Engalos
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Friedrich Engels, Socialism, Utopian and Scientific (selections)
The following text contains selections taken from a pamphlet published in 1880 by Friedrich Engels, longtime collaborator with Karl Marx, following Marxs death. In it, Engels sought to provide an overview of Marxs theories accessible to workers in Germany. This text was translated into English in 1892 with Engels approval. I have added paragraph numbers to this
The full text can be found through the Marx/Engels Internet Archive (marxists.org) 1993, 1999 at
Paper text can be found in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1978; 683-717.
1. What does Engels mean by the term “social production”? How is it different from “individual production”? What changes as a result of the shift from “individual production” to “social production”?
2. What, according to Engels, is the “anarchy of production” produced by capitalism? Why does capitalism produce this?
3. How, according to Engels, do economic crises lead to monopolies or “trusts”?
4. According to Engels, how does the relationship between a worker and the products that worker makes, change as a result of the transition from feudalism to capitalism? (Alienation is NOT in the short engels piece – put back in?)
5. According to Engels, why does machinery become “the most powerful weapon in the war of capital against the working-class”?
6. What does Engels mean by the phrase “The mode of production is in rebellion against the mode of exchange.”?
[Historical Materialism]
[1]The materialist conception of history starts from the proposition that the production of the means to support human life and, next to production, the exchange of things produced, is the basis of all social structure; that in every society that has appeared in history, the manner in which wealth is distributed and society divided into classes or orders is dependent upon what is produced, how it is produced, and how the products are exchanged. From this point of view, the final causes of all social changes and political revolutions are to be sought, not in mens brains, not in mens better insights into eternal truth and justice, but in changes in the modes of production and exchange. They are to be sought, not in the philosophy, but in the economics of each particular epoch. The growing perception that existing social institutions are unreasonable and unjust, that reason has become unreason, and right wrong 1), is only proof that in the modes of production and exchange, changes have silently taken place with which the social order, adapted to earlier economic conditions, is no longer in keeping. From this it also follows that the means of getting rid of the incongruities that have been brought to light must also be present, in a more or less developed condition, within the changed modes of production themselves. These means are not to be invented by deduction from fundamental principles, but are to be discovered in the stubborn facts of the existing system of production.
[2]What is, then, the position of modern Socialism in this connection?
[3]The present situation of society — this is now pretty generally conceded — is the creation of the ruling class of today, of the bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie broke up the feudal system and built upon its ruins the capitalist order of society, the kingdom of free competition, of personal liberty, of the equality, before the law, of all commodity owners, of all the rest of the capitalist blessings. Thenceforward, the capitalist mode of production could develop in freedom. Since steam, machinery, and the making of machines by machinery transformed the older manufacture into modern industry, the productive forces, evolved under the guidance of the bourgeoisie, developed with a rapidity and in a degree unheard of before. But just as the older manufacture, in its time, and handicraft, becoming more developed under its influence, had come into collision with the feudal trammels of the guilds, so now modern industry, in its complete development, comes into collision with the bounds within which the capitalist mode of production holds it confined. The new productive forces have already outgrown the capitalistic mode of using them. And this conflict between productive forces and modes of production is not a conflict engendered in the mind of man, like that between original sin and divine justice. It exists, in fact, objectively, outside us, independently of the will and actions even of the men that have brought it on. Modern Socialism is nothing but the reflex, in thought, of this conflict in fact; its ideal reflection in the minds, first, of the class directly suffering under it, the working class.
[4] Now, in what does this conflict consist?
[5] Before capitalist production — i.e., in the Middle Ages — the system of petty industry obtained generally, based upon the private property of the laborers in their means of production; in the country, the agriculture of the small peasant, freeman, or serf; in the towns, the handicrafts organized in guilds. The instruments of labor — land, agricultural implements, the workshop, the tool — were the instruments of labor of single individuals, adapted for the use of one worker, and, therefore, of necessity, small, dwarfish, circumscribed. But, for this very reason, they belonged as a rule to the producer himself. To concentrate these scattered, limited means of production, to enlarge them, to turn them into the powerful levers of production of the present day — this was precisely the historic role of capitalist production and of its upholder, the bourgeoisie. But the bourgeoisie, as is shown there, could not transform these puny means of production into mighty productive forces without transforming them, at the same time, from means of production of the individual into social means of production only workable by a collectivity of men. The spinning wheel, the handloom, the blacksmiths hammer, were replaced by the spinning-machine, the power-loom, the steam-hammer; the individual workshop, by the factory implying the co-operation of hundreds and thousands of workmen. In like manner, production itself changed from a series of individual into a series of social