Page:Landmarks of Scientific Socialism-Anti-Duehring-Engels-Lewis-1907.djvu/146

 proletariat has answered it blow for blow with the demand for social and economic equality, and equality has become the special battle cry of the French proletariat.

The demand for equality as made by the proletariat has a double significance. Either it is, as was particularly the case at first, in the Peasants' War, for example, a natural reaction against social inequalities which were obvious, against the contrast between rich and poor, masters and slaves, luxurious and hungry, and as such it is simply an expression of revolutionary instinct finding its justification in that fact and in that fact alone. On the other hand it may arise from reaction against the bourgeois claims of equality from which it deduces more or less just and far reaching claims, serves as a means of agitation to stir the workers, by means of a cry adopted by the capitalists themselves, against the capitalists, and in this case stands or falls with bourgeois equality itself. 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. Certain circumstances were required to produce it and these in their turn proceeded from a long anterior history. It is therefore anything but an eternal truth. And if the public regards it as self-evident in one sense or another if it, as Marx remarks "already occupies the position of a popular prejudice" it is not due to its being an axiomatic truth but to the universal broadening of conception in accordance with the spirit of the eighteenth century. If Herr Duehring then can set up his two