Modern Socialism is, in its essence, the direct product of the recognition, on the one hand, of the class antagonisms existing in the society of today between proprietors and non-proprietors, between capitalists and wage-workers; on the other hand, of the anarchy existing in production. (Opening sentence)

I bought my copy of Socialism: Utopian and Scientific in a cheap Chinese edition from the Marxist bookshop under Brixton railway arches in the 1980s. It cost 45p. Neither the Chinese editions nor the bookshop exist any more.

Prefaces

A feature of the texts by Marx and Engels is the way they come festooned with prefaces and introductions. This is because:

1. The societies they were describing in such detail, kept evolving and changing: the Europe of 1848 for which the Communist Manifesto was written had changed a lot by 1868, and out of all recognition by 1888.
2. More subtly, socialism itself kept changing, in the hands of socialist and communist parties spread right across the continent, some of which were banned, some of which (e.g. in Germany) entered Parliament, some of which (e.g. in England) were tempted to join forces with the increasingly well-organised trades unions who weren’t interested in overthrowing capitalism at all; they wanted to keep it in place, but with better pay and conditions for their members.

And thus Marx and Engels found themselves having to tag new introductions and prefaces to all their works in order to keep up with the changing realities of European society, and also the changing nature of socialist belief, which included the continual eruption of new and heretical brands of socialism.

This text has a foreword by Marx, two prefaces by Engels and then an introduction by Engels which is nearly as long (30 pages) as the original text (56 pages).

Origins and impact

Socialism: Utopian and Scientific is such a short text because it is an extract from a longer work Engels wrote in 1878, entitled Herr Eugen Dühring’s Revolution in Science or the Anti-Dühring, as it became known.

During the 1870s the German philosopher, positivist, economist, and socialist Eugen Karl Dühring (1833–1921) published a sequence of books in which he enunciated a ‘positivist’ philosophy, on which he based a form of ‘ethical communism’, along with an economic theory which suggested there would eventually be a harmony of the interests of capitalists and labourers. Things, in other words, could only get better. Dühring’s extensive erudition across numerous fields, and his ‘soft’ form of communism, made his ideas influential in left-wing circles.

Marx and Engels were naturally alarmed because Dühring’s views undermined their insistence on the necessity of class warfare, and the inevitability of a violent revolution in which the radicalised proletariat would overthrow bourgeois capitalism. Dühring denied all this.

Also, it happened that both Marx and Engels had for some time being mulling over the fact that Marx’s great masterwork, Capital, was impenetrable to ordinary readers and that they should probably write a more accessible summary of their philosophical, political and economic theories for the man in the street.

Thus the need for a handy summary of Marxism combined with the urge to refute Dühring’s views inspired Engels to write his lengthy Anti-Dühring – and then to extract three chapters of it into the present work.

Socialism: Utopian and Scientific went on to become probably the most influential single work written by either Marx or Engels. It was quickly translated into over ten European languages, and widely distributed. It became the main vehicle publicising their socialist ideas in the key decades from 1890 to 1910.

In his epic biography of Marx, Gareth Stedman Jones quotes contemporaries testifying to its impact. According to the communist David Riazanov, founder of the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow after the revolution (and then a high-profile victim of Stalin’s show trials in the 1930s):

Anti-Dühring was epoch-making in the history of Marxism. It was from this book that the younger generation, which began its activity during the second half of the 1870s, learned what was scientific socialism, what were its philosophical premises, what was its method… all the young Marxists who entered the public arena in the early 1880s – Bernstein, Kautsky, Plekhanov – were brought up on this book.

And Karl Kautsky, the Czech communist and torch bearer of orthodox Marxism between Engels’ death in 1895 and the outbreak of the Great War in 1914, said:

Judging by the influence that Anti-Dühring had upon me, no other book can have contributed so much to the understanding of Marxism. Marx’s Capital is the more powerful work, certainly. But it was only through Anti-Dühring that we learned to understand Capital and read it properly. (quoted in Jones, p.560)

Structure

Overall the book aims to distinguish Marx’s communism from all other previous and current versions of socialism, which Engels dismisses as ‘utopian’. Those other theories were or are based on morality – on moral feelings of outrage, sympathy for the oppressed, appeals to ‘justice’, and so on and so on.

Marx’s communism alone was scientific in the sense that Marx claimed to have uncovered the economic laws which underpinned the development of human civilisation and to have shown that a communist revolution will come regardless of anyone’s feelings or intentions.

Marx’s sociology had revealed that all previous societies have been based on class conflict. More than this, Marx had shown how societies evolve through the process of Dialectical Materialism, namely that at any given epoch there is a master narrative or ideology which, of necessity, contains within it the seeds of opposition and of its eventual overthrow. Within the slave society of ancient Rome lay the seeds of the feudal system. Within the feudal system lay the guilds and the seeds of the mercantilism which superseded it. Within mercantilism lay the seeds of the more organised, competitive capitalism.

And the capitalist system now triumphing in the West contained within itself the seeds of its own destruction. For, by concentrating more and more wealth and power in the hands of the bourgeoisie, the system inevitably, and unstoppably, created a larger and larger and larger class of powerless, impoverished, immiserated people – the proletariat – which sooner or later, must inevitably realise their superior strength, rise up and overthrow their capitalist masters and thus give rise to the communist society where everyone carries out productive labour, as they wish, and where everyone is equal.

This process was reinforced by the fundamental instability of capitalism – this was caused by the endless clash of rival companies and their products, an economic chaos which created day to day social anarchy, led inevitably to regular financial crashes and depressions and, at its highest level, gave rise to wars between rival capitalist empires fighting over raw materials and new markets in the third world.

This ‘system’, Engels explains, is simply not sustainable and will sooner or later crash under the weight of its own ‘contradictions’.

Chapter one

Engels begins the book by describing the thought of some characteristic ‘utopian’ socialists, starting with Saint-Simon, before going on to Charles Fourier and Robert Owen. He shows how their versions of socialism contained many insights but, at bottom, merely reflected the personal opinions of the authors.

Saint-Simon had the genius as early as 1802 to enunciate the principle that ‘all men must work’; to realise that the French Revolution had been a struggle not only between the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie but also the propertyless poor; and by 1815 was predicting that politics would soon boil down to issues of production: politics, in other words, would morph into economics – ‘the administration of things and the guidance of the processes of production’.

Fourier declared that humanity had progressed through four stages – savagery, patriarchy, barbarism and civilisation – each of which, including the bourgeois society of his time, partaking of the same tensions and stresses.

Robert Owen set up a model cotton factory at New Lanark in Scotland where he made the workers work shorter hours, and not the then customary seven days a week, provided hygienic accommodation and invented the infant school for the children. With the result that there was no drunkenness, no crime – and yet his investors still made sizeable returns on their money. Owen developed the idea that the wealth the working class produced ought to be retained by the working class instead of being siphoned off to support the aristocracy and the endless war against Napoleon. As his attacks on private property, religion and marriage became more strident, so Owen was dropped by his initial supporters.

According to Engels, each of these three political thinkers had valid and sometimes insightful contributions – but mixed up with hobby horses, personal views and experiences. The net effect was to contribute to a confused and confusing mish-mash of opinions welling up from the obvious injustices of society, and a thousand different schemes to put them right.

By contrast ‘scientific socialism’ derives from the close study of reality. It is based on a materialist conception of human history, and on the premise that the most important feature of any society is its level of technological achievement. The technology, and the economic system which derives from it, are the basis of the classes into which any given society is based, and underpin the ideology which is the collective value and belief system of that society.

• The economic basis of society.
• The instability of the capitalist system, constantly forced to seek out greater profits, new markets, resulting in periodic gluts and recessions.
• The inevitability of class conflict between factory owners and workers.
• The unstoppable triumph of the proletariat.

Chapter two

This is a short but genuinely interesting attempt to explain what dialectical materialism is.

Engels starts by asking you to reflect on your own experience and thoughts, how they are a constant flood of impressions and mental leaps and connections. Similarly, a moment’s reflection suggests that all organisms, people, objects, are in a constant state of flux. The Greeks knew this. They called it the dialectic, the acceptance of flow and change.

It was only from about the 16th century that western philosophers began to develop what became the natural sciences, whose central methodology is to isolate and define entities. This led to the triumph of Newtonian cosmology, which was reflected in the eighteenth century effort to define and categorise everything into static categories. Fixed entities. Unchanging mechanisms. The opposite of flow and change.

Engels sees the philosophy of Hegel as a rebellion against this mechanistic view of the universe and people. Hegel wanted to re-establish the impermanence of all entities and of all thought as the central feature of existence.

Engels goes on to claim that, as the 19th century had progressed, all the sciences had tended to prove Hegel right. We now know that planets and solar systems and even galaxies aren’t static, but come into and out of existence. The very landscape of the earth has changed out of all recognition over billions of years and is continually changing. Charles Darwin had proved that species are in a permanent state of flux. Even biology had proved that individual human beings – and all life forms – consist of cells which are continually dying, being sloughed off and replaced.

We are all of us, at the same time, something and not something. We are all processes.

This is the rebirth of dialectical thinking based on up-to-date science. This is a dialectic of matter. This is dialectical materialism, a worldview based on the idea that all things are in a state of flux, including humans and including human societies.

There is no such thing as a static society, there are no such things as static social ‘values’. A scientific study of history (such as the kind Marx and Engels claimed to have pioneered) shows that all previous societies have been in states of flux, always changing and evolving.

What Marx has proven in Capital and other writings is that these changes are not random, but the product of certain historical laws – laws which show that:

• all societies are based on the technology of the day
• the technology is owned and exploited by a ruling class which is always pitted against those it exploits, whether slaves or serfs or workers
• the ruling classes produce an ‘ideology’ which contains the ideas used to justify and bolster their power – ‘religion’, ‘morality’, ‘the sanctity of marriage’ etc

But each era has not only had a dominant class, but contains within itself seeds of the opposing class which will rise up and overthrow it.

From that time forward, Socialism was no longer an accidental discovery of this or that ingenious brain, but the necessary outcome of the struggle between two historically developed classes – the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. Its task was no longer to manufacture a system of society as perfect as possible, but to examine the historico-economic succession of events from which these classes and their antagonism had of necessity sprung, and to discover in the economic conditions thus created the means of ending the conflict. But the Socialism of earlier days was as incompatible with this materialist conception as the conception of Nature of the French materialists was with dialectics and modern natural science. The Socialism of earlier days certainly criticized the existing capitalistic mode of production and its consequences. But it could not explain them, and, therefore, could not get the mastery of them. It could only simply reject them as bad. The more strongly this earlier Socialism denounced the exploitations of the working-class, inevitable under Capitalism, the less able was it clearly to show in what this exploitation consisted and how it arose.

Lacking a proper understanding of a) dialectical thinking i.e. the constant process of becoming, and b) the material basis of society and human nature, the reformers Engels mentioned in chapter one – Saint-Simon, Fourier and Owen – certainly had ‘inspired moments’, but were unable to effect any real change.

The theory of surplus labour

Added to this philosophical breakthrough is another insight, just as important, in the field of economics, which is Marx’s discovery of how capitalism works.

Capitalism works through squeezing out of each worker the ‘surplus value’ of his labour. Vampire-like, capitalism accumulates wealth by stealing the worker’s productive labour.

The more strongly this earlier Socialism denounced the exploitations of the working-class, inevitable under Capitalism, the less able was it clearly to show in what this exploitation consisted and how it arose. For this it was necessary to present the capitalistic mode of production in its historical connection and its inevitableness during a particular historical period, and therefore, also, to present its inevitable downfall; and to lay bare its essential character, which was still a secret.

This was done by the discovery of surplus-value.

It was shown that the appropriation of unpaid labour is the basis of the capitalist mode of production and of the exploitation of the worker that occurs under it; that even if the capitalist buys the labour power of his labourer at its full value as a commodity on the market, he yet extracts more value from it than he paid for; and that in the ultimate analysis, this surplus-value forms those sums of value from which are heaped up constantly increasing masses of capital in the hands of the possessing classes. The genesis of capitalist production and the production of capital were both explained.

These two great discoveries, the materialistic conception of history and the revelation of the secret of capitalistic production through surplus-value, we owe to Marx. With these discoveries, Socialism became a science.

Chapter three

Applies Marx and Engels’s materialist view to history.

The materialist conception of history starts from the proposition that the production of the means to support human life and, next to production, the exchange of things produced, is the basis of all social structure; that in every society that has appeared in history, the manner in which wealth is distributed and society divided into classes or orders is dependent upon what is produced, how it is produced, and how the products are exchanged. From this point of view, the final causes of all social changes and political revolutions are to be sought, not in men’s brains, not in men’s better insights into eternal truth and justice, but in changes in the modes of production and exchange. They are to be sought, not in the philosophy, but in the economics of each particular epoch.

This passage introduces a lengthy description of the way capitalist production arose out of medieval, feudal production, of how individual cottage producers gave way to workshops and then to factory owners who could produce goods cheaper than individual artisans and craftsmen, who drove them to of business, and forced them to become wage-slaves working in their factories.

But, remember – according to Hegel’s dialectic, any system is always changing, always contains within itself the seeds of its own overthrow.

For example, the capitalist, by creating a huge labour force of hundreds, sometimes thousands, of workers – creates the very force that will overthrow him, a huge mass of exploited workers who are capable, because of their new proximity to each other, of discussing and understanding their plight, of organising and educating and, eventually, of rising up and ending their exploitation.

The joy of paradoxes

Marx and Engels enjoy paradoxes. In fact their argument often proceeds by paradoxical reversals rather by than strict logic. For example, there’s a long, involved passage where Engels explains that new technology and new machinery – which ought to make everyone’s lives more pleasant – is twisted by the capitalist system (i.e. the ravenous competition between capitalists, the need to keep costs down) into the very thing which oppresses the worker. For the spread of new technology leads to the laying off of workers, who then create a pool of unemployed labour, ready and willing to be re-employed and the cheapest rates, which allows the capitalist to reduce wages to his existing staff.

Thus it comes about, to quote Marx, that machinery becomes the most powerful weapon in the war of capital against the working-class; that the instruments of labor constantly tear the means of subsistence out of the hands of the laborer; that the very product of the worker is turned into an instrument for his subjugation.

This is given as an example of dialectical thinking, although to the literary-minded it could also be interpreted as a love of ironic reversals and paradoxes, a love of binaries which Marx and Engels again and again collapse into their opposites.

But the chief means by aid of which the capitalist mode of production intensified this anarchy of socialized production was the exact opposite of anarchy. It was the increasing organization of production, upon a social basis, in every individual productive establishment

Accumulation of wealth at one pole [among capitalists] is, therefore, at the same time accumulation of misery, agony of toil, slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation, at the opposite pole, i.e., on the side of the [workers].

In the trusts, freedom of competition changes into its very opposite – into monopoly.

The rise of monopolies

Engels points to a number of trends in contemporary capitalist society where, he claims, you can see the dialectical opposite of capitalist production already appearing.

For example, there is a tendency to monopoly in a number of industries e.g. railways or telegraphs. By an irony the tendency of a handful of big companies to buy up all the smaller ones repeats on a higher level the way early capitalists drove out small, cottage producers. Now it’s a lot of the capitalists who are turned into a ‘reserve army’ with nothing much to do all day except count their dividends.

At first, the capitalistic mode of production forces out the workers. Now, it forces out the capitalists, and reduces them, just as it reduced the workers, to the ranks of the surplus-population…

One step further along this line, in many European countries the state has bought out the monopoly capitalists, nationalising the railways and some other industries. This move is at one and the same time the peak of capitalist monopoly control but also – a forerunner of the way the state run by the workers will abolish all companies and run everything themselves.

The capitalist relationship is not abolished, rather it is pushed to the limit. But at this limit it changes into its opposite.

There is something powerful, slick, and magically persuasive about this rhetoric, like the famous phrases in The Communist Manifesto which describe the constructive/destructive impact of capitalism:

All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned…

It is a very effective way of thinking and makes for a powerful rhetoric.

The communist utopia

Having explained why previous socialist thinkers were mere rootless dreamers, having explained how Hegel’s theory of the dialectic can be allied with modern science to generate a theory of how things change, having explained how a materialist view of history throws out all fancy talk about God and Sin and Justice and focuses on the changing nature of production and the class antagonisms this throws up – and having looked in detail at why capitalist production is so unstable and gives rise to regular crises and recessions – Engels has prepared his reader for a vision of what a communist state should look like.

Namely that the means of production should not be used to enslave people and to create an unregulated chaos of competition – but brought into the ownership of the state, a state acting on behalf of everyone, so as to plan work and production, so as to maximise human life, health and happiness.

This solution can only consist in the practical recognition of the social nature of the modern forces of production, and therefore in the harmonizing with the socialized character of the means of production. And this can only come about by society openly and directly taking possession of the productive forces which have outgrown all control, except that of society as a whole. The social character of the means of production and of the products today reacts against the producers, periodically disrupts all production and exchange, acts only like a law of Nature working blindly, forcibly, destructively. But, with the taking over by society of the productive forces, the social character of the means of production and of the products will be utilized by the producers with a perfect understanding of its nature, and instead of being a source of disturbance and periodical collapse, will become the most powerful lever of production itself.

And the state, which has hitherto all through history been nothing more than the legal instrument through which the oppressing class dominates society – once it is identified with the great mass of the oppressed class, once it becomes truly representative of all of society – will die out. The state will wither away. Because its repressive function is no longer required in a society where production is controlled and planned by the whole population.

Insofar as the (repressive) government of persons is replaced by the (fair and just) administration of things. of the products of industry – so the entity which repressed people (the state) will simply vanish 🙂

It is here!

Engels has one last point to make, which is that the time for revolution is now, not because this, that or the other activist thinks so: but because it is objectively the case in the economic development of the West. In the early industrial revolution the amount produced by factories was barely enough to maintain subsistence living among the immiserated proletariat. But in the past forty years the amount of output, the wealth and variety and richness of industrial products, have reached new heights.

The socialized appropriation of the means of production does away, not only with the present artificial restrictions upon production, but also with the positive waste and devastation of productive forces and products that are at the present time the inevitable concomitants of production, and that reach their height in each new economic crisis.

Further, it sets free for the community at large a mass of means of production and of products, by doing away with the senseless extravagance of the ruling classes of today, and their political representatives.

The possibility of securing for every member of society, by means of socialized production, an existence not only fully sufficient materially, and becoming day-by-day more full, but an existence guaranteeing to all the free development and exercise of their physical and mental faculties – this possibility is now, for the first time, here. It is here.

With the seizing of the means of production by society, production of commodities is done away with, and, simultaneously, the mastery of the product over the producer. Anarchy in social production [i.e. chaotic competition between capitalists which leads to regular crises] is replaced by systematic, definite organization.

The struggle for individual existence disappears. Then, for the first time, man, in a certain sense, will finally be marked off from the rest of the animal kingdom, and emerge from mere animal conditions of existence into really human ones.

The whole sphere of the conditions of life which environ man, and which have hitherto ruled man, will now come under the dominion and control of man, who for the first time becomes the real, conscious lord of nature, because he has now become master of his own social organization.

The laws of his own social action, hitherto standing face-to-face with man as laws of Nature foreign to, and dominating him, will now be used with full understanding, and so mastered by him.

Man’s own social organization, hitherto confronting him as a necessity imposed by Nature and history, will now become the result of his own free action.

The extraneous objective forces that have, hitherto, governed history, will pass under the control of man himself.

Only from that time will man himself, more and more consciously, make his own history – only from that time will the social causes set in movement by him have, in the main and in a constantly growing measure, the results intended by him.

It is the ascent of man from the kingdom of necessity to the kingdom of freedom.

Thoughts

Wow. This is mind-blowing rhetoric, a heady, drunken mix of German philosophy, English economics, underpinned by the latest scientific theories and brought to bear on the great social issues of the age.

You can see why scads of people, from illiterate workers to highly educated intellectuals, would be roused and inspired by this vision. It is, at the end of the day, a wish for a better society, a wish every bit as utopian as the wish of Saint-Simon or Owen – but it is dressed up in a battery of ‘scientific’ and philosophical and economic arguments which pummel the brain like a heavyweight boxer.

Without doubt Marx brought an incredible rigour and thoroughness to left-wing thought across Europe, and then around the world, and his insights into how capitalism works, why it seems condemned to periodic crises, and into the way a culture’s ‘ideology’ masks the true nature of class conflict or exploitation of the poor by the rich, all these remain fertile insights right down to our own time.

But the entire prophetic and practical aspect of his creed failed. The most advanced economies – America, Britain and Germany – instead of experiencing a millennial revolution, managed to co-opt the workers into the fabric of bourgeois society by offering them the benefits of a welfare state – shorter hours, better working conditions, health benefits, pensions.

Exploitation continued, strikes and riots continued and the entire fabric of the West came under strain during periods of depression and seemed to many to have completely collapsed during the Great Depression, and yet…  even amid this ruinous failure of capitalism, the promised communist uprising never took place.

Instead, the revolution occurred in the most economically and socially backward society in Europe, Russia, and even then, less as a result of the inevitable triumph of capitalism magically morphing into its opposite – the process so beguilingly described by Engels in this entrancing pamphlet – but by straightforward social collapse brought about by prolonged war and starvation.

A political vacuum in which Lenin and his zealots were able to carry out a political and military coup, which then took years of civil war and immense suffering to settle down into the kind of prolonged totalitarian dictatorship which would have horrified Marx and Engels.

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Related links

• Socialism: Utopian and Scientific on Amazon
• Socialism: Utopian and Scientific online

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