A newly re-translated selection from Engels’ ‘Anti-Dühring on the concept of ‘justice.’

‘On “Justice”‘ (1877) by Frederick Engels from The Communist. Vol. 10 No. 6. June, 1931.

[NOTE: At the May Day meeting of the Socialists in New York, one placard read: “We want Justice, Jobs or Job Insurance.” The Socialists give the workers the choice—if they can’t get jobs or job insurance, they can perhaps get “Justice”—under the capitalist system, of course. What this choice amounts to, and how such a posing of the question exposes the capitalist character of the basis of present-day “Socialism,” was clearly analyzed by Friedrich Engels away back in 1878, in Herrn Eugen Duehrings Umwaelzung der Wissenschaft. In the following quotation from this book, Engels holds up to ridicule those “Socialists” who pin their faith to “Justice.” This book was issued in English by Charles H. Kerr under the title of Landmarks of Scientific Socialism, and is popularly called Anti-Duehring. The translation, however, is so incomplete and faulty that an accurate and complete edition is now being prepared in English. It is one of the fundamental works of Marxian philosophy, and should be studied by everyone who wishes to become a real Marxist. The following is a new translation of pages 3-4, and 161-162 of the German edition issued by Dietz, 1923. GERTRUDE HAESSLER.]

SPEAKING of the three great Utopians, Saint Simon, Fourier, and Owen, Engels says:

Like the philosophers of enlightenment (Aufklaerer), they wish to liberate not a specific class, but entire mankind. Like them, they wish to usher in the realm of reason and of everlasting justice; but there is a world of difference between their realm and that of the philosophers of enlightenment. In their eyes the bourgeois world established on the principles of these philosophers of enlightenment is also unreasonable and unjust and therefore is also destined for the rubbish heap, just as feudalism and all former social systems. That real reason and justice have hitherto never reigned in the world, arises merely from the fact that they were heretofore never properly understood. The one genius, who has now appeared and who has understood the truth, was missing. The fact that he has arisen just at this particular time, the fact that truth has only now come to be understood, is not an inevitable phenomenon arising from a combination of historical development and necessity, but a stroke of pure luck. He might just as well have been born 500 years ago, and could thus have spared mankind 500 years of error, conflict, and suffering.

This is essentially the point of view of all the British and French and the earlier German Socialists, including Weitling. Socialism is the expression of absolute truth, reason, and justice, and needs only to be discovered to conquer the world by its own inherent force. And since absolute truth is independent of time, space, and the historical development of mankind, it is pure chance when and where it will be discovered. Thus absolute truth, reason, and justice vary with every founder of every new school; and since each special variety of absolute truth, reason, and justice of each individual is in turn conditioned by his subjective methods of reasoning, his conditions of life, and the extent of his knowledge and mental training, there can be no other solution of this conflict of absolute truths than that they mutually wear one another down. Thus nothing more could come of this than a sort of eclectic average socialism, which, in fact, is the prevailing conception of most of the Socialist workers in France and England today—a mixture admitting of the most manifold shadings, composed of the less striking critical opinions, economic precepts and conceptions of the future society of the founders of various sects—a mixture which is brought about all the more easily, in proportion as the sharp edges of precision of its component parts are smoothed down in the stream of debate, like pebbles rubbed smooth in a brook. In order to make Socialism into a science, it has first to be put upon a material basis.

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If we had no better assurance for the oncoming revolution of the present method of distribution of the products of labor, with all its shrieking contrasts of misery and voluptuousness, of hunger and gluttony, than the consciousness that this method of distribution is unjust, and that justice will finally prevail, then we would be in a bad way, and would have a long wait ahead. The medieval mystics, dreaming of the coming thousand years’ golden age, also felt the injustice of the class antagonisms. At the threshold of modern industry, 350 years ago, Thomas Muenzer shouted it from the house-tops. In the British and in the French bourgeois revolution, the same cry rings out—and dies away. And if now this call to destroy the class antagonisms and class distinctions, which had left the toiling and suffering masses unresponsive up to 1830, finds a million echoes, if it grips one land after another, keeping pace with the development of large industry, if it grips them with an intensity in proportion as this industry develops, if now in one generation it has conquered a power which defies all powers united against it, and can feel certain of victory in the near future—how does this come about? It arises from the fact that modern great industry has created on one hand a proletariat, a class which for the first time in history puts forward the demand of the abolition not of this or that special class organization, or this or that special class prerogative, but the destruction of classes in general; a class which by its very social position is compelled to carry through this demand under penalty of sinking to the level of the Chinese coolies. And it arises also from the fact that in the bourgeoisie this same great industry has created on the other hand a class possessing a monopoly of all means of production and necessaries of life, but which, in every period of boom, and in every crisis following thereupon, demonstrates over again that the productive forces have developed beyond their power to control, a class under whose leadership society is dashing headlong to ruin, like a locomotive on which the engineer is too weak to release the jammed throttle. In other words, it arises from the fact that the productive forces brought forth by the modern capitalist mode of production as well as the system of distribution created by it have come into burning contradiction with the method of production itself, and to such a degree that the overthrow of these methods of production and distribution must bring about the abolition of all class distinctions, unless the whole of modern society is to go under. It is on this obvious material fact, which because of dire necessity is now becoming more or less clearly evident to the exploited proletariat, and not on some conception of justice or injustice of this or that arm-chair philosopher, that the certainty of victory of modern Socialism is based.

There are a number of journals with this name in the history of the movement. This Communist was the main theoretical journal of the Communist Party from 1927 until 1944. Its origins lie with the folding of The Liberator, Soviet Russia Pictorial, and Labor Herald together into Workers Monthly as the new unified Communist Party’s official cultural and discussion magazine in November, 1924. Workers Monthly became The Communist in March,1927 and was also published monthly. The Communist contains the most thorough archive of the Communist Party’s positions and thinking during its run. The New Masses became the main cultural vehicle for the CP and the Communist, though it began with with more vibrancy and discussion, became increasingly an organ of Comintern and CP program. Over its run the tagline went from “A Theoretical Magazine for the Discussion of Revolutionary Problems” to “A Magazine of the Theory and Practice of Marxism-Leninism” to “A Marxist Magazine Devoted to Advancement of Democratic Thought and Action.” The aesthetic of the journal also changed dramatically over its years. Editors included Earl Browder, Alex Bittelman, Max Bedacht, and Bertram D. Wolfe.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/communist/v10n06-jun-1931-communist.pdf