Page:Landmarks of Scientific Socialism-Anti-Duehring-Engels-Lewis-1907.djvu/239

 Clearly in the view of Herr Duehring the periodic industrial crises have by no means the same significance as we must attribute to them. According to Herr Duehring they are only occasional departures from normality and furnish a splendid motive for the institution of a properly regulated system.

(Duehring attributes crises to underconsumption; to which Engels replies:)

It is unfortunately true that the underconsumption of the masses and the limitation of the expenditures of the great majority to the necessities of life and the reproduction thereof is not by any means a new phenomenon. It has existed as long as the appropriating and the plundered classes have existed. Even in those historic periods where the condition of the masses was exceptionally prosperous, as in England in the fifteenth century, there was underconsumption; men were very far from having their entire yearly product at their own disposal. Although underconsumption has been a constant historical phenomenon for a thousand years, the general break down in trade, due to overproduction, has appeared, for the first time, within the last fifteen years. Yet the vulgar political economy of Herr Duehring attempts to explain the new phenomenon, not by means of the new factor of overproduction, but by means of the exceedingly old factor of underconsumption. It is just as if one were to try and explain a change in the relation of two mathematical quantities, one of which is constant and the other variable, not from the fact that the variable quantity has varied, but that the constant has remained constant. The underconsumption of the masses is a necessary condition of all forms of society in which robbers and robbed exist, and therefore of the capitalist system. But it is the capitalist system which