2. Theoretical¶
Core Argument¶
In the materialist conception of history, production and exchange form the bedrock of all social structure; class divisions are determined by what is produced, how it is produced, and how products are exchanged. The ultimate causes of social and political change are found not in ideas but in transformations of the mode of production. When existing institutions are perceived as unjust, this merely signals that silent changes in production have rendered the old social order obsolete. The resolution of such incongruities must be discovered within the changed material conditions themselves, not invented by the mind.
Modern socialism is the theoretical reflex of an objective contradiction: the capitalist mode of production has developed productive forces that have outgrown the capitalistic mode of using them. The bourgeoisie historically transformed scattered, individual means of production into concentrated, socialised means, workable only by a collectivity. Production became a series of social acts, and products became social products. Yet appropriation remained private and individual: the capitalist, not the collective worker, appropriates the product. This contradiction between socialised production and capitalist appropriation is the germ of all present social antagonisms. It manifests as the antagonism between proletariat and bourgeoisie, and as the antagonism between the organisation of production in the individual workshop and the anarchy of production in society at large. This anarchy compels capitalists to perfect machinery, creating an industrial reserve army and generating periodic crises as expansion outstrips market capacity. Since 1825, such crises have recurred approximately every ten years, violently expressing this fundamental contradiction.
The productive forces rebel against the capitalist mode, which can no longer transform abundant means of production into capital. This forces the capitalist class to treat productive forces as social, initially through joint-stock companies and ultimately through state ownership of colossal means of production. However, state ownership does not abolish the capitalist relation; the modern state is merely the ideal personification of total national capital. Engels attacks the “spurious socialism” that declares any state ownership socialist, arguing that if Bismarck’s nationalisation of Prussian railways for military and revenue purposes is socialist, then Napoleon and Metternich were socialists too. The true solution is society’s direct possession of the productive forces, replacing anarchy with planned production according to community needs. The proletariat seizes political power, turns means of production into state property, thereby abolishes itself as a class, and renders the state unnecessary. The state “dies out”; government of persons is replaced by administration of things. Socialised appropriation ends commodity production, the struggle for individual existence, and humanity’s subjection to blind social forces, enabling the leap from the kingdom of necessity to the kingdom of freedom. This is the historical mission of the proletariat, whose theoretical expression is scientific socialism.