ENVISIONING SOCIALISM
A Socialist Education
Project (SEP) Module
Table of Contents
Introduction
Suggested Additional
Discussion Questions
Albert Einstein, “Why Socialism?”
Fredrick Engels, “Socialism: Utopian and Scientific”
“The Development of Utopian Socialism”
“The Science of Dialectics”
“Historical Materialism”
Carl Bloice, “Our Socialist Vision”
Ricardo Alarcon, “Marx After Marxism”
Michael A. Lebowitz,
“New Wings for Socialism”
Introduction
After the collapse of the Eastern European socialist states and the economic and political crises engendered among those states that remained socialist interest in socialism diminished. Some progressives embraced the slogan of Margaret Thatcher: “There is no Alternative.” Other progressives looked inward, taking a self-critical attitude toward all that they had believed in, and embraced various forms of nihilism. And other progressives embraced identity and single issue politics and post-modern philosophies. Clearly, socialist movements and socialist ideas were in crisis.
While the end of the Cold War brought some repose from aspects of the arms race, the threat of
nuclear war, and certain forms of authoritarian government, the period since
1991 has not lived up to the promise of declining war and violence, a
people-oriented economic development, and real democratization. We have
witnessed the disintegration of states; rising internal war; imperial wars
against the former
Slowly but surely, progressives are revisiting the socialist vision as the issues of war, and poverty, and environmental devastation have made clear that there must be alternatives to global capitalism. More and more progressives (those imbued with a sensitivity to the needs of reform) are interested in revisiting the socialist vision. They are asking: “Why did socialism ‘fail?’ Can it be revived? Can we create a cooperative society based on principles of equality, democracy, and human dignity? What have the great socialist theorists of the past said about the conditions for and prospects of building socialism? How do contemporary writers answer these questions?”
This SEP module offers a set of readings that begin to address these questions. Obviously they can only scratch the surface in describing the history of socialist politics and vision. But they can serve as a vehicle for study groups to begin to struggle over the proposition that creating a new society is possible. Students of socialism can read these pieces and raise questions about what they are saying. Students can then move to construct their own modules to create “advanced” courses on socialism.
The first essay by Albert Einstein illustrates why one of the preeminent intellectuals of the twentieth century, indeed a scientist, embraced socialism. He defends the proposition that humans are social beings and dependent on society for their wellbeing. The idea of the symbiotic relationship between humans and society is denied by capitalism, an economic system that breeds an ethos of each against all. Profit, which drives the capitalist system, he claimed, was antithetical to human development. Einstein implies that peoples’ alienation from each other, from the product of their labors, and from the right to decide how ones’ labors are used are endemic to capitalism. Only a socialist society could foster full human fulfillment.
Fredrick Engels, Karl Marx’s life long intellectual partner, wrote an essay on the history of socialism that is presented here. In it he describes the visions of the great “utopian socialists” of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries who imagined new societies but did not have the benefit of envisioning alternatives to capitalism since capitalism was in its infancy when they wrote. He then describes how nature and societies develop “dialectically.” History is the unfolding of human activity and institutions along contradictory paths. Socialist movements, in this sense, can evolve only in the context of opposition to the development of capitalism. Finally, Engels discusses “historical materialism,” the conception of history that links ideas to changes in the material conditions of peoples’ lives, labor as the creator of all wealth, and class struggle. Contrary to the utopian socialists, the drive to create socialist society will result from changes in material conditions, in economic necessity and the practical activities of men and women who will bring it about.
Turning to modern writings, Carl Bloice addresses economic inequality and poverty and suggests that equality, access to basic economic resources, and human development are basic to any socialist vision. Ricardo Alarcon celebrates Marxist theory but points to one of its fundamental precepts; that practical political activity and alternative visions are grounded in the historical context in which they occur. He suggests to the reader that twenty-first century socialist struggles will be grounded in the realities of neo-liberal globalization and an anti-globalization activism that embraces multiple sectors of developed and exploited countries and addresses economic, environmental, racial and gender issues as well as class ones.
Finally, Michael Lebowitz describes a vision of socialism for
the twenty-first century. He refers to the survival of the Cuban revolution and
more recently the innovative moves toward socialism in
Some Additional
Anatole Anton and Richard Schmitt, Toward a New Socialism, 2006.
Emile Burns, What is
Marxism? An Introduction to the Study of Scientific Socialism, 1943.
Leo Huberman, Introduction
to Socialism, 1968.
Michael A. Lebowitz, Build
It Now: Socialism for the Twenty-First Century, 2006.
David Schweickart, After Capitalism, 2002.
Discussion Questions
1.
Is it capitalism,
rather than human nature, that makes human beings greedy, aggressive and
competitive?
2.
Is it true that good
institutions (economic systems, governments) come primarily from good ideas or
the coming together of ideas in historical circumstances when the ideas can be
made a reality?
3.
What do Engels and
Marx mean by “idealism?” What do they mean by “materialism?”
4.
Discuss the
“dialectical” method. Is it relevant to understanding the world and to engaging
in political activism?
5.
Is there a
relationship between the evolving mode of production and the possibility of
creating socialism?
6.
Why does understanding
history matter?
7.
Is the principle of
equality important to building a socialist society? Why or why not?
8.
Several modern writers
suggest that “market socialism” constitutes a constructive possibility for
human transformation, with examples today such as
9.
Is economic democracy,
such as workers’ control of the workplace, a good beginning for creating a
socialist society?
10.
Can we learn about
building socialism from countries like
11.
What are the “elements
of the new socialism?” Do they
constitute a useful list to guide action?
"We
shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if mankind is to
survive."
Why Socialism?
By Albert Einstein
From Monthly Review,
[Re-printed in Ideas and Opinions by Albert Einstein]
Transcribed by Lenny Gray
Is it advisable for one who is not an expert on economic and social issues to
express views on the subject of socialism? I believe for a number of reasons
that it is.
Let us first consider the question from the point of view of scientific
knowledge. It might appear that there are no essential methodological
differences between astronomy and economics: scientists in both fields attempt
to discover laws of general acceptability for a circumscribed group of
phenomena in order to make the interconnection of these phenomena as clearly
understandable as possible. But in reality such methodological differences do
exist. The discovery of general laws in the field of economics is made
difficult by the circumstance that observed economic phenomena are often
affected by many factors which are very hard to evaluate separately. In
addition, the experience which has accumulated since the beginning of the
so-called civilized period of human history has -- as is well known -- been
largely influenced and limited by causes which are by no means exclusively
economic in nature. For example, most of the major states of history owed their
existence to conquest. The conquering peoples established themselves, legally
and economically, as the privileged class of the conquered country. They seized
for themselves a monopoly of the land ownership and appointed a priesthood from
among their own ranks. The priests, in control of education, made the class
division of society into a permanent institution and created a system of values
by which the people were thenceforth, to a large extent unconsciously, guided
in their social behavior.
But historic tradition is, so to speak, of yesterday; nowhere have we really
overcome what Thorstein Veblen called "the predatory phase" of human
development. The observable economic facts belong to that phase and even such
laws as we can derive from them are not applicable to other phases. Since the
real purpose of socialism is precisely to overcome and advance beyond the
predatory phase of human development, economic science in its present state can
throw little light on the socialist society of the future.
Second, socialism is directed toward a social-ethical end. Science, however,
cannot create ends and, even less, instill them in human beings; science, at
most, can supply the means by which to attain certain ends. But the ends
themselves are conceived by personalities with lofty ethical ideals and -- if
these ends are not stillborn, but vital and vigorous -- are adopted and carried
forward by those many human beings who, half-unconsciously, determine the slow
evolution of society.
For these reasons, we should be on our guard not to overestimate science and
scientific methods when it is a question of human problems; and we should not
assume that experts are the only ones who have a right to express themselves on
questions affecting the organization of society.
Innumerable voices have been asserting for some time now that human society is
passing through a crisis, that its stability has been gravely shattered. It is
characteristic of such a situation that individuals feel indifferent or even
hostile toward the group, small or large, to which they belong. In order to
illustrate my meaning, let me record here a personal experience. I recently
discussed with an intelligent and well-disposed man the threat of another war,
which in my opinion would seriously endanger the existence of mankind, and I
remarked that only a supranational organization would offer protection from
that danger. Thereupon my visitor, very calmly and coolly, said to me:
"Why are you so deeply opposed to the disappearance of the human
race?"
I am sure that as little as a century ago no one would have so lightly made a
statement of this kind. It is the statement of a man who has striven in vain to
attain an equilibrium within himself and has more or less lost hope of
succeeding. It is the expression of a painful solitude and isolation from which
so many people are suffering in these days. What is the cause? Is there a way
out?
It is easy to raise such questions, but difficult to answer them with any
degree of assurance. I must try, however, as best I can, although I am very
conscious of the fact that our feelings and strivings are often contradictory
and obscure and that they cannot be expressed in easy and simple formulas.
Man is, at one and the same time, a solitary being and a social being. As a
solitary being, he attempts to protect his own existence and that of those who
are closest to him, to satisfy his personal desires, and to develop his innate
abilities. As a social being, he seeks to gain the recognition and affection of
his fellow human beings, to share in their pleasures, to comfort them in their
sorrows, and to improve their conditions of life. Only the existence of these
varied, frequently conflicting strivings accounts for the special character of
a man, and their specific combination determines the extent to which an
individual can achieve an inner equilibrium and can contribute to the
well-being of society. It is quite possible that the relative strength of these
two drives is, in the main, fixed by inheritance. But the personality that
finally emerges is largely formed by the environment in which a man happens to
find himself during his development, by the structure of the society in which
he grows up, by the tradition of that society, and by its appraisal of
particular types of behavior. The abstract concept "society" means to
the individual human being the sum total of his direct and indirect relations
to his contemporaries and to all the people of earlier generations. The
individual is able to think, feel, strive, and work by himself; but he depends
so much upon society -- in his physical, intellectual, and emotional existence
-- that it is impossible to think of him, or to understand him, outside the
framework of society. It is "society" which provides man with food,
clothing, a home, the tools of work, language, the forms of thought, and most
of the content of thought; his life is made possible through the labor and the
accomplishments of the many millions past and present who are all hidden behind
the small word "society."
It is evident, therefore, that the dependence of the individual upon society is
a fact of nature which cannot be abolished -- just as in the case of ants and
bees. However, while the whole life process of ants and bees is fixed down to
the smallest detail by rigid, hereditary instincts, the social pattern and
interrelationships of human beings are very variable and susceptible to change.
Memory, the capacity to make new combinations, the gift of oral communication
have made possible developments among human beings which are not dictated by
biological necessities. Such developments manifest themselves in traditions,
institutions, and organizations; in literature; in scientific and engineering
accomplishments; in works of art. This explains how it happens that, in a
certain sense, man can influence his life through his own conduct, and that in
this process conscious thinking and wanting can play a part.
Man acquires at birth, through heredity, a biological constitution which we
must consider fixed and unalterable, including the natural urges which are
characteristic of the human species. In addition, during his lifetime, he
acquires a cultural constitution which he adopts from society through
communication and through many other types of influences. It is this cultural
constitution which, with the passage of time, is subject to change and which
determines to a very large extent the relationship between the individual and
society Modern anthropology has taught us, through comparative investigation of
so-called primitive cultures, that the social behavior of human beings may
differ greatly, depending upon prevailing cultural patterns and the types of
organization which predominate in society. It is on this that those who are
striving to improve the lot of man may ground their hopes: human beings are not
condemned, because of their biological constitution, to annihilate each other
or to be at the mercy of a cruel, self-inflicted fate.
If we ask ourselves how the structure of society and the cultural attitude of
man should be changed in order to make human life as satisfying as possible, we
should constantly be conscious of the fact that there are certain conditions
which we are unable to modify. As mentioned before, the biological nature of
man is, for all practical purposes, not subject to change. Furthermore,
technological and demographic developments of the last few centuries have
created conditions which are here to stay. In relatively densely settled
populations with the goods which are indispensable to their continued
existence, an extreme division of labor and a highly centralized productive
apparatus are absolutely necessary. The time -- which, looking back, seems so
idyllic -- is gone forever when individuals or relatively small groups could be
completely self-sufficient. It is only a slight exaggeration to say that
mankind constitutes even now a planetary community of production and
consumption.
I have now reached the point where I may indicate briefly what to me
constitutes the essence of the crisis of our time. It concerns the relationship
of the individual to society. The individual has become more conscious than
ever of his dependence upon society. But he does not experience this dependence
as a positive asset, as an organic tie, as a protective force, but rather as a
threat to his natural rights, or even to his economic existence. Moreover, his position
in society is such that the egotistical drives of his make-up are constantly
being accentuated, while his social drives, which are by nature weaker,
progressively deteriorate. All human beings, whatever their position in
society, are suffering from this process of deterioration. Unknowingly
prisoners of their own egotism, they feel insecure, lonely, and deprived of the
naive, simple, and unsophisticated enjoyment of life. Man can find meaning in
life, short and perilous as it is, only through devoting himself to society.
The economic anarchy of capitalist society as it exists today is, in my
opinion, the real source of the evil. We see before us a huge community of
producers the members of which are unceasingly striving to deprive each other
of the fruits of their collective labor -- not by force, but on the whole in
faithful compliance with legally established rules. In this respect, it is
important to realize that the means of production -- that is to say, the entire
productive capacity that is needed for producing consumer goods as well as
additional capital goods -- may legally be, and for the most part are, the
private property of individuals.
For the sake of simplicity, in the discussion that follows I shall call
"workers" all those who do not share in the ownership of the means of
production -- although this does not quite correspond to the customary use of
the term. The owner of the means of production is in a position to purchase the
labor power of the worker. By using the means of production, the worker
produces new goods which become the property of the capitalist. The essential
point about this process is the relation between what the worker produces and
what he is paid, both measured in terms of real value. In so far as the labor
contract is "free," what the worker receives is determined not by the
real value of the goods he produces, but by his minimum needs and by the
capitalists' requirements for labor power in relation to the number of workers
competing for jobs. It is important to understand that even in theory the
payment of the worker is not determined by the value of his product.
Private capital tends to become concentrated in few hands, partly because of
competition among the capitalists, and partly because technological development
and the increasing division of labor encourage the formation of larger units of
production at the expense of the smaller ones. The result of these developments
is an oligarchy of private capital the enormous power of which cannot be
effectively checked even by a democratically organized political society. This
is true since the members of legislative bodies are selected by political
parties, largely financed or otherwise influenced by private capitalists who,
for all practical purposes, separate the electorate from the legislature. The
consequence is that the representatives of the people do not in fact
sufficiently protect the interests of the underprivileged sections of the
population. Moreover, under existing conditions, private capitalists inevitably
control, directly or indirectly, the main sources of information (press, radio,
education). It is thus extremely difficult, and indeed in most cases quite
impossible, for the individual citizen to come to objective conclusions and to
make intelligent use of his political rights.
The situation prevailing in an economy based on the private ownership of
capital is thus characterized main principles: first, means of production
(capital) are privately owned and the owners dispose of them as they see fit;
second, the labor contract is free. Of course, there is no such thing as a pure
capitalist society in this sense. In particular, it should be noted that the
workers, through long and bitter political struggles, have succeeded in
securing a somewhat improved form of the "free labor contract" for
certain categories of workers. But taken as a whole, the present-day economy
does not differ much from "pure" capitalism.
Production is carried on for profit, not for use. There is no provision that
all those able and willing to work will always be in a position to find
employment; an "army of unemployed" almost always exists. The worker
is constantly in fear of losing his job. Since unemployed and poorly paid
workers do not provide a profitable market, the production of consumers' goods
is restricted, and great hardship is the consequence. Technological progress
frequently results in more unemployment rather than in an easing of the burden
of work for all. The profit motive, in conjunction with competition among
capitalists, is responsible for an instability in the accumulation and
utilization of capital which leads to increasingly severe depressions.
Unlimited competition leads to a huge waste of labor, and to that crippling of
the social consciousness of individuals which I mentioned before.
This crippling of individuals I consider the worst evil of capitalism. Our
whole educational system suffers from this evil. An exaggerated competitive
attitude is inculcated into the student, who is trained to worship acquisitive
success as a preparation for his future career.
I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils,
namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an
educational system which would be oriented toward social goals. In such an
economy, the means of production are owned by society itself and are utilized
in a planned fashion. A planned economy, which adjusts production to the needs
of the community, would distribute the work to be done among all those able to
work and would guarantee a livelihood to every man, woman, and child. The
education of the individual, in addition to promoting his own innate abilities,
would attempt to develop in him a sense of responsibility for his fellow-men in
place of the glorification of power and success in our present society.
Nevertheless, it is necessary to remember that a planned economy is not yet
socialism. A planned economy as such may be accompanied by the complete
enslavement of the individual. The achievement of socialism requires the
solution of some extremely difficult socio-political problems: how is it
possible, in view of the far-reaching centralization of political and economic
power, to prevent bureaucracy from becoming all-powerful and overweening? How
can the rights of the individual be protected and therewith a democratic
counterweight to the power of bureaucracy be assured?
Fredrick Engels
Socialism: Utopian and Scientific
I
[The Development of Utopian Socialism]
Modern Socialism is, in its essence, the direct product of the recognition, on the one hand, of the class antagonisms existing in the society of today between proprietors and non-proprietors, between capitalists and wage-workers; on the other hand, of the anarchy existing in production. But, in its theoretical form, modern Socialism originally appears ostensibly as a more logical extension of the principles laid down by the great French philosophers of the 18th century. Like every new theory, modern Socialism had, at first, to connect itself with the intellectual stock-in-trade ready to its hand, however deeply its roots lay in material economic facts.
The great men, who in
We know today that this kingdom of reason was nothing more than the idealized kingdom of the bourgeoisie; that this eternal Right found its realization in bourgeois justice; that this equality reduced itself to bourgeois equality before the law; that bourgeois property was proclaimed as one of the essential rights of man; and that the government of reason, the Contrat Social of Rousseau, came into being, and only could come into being, as a democratic bourgeois republic. The great thinkers of the 18th century could, no more than their predecessors, go beyond the limits imposed upon them by their epoch.
But, side by side with the antagonisms of the feudal nobility and the burghers, who claimed to represent all the rest of society, was the general antagonism of exploiters and exploited, of rich idlers and poor workers. It was this very circumstance that made it possible for the representatives of the bourgeoisie to put themselves forward as representing not one special class, but the whole of suffering humanity. Still further. From its origin the bourgeoisie was saddled with its antithesis: capitalists cannot exist without wage-workers, and, in the same proportion as the mediaeval burgher of the guild developed into the modern bourgeois, the guild journeyman and the day-laborer, outside the guilds, developed into the proletarian. And although, upon the whole, the bourgeoisie, in their struggle with the nobility, could claim to represent at the same time the interests of the different working-classes of that period, yet in every great bourgeois movement there were independent outbursts of that class which was the forerunner, more or less developed, of the modern proletariat. For example, at the time of the German Reformation and the Peasants' War, the Anabaptists and Thomas Munzer; in the great English Revolution, the Levellers; in the great French Revolution, Babeuf.
These were theoretical enunciations, corresponding with these revolutionary uprisings of a class not yet developed; in the 16th and 17th centuries, Utopian pictures of ideal social conditions 2); in the 18th century, actual communistic theories (Morelly and Mably). The demand for equality was no longer limited to political rights; it was extended also to the social conditions of individuals. It was not simply class privileges that were to be abolished, but class distinctions themselves. A Communism, ascetic, denouncing all the pleasures of life, Spartan, was the first form of the new teaching. Then came the three great Utopians: Saint-Simon, to whom the middle-class movement, side by side with the proletarian, still had a certain significance; Fourier and Owen, who in the country where capitalist production was most developed, and under the influence of the antagonisms begotten of this, worked out his proposals for the removal of class distinction systematically and in direct relation to French materialism.
One thing is common to all three. Not one of them appears as a representative of the interests of that proletariat which historical development had, in the meantime, produced. Like the French philosophers, they do not claim to emancipate a particular class to begin with, but all humanity at once. Like them, they wish to bring in the kingdom of reason and eternal justice, but this kingdom, as they see it, is as far as Heaven from Earth, from that of the French philosophers.
For, to our three social reformers, the bourgeois world, based upon the principles of these philosophers, is quite as irrational and unjust, and, therefore, finds its way to the dust-hole quite as readily as feudalism and all the earlier stages of society. If pure reason and justice have not, hitherto, ruled the world, this has been the case only because men have not rightly understood them. What was wanted was the individual man of genius, who has now arisen and who understands the truth. That he has now arisen, that the truth has now been clearly understood, is not an inevitable event, following of necessity in the chains of historical development, but a mere happy accident. He might just as well have been born 500 years earlier, and might then have spared humanity 500 years of error, strife, and suffering.
We saw how the French philosophers of the 18th century, the forerunners of the Revolution, appealed to reason as the sole judge of all that is. A rational government, rational society, were to be founded; everything that ran counter to eternal reasons was to be remorselessly done away with. We saw also that this eternal reason was in reality nothing but the idealized understand of the 18th century citizen, just then evolving into the bourgeois. The French Revolution had realized this rational society and government.
But the new order of things, rational enough as compared with earlier conditions, turned out to be by no means absolutely rational. The state based upon reason completely collapsed. Rousseau's Contrat Social had found its realization in the Reign of Terror, from which the bourgeoisie, who had lost confidence in their own political capacity, had taken refuge first in the corruption of the Directorate, and, finally, under the wing of the Napoleonic despotism. The promised eternal peace was turned into an endless war of conquest. The society based upon reason had fared no better. The antagonism between rich and poor, instead of dissolving into general prosperity, had become intensified by the removal of the guild and other privileges, which had to some extent bridged it over, and by the removal of the charitable institutions of the Church. The "freedom of property" from feudal fetters, now veritably accomplished, turned out to be, for the small capitalists and small proprietors, the freedom to sell their small property, crushed under the overmastering competition of the large capitalists and landlords, to these great lords, and thus, as far as the small capitalists and peasant proprietors were concerned, became "freedom from property". The development of industry upon a capitalistic basis made poverty and misery of the working masses conditions of existence of society. Cash payment became more and more, in Carlyle's phrase, the sole nexus between man and man. The number of crimes increased from year to year. Formerly, the feudal vices had openly stalked about in broad daylight; though not eradicated, they were now at any rate thrust into the background. In their stead, the bourgeois vices, hitherto practiced in secret, began to blossom all the more luxuriantly. Trade became to a greater and greater extent cheating. The "fraternity" of the revolutionary motto was realized in the chicanery and rivalries of the battle of competition. Oppression by force was replaced by corruption; the sword, as the first social lever, by gold. The right of the first night was transferred from the feudal lords to the bourgeois manufacturers. Prostitution increased to an extent never head of. Marriage itself remained, as before, the legally recognized form, the official cloak of prostitution, and, moreover, was supplemented by rich crops of adultery.
In a word, compared with the splendid promises of the philosophers, the
social and political institutions born of the "triumph of reason"
were bitterly disappointing caricatures. All that was wanting was the men to
formulate this disappointment, and they came with the turn of the century. In
1802, Saint-Simon's
At this time, however, the capitalist mode of production, and with it the
antagonism between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, was still very
incompletely developed. Modern Industry, which had just arisen in
This historical situation also dominated the founders of Socialism. To the crude conditions of capitalistic production and the crude class conditions correspond crude theories. The solution of the social problems, which as yet lay hidden in undeveloped economic conditions, the Utopians attempted to evolve out of the human brain. Society presented nothing but wrongs; to remove these was the task of reason. It was necessary, then, to discover a new and more perfect system of social order and to impose this upon society from without by propaganda, and, wherever it was possible, by the example of model experiments. These new social systems were foredoomed as Utopian; the more completely they were worked out in detail, the more they could not avoid drifting off into pure phantasies.
These facts once established, we need not dwell a moment longer upon this side of the question, now wholly belonging to the past. We can leave it to the literary small fry to solemnly quibble over these phantasies, which today only make us smile, and to crow over the superiority of their own bald reasoning, as compared with such "insanity". For ourselves, we delight in the stupendously grand thoughts and germs of thought that everywhere break out through their phantastic covering, and to which these Philistines are blind.
Saint-Simon was a son of the great French Revolution, at the outbreak of
which he was not yet 30. The Revolution was the victory of the 3rd estate —
i.e., of the great masses of the nation, working in production and in
trade, over the privileged idle classes, the nobles and the priests.
But the victory of the 3rd estate soon revealed itself as exclusively the
victory of a smaller part of this "estate", as the conquest of
political power by the socially privileged section of it — i.e., the propertied
bourgeoisie. And the bourgeoisie had certainly developed rapidly during the
Revolution, partly by speculation in the lands of the nobility and of the
Church, confiscated and afterwards put up for sale, and partly by frauds upon
the nation by means of army contracts. It was the domination of these swindlers
that, under the Directorate, brought
Hence, to Saint-Simon the antagonism between the 3rd Estate and the
privileged classes took the form of an antagonism between "workers"
and "idlers". The idlers were not merely the old privileged classes,
but also all who, without taking any part in production or distribution, lived
on their incomes. And the workers were not only the wage-workers, but also the
manufacturers, the merchants, the bankers. That the idlers had lost the
capacity for intellectual leadership and political supremacy had been proved,
and was by the Revolution finally settled. That the non-possessing classes had
not this capacity seemed to Saint-Simon proved by the experiences of the Reign
of Terror. Then, who was to lead and command? According to Saint-Simon, science
and industry, both united by a new religious bond, destined to restore that
unity of religious ideas which had been lost since the time of the Reformation
— a necessarily mystic and rigidly hierarchic "new Christianity". But
science, that was the scholars; and industry, that was, in the first place, the
working bourgeois, manufacturers, merchants, bankers. These bourgeois were,
certainly, intended by Saint-Simon to transform themselves into a kind of
public officials, of social trustees; but they were still to hold, vis-a-vis of
the workers, a commanding and economically privileged position. The bankers
especially were to be called upon to direct the whole of social production by
the regulation of credit. This conception was in exact keeping with a time in
which Modern Industry in
Already in his
"See," says he to them, "what happened in
But to recognize the French Revolution as a class war, and not simply one between nobility and bourgeoisie, but between nobility, bourgeoisie, and the non-possessors, was, in the year 1802, a most pregnant discovery. In 1816, he declares that politics is the science of production, and foretells the complete absorption of politics by economics. The knowledge that economic conditions are the basis of political institutions appears here only in embryo. Yet what is here already very plainly expressed is the idea of the future conversion of political rule over men into an administration of things and a direction of processes of production — that is to say, the "abolition of the state", about which recently there has been so much noise.
Saint-Simon shows the same superiority over his contemporaries, when in
1814, immediately after the entry of the allies into Paris, and again in 1815,
during the Hundred Days' War, he proclaims the alliance of France and England,
and then of both of these countries, with Germany, as the only guarantee for
the prosperous development and peace of Europe. To preach to the French in 1815
an alliance with the victors of
If in Saint-Simon we find a comprehensive breadth of view, by virtue of which almost all the ideas of later Socialists that are not strictly economic are found in him in embryo, we find in Fourier a criticism of the existing conditions of society, genuinely French and witty, but not upon that account any the less thorough. Fourier takes the bourgeoisie, their inspired prophets before the Revolution, and their interested eulogists after it, at their own word. He lays bare remorselessly the material and moral misery of the bourgeois world. He confronts it with the earlier philosophers' dazzling promises of a society in which reason alone should reign, of a civilization in which happiness should be universal, of an illimitable human perfectibility, and with the rose-colored phraseology of the bourgeois ideologists of his time. He points out how everywhere the most pitiful reality corresponds with the most high-sounding phrases, and he overwhelms this hopeless fiasco of phrases with his mordant sarcasm.
Fourier is not only a critic, his imperturbably serene nature makes him a satirist, and assuredly one of the greatest satirists of all time. He depicts, with equal power and charm, the swindling speculations that blossomed out upon the downfall of the Revolution, and the shopkeeping spirit prevalent in, and characteristic of, French commerce at that time. Still more masterly is his criticism of the bourgeois form of the relations between sexes, and the position of woman in bourgeois society. He was the first to declare that in any given society the degree of woman's emancipation is the natural measure of the general emancipation.
But Fourier is at his greatest in his conception of the history of society. He divides its whole course, thus far, into four stages of evolution — savagery, barbarism, the patriarchate, civilization. This last is identical with the so-called civil, or bourgeois, society of today — i.e., with the social order that came in with the 16th century. He proves "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".
Fourier, as we see, uses the dialectic method in the same masterly way as his contemporary, Hegel. Using these same dialectics, he argues against talk about illimitable human perfectibility, that every historical phase has its period of ascent and also its period of descent, and he applies this observation to the future of the whole human race. As Kant introduced into natural science the idea of the ultimate destruction of the Earth, Fourier introduced into historical science that of the ultimate destruction of the human race.
Whilst in
The new mode of production was, as yet, only at the beginning of its period of ascent; as yet it was the normal, regular method of production — the only one possible under existing conditions. Nevertheless, even then it was producing crying social abuses — the herding together of a homeless population in the worst quarters of the large towns; the loosening of all traditional moral bonds, of patriarchal subordination, of family relations; overwork, especially of women and children, to a frightful extent; complete demoralization of the working-class, suddenly flung into altogether new conditions, from the country into the town, from agriculture into modern industry, from stable conditions of existence into insecure ones that change from day to day.
At this juncture, there came forward as a reformer a manufacturer
29-years-old — a man of almost sublime, childlike simplicity of character, and
at the same time one of the few born leaders of men. Robert 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.
In the industrial revolution most of his class saw only chaos and confusion,
and the opportunity of fishing in these troubled waters and making large
fortunes quickly. He saw in it the opportunity of putting into practice his
favorite theory, and so of bringing order out of chaos. He had already tried it
with success, as superintendent of more than 500 men in a
In spite of all this, Owen was not content. The existence which he secured for his workers was, in his eyes, still far from being worthy of human beings. "The people were slaves at my mercy." The relatively favorable conditions in which he had placed them were still far from allowing a rational development of the character and of the intellect in all directions, much less of the free exercise of all their faculties.
"And yet, the working part of this population of 2,500 persons was daily producing as much real wealth for society as, less than half a century before, it would have required the working part of a population of 600,000 to create. I asked myself, what became of the difference between the wealth consumed by 2,500 persons and that which would have been consumed by 600,000?" [3]
The answer was clear. It had been used to pay the proprietors of the
establishment 5 per cent on the capital they had laid out, in addition to over
300,000 pounds clear profit. And that which held for New Lanark held to a still
greater extent for all the factories in
"If this new wealth had not been created by machinery,
imperfectly as it has been applied, the wars of
To them, therefore, the fruits of this new power belonged. The newly-created gigantic productive forces, hitherto used only to enrich individuals and to enslave the masses, offered to Owen the foundations for a reconstruction of society; they were destined, as the common property of all, to be worked for the common good of all.
Owen's communism was based upon this purely business foundation, the
outcome, so to say, of commercial calculation. Throughout, it maintained this
practical character. Thus, in 1823, Owen proposed the relief of the distress in
His advance in the direction of Communism was the turning-point in Owen's
life. As long as he was simply a philanthropist, he was rewarded with nothing
but wealth, applause, honor, and glory. He was the most popular man in
He knew what confronted him if he attacked these — outlawry, excommunication
from official society, the loss of his whole social position. But nothing of
this prevented him from attacking them without fear of consequences, and what
he had foreseen happened. Banished from official society, with a conspiracy of
silence against him in the press, ruined by his unsuccessful Communist
experiments in America, in which he sacrificed all his fortune, he turned
directly to the working-class and continued working in their midst for 30
years. Every social movement, every real advance in
The Utopians' mode of thought has for a long time governed the Socialist
ideas of the 19th century, and still governs some of them. Until very recently,
all French and English Socialists did homage to it. The earlier German
Communism, including that of Weitling, was of the same school. To all these,
Socialism is the expression of absolute truth, reason and justice, and has only
to be discovered to conquer all the world by virtue of its own power. And as an
absolute truth is independent of time, space, and of the historical development
of man, it is a mere accident when and where it is discovered. With all this,
absolute truth, reason, and justice are different with the founder of each
different school. And as each one's special kind of absolute truth, reason, and
justice is again conditioned by his subjective understanding, his conditions of
existence, the measure of his knowledge and his intellectual training, there is
no other ending possible in this conflict of absolute truths than that they
shall be mutually exclusive of one another. Hence, from this nothing could come
but a kind of eclectic, average Socialism, which, as a matter of fact, has up
to the present time dominated the minds of most of the socialist workers in
To make a science of Socialism, it had first to be placed upon a real basis.
Next: The Science of Dialectics
Notes
[1] This is the passage of the French Revolution:
"Thought, the concept of law, all at once made itself felt, and against this the old scaffolding of wrong could make no stand. In this conception of law, therefore, a constitution has now been established, and henceforth everything must be cased upon this. Since the Sun had been in the firmament, and the planets circled around him, the sight had never been seen of man standing upon his head — i.e., on the Idea — and building reality after this image. Anaxagoras first said that the Nous, reason, rules the world; but now, for the first time, had men come to recognize that the Idea must rule the mental reality. And this was a magnificent sunrise. All thinking Beings have participated in celebrating this holy day. A sublime emotion swayed men at that time, an enthusiasm of reason pervaded the world, as if now had come the reconciliation of the Divine Principle with the world."
[Hegel: "The Philosophy of history", 1840, p.535]
Is it not high time to set the anti-Socialist law in action against such teachings, subversive and to the common danger, by the late Professor Hegel?
(2 Engels refers here to the works of the utopian Socialists Thomas More (16th century) and Tommaso Campanella (17th century).
[3] From The Revolution in Mind and Practice, p.21, a memorial
addressed to all the "red Republicans, Communists and Socialists of
Europe", and sent to the provisional government of
Fredrick Engels
Socialism: Utopian and Scientific
II
[The Science of Dialectics]
In the meantime, along with and after the French philosophy of the 18th century, had arisen the new German philosophy, culminating in Hegel.
Its greatest merit was the taking up again of dialectics as the highest form of reasoning. The old Greek philosophers were all born natural dialecticians, and Aristotle, the most encyclopaedic of them, had already analyzed the most essential forms of dialectic thought. The newer philosophy, on the other hand, although in it also dialectics had brilliant exponents (e.g. Descartes and Spinoza), had, especially through English influence, become more and more rigidly fixed in the so-called metaphysical mode of reasoning, by which also the French of the 18th century were almost wholly dominated, at all events in their special philosophical work. Outside philosophy in the restricted sense, the French nevertheless produced masterpieces of dialectic. We need only call to mind Diderot's Le Neveu de Rameau, and Rousseau's Discours sur l'origine et les fondements de l'inegalite parmi less hommes. We give here, in brief, the essential character of these two modes of thought.
When we consider and reflect upon Nature at large, or the history of mankind, or our own intellectual activity, at first we see the picture of an endless entanglement of relations and reactions, permutations and combinations, in which nothing remains what, where and as it was, but everything moves, changes, comes into being and passes away. We see, therefore, at first the picture as a whole, with its individual parts still more or less kept in the background; we observe the movements, transitions, connections, rather than the things that move, combine, and are connected. This primitive, naive but intrinsically correct conception of the world is that of ancient Greek philosophy, and was first clearly formulated by Heraclitus: everything is and is not, for everything is fluid, is constantly changing, constantly coming into being and passing away.
But this conception, correctly as it expresses the general character of the picture of appearances as a whole, does not suffice to explain the details of which this picture is made up, and so long as we do not understand these, we have not a clear idea of the whole picture. In order to understand these details, we must detach them from their natural, special causes, effects, etc. This is, primarily, the task of natural science and historical research: branches of science which the Greek of classical times, on very good grounds, relegated to a subordinate position, because they had first of all to collect materials for these sciences to work upon. A certain amount of natural and historical material must be collected before there can be any critical analysis, comparison, and arrangement in classes, orders, and species. The foundations of the exact natural sciences were, therefore, first worked out by the Greeks of the Alexandrian period 1), and later on, in the Middle Ages, by the Arabs. Real natural science dates from the second half of the 15th century, and thence onward it had advanced with constantly increasing rapidity. The analysis of Nature into its individual parts, the grouping of the different natural processes and objects in definite classes, the study of the internal anatomy of organized bodies in their manifold forms — these were the fundamental conditions of the gigantic strides in our knowledge of Nature that have been made during the last 400 years. But this method of work has also left us as legacy the habit of observing natural objects and processes in isolation, apart from their connection with the vast whole; of observing them in repose, not in motion; as constraints, not as essentially variables; in their death, not in their life. And when this way of looking at things was transferred by Bacon and Locke from natural science to philosophy, it begot the narrow, metaphysical mode of thought peculiar to the last century.
To the metaphysician, things and their mental reflexes, ideas, are isolated, are to be considered one after the other and apart from each other, are objects of investigation fixed, rigid, given once for all. He thinks in absolutely irreconcilable antitheses. His communication is 'yea, yea; nay, nay'; for whatsoever is more than these cometh of evil." For him, a thing either exists or does not exist; a thing cannot at the same time be itself and something else. Positive and negative absolutely exclude on another; cause and effect stand in a rigid antithesis, one to the other.
At first sight, this mode of thinking seems to us very luminous, because it is that of so-called sound commonsense. Only sound commonsense, respectable fellow that he is, in the homely realm of his own four walls, has very wonderful adventures directly he ventures out into the wide world of research. And the metaphysical mode of thought, justifiable and necessary as it is in a number of domains whose extent varies according to the nature of the particular object of investigation, sooner or later reaches a limit, beyond which it becomes one-sided, restricted, abstract, lost in insoluble contradictions. In the contemplation of individual things, it forgets the connection between them; in the contemplation of their existence, it forgets the beginning and end of that existence; of their repose, if forgets their motion. It cannot see the woods for the trees.
For everyday purposes, we know and can say, e.g., whether an animal is alive or not. But, upon closer inquiry, we find that his is, in many cases, a very complex question, as the jurists know very well. They have cudgelled their brains in vain to discover a rational limit beyond which the killing of the child in its mother's womb is murder. It is just as impossible to determine absolutely the moment of death, for physiology proves that death is not an instantaneous, momentary phenomenon, but a very protracted process.
In like manner, every organized being is every moment the same and not the same; every moment, it assimilates matter supplied from without, and gets rid of other matter; every moment, some cells of its body die and others build themselves anew; in a longer or shorter time, the matter of its body is completely renewed, and is replaced by other molecules of matter, so that every organized being is always itself, and yet something other than itself.
Further, we find upon closer investigation that the two poles of an antithesis, positive and negative, e.g., are as inseparable as they are opposed, and that despite all their opposition, they mutually interpenetrate. And we find, in like manner, that cause and effect are conceptions which only hold good in their application to individual cases; but as soon as we consider the individual cases in their general connection with the universe as a whole, they run into each other, and they become confounded when we contemplate that universal action and reaction in which causes and effects are eternally changing places, so that what is effect here and now will be cause there and then, and vice versa.
None of these processes and modes of thought enters into the framework of metaphysical reasoning. Dialectics, on the other hand, comprehends things and their representations, ideas, in their essential connection, concatenation, motion, origin and ending. Such processes as those mentioned above are, therefore, so many corroborations of its own method of procedure.
Nature is the proof of dialectics, and it must be said for modern science
that it has furnished this proof with very rich materials increasingly daily,
and thus has shown that, in the last resort, Nature works dialectically and not
metaphysically; that she does not move in the eternal oneness of a perpetually
recurring circle, but goes through a real historical evolution. In this
connection,
An exact representation of the universe, of its evolution, of the
development of mankind, and of the reflection of this evolution in the minds of
men, can therefore only be obtained by the methods of dialectics with its
constant regard to the innumerable actions and reactions of life and death, of
progressive or retrogressive changes. And in this spirit, the new German
philosophy has worked. Kant began his career by resolving the stable Solar
system of
This new German philosophy culminated in the Hegelian system. In this system — and herein is its great merit — for the first time the whole world, natural, historical, intellectual, is represented as a process — i.e., as in constant motion, change, transformation, development; and the attempt is made to trace out the internal connection that makes a continuous whole of all this movement and development. From this point of view, the history of mankind no longer appeared as a wild whirl of senseless deeds of violence, all equally condemnable at the judgment seat of mature philosophic reason and which are best forgotten as quickly as possible, but as the process of evolution of man himself. It was now the task of the intellect to follow the gradual march of this process through all its devious ways, and to trace out the inner law running through all its apparently accidental phenomena.
That the Hegelian system did not solve the problem it propounded is here immaterial. Its epoch-making merit was that it propounded the problem. This problem is one that no single individual will ever be able to solve. Although Hegel was — with Saint-Simon — the most encyclopaedic mind of his time, yet he was limited, first, by the necessary limited extent of his own knowledge and, second, by the limited extent and depth of the knowledge and conceptions of his age. to these limits, a third must be added. Hegel was an idealist. To him, the thoughts within his brain were not the more or less abstract pictures of actual things and processes, but, conversely, things and their evolution were only the realized pictures of the "Idea", existing somewhere from eternity before the world was. This way of thinking turned everything upside down, and completely reversed the actual connection of things in the world. Correctly and ingeniously as many groups of facts were grasped by Hegel, yet, for the reasons just given, there is much that is botched, artificial, labored, in a word, wrong in point of detail. The Hegelian system, in itself, was a colossal miscarriage — but it was also the last of its kind.
It was suffering, in fact, from an internal and incurable contradiction. Upon the one hand, its essential proposition was the conception that human history is a process of evolution, which, by its very nature, cannot find its intellectual final term in the discovery of any so-called absolute truth. But, on the other hand, it laid claim to being the very essence of this absolute truth. A system of natural and historical knowledge, embracing everything, and final for all time, is a contradiction to the fundamental law of dialectic reasoning.
This law, indeed, by no means excludes, but, on the contrary, includes the idea that the systematic knowledge of the external universe can make giant strides from age to age.
The perception of the fundamental contradiction in German idealism led necessarily back to materialism, but — nota bene — not to the simply metaphysical, exclusively mechanical materialism of the 18th century. Old materialism looked upon all previous history as a crude heap of irrationality and violence; modern materialism sees in it the process of evolution of humanity, and aims at discovering the laws thereof. With the French of the 18th century, and even with Hegel, the conception obtained of Nature as a whole — moving in narrow circles, and forever immutable, with its eternal celestial bodies, as Newton, and unalterable organic species, as Linnaeus, taught. Modern materialism embraces the more recent discoveries of natural science, according to which Nature also has its history in time, the celestial bodies, like the organic species that, under favorable conditions, people them, being born and perishing. And even if Nature, as a whole, must still be said to move in recurrent cycles, these cycles assume infinitely larger dimensions. In both aspects, modern materialism is essentially dialectic, and no longer requires the assistance of that sort of philosophy which, queen-like, pretended to rule the remaining mob of sciences. As soon as each special science is bound to make clear its position in the great totality of things and of our knowledge of things, a special science dealing with this totality is superfluous or unnecessary. That which still survives of all earlier philosophy is the science of thought and its law — formal logic and dialectics. Everything else is subsumed in the positive science of Nature and history.
Whilst, however, the revolution in the conception of Nature could only be
made in proportion to the corresponding positive materials furnished by
research, already much earlier certain historical facts had occurred which led
to a decisive change in the conception of history. In 1831, the first
working-class rising took place in
The new facts made imperative a new examination of all past history. Then it was seen that all past history, with the exception of its primitive stages, was the history of class struggles; that these warring classes of society are always the products of the modes of production and of exchange — in a word, of the economic conditions of their time; that the economic structure of society always furnishes the real basis, starting from which we can alone work out the ultimate explanation of the whole superstructure of juridical and political institutions as well as of the religious, philosophical, and other ideas of a given historical period. Hegel has freed history from metaphysics — he made it dialectic; but his conception of history was essentially idealistic. But now idealism was driven from its last refuge, the philosophy of history; now a materialistic treatment of history was propounded, and a method found of explaining man's "knowing" by his "being", instead of, as heretofore, his "being" by his "knowing".
From that time forward, Socialism was no longer an accidental discovery of this or that ingenious brain, but the necessary outcome of the struggle between two historically developed classes — the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. Its task was no longer to manufacture a system of society as perfect as possible, but to examine the historico-economic succession of events from which these classes and their antagonism had of necessity sprung, and to discover in the economic conditions thus created the means of ending the conflict. But the Socialism of earlier days was as incompatible with this materialist conception as the conception of Nature of the French materialists was with dialectics and modern natural science. The Socialism of 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 exploitations of the working-class, inevitable under Capitalism, the less able was it clearly to show in what this exploitation consisted and how it arose. but for this it was necessary — to present the capitalistic mode of production in its historical connection and its inevitableness during a particular historical period, and therefore, also, to present its inevitable downfall; and to lay bare its essential character, which was still a secret. This was done by the discovery of surplus-value.
It was shown that the appropriation of unpaid labor is the basis of the capitalist mode of production and of the exploitation of the worker that occurs under it; that even if the capitalist buys the labor power of his laborer at its full value as a commodity on the market, he yet extracts more value from it than he paid for; and that in the ultimate analysis, this surplus-value forms those sums of value from which are heaped up constantly increasing masses of capital in the hands of the possessing classes. The genesis of capitalist production and the production of capital were both explained.
These two great discoveries, the materialistic conception of history and the revelation of the secret of capitalistic production through surplus-value, we owe to Marx. With these discoveries, Socialism became a science. The next thing was to work out all its details and relations.
Next: Historical Materialism
Notes
(1
The Alexandrian period of the development of science comprises the period
extending from the 3rd century B.C. to the 17th century A.D. It derives its
name from the town of
Fredrick Engels
Socialism: Utopian and Scientific
III
[Historical Materialism]
The materialist conception of history starts from the proposition that the production of the means to support human life and, next to production, the exchange of things produced, is the basis of all social structure; that in every society that has appeared in history, the manner in which wealth is distributed and society divided into classes or orders is dependent upon what is produced, how it is produced, and how the products are exchanged. From this point of view, the final causes of all social changes and political revolutions are to be sought, not in men's brains, not in men's better insights into eternal truth and justice, but in changes in the modes of production and exchange. They are to be sought, not in the philosophy, but in the economics of each particular epoch. The growing perception that existing social institutions are unreasonable and unjust, that reason has become unreason, and right wrong 1), is only proof that in the modes of production and exchange changes have silently taken place with which the social order, adapted to earlier economic conditions, is no longer in keeping. From this it also follows that the means of getting rid of the incongruities that have been brought to light must also be present, in a more or less developed condition, within the changed modes of production themselves. These means are not to be invented by deduction from fundamental principles, but are to be discovered in the stubborn facts of the existing system of production.
What is, then, the position of modern Socialism in this connection?
The present situation of society — this is now pretty generally conceded — is the creation of the ruling class of today, of the bourgeoisie. The mode of production peculiar to the bourgeoisie, known, since Marx, as the capitalist mode of production, was incompatible with the feudal system, with the privileges it conferred upon individuals, entire social ranks and local corporations, as well as with the hereditary ties of subordination which constituted the framework of its social organization. The bourgeoisie broke up the feudal system and built upon its ruins the capitalist order of society, the kingdom of free competition, of personal liberty, of the equality, before the law, of all commodity owners, of all the rest of the capitalist blessings. Thenceforward, the capitalist mode of production could develop in freedom. Since steam, machinery, and the making of machines by machinery transformed the older manufacture into modern industry, the productive forces, evolved under the guidance of the bourgeoisie, developed with a rapidity and in a degree unheard of before. But just as the older manufacture, in its time, and handicraft, becoming more developed under its influence, had come into collision with the feudal trammels of the guilds, so now modern industry, in its complete development, comes into collision with the bounds within which the capitalist mode of production holds it confined. The new productive forces have already outgrown the capitalistic mode of using them. And this conflict between productive forces and modes of production is not a conflict engendered in the mind of man, like that between original sin and divine justice. It exists, in fact, objectively, outside us, independently of the will and actions even of the men that have brought it on. Modern Socialism is nothing but the reflex, in thought, of this conflict in fact; its ideal reflection in the minds, first, of the class directly suffering under it, the working class.
Now, in what does this conflict consist?
Before capitalist production — i.e., in the Middle Ages — the system of petty industry obtained generally, based upon the private property of the laborers in their means of production; in the country, the agriculture of the small peasant, freeman, or serf; in the towns, the handicrafts organized in guilds. The instruments of labor — land, agricultural implements, the workshop, the tool — were the instruments of labor of single individuals, adapted for the use of one worker, and, therefore, of necessity, small, dwarfish, circumscribed. But, for this very reason, they belonged as a rule to the producer himself. To concentrate these scattered, limited means of production, to enlarge them, to turn them into the powerful levers of production of the present day — this was precisely the historic role of capitalist production and of its upholder, the bourgeoisie. In the fourth section of Capital, Marx has explained in detail how since the 15th century this has been historically worked out through the three phases of simple co-operation, manufacture, and modern industry. But the bourgeoisie, as is shown there, could not transform these puny means of production into mighty productive forces without transforming them, at the same time, from means of production of the individual into social means of production only workable by a collectivity of men. The spinning wheel, the handloom, the blacksmith's hammer, were replaced by the spinning-machine, the power-loom, the steam-hammer; the individual workshop, by the factory implying the co-operation of hundreds and thousands of workmen. In like manner, production itself changed from a series of individual into a series of social acts, and the production from individual to social products. The yarn, the cloth, the metal articles that now come out of the factory were the joint product of many workers, through whose hands they had successively to pass before they were ready. No one person could say of them: "I made that; this is my product."
But where, in a given society, the fundamental form of production is that spontaneous division of labor which creeps in gradually and not upon any preconceived plan, there the products take on the form of commodities, whose mutual exchange, buying and selling, enable the individual producers to satisfy their manifold wants. And this was the case in the Middle Ages. The peasant, e.g., sold to the artisan agricultural products and bought from him the products of handicraft. Into this society of individual producers, of commodity producers, the new mode of production thrust itself. In the midst of the old division of labor, grown up spontaneously and upon no definite plan, which had governed the whole of society, now arose division of labor upon a definite plan, as organized in the factory; side by side with individual production appeared social production. The products of both were sold in the same market, and, therefore, at prices at least approximately equal. But organization upon a definite plan was stronger than spontaneous division of labor. The factories working with the combined social forces of a collectivity of individuals produced their commodities far more cheaply than the individual small producers. Individual producers succumbed in one department after another. Socialized production revolutionized all the old methods of production. But its revolutionary character was, at the same time, so little recognized that it was, on the contrary, introduced as a means of increasing and developing the production of commodities. When it arose, it found ready-made, and made liberal use of, certain machinery for the production and exchange of commodities: merchants' capital, handicraft, wage-labor. Socialized production thus introducing itself as a new form of the production of commodities, it was a matter of course that under it the old forms of appropriation remained in full swing, and were applied to its products as well.
In the medieval stage of evolution of the production of commodities, the question as to the owner of the product of labor could not arise. The individual producer, as a rule, had, from raw material belonging to himself, and generally his own handiwork, produced it with his own tools, by the labor of his own hands or of his family. There was no need for him to appropriate the new product. It belonged wholly to him, as a matter of course. His property in the product was, therefore, based upon his own labor. Even where external help was used, this was, as a rule, of little importance, and very generally was compensated by something other than wages. The apprentices and journeymen of the guilds worked less for board and wages than for education, in order that they might become master craftsmen themselves.
Then came the concentration of the means of production and of the producers in large workshops and manufactories, their transformation into actual socialized means of production and socialized producers. But the socialized producers and means of production and their products were still treated, after this change, just as they had been before — i.e., as the means of production and the products of individuals. Hitherto, the owner of the instruments of labor had himself appropriated the product, because, as a rule, it was his own product and the assistance of others was the exception. Now, the owner of the instruments of labor always appropriated to himself the product, although it was no longer his product but exclusively the product of the labor of others. Thus, the products now produced socially were not appropriated by those who had actually set in motion the means of production and actually produced the commodities, but by the capitalists. The means of production, and production itself, had become in essence socialized. But they were subjected to a form of appropriation which presupposes the private production of individuals, under which, therefore, every one owns his own product and brings it to market. The mode of production is subjected to this form of appropriation, although it abolishes the conditions upon which the latter rests. [2]
This contradiction, which gives to the new mode of production its capitalistic character, contains the germ of the whole of the social antagonisms of today. The greater the mastery obtained by the new mode of production over all important fields of production and in all manufacturing countries, the more it reduced individual production to an insignificant residuum, the more clearly was brought out the incompatibility of socialized production with capitalistic appropriation.
The first capitalists found, as we have said, alongside of other forms of labor, wage-labor ready-made for them on the market. But it was exceptional, complementary, accessory, transitory wage-labor. The agricultural laborer, though, upon occasion, he hired himself out by the day, had a few acres of his own land on which he could at all events live at a pinch. The guilds were so organized that the journeyman to today became the master of tomorrow. But all this changed, as soon as the means of production became socialized and concentrated in the hands of capitalists. The means of production, as well as the product, of the individual producer became more and more worthless; there was nothing left for him but to turn wage-worker under the capitalist. Wage-labor, aforetime the exception and accessory, now became the rule and basis of all production; aforetime complementary, it now became the sole remaining function of the worker. The wage-worker for a time became a wage-worker for life. The number of these permanent was further enormously increased by the breaking-up of the feudal system that occurred at the same time, by the disbanding of the retainers of the feudal lords, the eviction of the peasants from their homesteads, etc. The separation was made complete between the means of production concentrated in the hands of the capitalists, on the one side, and the producers, possessing nothing but their labor-power, on the other. The contradiction between socialized production and capitalistic appropriation manifested itself as the antagonism of proletariat and bourgeoisie.
We have seen that the capitalistic mode of production thrust its way into a society of commodity-producers, of individual producers, whose social bond was the exchange of their products. But every society based upon the production of commodities has this peculiarity: that the producers have lost control over their own social inter-relations. Each man produces for himself with such means of production as he may happen to have, and for such exchange as he may require to satisfy his remaining wants. No one knows how much of his particular article is coming on the market, nor how much of it will be wanted. No one knows whether his individual product will meet an actual demand, whether he will be able to make good his costs of production or even to sell his commodity at all. Anarchy reigns in socialized production.
But the production of commodities, like every other form of production, has it peculiar, inherent laws inseparable from it; and these laws work, despite anarchy, in and through anarchy. They reveal themselves in the only persistent form of social inter-relations — i.e., in exchange — and here they affect the individual producers as compulsory laws of competition. They are, at first, unknown to these producers themselves, and have to be discovered by them gradually and as the result of experience. They work themselves out, therefore, independently of the producers, and in antagonism to them, as inexorable natural laws of their particular form of production. The product governs the producers.
In mediaeval society, especially in the earlier centuries, production was essentially directed toward satisfying the wants of the individual. It satisfied, in the main, only the wants of the producer and his family. Where relations of personal dependence existed, as in the country, it also helped to satisfy the wants of the feudal lord. In all this there was, therefore, no exchange; the products, consequently, did not assume the character of commodities. The family of the peasant produced almost everything they wanted: clothes and furniture, as well as the means of subsistence. Only when it began to produce more than was sufficient to supply its own wants and the payments in kind to the feudal lords, only then did it also produce commodities. This surplus, thrown into socialized exchange and offered for sale, became commodities.
The artisan in the towns, it is true, had from the first to produce for exchange. But they, also, themselves supplied the greatest part of their individual wants. They had gardens and plots of land. They turned their cattle out into the communal forest, which, also, yielded them timber and firing. The women spun flax, wool, and so forth. Production for the purpose of exchange, production of commodities, was only in its infancy. Hence, exchange was restricted, the market narrow, the methods of production stable; there was local exclusiveness without, local unity within; the mark in the country; in the town, the guild.
But with the extension of the production of commodities, and especially with the introduction of the capitalist mode of production, the laws of commodity-production, hitherto latent, came into action more openly and with greater force. The old bonds were loosened, the old exclusive limits broken through, the producers were more and more turned into independent, isolated producers of commodities. It became apparent that the production of society at large was ruled by absence of plan, by accident, by anarchy; and this anarchy grew to greater and greater height. But the chief means by aid of which the capitalist mode of production intensified this anarchy of socialized production was the exact opposite of anarchy. It was the increasing organization of production, upon a social basis, in every individual productive establishment. By this, the old, peaceful, stable condition of things was ended. Wherever this organization of production was introduced into a branch of industry, it brooked no other method of production by its side. The field of labor became a battle-ground. The great geographical discoveries, and the colonization following them, multiplied markets and quickened the transformation of handicraft into manufacture. The war did not simply break out between the individual producers of particular localities. The local struggles begat, in their turn, national conflicts, the commercial wars of the 17th and 18th centuries.
Finally, modern industry and the opening of the world-market made the struggle universal, and at the same time gave it an unheard-of virulence. Advantages in natural or artificial conditions of production now decide the existence or non-existence of individual capitalists, as well as of whole industries and countries. He that falls is