Fragments¶
Core Argument¶
This chapter, composed of two fragments from Engels’ preparatory notes, advances a materialist critique of the role of force in the historical transformation of property relations, directly challenging the idealist and voluntarist conceptions of justice that underpin utopian socialism. The core argument is that communal land ownership among Indo-Germanic peoples was originally established and maintained not by continuous violence, but by the expulsion of prior inhabitants; thereafter, internal social evolution, not force, governed the gradual transition to private property. Engels insists that for centuries—up to the sixteenth century in many cases—the division of communal land among individual peasants occurred “purely spontaneously,” a slow, organic process that left remnants of collective tenure intact. Force, he contends, was deployed only reactively, against these surviving communal forms, as seen in the English enclosures of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the German equivalent in the nineteenth. Ireland is singled out as a “special case,” implicitly because its rundale system of communal tillage persisted under conditions of direct colonial bondage, where force was structural rather than episodic.
The second fragment, an abstract on Thomas More, sharpens the polemical thrust. Engels notes that More’s demand for “Justice”—the replacement of force with “sociality”—was made 360 years prior and remains unfulfilled. The target here is the moralising, ahistorical socialism that believes the mere proclamation of ethical principles can supersede the actual material dynamics of class struggle and property transformation. By juxtaposing More’s pious wish with the concrete historical analysis of land tenure, Engels argues that such appeals to justice are impotent abstractions; they mistake the symptom for the cause. The chapter thus draws on the historical record of Celtic, Germanic, and Slavic communal property—including the Russian serf commune and Irish rundale—to demonstrate that the real motor of historical change is not the moral will but the spontaneous and later forcible dissolution of communal forms under the pressure of emerging class relations. The polemic is directed squarely against the utopian socialists and, by extension, against Dühring’s metaphysical “force theory,” which Engels would dismantle systematically in Anti-Dühring. Here, the preparatory notes lay the groundwork: force is not the primordial creative principle of history, but a secondary, often reactionary instrument wielded against already-decaying communal institutions.