According to the laws of bourgeois economics, the greatest part of the product does not belong to the workers who have produced it. If we now say: that is unjust, that ought not to be so, then that has nothing immediately to do with economics. We are merely saying that this economic fact is in contradiction to our sense of morality. Marx, therefore, never based his communist demands upon this, but upon the inevitable collapse of the capitalist mode of production which is daily taking place before our eyes to an ever growing degree; he says only that surplus value consists of unpaid labour, which is a simple fact. But what in economic terms may be formally incorrect, may all the same be correct from the point of view of world history. If mass moral consciousness declares an economic fact to be unjust, as it did at one time in the case of slavery and statute labour, that is proof that the fact itself has outlived its day, that other economic facts have made their appearance due to which the former has become unbearable and untenable. Therefore, a very true economic content may be concealed behind the formal economic incorrectness.
- Frederick Engels, preface to the first German edition of the Poverty of Philosophy
Engels is underappreciated in general in my opinion. He has so many gems like this, and I find his writing is much easier to digest than Marx.
That is a nice quote!
If mass moral consciousness declares an economic fact to be unjust, as it did at one time in the case of slavery and statute labour, that is proof that the fact itself has outlived its day, that other economic facts have made their appearance due to which the former has become unbearable and untenable.
I particularly like the reference to Hegel’s “What is rational is actual; and what is actual is rational” which Lenin also commented on as being correct and which anchors the whole dialectical method firmly in material reality (even in Hegel, despite his mix of materialism and idealism, but fully from Marx onward).
From Losurdo’s “Hegel and the Freedom of Moderns”:
The assertion of the rationality of the actual is not therefore the rejection of the change, but its anchor to the objective dialect of the actual.
(…)
Lenin notes in the margin: “what is real is rational.” And, reading Lectures on the Philosophy of History, the great revolutionary writes twice that “reason governs the world.” The second time, in the margin, he writes “NB”, to underscore the importance of the claim and his complete agreement with it. It is perhaps Lenin himself who can provide the conceptual apparatus most suitable to our understanding of the Hegelian distinction between actuality and mere empirical immediacy: there is a strategic actuality and a tactical actuality; in every historical situation one thing is the main current (for example, putting an end to serfdom at the twilight of feudalism), and another thing is the reactionary current at that time (for example, attempts to revitalize, in all of its antique “splendor”, the institution of serfdom at its twilight - or well on its way, and as such “inactual”). The reactionary current is certainly not able to erase strategic actuality from the main current; however, on a tactical level it is nonetheless present and must therefore be appropriately dealt with.
