Socialism: Utopian and Scientific¶
Core Argument¶
Modern socialism emerged not from abstract ideals but from the recognition of real class antagonisms between capitalists and wage-workers, and the anarchy inherent in capitalist production. Its earliest expressions, however, were utopian. The great eighteenth-century French Enlightenment thinkers had subjected all institutions to the judgement of reason, but their proclaimed "kingdom of reason" proved to be merely the idealised kingdom of the bourgeoisie—bourgeois justice, equality before the law, and property as an essential right. The French Revolution's rational society collapsed into war and intensified class antagonisms; industry made working-class misery a condition of existence.
The utopian socialists—Saint-Simon, Fourier, and Owen—saw this bourgeois world as irrational and unjust, yet none represented the proletariat as a class. They claimed to emancipate all humanity at once, seeking to impose new systems from without, as if truth had been discovered by happy accident rather than historical necessity. Saint-Simon grasped the antagonism between "workers" and "idlers," declared politics the science of production, and foresaw the abolition of the state. Fourier used dialectics to show that civilisation moves in a vicious circle where poverty is born of superabundance. Robert Owen, applying materialist philosophy to industry at New Lanark, transformed a demoralised workforce into a model colony while his business prospered. He calculated that 2,500 workers produced as much wealth as 600,000 had fifty years earlier, concluding this new productive power belonged to the workers. His communism was a practical, business-like proposal, but his attacks on private property, religion, and marriage led to ostracism.
The fundamental breakthrough came with Marx's two great discoveries: the materialist conception of history and the revelation of surplus value. History revealed itself as the history of class struggles, with the economic structure forming the real basis for explaining all political and ideological superstructures. Surplus value showed that capitalist exploitation consists in appropriating unpaid labour, even when labour-power is bought at its full value. Socialism thus became a science, not an accidental discovery.
The objective conflict between modern industry's productive forces and the capitalist mode of production manifests as the contradiction between socialised production and private appropriation. Machinery displaces workers, creating an industrial reserve army; periodic commercial crises, occurring every ten years since 1825, are violent explosions of this contradiction. Capital concentrates through joint-stock companies, trusts, and ultimately state ownership, but this does not abolish the capitalist relation. The solution is society's direct and conscious taking possession of the productive forces. The proletariat seizes political power, abolishes itself as a class, and renders the state unnecessary—the state does not abolish itself but dies out, as government of persons is replaced by administration of things. This is the ascent from necessity to freedom.