Frederick Engels
Socialism: Utopian and Scientific
1892 English Edition Introduction
[General Introduction and the History of Materialism]
The present little book is, originally, part of a
larger whole. About 1875, Dr. E. Dühring, privatdocent [university lecturer who formerly received fees from his students rather than a wage] at Berlin University,
suddenly and rather clamorously announced his conversion to Socialism,
and presented the German public not only with an elaborate Socialist theory,
but also with a complete practical plan for the reorganization of society.
As a matter of course, he fell foul of his predecessors; above all, he
honored Marx by pouring out upon him the full vials of his wrath.
This took place about the same time when the two sections of the
Socialist party in Germany — Eisenachers and Lasselleans — had just effected
their fusion [at the Gotha Unification Congress], and thus obtained not only an immense increase of strength,
but, was what more, the faculty of employing the whole of this strength
against the common enemy. The Socialist party in Germany was fast becoming
a power. But, to make it a power, the first condition was that the newly-conquered
unity should not be imperilled. And Dr. Dühring openly proceeded to form
around himself a sect, the nucleus of a future separate party. It, thus,
became necessary to take up the gauntlet thrown down to us, and to fight
out the struggle, whether we liked it or not.
This, however, though it might not be an over-difficult, was evidently
a long-winded business. As is well-known, we Germans are of a terribly
ponderous Grundlichkeit, radical profundity or profound radicality, whatever
you may like to call it. Whenever anyone of us expounds what he considers
a new doctrine, he has first to elaborate it into an all-comprising system.
He has to prove that both the first principles of logic and the fundamental
laws of the universe had existed from all eternity for no other purpose
than to ultimately lead to this newly-discovered, crowning theory. And
Dr. Dühring, in this respect, was quite up to the national mark. Nothing
less than a complete "System of Philosophy", mental, moral, natural, and
historical; a complete "System of Political Economy and Socialism"; and,
finally, a "Critical History of Political Economy" — three big volumes
in octavo, heavy extrinsically and intrinsically, three army-corps of arguments
mobilized against all previous philosophers and economists in general,
and against Marx in particular — in fact, an attempt at a complete "revolution
in science" — these were what I should have to tackle. I had to treat
of all and every possible subject, from concepts of time and space to Bimetallism;
from the eternity of matter and motion, to the perishable nature of moral
ideas; from Darwin's natural selection to the education of youth in a future
society. Anyhow, the systematic comprehensiveness of my opponent gave me
the opportunity of developing, in opposition to him, and in a more connected
form than had previously been done, the views held by Marx and myself on
this great variety of subjects. And that was the principal reason which
made me undertake this otherwise ungrateful task.
My reply was first published in a series of articles in the Leipzig
Vorwarts, the chief organ of the Socialist party [1],
and later on as a book: "Herr Eugen Dührings Umwalzung der Wissenchaft"
(Mr. E. Dühring's "Revolution in Science"), a second edition of which appeared
in Zurich, 1886.
At the request of my friend, Paul Lafargue, now representative
of Lille in the French Chamber of Deputies, I arranged three chapters of
this book as a pamphlet, which he translated and published in 1880, under
the title: "Socialisme utopique et Socialisme scientifique". From this
French text, a Polish and a Spanish edition were prepared. In 1883, our
German friends brought out the pamphlet in the original language. Italian,
Russian, Danish, Dutch, and Roumanian translations, based upon the German
text, have since been published. Thus, the present English edition, this
little book circulates in 10 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. In Germany, it has had four editions of about
20,000 copies in all.
The Appendix, "The Mark", was written with the intention of spreading
among the German Socialist party some elementary knowledge of the history
and development of landed property in Germany. This seemed all the more
necessary at a time when the assimilation by that party of the working-people
of the towns was in a fair way of completion, and when the agricultural
laborers and peasant had to be taken in hand. This appendix has been included
in the translation, as the original forms of tenure of land common to all
Teutonic tribes, and the history of their decay, are even less known in
England and in Germany. I have left the text as it stands in the original,
without alluding to the hypothesis recently started by Maxim Kovalevsky,
according to which the partition of the arable and meadow lands among the
members of the Mark was preceded by their being cultivated for joint-account
by a large patriarchal family community, embracing several generations
(as exemplified by the still existing South Slavonian Zadruga), and that
the partition, later on, took place when the community had increased, so
as to become too unwieldy for joint-account management. Kovalevsky is probably
quite right, but the matter is still sub judice [under consideration].
The economic terms used in this work, as afar as they are new,
agree with those used in the English edition of Marx's Capital.
We call "production of commodities" that economic phase where articles
are produced not only for the use of the producers, but also for the purpose
of exchange; that is, as commodities, not as use values. This phase
extends from the first beginnings of production for exchange down to our
present time; it attains its full development under capitalist production
only, that is, under conditions where the capitalist, the owner of the
means of production, employs, for wages, laborers, people deprived of all
means of production except their own labor-power, and pockets the excess
of the selling price of the products over his outlay. We divide the history
of industrial production since the Middle Ages into three periods:
handicraft, small master craftsman with a few journeymen and apprentices,
where each laborer produces a complete article;
manufacture, where greater numbers of workmen, grouped in one large establishment,
produce the complete article on the principle of division of labor, each
workman performing only one partial operation, so that the product is complete
only after having passed successively through the hands of all;
modern industry, where the product is produced by machinery driven by power,
and where the work of the laborer is limited to superintending and correcting
the performance of the mechanical agent.
I am perfectly aware that the contents of this work will meet with objection
from a considerable portion of the British public. But, if we Continentals
had taken the slightest notice of the prejudices of British "respectability",
we should be even worse off than we are. This book defends what we call
"historical materialism", and the word materialism grates upon the ears
of the immense majority of British readers. "Agnosticism" might be tolerated,
but materialism is utterly inadmissible.
And, yet, the original home of all modern materialism, from the
17th century onwards, is England.
"Materialism is the natural-born son of Great Britain. Already the
British schoolman, Duns Scotus, asked, 'whether it was impossible for the
matter to think?'
"In order to effect this miracle, he took refuge in God's omnipotence
— i.e., he made theology preach materialism. Moreover, he was a nominalist.
Nominalism,
the first form of materialism, is chiefly found among the English schoolmen.
"The real progenitor of English materialism is Bacon. To him,
natural philosophy is the only true philosophy, and physics based upon
the experience of the senses is the chiefest part of natural philosophy.
Anaxagoras and his homoiomeriae, Democritus and his atoms, he often quotes
as his authorities. According to him, the senses are infallible and the
source of all knowledge. All science is based on experience, and consists
in subjecting the data furnished by the senses to a rational method of
investigation. Induction, analysis, comparison, observation, experiment,
are the principal forms of such a rational method. Among the qualities
inherent in matter, motion is the first and foremost, not only in the form
of mechanical and mathematical motion, but chiefly in the form of an impulse,
a vital spirit, a tension — or a 'qual', to use a term of Jakob Bohme's
[2] — of
matter.
"In Bacon, its first creator, materialism still occludes within
itself the germs of a many-sided development. On the one hand, matter,
surrounded by a sensuous, poetic glamor, seems to attract man's whole entity
by winning smiles. On the other, the aphoristically formulated doctrine
pullulates with inconsistencies imported from theology.
"In its further evolution, materialism becomes one-sided. Hobbes
is the man who systematizes Baconian materialism. Knowledge based upon
the senses loses its poetic blossom, it passes into the abstract experience
of the mathematician; geometry is proclaimed as the queen of sciences.
Materialism takes to misanthropy. If it is to overcome its opponent, misanthropic,
flashless spiritualism, and that on the latter's own ground, materialism
has to chastise its own flesh and turn ascetic. Thus, from a sensual, it
passes into an intellectual, entity; but thus, too, it evolves all the
consistency, regardless of consequences, characteristic of the intellect.
"Hobbes, as Bacon's continuator, argues thus: if all human knowledge
is furnished by the senses, then our concepts and ideas are but the phantoms,
divested of their sensual forms, of the real world. Philosophy can but
give names to these phantoms. One name may be applied to more than one
of them. There may even be names of names. It would imply a contradiction
if, on the one hand, we maintained that all ideas had their origin in the
world of sensation, and, on the other, that a word was more than a word;
that, besides the beings known to us by our senses, beings which are one
and all individuals, there existed also beings of a general, not individual,
nature. An unbodily substance is the same absurdity as an unbodily body.
Body, being, substance, are but different terms for the same reality. It
is impossible to separate thought from matter that thinks. This matter
is the substratum of all changes going on in the world. The word infinite
is meaningless, unless it states that our mind is capable of performing
an endless process of addition. Only material things being perceptible
to us, we cannot know anything about the existence of God. My own existence
alone is certain. Every human passion is a mechanical movement, which has
a beginning and an end. The objects of impulse are what we call good. Man
is subject to the same laws as nature. Power and freedom are identical.
"Hobbes had systematized Bacon, without, however, furnishing a
proof for Bacon's fundamental principle, the origin of all human knowledge
from the world of sensation. It was Locke who, in his Essay on the Human
Understanding, supplied this proof.
"Hobbes had shattered the theistic prejudices of Baconian materialism;
Collins, Dodwell, Coward, Hartley, Priestley, similarly shattered the last
theological bars that still hemmed in Locke's sensationalism. At all events,
for practical materialists, Deism is but an easy-going way of getting rid
of religion."
Karl Marx
The Holy Family
p. 201 - 204
Thus Karl Marx wrote about the British origin of modern materialism. If
Englishmen nowadays do not exactly relish the compliment he paid their
ancestors, more's the pity. It is none the less undeniable that Bacon,
Hobbes, and Locke are the fathers of that brilliant school of French materialism
which made the 18th century, in spite of all battles on land and sea won
over Frenchmen by Germans and Englishmen, a pre-eminently French century,
even before that crowning French Revolution, the results of which we outsiders,
in England as well as Germany, are still trying to acclimatize.
There is no denying it. About the middle of this century, what
struck every cultivated foreigner who set up his residence in England,
was what he was then bound to consider the religious bigotry and stupidity
of the English respectable middle-class. We, at that time, were all materialists,
or, at least, very advanced free-thinkers, and to us it appeared inconceivable
that almost all educated people in England should believe in all sorts
of impossible miracles, and that even geologists like Buckland and Mantell
should contort the facts of their science so as not to clash too much with
the myths of the book of Genesis; while, in order to find people who dared
to use their own intellectual faculties with regard to religious matters,
you had to go amongst the uneducated, the "great unwashed", as they were
then called, the working people, especially the Owenite Socialists.
But England has been "civilized" since then. The exhibition of
1851 sounded the knell of English insular exclusiveness. England became
gradually internationalized, in diet, in manners, in ideas; so much so
that I begin to wish that some English manners and customs had made as
much headway on the Continent as other Continental habits have made here.
Anyhow, the introduction and spread of salad-oil (before 1851 known only
to the aristocracy) has been accompanied by a fatal spread of Continental
scepticism in matters religious, and it has come to this, that agnosticism,
though not yet considered "the thing" quite as much as the Church of England,
is yet very nearly on a par, as far as respectability goes, with Baptism,
and decidedly ranks above the Salvation Army. And I cannot help believing
that under those circumstances it will be consoling to many who sincerely
regret and condemn this progress of infidelity to learn that these "new-fangled
notions" are not of foreign origin, are not "made in Germany", like so
many other articles of daily use, but are undoubtedly Old English, and
that their British originators 200 years ago went a good deal further than
their descendants now dare to venture.
What, indeed, is agnosticism but, to use an expressive Lancashire
term, "shamefaced" materialism? The agnostic's conception of Nature is
materialistic throughout. The entire natural world is governed by law,
and absolutely excludes the intervention of action from without. But, he
adds, we have no means either of ascertaining or of disproving the existence
of some Supreme Being beyond the known universe. Now, this might hold good
at the time when Laplace, to Napoleon's question, why, in the great astronomer's
Treatise on Celestial Mechanics, the Creator was not even mentioned,
proudly replied" "I had no need of this hypothesis." But, nowadays, in
our evolutionary conception of the universe, there is absolutely no room
for either a Creator or a Ruler; and to talk of a Supreme Being shut out
from the whole existing world, implies a contradiction in terms, and, as
it seems to me, a gratuitous insult to the feelings of religious people.
Again, our agnostic admits that all our knowledge is based upon
the information imparted to us by our senses. But, he adds, how do we know
that our senses give us correct representations of the objects we perceive
through them? And he proceeds to inform us that, whenever we speak of objects,
or their qualities, of which he cannot know anything for certain, but merely
the impressions which they have produced on his senses. Now, this line
of reasoning seems undoubtedly hard to beat by mere argumentation. But
before there was argumentation, there was action. Im Anfang war die
That. [from Goethe's Faust: "In the beginning was the deed."] And
human action had solved the difficulty long before human ingenuity invented
it. The proof of the pudding is in the eating. From the moment we turn
to our own use these objects, according to the qualities we perceive in
them, we put to an infallible test the correctness or otherwise of our
sense-perception. If these perceptions have been wrong, then our estimate
of the use to which an object can be turned must also be wrong, and our
attempt must fail. But, if we succeed in accomplishing our aim, if we find
that the object does agree with our idea of it, and does answer the purpose
we intended it for, then that is proof positive that our perceptions of
it and of its qualities, so far, agree with reality outside ourselves.
And, whenever we find ourselves face-to-face with a failure, then we generally
are not long in making out the cause that made us fail; we find that the
perception upon which we acted was either incomplete and superficial, or
combined with the results of other perceptions in a way not warranted by
them — what we call defective reasoning. So long as we take care to train
our senses properly, and to keep our action within the limits prescribed
by perceptions properly made and properly used, so long as we shall find
that the result of our action proves the conformity of our perceptions
with the objective nature of the things perceived. Not in one single instance,
so far, have we been led to the conclusion that our sense-perception, scientifically
controlled, induce in our minds ideas respecting the outer world that are,
by their very nature, at variance with reality, or that there is an inherent
incompatibility between the outer world and our sense-perceptions of it.
But then come the Neo-Kantian agnostics and say: We may correctly
perceive the qualities of a thing, but we cannot by any sensible or mental
process grasp the thing-in-itself. This "thing-in-itself" is beyond our
ken. To this Hegel, long since, has replied: If you know all the qualities
of a thing, you know the thing itself; nothing remains but the fact that
the said thing exists without us; and, when your senses have taught you
that fact, you have grasped the last remnant of the thing-in-itself, Kant's
celebrated unknowable Ding an sich. To which it may be added that
in Kant's time our knowledge of natural objects was indeed so fragmentary
that he might well suspect, behind the little we knew about each of them,
a mysterious "thing-in-itself". But one after another these ungraspable
things have been grasped, analyzed, and, what is more, reproduced
by the giant progress of science; and what we can produce we certainly
cannot consider as unknowable. To the chemistry of the first half of this
century, organic substances were such mysterious object; now we learn to
build them up one after another from their chemical elements without the
aid of organic processes. Modern chemists declare that as soon as the chemical
constitution of no-matter-what body is known, it can be built up from its
elements. We are still far from knowing the constitution of the highest
organic substances, the albuminous bodies; but there is no reason why we
should not, if only after centuries, arrive at the knowledge and, armed
with it, produce artificial albumen. But, if we arrive at that, we shall
at the same time have produced organic life, for life, from its lowest
to its highest forms, is but the normal mode of existence of albuminous
bodies.
As soon, however, as our agnostic has made these formal mental
reservations, he talks and acts as the rank materialist he at bottom is.
He may say that, as far as we know, matter and motion, or as it
is now called, energy, can neither be created nor destroyed, but that we
have no proof of their not having been created at some time or other. But
if you try to use this admission against him in any particular case, he
will quickly put you out of court. If he admits the possibility of spiritualism
in abstracto, he will have none of it in concreto. As far
as we know and can know, he will tell you there is no creator and no Ruler
of the universe; as far as we are concerned, matter and energy can neither
be created nor annihilated; for us, mind is a mode of energy, a function
of the brain; all we know is that the material world is governed by immutable
laws, and so forth. Thus, as far as he is a scientific man, as far as he
knows anything, he is a materialist; outside his science, in spheres
about which he knows nothing, he translates his ignorance into Greek and
calls it agnosticism.
At all events, one thing seems clear: even if I was an agnostic,
it is evident that I could not describe the conception of history sketched
out in this little book as "historical agnosticism". Religious people would
laugh at me, agnostics would indignantly ask, was I making fun of them?
And, thus, I hope even British respectability will not be overshocked if
I use, in English as well as in so many other languages, the term "historical
materialism", to designate that view of the course of history which seeks
the ultimate cause and the great moving power of all important historic
events in the economic development of society, in the changes in the modes
of production and exchange, in the consequent division of society into
distinct classes, and in the struggles of these classes against one another.
This indulgence will, perhaps, be accorded to me all the sooner
if I show that historical materialism may be of advantage even to British
respectability. I have mentioned the fact that, about 40 or 50 years ago,
any cultivated foreigner settling in England was struck by what he was
then bound to consider the religious bigotry and stupidity of the English
respectable middle-class. I am now going to prove that the respectable
English middle-class of that time was not quite as stupid as it looked
to the intelligent foreigner. Its religious leanings can be explained.
Notes
1.
Vorwarts existed in Leipzig from 1876-78, after the Gotha Unification Congress.
2.
"Qual" is a philosophical play
upon words. Qual literally means torture, a pain which drives to
action of some kind; at the same time, the mystic Bohme puts into
the German word something of the meaning of the Latin qualitas;
his "qual" was the activating principle arising from, and promoting
in its turn, the spontaneous development of the thing, relation, or
person subject to it, in contradistinction to a pain inflicted from
without. [Note by Engels to the English Edition]