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WorkFriedrich Engels

Socialism: Utopian and Scientific

Engels's short primer, which honours Owen, Fourier and Saint-Simon as socialism's founders and then argues that Marx made their hopes a science.

by Friedrich Engels150 passages held

  • German, the original language
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Original title
Die Entwicklung des Sozialismus von der Utopie zur Wissenschaft
First published
(aged 63)
Original language
German

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Overview

From 1800 Robert Owen ran the cotton mills at New Lanark in Scotland, and Engels gives him his full due: shorter hours than any competitor, schools for the youngest children, wages paid through a four-month stoppage, and a healthy return for the owners all the same. Owen and the two French reformers Saint-Simon and Fourier had seen clearly what the new industrial society was doing to people. Engels's case against them is about method. They treated socialism as a plan that a gifted mind invents and the rich and powerful adopt once they are persuaded, and so it failed each time it met the world. His claim is that socialism grows out of capitalism itself: the factory makes goods in common, its owner takes them privately, and the crises produced by that clash push society toward common ownership whether anyone designs it or not. He credits Marx with the two discoveries that, in his account, turned socialism into a science — a history driven by the way people produce, and profit explained as unpaid labour — and he ends with a state that is not abolished but withers away. The pamphlet was cut from his long polemic against Eugen Dühring, a Berlin lecturer. At the request of Paul Lafargue, Marx's son-in-law, Engels reworked three chapters, and Lafargue's translation ran in La Revue socialiste in the spring of 1880. The German original followed in 1883, requested by the editors of Der Sozialdemokrat, the party paper printed in Zurich while the Anti-Socialist Laws banned socialist print in Germany.

Key concepts

What does it mean that production became social but ownership stayed private?

Goods came to be made by many people together, yet they still belong to one owner. A medieval weaver owned his cloth because he made it with his own loom. In a mill, hundreds of workers share the machines and each piece passes through many hands, but the owner of the mill takes the whole product as if it were his own work. Engels sees every later conflict of capitalism growing from this mismatch.

What is the 'anarchy of production' in this book?

It is the absence of any plan for the economy as a whole. Each owner produces for sale without knowing whether anyone needs his goods or whether he will cover his costs. Inside each factory work is tightly organised; between factories no one coordinates anything. The market still has laws, but they act blindly, like a force of nature, and show themselves only afterwards, through gluts, price collapses and bankruptcies.

What is the 'industrial reserve army'?

It is Engels's name, first used in 1845, for the surplus of workers that capitalism keeps without work. Every better machine does the job of more people, so more are thrown onto the street than the factories need on average. They wait for boom times, and meanwhile their presence holds everyone's wages down to what barely keeps a worker alive. Unemployment, on this account, is not an accident but a lever the system relies on.

Why does Engels call the modern state the 'ideal collective capitalist'?

Because, whatever its form, the state exists to protect the conditions under which capitalists make their profits, against workers and against individual capitalists alike. When it takes over railways, the post or the telegraph, it does not end that role but becomes an actual owner of capital, employing wage workers just as a company does. The more it owns, the more citizens it exploits. State ownership, for Engels, is a step towards the solution, not the solution itself.

What did Fourier mean by civilisation's 'vicious circle'?

Fourier, the French critic of commercial society, saw that modern civilisation keeps creating contradictions it cannot overcome, so that it always achieves the opposite of what it intends: poverty grows out of abundance itself. Engels takes the phrase over for capitalism's trade cycle, in which boom, overproduction, crash and slow recovery follow one another roughly every ten years, and he adds what Fourier could not yet see: the circle keeps getting tighter.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

Honouring the founders, faulting their method

Can a just society be designed by one clear mind and handed to the powerful to adopt? Engels admires the men who tried, and explains why their good plans kept failing.

Owen turned a demoralised mill town of 2,500 people into a model colony without police or poor relief, then lost fame and fortune by attacking property, religion and marriage. Fourier exposed civilisation as a circle that keeps producing the opposite of what it intends. Their shared error was to treat socialism as a timeless truth awaiting its discoverer, as if a genius born five centuries earlier could have spared the world its suffering. Such rival truths only grind one another into a vague average socialism, like pebbles in a stream.

  • socialism
  • critique
  • intellectual history
  • education
  • morality
  • history

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Made by many, owned by one

What happens when goods are made jointly in the factory but still belong to whoever owns the machines? Engels finds in that mismatch the engine of every crisis and the seed of what comes next.

A medieval craftsman owned what he made with his own tools, so no one had to ask whose it was. The factory ended that: yarn passes through many hands and no worker can say "I made this", yet the owner keeps it as if he had. From the clash follow careful order inside each mill and anarchy between them, a crash roughly every ten years in which plenty itself breeds want, and at last joint-stock companies, trusts and state ownership that leave the capitalist nothing to do but collect dividends.

  • capitalism
  • political economy
  • labor
  • industrialization
  • competition
  • exploitation
  • capital
  • wages

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The state that withers away

If society takes over the factories and the land, what is left for a state to do? Engels answers that it is not abolished by decree but falls asleep, one field after another.

Every state so far, Engels argues, has served a ruling class: slaveholders, feudal lords, the modern middle class. Its seizure of the means of production in the name of the whole society is therefore its first representative act and its last independent one, as government over people gives way to the running of things. Nationalisation alone is not the change: were state tobacco socialist, Napoleon and Metternich would count among its founders. The goal is a humanity that makes its history knowingly, a leap from necessity into freedom.

  • socialism
  • revolution
  • class struggle
  • proletariat
  • historical materialism
  • science

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Materialism and the respectable English

Why does the word "materialism" make a respectable reader flinch, and who gains when religion is kept alive for the poor? Writing for English readers in 1892, Engels turns the book's method on their own history.

Materialism, Engels reminds the British, began with Bacon, Hobbes and Locke, and he calls the agnosticism of their scientists a shamefaced materialism. He then reads English history through class. Calvin's teaching that God elects the saved mirrored a market where success or ruin depends on forces no merchant controls, and a middle class that never governed alone learned to pay for religion as a moral means of keeping the masses in check, down to revivalists imported from America and the Salvation Army.

  • materialism
  • religion
  • ideology
  • epistemology
  • class conflict
  • revolution

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Within this work

passages held
150
distinct concepts
256
by passages held, corpus-wide
#412

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “bourgeoisie” and “capitalism”.
Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 16 pairings. 93 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
ConceptPaired conceptShared passages
bourgeoisiecapitalism4
bourgeoisieclass conflict3
capitalismclass conflict3
capitalismhistorical materialism3
class strugglesocialism3
dialecticshistorical materialism3
class strugglehistorical materialism2
bourgeoisiematerialism1
bourgeoisiesocialism1
capitalismclass struggle1
capitalismmaterialism1
class conflicthistorical materialism1
class conflictsocialism1
class struggledialectics1
dialecticsmaterialism1
historical materialismmaterialism1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

  1. 1845 The Condition of the Working Class in England (Die Lage der arbeitenden Klasse in England)

    Engels's first major book, written at twenty-four before he had properly met Marx; its documentary materialism fed the partnership and the histories that followed.

     DE
  2. 1877 Landmarks of Scientific Socialism (Herrn Eugen Dührings Umwälzung der Wissenschaft)

    Provoked by a rival socialist's rising influence in the German party, this two-year polemic doubled as Marxism's first systematic textbook; three of its chapters became the widely read Socialism: Utopian and Scientific.

     EN
  3. 1883 Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (Die Entwicklung des Sozialismus von der Utopie zur Wissenschaft) you are here DE
  4. 1886 Feuerbach: The Roots of the Socialist Philosophy (Ludwig Feuerbach und der Ausgang der klassischen deutschen Philosophie)

    The 1888 book edition carried the first printing of Marx's Theses on Feuerbach; Engels had written the essay in 1886 to review a study of Feuerbach and retrace his and Marx's exit from Hegel.

     EN
  5. 1896 The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man (Anteil der Arbeit an der Menschwerdung des Affen)

    A fragment from the unfinished Dialectics of Nature, in which Engels turned his materialism on natural science and human origins; the rest of that project went unpublished until 1925.

     DE
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