Born Free

I have read Anti-Duhring by Friedrich Engels and have almost finished The Social Contract by Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
What initially drew me to Anti-Duhring was the impression—perhaps mistaken—that Engels was zealously defending financial capital there, praising the remarkable credit system it had created. But either I read inattentively or my attention shifted elsewhere; in any case, I found nothing of the sort. Some sections I read with difficulty, others with genuine interest—for instance, the history of the militarization of Europe. All the more so because this question is quite relevant today. Engels devotes several pages to it.
According to Engels, the history of European militarization begins with the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1871. In general, he considers militarization a secondary issue and therefore does not call on the working classes to struggle against it. Engels believes that militarization will exhaust and destroy itself, since it apparently produces no surplus value, creates no surplus product, and thus fails to serve the aims of capitalism. An unprofitable enterprise that brings no profit to anyone will collapse on its own. War, he suggests, is essentially unnecessary and was merely the pastime of senile feudal lords who amused themselves with hunting and warfare. Capitalists, he argues, would have no interest in it.
Yet somehow this phenomenon—the hobby of decaying feudal lords who had everything: choice in food, clothing, property, beautiful women, travel, and all other earthly pleasures, but for whom none of this cancelled the existential crisis of mortality—has survived to this day. War seems to have been one of the means of coping with this universal affliction, independent of material well-being.
Perhaps this persists because even now many people feel like feudal lords: they are born into everything, they do not need to earn their daily bread through labor, and they too suffer from an existential crisis—they are mortal.
And then there is Leo Tolstoy, who wrote: “While I robbed and killed” (referring to his participation in the Caucasian War), “I was respected and honored. But when I began to preach Christ’s commandments—‘do not kill, do not steal,’ and above all non-resistance to evil by violence—I became despised by many and was even excommunicated from the Church.”
In short, I have not, of course, read D;hring himself, but Anti-D;hring disappointed me. Criticizing Engels’s critique would require a separate article altogether. I lack the time for that. And who would need it anyway? Even Lenin did not bother to do so. He merely noted that D;hring was, after all, “one of ours,” while Engels dismantled him in such detail in order to preserve the purity and strict academic nature of Marxist theory.
But who needs this academic purity? Many workers were completely illiterate or poorly educated. And bourgeois scholars were—and still are—largely uninterested in poor children working sixteen-hour days, or in the unfortunate and impoverished in general. They too want professorships, higher degrees, salaries, bonuses, and titles, in order to maintain a high level of comfort—not luxury, perhaps, but still comfort—so that they themselves do not have to wash floors and dishes, leaving that to the unlucky, the marginalized, the semi-legal.
As Rousseau noted in The Social Contract, truth brings neither titles nor chairs nor other benefits:;“Truth does not lead to wealth, and the people grant neither embassies, nor professorships, nor pensions.”
Many of the critical remarks Engels directs at D;hring can easily be applied to Marx himself.
I have always been struck by how these great thinkers, constantly reasoning about the structure of human society, almost entirely eliminated the question of how that society is actually governed. They abolished human will and replaced it with economic interests. As if no one experiences an existential crisis, as if everyone has the psychology of a shopkeeper.
But then they should not have counted themselves as members of the human race either, because, as is well known, Marx derived little economic benefit from his work, for himself or his family. Engels’s financial assistance was often insufficient. A large portion of expenses went to liqueurs and good tobacco—habits Marx acquired in his youth and likely could not abandon later. I know very little about the daily life of the genius in his mature years. But his letters make it clear that he was perpetually at odds with his budget, constantly asking—indeed demanding—that Engels urgently send money, as they were living in England on potatoes alone, and even those on credit. It is deeply sad.
What surprises me is that Marx, given his own precarious circumstances, devoted so little attention to the psychology of self-governance and the governance of human society. Adam Smith, after all, first wrote a psychological work—The Theory of Moral Sentiments—and only later An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations.
In Anti-Duhring, Engels devotes a chapter to defending Marx and his theory of surplus value. But in the end, while sorting through terminology—profit, surplus value, distributive value—he dismisses it all as unimportant, insisting that what matters is simply that workers are underpaid, that surplus profits arise from this, and that the result is, on the one hand, poverty and misery with all their social consequences, and on the other, unimaginable luxury.
Adam Smith does not analyze this issue in such detail, but he provides a simple and correct understanding of it. He explains what happens when profits are spent not on improving production—including workers and their living conditions—but on luxury and развлечения, and where this ultimately leads.
For a state to prosper, it must ensure that the interests of all its citizens are taken into account. Therefore, government institutions may cool the excesses of unrestrained capital through higher taxes and channel the resulting revenues into solving social problems and developing science. A minimum hourly wage may be established, as in the United States today, or a minimum monthly wage, as was the case in the Soviet Union. The prohibition of child labor is also within the state’s power. Free medical services—especially dental care, and free implants in particular—are not a luxury but a necessity.
Since the state disposes of our money, it is crucial that it be governed competently, humanely, and by educated people who care about the common good, rather than by senile feudal archetypes of the past, obsessed only with entertaining themselves and flattering their boundless ambition—the very ambition that brought them to power.
I was struck today by a phrase by Feuerbach that I happened to hear: “I feel, therefore I exist.” In his philosophy, the “I” always presupposes a “Thou.” But in my view, the first to place feeling before thought was Rousseau.
After Anti-D;hring, The Social Contract by Rousseau simply stunned me. He immediately takes the bull by the horns. There, Descartes’ postulate “I think, therefore I am” is brought to completion, yet everything is permeated by a powerful feeling of the need to reconcile right and advantage.
In my view, the American Constitution is largely based on Rousseau’s The Social Contract, published in France in 1762. It seems to me that those who read The Social Contract were inspired by Rousseau’s conclusions and definitions and raised the question of America’s independence from England. Why maintain rulers who do nothing useful?
It is interesting that the Declaration proclaiming the independence of the United States from England was adopted on July 4, 1776. Rousseau, born on June 28, 1712, died on July 2, 1778. But the march of his ideas continued: in 1789, the French Revolution erupted.
Rousseau immediately proclaims that every human being is born free and that freedom is the first right of each person. Power must serve the people and ensure their freedom and civil rights. The people must obey authority, but they must not tolerate senile, corrupt authority that robs them. A government incapable of governing should be overthrown and replaced with new rulers.
Rousseau examines in detail various forms of government—monarchy, oligarchy, democracy, autocracy, dictatorship, and others. But he idealizes none of them. He believes that every form of power can decay, and if the helmsman is steering the ship toward the rocks, it is better to replace such a helmsman. He proves this logically, eloquently, convincingly, and passionately, leaving not the slightest doubt of his correctness.
Reading The Social Contract is easy, pleasurable, and useful: it awakens both thought and feeling.
Marx, immersed in his constant calculations, tables, and sarcasm toward other socialist theorists, once remarked that “his teaching is not a dogma, but a guide to action.” In my view, this definition applies far more accurately to Rousseau’s The Social Contract. It truly became a guide to action for all those who sought a just, rational, and progressive organization of society and the state.
I would like to end my essay with the opening words of Rousseau’s The Social Contract:
“Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains. One believes himself the master of others, and yet is more of a slave than they. How did this change come about? I do not know. What can make it legitimate? I believe I can answer this question.”
“While a people, compelled to obey, obeys, it does well, but as soon as it can shake off the yoke and does so, it does even better. For by recovering its liberty by the same right by which it was taken away, it was justified in reclaiming it—or else there was no justification for taking it away.”