Socialism: Utopian and Scientific

#PUBLICATION NOTE

This edition of Socialism: Utopian and Scientific has been prepared and revised for digital publication by the Institute of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism under the Central Committee of the Communist Party in Switzerland on the basis of the edition published in the Collected Works of Marx and Engels, First English Edition, Volumes 24 and 27, Lawrence & Wishart, London.

#INTRODUCTION NOTE

This is a pamphlet written by Comrade Friedrich Engels in London, England, United Kingdom between January and the first half of March 1880 on the basis of Section 3 of his work, Anti-Dühring. It was first published in the journal La Revue Socialiste, Nos. 3-5 (20th of March, 20th of April, and 5th of May, 1880).

In 1880, at Comrade Paul Lafargue's request, Comrade Engels rewrote three chapters of Anti-Dühring — Sections 1.1, 4.1, and 4.2 — into a separate popular work. Working on it, Engels made a number of additions and changes in the text. Already in Engels's lifetime, the work was translated into many European languages and gained wide currency among the workers, thus effectively promoting the dissemination of Marxist ideas.

#Workers and oppressed people of the world, unite!

#PREFACE TO THE 1880 FRENCH EDITION

#Karl Marx

#Around the 4th and 5th of May, 1880

#★

The pages which form the subject of the present pamphlet, first published as three articles in La Revue Socialiste [Socialist Review], have been translated by the latest book by Engels, Anti-Dühring: Mr. Eugen Dühring's Revolution in Science.

Friedrich Engels, one of the foremost representatives of contemporary Socialism, distinguished himself in 1844 with his Outline of a Critique of Political Economy, which first appeared in the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher [German-French Yearbooks], published in Paris by Marx and Ruge. The Outline already formulates certain general principles of scientific Socialism. Engels was then living in Manchester, where he wrote (in German) The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845), an important work, to which Marx did full justice in Capital. During his first stay in England, he also contributed — as he later did from Brussels — to The Northern Star, the official journal of the Chartist Socialist movement, and to the New Moral World of Robert Owen.

During his stay in Brussels, he and Marx founded the German workers' Communist club,¹ linked with Flemish and Walloon workers' clubs, and, with Bornstedt, the Deutsche-Brüsseler Zeitung [German Brussels News]. At the invitation of the German committee (residing in London) of the League of the Just,² they joined this society, which had originally been set up by Karl Schapper after his flight from France, where he had taken part in the Blanqui conspiracy of 1839.³ From then on, the League was transformed into an international Communist League after the suppression of the usual formalism of secret societies. Nevertheless, in those circumstances, the society had to remain underground as far as governments were concerned. In 1847, at the International Congress held by the League in London, Marx and Engels were instructed to draft the Manifesto of the Communist Party, published immediately before the February Revolution and at once translated into almost all the European languages. The Communist Manifesto is one of the most valuable documents of modern Socialism; even today, it remains one of the most vigorous and clearest expositions of the development of bourgeois society and the formation of the proletariat, which must put an end to capitalist society; as in The Poverty of Philosophy by Marx, published a year earlier, here, for the first time, the theory of class struggle is clearly formulated.

In the same year, they were involved in founding the Democratic Association of Brussels,⁴ an international and public association, where the delegates of the radical bourgeois and those of the Socialist workers met.

After the February Revolution, Engels became one of the editors of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung [New Rhenish News], founded in 1848 by Marx in Cologne and suppressed on the 19th of May, 1849 by a Prussian State coup. After taking part in the uprising at Elberfeld, Engels fought in the Baden-Palatinate Campaign against the Prussians (June-July 1849) as the aide-de-camp of Willich, who was then colonel of a battalion of francs-tireurs.⁵

In 1850, in London, he contributed to the Political-Economic Review of the New Rhenish News edited by Marx and printed in Hamburg. There, Engels for the first time published The Peasant War in Germany, which 19 years later appeared again in Leipzig as a pamphlet and ran into three editions.

After the resumption of the Socialist movement in Germany, Engels contributed to the Volksstaat [People's State] and Vorwärts [Forward] his most important articles, most of which were reprinted in the form of pamphlets, such as On Social Relations in Russia, Prussian Schnapps in the German Reichstag, The Housing Question, The Bakuninites at Work, and so on.

In 1870, after leaving Manchester for London, Engels joined the General Council of the International, where he was entrusted with the correspondence with Spain, Portugal, and Italy.

The series of final articles which he contributed to the Forward under the ironic title of Mr. Eugen Dühring's Revolution in Science (in response to the allegedly new theories of Mr. Eugen Dühring on science in general and Socialism in particular) were assembled in one volume and were a great success among German Socialists. In the present pamphlet, we reproduce the most topical excerpt from the theoretical section of the book, which constitutes what might be termed an introduction to scientific Socialism.

#Workers and oppressed people of the world, unite!

#PREFACE TO THE 1882 GERMAN EDITION

#Friedrich Engels

#21st of September, 1882

#★

The following work is derived from three chapters of my book, Mr. Eugen Dühring's Revolution in Science, Leipzig, 1878. I put them together for my friend Paul Lafargue for translation into French and added a few extra remarks. The French translation revised by me appeared first in the Socialist Review and then independently under the title Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, Paris, 1880. A rendering into Polish made from the French translation has just appeared in Geneva.

The surprising success of the Lafargue translation in the French-speaking countries, and especially in France itself, forced me to consider the question of whether a separate German edition of these three chapters would not likewise be of value. Then, the editors of the Zurich Sozialdemokrat [Social-Democrat] informed me that a demand was generally being raised within the German Social-Democratic Party for the publication of new propaganda pamphlets, and they asked me whether I would not apply those three chapters to this purpose.⁶ I was naturally in agreement with that and put my work at their disposal.

It was, however, not originally written for immediate popular propaganda. How could what was, in the first place, a purely scientific work be suitable for that? What changes in form and content were required?

So far as form is concerned, only the numerous foreign words could awaken doubts. But even Lassalle in his speeches and propaganda writings was not at all sparing with foreign words, and, to my knowledge, there has been no complaint about it. Since that time, our workers have read newspapers to a far greater extent and far more regularly, and, to the same extent, they have become thereby more familiar with foreign words. I have restricted myself to removing all unnecessary foreign words. Where they were unavoidable, I have refrained from adding so-called explanatory translations. The unavoidable foreign words, usually generally accepted scientific-technical expressions, would not have been unavoidable if they had been translatable. Translation, therefore, distorts the sense; it confuses instead of explaining. Verbal information is of much greater assistance.

The content, on the other hand, I think I can assert, will cause German workers few difficulties. In general, only Section 3 is difficult, but far less so for workers, whose general conditions of life it concerns, than for the «educated» bourgeois. In the many explanatory additions that I have made here, I have had in mind not so much the workers as «educated» readers; persons of the type of Deputy von Eynern, Privy Councillor Heinrich von Sybel, and othe Treitschkes, who are governed by the irresistible impulse to demonstrate again and again in black and white their frightful ignorance and, following from this, their colossal misconception of Socialism. If Don Quixote tilts his lance at windmills, that is in accordance with his office and his role; but it would be impossible for us to permit Sancho Panza anything of the sort.

Such readers will also be surprised that, in a sketch of the history of the development of Socialism, they should encounter the Kant-Laplace cosmogony, modern natural science and Darwin, classical German philosophy and Hegel. But scientific Socialism is, after all, an essentially German product and could arise only in that nation whose classical philosophy had kept alive the tradition of conscious dialectics: in Germany.⁷ The materialist conception of history and its specific application to the modern class struggle between proletariat and bourgeoisie was only possible by means of dialectics. And if the schoolmasters of the German bourgeoisie have drowned the memory of the great German philosophers and of the dialectics produced by them in a swamp of empty eclecticism — so much so that we are compelled to appeal to modern natural science as a witness to the preservation of dialectics in reality — we German Socialists are proud of the fact that we are descended not only from Saint-Simon, Fourier, and Owen, but also from Kant, Fichte, and Hegel.

#Friedrich Engels

#London

#21st of September, 1882

#Workers and oppressed people of the world, unite!

#PREFACE TO THE 1891 GERMAN EDITION

#Friedrich Engels

#12th of May, 1891

#★

My assumption that the contents of this publication will present little difficulty to our German workers has proven correct. At any rate, since March 1883, when it first appeared, three editions totaling 10'000 copies have been disposed of, and this under the operation of the now defunct Anti-Socialist Law⁸ — which again illustrates how impotent police bans against a movement like that of the modern proletariat are.

Since the first edition, various translations into foreign languages have also appeared: an Italian rendition by Pasquale Martignetti, Benvenuto, 1883; a Russian one, Geneva, 1884; a Danish one, Copenhagen, 1885; a Spanish one, Madrid, 1886; and a Dutch one, The Hague, 1886.

The present edition has undergone various slight alterations; more important additions have been made in only two places: in Section 1 on Saint-Simon, who was dealt with too briefly in comparison with Fourier and Owen, and toward the end of Section 3 on the new form of production, the «trusts», which meanwhile has become important.

#Friedrich Engels

#London

#12th of May, 1891

#Workers and oppressed people of the world, unite!

#PREFACE TO THE 1892 ENGLISH EDITION

#Friedrich Engels

#20th of April, 1892

#★

The present little book is, originally, a part of a larger whole. Around 1875, Dr. Eugen Dühring, Privatdocent 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 honoured Marx by pouring out upon him the full vials of his wrath.

This took place about the time when the two factions of the Socialist Party in Germany — Eisenachers and Lassalleans⁹ — had just effected their fusion, 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 imperiled. And Dr. Dühring openly proceeded to form around himself a sect, the nucleus of a future separate political 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 overly difficult, was evidently a long-winded, business. As is well known, we Germans are of a terribly ponderous Gründlichkeit, radical profundity or profound radicality, whatever you may like to call it. Whenever any one of us expounds what they consider a new doctrine, they have first to elaborate it into an all-comprising system. They have 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 the concepts of time and space to Bimetallism;¹⁰ 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. Anyway, 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 main reason which made me undertake this otherwise ungrateful task.

My reply was first published in a series of articles in the Leipzig Forward, the chief organ of the Socialist Party, and later on as a book: Mr. Eugen 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, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific. From this French text, Polish and Spanish editions were prepared. In 1883, our German friends brought out the pamphlet in the original language. Italian, Russian, Danish, Dutch, and Romanian translations, based upon the German text, have since been published. Thus, with the present English edition, this little book circulates in ten 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 political party of the working people of the cities was in a fair way of completion, and when the farm workers and peasants 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 Germanic tribes, and the history of their decay, are even less known in England than in Germany. I have left the text as it stands in the original, without alluding to the hypothesis recently started by Maksim Kovalevskij, 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 paternalist family community embracing several generations (as exemplified by the still existing South Slavic Zadruga), and that the partition, later on, took place when the community had increased, so as to become too unwieldy for joint-account management. Kovalevskij 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.¹¹ We call «commodity production» that economic phase where articles are produced not only for the use of the producers, but also for purposes 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 capitalists, the owners of the means of production, employ, for wages, workers, people deprived of all means of production except their own labour power, and pocket the excess of the selling price of the products over their outlay. We divide the history of industrial production since the Middle Ages into three periods:

• Firstly, handicraft, small master craftspeople with a few journeypeople and apprentices, where each worker produces the complete article.
• Secondly, manufacture, where greater numbers of workers, grouped in one large establishment, produce the complete article on the principle of division of labour, each worker performing only one partial operation, so that the product is complete only after having passed successively through the hands of all.
• Thirdly, modern industry, where the product is produced by machinery driven by power, and where the work of the workers is limited to superintending and correcting the performances 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», that is, of British philistines, 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 onward, is England.

Materialism is the natural-born child of Britain. Already the British educator, Duns Scotus, asked whether it was possible for matter to think.

In order to effect this miracle, he took refuge in God's omnipotence, that is, he made theology preach materialism. Moreover, he was a nominalist.¹² Nominalism, the first form of materialism, is chiefly found among the English educators.

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,¹³ 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 main 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 Böhme's¹⁴ — of matter. The primary forms of matter are the living, individualizing forces of being inherent in it and producing the distinctions between the species.

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 glamour, seems to attract people'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 person who systematizes Baconian materialism. Knowledge based upon the senses loses its poetic blossom, it passes into the abstract experience of the mathematician; physical motion is sacrificed to mechanical or mathematical motion; geometry is proclaimed as the queen of the sciences. Materialism takes to misanthropy. If it is to overcome its opponent, misanthropic, fleshless 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.

Hobes, 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 sub-stratum 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. Humanity 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 An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, supplied this proof.

Hobbes had shattered the Theist 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, Theism¹⁵ is but an easy-going way of getting rid of religion.¹⁶

Thus Karl Marx wrote about the British origin of modern materialism. If the English 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 materialists which made the 18th century, in spite of all battles on land and sea won over the French by the Germans and the English, a preeminently French century, even before that crowning French revolution, the results of which we outsiders, in England as well as in Germany, are still trying to acclimatize.

There is no denying it. About the middle of this century, what struck all cultivated foreigners who set up their residences in England was what they were then bound to consider the religious bigotry and stupidity of the English respectable bourgeoisie. We, at that time, were all materialists, or, at least, very advanced freethinkers, 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 among 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 1851¹⁷ 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. Anyway, 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 part, as far as respectability goes, with Baptism, and decidedly ranks above the Salvation Army. And I cannot help believing that, under these 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 conception of nature is materialist throughout. The entire natural world is governed by law, and absolutely excludes the intervention of action from the outside. But, it 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 A Treatise of Celestial Mechanics, the Creator was not even mentioned, proudly replied: «Je n'avais pas besoin de cette hypothèse.» [«I had no need off 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, the agnostic conception admits that all our knowledge is based upon the information imparted to us by our senses. But, it adds, how do we know that our senses give us correct representations of the objects we perceive through them? And it proceeds to inform us that, whenever it speaks of objects or their qualities, it does in reality not mean these objects and qualities, of which it cannot know anything for certain, but merely the impressions which they have produced on our 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 Tat. [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 these objects, according to the qualities we perceive in them, we put to an infallible test the correctness or otherwise of our sense perceptions. 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 positive proof 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 and to use our senses properly, and to keep our action within the limits prescribed by perceptions properly made and properly used, so long 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 perceptions, 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, analysed, 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, proteins; but there is no reason why we should not, if only after centuries, arrive at that knowledge and, armed with it, produce artificial proteins. 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 protein.

As soon, however, as our agnostics have made these formal mental reservations, they talk and act as the rank materialists they at bottom are. They 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 them in any particular case, they will quickly put you out of court. If they admit the possibility of spiritualism in abstracto [in the abstract], they will have none of it in concreto [in the concrete]. As far as we know and can know, they 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 on. Thus, as far as they are scientists, as far as they know anything, they are materialists; outside their science, in spheres about which they know nothing, they translate their ignorance into Greek and call it agnosticism.

At all events, one thing seems clear: Even if I were 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 going to make fun of them? And thus I hope even British respectability, which in German is called philistinism, 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 motive force of all important historical 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 the respectability of British philistines. I have mentioned the fact that, about 40 or 50 years ago, any cultivated foreigner settling in England was struck by what they were then bound to consider the religious bigotry and stupidity of the English respectable bourgeoisie. I am now going to prove that the respectable English bourgeoisie of that time was not quite as stupid as it looked to the intelligent foreigner. Its religious leanings can be explained.

When Europe emerged from the Middle Ages, the rising bourgeoisie of the cities 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 free 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 Muslim countries. It surrounded feudal institutions with the halo of divine consecration. 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, full 1/3 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 bourgeoisie went on the great revival of science: astronomy, mechanics, physics, anatomy, and 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 overstep 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 bourgeoisie 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 merchants of the cities started the cry, it was sure to find, and did find, a strong echo in the masses of the rural people, the peasants, who everywhere had to fight for their very existence against 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 uprisings of a political nature: first, that of the lower nobility under Franz von Sickingen (1523), then the great Peasant War (1525).¹⁸ Both were defeated, chiefly in consequence of the indecision of the parties most interested, the burghers of the cities — an indecision into the causes of which we cannot here enter. From that moment, the struggle deteriorated into a fight between the local princes and the Imperial 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-eastern Germany converted to Lutheranism than they were from freepersons 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 people's activity or cleverness, but upon circumstances uncontrollable by them. It is not a matter of will or work, but of the mercy of unknown superior economic powers; and this was especially true during a period of economic revolution, when all old commercial routes and centres were replaced by new ones, when India and the Americas 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 was thoroughly democratic and republican; and where the Kingdom of God was republicanized, could the kingdoms of this world remain subject to monarchs, bishops, and lords? While German Lutheranism became a willing tool in the hands of small princes, Calvinism founded a republic in the Netherlands, and active republican political 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 bourgeoisie of the cities brought it on, and the middle peasantry (yeomanry) of the rural districts fought it out. Curiously enough, in all of the three great bourgeois revolutions, 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. 100 years after Cromwell, the yeomanry of England had almost disappeared. Anyway, had it not been for that yeomanry and for the plebeian element in the cities, the bourgeoisie would never have fought the matter out to the bitter end, and would never have brought Charles the First 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 in 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 respectable philistinism under the name of the «Great Rebellion», and the struggles succeeding it, were brought to a close by the comparatively puny event of 1689 entitled by Liberal historians the «Glorious Revolution».¹⁹

The new starting point was a compromise between the rising bourgeoisie and 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 Wars of the Roses.²⁰ 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 by sheep. Henry the Eighth, while squandering the Church lands, created fresh bourgeois landlords by wholesale; the innumerable confiscations 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 the Seventh, 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 faction of the big landowners willing, for economic or political reasons, to cooperate with the leaders 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 big landowning families, provided the economic interests of the financial, manufacturing, and commercial bourgeoisie 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 bourgeoisie.

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 masses of the nation. The merchants or manufacturers themselves stood in the position of masters, or, as it was until lately called, of «natural superiors» to their clerks, their workers, their domestic servants. Their interest was to get as much and as good work out of them as they could; for this end, they had to be trained to proper submission. They were themselves religious; their religion had supplied the standard under which they had fought the king and the lords; they were not long in discovering the opportunities this same religion offered them for working upon the minds of their 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 masses of the nation, and one of the means employed for that purpose was the influence of religion.

There was another fact that contributed to strengthen the religious leanings of the bourgeoisie. That was the rise of materialism in England. This new, irreligious doctrine not only shocked the pious feelings of the bourgeoisie; it announced itself as a philosophy only fit for scholars and cultivated people 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,²¹ to wit, the people. Similarly, with the successors of Hobbes, with Bolingbroke, Shaftesbury, and so on, the new Deist form of materialism remained an aristocratic, esoteric doctrine, and, therefore, hateful to the bourgeoisie 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 contingents against the Stuarts continued to furnish the main strength of the progressive bourgeoisie, 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 materialist school of philosophers, a branch of Cartesianism.²² 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 shortcut, and boldly applied it to all subjects of knowledge in the giant work after which they were named — the Encyclopédie [Encyclopaedia]. Thus, in one or the other of its two forms — avowed materialism or Deism — it became the creed of the whole cultured 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.²³

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 feudal lords 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 Civil²⁴ 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 écrivez Londres et vous prononcez Constantinople [you write London, but pronounce it Constantinople], said a French person — that same English law is the only one which has preserved through ages, and transmitted to the United States 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 them 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 hey fought it. Another was that the ways of this revolution went very much against their grain. Not only its «execrable» terrorism, but the very attempt to carry bourgeois rule to extremes. What should the British bourgeois do without their aristocracy, that taught them manners, such as they were, and invented fashions for them — that furnished officers for the army, which kept order at home, and the navy, which conquered colonial possessions and new markets abroad? There was indeed a progressive minority of the bourgeoisie, that minority whose interests were not so well attended to under the compromise; this faction, composed chiefly of the less wealthy bourgeois, did sympathize with the revolution,²⁵ 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 their 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 neighbouring 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 person, the more stubbornly the English bourgeoisie 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, and so on, were more and more pushed into the background by the manufacturers. The compromise of 1689, even after the gradual changes it had undergone in favour 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 Act²⁶ 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, 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 workers. 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 in power. This power it proved as early as 1824, by forcing a reluctant Parliament to repeal the acts forbidding combinations of workers.²⁷ During the Reform agitation, the workers constituted the radical wing of the Reform party; the Act of 1832 having excluded them from the suffrage, they formulated their demands in the People's Charter,²⁸ and constituted themselves, in opposition to the big bourgeois Anti-Corn Law party,²⁹ into an independent political party, the Chartists, the first workers' party of modern times.

Then came the Continental Revolution 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 standpoint of capitalist society. And then came the general reaction. First the defeat of the Chartists on the 10th of April, 1848; then the crushing of the Paris workers' uprising 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 on the 2nd of December, 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 they feel that necessity after all these experiences? Regardless of the sneers of their Continental peers, they continued to spend thousands and tens of thousands, year after year, on the evangelization of the lower orders; not content with their own native religious machinery, they appealed to Brother Jonathan, the greatest organizer in existence of religion as a trade, and imported from the United States revivalism, Moody and Sankey, and the like;³⁰ and, finally, they 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 the United States, where feudalism was unknown, and society at the very beginning started from a bourgeois basis. And even in France and the United States, 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 wealthy bourgeoisie submitted to this remained inconceivable to me until the big 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 that the English bourgeois 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.³¹ Even now, the endless newspaper debates about bourgeois education show that the English bourgeoisie 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 people who had carried the day, the Cobdens, Brights, Forsters, and so on, should remain excluded from a share in the official government of the country, until, 20 years afterward, a new Reform Act³² 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 honoured whenever one of themselves is found worthy of admission into this select and privileged body, manufactured, after all, by themselves.

The industrial and commercial bourgeoisie 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 Revolution, as well as the unparalleled extension of English trade from 1848 to '66 (ascribed vulgarly to free trade alone, but due far more to the colossal development of railways, ocean steamers, and means of interaction 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 favourable moment and introduce household suffrage, which was extended to all lease-holders 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.³³ 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 furnishes the majority of voters. But parliamentary government is a capital school for teaching respect for tradition; if the bourgeoisie looks with awe and veneration upon what Lord John Manners playfully called «our old nobility», the masses of working people then looked up with respect and deference to what used to be designated as «their betters», the bourgeoisie. Indeed, the British workers, some 15 years ago, were the model workers, whose respectful regard for the position of their masters, and whose self-restraining modesty in claiming rights for themselves, consoled our German economists of the Lectern-Socialist school³⁴ for the incurable Communist and revolutionary tendencies of their own workers at home.

But the English bourgeois — good businesspeople as they are — saw farther than the German professors. They had shared their power but reluctantly with the working class. They had learned, 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 use of all possible means of pious demagogy and revivalism, from ritualism³⁵ to the Salvation Army.

And now came the triumph of British respectable philistinism over the free thought and religious laxity of the Continental bourgeois. The workers 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 them, quietly drops the burning cigar they brought swaggeringly on board; one by one, the scoffers turned pious in outward behaviour, spoke with respect for the Church, its dogmas and rites, and even conformed with the latter as far as could not be helped. French bourgeois dined maigre [without meat or milk] on Fridays, and German ones sat 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 forever. And now, it was the turn of the British bourgeois 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 [after-the-event] conversion of the Continental bourgeois will stem the rising proletarian tide. Tradition is a great delaying force, is the inertia 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 economic 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 political parties, Conservatives and Liberals, and that the working class must work out its salvation by and through the great Liberal Party. Workers' 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 scabs. But for all that, the English working class is moving, as even Professor Brentano has sorrowfully had to report to his fraternal Lectern-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 overly cautious mistrust of the name of Socialism, while it gradually absorbs the substance; and the movement spreads and seizes one stratum of the workers after another. It has now shaken out of their torpor the unskilled workers 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 afterward. If the children of the old Chartists, for reasons explained above, were not quite up to the mark, the grandchildren bid fair to be worthy of their ancestors.

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 of 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 bourgeoisie has shown itself lamentably deficient in political capacity, discipline, courage, energy, and perseverance, the German working class has given ample proof of all these qualities. 400 years ago, Germany was the starting point of the first upheaval of the European bourgeoisie; 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?

#F. Engels

#20th of April, 1892

#Workers and oppressed people of the world, unite!

#SOCIALISM: UTOPIAN AND SCIENTIFIC

#Friedrich Engels

#January-March 1880

#★

#1

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 people who in France prepared people's minds for the coming revolution were themselves extreme revolutionaries. They recognized no external authority of any kind whatsoever. Religion, natural science, society, political institutions, everything was subjected to the most unsparing criticism: everything must justify its existence before the judgement 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 on its head;³⁶ 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 until then 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; from then on, superstition, injustice, privilege, and 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, Rousseau's Social Contract,³⁷ came into being, and only could come into being, as a bourgeois-democratic republic. The great thinkers of the 18th century could, no more than their predecessors, go beyond the limits imposed on them by their epoch.

But, side by side with the antagonism 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 burghers of the guilds developed into the modern bourgeois, the guild journeypersons and the day-labourers, outside the guilds, developed into the proletarians. And, although, on the whole, the bourgeoisie, in its struggle with the nobility, could claim to represent, at the same time, the interests of the different working classes of that period, 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 Peasant War, the Anabaptists³⁸ and Thomas Münzer; in the Great English Revolution, the Levelers;³⁹ in the Great French Revolution, Babeuf.

There 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;⁴⁰ in the 18th, actual Communist theories (Morelly and Mably). 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 bourgeois 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 created by 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 conditions 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 on the principles of these philosophers, is quite as irrational and unjust, and, therefore, finds its way to the dustbin quite as readily as feudalism and all the earlier stages of society. If pure reason and justice have not, until now, ruled the world, this has been the case only because people have not rightly understood them. What was wanted was the individual genius, who has now arisen and who understands the truth. That this genius has now arisen, that the truth has now been clearly understood, is not an inevitable event, following of necessity in the chain of historical development, but a mere happy accident. They 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 middle burgher, 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 on reason completely collapsed. Rousseau's Social Contract had found its realization in the Reign of Terror, from which the bourgeoisie, which had lost confidence in its own political capacity, had taken refuge first in the corruption of the Directorate,⁴¹ and, finally, under the wing of the Napoleonic despotism. The promised eternal peace was turned into an endless war of conquest. The society based on 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 big 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 on a capitalist basis made poverty and misery of the working masses conditions of existence of society. Cash payment became more and more, in Carlyle's phrase, the sole nexus between people. 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, until now practised in secret, began to blossom all the more luxuriantly. Trade became to a greater and greater extent cheating. The «fraternity» of the revolutionary motto⁴² 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 people 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 the 1st of January, 1800, Robert Owen undertook the direction of New Lanark.⁴³

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 capitalist character — conflicts, not only between the classes created by 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, around 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-not» 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 itself. But, in doing so, they only proved how impossible it was for their domination to last under the conditions of that time. The proletariat, which then for the first time evolved itself from these «have-not» 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 the outside, or down from above.

This historical situation also dominated the founders of Socialism. To the crude conditions of capitalist production and the crude class conditions corresponded 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 on society from the outside 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 fantasies.

These facts once established, we need not dwell a moment longer on 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 fantasies, 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 fantastic covering, and to which these philistines are blind.

Saint-Simon was a child of the Great French Revolution, at the outbreak of which he was not yet 30 years old. The revolution was the victory of the Third Estate, that is, 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 Third Estate soon revealed itself as exclusively the victory of a small part of this «estate», as the conquest of political power by the socially privileged section of it, that is, the propertied bourgeoisie. And the bourgeoisie had certainly developed rapidly during the revolution, partly be speculation in the lands of the nobility and of the Church, confiscated and afterward put up for sale, and partly by frauds on the nation by means of army contracts. It was the domination of these swindlers that, under the Directorate, brought France and the revolution to the verge of ruin, and thus gave Napoleon the pretext for his State coup.

Hence, to Saint-Simon, the antagonism between the Third 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 did not have 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, as opposed to the workers, a commanding and economically privileged position. The bankers especially were to be called on 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 on 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».⁴⁴

Already, in his Geneva letters, Saint-Simon lays down the proposition that «all people ought to work».⁴⁵ In the same work, he recognizes also that the Reign of Terror was the reign of the non-possessing masses. He says to them:

See what happened in France at the time when your comrades held sway there; they brought about a famine.⁴⁵

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 predicts the complete absorption of politics by economics.⁴⁶ The knowledge that economic conditions are the basis for 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 people 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,⁴⁷ he proclaims the alliance of France with England, and then of both these countries with Germany, as the only guarantee for the prosperous development and peace of Europe.⁴⁸ To preach to the French in 1815 an alliance with the victors of Waterloo required as much courage as historical foresight.⁴⁹

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 on that account any less thorough. Fourier takes the bourgeoisie, its 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-coloured 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 on the downfall of the revolution, and the shopkeeping spirit prevalent in, and characteristic of, French commerce at that time. Still more masterly in his criticism of the bourgeois form of the relations between the genders, 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.⁵⁰

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, patriarchate, and civilization. This last is identical with the so-called civil or bourgeois society of today — that is, with the social order that came in with the 16th century. He proves «that the civilized stage raises every vice practised by barbarism in a simple fashion into a form of existence, complex, ambiguous, equivocal, hypocritical»⁵¹ — that civilization moves in «a vicious circle»,⁵² 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, for example, «under civilization, poverty is born of superabundance itself».⁵³

Fourier, as we see, uses the dialectical method in the same masterly way as his contemporary, Hegel. Using this same dialectics, he argues, against the 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.

While, 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 of society into big 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 neighbourhoods of the big cities; the loosening of all traditional moral bonds, of paternalist 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 countryside into the cities, from agriculture into modern industry, from stable conditions of existence into insecure ones that changed from day to day.

At this juncture, there came forward as a reformer a manufacturer 29 years old — a person of almost sublime, childlike simplicity of character, and, at the same time, one of the few born leaders of people. Robert Owen had adopted the teaching of the materialist philosophers: that people's character is the product, on the one hand, of heredity, on the other, of the environment of the individual during their lifetime, and especially during their 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 favourite theory, and so of bringing order out of chaos. He had already tried it with success, as superintendent of more than 500 people in a Manchester factory. From 1800 to '29, 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, and 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 scarcely be got home again. While his competitors worked their people 13 or 14 hours a day, in New Lanark, the workday was only 10 1/2 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.⁵³

The relatively favourable 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?⁵³

The answer was clear. It had been used to pay the proprietors of the establishment 5% on the capital they had laid out, in addition to over GBP 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.⁵³

To them, therefore, the fruits of this new power belonged. The newly created gigantic productive forces, until then 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 on 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.⁵⁴ 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 included⁵⁵ — 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, honour, and glory. He was the most popular person in Europe. Not only people of his own class, but statespersons 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, and 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 predicted happened. Banished from official society, with a conspiracy of silence against him in the press, ruined by his unsuccessful communist experiments in North America, in which he sacrificed all his fortune, he turned directly to the working class and continued working in its midst for 30 years. Every social movement, every real advance in England on behalf of the workers links itself to the name of Robert Owen. He forced through, in 1819, after five years' fighting, the first law limiting the hours of labour of women and children in factories.⁵⁶ He was president of the first congress at which all the trade unions of England united in a single great trade association.⁵⁷ He introduced as transitional measures to the complete communist 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 merchants and manufacturers are socially quite unnecessary. On the other hand, he introduced labour bazaars for the exchange of the products of labour through the medium of labour notes, whose unit was a single hour of work;⁵⁸ institutions necessarily doomed to failure, but completely anticipating Proudhon's bank of exchange of a much later period,⁵⁹ and differing entirely from this in that it did not claim to be the panacea for all social ills, but only a first step toward 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 paid 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 absolute truth is independent of time, space and human historical development, 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 their subjective understanding, their conditions of existence, the measure of their knowledge, and their intellectual training, there is no other ending possible in this conflict of absolute truths than that they shall be mutually exclusive from 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. Here, a mishmash allowing the most manifold shades of opinion; a mishmash of such critical statements, economic theories, pictures of future society by the founders of different sects as excite a minimum of opposition; a mishmash which is the more easily brewed the more the 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 on a real basis.

#2

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 reclaiming of dialectics as the highest form of reasoning. The old Greek philosophers were all born natural dialecticians, and Aristotle, the most encyclopaedic intellect of them, had already analysed the most essential forms of dialectical thought. The newer philosophy, on the other hand, although in it also dialectics had brilliant exponents (for example, 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 n the restricted sense, the French nevertheless produced masterpieces of dialectics. We need only call to mind Diderot's Rameau's Nephew⁶⁰ and Rousseau's Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Human Inequality. We give here, in brief, the essential character of these two modes of thought.

When we consider and reflect on nature at large, or human history, 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 worldview 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.⁶¹

But this worldview, 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 do not have a clear idea of the whole picture. In order to understand these details, we must detach them from their natural or historical connection and examine each one separately, its nature, special causes, effects, and so on. This is, primarily, the task of natural science and historical research; branches of science which the Greeks 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 on. 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,⁶² and later on, in the Middle Ages, by the Arabs. Real natural science dates from the second half of the 15th century, and from then on it has 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 constants, 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 created the narrow, metaphysical mode of thought peculiar to the last century.

To metaphysicians, 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 and for all. They think in absolutely irreconcilable antitheses. «His communication is ‹yea, yea; nay, nay›; for whatsoever is more than these cometh of evil.»⁶³ For them, 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 to each other.

At first sight, this mode of thinking seems to us very luminous, because it is that of so-called common sense. Only sound common sense, respectable that it is, in the homely realm of its own four falls, had very wonderful adventures directly it 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 wood for the trees.

For everyday purposes, we know and can say, for example, whether an animal is alive or not. But, on closer inquiry, we find that this is, in many cases, a very complex question, as the jurists know very well. They have cudgeled their brains in vain to discover a rational limit beyond which the killing of the child in the 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.

Likewise, every organic being is every moment the same and not the same; every moment, it assimilates matter supplied from the outside, 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 organic being is always itself, and yet something other than itself.

Further, we find on closer investigation that the two poles of an antithesis, positive and negative, for example, are as inseparable as they are opposed, and that, despite all their opposition, they mutually interpenetrate. And we find, likewise, 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 the other way around.

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 natural science that it has furnished this proof with very rich materials, increasing daily, and thus has shown that, in the last resort, nature works dialectically and not metaphysically; that it 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 humanity itself — are the products of a process of evolution going on through millions of years.⁶⁴ 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 human development, and of the reflection of this evolution in the human mind, 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.⁶⁵

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, that is, 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, human history no longer appeared as a wild whirl of senseless deeds of violence, all equally condemnable at the judgement seat of mature philosophical reason, and which are best forgotten as quickly as possible; but as the process of human evolution itself. 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. 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, he was still limited, first, by the necessarily 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 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 individual groups of facts were grasped by Hegel, for the reasons just given, there is still much that is botched, artificial, laboured, 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. On 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 dialectical reasoning. This law, indeed, by no means excludes, but, on the contrary, includes the idea that the systematic knowledge of the external world can make giant strides from age to age.

The perception of the fundamental contradiction in German idealism led necessarily back to imperialism, but, and this is important to note, not to the simply metaphysical, exclusively mechanical materialism of the 18th century. Old materialism, in a naively revolutionary and simple way, rejected 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.⁶⁶ 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 favourable 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 dialectical, 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 laws — formal logic and dialectics. Everything else is subsumed in the positive science of nature and history.

While, 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 uprising took place in Lyons;⁶⁷ between 1838 and '42, the first national working-class movement, that of the English Chartists,⁶⁸ reached its height. The class struggle between proletariat and bourgeoisie came to the front in the history of the most developed countries in Europe, in proportion to the development, on the one hand, of modern industry, on the other, of the newly acquired political supremacy of the bourgeoisie. Facts more and more strenuously gave the lie to the teachings of bourgeois economics as to the unity of the interests of capital and labour, 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 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 on 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 basis of society is always 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 had freed history from metaphysics — he had made it dialectical; but his conception of history was essentially idealist. But now, idealism was driven from its last refuge, the philosophy of history; now, a materialist treatment of history was propounded, and a method found of explaining people's «knowing» by their «being», instead of, until then, their «being» by their «knowing».

From that time on, 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 capitalist 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 exploitation 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: firstly, to present the capitalist method of production in its historical connection and its inevitability during a particular historical period, and, therefore, also, to present its inevitable downfall: and, secondly, to lay bare its essential character, which was still a secret. This was done by the discovery of surplus-value. It was shown that the appropriation of unpaid labour is the basis of the capitalist mode of production and of the exploitation of the workers that occurs under it; that, even if the capitalists buy the labour-power of their labourers at its full value as a commodity on the market, they still extract more value from it than they paid for; and that, in the final analysis, this surplus-value forms those sums of value from which are heaped up the 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 discoveries, the materialist conception of history and the revelation of the secret of capitalist 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.

#3

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 on 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 people's brains, not in people's better insight 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, 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, then, is the position of modern Socialism in this connection?

The present structure 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 on 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. From then on, the capitalist mode of production could develop in freedom. Since steam, machinery, and the making of machines by industry, the productive forces evolved under the guidance of the bourgeoisie developed with a rapidity and to a degree unheard of before. But just as the older manufacture, in its time, and handicrafts, becoming more developed under its influence, had come into collision with the feudal trammels of the guilds, so now modern industry, in its more 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 capitalist mode of using them. And this conflict between productive forces and modes of production is not a conflict engendered in the human mind, like that between original sin and divine justice. It exists, in fact, objectively, outside us, independently of the will and actions even of the people who 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, that is, in the Middle Ages, the system of small-scale industry obtained generally, based on the private property of the labourers in their means of production; in the countryside, the agriculture of small peasants, whether freepersons or serfs; in the cities, the handicrafts organized in guilds. The instruments of labour — land, agricultural implements, the workshop, the tool — were the instruments of labour 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 producers themselves. 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 historical role of capitalist production and of its upholder, the bourgeoisie. In Section 1.4 of Capital, Marx has explained in detail how, since the 15th century, this has been historically worked out through the three phases of simple cooperation, manufacture, and modern industry. But the bourgeoisie, as is also 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 individuals into social means of production only workable by a collective of people. The spinning wheel, the hand loom, the blacksmith's hammer, were replaced by the spinning machine, the power loom, the steam hammer; the individual workshop by the factory implying the cooperation of hundreds and thousands of workers. Likewise, production itself changed from a series of individual into a series of social acts, and the products from individual to social products. The yarn, the cloth, the metal articles that now came out of the factory were the joint products 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 labour which creeps in gradually and not on any preconceived plan, there the products take on the form of commodities, whose mutual exchange, purchase and sale, enable the individual producers to satisfy their manifold wants. And this was the case in the Middle Ages. The peasants, for example, sold to the handicraftspeople agricultural products and bought from them 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 labour, grown up spontaneously and on no definite plan, which had governed the whole of society, now arose division of labour on 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 on a definite plan was stronger than spontaneous division of labour. The factories working with the combined social forces of a collective of individuals produced their commodities far more cheaply than the individual small producers. Individual production 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 commodity production. When it arose, it found ready-made, and made liberal use of, certain machinery for the production and exchange of commodities: merchants' capital, handicrafts, wage labour. Socialized production thus introducing itself as a new form of commodity production, 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 mediaeval stage of evolution of commodity production, the question as to the owner of the product of labour could not arise. The individual producers, as a rule, had, from raw material belonging to themselves, and generally their own handiwork, produced it with their own tools, by the labour of their own hands or of their families. There was no need for them to appropriate the new product. It belonged wholly to them, as a matter of course. Their property in the product was, therefore, based on their own labour. 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 journeypeople of the guilds worked less for board and wages than for education, in order that they might become master handicraftspeople 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, that is, as the means of production and the products of individuals. Until then, the owners of the instruments of labour had themselves appropriated the product, because, as a rule, it was their own product and the assistance of others was the exception. Now, the owners of the instruments of labour always appropriated to themselves the product, although it was no longer their product, but exclusively the product of the labour 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, everyone owns their own product and brings it to market. The mode of production is subjected to this form of appropriation, although it abolishes the conditions on which the latter rests.⁶⁹

This contradiction, which gives to the new mode of production its capitalist 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 capitalist appropriation.

The first capitalists found, as we have said, alongside other forms of labour, wage labour ready-made for them on the market. But it was exceptional, complementary, accessory, transitory wage labour. The agricultural labourers, though, on occasion, they hired themselves out by the day, had a few acres of their own land on which they could at all events live at a pinch. The guilds were so organized that the journeypeople of today became the masters 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 producers became more and more worthless; there was nothing left for them but to turn wage-workers under the capitalists. Wage labour, before the exception and accessory, now became the rule and basis of all production; before complementary, it now became the sole remaining function of the workers. The wage-workers for a time became wage-workers for life. The number of these permanent wage-workers 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, and so on. The separation was made complete between the means of production concentrated in the hands of the capitalists, on the one hand, and the producers, possessing nothing but their labour power, on the other hand. The contradiction between socialized production and capitalist appropriation manifested itself as the antagonism of proletariat and bourgeoisie.

We have seen that the capitalist 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 on commodity production has this peculiarity: that the producers have lost control over their own social interrelations. Each person produces for themself with such means of production as they may happen to have, and for such exchange as they may require to satisfy their remaining wants. No one knows how much of their particular article is coming on the market, nor how much of it will be wanted. No one knows whether their individual product will meet an actual demand, whether they will be able to make good their cost of production or even to sell their commodity at all. Anarchy reigns in socialized production.

But commodity production, like every other form of production, has its 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 interrelations, that is, 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 producers and their families. Where relations of personal dependence existed, as in the countryside, it also helped to satisfy the wants of the feudal lords. In all this, there was, therefore, no exchange; the products, consequently, did not assume the character of commodities. The families of the peasants produced almost everything they wanted: clothes and furniture, as well as means of subsistence. Only when they began to produce more than was sufficient to supply their own wants and the payments in kind to the feudal lords, only then did they also produce commodities. This surplus, thrown into socialized exchange and offered for sale, became commodities.

The handicraftspeople of the cities, it is true, had from the first to produce for exchange. But they, also, themselves supplied the greatest part of their own individual wants. They had gardens and plots of land. They turned their cattle out into the communal forest, which, also, yielded them timber and firewood. The women spun flax, wool, and so on. Production for the purpose of exchange, commodity production, was only in its infancy. Hence, exchange was restricted, the market narrow, the methods of production stable; there was local exclusiveness outside, local unity inside; the mark in the countryside, the guild in the cities.

But, with the extension of commodity production, and especially with the introduction of the capitalist mode of production, the laws of commodity production, until then 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, on 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. Wherever it took possession of handicrafts, it destroyed their old form. The field of labour became a battleground. The great geographical discoveries, and the colonization following after them, multiplied markets and quickened the transformation of handicrafts into manufacture. The war did not simply break out between the individual producers of particular localities. The local struggles in turn created national conflicts, the commercial wars of the 17th and 18th centuries.⁷⁰

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. Those who fall are remorselessly cast arise. It is the Darwinian struggle of the individual for existence transferred from nature to society with intensified violence. The conditions of existence natural to animals appear as the final form of human development. The contradiction between socialized production and capitalist 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 capitalist 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»,⁵² 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 like a spiral, and must come to an end, like the movement of the 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 people 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 capitalist must perfect their machinery more and more, under penalty of ruin.

But the perfecting of machinery makes human labour superfluous. If the introduction and increase of machinery means the displacement of millions of manual workers 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 1845,⁷¹ available at the times when industry is working at high pressure, to be cast out on the street when the inevitable crash comes, a constant dead weight on the limbs of the working class in its struggle for existence with capital, a regulator for the 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 labour constantly tear the means of subsistence out of the hands of the labourers; that the very product of the workers is turned into an instrument for their subjugation. Thus, it comes about that the economizing of the instruments of labour becomes, at the same time, from the outset, the most reckless waste of labour power, and robbery based on the normal conditions under which labour functions; that machinery, «the most powerful instrument for shortening labour time, becomes the most unfailing means for placing every moment of the labourers' time and that of their families at the disposal of the capitalists for the purpose of expanding the value of their capital».⁷² Thus, it comes about that over-work of some becomes the preliminary condition for the idleness of others, and that modern industry, which hunts after new consumers all over the world, forces the consumption of the masses at home down to a starvation minimum, and, in doing so, 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 labourers to capital more firmly than the wedges of Vulcan did Prometheus to the rock. It establishes an accumulation of misery, corresponding to 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, that is, on the side of the class that produces its own products in the form of capital.»⁷² 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 capitalists always to improve their machinery, always to increase its productive force. The bare possibility of extending the field of production is transformed for them into a similar 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 quantitative, 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 periodical. Capitalist production has begotten another «vicious circle».⁵²

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 developed peoples and their more or less backward hangers-on, are thrown out of joint about once every ten years. Commerce is at a standstill, the markets are glutted, products accumulate, as multitudinous as they are unsaleable, hard cash disappears, credit vanishes, factories are closed, the masses of the workers are in want of the means of subsistence, because they have produced too much of the means of subsistence; bankruptcy follows on bankruptcy, execution on 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 give 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 as «a crisis from plethora».⁵²

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 capitalists 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 dormant, and, for that very reason, the industrial reserve army must also lie dormant. Means of production, means of subsistence, available labourers, all the elements of production and of general wealth, are present in abundance. But «abundance becomes the source of distress and want»⁵² (Fourier), because it is the very thing that prevents the transformation of the means of production and subsistence into capital. For, in capitalist society, the means of production can only function when they have undergone a preliminary transformation into capital, into the means of exploiting human labour 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 capitalist 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 productive 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 capitalist 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 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 railroads, they exclude all other forms of capitalist exploitation. At a further stage of evolution, this form also becomes insufficient. The producers on a large scale in a particular branch of 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 the 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 on a single plan, and with a capital of GBP 6'000'000.

In the trusts, freedom of competition changes into its very opposite — into monopoly — and the production without any definite plan of capitalist society capitulates to the production on a definite plan of the invading socialist 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.⁷³ This necessity for conversion into State property is felt first in the great institutions for interaction and communication — the postal 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 shows how unnecessary the bourgeoisie is for that purpose. All the social functions of the capitalists are now performed by salaried employees. The capitalists have 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 capitalist 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 capitalist 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 the modes of production, appropriation, and exchange 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 of 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 on 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 of 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 humanity. 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 on 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 producers and then the appropriators, is replaced by the mode of appropriation of the products that is based on the nature of the modern means of production; on 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.

While 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. While it forces on more and more the transformation of the vast means of the way to accomplishing this revolution. The proletariat conquers political power and turns the means of production into State property.

But, in doing this, it abolishes itself as proletariat, abolishes all class distinctions and class antagonisms, abolishes also the State as State. Society thus far, based on class antagonisms, had need of the State. That is, of an organization of the particular class which was, for the time being, the exploiting class, an organization for the purpose of preventing any interference from the outside 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 labour). 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 slave-owning citizens; in the Middle Ages, the feudal lords; in our own time, 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 on 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 people understanding that the existence of classes is in contradiction to justice, equality, and so on, 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 consequence of the deficient and restricted development of production in former times. So long as the total social labour only yields a produce which but slightly exceeds that barely necessary for the existence of all; so long, therefore, as labour 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 labour, arises a class freed from directly productive labour, which looks after the general affairs of society — the direction of labour, State business, law, science, art, and so on. It is, therefore, the law of the division of labour 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 on the insufficiency of production. It will be swept away by the complete development of the 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 it all, and, therefore, the existence of class distinction itself has become an 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, and intellectually a hindrance to development.

This point is now reached. Its political and intellectual bankruptcy is scarcely any longer a secret to the bourgeoisie itself. Its economic bankruptcy recurs regularly every ten 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 on 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 on production, but also with the positive waste and devastation of the 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.⁷⁴

With the seizure of the means of production by society, commodity production is done away with, and, simultaneously, the mastery of the product over the producers. Anarchy in social production is replaced by systematic, definite organization. The struggle for individual existence disappears. Then, for the first time, humanity, 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 condition people, and which have until now ruled people, now comes under the dominion and control of people, who, for the first time, become the real, conscious lords of nature, because they have now become masters of their own social organization. The laws of their own social action, until now standing face to face with people as laws of nature foreign to and dominating them, will then be used with full understanding, and so mastered by them. People's own social organization, until now confronting them as a necessity imposed by nature and history, now becomes the result of their own free action. The extraneous objective forces that have until now governed history pass under the control of people themselves. Only from that time will people themselves, more and more consciously, make their own history — only from that time will the social causes set in movement by them have, in the main and in a constantly growing measure, the results intended by them. It is the ascent of humanity from the kingdom of necessity to the kingdom of freedom.

#CONCLUSION

Let us briefly sum up our sketch of historical evolution:

• 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 producers themselves or of their feudal lords. Only where an excess of production over this consumption occurs is such excess offered for sale, enters into exchange. Commodity production, therefore, is only in its infancy. But, already, it contains within itself, in embryo, anarchy in the production of society at large.
• Capitalist Revolution. Transformation of industry, at first by means of simple cooperation and manufacture. Concentration of the means of production, until then 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 capitalists appear. In their capacity as owners of the means of production, they also appropriate the products and turn 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 capitalists. This is the fundamental contradiction, from which arise all the contradictions in which our present-day society moves, and which modern industry brings to light.
  • Severance of the producers from the means of production. Condemnation of the workers to wage labour for life. Antagonism between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie.
  • Growing predominance and increasing effectiveness of the laws governing commodity production. Unbridled competition. Contradiction between socialized organization in the individual factory and social anarchy in production as a whole.
  • On the one hand, perfecting of machinery, made by competition compulsory for each individual manufacturer, and complemented by a constantly growing displacement of labourers. 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, overproduction, glutting of the markets, crises every ten years, the vicious circle: excess here, of means of production and products — excess there, of labourers, 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. The bourgeoisie is convicted of incapacity further to manage its own social productive forces.
  • Partial recognition of the social character of the productive forces forced on the capitalists themselves. Taking over of the great institutions for production and communication, first by joint-stock companies, later on by trusts, then by the State. The bourgeoisie demonstrated to be a superfluous class. All its social functions are now performed by salaried employees.
• Proletarian Revolution. Solution of the contradictions. The proletariat conquers political 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 on a predetermined plan becomes possible from then on. The development of production makes the existence of different classes of society from then on an anachronism. In proportion as anarchy in social production vanishes, the political power of the State dies out. People, at last the masters of their own form of social organization, become, at the same time, lords over nature, their own masters — 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.