Understanding Marxist Classics: "Socialism: Utopian and Scientific"

Friedrich Engels's short text lays out the basics of Marxism.

Friedrich Engels’s short book, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific is an essential key text in Marxist theory. It is an excellent introduction to the fundamentals of Marxism and dialectical materialism. Engels published Socialism: Utopian and Scientific in 1880. It was actually extracted from a longer polemic, Anti-Duhring. Engels’s goal with the essay was to make a shorter, more easily accessible version of Karl Marx’s magnum opus, Capital.

Engels’s book is divided into three sections: Part I- “Utopian Socialism”; Part II- “Dialectics”; and Part III- “Historical Materialism.” This post tackles the first two chapters, with chapter three appearing in the follow-up piece.

Engels opens Socialism by examining the various socialist tendencies that came before Marxism, which he calls “utopian” socialism (or even, “bourgeois” socialism). Contrary to popular belief, Engels and Marx did not invent the concept of socialism. Indeed, the idea of a moneyless, classless society, devoid of want and poverty, where every individual’s basic needs are met and the economic means of subsistence are held in common ownership, is as old as humanity itself.

What Marx and Engels did for socialist theory, as we shall see momentarily, is develop it into a science.

Engels focuses on three principal utopian socialist figures: Saint-Simon, Charles Fourier, and Robert Owen. These radical intellectuals all came out of the French Revolution with its emphasis on truth, reason, and the Enlightenment. They witnessed the failure and betrayals of the French Revolution (which was, at heart, a bourgeois revolution — like the American Revolution) and aimed to create a blueprint for human emancipation.

“[T]he new order of things, rational enough as compared with earlier conditions,” Engels writes of the failure of the French Revolution, “turned out to be by no means absolutely rational.

The state based upon reason completely collapsed. Rousseau’s Contrat Social [The Social Contract] had found its realization in the Reign of Terror, from which the bourgeoisie, who had lost confidence in their own political capacity, had taken refuge first in the corruption of the Directorate [the right-wing governing body of France from 1795-1799], and, finally, under the wing of Napoleonic despotism. The promised eternal peace was turned into an endless war of conquest. The society based upon reason had fared no better. The antagonism between rich and poor, instead of dissolving into general prosperity, had become intensified by the removal of the guild and other privileges, which had to some extent bridged it over…

Engels continues:

The “freedom of property” from feudal fetters, now veritably accomplished, turned out to be, for the small capitalists and small proprietors, the freedom to sell their small property, crushed under the overmastering competition of the large capitalists and landlords, to these great lords, and thus, as far as the small capitalists and peasant proprietors were concerned, became “freedom from property.” The development of industry upon a capitalistic basis made poverty and misery of the working masses conditions of existence of society. Cash payment became more and more, in Carlyle’s phrase … the sole nexus between man and man. [Emphasis in original.]

“… Oppression by force was replaced by corruption; the sword, as the first social leveler, by gold,” he writes.

Saint-Simon, Fourier, and Owen all planted the initial seeds of what Engels and Marx would later develop into scientific socialism. They were all highly critical of the newly emerging capitalist system and the widespread greed, poverty, and inequality it created in France, England and much of Europe.

However, their efforts were dubbed “utopian” because they were ultimately too individualized, too generalized, and too theoretically underdeveloped in terms of their understanding of the then-emerging capitalist system. The utopian socialists believed all that was necessary to change the world was for one to develop the ideal “socialist plan” or “blueprint” and to then simply impose that plan on to existing society. Figures like Owen and Fourier, likewise, naively believed they could build socialism by appealing to the conscience of the wealthy (a bourgeois theme prevalent in Charles Dickens’s novels). No violent revolution or messy class struggle was necessary.

Indeed, we continue to see reverberations of the utopian socialist mindset in contemporary “socialist” organizations that insist we can simply vote socialism into existence. Another manifestation of utopian socialism insists that if we merely elect enough “progressive” Democrats into Congress, we can “take back” the corporate-owned and funded, Democratic Party.  

As such, all of the early socialists’ various projects and ideas were “foredoomed as Utopian,” according to Engels.

“[T]he more completely they were worked out in detail,” Engels writes, “the more they could not avoid drifting off into pure phantasies [sic].”

The early utopian socialists all adhered to the “Great Man” theory. They believed that socialism need merely be imposed upon the masses from above by the intelligent elite. And, indeed, Saint-Simon, Fourier, and Owen all came from that elite class. The utopians, likewise, had little faith in the ability of the mass of poor and working people in France, England, and Germany to bring about their own emancipation. The masses were, in their minds, simply too poor and ignorant to ever organize collectively for their own economic freedom.

This, again, was an attitude that Engels and Marx (both of whom were actively involved in the working-class activism of their time) did not share. It was another area in which they would further develop socialism from a bourgeois vanity project, into a materialist science driven by class struggle.

As Engels writes:

To all of these [utopian socialists], Socialism is the expression of absolute truth, reason and justice, and has only to be discovered to conquer all the world by virtue of its own power. And as an absolute truth is independent of time, space, and of the historical development of man, it is a mere accident when and where it is discovered. With all this, absolute truth, reason, and justice are different with the founder of each different school...

Hence, from this nothing could come but a kind of eclectic, average Socialism, which … has up to the present time dominated the minds of most of the socialist workers in France and England. Hence, a mish-mash allowing of the most manifold shades of opinion: a mish-mash of such critical statements, economic theories, pictures of future society by the founders of different sects, as excite a minimum of opposition; a mish-mash which is the more easily brewed the more definite sharp edges of the individual constituents are rubbed down in the stream of debate, like rounded pebbles in a brook.

“To make a science of Socialism,” Engels concludes the first chapter, “it had first to be placed upon a real basis.”

In the second chapter (“Dialectics”), Engels contrasts Hegel’s theory of dialectics with the traditional metaphysical view of science that had previously prevailed in Europe. Dialectics is a philosophical concept concerning how we view the world and how that world is constantly changing. More importantly, dialectics is concerned with how we can actively transform the world.

The Greek philosophers were adherents of the “dialectical method” (though they did not call it by that specific term). Heraclitus, in particular, wrote about how one can never step into the same river twice. This is because not only is the river itself constantly changing — even if in subtle, imperceptible ways — but so is the individual stepping into it. Thus, for Heraclitus, “nothing was fixed, fast, or frozen.” Everything is in a constant state of flux. And, often, what causes such changes is, according to Heraclitus, “strife.”

“Strife is the father of all things,” he wrote. “…. The fairest harmony is born of things different, and discord is what produces all things.” This is a crucial point which Engels will return to later in the text.

Hegel contrasted his dialectical approach to viewing the world with the “metaphysical” approach which views things as fixed, static, and never in contradiction with one another. Engels specifically points to Sir Francis Bacon and John Locke as standard proponents of the metaphysical outlook.

“To the metaphysician,” writes Engels, “things and their mental reflexes, ideas, are isolated, are to be considered one after the other and apart from each other, are objects of investigation fixed, rigid, given once for all. He thinks in absolutely irreconcilable antitheses…”

[T]he metaphysical mode of thought, justifiable and necessary as it is in a number of domains whose extent varies according to the nature of the particular object of investigation, sooner or later reaches a limit, beyond which it becomes one-sided, restricted, abstract, lost in insoluble contradictions. In the contemplation of individual things, it forgets the connection between them; in the contemplation of their existence, it forgets the beginning and end of that existence; of their repose, it forgets their motion. It cannot see the woods for the trees.

Suffice to say, Engels and Marx were both highly influenced by Hegel as students. Marx was even a member of a student-group called the Young Hegelians in Germany. However, Engels and Marx saw Hegel’s theoretical “idealism” as his major blind-spot. In Marxism, idealism is often contrasted with materialism. Marx and Engels believed that ideas and theories alone were not enough to change the world. One needed to work with the real-life material conditions within society in order to bring about change.

“The philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways,” Marx once wrote. “The point, however, is to change it.”

“[T]he old idealist conception of history … knew nothing of class struggle based upon economic interests…,” writes Engels. “[P]roduction and all economic relations appeared in it only as incidental, subordinate elements in the ‘history of civilization.’”

He continues:

… From that time forward, Socialism was no longer an accidental discovery of this or that ingenious brain, but the necessary outcome of the struggle between two historically developed classes — the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. Its task was no longer to manufacture a system of society as perfect as possible, but to examine the historico-economic succession of events from which these classes and their antagonism had of necessity sprung, and to discover in the economic conditions thus created the means of ending the conflict. … 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.

Engels points to the capitalist’s reliance on the extraction of “surplus-value” as the key component to its sustained function. Put simply, capitalists (or employers and bosses) extract more labor-power from their workers than they ultimately pay for. This surplus labor is essentially unpaid labor. It is a form of wage theft from the worker. The capitalist keeps this surplus value for himself. This is how the capitalist generates profit — the ultimate goal under capitalism.

“These two great discoveries,” Engels writes, “the materialistic conception of history and the revelation of the secret of capitalistic production through surplus-value, we owe to Marx. With these discoveries, Socialism became a science. The next thing was to work out all its details and relations.”

Stay tuned for my analysis of the third and final chapter in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific. And, if you like what you read here, please consider becoming a subscriber. This Substack is entirely reader funded.

As always, no war but class war!