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    Socialism: Utopian and Scientific
    Socialism: Utopian and Scientific
    Socialism: Utopian and Scientific
    Ebook125 pages1 hour

    Socialism: Utopian and Scientific

    By Edward Aveling and Friedrich Engels

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    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherArchive Classics
    Release dateMar 1, 1935

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    • 5/5
      The hardest 84 pages I've ever read. Not overly complicated, though. Probably requires multiple reads for full digestion. Conveyed a more full understanding of the contradictions of capitalism and the solutions of socialism.

    Book preview

    Socialism - Edward Aveling

    Project Gutenberg's Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, by Frederick Engels

    This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with

    almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or

    re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included

    with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org

    Title: Socialism: Utopian and Scientific

    Author: Frederick Engels

    Translator: Edward Aveling

    Release Date: March 24, 2012 [EBook #39257]

    Language: English

    *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SOCIALISM: UTOPIAN AND SCIENTIFIC ***

    Produced by Adrian Mastronardi and the Online Distributed

    Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was

    produced from images generously made available by The

    Internet Archive/Canadian Libraries)

    Transcriber's Note:

    Inconsistent hyphenation in the original document has been preserved.

    Obvious typographical errors have been corrected. For a complete list, please see the

    end of this document

    .

    PRINTED IN U.S.A.

    SOCIALISM

    UTOPIAN AND SCIENTIFIC

    BY

    FREDERICK ENGELS

    TRANSLATED BY EDWARD AVELING

    D.Sc., Fellow of University College, London

    WITH A SPECIAL INTRODUCTION BY THE AUTHOR

    CHICAGO

    CHARLES H. KERR & COMPANY

    PUBLISHER'S NOTE

    Socialism, Utopian and Scientific needs no preface. It ranks with the Communist Manifesto as one of the indispensable books for any one desiring to understand the modern socialist movement. It has been translated into every language where capitalism prevails, and its circulation is more rapid than ever before.

    In 1900, when our publishing house had just begun the circulation of socialist books, we brought out the first American reprint of the authorized translation of this work. The many editions required by the growing demand have worn out the plates, and we are now reprinting it in more attractive form.

    It will be observed that the author in his introduction says that from 1883 to 1892, 20,000 copies of the book were sold in Germany. Our own sales of the book in America from 1900 to 1908 were not less than 30,000.

    Last year we published the first English version of the larger work to which the author refers in the opening page of his introduction. The translation is by Austin Lewis, and bears the title Landmarks of Scientific Socialism (cloth, $1.00). It includes the greater portion of the original work, omitting what is presented here, and also some of the personalities due to the heat of controversy.

    Frederick Engels is second only to Karl Marx among socialist writers, and his influence in the United States is only beginning.

    C.H.K.

    June, 1908.

    INTRODUCTION

    The present little book is, originally, a part of a larger whole. About 1875, Dr. E. Dühring, privatdocent 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 time when the two sections of the Socialist party in Germany—Eisenachers and Lassallians—had just effected their fusion, and thus obtained not only an immense increase of strength, but, what was 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 imperiled. 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 Gründlichkeit, 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 the 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 Vorwärts, the chief organ of the Socialist party, and later on as a book: Herrn Eugen Dühring's Umwälzung der Wissenschaft (Mr. E. Dühring's Revolution in Science), a second edition of which appeared in Zürich, 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, with the present English edition, this little book circulates 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. In Germany it has had four editions of about 20,000 copies in all.

    The economic terms used in this work, as far 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 purposes 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: (1) handicraft, small master craftsmen with a few journeymen and apprentices, where each laborer produces the complete article; (2) 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; (3) 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 performances 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

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