1. General¶
Core Argument¶
Modern socialism, as Engels establishes, emerges directly from the recognition of the fundamental class antagonism between proprietors and non-proprietors, and the consequent anarchy of capitalist production. The great French Enlightenment philosophers of the eighteenth century had subjected all social institutions to the tribunal of reason, yet their proclaimed kingdom of reason proved to be nothing more than the idealised kingdom of the bourgeoisie itself, enshrining bourgeois justice, formal equality before the law, and the sanctity of property rights. However, alongside the struggle between bourgeoisie and nobility existed the deeper, more general antagonism between exploiters and exploited, which allowed the rising bourgeoisie to present itself as the representative of all suffering humanity. From its very origin, the bourgeoisie was encumbered with its own antithesis, the proletariat. In every great bourgeois movement, there were independent outbursts from the forerunners of the modern proletariat, accompanied by corresponding theoretical enunciations: utopian pictures in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and actual communistic theories in the eighteenth. The three great utopian socialists—Saint-Simon, Fourier, and Owen—did not represent the specific interests of the proletariat but claimed to emancipate all humanity, seeking to establish a kingdom of reason and eternal justice. Their socialism presented itself as absolute truth, independent of time and historical development, inevitably degenerating into a mish-mash of eclectic, average socialism. To transform socialism into a science, it had to be placed upon a real, material basis.
The working-class risings in Lyons in 1831 and the Chartist movement in England from 1838 to 1842 forced a decisive break with idealist conceptions of history. As modern industry and bourgeois political supremacy developed, the class struggle between proletariat and bourgeoisie came to the fore, refuting bourgeois economics’ claims of a fundamental harmony between capital and labour. These new facts demanded a thorough re-examination of all past history. It was then recognised that all recorded history is the history of class struggles; that warring classes are products of the modes of production and exchange—the economic conditions of their time; and that the economic structure of society forms the real basis for explaining the entire superstructure of legal, political, and ideological institutions. Idealism was thus driven from the philosophy of history, replaced by a materialist treatment that explains human consciousness from material existence.
Earlier socialism could only condemn the capitalist mode of production, not explain it. Two theoretical discoveries were necessary: first, presenting capitalist production in its historical context as inevitable for a particular period, and therefore destined for inevitable downfall; second, laying bare its essential character. This was accomplished through the discovery of surplus-value, demonstrating that the appropriation of unpaid labour is the very basis of capitalist production and exploitation. Marx made both discoveries—the materialist conception of history and the revelation of surplus-value—thereby turning socialism from a utopian dream into a science.