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In both cases the real content of the proletarian claims of equality is the abolition of classes. Every demand for equality transcending this is of necessity absurd. We have already given examples and can furnish many more when we come to consider Herr Duehring's prophecies of the future. So the notion of equality, in its proletarian as well as in its bourgeois form, is itself a historic product.
Goethe was evidently wrong when he introduced Mephistopheles as a black dog instead of a cat similarly colored. This is ethics suited not only to all worlds but to cats also. Equality. By dint of experience we have come to learn Herr Duehring's "method."
If, as according to Herr Duehring's teachings, the economic development and the economic conditions of a certain country are altogether dependent upon political forces there is no explanation of the fact that Frederick William IV after 1848 could not succeed, in spite of his army, in attaching the guilds of the Middle Ages and other romantic tomfooleries to the steam-engines, railroads and the newly developing greater industry, or why the Czar who 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.
And now we can see the childishness of Herr Duehring's notion that society can obtain possession of the means of production without revolutionizing the old methods of production from the ground up and above all doing away with the old form of the division of labor.
To call such a process "composition" and to speak of the term "evolution" as a purely imaginary term belongs to one who does not know anything of the matter, hard as it is to imagine such ignorance at this date. We have still somewhat to say with respect to Herr Duehring's views of life in general. Elsewhere he sets forth the following statement with respect to life.
Either the molecules of Herr Duehring's society from the multiplication of which all society is built up is merely a priori and destined to fail, since two men cannot produce a child, or we must consider them as two heads of families. In this case the entire foundation is made its very opposite.
But Herr Duehring cannot wait until religion dies a natural death. He treats it after a radical fashion. He out Bismarcks Bismarck, he makes severe "May laws" not only against Catholicism but against all religion. He sets his gendarmes of the future on religion and thereby gives it a longer lease of life by martyrdom. Wherever we look we find that Duehring's socialism has the Prussian brand.
It seems that there is also a public whose interests in this matter are sufficient to induce them to purchase the polemic against Duehring's opinions, in spite of the fact that it is now without an object, and who evidently derive pleasure from the positive development.
But if we are now prepared to meet Herr Duehring's silly and incompetent consideration of equality of rights we are not yet ready to take issue with the idea itself which through the influence of Rousseau has played a theatrical part, and since the days of the great Revolution a practical and political part, and now plays no insignificant role in the agitation carried on by the socialist movement of all countries.
The book is controversial and I have an idea that it is unfair to my antagonist for me to alter anything when he cannot do so. I could only claim the right to reply to Herr Duehring's answer. But what Herr Duehring has written with respect to my attack I have not read and shall not do so, unless obliged. I am theoretically done with him.
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