to the political circumstances … on the contrary, it threw all the mouldy old political rubbish aside and fashioned new political conditions in which the new economic conditions could find their being and develop. And it has developed splendidly in the suitable political atmosphere, so splendidly, indeed, that the bourgeoisie is now not very far from the position which the nobility occupied in 1789. It is becoming more and more not only a social superfluity, but a social impediment. It takes an ever-diminishing part in the work of production, and becomes more and more, as the noble did, a mere revenue consuming class. And this revolution and the creation of a new class, the proletariat—was brought about not by any force nonsense, but by purely economic means."
It is with difficulty we refrain from giving further quotations from this book, so rich in ideas, so profoundly and well reasoned, so full of interesting matter, presented in a forcible, clear, logical style. Unfortunately our space is limited, and even if we have not given the best quotations we might have done—partly at any rate because such would have had to be more lengthy—we hope that what has been given will be sufficient to whet the reader's appetite to make him read the book itself. One more quotation we shall give below when dealing with what Engels had to say about the State.