The origins of socialist theory (1971)

Book Review from the May 1971 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Origins of Socialism, by G. Lichtheim. Weidenfeld and Nicolson. £2.50. A Short History of Socialism, by G. Lichtheim. Weidenfeld and Nicolson. £1.50 (paperback).

Socialist theory has customarily been said to derive from French political thought, English economic science and German philosophy. As Marx was the first to bring these three trends together Socialist theory is sometimes called Marxism. Lichtheim follows this tradition and sees Socialism as one reaction to the coming of industrial capitalism, as a theory which accepted industrialisation but not private enterprise and the profit motive.

French utopian Socialism introduced the idea that society should be organised on a more rational basis to take account of industrialisation. Its most prominent representatives were the followers of Saint Simon and Fourier. The former were responsible for such phrases as “the exploitation of man by man", “the administration of things’’ and, in France, “socialism”. They, and the Fourierists, were pioneers of what is now called women’s liberation and Fourier was among the first to argue that the distinction between town and country could disappear and that work could be made pleasant.

The French Revolution also produced another political trend, the revolutionary communists, who declared that the bourgeoisie had to be overthrown in the same way as the aristocracy had been: by violent insurrection and a temporary emergency dictatorship. Marx and Engels wrote the Communist Manifesto of 1848 for the German section of this trend, the Communist League. But by 1865, says Lichtheim, Marx had outgrown this “communist" phase and come to be the theorist of “democratic socialism” relying on the development of the working class movement rather than on conspiratorial insurrections for the establishment of Socialism.

In 1848, Lichtheim points out, Marx who had not yet worked out the distinction between labour and labour-power was still really a “Ricardian socialist”. David Ricardo, one of the leading English economic thinkers of his day (he died in 1823), was by no means a Socialist but he had said that labour was the source of value. Some of his followers who were also committed to Robert Owen’s Utopian Socialism gave this labour theory of value an anti-capitalist and pro-worker content and can be said to have done some of the preliminary work which Marx was to develop in Capital.

Marx was brought up and educated in what is now Germany and at university, like many others, became immersed in German philosophy and particularly that of Hegel. His critical study of Hegel and his followers led him to develop the materialist conception of history as an alternative historical theory.

Lichtheim’s books, especially the Origins, cover this ground very well, though it is odd to read of people such as the Fabians in Britain and the Stalinists in Russia as “socialists” when they stood rather for state capitalism. But when it comes to discussing Socialism as a system of society Lichtheim’s means more or less what we do.

In the concluding chapter of his Short History he defines Socialism as a democratic classless society based on common (as opposed to State) ownership in which “the wage relation has been abolished” and “all citizens have an equal claim upon the provision of goods and services” and "welfare services would be equally available to all at zero prices”:

  Anything that falls short of abolishing the wage relation has no claim to be described as socialism, though it may be a station on the way thereto.

The last part betrays Lichtheim’s basically gradualist approach to the establishment of Socialism. Indeed he suggests that Socialism is not an immediate prospect and probably will not be until the world is fully industrialised. Obviously we do not agree with this assessment but at least we can recognise that Lichtheim is on the same wavelength as us.

Both books are worth study as much for their discussion of the problems of Socialist and Marxist theory as for their account of its origins and history.

Adam Buick

Socialism Inevitable (1933)

From the May 1933 issue of the Socialist Standard

When Engels wrote to the effect that the establishment of Socialism would mean the ascent of man from the kingdom of necessity to the kingdom of freedom he was not guilty of a mere rhetorical flourish. He was expressing a profound sociological truth. The fact that under Socialism social forces will be under man’s control to an extent never previously reached, and further, that this would be the inevitable result of the development of society, as the dissolution of Capitalist society is mainly a question of time, plus the action and interaction of social forces in their entirety. 

Let us explain, in a more general way, our meaning.

The continuity with which the presence and pressure of adverse social conditions has pervaded human society is such that the idea of moulding human association to exclude privation and want impresses some people as being the product of a sentimental imagination. This arbitrary assumption is wholly wrong. The idea in question is the result of a logical deduction made after a study of the social history of mankind, and considerably animated by the pressure of the effects of capitalism upon us as members of the working class.

The socialist philosophy of life is born and nourished by the knowledge that capitalism can never be made to function in the interest of those who produce the means of living, or even of making the essential needs of social life its primary concern. This view may be challenged on the ground that capitalism is a social system and, as such, must concern itself with social needs.

We may speak of capitalist society as a social order, as one that has evolved from other and different forms of social life, but our reason for doing so is that its structure has a basis from which certain more or less regular and regulated economic, political, legal and sex[ relationships arise. It is, therefore, known in the science of sociology as a social order.

Since the breakdown of tribal society, under which private property had little or no meaning as a social status, social convulsions and revolutions have been experienced through which one form of class rule has superseded another. But whilst each ruling class has fought for social control in order to remove the obstacles that impede its further development, the social organisation following the conquest of power is the result of normal development and not the conscious design of the ruling class in question. Economic and political development has continued without those who have gained most from it being aware of the nature of the process.

Society to-day has an orderly appearance, but the anarchic character of its foundations produces effects that are constantly felt. At the very basis of this social system, in the course of the production and distribution of its wealth, there exists, despite the social form which production takes, a considerable degree of anarchy among those under whose “guidance” the process of production and distribution is carried on. The preservation of class rule compels a measure of co-ordination among the rulers in order to conserve the institution of private property, but in the quest for enrichment the scramble between capitalists is carried on with an intensity that bears comparison with the struggle for life in the animal kingdom.

In this scramble for wealth the machinery of production is overworked and the world becomes flooded with goods which the producing class cannot obtain in sufficiency and the owning class cannot dispose of at a profit. Where this condition obtains wealth is often destroyed instead of being consumed, because consumption was not the underlying purpose of its production.

Looking at the matter superficially one might take it for granted that the needs of society as a whole would be the first concern, but ,this is not sq in class society. Were it really so, the trash that passes under the name of human requirements would never be placed at our disposal.

It is true that the wealth produced in capitalist society has a use-value, but such use-value as it may have is a mere incident to its existence. It is not for its usefulness that it is produced, but for its capacity to bring profit to the capitalists. No profit, or ultimate prospect of profit, then no production is permissible.

In thus criticising capital’s mode of activity, we socialists imply nothing of moral significance. We are too well aware that things cannot be different from what they are as far as the main purpose of capitalism is concerned. Our case is strengthened, not weakened, by the recognition of the fact that business in capitalist society cannot be run without profit. But we are concerned with the consequences which flow from the quest for profit, because, as workers, we know our exploitation is the source from which profit is derived, and hence is inseparable from capital’s existence. And this brings us to a lesson from another side of the effects of capitalism.

It is estimated that approximately thirty millions of people throughout the world are unemployed, and not even the most daring of our social optimists can reasonably point to the probability of these millions being entirely absorbed in a “trade revival.”

Were it not for the tragic side of this feature of social development, it would be possible to share some sensation of humour from the irony of the situation. Here is the vital force of capital’s organism, the source which gives it life and growth, a mass of human labour power rendered stagnant because of the inability of those who normally profit from its use to set it in motion. At the behest of the capitalists more has been produced than is sufficient to satisfy what the economists call the effective demand of the market. Therefore, workers must be unemployed, with their already meagre means stinted still further.

It is idle to insist that the conditions so far referred to arise from such a social disturbance as the late European war, or that they are occasioned by the particular government in office at any given time. Their existence is independent of any political administration, and would be here though the late war had never been. Wars and policies of governments may aggravate such conditions, but they do not cause them to exist. Given the condition that an individual or a class has the right and power to own the land, mines, mills, factories, and other means of obtaining those things which we need to live, and the whole of the conditions referred to follow as an inevitable consequence. Class ownership of the means of life, it cannot be too often stated, is the root cause of poverty, unemployment, wars and such-like social anomalies.

The class division in modern society tends to become wider and wider as time goes on, which no amount of social “amelioration” can stay. So much so that world economic conferences are now a generally accepted fact in capitalist psychology. Many who previously accepted the doctrine of no interference or intervention in matters of finance and industry by the State, now gladly welcome its assistance. Surely this must be taken as a sign of the trend of events, when the capitalists employ their State machine more and more to check the havoc wrought by their own machinations.

Yet these things were all seen by thinkers long before they reached their present dimensions; in fact, whilst they were yet in their infancy.

In the early part of the 19th century, Charles Fourier, an eminent French historian and sociologist, and one of the early utopian socialists, predicted that the unbridled competition of his time (immediately after the French Revolution of 1789) must result in great concentration of the means of production in the hands of a few. He saw, also, the growth of one of civilisation’s greatest contradictions, poverty “born of superabundance itself.” Fourier proved to be a forerunner of a writer on a similar theme, who came a few decades later and had the added advantage of surveying a more developed capitalism, namely, Karl Marx. It was he who first scientifically diagnosed the source of the economic ailments of mankind, and correctly exposed the process by which the working class is exploited. The mechanisation of industry (I almost said, of life itself) Marx saw with the full force of its consequences. But he did not blame the machine or its inventor. With the clear insight of the social scientist he saw that in the form of its ownership, together with the same form of ownership in all the means of production, lay the cause of the trouble.

Since Marx wrote, the ever-increasing development of machinery has proceeded apace, spreading misery among the producers throughout the entire capitalist world, and making more difficult the problem of finding markets.

What, then, of the future of human society? Are we to relapse into a state akin to barbarism, which some fear? or is society to move forward along the path marked out for it by the laws of social development ?

In the light of the lessons of history, we socialists declare for the latter course, not merely on the ground of the wish being father to the thought, but because, as indicated above, history shows that when any given form of society reaches a stage where further development is hampered, those whose interest it is to take the step for advancement, invariably do so; even though the immediate consequences of the act may serve as a deterrent.

It is a fact becoming demonstrably clearer as time proceeds that capitalism has outgrown its usefulness to humanity, and stands as a barrier to social advancement. How this increasingly affects certain sections of the capitalist class itself, causing them to cry out for world organisation, the cancellation of war debts, and the thousand and one other nostrums now proposed for the rehabilitation of capitalism, is no concern of ours or the working class in general. Our only concern is the overthrow of capitalism and the establishment of Socialism.

The workers are denied the possibility of enjoying the fruits of their labour, as they are hampered in sharing the real benefits bequeathed to society by all past history. It is they whom social laws have selected to bring the next stage in the development of society.

The generalisation of Frederick Engels, with which we opened this article will then be an accomplished fact. The subjection of the powers of production to social control and regulation through Socialism will likewise vindicate the words of Marx, who declared of the capitalist thus: —

  “Fanatically bent on making value expand itself, he ruthlessly forces the human race to produce for production’s sake; he thus forces the development of the productive powers of society, and creates those material conditions, which alone can form the real basis of a higher form of society, a society in which the full and free development of every individual forms the ruling principle.”

Robert Reynolds

Quotes (1904)

Quotes from the November 1904 issue of the Socialist Standard

Early issues of the Socialist Standard would be peppered with brief quotes which would serve as inspirational, informative and, most importantly, as space fillers. Here are the quotes from the November 1904 issue of the Socialist Standard:

And we too love peace, but not the peace of slavery. Marat.

They shall build houses and inhabit them; and they shall plant vineyards and eat fruit of them. They shall not build, and another inhabit; they shall not plant, and another eat. — Isaiah. LXV. 21, 22.

What sort of society is this that has, to the extent that ours has, inequality and injustice for a basis? Such a society is fit only to be kicked out through the windows — its banquet tables, its orgies, its debaucheries, its scoundrelism, together with all those who are seated leaning on both elbows and enjoying it on the backs of others whom they keep down on all fours. The hell of the poor is the paradise the rich love to solace themselves in. Victor Hugo.

The human race is gradually learning the simple lesson, that the people as a whole are wiser for the public good and the public prosperity, than any privileged class of men, however refined and cultivated, have ever been, or, by any possibility, can ever become. — Lewis H. Morgan. Ancient Society.

The artisan who is demanding at this time an eight hours day in the building trades is simply striving to recover what his ancestor worked by four or five centuries ago.  — Thorold Rogers.

Wage-Workers of the World, Unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains — you have the World to win.  — Karl Marx

The great appear great to us because we are on our knees: let us rise!  — Theroigne.

The modern state, whatever its form, is essentially a capitalist machine; it is the state of the capitalist; the ideal total capitalist.  — Frederick Engels.

The punishment good citizens get for neglecting their politics is to be governed by bad men.  — Plato.

The abolition of poverty and the abolition of capitalism shall be accomplished at one and the same time.

Room! For the men of mind make way!
  Ye robber Rulers, pause no longer;
Ye cannot stay the opening day:
  The world rolls on, the light grows stronger.
The People's Advent's coming!
— Gerald Massey.

Political economists see nothing but the past; hence future generations will represent the civilization of political economists by a head reversed and looking backward. — Fourier. 

Tugan-Baranovsky's Criticism of Marx. (1930)

Book Review from the February 1930 issue of the Socialist Standard

“Modern Socialism in its Historical Development," by M. Tugan-Baranovsky, was published in 1910. It was translated from the Russian by M. I. Redmount.

The most interesting feature of the work is the record of working-class efforts and ideas in the early days of the movement. The phrasing is inclined to be awkward, possibly due to difficulties of translation. It is, in places, not easy to get at the ideas. When understood, however, the work presents a rather curious instance of an author losing sight of his own premises, merely because society has failed to act on them. 

On page 14 he defines Socialism as 

The social organization in which, owing to equal obligations and equal rights of all to participate in the communal work, as also owing to the equal right to participate in the produce of this work, the exploitation of one member of the community by another is impossible.

Having laid this down as a working principle—incomplete as it is—the reader might expect that it would, at least, be used to show wherein working-class parties, calling themselves Socialist failed to act up to their name. Instead, M. Baranovsky, confusing labour politics with what he calls Marxism, declares that the latter has departed from its principles. By Marxism he means the principles that should govern the workers in their efforts to emancipate themselves. These principles were broadly outlined by Karl Marx in the Communist Manifesto.

On page 8 M. Baranovsky says that Socialists recognised that they had to bear in mind the immediate needs of the people and shape their policy on them. In consequence of these ingenious Marxian tactics, he says, Socialism has become the greatest political power of the present. He describes this action as transferring the centre of gravity of the Socialist movement into the sphere of practical politics. The ultimate aim, he says, recedes into the background, whilst the proper ideal continues to serve but as a symbol, without any concrete content, and finally, the tactics of Marxism have in theory resulted in weakening the interest in the final issue of Socialism.

Here, he fails to see that it is the Labour Party that has falsified Socialist principles by their reformist policy. The broad facts of the working-class position, and the principles drawn from them are, in essence, the same to-day as when Marx outlined them in the Communist Manifesto. M. Baranovsky should, reasoning from his declared facts, have noted that the Labour Party cannot, at the same time, be both a reformist and a Socialist party.

This failure to see that a Socialist party must have Socialist principles, and base its political activities on them, vitiates the work throughout. To M. Baranovsky the Labour Party is a Socialist party in spite of its reformist policy and its denial of Socialist principle.

The reason for his shortsightedness is seen after a careful examination of his book. M. Baranovsky has the Utopian mind. Something of the soundness of the Socialist position he glimpses here and there; but in the main he belongs to the period of which he writes most fluently; the period when reformers like Owen, Fourier and St. Simon saw the rottenness of Capitalism and planned new systems to supplant it. In his preface he compares these with Marx, as follows:—

And taking into consideration that Marxism, as I strongly believe, does not embrace all the scientific elements of Socialism, my investigation necessarily assumed an historical character in so far as I was obliged to retrospect and introduce earlier, partly forgotten doctrines of the so-called Utopian category, which I consider deserving of the most serious attention and which in some respects are even more scientific than Marxism.

One of the best-known of the Utopians was Fourier. His plan for the reformation of society was the formation of groups, called Phalanstries, each group to settle on the land and provide for themselves by their associated labour. Fourier himself waited in vain for some charitable millionaire to finance his first group. Yet there have been quite a number of these experiments in different parts of the world. They were all failures. Capitalist society is too strong an organism to be affected by such dreamlike projects.

Wherein can such schemes be termed scientific? M. Baranovsky does not tell us. But Marxism, as he calls it, can tell us why they always failed. Working-men cannot throw up their jobs and form groups to produce for themselves. They have no capital to start with (a necessity under Capitalism) and Capitalists already own the land.

But the Utopians are unscientific in another respect. They say that nothing can be achieved by struggling against those in power. The only effective weapon is persuasion. They turn their backs on the class struggle, instead of recognising it and taking their place in the ranks of the workers. What could be more unscientific than refusing to see what is so evident in modern society. The antagonism between Capitalists and workers is the most outstanding feature of modern times, all over the Capitalist world, and conditions cannot essentially change for the working-class until they get the upper hand in that struggle.

But it is not the early Utopian ideas with which M. Baranovsky is chiefly obsessed. His Utopianism has advanced some what. Sixty pages are devoted to what he conceives as the special forms that the future society may take. He reviews the possibilities of eight different systems. Socialism and Communism have each four alternative arrangements, according to him : Centralized, Corporate, Federal And Anarchical. The Utopian cast of his mind is plainly revealed in the profitless task of reviewing these forms. But even more so is this the case in the last section of his book ,where he says on page 230:—

In the Socialist community, just so as in the Capitalistic, the price of a commodity will rise in the case of demand exceeding supply, and fall in the inverse instance.

In this quotation we see how Capitalist ideas clog the minds of those who try to frame schemes to escape from the evils of the present system. M. Baranovsky would carry over into a future system he has somehow conjured up, the very things that make Capitalism what it is. He would still have commodities and commodity production. Sale and purchase of the necessaries of life.

Capitalism is based on the class ownership of the means of wealth production and the commodity character of human labour-power. Labour-power is bought by the Capitalists to operate the machinery of production and sell their commodities on the world's market. The energy of the worker is a commodity, he is stamped with the commodity character. He is compelled to suffer all the vicissitudes that distinguish other commodities in the Capitalist world: over-supply, depreciation and physical decay, when he can no longer sell his one commodity.

Throughout the productive and commercial world everything has a practical aim in view. The object of it all is profit. The workers themselves cultivate efficiency, eliminate waste, produce all forms of wealth, and run all the services that minister to the world's needs. Yet they suffer poverty because they do all this for those who buy their energy. Everywhere business is run on practical lines and becoming more rationalised every day. Yet the worker’s mind is still obsessed with the false notion that wealth can only be produced by this arrangement that makes the bulk of human society—the working-class —a class of wage-slaves.

Production and distribution of wealth can be carried on by society without the enslavement of one class. But only the class that is enslaved can possibly want such a system. Consequently, it can only be established by the workers themselves. Moreover, it can only be established in opposition to the Capitalist class. Which means that the workers' first task is to critically examine and understand the basis of Capitalism. He will then know for himself what must be changed or eliminated in order that he and his class may win security and freedom from exploitation.

F. Foan

A Prophet of Liberation (1973)

Book Review from the May 1973 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Utopian Vision of Charles Fourier; Selected Texts on Work, Love and Passionate Attraction, Translated and edited by Jonathan Beecher and Richard Bienvenu. Cape, £3.95

Marx and Engels praised and criticized Fourier. The criticism, inevitably, was that of all the Utopian Socialists of 1800 and thereabouts. As Engels put it in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific:

The solution of the social problems, which as yet lay hidden in undeveloped economic conditions, the Utopians attempted to evolve out of the human brain. Society presented nothing but wrongs; to remove these was the task of reason. It was necessary, then, to discover a new and more perfect system of social order and to impose this upon society from without by propaganda, and, wherever it was possible, by the example of model experiments. These new social systems were foredoomed as Utopian; the more completely they were worked out in detail, the more they could not avoid drifting off into pure phantasies.

Yet the praise was undeniable too: for Fourier's satire, the "power and charm" of his denunciations of commerce, his view of women's position, and his historical insight.

Of all the Utopians, Fourier most readily wins sympathy today. Saint-Simon's gospel of work may seem too severe. Owen's experiments not free from the suspicion of progressive management; with Fourier, however, the human concern which won that word "charm" is almost irresistible. His answer to the classic question of who would do dirty work under Socialism is memorable. Muck? Filth? Let children do it: they love such things.

The present collection of Fourier's writings draw strongly on material which was not available to Marx and Engels. This is the volume published for the first time in Paris in 1967 under the title Le Nouveau Monde Amoureux (The New Amorous World). It would not have altered their view, but it greatly amplifies the vision of a satisfying society as Fourier saw it. It enables us also to see how far away the Fourierists who founded 19th-century communities were from what was in his mind: straitlaced groups who, as the Introduction remarks, "for tactical as well as personal reasons" ignored his intention of a realm of sexual freedom.

After a financially comfortable upbringing, Fourier was woken to the realities of social life in the years following the French Revolution. Experiences in the Lyon insurrection of 1793 are said to have given him "a lasting horror of political revolution and social turmoil", and the rifeness of profiteering and speculation under the Directory made him a bitter critic of "anarchic" competition. From these points of departure he constructed a series of proposals for the reconstruction of society, leading to the master-plan: a scheme of "natural association" in which the gratification of personal desires and passions would be for human good. By 1819 he had completed, but was never able to publish in entirety, his Grande Traité on society and human nature.

It was essential to Fourier that his idea be put into practice. His conception was of a community called the Phalanx, made up of small "passional" groups. For years he sought a patron to provide the land and the backing; he tried bankers, philanthropists and ambassadors. Though these appeals brought nothing, a small band of disciples formed. He quickly dissociated himself from an attempt at a community in 1833; after his death in 1837 Fourierism became a political fashion for a few years. Fourierist study groups in Russia included Dostoevsky and Alexander Herzen among their members. A number of Fourier communities were set up in America, almost all under-capitalized and incapable of survival for any length of time—the only part-successful one, Brook Farm, was ruined by a fire in 1846.

Fourier's emphasis was on human fulfilment. He saw that capitalism and its commerce were not only degrading and starving millions of people physically, but also deprived them of necessary emotional satisfactions. He was concerned about ending work as slavery—not by inducement to make work attractive, but by letting it be attractive as he was convinced it was to everyone: civilization had perverted it. There was no reason why men should spend all their lives or even all day at one kind of work. In Harmony (Fourier's name for his Utopia) they would do many different things, in pleasant surroundings and among friends and lovers. Economic security would be provided by the "social minimum", a guaranteed income which made the framework for freedom of choice.

Like most Utopians, Fourier advocated a predominantly agricultural life. He did not deny the place of industry, but it had to be secondary; and factories and workshops must be specially luxurious if people were to want to work in them. However, he argued a great increase in agricultural production and a decrease in manufacture: goods would be so excellently made as to need replacing only occasionally, while the Harmonians would consume correspondingly more of the social wealth in food. The fullest expression of pleasure in work would be the appearance of armies of "a million industrial athletes" for huge projects like bridge-building and land reclamation.

But the real destiny of mankind in this new world was the complete liberation of the instincts. The satisfaction of material needs led to organised release from sexual and emotional bondage. As Engels pointed out, Fourier was "the first to declare that in any given society the degree of women's emancipation is the natural measure of the general emancipation". Fourier attacked Christianity's "enslaved monogamy" furiously, for brutalizing sexual relations and for the hypocrisy which turned love into a self-centred activity. He saw sexual love as a central part of community life.

Love in the Phalanstery is no longer, as it is with us, a recreation which detracts from work; on the contrary it is the soul and the vehicle, the mainspring of all works and of the whole of universal attraction.

The proposals for a free sexual life turn out to be elaborately regulated. There is a hierarchy of officials, and a mighty rule-book. The orgies sound like committee-ridden village fêtes, and there are even Courts allotting playful forfeit-type penalties. Fourier insists that the code is voluntary and to facilitate expression, but it rings uneasily of regimentation; the high priests, matrons, pontiffs etc. are plainly sexual bureaucrats in the making. Nevertheless, the vision remains a remarkable one when it is seen in contrast with all that was taken for granted about sex relationships in the bourgeois society of the period.

In one respect particularly Fourier was startlingly ahead of his time. His Utopia involved the liberation of the sexual "deviant":

In Harmony manias will be particularly bizarre and plentiful among the more complex personality types. In civilization on the contrary the complex personalities are those who try hardest to stifle and hide their manias. They do so out of an excessive respect for civilised standards and public opinion and also out of a desire to avoid criticism, of which they already have quite enough. 

Every person's proclivities would be marked on papers he carried, so as to find appropriate partners without difficulty. The "manias" would contribute to society's well-being just as much as normal sexuality. The only line Fourier drew was at activities in which a person was abused, or made an object against his will. Thus, he anticipated by a century and a half the "gay liberation" movement and its logical conclusion—that society must be reorganized first.

This was indeed the great merit which enables us to see Fourier as a forerunner of Socialism. He perceived that the material basis of life was the essential condition to be provided, and this could be done only by creating a new kind of social order. Capitalism's "disgusting civilization" was inimical to every human need:

The results of this system—poverty, oppression, deceit and carnage—are wholly contrary to man's desires and to the goal of nature.

When security, comfort and pleasure in work have been attained, man could then become truly liberated. Sexual relationships would be freed from coercion and necessity, and the gratification of instinct produce social enthusiasm and harmony.

The translation of this vision to class-consciousness and comprehension of political power as the means was, as Engels wrote, simply not possible in Fourier's time. It remained an idea, hopeful of achievement by luck or infection. There is very much, however, which resembles what Socialists today look forward to in the society of the future. The belief in small communities as islands of liberated living still persists, but—as in Fourier's day—a world away from what his mind saw. His view was of a whole society; no group of men is an island.

Robert Barltrop

Frederick Engels: A Lifetime's Service (1995)

From the August 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

1995 is the Centenary of the death of Karl Marx's friend and collaborator Frederick Engels, and Engels spent his entire adult life working for socialism. A prolific and popular writer as well as indefatigable activist and theorist, his name is justly coupled with that of his life-long friend as the originator of scientific socialism.

Engels became a Socialist (or Communist in the language of the time) earlier than Marx, in October 1842—at the age of 22—after a meeting with Moses Hess. Hess, Engels wrote a year later, was the first of the "Young Hegelians" to embrace socialist ideas, so founding a school of German "philosophical communism". 

The Young Hegelians were a group of intellectuals who gave Hegel's philosophical views a radical twist and used them to criticise the then existing political and social order. Engels associated with them when he was in Berlin doing his military service in 1841-2. 

Hegel (who had died in 1831) was a conservative who supported both Protestant Christianity and the Prussian monarchy, but as he saw the history of humanity as a progression through stages towards the goal of a free and rational society it is easy to see how his philosophical views could be given a radical interpretation, He himself saw "the end of history", or the goal towards which society had been moving throughout history, as being the Protestant monarchy; the Young Hegelians saw this as a democratic and non-religious state; Moses Hess saw it as a society of equality and common ownership, a view to which Engels, as stated, adhered in 1842 and which Marx came over to towards the end of 1843. 

Owenite Socialism 

Soon after becoming a Communist Engels went to live and work in England, in the office of the Manchester branch of the cotton-spinning firm, Ermen & Engels, in which his father was a partner. Here he encountered another group which advocated common ownership, but which had reached this conclusion by a quite different route: the Owenites or, as they called themselves, the Socialists (they in fact invented the word). 

Robert Owen, who could justly be called the father of modem, or industrial era, socialism, had developed a materialist theory of human behaviour and argued that marriage, religion and private prop­erty "together form the great trinity of causes of crime and.immorality among mankind". 

The Owenites were essentially a propaganda group carrying on agitation against this trinity. They repudiated state and church sponsored marriage for life and advocated divorce, birth control and worn en's liberation. They attacked the bible and Christianity as untrue (some from an atheist point of view, but others advocated a new "religion of humanity. They denounced private property and competitive individualism and advocated a "rational system of society" where there would be common ownership and distribution according to needs without money or buying and selling. Insofar as they did more than propagate these ideas they attempted to set up settlements in both Britain and America on communist lines. 

At this time—the early 1840s—the Owenite Socialists were the strongest they were ever to be. Their national association had tens of thousands of members they were able to open meeting places up and down the country, like the Hall of Science in Manchester. They also ran a weekly paper called the 'New Moral World' as well as publishing numerous tracts and pamphlets. Engels attended the Sunday lectures at the Manchester Hall of Science and was clearly impressed both by the hundreds of people attending but also by the quality of the lectures and discussions. There can be no doubt that, after becoming a philosophical communist under the influence of Hess, Engels learned much of the rest of his socialist ideas from the Owenites.

One obvious example is his views on marriage and women's liberation. Not only did he not believe in marriage but he did not practise it either. He and Mary Burns lived together as partners for 18 years until her death in 1863. Afterwards he and Lizzie Burns lived together as "Mr and Mrs Engels" till her death in 1878. In neither case were these relationships sanctified by the church or state (though Engels and Lizzie Burns did go through a formal marriage ceremony on her death-bed as her last wish). Marx's wife was so shocked by this flouting of bourgeois convention that she always refused to meet Mary Burns.

Engels's book on The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, published in 1884, shows an evident sympathy for the plight of women as an oppressed group, as when he describes the ending of descent through the female line and the coming of the father-dominated patriarchal family as "the world-historic defeat of the female sex", a wrong which he argued would be undone through the (re-)establishment of common ownership in place of private property. The Owenites of the 1840s would have appreciated both the book and the sentiment.

Engels contributed articles to the New Moral World from November 1843 to May 1845. He returned to Germany in August 1844 where he remained in his father's house in his home town of Barmen (near Düsseldorf in the Rhineland). Here he joined with Hess in carrying out a campaign in the area of basic socialist propaganda, i.e. straight arguments for a communist society without private property, competition, buying and selling or money. It was here too that he wrote his first book The Condition of the Working Class in England based on information he had gathered while working in Manchester and associating with the Owenites, Chartists and trade unionists of the North of England. 

Agitation for Socialism 

In February 1845 he and Hess spoke at a series of meetings in Elberfeld. At the first of these Engels began by denouncing existing society in these terms: 

In our present-day society, each man works on his own, each strives for his own enrichment and is not in the least concerned with what the rest are doing; rational organisation, or distribution of jobs, is out of the question; on the contrary, each seeks to get the better of the other, seeks to exploit any favourable opportunity for his own private advantage and has neither time nor inclination to think about the fact that, at bottom, his own interests coincide with those of all other people. The individual capitalist is involved in struggle with all the other capitalists; the individual worker with all the other workers; all capitalists fight against the workers just as the mass of workers in their turn have, of necessity, to fight against the mass of capitalists. In this war of all against all, in this general confusion and mutual exploitation, the essence of present-day bourgeois society is to be found. But, gentlemen, such an unregulated economic system must, in the long run, lead to the most disastrous results for society . . . (Marx-Engels Collected Works, Vo1.4, p. 243).

Among these "disastrous results" were commercial crises. These would be impossible in a communist society: 

In communist society, where the interests of individuals are not opposed to one another but, on the contrary, are united, competition is eliminated. As is self-evident, there can no longer be any question of the ruin of particular classes, nor of the very existence of classes such as the rich and the poor nowadays. As soon as private gain, the aim of the individual to enrich himself on his own, disappears from the production and distribution of the goods necessary to life, trade crises will also disappear of themselves. In communist society it will be easy to be informed about both production and consumption. Since we know how much, on the average, a person needs, it is easy to calculate how much is needed by a given number of individuals, and since production is no longer in the hands of private producers but in those of the community and its administrative bodies, it is a trifling matter to regulate production according to needs. Thus we see how the main evils of the present social situation disappear under communist organisation. "(Marx-Engels Collected Works, p.246). 

Because he was arguing directly for Socialism Engels had to face the same objections as Socialists do today, in particular "it' s a nice idea, but it would never work". Engels chose to counter this by saying that "community of goods" and voluntary work had been tried and were working in various communistic colonies set up by the Shakers, the Rappites and others, to show that people could live in communist conditions. For his informa­tion he relied heavily on a series of articles by the Owenite John Finch which had appeared in the New Moral World between January and October 1844. Engels quoted Finch's description of how the Rappite community at Economy functioned: 

They live in families of from twenty to forty individuals, each of which has a separate house and domestic establishment. The family gets its supplies as much as it requires from the common stores. They have an abundance for all and they get as much as they wish without charge. When they need clothing, they apply to the head tailor, the head seamstress or shoemaker and are furnished with it made to their taste. Fresh meat and the other foods are divided among the families according to the number of individuals in each, and they have everything in abundance and plenitude." ("Description of Recently Founded Communist Colonies Still in Exist­ence", Marx-Engels Collected Works, Vol.4, p.220). 

Engels envisaged a communist society (as opposed to a communist colony or commune) functioning on this sort of principle too. But what would be the incentive to work? Who would do the dirty work? Engels had already answered this in the first article he wrote for the New Moral World in November 1843: 

It was Fourier, who, for the first time, established the great axiom of social philosophy, that every individual having an inclination or predilection for some particular kind of work, the sum of all these inclinations of all individuals must be, upon the whole, an adequate power for providing for the wants of all. From this principle, it follows, that if every individual is left to his own inclination, to do and to leave what he pleases, the wants of all will be provided for, without the forcible means used by the present system of society. This assertion looks bold, and yet; after Fourier's mode of establishing it, is quite unassailable, almost self-evident—the egg of Colombus. Fourier proves, that every one is born with an inclination for some kind of work, that absolute idleness is nonsense, a thing which never existed, and cannot exist: that the essence of the human mind is to be active itself and to bring the body into activity; and that, therefore, there is no necessity for making people active by force, as in the now existing state of society, but only to give their natural activity the right direction. He goes on proving the identity of labour and enjoyment, and shows the irrationality of the present social system, which separates them, making labour a toil, and placing enjoyment above the reach of the majority of the labourers; he shows further, how, under rational arrangements, labour may be made, what it is intended to be, an enjoyment, leaving every one to follow his own inclinations." ('Progress of Social Reform on the Continent', Marx-Engels Collected Works, Vol. 3, pp394-5). 

Ahead of their time 

Engels later revised his rather optimistic view of these communist-type settlements within capitalism. In 1848 in the Communist Manifesto, which he and Marx drafted, the section on "Critical-Utopian Socialism and Communism" refers to "small experiments, necessarily doomed to failure", explaining this failure as being due to the fact that conditions weren't yet ripe for the establishment of socialism: industry wasn't developed enough nor was the working class. 

This left the ideas the early Socialists expressed—ideas of common ownership, voluntary work, distribution according to need and no money and no buying and selling—hanging in the air, as it were, with no material or class basis. As a result they appeared as abstract propositions unrelated to practical reality, or "utopian" in that sense. The ideas themselves, however, remained perfectly valid as a description of the content of socialism, of the features of the society workers would have to establish to free themselves from the exploitation they suffered under capitalism. 

Engels's criticism of the Utopian Socialists was not of their ideas for a new society but of the fact that these were not connected to the working class movement as a means of realising them, and in fact could not have been at the time they were first put forward in the 1820s and 1830s. As he and Marx went on to say in the same section of the Communist Manifesto: 

But these Socialist and Communist publications contain also a critical element. They attack every principle of existing society. Hence they are full of the most valuable materials for the enlightenment of the working class. The practical measures proposed in them—such as the abolition of the distinction between town and country, of the family, of the carrying on of industries for the account of private individuals, of the wage system, the proclamation of social harmony, the conversion of the functions of the State into a mere superintendence of production, all these proposals point solely to the disappearance of class antagonisms.

Although Engels was never again to enter into such detail as to what a socialist society might be like as he did in 1843-5, he never departed from this view that the classless society the working class should strive for should be a society of common ownership, democratic control, production and distribution for needs, without buying and selling, money, wages or the coercive state.

Adam Buick

Engels - what to read . . .

The Condition of the Working Class in England

Classic description from a Socialist point of view of the conditions industrial capitalism imposed on the newly-formed working class in England in the 1840s. Written in 1845 when Engels was still only 24, it was based on his first-hand experience of living and working in Manchester at the branch of his father's cotton business from 1842 to 1844.

Socialism, Utopian and Scientific

The third part of a longer work Anti-Duhring published as a separate pamphlet in 1880. The most widely-distributed of all Engels's writings and still the best introduction in the words of one of them to the social and political ideas of Marx and Engels.

Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State

Another Socialist classic, published in 1884, in which Engels traces the origin both of the state as a separate coercive institution standing over the rest of society and of the patriarchal family and the subjection of women to the coming of private ownership of land and other resources and the dissolution of the communistic  conditions in which humans originally lived. The re-establishment of common ownership, Engels argues, will lead to the disappearance of the state and to the restoration of equality between men and women.

The Housing Question

Series of articles Engels wrote in 1872-3, published as a separate pamphlet in 1887, analysing typical attempts to deal with a social problem by means of reform measures within capitalism. Engels shows how such measures can never solve the problem; at best they can only relieve it temporarily, as any measure which permanently reduces the cost of living of the working class will exert a downward pressure on wage levels, so taking away with the one hand what the other had given.

Articles from the Labour Standard

Series of articles in English for a London trade-union paper in 1881, aimed at persuading English trade-unionists that pure and simple trade-unionism was not enough and that workers should also organise politically with the aim if abolishing the whole system of having to work for an employer for a wage. Still sound advice today.