Socialism:
Utopian and Scientific by Frederick Engels along with the Communist Manifesto is one of the
indispensable books for any one desiring to understand the modern socialist
movement. The author Engels says that the industrial production since the
Middle Ages can be divided into three periods. First, handicraft, second
manufacture and third modern industry.
Engels says that ‘tradition is
a great retarding force.’ Engels observed that the working class in England was
moving slowly, like all things in England. He stresses that the triumph of the
European working-class does not depend upon England alone. It can only be
secured by the co-operation of, at least, England France, and Germany. He
further states that in both these countries the working –class movement is well
ahead of England. According to Engels, modern Socialism is a logical extension
of the principles laid down by the great French philosophers of the eighteenth
century.
Engels quotes Fourier, who
according to him was the first to declare that in any given society the degree
of women’s emancipation is the natural measure of the general emancipation. He
further quotes Fourier. Fourier says that ‘that the civilized stage raises
every vice practiced by barbarism in a simple fashion, into a form of existence,
complex, ambiguous, equivocal, hypocritical’’—that civilization moves in “”a vicious circle,’’ in contradictions which
it constantly reproduces without being able to solve them; hence it constantly
arrives at the very opposite to that which it wants to attain, or pretends to
want to attain, so that, e.g., “under civilization poverty is born of
superabundance itself.’’
Engels mentions Robert Owen.
He says that Owen had adopted the teaching of the materialistic philosophers;
that man’s character is the product, on the one hand, of heredity, on the
other, of the environment of the individual during his lifetime, and especially
during his period of development. According to Owen the three obstacles in
social reform are private property, religion and the present form of marriage.
According to Engels the
Socialism of the earlier days certainly criticized the existing capitalistic
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, the more strongly this earlier Socialism denounced the exploitation of
the working-class, inevitable under Capitalism, the less able was it clearly to
show in what this exploitation consisted and how it arose. Engels admits that
the materialistic conception of history and the revelation of the secret of
capitalistic production through surplus-value belongs to Marx. With these discoveries
Socialism became a science.
In medieval society especially
in the earlier centuries, production was essentially directed towards
satisfying the wants of the individual. It satisfied only the wants of the
producer and his family.no exchange was involved and the products did not
assume the character of commodities.
Only when the family of the peasant began to produce more than was
sufficient to supply its own wants and the payments in kind to the feudal lord,
only then did it also produce commodities. This surplus, thrown into socialized
exchange and offered for sale, became commodities.
Engels quotes Marx that
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 labourer; that the very product of the
worker is turned into an instrument for his subjugation. Engels quotes Marx
from ‘Capital, Vol.I’. Marx says that the accumulation of wealth at one pole
is, therefore, at the same time, accumulation of misery, agony of toil, slavery,
ignorance, brutality, mental degradation, at the opposite pole, i.e., on the
side of the class that produces its own product in the form of capital.
Engels states that in
capitalistic society the means of production can only function when they have
undergone a preliminary transformation into capital, into the means of
exploiting human labor-power.
Engels suggests that to
accomplish the act of universal emancipation is the historical mission of the
modern proletariat. To thoroughly comprehend the historical conditions and thus
the very nature of this act, to impart to the now oppressed proletarian class a
full knowledge of the conditions and of the meaning of the momentous act it is
called upon to accomplish, this is the task of the theoretical expression of
the proletarian movement, scientific Socialism.
