NOTE: This is a classic work of literature and a foundational part of Marxism, one of the most important political and economic theories ever. I don’t think a traditional review where I critique the author’s writing is going to be of much value to anyone. It’s a product of its place and time, and a part of our history. Since it’s in the public domain, I’ll attempt to summarize the key ideas, clarify its importance, and will also attach my notes so you can read them yourself to either enjoy or criticize my doodles.
Friedrich Engels wrote this in 1844 as a guide for both the way socialism has been interpreted and attempted throughout history. It explains the view of history and class struggle that he and Karl Marx developed as part of Marxism. He actually worried at first that the work was too heavy in “foreign words” to appeal to workers. That was his target audience, so he reworked it with an eye toward clarity. Later on he said he was worried for nothing. Workers bought at least 30,000 copies of this during his lifetime, including where it was illegal to do so.
Socialism: Utopian and Scientific is partly a response to the ideas of Doctor E. Duhring. He was a rising non-Marxist socialist at the time and a major force in the German Socialist party. Engels thinks he’s a windbag, and mocks him for being a ponderous philosopher. The wrong-ness Engels perceived in Duhring’s speeches and thinking convinced Engels to write this work. In doing so, he also placed Marxism in relation to the natural science and philosophy of this period.
The most important thing to understand is that there have been many socialisms throughout history, by which Engels means many different The most important thing to understand is that there have been many socialisms throughout history. By this, Engels means many different attempts to build a society where the people at large decide what goods will be produced and how it will be distributed. Many of these attempts took place in what we’d call “utopian” societies. In attempted utopias, leaders tried to construct ways of life without the ills and injustices of the larger world. Engels argues that these utopias shared a central flaw. They assumed that if someone just came up with the correct rules and structure of society, then justice would fall into place. What their experiences reveal? That people can’t just come up with the perfect structure to a society and expect it all to work out.
Engels means to show the validity of an idea called historical materialism. This is a method of analysis that suggests human history is largely driven by class struggle, how we produce communities, and who gets what. To explain historical materialism, Engels goes back to the origins of materialism as a philosophy. He starts with Francis Bacon, a natural philosopher that was also an early proponent of the scientific method. Engels emphasizes two points about natural philosophy, namely that in it,
- Everything we know comes from our senses, and through them we can come to understand the world, and
- We must investigate data rationally to reveal the truth about our world.
Philosophers like Thomas Hobbes and John Locke get a mention as well for developing this materialist idea further. Engels is suggesting the materialist idea that if something is true, then we should be able to make use of it or predict its behavior. Then, in observing the results, we can determine whether our understanding was correct or whether it needs revision.
Historical materialism, per Engels, is the idea that the “ultimate cause and great moving power” of human history is economic development. By this he means the changes over time in how we produce and exchange goods and services. It involves how we interact as classes, and how we struggle against each other on this basis. To illustrate this, Engels traces the development of humanity through eras of history. Keep in mind he does this as he understood them at the time, being a 19th century man based in Europe. We start from the feudal system of the Middle Ages, where nobles, kings and the church held sway. Then, we see the bourgeois class emerge and gain power as methods of manufacturing get more complex. This new class bumped up against the power of kings and the church. It claimed to stand for scientific progress instead of doctrine.
The rise of a new class and fall of another led to many instances of chaos and revolution over the following centuries. These included bourgeois uprisings like the French Revolution and the revolutions of 1848. Eventually two new classes predominated in society. These were the bourgeoisie, which held power and wealth, and the proletariat or working class, which was subordinate to the wealthy capitalist class. The proletariat was forced by circumstance to sell their labor power to the bourgeoisie to survive.
Engels argued that socialism is about resolving the tension between capitalists and wage-earners. It could solve the problem that he calls the “anarchy ruling in production” and its consequences. He notes that socialism draws its roots, in part, from philosophers of the Enlightenment era. Supposedly universal values like truth, freedom, equality and justice were valuable. But they were also selectively preserved by a bourgeois dominated society, usually in service of their interests. When the working class pursued these values in ways that conflicted with the ruling class, suddenly these values weren’t so universal.
Three major utopian socialist figures get mention in the book, namely Saint-Simon, Charles Fourier and Robert Owen. Engels notes that while they were socialist, they did not represent the working class. These utopians tried to create a perfect social order in their own heads, out of whole cloth, and devise experimental communities in order to model their ideas. Engels believed this was a well-meaning disaster in the making. He goes through the history of each of their movements briefly, detailing where he thought they made valuable contributions and where he believes they failed.
In order to further explain Marxist philosophy, Engels delves into German and Greek philosophers in a line that ends with G.W.F. Hegel and his idea of dialectics. So, what are dialectics? The central idea is a focus on the interactions and interconnected nature of everything. To quote Engels,
“Everything moves, changes, comes into being and passes away… we observe the movements, transitions, connections, rather than the things that move, change and are connected.”
In other words, everything is connected, everything is moving, everything impacts everything else. It’s all in flux. Analyzing certain things metaphysically is useful in many contexts. But it’s not at the core of Marxist thinking. Marxism is all about observing and drawing connections. It tries to see evolution and processes of change at work. This does come out of the ideas of Hegel. He saw history as an almost evolutionary historical process with an end trajectory. That end trajectory is progress.
For Marx and Engels, materialism isn’t just relying on observation and data and experimentation and reason. It’s also about studying the historical development of humanity. Marxists try to keep an eye toward the processes that shape our societies and our character as a species. The economic processes and relations we undertake – what we make, how, and who gets what – are what most determine our lives and destiny.
This isn’t to say that religion, politics, arts, culture and the like don’t matter. They do, even to Marx and Engels. But economics is about how we survive. It’s about what we build and the way we get waht we need to live our lives. As such, it affects all those other things too. Historical materialism sees production, exchange, wealth distribution and class struggle as essential to history. Engels believes we can trace all revolutions back to these economic questions. Does this position hold up when we think about all revolutions in history? Perhaps not. But we can look at them and analyze what questions of economic life were in play, even as other issues took center stage. The answers might surprise us.
The third chapter of Socialism: Utopian and Scientific moves on to cover a lot of the same ground you’d find in The Communist Manifesto, the Principles of Communism, or A People’s Guide to Capitalism by Hadas Thier. It attempts to introduce the main scope of Marxist economic thinking. You’ll get the struggle between bourgeoisie and proletariat classes, the evolution of production methods from the Middle Ages to the Industrial Revolution. It covers the history of primitive accumulation of wealth, by capitalists, using theft, law and the sword.
But back to what Engels calls the “anarchy of social production”. In this chapter, he fleshes that out more. Capitalists running their factories don’t easily know how much product to make. They don’t know if it will be sold, much less whether they will be able to profit. Nowadays we have sophisticated ways to guess at the answers to these questions. Our leading corporations certainly employ them, but they remain guesses. They’re not a sure thing. There’s no one voice in charge of determining all this, that’s the anarchy part of the production process. It’s also something that didn’t occur, at least on a large scale, in the old days of feudal artisans and such.
There’s contradiction between the social, organized way we produce goods and the unpredictable, leaderless market in which we have to sell them. This causes a vicious cycle that Marx and Engels say leads to capitalist crises.
This contradiction forces businesses who want to stay in business:
- To COMPETE
- To INNOVATE
- To EXPAND
- To DRIVE DOWN WAGES
- To MINIMIZE LABOR
- To MAXIMIZE PRODUCTION
- To CONQUER NEW MARKETS
They do this in an endless quest for infinite growth on a finite planet. These are incentives that a company under capitalism can’t avoid. Unfortunately, they lead companys to overproduce goods. Meanwhile, they’ve driven down wages and standards of living. They do it so much that the workers in their markets can no longer getbuyven buy the goods they produce. This all helps drive the system toward collapse. We’re all familiar with the shuttered businesses, foreclosures and unemployment lines that occur. We call these periods recessions.
Engels will be the first to point out that this isn’t just because capitalists are all evil. They’re beholden to these forces that the system unleashes. They don’t have a choice unless they want to go bankrupt or get out of the game. Asking them to change is basically asking for the laws of physics to change. It isn’t possible. It’s a vicious cycle.
In that cycle, companies consolidate into trusts and monopolies. Capital ends up in fewer and fewer hands. A small number of companies dominate more and more of our lives. Sometimes it even becomes clear to capitalist-dominated governments that a nationalized industry would be preferable. These countries nationalize utilities and infrastructure like railroads, telephone lines, and so on. Yet in the 21st century, privatization of once-nationalized common infrastructure is just as common, if not more so. Additionally, we know that a state isn’t necessarily any more accountable to the people, or to the working class, than the companies they might usurp.
Engels’ conclusion? Proletarians must seize state power, and with it, seize control of private productive property. He reminds us that in Marxist philosophy, the state is seen as ultimately the tool of the ruling class. Currently, it is the bourgeois, or capitalist, class. A socialist transitional period has to take place in order to eliminate class distinctions and scarcity. When these take place, communists believe the state will “wither away.” People will still need to meet, make decisions, plan and administer the forces of production. But the apparatus of laws that constrict people? The often violent tools used to enforce those laws? Those ought to be gone under actual, end-stage communism. But Engels didn’t believe this could happen overnight. Nor did he believe, as anarchists do, that you could achieve this without using the state during a transitional period. That reminds me, definitely going to have to read up on anarchists, too.
Capitalism had a very, very productive run, Engels says. Perhaps a capitalist class was always necessary, for a time. They helped to build up our society’s capacity to produce the things we need on an industrial scale. We may be able to use this power to overcome scarcity forever. Whether that’s true or not, though, he declares that the time of the capitalist class is over. We now have the power to provide everyone a life of freedom from want, and the freedom to develop their true potential. That means an end to letting commodity production govern our lives. It means an end to the market economy in favor of one with planned organization. It means the participation of workers in all decisions. A lot of people do perceive this idea of “central planning” to be an Achilles’ Heel of Marxist thinking. Are they right? I don’t know. I do know that I want to read more into it by proponents and opponents of the idea. Socialism: Utopian and Scientific is a useful guide to the philosophical underpinnings of Marxism. It increased my level of interest in reading more Western philosophy in general. That will happen one fine day, when I make that time.
Read This If:
You’re looking for context into the grand and expansive ideas of Marxism. You want to know how the ideology is and isn’t similar to the socialist movements before it, and to other anti-capitalist movements.
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