1. Historical¶
Core Argument¶
The French Revolution’s promise of a rational society collapsed into the Terror, the Directorate, and Napoleonic despotism. The “triumph of reason” intensified class antagonism, replacing feudal vices with bourgeois ones: trade became cheating, oppression was replaced by corruption, and prostitution increased. Around 1800, capitalist production and the bourgeoisie-proletariat antagonism were still underdeveloped. The proletariat emerged as a nucleus of a new class but was incapable of independent political action, appearing as an oppressed estate needing help from above. This historical situation shaped the utopian socialists, who attempted to solve social problems hidden in undeveloped economic conditions by evolving solutions from the human brain, imposing new systems through propaganda and model experiments. These systems were foredoomed as utopian; the more detailed they became, the more they drifted into fantasies.
Saint-Simon, Fourier, and Owen are the key figures. Saint-Simon’s Geneva letters of 1802 declared all men must work and recognised the French Revolution as a class war. He later declared politics is the science of production and foretold the “abolition of the state” through conversion of political rule into administration of things. Fourier criticised bourgeois society, exposing its material and moral misery, using dialectics to show civilisation moves in a vicious circle where poverty is born of abundance. He was first to declare women’s emancipation the measure of general emancipation. Owen, a manufacturer, applied materialist philosophy at New Lanark, creating a model colony with shorter hours, infant schools, and full wages during a crisis, while the business profited. He concluded the new wealth created by the working class belonged to them, leading him to communism. Owen attacked private property, religion, and marriage, was ostracised, and turned to the working class, forcing through the first factory law of 1819, uniting trade unions, and introducing co-operative societies and labour bazaars.
Engels attacks Dühring’s treatment of these figures. Dühring dismisses Fourier’s critique of existing society as merely “occasional”, when in fact almost every page of Fourier’s work contains sparkling satire of civilisation. Regarding Owen, Dühring relies solely on the philistine Sargant’s biography, which omits Owen’s key works on marriage and communism, and thus claims Owen did not advocate “clear-cut communism”. Had Dühring read Owen’s Book of the New Moral World, he would have found exactly that, including detailed plans for a communist community. Moreover, Owen actually practised clear-cut communism for five years at the Harmony Hall colony in Hampshire. Dühring’s ignorance is profound.
The utopians were necessarily utopian because capitalist production was too undeveloped for the elements of the new society to be generally apparent; they had to construct it from reason. But eighty years later, Dühring claims an “authoritative” system constructed from his own sovereign head, not from historically developed material. He is therefore the epigone of the utopians, the latest utopian. While alchemy was necessary in its epoch, modern industry has made the contradictions of capitalism palpable and the approaching collapse obvious. The class struggle is daily more violent, and the conditions and basic features of the necessary social transformation have been apprehended from history. Dühring, ignoring this economic material, is like someone trying to restore alchemy after modern chemistry has been established.