HKB
is still much more powerful could not only not pay his debts but could not collect his forces without drawing on the credit of the economic conditions of Western Europe.
According to Herr Duehring force is the absolute evil. The first act of force is to him the first fall into sin. His whole conception is a preachment over the infection of all history up to the present time with the original sin. He talks about the disgraceful falsifying of all natural and social laws by the invention of the devil, force. That force plays another role in history, a revolutionary role, that it is in the words of Marx, the midwife of the old society which is pregnant with the new, that it is the tool by the means of which social progress is forwarded, and foolish, dead political forms destroyed,--of that Herr Duehring has no word to say, only with sighs and groans does he admit the possibility that force may be necessary for the overthrow of a thievish economic system. He simply declares that every application of force demoralizes him who uses it. And this in spite of the moral and intellectual uplift which has followed every victorious revolution. He says this in Germany, too, where a powerful and necessary uprising would at least have the advantage of abolishing the slavish snobbery of the national mind which has prevailed since the humiliation of the Thirty Years War. And this foolish and senseless sort of preaching is set up in opposition to the most revolutionary party known to history.
V. Theory of Value.
It is now about a hundred years since a book appeared in Leipsic which by the beginning of this century had gone through thirty-one editions and which was distributed throughout the towns and the country districts by officials, preachers and humanitarians, of all sorts, and which was universally adopted in the schools as a reader. This book was called, "The Children's Friend" by Rochow. It had the object of teaching the children of the peasant and laboring classes their vocation in life and their duties to their social and political superiors, and making them satisfied with their lot in life, with black bread and potatoes, compulsory servitude, low wages, fatherly beatings and other similar agreeable things. In pursuit of this end, the youth in town and country was informed what a wise provision of nature it was that man was obliged to get his food and enjoyment by means of his labor, and how fortunate the peasant and handworker ought to feel that they were able to spice their food with hard labor while the spendthrift and the picture suffered the pangs of indigestion or lack of appetite. These commonplaces which old Rochow thought good enough for the peasant children of his day have been elevated into the "absolute fundamental" of the newest political economy by Herr Duehring.
Value is defined as follows by Herr Duehring "Value is what economic goods and activities will fetch in exchange." What they will fetch is shown "by the price or some other equivalent, wages for example." In other words Value is price. Or not to do Herr Duehring an injury and to show the absolute absurdity of his definition in his own language, "Value is prices." On page 19 he says "Value and its prices expressed in money" and he also affirms that the same value has very different prices and therefore has different values. If Hegel had not died long ago he would hang himself out of pure jealousy, for, with all his theology, he could not have produced this value which has as many different values as it has prices. One would have to possess the confidence of Herr Duehring to begin a new and more profound treatment of political economy with the declaration that there is no difference between value and price except that one is expressed in terms of money and the other is not.
(After gentle raillery of Duehring's statements Engels proceeds.)