From Volume 5, Issue Number 35 of EIR Online, Published Aug.29, 2006

This Week You Need To Know

Science: The Essence of Economics
How the Liberals Tried To Make Engels' Monkey Into a Man
by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.

August 23, 2006

Foreword: Engels and the British Myth of Karl Marx

One of the most striking of the direct insights into the continuing, inherent, systemic incompetence of Anglo-Dutch Liberal approaches to economy, is provided by examining the thinly disguised, anti-American leaning of a manufacturer whose income came chiefly from English production of slave-produced cotton. His name was, Frederick Engels.

During the relevant part of the 1870s, Engels took the occasion to express his customary prejudice against the channels through which U.S. influence contributed to the improved social and economic policies of Bismarck's Germany. Engels' lurch, was published, most notably, by nominally Marxist circles, under the rubric of Anti-Dühring. This piece of propaganda was directed by Engels against, implicitly, not only the German-American economist Frederick List, but, also against the world's leading living economist of the 1870s, the U.S.A.'s Henry C. Carey. This connection to Carey is not identified explicitly in that published piece; however, the targeting of Carey was readily recognized by those circles against whom the literary tract was directed.

The particular attack to which I refer here, occurred in the context of Carey's connections to the role of the German philosopher Eugen Dühring, the Dühring who was among the notable political factors in discussions leading into the Bismarck government's adoption of essential features of the economic and social policy of the American System of political-economy for Germany. Engels' tendentious prose for that occasion, chose Dühring as the featured, named target of his rage against the American influence behind the Bismarck reforms. The principal, actual target of the attack was not Dühring, but the world's leading economist of that time, the Carey who was also the principal U.S. figure participating in the U.S. advice to Germany on the Bismarck economic reforms....

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