Socialism: Utopian and Scientific

Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, apart from having a terribly clumsy name, is a pamphlet comprised mostly of excerpts from Anti-Dühring, which was itself a riposte to the work of Eugen Dühring, who was a socialist, but not a fan of Marxism. At the time, Dühring was forming a sect within the German Socialist party - so we can understand why Engels penned so many pages against his ideas. Of course, Engels is now the main reason anybody even remembers his name.

For me, there was little really truly new here, so I’ve struggled to come up with much that that I thought would be interesting to others, so what follows is a broad sketch of the content, with the bits I found most interesting or important highlighted.

He begins by explaining what he means by ‘materialism’, which is about two pages long, but adequately summed up by a single line:

It is impossible to separate thought from matter that thinks.

He then complains at great length about the religiosity of the British middle-classes and religion generally before proceeding to a history of the English, French and industrial revolutions, taking the occasional swipe at religion as he does so. After a bit of this, we finally get to his real issue with Britain and religion:

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.

He goes on to lay out a load of stuff about the hijacking of the French Revolution by the bourgeoisie.

The promised eternal peace was turned into an endless war of conquest. … 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.

Oppression by force was replaced by corruption; the sword, as the first social lever, by gold.

We can also find an early example of the ‘socialism starves people meme, with Saint Simon talking about the French Revolution:

“See,” says he to them, “what happened in France at the time when your comrades held sway there; they brought about a famine.”

But we shouldn’t complain too much about Saint Simon, because

“In 1816, he declares that politics is the science of production, and foretells the complete absorption of politics by economics”

He also predicted the EU:

in 1814, immediately after the entry of the allies into Paris, and again in 1815, during the Hundred Days’ War, he proclaims the alliance of France with England, and then of both these countries with Germany, as the only guarantee for the prosperous development and peace of Europe.

Very shortly after this, about Fourier, Engels writes:

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.

After this he tells us the story we’ve all heard many times of the Industrial Revolution, paying particular attention to Britain, laying out the struggles of the Chartists and the reforms that followed. With reference to the revolutions that occurred in parallel elsewhere in Europe he takes another swipe at religion, saying:

If the British bourgeois had been convinced before of the necessity of maintaining the common people in a religious mood, how much more must he feel that necessity after all these experiences? Regardless of the sneers of his Continental compeers, he continued to spend thousands and tens of thousands, year after year, upon the evangelization of the lower orders

Engels then argues that the British reforms were possible in part, through religion, and also through the natural deference that the British classes have for those above them.

if the middle-class look with awe and veneration upon what Lord John Manners playfully called “our old nobility,” the mass of the working-people then looked up with respect and deference to what used to be designated as “their betters,” the middle-class

He also has one slightly bizarre thing to say about the British working men:

it is the working-class which keeps alive the finest qualities of the English character, and that, if a step in advance is once gained in England, it is, as a rule, never lost afterwards

We have seen this rule sadly, and violently, proved false.

The work itself leaps around a bit, so I’m afraid this must too. So please forgive these jumps.

Describing the social damage caused by the earliest stages of capitalism, he says:

the herding together of a homeless population in the worst quarters of the large towns; the loosening of all traditional moral bonds, of patriarchal subordination, of family relations; overwork, especially of women and children

In the context of this upheaval he tells us the story of Robert Owen, who set up a factory colony with remarkably good conditions for the time. Children were educated from age two and the working days were 3 hours shorter than the other factories of the time.

But Owen was dissatisfied with this. He remarked

The people were slaves at my mercy.

He then tells us of Owen’s journey from a philanthropist to a communist:

His advance in the direction of Communism was the turning-point in Owen’s life. As long as he was simply a philanthropist, he was rewarded with nothing but wealth, applause, honor, and glory. … But when he came out with his Communist theories, that was quite another thing. … He knew what confronted him if he attacked these—outlawry, excommunication from official society, the loss of his whole social position.

Another jarring transition now, into a description of dialectics, including its origins with the Ancient Greeks who, he says, were natural dialecticians.

Dialectics, he says, is the rejection of straightforward cause and effect - something that has entered into more space than it deserves thanks to the advances of science at the time. While cause and effect are perfectly sufficient for Newtonian physics, they are lacking for the complexities of reality.

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

He elaborates that to view a situation dialectically is to view it, not in isolation, and not statically. It must be viewed as connected and dynamic to truly be dialectical.

Another jump now, into the historical development of socialised production.

He tells in the Middle Ages how individual craftsmen would make commodities for sale and how eventually these came into competition with the products of factory, or social labour and were almost entirely outcompeted in the market.

This marked a historic change:

Now the owner of the instruments of labor always appropriated to himself the product, although it was no longer his product but exclusively the product of the labor of others.

The very machinery that produced such excesses provides the bourgeoisie with the very tools with which deprive those who worked them.

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

Thus it comes about that over-work of some becomes the preliminary condition for the idleness of others, and that modern industry, which hunts after new consumers over the whole world, forces the consumption of the masses at home down to a starvation minimum

He goes on to describe the broader implications of the new mode of production

The extension of the markets can not keep pace with the extension of production. The collision becomes inevitable, and as this cannot produce any real solution so long as it does not break in pieces the capitalist mode of production, the collisions become periodic. Capitalist production has begotten another “vicious circle”.

Of course, as we know well by now, at the end of these vicious cycles is a crisis which emerges as a recession.

production and exchange among all civilized peoples and their more or less barbaric hangers-on, are thrown out of joint about once every ten years

This all seems rather prescient given the current world situation, but in fact, Engels here is being rather too optimistic. In reality, crises of capitalism occur - on average - every 4-7 years.

He also goes on to describe the tendency towards monopoly, saying:

At first the capitalistic mode of production forces out the workers. Now it forces out the capitalists, and reduces them, just as it reduced the workers

Finally, he lays out the past and future of the means of production, in three stages. Skipping over most of history, he says the first is found in Mediæval Society, the second in Capitalist Revolution, and finally in Proletarian Revolution.

The proletariat seizes the public power, and by means of this transforms the socialized means of production, slipping from the hands of the bourgeoisie, into public property. By this act the proletariat frees the means of production from the character of capital they have thus far borne, and gives their socialized character complete freedom to work itself out. Socialized production upon a predetermined plan becomes henceforth possible.