Socialism: Utopian and Scientific

A Pamphlet Broken Off From Anti-Dühring

From 1877 Engels wrote a serial refuting Eugen Dühring of Berlin, whose system was displacing Marxism inside the German party. Collected, it became Herr Eugen Dühring's Revolution in Science: Anti-Dühring (1878).

Paul Lafargue asked for some of it separately. Engels arranged three chapters as a pamphlet, Lafargue translated it, and it appeared in the March, April and May 1880 issues of Revue Socialiste as Socialisme utopique et Socialisme scientifique. Polish and Spanish editions came from the French, German friends brought out the original in 1883, and Italian, Russian, Danish, Dutch and Romanian versions followed from the German. In the 1892 English preface Engels noted that the little book was circulating in ten languages: 'I am not aware that any other Socialist work, not even our Communist Manifesto of 1848, or Marx's Capital, has been so often translated.'

This pamphlet, in other words, was the actual channel by which Marxism reached a mass readership. Much of the twentieth-century socialist movement came in through these hundred-odd pages rather than through Capital.

Part I: Three Men's Utopias

The first chapter treats Saint-Simon, Fourier and Owen, and against the common impression it is not a chapter of mockery. Engels places the three at the point where the kingdom of reason promised by the French Revolution had turned out to be a set of 'bitterly disappointing caricatures'. That they drew their solutions out of the human brain and sought to impose them on society from outside is a reflection of immature capitalist and class conditions, not a personal failing. His own attitude is explicit: 'we delight in the stupendously grand thoughts and germs of thought that everywhere break out through their phantastic covering.'

Part II: What Makes It 'Scientific'

The second chapter sets metaphysical thinking against dialectics, summarises the road from Hegel to materialism, and fixes the point at which socialism became a science in two discoveries: the materialist conception of history, and the secret of capitalist production laid open through surplus value. 'These two great discoveries… we owe to Marx. With these discoveries, Socialism became a science.'

Part III: Nationalisation Is Not the Solution

The third chapter is what joins this entry to the question of the state. Engels reads joint-stock companies, trusts and state takeovers as signs of capitalism outgrowing its own form, and then nails the point down:

'The modern state, no matter what its form, is essentially a capitalist machine: the state of the capitalists, the ideal personification of the total national capital. The more it proceeds to the taking over of productive forces, the more does it actually become the national capitalist, the more citizens does it exploit. The workers remain wage-workers, proletarians. The capitalist relation is not done away with. It is, rather, brought to a head.'

The famous footnote hangs here. Since Bismarck went in for state ownership, a 'kind of spurious Socialism' has arisen that declares all state ownership socialistic. But if the state taking over the tobacco trade is socialist, then Napoleon and Metternich must be numbered among the founders of socialism. If Belgium building its railways for political and financial reasons, and Bismarck buying the Prussian lines to have them in hand in case of war, were socialist measures, then the royal porcelain manufacture and the army's regimental tailor would be socialist institutions too.

The State Dies Out

The most quoted sentences on the state close the same chapter. In seizing political power and turning the means of production into state property the proletariat abolishes itself as proletariat and abolishes the state as state. That first act, taking possession of the means of production in the name of society, is at the same time its last independent act as a state. Thereafter 'the government of persons is replaced by the administration of things, and by the conduct of processes of production'. And: 'The State is not "abolished". It dies out.'

Rereading the passage in 1917, Lenin corrected the usual gloss: what withers away is the proletarian semi-state left after the revolution, while the bourgeois state is abolished by the revolution itself. The correction was aimed at readings that used this pamphlet as an alibi for reformism.

The Names It Left in Korean

The pair 공상적 사회주의 / 과학적 사회주의 comes from this pamphlet's title. Korean editions have appeared as 공상에서 과학으로, 공상적 사회주의와 과학적 사회주의, and 사회주의의 공상에서 과학으로의 발전; the last is closest to Die Entwicklung des Sozialismus von der Utopie zur Wissenschaft, and the first is what everyone says.