Frederick Engels

Socialism: Utopian and Scientific

## 1892 English Edition Introduction

[General Introduction and the History of Materialism]

The present little book is, originally, part of a
larger whole. About 1875, Dr. E. Dühring, privatdocent [university lecturer who formerly received fees from his students rather than a wage] at Berlin University,
suddenly and rather clamorously announced his conversion to Socialism,
and presented the German public not only with an elaborate Socialist theory,
but also with a complete practical plan for the reorganization of society.
As a matter of course, he fell foul of his predecessors; above all, he
honored Marx by pouring out upon him the full vials of his wrath.

This took place about the same time when the two sections of the
Socialist party in Germany — Eisenachers and Lasselleans — had just effected
their fusion [at the Gotha Unification Congress], and thus obtained not only an immense increase of strength,
but, what was more, the faculty of employing the whole of this strength
against the common enemy. The Socialist party in Germany was fast becoming
a power. But, to make it a power, the first condition was that the newly-conquered
unity should not be imperilled. And Dr. Dühring openly proceeded to form
around himself a sect, the nucleus of a future separate party. It, thus,
became necessary to take up the gauntlet thrown down to us, and to fight
out the struggle, whether we liked it or not.

This, however, though it might not be an over-difficult, was evidently
a long-winded business. As is well-known, we Germans are of a terribly
ponderous Grundlichkeit, radical profundity or profound radicality, whatever
you may like to call it. Whenever anyone of us expounds what he considers
a new doctrine, he has first to elaborate it into an all-comprising system.
He has to prove that both the first principles of logic and the fundamental
laws of the universe had existed from all eternity for no other purpose
than to ultimately lead to this newly-discovered, crowning theory. And
Dr. Dühring, in this respect, was quite up to the national mark. Nothing
less than a complete "System of Philosophy", mental, moral, natural, and
historical; a complete "System of Political Economy and Socialism"; and,
finally, a "Critical History of Political Economy" — three big volumes
in octavo, heavy extrinsically and intrinsically, three army-corps of arguments
mobilized against all previous philosophers and economists in general,
and against Marx in particular — in fact, an attempt at a complete "revolution
in science" — these were what I should have to tackle. I had to treat
of all and every possible subject, from concepts of time and space to Bimetallism;
from the eternity of matter and motion, to the perishable nature of moral
ideas; from Darwin's natural selection to the education of youth in a future
society. Anyhow, the systematic comprehensiveness of my opponent gave me
the opportunity of developing, in opposition to him, and in a more connected
form than had previously been done, the views held by Marx and myself on
this great variety of subjects. And that was the principal reason which
made me undertake this otherwise ungrateful task.

My reply was first published in a series of articles in the Leipzig
Vorwarts, the chief organ of the Socialist party [1],
and later on as a book: "Herr Eugen Dührings Umwalzung der Wissenschaft"
(Mr. E. Dühring's "Revolution in Science"), a second edition of which appeared
in Zurich, 1886.

At the request of my friend, Paul Lafargue, now representative
of Lille in the French Chamber of Deputies, I arranged three chapters of
this book as a pamphlet, which he translated and published in 1880, under
the title: "Socialisme utopique et Socialisme scientifique". From this
French text, a Polish and a Spanish edition were prepared. In 1883, our
German friends brought out the pamphlet in the original language. Italian,
Russian, Danish, Dutch, and Roumanian translations, based upon the German
text, have since been published. Thus, the present English edition, this
little book circulates in 10 languages. I am not aware that any other Socialist
work, not even our Communist Manifesto of 1848, or Marx's Capital,
has been so often translated. In Germany, it has had four editions of about
20,000 copies in all.

The Appendix, "The Mark", was written with the intention of spreading
among the German Socialist party some elementary knowledge of the history
and development of landed property in Germany. This seemed all the more
necessary at a time when the assimilation by that party of the working-people
of the towns was in a fair way of completion, and when the agricultural
laborers and peasant had to be taken in hand. This appendix has been included
in the translation, as the original forms of tenure of land common to all
Teutonic tribes, and the history of their decay, are even less known in
England and in Germany. I have left the text as it stands in the original,
without alluding to the hypothesis recently started by Maxim Kovalevsky,
according to which the partition of the arable and meadow lands among the
members of the Mark was preceded by their being cultivated for joint-account
by a large patriarchal family community, embracing several generations
(as exemplified by the still existing South Slavonian Zadruga), and that
the partition, later on, took place when the community had increased, so
as to become too unwieldy for joint-account management. Kovalevsky is probably
quite right, but the matter is still sub judice [under consideration].

The economic terms used in this work, as far as they are new,
agree with those used in the English edition of Marx's Capital.
We call "production of commodities" that economic phase where articles
are produced not only for the use of the producers, but also for the purpose
of exchange; that is, as commodities, not as use values. This phase
extends from the first beginnings of production for exchange down to our
present time; it attains its full development under capitalist production
only, that is, under conditions where the capitalist, the owner of the
means of production, employs, for wages, laborers, people deprived of all
means of production except their own labor-power, and pockets the excess
of the selling price of the products over his outlay. We divide the history
of industrial production since the Middle Ages into three periods:

handicraft, small master craftsman with a few journeymen and apprentices,
where each laborer produces a complete article;

manufacture, where greater numbers of workmen, grouped in one large establishment,
produce the complete article on the principle of division of labor, each
workman performing only one partial operation, so that the product is complete
only after having passed successively through the hands of all;

modern industry, where the product is produced by machinery driven by power,
and where the work of the laborer is limited to superintending and correcting
the performance of the mechanical agent.

I am perfectly aware that the contents of this work will meet with objection
from a considerable portion of the British public. But, if we Continentals
had taken the slightest notice of the prejudices of British "respectability",
we should be even worse off than we are. This book defends what we call
"historical materialism", and the word materialism grates upon the ears
of the immense majority of British readers. "Agnosticism" might be tolerated,
but materialism is utterly inadmissible.

And, yet, the original home of all modern materialism, from the
17th century onwards, is England.

"Materialism is the natural-born son of Great Britain. Already the
British schoolman, Duns Scotus, asked, 'whether it was impossible for the
matter to think?'

"In order to effect this miracle, he took refuge in God's omnipotence
— i.e., he made theology preach materialism. Moreover, he was a nominalist.
Nominalism,
the first form of materialism, is chiefly found among the English schoolmen.

"The real progenitor of English materialism is Bacon. To him,
natural philosophy is the only true philosophy, and physics based upon
the experience of the senses is the chiefest part of natural philosophy.
Anaxagoras and his homoiomeriae, Democritus and his atoms, he often quotes
as his authorities. According to him, the senses are infallible and the
source of all knowledge. All science is based on experience, and consists
in subjecting the data furnished by the senses to a rational method of
investigation. Induction, analysis, comparison, observation, experiment,
are the principal forms of such a rational method. Among the qualities
inherent in matter, motion is the first and foremost, not only in the form
of mechanical and mathematical motion, but chiefly in the form of an impulse,
a vital spirit, a tension — or a 'qual', to use a term of Jakob Bohme's
[2] — of
matter.

"In Bacon, its first creator, materialism still occludes within
itself the germs of a many-sided development. On the one hand, matter,
surrounded by a sensuous, poetic glamor, seems to attract man's whole entity
by winning smiles. On the other, the aphoristically formulated doctrine
pullulates with inconsistencies imported from theology.

"In its further evolution, materialism becomes one-sided. Hobbes
is the man who systematizes Baconian materialism. Knowledge based upon
the senses loses its poetic blossom, it passes into the abstract experience
of the mathematician; geometry is proclaimed as the queen of sciences.
Materialism takes to misanthropy. If it is to overcome its opponent, misanthropic,
flashless spiritualism, and that on the latter's own ground, materialism
has to chastise its own flesh and turn ascetic. Thus, from a sensual, it
passes into an intellectual, entity; but thus, too, it evolves all the
consistency, regardless of consequences, characteristic of the intellect.

"Hobbes, as Bacon's continuator, argues thus: if all human knowledge
is furnished by the senses, then our concepts and ideas are but the phantoms,
divested of their sensual forms, of the real world. Philosophy can but
give names to these phantoms. One name may be applied to more than one
of them. There may even be names of names. It would imply a contradiction
if, on the one hand, we maintained that all ideas had their origin in the
world of sensation, and, on the other, that a word was more than a word;
that, besides the beings known to us by our senses, beings which are one
and all individuals, there existed also beings of a general, not individual,
nature. An unbodily substance is the same absurdity as an unbodily body.
Body, being, substance, are but different terms for the same reality. It
is impossible to separate thought from matter that thinks. This matter
is the substratum of all changes going on in the world. The word infinite
is meaningless, unless it states that our mind is capable of performing
an endless process of addition. Only material things being perceptible
to us, we cannot know anything about the existence of God. My own existence
alone is certain. Every human passion is a mechanical movement, which has
a beginning and an end. The objects of impulse are what we call good. Man
is subject to the same laws as nature. Power and freedom are identical.

"Hobbes had systematized Bacon, without, however, furnishing a
proof for Bacon's fundamental principle, the origin of all human knowledge
from the world of sensation. It was Locke who, in his Essay on the Human
Understanding, supplied this proof.

"Hobbes had shattered the theistic prejudices of Baconian materialism;
Collins, Dodwell, Coward, Hartley, Priestley, similarly shattered the last
theological bars that still hemmed in Locke's sensationalism. At all events,
for practical materialists, Deism is but an easy-going way of getting rid
of religion."

Karl Marx

The Holy Family

p. 201 - 204

Thus Karl Marx wrote about the British origin of modern materialism. If
Englishmen nowadays do not exactly relish the compliment he paid their
ancestors, more's the pity. It is none the less undeniable that Bacon,
Hobbes, and Locke are the fathers of that brilliant school of French materialism
which made the 18th century, in spite of all battles on land and sea won
over Frenchmen by Germans and Englishmen, a pre-eminently French century,
even before that crowning French Revolution, the results of which we outsiders,
in England as well as Germany, are still trying to acclimatize.

There is no denying it. About the middle of this century, what
struck every cultivated foreigner who set up his residence in England,
was what he was then bound to consider the religious bigotry and stupidity
of the English respectable middle-class. We, at that time, were all materialists,
or, at least, very advanced free-thinkers, and to us it appeared inconceivable
that almost all educated people in England should believe in all sorts
of impossible miracles, and that even geologists like Buckland and Mantell
should contort the facts of their science so as not to clash too much with
the myths of the book of Genesis; while, in order to find people who dared
to use their own intellectual faculties with regard to religious matters,
you had to go amongst the uneducated, the "great unwashed", as they were
then called, the working people, especially the Owenite Socialists.

But England has been "civilized" since then. The exhibition of
1851 sounded the knell of English insular exclusiveness. England became
gradually internationalized, in diet, in manners, in ideas; so much so
that I begin to wish that some English manners and customs had made as
much headway on the Continent as other Continental habits have made here.
Anyhow, the introduction and spread of salad-oil (before 1851 known only
to the aristocracy) has been accompanied by a fatal spread of Continental
scepticism in matters religious, and it has come to this, that agnosticism,
though not yet considered "the thing" quite as much as the Church of England,
is yet very nearly on a par, as far as respectability goes, with Baptism,
and decidedly ranks above the Salvation Army. And I cannot help believing
that under those circumstances it will be consoling to many who sincerely
regret and condemn this progress of infidelity to learn that these "new-fangled
notions" are not of foreign origin, are not "made in Germany", like so
many other articles of daily use, but are undoubtedly Old English, and
that their British originators 200 years ago went a good deal further than
their descendants now dare to venture.

What, indeed, is agnosticism but, to use an expressive Lancashire
term, "shamefaced" materialism? The agnostic's conception of Nature is
materialistic throughout. The entire natural world is governed by law,
and absolutely excludes the intervention of action from without. But, he
adds, we have no means either of ascertaining or of disproving the existence
of some Supreme Being beyond the known universe. Now, this might hold good
at the time when Laplace, to Napoleon's question, why, in the great astronomer's
Treatise on Celestial Mechanics, the Creator was not even mentioned,
proudly replied" "I had no need of this hypothesis." But, nowadays, in
our evolutionary conception of the universe, there is absolutely no room
for either a Creator or a Ruler; and to talk of a Supreme Being shut out
from the whole existing world, implies a contradiction in terms, and, as
it seems to me, a gratuitous insult to the feelings of religious people.

Again, our agnostic admits that all our knowledge is based upon
the information imparted to us by our senses. But, he adds, how do we know
that our senses give us correct representations of the objects we perceive
through them? And he proceeds to inform us that, whenever we speak of objects,
or their qualities, of which he cannot know anything for certain, but merely
the impressions which they have produced on his senses. Now, this line
of reasoning seems undoubtedly hard to beat by mere argumentation. But
before there was argumentation, there was action. Im Anfang war die
That. [from Goethe's Faust: "In the beginning was the deed."] And
human action had solved the difficulty long before human ingenuity invented
it. The proof of the pudding is in the eating. From the moment we turn
to our own use of these objects, according to the qualities we perceive in
them, we put to an infallible test the correctness or otherwise of our
sense-perception. If these perceptions have been wrong, then our estimate
of the use to which an object can be turned must also be wrong, and our
attempt must fail. But, if we succeed in accomplishing our aim, if we find
that the object does agree with our idea of it, and does answer the purpose
we intended it for, then that is proof positive that our perceptions of
it and of its qualities, so far, agree with reality outside ourselves.
And, whenever we find ourselves face-to-face with a failure, then we generally
are not long in making out the cause that made us fail; we find that the
perception upon which we acted was either incomplete and superficial, or
combined with the results of other perceptions in a way not warranted by
them — what we call defective reasoning. So long as we take care to train
our senses properly, and to keep our action within the limits prescribed
by perceptions properly made and properly used, so long as we shall find
that the result of our action proves the conformity of our perceptions
with the objective nature of the things perceived. Not in one single instance,
so far, have we been led to the conclusion that our sense-perception, scientifically
controlled, induce in our minds ideas respecting the outer world that are,
by their very nature, at variance with reality, or that there is an inherent
incompatibility between the outer world and our sense-perceptions of it.

But then come the Neo-Kantian agnostics and say: We may correctly
perceive the qualities of a thing, but we cannot by any sensible or mental
process grasp the thing-in-itself. This "thing-in-itself" is beyond our
ken. To this Hegel, long since, has replied: If you know all the qualities
of a thing, you know the thing itself; nothing remains but the fact that
the said thing exists without us; and, when your senses have taught you
that fact, you have grasped the last remnant of the thing-in-itself, Kant's
celebrated unknowable Ding an sich. To which it may be added that
in Kant's time our knowledge of natural objects was indeed so fragmentary
that he might well suspect, behind the little we knew about each of them,
a mysterious "thing-in-itself". But one after another these ungraspable
things have been grasped, analyzed, and, what is more, reproduced
by the giant progress of science; and what we can produce we certainly
cannot consider as unknowable. To the chemistry of the first half of this
century, organic substances were such mysterious objects; now we learn to
build them up one after another from their chemical elements without the
aid of organic processes. Modern chemists declare that as soon as the chemical
constitution of no-matter-what body is known, it can be built up from its
elements. We are still far from knowing the constitution of the highest
organic substances, the albuminous bodies; but there is no reason why we
should not, if only after centuries, arrive at the knowledge and, armed
with it, produce artificial albumen. But, if we arrive at that, we shall
at the same time have produced organic life, for life, from its lowest
to its highest forms, is but the normal mode of existence of albuminous
bodies.

As soon, however, as our agnostic has made these formal mental
reservations, he talks and acts as the rank materialist he at bottom is.
He may say that, as far as we know, matter and motion, or as it
is now called, energy, can neither be created nor destroyed, but that we
have no proof of their not having been created at some time or other. But
if you try to use this admission against him in any particular case, he
will quickly put you out of court. If he admits the possibility of spiritualism
in abstracto, he will have none of it in concreto. As far
as we know and can know, he will tell you there is no creator and no Ruler
of the universe; as far as we are concerned, matter and energy can neither
be created nor annihilated; for us, mind is a mode of energy, a function
of the brain; all we know is that the material world is governed by immutable
laws, and so forth. Thus, as far as he is a scientific man, as far as he
knows anything, he is a materialist; outside his science, in spheres
about which he knows nothing, he translates his ignorance into Greek and
calls it agnosticism.

At all events, one thing seems clear: even if I was an agnostic,
it is evident that I could not describe the conception of history sketched
out in this little book as "historical agnosticism". Religious people would
laugh at me, agnostics would indignantly ask, was I making fun of them?
And, thus, I hope even British respectability will not be overshocked if
I use, in English as well as in so many other languages, the term "historical
materialism", to designate that view of the course of history which seeks
the ultimate cause and the great moving power of all important historic
events in the economic development of society, in the changes in the modes
of production and exchange, in the consequent division of society into
distinct classes, and in the struggles of these classes against one another.

This indulgence will, perhaps, be accorded to me all the sooner
if I show that historical materialism may be of advantage even to British
respectability. I have mentioned the fact that, about 40 or 50 years ago,
any cultivated foreigner settling in England was struck by what he was
then bound to consider the religious bigotry and stupidity of the English
respectable middle-class. I am now going to prove that the respectable
English middle-class of that time was not quite as stupid as it looked
to the intelligent foreigner. Its religious leanings can be explained.

Notes

1.
Vorwarts existed in Leipzig from 1876-78, after the Gotha Unification Congress.

2.
"Qual" is a philosophical play
upon words. Qual literally means torture, a pain which drives to
action of some kind; at the same time, the mystic Bohme puts into
the German word something of the meaning of the Latin qualitas;
his "qual" was the activating principle arising from, and promoting
in its turn, the spontaneous development of the thing, relation, or
person subject to it, in contradistinction to a pain inflicted from
without. [Note by Engels to the English Edition]

Next: Introduction (Part II — History of the English middle-class)

Socialism: Utopian and Scientific

Frederick Engels

Socialism: Utopian and Scientific

1892 English Edition Introduction

[History (the role of Religion) in the English middle-class]

When Europe emerged from the Middle Ages, the rising
middle-class of the towns constituted its revolutionary element. It had
conquered a recognized position within mediaeval feudal organization, but
this position, also, had become too narrow for its expansive power. The
development of the middle-class, the bourgeoisie, became incompatible
with the maintenance of the feudal system; the feudal system, therefore,
had to fall.

But the great international centre of feudalism was the Roman
Catholic Church. It united the whole of feudalized Western Europe, in spite
of all internal wars, into one grand political system, opposed as much
to the schismatic Greeks as to the Mohammedan countries. It had organized
its own hierarchy on the feudal model, and, lastly, it was itself by far
the most powerful feudal lord, holding, as it did, fully 1/3rd of the soil
of the Catholic world. Before profane feudalism could be successfully attacked
in each country and in detail, this, its sacred central organization, had
to be destroyed.

Moreover, parallel with the rise of the middle-class went on the
great revival of science; astronomy, mechanics, physics, anatomy, physiology
were again cultivated. And the bourgeoisie, for the development of its
industrial production, required a science which ascertained the physical
properties of natural objects and the modes of action of the forces of
Nature. Now up to then science had but been the humble handmaid of the
Church, had not been allowed to overlap the limits set by faith, and for
that reason had been no science at all. Science rebelled against the Church;
the bourgeoisie could not do without science, and, therefore, had to join
in the rebellion.

The above, though touching but two of the points where the rising
middle-class was bound to come into collision with the established religion,
will be sufficient to show, first, that the class most directly interested
in the struggle against the pretensions of the Roman Church was the bourgeoisie;
and second, that every struggle against feudalism, at that time, had to
take on a religious disguise, had to be directed against the Church in
the first instance. But if the universities and the traders of the cities
started the cry, it was sure to find, and did find, a strong echo in the
masses of the country people, the peasants, who everywhere had to struggle
for their very existence with their feudal lords, spiritual and temporal.

The long fight of the bourgeoisie against feudalism culminated
in three great, decisive battles.

The first was what is called the Protestant Reformation in Germany.
The war cry raised against the Church, by Luther, was responded to by two
insurrections of a political nature; first, that of the lower nobility
under Franz von Sickingen (1523), then the great Peasants' War, 1525. Both
were defeated, chiefly in consequence of the indecision of the parties
most interested, the burghers of the towns – an indecision into the causes
of which we cannot here enter. From that moment, the struggle degenerated
into a fight between the local princes and the central power, and ended
by blotting out Germany, for 200 years, from the politically active nations
of Europe. The Lutheran Reformation produced a new creed indeed, a religion
adapted to absolute monarchy. No sooner were the peasants of North-east
Germany converted to Lutheranism than they were from freemen reduced to
serfs.

But where Luther failed, Calvin won the day. Calvin's creed was
one fit for the boldest of the bourgeoisie of his time. His predestination
doctrine was the religious expression of the fact that in the commercial
world of competition success or failure does not depend upon a man's activity
or cleverness, but upon circumstances uncontrollable by him. It is not
of him that willeth or of him that runneth, but of the mercy of unknown
superior economic powers; and this was especially true at a period of economic
revolution, when all old commercial routes and centres were replaced by
new ones, when India and America were opened to the world, and when even
the most sacred economic articles of faith – the value of gold and silver
– began to totter and to break down. Calvin's church constitution of God
was republicanized, could the kingdoms of this world remains subject to
monarchs, bishops, and lords? While German Lutheranism became a willing
tool in the hands of princes, Calvinism founded a republic in Holland,
and active republican parties in England, and, above all, Scotland.

In Calvinism, the second great bourgeois upheaval found its doctrine
ready cut and dried. This upheaval took place in England. The middle-class
of the towns brought it on, and the yeomanry of the country districts fought
it out. Curiously enough, in all the three great bourgeois risings, the
peasantry furnishes the army that has to do the fighting; and the peasantry
is just the class that, the victory once gained, is most surely ruined
by the economic consequences of that victory. A hundred years after Cromwell,
the yeomanry of england had almost disappeared. Anyhow, had it not been
for that yeomanry and for the plebian element in the towns, the
bourgeoisie alone would never have fought the matter out to the bitter
end, and would never have brought Charles I to the scaffold. In order to
secure even those conquests of the bourgeoisie that were ripe for gathering
at the time, the revolution had to be carried considerably further – exactly
as in 1793 in France and 1848 in Germany. This seems, in fact, to be one
of the laws of evolution of bourgeois society.

Well, upon this excess of revolutionary activity there necessarily
followed the inevitable reaction which, in its turn, went beyond the point
where it might have maintained itself. After a series of oscillations,
the new centre of gravity was at last attained and became a new starting-point.
The grand period of English history, known to respectability under the
name of "the Great Rebellion", and the struggles succeeding it, were brought
to a close by the comparatively puny events entitled by Liberal historians
"the Glorious Revolution".

The new starting-point was a compromise between the rising middle-class
and the ex-feudal landowners. The latter, though called, as now, the aristocracy,
had been long since on the way which led them to become what Louis Philippe
in France became at a much later period: "The first bourgeois of the kingdom".
Fortunately for England, the old feudal barons had killed one another during
the War of the Roses. Their successors, though mostly scions of the old
families, had been so much out of the direct line of descent that they
constituted quite a new body, with habits and tendencies far more bourgeois
than feudal. They fully understood the value of money, and at once began
to increase their rents by turning hundreds of small farmers out and replacing
them with sheep. Henry VIII, while squandering the Church lands, created
fresh bourgeois landlords by wholesale; the innumerable confiscation of
estates, regranted to absolute or relative upstarts, and continued during
the whole of the 17th century, had the same result. Consequently, ever
since Henry VII, the English "aristocracy", far from counteracting the
development of industrial production, had, on the contrary, sought to indirectly
profit thereby; and there had always been a section of the great landowners
willing, from economical or political reasons, to cooperate with the leading
men of the financial and industrial bourgeoisie. The compromise of 1689
was, therefore, easily accomplished. The political spoils of "pelf and
place" were left to the great landowning families, provided the economic
interests of the financial, manufacturing, and commercial middle-class
were sufficiently attended to. And these economic interests were at that
time powerful enough to determine the general policy of the nation. There
might be squabbles about matters of detail, but, on the whole, the aristocratic
oligarchy knew too well that its own economic prosperity was irretrievably
bound up with that of the industrial and commercial middle-class.

From that time, the bourgeoisie was a humble, but still a recognized,
component of the ruling classes of England. With the rest of them, it had
a common interest in keeping in subjection the great working mass of the
nation. The merchant or manufacturer himself stood in the position of master,
or, as it was until lately called, of "natural superior" to his clerks,
his work-people, his domestic servants. His interest was to get as much
and as good work out of them as he could; for this end, they had to be
trained to proper submission. He was himself religious; his religion had
supplied the standard under which he had fought the king and the lords;
he was not long in discovering the opportunities this same religion offered
him for working upon the minds of his natural inferiors, and making them
submissive to the behests of the masters it had pleased God to place over
them. In short, the English bourgeoisie now had to take a part in keeping
down the "lower orders", the great producing mass of the nation, and one
of the means employed for that purpose was the influence of religion.

There was another factor that contributed to strengthen the religious
leanings of the bourgeoisie. That was the rise of materialism in England.
This new doctrine not only shocked the pious feelings of the middle-class;
it announced itself as a philosophy only fit for scholars and cultivated
men of the world, in contrast to religion, which was good enough for the
uneducated masses, including the bourgeoisie. With Hobbes, it stepped on
the stage as a defender of royal prerogative and omnipotence; it called
upon absolute monarchy to keep down that puer robustus sed malitiosus
["Robust but malicious boy"] – to wit, the people. Similarly, with the
successors of Hobbes, with Bolingbroke, Shaftesbury, etc., the new deistic
form of materialism remained an aristocratic, esoteric doctrine, and, therefore,
hateful to the middle-class both for its religious heresy and for its anti-bourgeois
political connections. Accordingly, in opposition to the materialism and
deism of the aristocracy, those Protestant sects which had furnished the
flag and the fighting contingent against the Stuarts continued to furnish
the main strength of the progressive middle-class, and form even today
the backbone of "the Great Liberal Party".

In the meantime, materialism passed from England to France, where
it met and coalesced with another materialistic school of philosophers,
a branch of Cartesianism. In France, too, it remained at first an exclusively
aristocratic doctrine. But, soon, its revolutionary character asserted
itself. The French materialists did not limit their criticism to matters
of religious belief; they extended it to whatever scientific tradition
or political institution they met with; and to prove the claim of their
doctrine to universal application, they took the shortest cut, and boldly
applied it to all subjects of knowledge in the giant work after which they
were named – the Encyclopaedia. Thus, in one or the other of its two forms
– avowed materialism or deism – it became the creed of the whole culture's
youth of France; so much so that, when the Great Revolution broke out,
the doctrine hatched by English Royalists gave a theoretical flag to French
Republicans and Terrorists, and furnished the text for the Declaration
of the Rights of Man. The Great French Revolution was the third uprising
of the bourgeoisie, but the first that had entirely cast off the religious
cloak, and was fought out on undisguised political lines; it was the first,
too, that was really fought out up to the destruction of one of the combatants,
the aristocracy, and the complete triumph of the other, the bourgeoisie.
In England, the continuity of pre-revolutionary and post-revolutionary
institutions, and the compromise between landlords and capitalists, found
its expression in the continuity of judicial precedents and in the religious
preservation of the feudal forms of the law. In France, the Revolution
constituted a complete breach with the traditions of the past; it cleared
out the very last vestiges of feudalism, and created in the Code Civil
a masterly adaptation of the old Roman law – that almost perfect expression
of the juridical relations corresponding to the economic stage called by
Marx the production of commodities – to modern capitalist conditions;
so masterly that this French revolutionary code still serves as a model
for reforms of the law of property in all other countries, not excepting
England. Let us, however, not forget that if English law continues to express
the economic relations of capitalist society in that barbarous feudal language
which corresponds to the thing expressed, just as English spelling corresponds
to English pronunciation – vous ecrivez Londres et vous prononcez Constantinople,
said a Frenchman – that same English law is the only one which has preserved
through ages, and transmitted to America and the Colonies, the best part
of that old Germanic personal freedom, local self-government, and independence
from all interference (but that of the law courts), which on the Continent
has been lost during the period of absolute monarchy, and has nowhere been
as yet fully recovered.

To return to our British bourgeois. The French Revolution gave
him a splendid opportunity, with the help of the Continental monarchies,
to destroy French maritime commerce, to annex French colonies, and to crush
the last French pretensions to maritime rivalry. That was one reason why
he fought it. Another was that the ways of this revolution went very much
against his grain. Not only its "execrable" terrorism, but the very attempt
to carry bourgeois rule to extremes. What should the British bourgeois
do without his aristocracy, that taught him manners, such as they were,
and invented fashions for him – that furnished officers for the army,
which kept order at home, and the navy, which conquered colonial possessions
and new markets aboard? There was, indeed, a progressive minority of the
bourgeoisie, that minority whose interests were not so well attended to
under the compromise; this section, composed chiefly of the less wealthy
middle-class, did sympathize with the Revolution, but it was powerless
in Parliament.

Thus, if materialism became the creed of the French Revolution,
the God-fearing English bourgeois held all the faster to his religion.
Had not the reign of terror in Paris proved what was the upshot, if the
religious instincts of the masses were lost? The more materialism spread
from France to neighboring countries, and was reinforced by similar doctrinal
currents, notably by German philosophy, the more, in fact, materialism
and free thought generally became, on the Continent, the necessary qualifications
of a cultivated man, the more stubbornly the English middle-class stuck
to its manifold religious creeds. These creeds might differ from one another,
but they were, all of them, distinctly religious, Christian creeds.

While the Revolution ensured the political triumph of the bourgeoisie
in France, in England Watt, Arkwright, Cartwright, and others, initiated
an industrial revolution, which completely shifted the centre of gravity
of economic power. The wealth of the bourgeoisie increased considerably
faster than that of the landed aristocracy. Within the bourgeoisie itself,
the financial aristocracy, the bankers, etc., were more and more pushed
into the background by the manufacturers. The compromise of 1689, even
after the gradual changes it had undergone in favor of the bourgeoisie,
no longer corresponded to the relative position of the parties to it. The
character of these parties, too, had changed; the bourgeoisie of 1830 was
very different from that of the preceding century. The political power
still left to the aristocracy, and used by them to resist the pretensions
of the new industrial bourgeoisie, became incompatible with the new economic
interests. A fresh struggle with the aristocracy was necessary; it could
end only in a victory of the new economic power. First, the Reform Act
was pushed through, in spite of all resistance, under the impulse of the
French Revolution of 1830. It gave to the bourgeoisie a recognized and
powerful place in Parliament. Then the Repeal of the Corn Laws [a move
toward free-trade], which settled, once and for all, the supremacy of the
bourgeoisie, and especially of its most active portion, the manufacturers,
over the landed aristocracy. This was the greatest victory of the bourgeoisie;
it was, however, also the last it gained in its own exclusive interest.
Whatever triumphs it obtained later on, it had to share with a new social
power – first its ally, but soon its rival.

The industrial revolution had created a class of large manufacturing
capitalists, but also a class – and a far more numerous one – of manufacturing
work-people. This class gradually increased in numbers, in proportion as
the industrial revolution seized upon one branch of manufacture after another,
and in the same proportion it increased its power. This power it proved
as early as 1824, by forcing a reluctant Parliament to repeal the acts
forbidding combinations of workmen. During the Reform agitation, the workingmen
constituted the Radical wing of the Reform party; the Act of 1832 having
excluded them from the suffrage, the formulated their demands in the People's
Charter, and constituted themselves, in opposition to the great bourgeois
Anti-Corn Law party, into an independent party, the Chartists, the first
working-men's party of modern times.

Then came the Continental revolutions of February and March 1848,
in which the working people played such a prominent part, and, at least
in Paris, put forward demands which were certainly inadmissible from the
point of view of capitalist society. And then came the general reaction.
First, the defeat of the Chartists on April 10, 1848; then the crushing
of the Paris workingmen's insurrection in June of the same year; then the
disasters of 1849 in Italy, Hungary, South Germany, and at last the victory
of Louis Bonaparte over Paris, December 2, 1851. For a time, at least,
the bugbear of working-class pretensions was put down, but at what cost!
If the British bourgeois had been convinced before of the necessity of
maintaining the common people in a religious mood, how much more must he
feel that necessity after all these experiences? Regardless of the sneers
of his Continental compeers, he continued to spend thousands and tens of
thousands, year after year, upon the evangelization of the lower orders;
not content with his own native religious machinery, he appealed to Brother
Jonathan 1),
the greatest organizer in existence of religion as a trade, and imported
from America revivalism, Moody and Sankey, and the like;
and, finally, he accepted the dangerous aid of the Salvation Army, which
revives the propaganda of early Christianity, appeals to the poor as the
elect, fights capitalism in a religious way, and thus fosters an element
of early Christian class antagonism, which one day may become troublesome
to the well-to-do people who now find the ready money for it.

It seems a law of historical development that the bourgeoisie
can in no European country get hold of political power – at least for
any length of time – in the same exclusive way in which the feudal aristocracy
kept hold of it during the Middle Ages. Even in France, where feudalism
was completely extinguished, the bourgeoisie as a whole has held full possession
of the Government for very short periods only. During Louis Philippe's
reign, 1830-48, a very small portion of the bourgeoisie ruled the kingdom;
by far the larger part were excluded from the suffrage by the high qualification.
Under the Second Republic, 1848-51, the whole bourgeoisie ruled but for
three years only; their incapacity brought on the Second Empire. It is
only now, in the Third Republic, that the bourgeoisie as a whole have kept
possession of the helm for more than 20 years; and they are already showing
lively signs of decadence. A durable reign of the bourgeoisie has been
possible only in countries like America, where feudalism was unknown, and
society at the very beginning started from a bourgeois basis. And even
in France and America, the successors of the bourgeoisie, the working people,
are already knocking at the door.

In England, the bourgeoisie never held undivided sway. Even the
victory of 1832 left the landed aristocracy in almost exclusive possession
of all the leading Government offices. The meekness with which the middle-class
submitted to this remained inconceivable to me until the great Liberal
manufacturer, Mr. W. A. Forster, in a public speech, implored the young
men of Bradford to learn French, as a means to get on in the world, and
quoted from his own experience how sheepish he looked when, as a Cabinet
Minister, he had to move in society where French was, at least, as necessary
as English! The fact was, the English middle-class of that time were, as
a rule, quite uneducated upstarts, and could not help leaving to the aristocracy
those superior Government places where other qualifications were required
than mere insular narrowness and insular conceit, seasoned by business
sharpness. 2)
Even now the endless newspaper debates about middle-class education show
that the English middle-class does not yet consider itself good enough
for the best education, and looks to something more modest. Thus, even
after the repeal of the Corn Laws, it appeared a matter of course that
the men who had carried the day – the Cobdens, Brights, Forsters, etc.
– should remain excluded from a share in the official government of the
country, until 20 years afterwards a new Reform Act opened to them the
door of the Cabinet. The English bourgeoisie are, up to the present day,
so deeply penetrated by a sense of their social inferiority that they keep
up, at their own expense and that of the nation, an ornamental caste of
drones to represent the nation worthily at all State functions; and they
consider themselves highly honored whenever one of themselves is found
worthy of admission into this select and privileged body, manufactured,
after all, by themselves.

The industrial and commercial middle-class had, therefore, not
yet succeeded in driving the landed aristocracy completely from political
power when another competitor, the working-class, appeared on the stage.
The reaction after the Chartist movement and the Continental revolutions,
as well as the unparalleled extension of English trade from 1848-66 (ascribed
vulgarly to Free Trade alone, but due far more to the colossal development
of railways, ocean steamers, and means of intercourse generally), had again
driven the working-class into the dependency of the Liberal party, of which
they formed, as in pre-Chartist times, the Radical wing. Their claims to
the franchise, however, gradually became irresistible; while the Whig leaders
of the Liberals "funked", Disraeli showed his superiority by making the
Tories seize the favorable moment and introduce household suffrage in the
boroughs, along with a redistribution of seats. Then followed the ballot;
then, in 1884, the extension of household suffrage to the counties and
a fresh redistribution of seats, by which electoral districts were, to
some extent, equalized. All these measures considerably increased the electoral
power of the working-class, so much so that in at least 150 to 200 constituencies
that class now furnished the majority of the voters. But parliamentary
government is a capital school for teaching respect for tradition; if the
middle-class look with awe and veneration upon what Lord John Manners playfully
called "our old nobility", the mass of the working-people then looked up
with respect and deference to what used to be designated as "their betters",
the middle-class. Indeed, the British workman, some 15 years ago, was the
model workman, whose respectful regard for the position of his master,
and whose self-restraining modesty in claiming rights for himself, consoled
our German economists of the Katheder-Socialist school for the incurable
communistic and revolutionary tendencies of their own working-men at home.

But the English middle-class – good men of business as they are
– saw farther than the German professors. They had shared their powers
but reluctantly with the working-class. They had learnt, during the Chartist
years, what that puer robustus sed malitiosus, the people, is capable
of. And since that time, they had been compelled to incorporate the better
part of the People's Charter in the Statutes of the United Kingdom. Now,
if ever, the people must be kept in order by moral means, and the first
and foremost of all moral means of action upon the masses is and remains
– religion. Hence the parsons' majorities on the School Boards, hence
the increasing self-taxation of the bourgeoisie for the support of all
sorts of revivalism, from ritualism to the Salvation Army.

And now came the triumph of British respectability over the free
thought and religious laxity of the Continental bourgeois. The workmen
of France and Germany had become rebellious. They were thoroughly infected
with Socialism, and, for very good reasons, were not at all particular
as to the legality of the means by which to secure their own ascendancy.
The puer robustus, here, turned from day-to-day more malitiosus.
Nothing remained to the French and German bourgeoisie as a last resource
but to silently drop their free thought, as a youngster, when sea-sickness
creeps upon him, quietly drops the burning cigar he brought swaggeringly
on board; one-by-one, the scoffers turned pious in outward behavior, spoke
with respect of the Church, its dogmas and rites, and even conformed with
the latter as far as could not be helped. French bourgeois dined maigre
on Fridays, and German ones say out long Protestant sermons in their pews
on Sundays. They had come to grief with materialism. "Die Religion muss
dem Volk erhalten werden" – religion must be kept alive for the people
– that was the only and the last means to save society from utter ruin.
Unfortunately for themselves, they did not find this out until they had
done their level best to break up religion for ever. And now it was the
turn of the British bourgeoisie to sneer and to say: "Why, you fools, I
could have told you that 200 years ago!"

However, I am afraid neither the religious stolidity of the British,
nor the post festum conversion of the Continental bourgeois will
stem the rising Proletarian tide. Tradition is a great retarding force,
is the vis inertiae of history, but, being merely passive, is sure
to be broken down; and thus religion will be no lasting safeguard to capitalist
society. If our juridical, philosophical, and religious ideas are the more
or less remote offshoots of the economical relations prevailing in a given
society, such ideas cannot, in the long run, withstand the effects of a
complete change in these relations. And, unless we believe in supernatural
revelation, we must admit that no religious tenets will ever suffice to
prop up a tottering society.

In fact, in England too, the working-people have begun to move
again. They are, no doubt, shackled by traditions of various kinds. Bourgeois
traditions, such as the widespread belief that there can be but two parties,
Conservatives and Liberals, and that the working-class must work out its
salvation by and through the great Liberal Party. Working-men's traditions,
inherited from their first tentative efforts at independent action, such
as the exclusion, from ever so many old Trade Unions, of all applicants
who have not gone through a regular apprenticeship; which means the breeding,
by every such union, of its own blacklegs. But, for all that, the English
working-class is moving, as even Professor Brentano has sorrowfully had
to report to his brother Katheder-Socialists. It moves, like all things
in England, with a slow and measured step, with hesitation here, with more
or less unfruitful, tentative attempts there; it moves now and then with
an over-cautious mistrust of the name of Socialism, while it gradually
absorbs the substance; and the movement spreads and seizes one layer of
the workers after another. It has now shaken out of their torpor the unskilled
laborers of the East End of London, and we all know what a splendid impulse
these fresh forces have given it in return. And if the pace of the movement
is not up to the impatience of some people, let them not forget that it
is the working-class which keeps alive the finest qualities of the English
character, and that, if a step in advance is once gained in England, it
is, as a rule, never lost afterwards. If the sons of the old Chartists,
for reasons unexplained above, were not quite up to the mark, the grandsons
bid fair to be worthy of their forefathers.

But the triumph of the European working-class does not depend
upon England alone. It can only be secured by the cooperation of, at least,
England, France, and Germany. In both the latter countries, the working-class
movement is well ahead of England. In Germany, it is even within measurable
distance of success. The progress it has there made during the last 25
years is unparalleled. It advances with ever-increasing velocity. If the
German middle-class have shown themselves lamentably deficient in political
capacity, discipline, courage, energy, and perseverance, the German working-class
have given ample proof of all these qualities. Four hundred years ago,
Germany was the starting-point of the first upheaval of the European middle-class;
as things are now, is it outside the limits of possibility that Germany
will be the scene, too, of the first great victory of the European proletariat?

Frederick Engels

London

April 20, 1892

Notes

1.
"Brother Jonathan" – A sort of Anglo-Christian "Uncle Sam".

2.
And even in business matters, the conceit of
national Chauvinism is but a sorry adviser. Up to quite recently,
the average English manufacturer considered it derogatory for an
Englishman to speak any language but his own, and felt rather proud
than otherwise of the fact that "poor devils" of foreigners settled
in England and took off his hands the trouble of disposing of his
products abroad. He never noticed that these foreigners, mostly
Germans, thus got command of a very large part of British foreign
trade, imports and exports, and that the direct foreign trade of
Englishmen became limited, almost entirely, to the colonies, China,
the United States, and South America. Nor did he notice that these
Germans traded with other Germans abroad, who gradually organized a
complete network of commercial colonies all over the world. But,
when Germany, about 40 years ago [c.1850], seriously began
manufacturing for export, this network served her admirably in her
transformation, in so short a time, from a corn-exporting into a
first-rate manufacturing country. Then, about 10 years ago, the
British manufacturer got frightened, and asked his ambassadors and
consuls how it was that he could no longer keep his customers
together. The unanimous answer was:

(1) You don't learn customer's language but expect him to speak
your own;

(2) You don't even try to suit your customer's wants, habits,
and tastes, but expect him to conform to your English ones.

Next: French Socialism

Socialism: Utopian and Scientific

Frederick Engels

Socialism: Utopian and Scientific

## I

[The Development of Utopian Socialism]

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. But, in its theoretical form, modern Socialism originally
appears ostensibly as a more logical extension of the principles laid down
by the great French philosophers of the 18th century. Like every new theory,
modern Socialism had, at first, to connect itself with the intellectual
stock-in-trade ready to its hand, however deeply its roots lay in material
economic facts.

The great men, who in France prepared men’s minds for the coming
revolution, were themselves extreme revolutionists. They recognized no
external authority of any kind whatever. Religion, natural science, society,
political institutions – everything was subjected to the most unsparing
criticism: everything must justify its existence before the judgment-seat
of reason or give up existence. Reason became the sole measure of everything.
It was the time when, as Hegel says, the world stood upon its head [1];
first in the sense that the human head, and the principles arrived at by
its thought, claimed to be the basis of all human action and association;
but by and by, also, in the wider sense that the reality which was in contradiction
to these principles had, in fact, to be turned upside down. Every form
of society and government then existing, every old traditional notion,
was flung into the lumber-room as irrational; the world had hitherto allowed
itself to be led solely by prejudices; everything in the past deserved
only pity and contempt. Now, for the first time, appeared the light of
day, the kingdom of reason; henceforth superstition, injustice, privilege,
oppression, were to be superseded by eternal truth, eternal Right, equality
based on Nature and the inalienable rights of man.

We know today that this kingdom of reason was nothing more than
the idealized kingdom of the bourgeoisie; that this eternal Right found
its realization in bourgeois justice; that this equality reduced itself
to bourgeois equality before the law; that bourgeois property was proclaimed
as one of the essential rights of man; and that the government of reason,
the Contrat Social of Rousseau, came into being, and only could
come into being, as a democratic bourgeois republic. The great thinkers
of the 18th century could, no more than their predecessors, go beyond the
limits imposed upon them by their epoch.

But, side by side with the antagonisms of the feudal nobility
and the burghers, who claimed to represent all the rest of society, was
the general antagonism of exploiters and exploited, of rich idlers and
poor workers. It was this very circumstance that made it possible for the
representatives of the bourgeoisie to put themselves forward as representing
not one special class, but the whole of suffering humanity. Still further.
From its origin the bourgeoisie was saddled with its antithesis: capitalists
cannot exist without wage-workers, and, in the same proportion as the mediaeval
burgher of the guild developed into the modern bourgeois, the guild journeyman
and the day-laborer, outside the guilds, developed into the proletarian.
And although, upon the whole, the bourgeoisie, in their struggle with the
nobility, could claim to represent at the same time the interests of the
different working-classes of that period, yet in every great bourgeois
movement there were independent outbursts of that class which was the forerunner,
more or less developed, of the modern proletariat. For example, at the
time of the German Reformation and the Peasants’ War, the Anabaptists and
Thomas Münzer; in the great English Revolution, the Levellers;
in the great French Revolution, Babeuf.

These were theoretical enunciations, corresponding with these
revolutionary uprisings of a class not yet developed; in the 16th and 17th
centuries, Utopian pictures of ideal social conditions; in the 18th century, actual communistic theories (Morelly and Mably)[2]. The
demand for equality was no longer limited to political rights; it was extended
also to the social conditions of individuals. It was not simply class privileges
that were to be abolished, but class distinctions themselves. A Communism,
ascetic, denouncing all the pleasures of life, Spartan, was the first form
of the new teaching. Then came the three great Utopians: Saint-Simon, to
whom the middle-class movement, side by side with the proletarian, still
had a certain significance; Fourier; and Owen, who in the country where
capitalist production was most developed, and under the influence of the
antagonisms begotten of this, worked out his proposals for the removal
of class distinction systematically and in direct relation to French materialism.

One thing is common to all three. Not one of them appears as a
representative of the interests of that proletariat which historical development
had, in the meantime, produced. Like the French philosophers, they do not
claim to emancipate a particular class to begin with, but all humanity
at once. Like them, they wish to bring in the kingdom of reason and eternal
justice, but this kingdom, as they see it, is as far as Heaven from Earth,
from that of the French philosophers.

For, to our three social reformers, the bourgeois world, based
upon the principles of these philosophers, is quite as irrational and unjust,
and, therefore, finds its way to the dust-hole quite as readily as feudalism
and all the earlier stages of society. If pure reason and justice have
not, hitherto, ruled the world, this has been the case only because men
have not rightly understood them. What was wanted was the individual man
of genius, who has now arisen and who understands the truth. That he has
now arisen, that the truth has now been clearly understood, is not an inevitable
event, following of necessity in the chains of historical development,
but a mere happy accident. He might just as well have been born 500 years
earlier, and might then have spared humanity 500 years of error, strife,
and suffering.

We saw how the French philosophers of the 18th century, the forerunners of the Revolution, appealed to reason as the sole judge of all that is. A rational government, rational society, were to be founded; everything that ran counter to eternal reason was to be remorselessly done away with. We saw also that this eternal reason was in reality nothing but the idealized understanding of the 18th century citizen, just then evolving into the bourgeois. The French Revolution had realized this rational society and government.

But the new order of things, rational enough as compared with earlier conditions, turned out to be by no means absolutely rational. The state based upon reason completely collapsed. Rousseau’s Contrat Social had found its realization in the Reign of Terror, from which the bourgeoisie, who had lost confidence in their own political capacity, had taken refuge first in the corruption of the Directorate, and, finally, under the wing of the Napoleonic despotism. The promised eternal peace was turned into an endless war of conquest. The society based upon reason had fared no better. The antagonism between rich and poor, instead of dissolving into general prosperity, had become intensified by the removal of the guild and other privileges, which had to some extent bridged it over, and by the removal of the charitable institutions of the Church. The “freedom of property” from feudal fetters, now veritably accomplished, turned out to be, for the small capitalists and small proprietors, the freedom to sell their small property, crushed under the overmastering competition of the large capitalists and landlords, to these great lords, and thus, as far as the small capitalists and peasant proprietors were concerned, became “freedom from property”. The development of industry upon a capitalistic basis made poverty and misery of the working masses conditions of existence of society. Cash payment became more and more, in Carlyle’s phrase [See Thomas Carlyle, Past and Present, London 1843], the sole nexus between man and man. The number of crimes increased from year to year. Formerly, the feudal vices had openly stalked about in broad daylight; though not eradicated, they were now at any rate thrust into the background. In their stead, the bourgeois vices, hitherto practiced in secret, began to blossom all the more luxuriantly. Trade became to a greater and greater extent cheating. The “fraternity” of the revolutionary motto was realized in the chicanery and rivalries of the battle of competition. Oppression by force was replaced by corruption; the sword, as the first social lever, by gold. The right of the first night was transferred from the feudal lords to the bourgeois manufacturers. Prostitution increased to an extent never heard of. Marriage itself remained, as before, the legally recognized form, the official cloak of prostitution, and, moreover, was supplemented by rich crops of adultery.

In a word, compared with the splendid promises of the philosophers, the social and political institutions born of the “triumph of reason” were bitterly disappointing caricatures. All that was wanting was the men to formulate this disappointment, and they came with the turn of the century. In 1802, Saint-Simon’s Geneva letters appeared; in 1808 appeared Fourier’s first work, although the groundwork of his theory dated from 1799; on January 1, 1800, Robert Owen undertook the direction of New Lanark.

At this time, however, the capitalist mode of production, and with it the antagonism between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, was still very incompletely developed. Modern Industry, which had just arisen in England, was still unknown in France. But Modern Industry develops, on the one hand, the conflicts which make absolutely necessary a revolution in the mode of production, and the doing away with its capitalistic character – conflicts not only between the classes begotten of it, but also between the very productive forces and the forms of exchange created by it. And, on the other hand, it develops, in these very gigantic productive forces, the means of ending these conflicts. If, therefore, about the year 1800, the conflicts arising from the new social order were only just beginning to take shape, this holds still more fully as to the means of ending them. The “have-nothing” masses of Paris, during the Reign of Terror, were able for a moment to gain the mastery, and thus to lead the bourgeois revolution to victory in spite of the bourgeoisie themselves. But, in doing so, they only proved how impossible it was for their domination to last under the conditions then obtaining. The proletariat, which then for the first time evolved itself from these “have-nothing” masses as the nucleus of a new class, as yet quite incapable of independent political action, appeared as an oppressed, suffering order, to whom, in its incapacity to help itself, help could, at best, be brought in from without or down from above.

This historical situation also dominated the founders of Socialism. To the crude conditions of capitalistic production and the crude class conditions correspond crude theories. The solution of the social problems, which as yet lay hidden in undeveloped economic conditions, the Utopians attempted to evolve out of the human brain. Society presented nothing but wrongs; to remove these was the task of reason. It was necessary, then, to discover a new and more perfect system of social order and to impose this upon society from without by propaganda, and, wherever it was possible, by the example of model experiments. These new social systems were foredoomed as Utopian; the more completely they were worked out in detail, the more they could not avoid drifting off into pure phantasies.

These facts once established, we need not dwell a moment longer upon this side of the question, now wholly belonging to the past. We can leave it to the literary small fry to solemnly quibble over these phantasies, which today only make us smile, and to crow over the superiority of their own bald reasoning, as compared with such “insanity”. For ourselves, we delight in the stupendously grand thoughts and germs of thought that everywhere break out through their phantastic covering, and to which these Philistines are blind.

Saint-Simon was a son of the great French Revolution, at the outbreak of which he was not yet 30. The Revolution was the victory of the 3rd estate – i.e., of the great masses of the nation, working in production and in trade, over the privileged idle classes, the nobles and the priests. But the victory of the 3rd estate soon revealed itself as exclusively the victory of a smaller part of this “estate”, as the conquest of political power by the socially privileged section of it – i.e., the propertied bourgeoisie. And the bourgeoisie had certainly developed rapidly during the Revolution, partly by speculation in the lands of the nobility and of the Church, confiscated and afterwards put up for sale, and partly by frauds upon the nation by means of army contracts. It was the domination of these swindlers that, under the Directorate, brought France to the verge of ruin, and thus gave Napoleon the pretext for his coup d’état.

Hence, to Saint-Simon the antagonism between the 3rd Estate and the privileged classes took the form of an antagonism between “workers” and “idlers”. The idlers were not merely the old privileged classes, but also all who, without taking any part in production or distribution, lived on their incomes. And the workers were not only the wage-workers, but also the manufacturers, the merchants, the bankers. That the idlers had lost the capacity for intellectual leadership and political supremacy had been proved, and was by the Revolution finally settled. That the non-possessing classes had not this capacity seemed to Saint-Simon proved by the experiences of the Reign of Terror. Then, who was to lead and command? According to Saint-Simon, science and industry, both united by a new religious bond, destined to restore that unity of religious ideas which had been lost since the time of the Reformation – a necessarily mystic and rigidly hierarchic “new Christianity”. But science, that was the scholars; and industry, that was, in the first place, the working bourgeois, manufacturers, merchants, bankers. These bourgeois were, certainly, intended by Saint-Simon to transform themselves into a kind of public officials, of social trustees; but they were still to hold, vis-à-vis of the workers, a commanding and economically privileged position. The bankers especially were to be called upon to direct the whole of social production by the regulation of credit. This conception was in exact keeping with a time in which Modern Industry in France and, with it, the chasm between bourgeoisie and proletariat was only just coming into existence. But what Saint-Simon especially lays stress upon is this: what interests him first, and above all other things, is the lot of the class that is the most numerous and the most poor (“la classe la plus nombreuse et la plus pauvre”).

Already in his Geneva letters, Saint-Simon lays down the proposition that “all men ought to work”. In the same work he recognizes also that the Reign of Terror was the reign of the non-possessing masses.

“See,” says he to them, “what happened in France at the time when your comrades held sway there; they brought about a famine.” [Lettres d’un habitant de Genève à ses contemporains, Saint-Simon, 1803]

But to recognize the French Revolution as a class war, and not simply one between nobility and bourgeoisie, but between nobility, bourgeoisie, and the non-possessors, was, in the year 1802, a most pregnant discovery. In 1816, he declares that politics is the science of production, and foretells the complete absorption of politics by economics. The knowledge that economic conditions are the basis of political institutions appears here only in embryo. Yet what is here already very plainly expressed is the idea of the future conversion of political rule over men into an administration of things and a direction of processes of production – that is to say, the “abolition of the state”, about which recently there has been so much noise.

Saint-Simon shows the same superiority over his contemporaries, when in 1814, immediately after the entry of the allies into Paris, and again in 1815, during the Hundred Days’ War, he proclaims the alliance of France and England, and then of both of these countries, with Germany, as the only guarantee for the prosperous development and peace of Europe. To preach to the French in 1815 an alliance with the victors of Waterloo required as much courage as historical foresight.

If in Saint-Simon we find a comprehensive breadth of view, by virtue of which almost all the ideas of later Socialists that are not strictly economic are found in him in embryo, we find in Fourier a criticism of the existing conditions of society, genuinely French and witty, but not upon that account any the less thorough. Fourier takes the bourgeoisie, their inspired prophets before the Revolution, and their interested eulogists after it, at their own word. He lays bare remorselessly the material and moral misery of the bourgeois world. He confronts it with the earlier philosophers’ dazzling promises of a society in which reason alone should reign, of a civilization in which happiness should be universal, of an illimitable human perfectibility, and with the rose-colored phraseology of the bourgeois ideologists of his time. He points out how everywhere the most pitiful reality corresponds with the most high-sounding phrases, and he overwhelms this hopeless fiasco of phrases with his mordant sarcasm.

Fourier is not only a critic, his imperturbably serene nature makes him a satirist, and assuredly one of the greatest satirists of all time. He depicts, with equal power and charm, the swindling speculations that blossomed out upon the downfall of the Revolution, and the shopkeeping spirit prevalent in, and characteristic of, French commerce at that time. Still more masterly is his criticism of the bourgeois form of the relations between sexes, and the position of woman in bourgeois society. He was the first to declare that in any given society the degree of woman’s emancipation is the natural measure of the general emancipation.

But Fourier is at his greatest in his conception of the history of society. He divides its whole course, thus far, into four stages of evolution – savagery, barbarism, the patriarchate, civilization. This last is identical with the so-called civil, or bourgeois, society of today – i.e., with the social order that came in with the 16th century. He proves “that the civilized stage raises every vice practiced by barbarism in a simple fashion into a form of existence, complex, ambiguous, equivocal, hypocritical” – that civilization moves “in a vicious circle”, in contradictions which it constantly reproduces without being able to solve them; hence it constantly arrives at the very opposite to that which it wants to attain, or pretends to want to attain, so that, e.g., “under civilization poverty is born of superabundance itself”. [Théorie de l’unite universelle, Fourier, 1843 and Le nouveau monde industriel et sociétaire, ou invention du procédé d'industrie attrayante et enaturelle distribuée en séries passionnées, Fourier, 1845]

Fourier, as we see, uses the dialectic method in the same masterly way as his contemporary, Hegel. Using these same dialectics, he argues against talk about illimitable human perfectibility, that every historical phase has its period of ascent and also its period of descent, and he applies this observation to the future of the whole human race. As Kant introduced into natural science the idea of the ultimate destruction of the Earth, Fourier introduced into historical science that of the ultimate destruction of the human race.

Whilst in France the hurricane of the Revolution swept over the land, in England a quieter, but not on that account less tremendous, revolution was going on. Steam and the new tool-making machinery were transforming manufacture into modern industry, and thus revolutionizing the whole foundation of bourgeois society. The sluggish march of development of the manufacturing period changed into a veritable storm and stress period of production. With constantly increasing swiftness the splitting-up into large capitalists and non-possessing proletarians went on. Between these, instead of the former stable middle-class, an unstable mass of artisans and small shopkeepers, the most fluctuating portion of the population, now led a precarious existence.

The new mode of production was, as yet, only at the beginning of its period of ascent; as yet it was the normal, regular method of production – the only one possible under existing conditions. Nevertheless, even then it was producing crying social abuses – the herding together of a homeless population in the worst quarters of the large towns; the loosening of all traditional moral bonds, of patriarchal subordination, of family relations; overwork, especially of women and children, to a frightful extent; complete demoralization of the working-class, suddenly flung into altogether new conditions, from the country into the town, from agriculture into modern industry, from stable conditions of existence into insecure ones that change from day to day.

At this juncture, there came forward as a reformer a manufacturer 29-years-old – a man of almost sublime, childlike simplicity of character, and at the same time one of the few born leaders of men. Robert Owen had adopted the teaching of the materialistic philosophers: that man’s character is the product, on the one hand, of heredity; on the other, of the environment of the individual during his lifetime, and especially during his period of development. In the industrial revolution most of his class saw only chaos and confusion, and the opportunity of fishing in these troubled waters and making large fortunes quickly. He saw in it the opportunity of putting into practice his favorite theory, and so of bringing order out of chaos. He had already tried it with success, as superintendent of more than 500 men in a Manchester factory. From 1800 to 1829, he directed the great cotton mill at New Lanark, in Scotland, as managing partner, along the same lines, but with greater freedom of action and with a success that made him a European reputation. A population, originally consisting of the most diverse and, for the most part, very demoralized elements, a population that gradually grew to 2,500, he turned into a model colony, in which drunkenness, police, magistrates, lawsuits, poor laws, charity, were unknown. And all this simply by placing the people in conditions worthy of human beings, and especially by carefully bringing up the rising generation. He was the founder of infant schools, and introduced them first at New Lanark. At the age of two, the children came to school, where they enjoyed themselves so much that they could scarely be got home again. Whilst his competitors worked their people 13 or 14 hours a day, in New Lanark the working-day was only 10 and a half hours. When a crisis in cotton stopped work for four months, his workers received their full wages all the time. And with all this the business more than doubled in value, and to the last yielded large profits to its proprietors.

In spite of all this, Owen was not content. The existence which he secured for his workers was, in his eyes, still far from being worthy of human beings. "The people were slaves at my mercy." The relatively favorable conditions in which he had placed them were still far from allowing a rational development of the character and of the intellect in all directions, much less of the free exercise of all their faculties.

“And yet, the working part of this population of 2,500 persons was daily producing as much real wealth for society as, less than half a century before, it would have required the working part of a population of 600,000 to create. I asked myself, what became of the difference between the wealth consumed by 2,500 persons and that which would have been consumed by 600,000?” [3]

The answer was clear. It had been used to pay the proprietors of the establishment 5 per cent on the capital they had laid out, in addition to over £300,000 clear profit. And that which held for New Lanark held to a still greater extent for all the factories in England.

“If this new wealth had not been created by machinery, imperfectly as it has been applied, the wars of Europe, in opposition to Napoleon, and to support the aristocratic principles of society, could not have been maintained. And yet this new power was the creation of the working-classes.”

Note, l. c., p.22.

To them, therefore, the fruits of this new power belonged. The newly-created gigantic productive forces, hitherto used only to enrich individuals and to enslave the masses, offered to Owen the foundations for a reconstruction of society; they were destined, as the common property of all, to be worked for the common good of all.

Owen’s communism was based upon this purely business foundation, the outcome, so to say, of commercial calculation. Throughout, it maintained this practical character. Thus, in 1823, Owen proposed the relief of the distress in Ireland by Communist colonies, and drew up complete estimates of costs of founding them, yearly expenditure, and probable revenue. And in his definite plan for the future, the technical working out of details is managed with such practical knowledge – ground plan, front and side and bird’s-eye views all included – that the Owen method of social reform once accepted, there is from the practical point of view little to be said against the actual arrangement of details.

His advance in the direction of Communism was the turning-point in Owen’s life. As long as he was simply a philanthropist, he was rewarded with nothing but wealth, applause, honor, and glory. He was the most popular man in Europe. Not only men of his own class, but statesmen and princes listened to him approvingly. But when he came out with his Communist theories that was quite another thing. Three great obstacles seemed to him especially to block the path to social reform: private property, religion, the present form of marriage.

He knew what confronted him if he attacked these – outlawry, excommunication from official society, the loss of his whole social position. But nothing of this prevented him from attacking them without fear of consequences, and what he had foreseen happened. Banished from official society, with a conspiracy of silence against him in the press, ruined by his unsuccessful Communist experiments in America, in which he sacrificed all his fortune, he turned directly to the working-class and continued working in their midst for 30 years. Every social movement, every real advance in England on behalf of the workers links itself on to the name of Robert Owen. He forced through in 1819, after five years’ fighting, the first law limiting the hours of labor of women and children in factories. He was president of the first Congress at which all the Trade Unions of England united in a single great trade association. He introduced as transition measures to the complete communistic organization of society, on the one hand, cooperative societies for retail trade and production. These have since that time, at least, given practical proof that the merchant and the manufacturer are socially quite unnecessary. On the other hand, he introduced labor bazaars for the exchange of the products of labor through the medium of labor-notes, whose unit was a single hour of work; institutions necessarily doomed to failure, but completely anticipating Proudhon’s bank of exchange of a much later period, and differing entirely from this in that it did not claim to be the panacea for all social ills, but only a first step towards a much more radical revolution of society.

The Utopians’ mode of thought has for a long time governed the Socialist ideas of the 19th century, and still governs some of them. Until very recently, all French and English Socialists did homage to it. The earlier German Communism, including that of Weitling, was of the same school. To all these, Socialism is the expression of absolute truth, reason and justice, and has only to be discovered to conquer all the world by virtue of its own power. And as an absolute truth is independent of time, space, and of the historical development of man, it is a mere accident when and where it is discovered. With all this, absolute truth, reason, and justice are different with the founder of each different school. And as each one’s special kind of absolute truth, reason, and justice is again conditioned by his subjective understanding, his conditions of existence, the measure of his knowledge and his intellectual training, there is no other ending possible in this conflict of absolute truths than that they shall be mutually exclusive of one another. Hence, from this nothing could come but a kind of eclectic, average Socialism, which, as a matter of fact, has up to the present time dominated the minds of most of the socialist workers in France and England. Hence, a mish-mash allowing of the most manifold shades of opinion: a mish-mash of such critical statements, economic theories, pictures of future society by the founders of different sects, as excite a minimum of opposition; a mish-mash which is the more easily brewed the more definite sharp edges of the individual constituents are rubbed down in the stream of debate, like rounded pebbles in a brook.

To make a science of Socialism, it had first to be placed upon a real basis.

Next: Dialectics

Notes

1.
This is the passage on the French Revolution:

“Thought, the concept of law, all at once made itself felt, and against this the old scaffolding of wrong could make no stand. In this conception of law, therefore, a constitution has now been established, and henceforth everything must be based upon this. Since the Sun had been in the firmament, and the planets circled around him, the sight had never been seen of man standing upon his head – i.e., on the Idea – and building reality after this image. Anaxagoras first said that the Nous, Reason, rules the world; but now, for the first time, had men come to recognize that the Idea must rule the mental reality. And this was a magnificent sunrise. All thinking Beings have participated in celebrating this holy day. A sublime emotion swayed men at that time, an enthusiasm of reason pervaded the world, as if now had come the reconciliation of the Divine Principle with the world.”

[Hegel: “The Philosophy of history”, 1840, p.535]

Is it not high time to set the anti-Socialist law in action against such teachings, subversive and to the common danger, by the late Professor Hegel?

2.
Engels refers here to the works of the utopian Socialists Thomas More (16th century) and Tommaso Campanella (17th century). See Code de la nature, Morelly, Paris 1841 and De la législation, ou principe des lois, Mably, Amsterdam 1776.

3.
From The Revolution in Mind and Practice, p.21, a memorial addressed to all the “red Republicans, Communists and Socialists of Europe,” and sent to the provisional government of France, 1848, and also “to Queen Victoria and her responsible advisers.”

Frederick Engels

Socialism: Utopian and Scientific

## II

[Dialectics]

In the meantime, along with and after the French philosophy
of the 18th century, had arisen the new German philosophy, culminating
in Hegel.

Its greatest merit was the taking up again of dialectics as the
highest form of reasoning. The old Greek philosophers were all born natural
dialecticians, and Aristotle, the most encyclopaedic of them, had already
analyzed the most essential forms of dialectic thought. The newer philosophy,
on the other hand, although in it also dialectics had brilliant exponents
(e.g. Descartes and Spinoza), had, especially through English influence,
become more and more rigidly fixed in the so-called metaphysical mode of
reasoning, by which also the French of the 18th century were almost wholly
dominated, at all events in their special philosophical work. Outside philosophy
in the restricted sense, the French nevertheless produced masterpieces
of dialectic. We need only call to mind Diderot's Le Neveu de Rameau,
and Rousseau's Discours sur l'origine et les fondements de l'inegalite
parmi les hommes. We give here, in brief, the essential character
of these two modes of thought.

When we consider and reflect upon Nature at large, or the history
of mankind, or our own intellectual activity, at first we see the picture
of an endless entanglement of relations and reactions, permutations and
combinations, in which nothing remains what, where and as it was, but everything
moves, changes, comes into being and passes away. We see, therefore, at
first the picture as a whole, with its individual parts still more or less
kept in the background; we observe the movements, transitions, connections,
rather than the things that move, combine, and are connected. This primitive,
naive but intrinsically correct conception of the world is that of ancient
Greek philosophy, and was first clearly formulated by Heraclitus: everything
is and is not, for everything is fluid, is constantly changing, constantly
coming into being and passing away.[A]

But this conception, correctly as it expresses the general character
of the picture of appearances as a whole, does not suffice to explain the
details of which this picture is made up, and so long as we do not understand
these, we have not a clear idea of the whole picture. In order to understand
these details, we must detach them from their natural, special causes,
effects, etc. This is, primarily, the task of natural science and historical
research: branches of science which the Greek of classical times, on very
good grounds, relegated to a subordinate position, because they had first
of all to collect materials for these sciences to work upon. A certain
amount of natural and historical material must be collected before there
can be any critical analysis, comparison, and arrangement in classes, orders,
and species. The foundations of the exact natural sciences were, therefore,
first worked out by the Greeks of the Alexandrian period [B],
and later on, in the Middle Ages, by the Arabs. Real natural science dates

from the second half of the 15th century, and thence onward it had advanced

with constantly increasing rapidity. The analysis of Nature into its individual

parts, the grouping of the different natural processes and objects in definite

classes, the study of the internal anatomy of organized bodies in their

manifold forms — these were the fundamental conditions of the gigantic

strides in our knowledge of Nature that have been made during the last

400 years. But this method of work has also left us as legacy the habit

of observing natural objects and processes in isolation, apart from their

connection with the vast whole; of observing them in repose, not in motion;

as constraints, not as essentially variables; in their death, not in their

life. And when this way of looking at things was transferred by Bacon and

Locke from natural science to philosophy, it begot the narrow, metaphysical

mode of thought peculiar to the last century.

To the metaphysician, things and their mental reflexes, ideas,
are isolated, are to be considered one after the other and apart from
each other, are objects of investigation fixed, rigid, given once for all.
He thinks in absolutely irreconcilable antitheses. His communication is
"'yea, yea; nay, nay'; for whatsoever is more than these cometh of evil."
For him, a thing either exists or does not exist; a thing cannot at the
same time be itself and something else. Positive and negative absolutely
exclude one another; cause and effect stand in a rigid antithesis, one to
the other.

At first sight, this mode of thinking seems to us very luminous,
because it is that of so-called sound commonsense. Only sound commonsense,
respectable fellow that he is, in the homely realm of his own four walls,
has very wonderful adventures directly he ventures out into the wide world
of research. And the metaphysical mode of thought, justifiable and necessary
as it is in a number of domains whose extent varies according to the nature
of the particular object of investigation, sooner or later reaches a limit,
beyond which it becomes one-sided, restricted, abstract, lost in insoluble
contradictions. In the contemplation of individual things, it forgets the
connection between them; in the contemplation of their existence, it forgets
the beginning and end of that existence; of their repose, it forgets their
motion. It cannot see the woods for the trees.

For everyday purposes, we know and can say, e.g., whether an animal
is alive or not. But, upon closer inquiry, we find that this is, in many
cases, a very complex question, as the jurists know very well. They have
cudgelled their brains in vain to discover a rational limit beyond which
the killing of the child in its mother's womb is murder. It is just as
impossible to determine absolutely the moment of death, for physiology
proves that death is not an instantaneous, momentary phenomenon, but a
very protracted process.

In like manner, every organized being is every moment the same
and not the same; every moment, it assimilates matter supplied from without,
and gets rid of other matter; every moment, some cells of its body die
and others build themselves anew; in a longer or shorter time, the matter
of its body is completely renewed, and is replaced by other molecules of
matter, so that every organized being is always itself, and yet something
other than itself.

Further, we find upon closer investigation that the two poles
of an antithesis, positive and negative, e.g., are as inseparable as they
are opposed, and that despite all their opposition, they mutually interpenetrate.
And we find, in like manner, that cause and effect are conceptions which
only hold good in their application to individual cases; but as soon as
we consider the individual cases in their general connection with the universe
as a whole, they run into each other, and they become confounded when we
contemplate that universal action and reaction in which causes and effects
are eternally changing places, so that what is effect here and now will
be cause there and then, and vice versa.

None of these processes and modes of thought enters into the framework
of metaphysical reasoning. Dialectics, on the other hand, comprehends things
and their representations, ideas, in their essential connection, concatenation,
motion, origin and ending. Such processes as those mentioned above are,
therefore, so many corroborations of its own method of procedure.

Nature is the proof of dialectics, and it must be said for modern
science that it has furnished this proof with very rich materials increasingly
daily, and thus has shown that, in the last resort, Nature works dialectically
and not metaphysically; that she does not move in the eternal oneness of
a perpetually recurring circle, but goes through a real historical evolution.
In this connection, Darwin must be named before all others. He dealt the
metaphysical conception of Nature the heaviest blow by his proof that all
organic beings, plants, animals, and man himself, are the products of a
process of evolution going on through millions of years. But, the naturalists,
who have learned to think dialectically, are few and far between, and this
conflict of the results of discovery with preconceived modes of thinking,
explains the endless confusion now reigning in theoretical natural science,
the despair of teachers as well as learners, of authors and readers alike.

An exact representation of the universe, of its evolution, of
the development of mankind, and of the reflection of this evolution in
the minds of men, can therefore only be obtained by the methods of dialectics
with its constant regard to the innumerable actions and reactions of life
and death, of progressive or retrogressive changes. And in this spirit,
the new German philosophy has worked. Kant began his career by resolving
the stable Solar system of Newton and its eternal duration, after the famous
initial impulse had once been given, into the result of a historical process,
the formation of the Sun and all the planets out of a rotating, nebulous
mass. From this, he at the same time drew the conclusion that, given this
origin of the Solar system, its future death followed of necessity. His
theory, half a century later, was established mathematically by Laplace,
and half a century after that, the spectroscope proved the existence in
space of such incandescent masses of gas in various stages of condensation.

This new German philosophy culminated in the Hegelian system. In this system
— and herein is its great merit — for the first time the whole world,
natural, historical, intellectual, is represented as a process — i.e.,
as in constant motion, change, transformation, development; and the attempt
is made to trace out the internal connection that makes a continuous whole
of all this movement and development. From this point of view, the history
of mankind no longer appeared as a wild whirl of senseless deeds of violence,
all equally condemnable at the judgment seat of mature philosophic reason
and which are best forgotten as quickly as possible, but as the process
of evolution of man himself. It was now the task of the intellect to follow
the gradual march of this process through all its devious ways, and to
trace out the inner law running through all its apparently accidental phenomena.

That the Hegelian system did not solve the problem it propounded
is here immaterial. Its epoch-making merit was that it propounded the problem.
This problem is one that no single individual will ever be able to solve.
Although Hegel was — with Saint-Simon — the most encyclopaedic mind of
his time, yet he was limited, first, by the necessary limited extent of
his own knowledge and, second, by the limited extent and depth of the knowledge
and conceptions of his age. To these limits, a third must be added; Hegel
was an idealist. To him, the thoughts within his brain were not the more
or less abstract pictures of actual things and processes, but, conversely,
things and their evolution were only the realized pictures of the "Idea",
existing somewhere from eternity before the world was. This way of thinking
turned everything upside down, and completely reversed the actual connection
of things in the world. Correctly and ingeniously as many groups of facts
were grasped by Hegel, yet, for the reasons just given, there is much that
is botched, artificial, labored, in a word, wrong in point of detail. The
Hegelian system, in itself, was a colossal miscarriage — but it was also
the last of its kind.

It was suffering, in fact, from an internal and incurable contradiction.
Upon the one hand, its essential proposition was the conception that human
history is a process of evolution, which, by its very nature, cannot find
its intellectual final term in the discovery of any so-called absolute
truth. But, on the other hand, it laid claim to being the very essence
of this absolute truth. A system of natural and historical knowledge, embracing
everything, and final for all time, is a contradiction to the fundamental
law of dialectic reasoning.

This law, indeed, by no means excludes, but, on the contrary,
includes the idea that the systematic knowledge of the external universe
can make giant strides from age to age.

The perception of the fundamental contradiction in German
idealism led necessarily back to materialism, but — nota bene —
not to the simply metaphysical, exclusively mechanical materialism of the
18th century. Old materialism looked upon all previous history as a crude
heap of irrationality and violence; modern materialism sees in it the process
of evolution of humanity, and aims at discovering the laws thereof. With
the French of the 18th century, and even with Hegel, the conception obtained
of Nature as a whole — moving in narrow circles, and forever immutable,
with its eternal celestial bodies, as Newton, and unalterable organic species,
as Linnaeus, taught. Modern materialism embraces the more recent discoveries
of natural science, according to which Nature also has its history in time,
the celestial bodies, like the organic species that, under favorable conditions,
people them, being born and perishing. And even if Nature, as a whole,
must still be said to move in recurrent cycles, these cycles assume infinitely
larger dimensions. In both aspects, modern materialism is essentially dialectic,
and no longer requires the assistance of that sort of philosophy which,
queen-like, pretended to rule the remaining mob of sciences. As soon as
each special science is bound to make clear its position in the great totality
of things and of our knowledge of things, a special science dealing with
this totality is superfluous or unnecessary. That which still survives
of all earlier philosophy is the science of thought and its law — formal
logic and dialectics. Everything else is subsumed in the positive science
of Nature and history.

Whilst, however, the revolution in the conception of Nature could
only be made in proportion to the corresponding positive materials furnished
by research, already much earlier certain historical facts had occurred
which led to a decisive change in the conception of history. In 1831, the
first working-class rising took place in Lyons; between 1838 and 1842,
the first national working-class movement, that of the English Chartists,
reached its height. The class struggle between proletariat and bourgeoisie
came to the front in the history of the most advanced countries in Europe,
in proportion to the development, upon the one hand, of modern industry,
upon the other, of the newly-acquired political supremacy of the bourgeoisie.
Facts more and more strenuously gave the lie to the teachings of bourgeois
economy as to the identity of the interests of capital and labor, as to
the universal harmony and universal prosperity that would be the consequence
of unbridled competition. All these things could no longer be ignored,
any more than the French and English Socialism, which was their theoretical,
though very imperfect, expression. But the old idealist conception of history,
which was not yet dislodged, knew nothing of class struggles based upon

economic interests, knew nothing of economic interests; production and

all economic relations appeared in it only as incidental, subordinate elements

in the "history of civilization".

The new facts made imperative a new examination of all past history.

Then it was seen that all past history, with the exception of its

primitive stages, was the history of class struggles; that these warring

classes of society are always the products of the modes of production and

of exchange — in a word, of the economic conditions of their time;

that the economic structure of society always furnishes the real basis,

starting from which we can alone work out the ultimate explanation of the

whole superstructure of juridical and political institutions as well as

of the religious, philosophical, and other ideas of a given historical

period. Hegel has freed history from metaphysics — he made it dialectic;

but his conception of history was essentially idealistic. But now idealism

was driven from its last refuge, the philosophy of history; now a materialistic

treatment of history was propounded, and a method found of explaining man's

"knowing" by his "being", instead of, as heretofore, his "being" by his

"knowing".

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, but

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 labor 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 labor power of his

laborer 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. The

next thing was to work out all its details and relations.

Next: Historical Materialism

Notes

[A]

Unknown to the Western world until the 20th-century, the Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu was a predecessor of or possibly contemporary to Heraclitus. Lao Tzu wrote the renowned Tao Te Ching in which he also espouses the fundamental principles of dialectics.

[B]

The Alexandrian period of the development of science comprises the

period extending from the 3rd century B.C. to the 17th century

A.D. It derives its name from the town of Alexandria in Egypt,

which was one of the most important centres of international

economic intercourses at that time. In the Alexandrian period,

mathematics (Euclid and Archimedes), geography, astronomy, anatomy,

physiology, etc., attained considerable development.

China also been began development in natural sciences in the third century B.C.E.

Frederick Engels

Socialism: Utopian and Scientific

## III

[Historical Materialism]

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. The growing perception that existing social institutions are unreasonable
and unjust, that reason has become unreason, and right wrong [1],
is only proof that in the modes of production and exchange changes have
silently taken place with which the social order, adapted to earlier economic
conditions, is no longer in keeping. From this it also follows that the
means of getting rid of the incongruities that have been brought to light
must also be present, in a more or less developed condition, within the
changed modes of production themselves. These means are not to be invented
by deduction from fundamental principles, but are to be discovered in the
stubborn facts of the existing system of production.

What is, then, the position of modern Socialism in this connection?

The present situation of society — this is now pretty generally
conceded — is the creation of the ruling class of today, of the bourgeoisie.
The mode of production peculiar to the bourgeoisie, known, since Marx,
as the capitalist mode of production, was incompatible with the feudal
system, with the privileges it conferred upon individuals, entire social
ranks and local corporations, as well as with the hereditary ties of subordination
which constituted the framework of its social organization. The bourgeoisie
broke up the feudal system and built upon its ruins the capitalist order
of society, the kingdom of free competition, of personal liberty, of the
equality, before the law, of all commodity owners, of all the rest of the
capitalist blessings. Thenceforward, the capitalist mode of production
could develop in freedom. Since steam, machinery, and the making of machines
by machinery transformed the older manufacture into modern industry, the
productive forces, evolved under the guidance of the bourgeoisie, developed
with a rapidity and in a degree unheard of before. But just as the older
manufacture, in its time, and handicraft, becoming more developed under
its influence, had come into collision with the feudal trammels of the
guilds, so now modern industry, in its complete development, comes into
collision with the bounds within which the capitalist mode of production
holds it confined. The new productive forces have already outgrown the
capitalistic mode of using them. And this conflict between productive forces
and modes of production is not a conflict engendered in the mind of man,
like that between original sin and divine justice. It exists, in fact,
objectively, outside us, independently of the will and actions even of
the men that have brought it on. Modern Socialism is nothing but the reflex,
in thought, of this conflict in fact; its ideal reflection in the minds,
first, of the class directly suffering under it, the working class.

Now, in what does this conflict consist?

Before capitalist production — i.e., in the Middle Ages — the
system of petty industry obtained generally, based upon the private property
of the laborers in their means of production; in the country, the agriculture
of the small peasant, freeman, or serf; in the towns, the handicrafts organized
in guilds. The instruments of labor — land, agricultural implements, the
workshop, the tool — were the instruments of labor of single individuals,
adapted for the use of one worker, and, therefore, of necessity, small,
dwarfish, circumscribed. But, for this very reason, they belonged as a
rule to the producer himself. To concentrate these scattered, limited means
of production, to enlarge them, to turn them into the powerful levers of
production of the present day — this was precisely the historic role of
capitalist production and of its upholder, the bourgeoisie. In the fourth
section of Capital, Marx has explained in detail how since the 15th
century this has been historically worked out through the three phases
of simple co-operation, manufacture, and modern industry. But the bourgeoisie,
as is shown there, could not transform these puny means of production into
mighty productive forces without transforming them, at the same time, from
means of production of the individual into social means of production
only workable by a collectivity of men. The spinning wheel, the handloom,
the blacksmith's hammer, were replaced by the spinning-machine, the power-loom,
the steam-hammer; the individual workshop, by the factory implying the
co-operation of hundreds and thousands of workmen. In like manner, production
itself changed from a series of individual into a series of social acts,
and the production from individual to social products. The yarn, the cloth,
the metal articles that now come out of the factory were the joint product
of many workers, through whose hands they had successively to pass before
they were ready. No one person could say of them: "I made that; this is
my product."

But where, in a given society, the fundamental form of production
is that spontaneous division of labor which creeps in gradually and not
upon any preconceived plan, there the products take on the form of commodities,
whose mutual exchange, buying and selling, enable the individual producers
to satisfy their manifold wants. And this was the case in the Middle Ages.
The peasant, e.g., sold to the artisan agricultural products and bought
from him the products of handicraft. Into this society of individual producers,
of commodity producers, the new mode of production thrust itself. In the
midst of the old division of labor, grown up spontaneously and upon no
definite plan, which had governed the whole of society, now arose division
of labor upon a definite plan, as organized in the factory; side
by side with individual production appeared social production.
The products of both were sold in the same market, and, therefore, at prices
at least approximately equal. But organization upon a definite plan was
stronger than spontaneous division of labor. The factories working with
the combined social forces of a collectivity of individuals produced their
commodities far more cheaply than the individual small producers. Individual
producers succumbed in one department after another. Socialized production
revolutionized all the old methods of production. But its revolutionary
character was, at the same time, so little recognized that it was, on the
contrary, introduced as a means of increasing and developing the production
of commodities. When it arose, it found ready-made, and made liberal use
of, certain machinery for the production and exchange of commodities: merchants'
capital, handicraft, wage-labor. Socialized production thus introducing
itself as a new form of the production of commodities, it was a matter
of course that under it the old forms of appropriation remained in full
swing, and were applied to its products as well.

In the medieval stage of evolution of the production of commodities,
the question as to the owner of the product of labor could not arise. The
individual producer, as a rule, had, from raw material belonging to himself,
and generally his own handiwork, produced it with his own tools, by the
labor of his own hands or of his family. There was no need for him to appropriate
the new product. It belonged wholly to him, as a matter of course. His
property in the product was, therefore, based upon his own labor.
Even where external help was used, this was, as a rule, of little importance,
and very generally was compensated by something other than wages. The apprentices
and journeymen of the guilds worked less for board and wages than for education,
in order that they might become master craftsmen themselves.

Then came the concentration of the means of production and of
the producers in large workshops and manufactories, their transformation
into actual socialized means of production and socialized producers. But
the socialized producers and means of production and their products were
still treated, after this change, just as they had been before — i.e.,
as the means of production and the products of individuals. Hitherto, the
owner of the instruments of labor had himself appropriated the product,
because, as a rule, it was his own product and the assistance of others
was the exception. Now, the owner of the instruments of labor always appropriated
to himself the product, although it was no longer his product but
exclusively the product of the labor of others. Thus, the products
now produced socially were not appropriated by those who had actually set
in motion the means of production and actually produced the commodities,
but by the capitalists. The means of production, and production
itself, had become in essence socialized. But they were subjected to a
form of appropriation which presupposes the private production of individuals,
under which, therefore, every one owns his own product and brings it to
market. The mode of production is subjected to this form of appropriation,
although it abolishes the conditions upon which the latter rests. [2]

This contradiction, which gives to the new mode of production
its capitalistic character, contains the germ of the whole of the social
antagonisms of today. The greater the mastery obtained by the new mode
of production over all important fields of production and in all manufacturing
countries, the more it reduced individual production to an insignificant
residuum, the more clearly was brought out the incompatibility of socialized
production with capitalistic appropriation.

The first capitalists found, as we have said, alongside of other
forms of labor, wage-labor ready-made for them on the market. But it was
exceptional, complementary, accessory, transitory wage-labor. The agricultural
laborer, though, upon occasion, he hired himself out by the day, had a
few acres of his own land on which he could at all events live at a pinch.
The guilds were so organized that the journeyman of today became the master
of tomorrow. But all this changed, as soon as the means of production became
socialized and concentrated in the hands of capitalists. The means of production,
as well as the product, of the individual producer became more and more
worthless; there was nothing left for him but to turn wage-worker under
the capitalist. Wage-labor, aforetime the exception and accessory, now
became the rule and basis of all production; aforetime complementary, it
now became the sole remaining function of the worker. The wage-worker for
a time became a wage-worker for life. The number of these permanent was
further enormously increased by the breaking-up of the feudal system that
occurred at the same time, by the disbanding of the retainers of the feudal
lords, the eviction of the peasants from their homesteads, etc. The separation
was made complete between the means of production concentrated in the hands
of the capitalists, on the one side, and the producers, possessing nothing
but their labor-power, on the other. The contradiction between socialized
production and capitalistic appropriation manifested itself as the antagonism
of proletariat and bourgeoisie.

We have seen that the capitalistic mode of production thrust its
way into a society of commodity-producers, of individual producers, whose
social bond was the exchange of their products. But every society based
upon the production of commodities has this peculiarity: that the producers
have lost control over their own social inter-relations. Each man produces
for himself with such means of production as he may happen to have, and
for such exchange as he may require to satisfy his remaining wants. No
one knows how much of his particular article is coming on the market, nor
how much of it will be wanted. No one knows whether his individual product
will meet an actual demand, whether he will be able to make good his costs
of production or even to sell his commodity at all. Anarchy reigns in socialized
production.

But the production of commodities, like every other form of production,
has it peculiar, inherent laws inseparable from it; and these laws work,
despite anarchy, in and through anarchy. They reveal themselves in the
only persistent form of social inter-relations — i.e., in exchange —
and here they affect the individual producers as compulsory laws of competition.
They are, at first, unknown to these producers themselves, and have to
be discovered by them gradually and as the result of experience. They work
themselves out, therefore, independently of the producers, and in antagonism
to them, as inexorable natural laws of their particular form of production.
The product governs the producers.

In mediaeval society, especially in the earlier centuries, production
was essentially directed toward satisfying the wants of the individual.
It satisfied, in the main, only the wants of the producer and his family.
Where relations of personal dependence existed, as in the country, it also
helped to satisfy the wants of the feudal lord. In all this there was,
therefore, no exchange; the products, consequently, did not assume the
character of commodities. The family of the peasant produced almost everything
they wanted: clothes and furniture, as well as the means of subsistence.
Only when it began to produce more than was sufficient to supply its own
wants and the payments in kind to the feudal lords, only then did it also
produce commodities. This surplus, thrown into socialized exchange and
offered for sale, became commodities.

The artisan in the towns, it is true, had from the first to produce
for exchange. But they, also, themselves supplied the greatest part of
their individual wants. They had gardens and plots of land. They turned
their cattle out into the communal forest, which, also, yielded them timber
and firing. The women spun flax, wool, and so forth. Production for the
purpose of exchange, production of commodities, was only in its infancy.
Hence, exchange was restricted, the market narrow, the methods of production
stable; there was local exclusiveness without, local unity within; the
mark in the country; in the town, the guild.

But with the extension of the production of commodities, and especially
with the introduction of the capitalist mode of production, the laws of
commodity-production, hitherto latent, came into action more openly and
with greater force. The old bonds were loosened, the old exclusive limits
broken through, the producers were more and more turned into independent,
isolated producers of commodities. It became apparent that the production
of society at large was ruled by absence of plan, by accident, by anarchy;
and this anarchy grew to greater and greater height. 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. By this, the old, peaceful, stable condition
of things was ended. Wherever this organization of production was introduced
into a branch of industry, it brooked no other method of production by
its side. The field of labor became a battle-ground. The great geographical
discoveries, and the colonization following them, multiplied markets and
quickened the transformation of handicraft into manufacture. The war did
not simply break out between the individual producers of particular localities.
The local struggles begat, in their turn, national conflicts, the commercial
wars of the 17th and 18th centuries.

Finally, modern industry and the opening of the world-market made
the struggle universal, and at the same time gave it an unheard-of virulence.
Advantages in natural or artificial conditions of production now decide
the existence or non-existence of individual capitalists, as well as of
whole industries and countries. He that falls is remorselessly cast aside.
It is the Darwinian struggle of the individual for existence transferred
from Nature to society with intensified violence. The conditions of existence
natural to the animal appear as the final term of human development. The
contradiction between socialized production and capitalistic appropriation
now presents itself as an antagonism between the organization of production
in the individual workshop and the anarchy of production in society generally.

The capitalistic mode of production moves in these two forms of
the antagonism immanent to it from its very origin. It is never able to
get out of that "vicious circle" which Fourier had already discovered.
What Fourier could not, indeed, see in his time is that this circle is
gradually narrowing; that the movement becomes more and more a spiral,
and must come to an end, like the movement of planets, by collision with
the centre. It is the compelling force of anarchy in the production of
society at large that more and more completely turns the great majority
of men into proletarians; and it is the masses of the proletariat again
who will finally put an end to anarchy in production. It is the compelling
force of anarchy in social production that turns the limitless perfectibility
of machinery under modern industry into a compulsory law by which every
individual industrial capitalist must perfect his machinery more and more,
under penalty of ruin.

But the perfecting of machinery is making human labor superfluous.
If the introduction and increase of machinery means the displacement of
millions of manual by a few machine-workers, improvement in machinery means
the displacement of more and more of the machine-workers themselves. It
means, in the last instance, the production of a number of available wage
workers in excess of the average needs of capital, the formation of a complete
industrial reserve army, as I called it in 1845 [3],
available at the times when industry is working at high pressure, to be
cast out upon the street when the inevitable crash comes, a constant dead
weight upon the limbs of the working-class in its struggle for existence
with capital, a regulator for keeping of wages down to the low level that
suits the interests of capital.

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.

Thus it comes about that the economizing of the instruments of labor becomes
at the same time, from the outset, the most reckless waste of labor-power,
and robbery based upon the normal conditions under which labor functions;
that machinery,

"the most powerful instrument for shortening labor time, becomes the
most unfailing means for placing every moment of the laborer's time and
that of his family at the disposal of the capitalist for the purpose of
expanding the value of his capital." (Capital, English edition,
p. 406)

Thus it comes about that the overwork of some becomes the preliminary
condition for the idleness of others, and that modern industry, which hunts
after new consumers over the whole world, forces the consumption of the
masses at home down to a starvation minimum, and in doing thus destroys
its own home market.

"The law that always equilibrates the relative surplus-population,
or industrial reserve army, to the extent and energy of accumulation, this
law rivets the laborer to capital more firmly than the wedges of Vulcan
did Prometheus to the rock. It establishes an accumulation of misery, corresponding
with the accumulation of capital. Accumulation of wealth at one pole 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 class that produces its own product in the form of capital
(Marx's Capital, p. 661)

And to expect any other division of the products from the capitalist mode
of production is the same as expecting the electrodes of a battery not
to decompose acidulated water, not to liberate oxygen at the positive,
hydrogen at the negative pole, so long as they are connected with the
battery.

We have seen that the ever-increasing perfectibility of modern machinery
is, by the anarchy of social production, turned into a compulsory law that
forces the individual industrial capitalist always to improve his machinery,
always to increase its productive force. The bare possibility of extending
the field of production is transformed for him into a similarly compulsory
law. The enormous expansive force of modern industry, compared with which
that of gases is mere child's play, appears to us now as a necessity
for expansion, both qualitative and quantative, that laughs at all resistance.
Such resistance is offered by consumption, by sales, by the markets for
the products of modern industry. But the capacity for extension, extensive
and intensive, of the markets is primarily governed by quite different
laws that work much less energetically. The extension of the markets cannot
keep pace with the extension of production. The collision becomes inevitable,
and as this cannot produce any real solution so long as it does not break
in pieces the capitalist mode of production, the collisions become periodic.
Capitalist production has begotten another "vicious circle".

As a matter of fact, since 1825, when the first general crisis
broke out, the whole industrial and commercial world, production and exchange
among all civilized peoples and their more or less barbaric hangers-on,
are thrown out of joint about once every 10 years. Commerce is at a stand-still,
the markets are glutted, products accumulate, as multitudinous as they
are unsaleable, hard cash disappears, credit vanishes, factories are closed,
the mass of the workers are in want of the means of subsistence, because
they have produced too much of the means of subsistence; bankruptcy follows
upon bankruptcy, execution upon execution. The stagnation lasts for years;
productive forces and products are wasted and destroyed wholesale, until
the accumulated mass of commodities finally filter off, more or less depreciated
in value, until production and exchange gradually begin to move again.
Little by little, the pace quickens. It becomes a trot. The industrial
trot breaks into a canter, the canter in turn grows into the headlong gallop
of a perfect steeplechase of industry, commercial credit, and speculation,
which finally, after breakneck leaps, ends where it began — in the ditch
of a crisis. And so over and over again. We have now, since the year 1825,
gone through this five times, and at the present moment (1877), we are
going through it for the sixth time. And the character of these crises
is so clearly defined that Fourier hit all of them off when he described
the first "crise plethorique", a crisis from plethora.

In these crises, the contradiction between socialized production
and capitalist appropriation ends in a violent explosion. The circulation
of commodities is, for the time being, stopped. Money, the means of circulation,
becomes a hindrance to circulation. All the laws of production and circulation
of commodities are turned upside down. The economic collision has reached
its apogee. The mode of production is in rebellion against the mode
of exchange.

The fact that the socialized organization of production within
the factory has developed so far that it has become incompatible with the
anarchy of production in society, which exists side by side with and dominates
it, is brought home to the capitalist themselves by the violent concentration
of capital that occurs during crises, through the ruin of many large, and
a still greater number of small, capitalists. The whole mechanism of the
capitalist mode of production breaks down under the pressure of the productive
forces, its own creations. It is no longer able to turn all this mass of
means of production into capital. They lie fallow, and for that very reason
the industrial reserve army must also lie fallow. Means of production,
means of subsistence, available laborers, all the elements of production
and of general wealth, are present in abundance. But "abundance becomes
the source of distress and want" (Fourier), because it is the very thing
that prevents the transformation of the means of production and subsistence
into capital. For in capitalistic society, the means of production can
only function when they have undergone a preliminary transformation into
capital, into the means of exploiting human labor-power. The necessity
of this transformation into capital of the means of production and subsistence
stands like a ghost between these and the workers. It alone prevents the
coming together of the material and personal levers of production; it alone
forbids the means of production to function, the workers to work and live.
On the one hand, therefore, the capitalistic mode of production stands
convicted of its own incapacity to further direct these productive forces.
On the other, these productive forces themselves, with increasing energy,
press forward to the removal of the existing contradiction, to the abolition
of their quality as capital, to the practical recognition of their character
as social production forces.

This rebellion of the productive forces, as they grow more and
more powerful, against their quality as capital, this stronger and stronger
command that their social character shall be recognized, forces the capital
class itself to treat them more and more as social productive forces, so
far as this is possible under capitalist conditions. The period of industrial
high pressure, with its unbounded inflation of credit, not less than the
crash itself, by the collapse of great capitalist establishments, tends
to bring about that form of the socialization of great masses of the means
of production which we meet with in the different kinds of joint-stock
companies. Many of these means of production and of distribution are, from
the outset, so colossal that, like the railways, they exclude all other
forms of capitalistic expansion. At a further stage of evolution, this
form also becomes insufficient. The producers on a large scale in a particular
branch of an industry in a particular country unite in a "Trust", a union
for the purpose of regulating production. They determine the total amount
to be produced, parcel it out among themselves, and thus enforce the selling
price fixed beforehand. But trusts of this kind, as soon as business becomes
bad, are generally liable to break up, and on this very account compel
a yet greater concentration of association. The whole of a particular industry
is turned into one gigantic joint-stock company; internal competition gives
place to the internal monopoly of this one company. This has happened in
1890 with the English alkali production, which is now, after the fusion
of 48 large works, in the hands of one company, conducted upon a single
plan, and with a capital of 6,000,000 pounds.

In the trusts, freedom of competition changes into its very opposite
— into monopoly; and the production without any definite plan of capitalistic
society capitulates to the production upon a definite plan of the invading
socialistic society. Certainly, this is so far still to the benefit and
advantage of the capitalists. But, in this case, the exploitation is so
palpable, that it must break down. No nation will put up with production
conducted by trusts, with so barefaced an exploitation of the community
by a small band of dividend-mongers.

In any case, with trusts or without, the official representative
of capitalist society — the state — will ultimately have to undertake
the direction of production. [4]
This necessity for conversion into State property is felt first in the
great institutions for intercourse and communication — the post office,
the telegraphs, the railways.

If the crises demonstrate the incapacity of the bourgeoisie for
managing any longer modern productive forces, the transformation of the
great establishments for production and distribution into joint-stock companies,
trusts, and State property, show how unnecessary the bourgeoisie are for
that purpose. All the social functions of the capitalist has no further
social function than that of pocketing dividends, tearing off coupons,
and gambling on the Stock Exchange, where the different capitalists despoil
one another of their capital. 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,
although not immediately into those of the industrial reserve army.

But, the transformation — either into joint-stock companies and
trusts, or into State-ownership — does not do away with the capitalistic
nature of the productive forces. In the joint-stock companies and trusts,
this is obvious. And the modern State, again, is only the organization
that bourgeois society takes on in order to support the external conditions
of the capitalist mode of production against the encroachments as well
of the workers as of individual capitalists. The modern state, no matter
what its form, is essentially a capitalist machine — the state of the
capitalists, the ideal personification of the total national capital. The
more it proceeds to the taking over of productive forces, the more does
it actually become the national capitalist, the more citizens does it exploit.
The workers remain wage-workers — proletarians. The capitalist relation
is not done away with. It is, rather, brought to a head. But, brought to
a head, it topples over. State-ownership of the productive forces is not
the solution of the conflict, but concealed within it are the technical
conditions that form the elements of that solution.

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.

Active social forces work exactly like natural forces: blindly,
forcibly, destructively, so long as we do not understand, and reckon with,
them. But, when once we understand them, when once we grasp their action,
their direction, their effects, it depends only upon ourselves to subject
them more and more to our own will, and, by means of them, to reach our
own ends. And this holds quite especially of the mighty productive forces
of today. As long as we obstinately refuse to understand the nature and
the character of these social means of action — and this understanding
goes against the grain of the capitalist mode of production, and its defenders
— so long these forces are at work in spite of us, in opposition to us,
so long they master us, as we have shown above in detail.

But when once their nature is understood, they can, in the hands of the producers
working together, be transformed from master demons into willing servants.
The difference is as that between the destructive force of electricity
in the lightning in the storm, and electricity under command in the telegraph
and the voltaic arc; the difference between a conflagration, and fire working
in the service of man. With this recognition, at last, of the real nature
of the productive forces of today, the social anarchy of production gives
place to a social regulation of production upon a definite plan, according
to the needs of the community and of each individual. Then the capitalist
mode of appropriation, in which the product enslaves first the producer,
and then the appropriator, is replaced by the mode of appropriation of
the products that is based upon the nature of the modern means of production;
upon the one hand, direct social appropriation, as means to the maintenance
and extension of production — on the other, direct individual appropriation,
as means of subsistence and of enjoyment.

Whilst the capitalist mode of production more and more completely
transforms the great majority of the population into proletarians, it creates
the power which, under penalty of its own destruction, is forced to accomplish
this revolution. Whilst it forces on more and more of the transformation
of the vast means of production, already socialized, into State property,
it shows itself the way to accomplishing this revolution. The proletariat
seizes political power and turns the means of production into State property.

But, in doing this, it abolishes itself as proletariat, abolishes
all class distinction and class antagonisms, abolishes also the State as
State. Society, thus far, based upon class antagonisms, had need of the
State. That is, of an organization of the particular class which was, pro
tempore, the exploiting class, an organization for the purpose of preventing
any interference from without with the existing conditions of production,
and, therefore, especially, for the purpose of forcibly keeping the exploited
classes in the condition of oppression corresponding with the given mode
of production (slavery, serfdom, wage-labor). The State was the official
representative of society as a whole; the gathering of it together into
a visible embodiment. But, it was this only in so far as it was the State
of that class which itself represented, for the time being, society as
a whole:

in ancient times, the State of slaveowning citizens;

in the Middle Ages, the feudal lords;

in our own times, the bourgeoisie.

When, at last, it becomes the real representative of the whole of society,
it renders itself unnecessary. As soon as there is no longer any social
class to be held in subjection; as soon as class rule, and the individual
struggle for existence based upon our present anarchy in production, with
the collisions and excesses arising from these, are removed, nothing more
remains to be repressed, and a special repressive force, a State, is no
longer necessary. The first act by virtue of which the State really constitutes
itself the representative of the whole of society — the taking possession
of the means of production in the name of society — this is, at the same
time, its last independent act as a State. State interference in social
relations becomes, in one domain after another, superfluous, and then dies
out of itself; the government of persons is replaced by the administration
of things, and by the conduct of processes of production. The State is
not "abolished". It dies out. This gives the measure of the value
of the phrase: "a free State", both as to its justifiable use at times by
agitators, and as to its ultimate scientific insufficiency; and also of
the demands of the so-called anarchists for the abolition of the State
out of hand.

Since the historical appearance of the capitalist mode of production,
the appropriation by society of all the means of production has often been
dreamed of, more or less vaguely, by individuals, as well as by sects,
as the ideal of the future. But it could become possible, could become
a historical necessity, only when the actual conditions for its realization
were there. Like every other social advance, it becomes practicable, not
by men understanding that the existence of classes is in contradiction
to justice, equality, etc., not by the mere willingness to abolish these
classes, but by virtue of certain new economic conditions. The separation
of society into an exploiting and an exploited class, a ruling and an oppressed
class, was the necessary consequences of the deficient and restricted development
of production in former times. So long as the total social labor only yields
a produce which but slightly exceeds that barely necessary for the existence
of all; so long, therefore, as labor engages all or almost all the time
of the great majority of the members of society — so long, of necessity,
this society is divided into classes. Side by side with the great majority,
exclusively bond slaves to labor, arises a class freed from directly productive
labor, which looks after the general affairs of society: the direction
of labor, State business, law, science, art, etc. It is, therefore, the
law of division of labor that lies at the basis of the division into classes.
But this does not prevent this division into classes from being carried
out by means of violence and robbery, trickery and fraud. It does not prevent
the ruling class, once having the upper hand, from consolidating its power
at the expense of the working-class, from turning its social leadership
into an intensified exploitation of the masses.

But if, upon this showing, division into classes has a certain
historical justification, it has this only for a given period, only under
given social conditions. It was based upon the insufficiency of production.
It will be swept away by the complete development of modern productive
forces. And, in fact, the abolition of classes in society presupposes a
degree of historical evolution at which the existence, not simply of this
or that particular ruling class, but of any ruling class at all, and, therefore,
the existence of class distinction itself, has become a obsolete anachronism.
It presupposes, therefore, the development of production carried out to
a degree at which appropriation of the means of production and of the products,
and, with this, of political domination, of the monopoly of culture, and
of intellectual leadership by a particular class of society, has become
not only superfluous but economically, politically, intellectually, a hindrance
to development.

This point is now reached. Their political and intellectual bankruptcy
is scarcely any longer a secret to the bourgeoisie themselves. Their economic
bankruptcy recurs regularly every 10 years. In every crisis, society is
suffocated beneath the weight of its own productive forces and products,
which it cannot use, and stands helpless, face-to-face with the absurd
contradiction that the producers have nothing to consume, because consumers
are wanting. The expansive force of the means of production bursts the bonds
that the capitalist mode of production had imposed upon them. Their deliverance
from these bonds is the one precondition for an unbroken, constantly-accelerated
development of the productive forces, and therewith for a practically unlimited
increase of production itself. Nor is this all. 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 the crises.
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, but it is here. [5]

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 is replaced by
systematic, definite organization. The struggle for individual existence
disappears. Then, for the first time, man, in a certain sense, is finally
marked off from the rest of the animal kingdom, and emerges 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,
now comes 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 then 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, now becomes the result of his own free action.
The extraneous objective forces that have, hitherto, governed history, 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.

Let us briefly sum up our sketch of historical evolution.

I. Mediaeval Society — Individual production on a small scale.
Means of production adapted for individual use; hence primitive, ungainly,
petty, dwarfed in action. Production for immediate consumption, either
of the producer himself or his feudal lord. Only where an excess of production
over this consumption occurs is such excess offered for sale, enters into
exchange. Production of commodities, therefore, only in its infancy. But
already it contains within itself, in embryo, anarchy in the production
of society at large.

II. Capitalist Revolution — transformation of industry, at first
by means of simple cooperation and manufacture. Concentration of the means
of production, hitherto scattered, into great workshops. As a consequence,
their transformation from individual to social means of production — a
transformation which does not, on the whole, affect the form of exchange.
The old forms of appropriation remain in force. The capitalist appears.
In his capacity as owner of the means of production, he also appropriates
the products and turns them into commodities. Production has become a social
act. Exchange and appropriation continue to be individual acts,
the acts of individuals. The social product is appropriated by the individual
capitalist. Fundamental contradiction, whence arise all the contradictions
in which our present-day society moves, and which modern industry brings
to light.

A. Severance of the producer from the means of production. Condemnation
of the worker to wage-labor for life. Antagonism between the proletariat
and the bourgeoisie.

B. Growing predominance and increasing effectiveness of the laws
governing the production of commodities. Unbridled competition. Contradiction
between socialized organization in the individual factory and social anarchy
in the production as a whole.

C. On the one hand, perfecting of machinery, made by competition
compulsory for each individual manufacturer, and complemented by a constantly
growing displacement of laborers. Industrial reserve-army. On the other
hand, unlimited extension of production, also compulsory under competition,
for every manufacturer. On both sides, unheard-of development of productive
forces, excess of supply over demand, over-production and products — excess
there, of laborers, without employment and without means of existence.
But these two levers of production and of social well-being are unable
to work together, because the capitalist form of production prevents the
productive forces from working and the products from circulating, unless
they are first turned into capital — which their very superabundance prevents.
The contradiction has grown into an absurdity. The mode of production rises
in rebellion against the form of exchange.

D. Partial recognition of the social character of the productive
forces forced upon the capitalists themselves. Taking over of the great
institutions for production and communication, first by joint-stock companies,
later in by trusts, then by the State. The bourgeoisie demonstrated to
be a superfluous class. All its social functions are now performed by salaried
employees.

III. Proletarian Revolution — Solution of the contradictions.
The proletariat seizes the public power, and by means of this transforms
the socialized means of production, slipping from the hands of the bourgeoisie,
into public property. By this act, the proletariat frees the means of production
from the character of capital they have thus far borne, and gives their
socialized character complete freedom to work itself out. Socialized production
upon a predetermined plan becomes henceforth possible. The development
of production makes the existence of different classes of society thenceforth
an anachronism. In proportion as anarchy in social production vanishes,
the political authority of the State dies out. Man, at last the master
of his own form of social organization, becomes at the same time the lord
over Nature, his own master — free.

To accomplish this act of universal emancipation is the historical
mission of the modern proletariat. To thoroughly comprehend the historical
conditions and thus the very nature of this act, to impart to the now oppressed
proletarian class a full knowledge of the conditions and of the meaning
of the momentous act it is called upon to accomplish, this is the task
of the theoretical expression of the proletarian movement, scientific Socialism.

Notes

1.
Mephistopheles in Goethe's Faust

2.
It is hardly necessary in this connection to point out that, even if the form of appropriation remains the same, the character of the appropriation is just as much revolutionized as production is by the changes described above. It is, of course, a very different matter whether I appropriate to myself my own product or that of another. Note in passing that wage-labor, which contains the whole capitalist mode of production in embryo, is very ancient; in a sporadic, scattered form, it existed for centuries alongside slave-labor. But the embryo could duly develop into the capitalistic mode of production only when the necessary historical pre-conditions had been furnished.

3.
"The Conditions of the Working-Class in England" — Sonnenschein & Co., p.84.

4.
I say "have to". For only when the means of production and distribution have actually outgrown the form of management by joint-stock companies, and when, therefore, the taking them over by the State has become economically inevitable, only then — even if it is the State of today that effects this — is there an economic advance, the attainment of another step preliminary to the taking over of all productive forces by society itself. But of late, since Bismarck went in for State-ownership of industrial establishments, a kind of spurious Socialism has arisen, degenerating, now and again, into something of flunkyism, that without more ado declares all State-ownership, even of the Bismarkian sort, to be socialistic. Certainly, if the taking over by the State of the tobacco industry is socialistic, then Napoleon and Metternich must be numbered among the founders of Socialism.

If the Belgian State, for quite ordinary political and financial reasons, itself constructed its chief railway lines; if Bismarck, not under any economic compulsion, took over for the State the chief Prussian lines, simply to be the better able to have them in hand in case of war, to bring up the railway employees as voting cattle for the Government, and especially to create for himself a new source of income independent of parliamentary votes — this was, in no sense, a socialistic measure, directly or indirectly, consciously or unconsciously. Otherwise, the Royal Maritime Company, the Royal porcelain manufacture, and even the regimental tailor of the army would also be socialistic institutions, or even, as was seriously proposed by a sly dog in Frederick William III's reign, the taking over by the State of the brothels.

5.
A few figures may serve to give an approximate idea of the enormous expansive force of the modern means of production, even under capitalist pressure. According to Mr. Giffen, the total wealth of Great Britain and Ireland amounted, in round numbers in

1814 to £ 2,200,000,000,

1865 to £ 6,100,000,000,

1875 to £ 8,500,000,000.

As an instance of the squandering of means of production and of products during a crisis, the total loss in the German iron industry alone, in the crisis of 1873-78, was given at the second German Industrial Congress (Berlin, February 21, 1878), as 22,750,000 pounds.

Socialism: Utopian and Scientific