Socialism, Utopian and Scientific
Glossary
A
- Agnosticism as "Shamefaced" Materialism
- Engels' polemical redescription, in the 1892 Introduction written for English readers, of Victorian agnosticism — the fashionable middle-class alternative to both dogmatic religion and "inadmissible" materialism. He argues the agnostic's actual working picture of nature "is materialistic throughout," governed entirely by law with no room for divine intervention, and that agnosticism differs from materialism only by a formal reservation refusing to rule out an unknowable Supreme Being "beyond the known universe." His verdict: "as far as he is a scientific man, as far as he knows anything, he is a materialist; outside his science... he translates his ignorance into Greek and calls it agnosticism" — using the Lancashire word "shamefaced" to suggest materialism practiced under a socially respectable disguise.
- Related: Historical Materialism, French Materialism and Eighteenth-Century Philosophy
- Anarchy of Production
- Chapter 4's term for the fact that under commodity production "no one knows how much of his particular article is coming on the market, nor how much of it will be wanted" — production has no overall plan, only the "compulsory laws of competition" that individual producers discover by trial and failure. Engels stresses that this anarchy coexists with, and is intensified by, the opposite tendency inside each factory: "the increasing organization of production, upon a social basis, in every individual productive establishment." The anarchy of production is, for Engels, the direct cause of periodic commercial crises and of the "industrial reserve army" of unemployed workers that competition requires.
- Related: Crises (Commercial and Industrial Crises), Industrial Reserve Army, Capitalist Mode of Production, Fourier
C
- Capitalist Mode of Production
- Engels' term, following Marx, for the historically specific system in which "the capitalist, the owner of the means of production, employs, for wages, laborers, people deprived of all means of production except their own labor-power, and pockets the excess of the selling price of the products over his outlay," as the 1892 Introduction's glossary of terms puts it. Chapter 4 traces its rise out of the "petty industry" of the Middle Ages — the small peasant and the guild artisan, each owning and working his own tools — through the concentration of scattered tools into factories, which turned individual means of production into genuinely "social means of production" while appropriation of the product stayed private. That mismatch between socialized production and individual, capitalist appropriation is, in Engels' own words, the "fundamental contradiction, whence arise all the contradictions in which our present day society moves."
- Related: Commodity Production, Anarchy of Production, Class Struggle, Surplus Value
- Class Struggle
- The finding that reorganizes Engels' account of history once the materialist method is applied to it: "all past history, with the exception of its primitive stages, was the history of class struggles," and these "warring classes of society are always the products of the modes of production and of exchange." Chapter 3 credits the visibility of this fact to real events — the 1831 Lyons rising and the Chartist movement of 1838–42 — which made the old idealist history's silence about "economic interests" untenable. Chapter 4 then applies the concept concretely to Engels' own moment as "the antagonism of proletariat and bourgeoisie," rooted specifically in the contradiction between socialized production and individual, capitalist appropriation, rather than the broader narrative sweep the term carries in the Communist Manifesto.
- Related: Historical Materialism, Capitalist Mode of Production, The State "Dies Out"
- Commodity Production
- Defined precisely by Engels in the 1892 Introduction, to match the terminology of the English Capital: "that economic phase where articles are produced not only for the use of the producers, but also for purposes of exchange; that is, as commodities, not as use-values." He dates it from "the first beginnings of production for exchange down to our present time," reaching "its full development under capitalist production only." Chapter 4 divides its history into three stages of industrial organization — handicraft, manufacture, and modern machine industry — and argues that capitalism is commodity production's own most developed and most contradictory form, since it socializes the labor of production while keeping the sale of the product an individual, market-mediated act.
- Related: Capitalist Mode of Production, Anarchy of Production, Historical Materialism
- Cooperative Production and the Socialization of the Means of Production
- The positive program Engels sketches for the aftermath of proletarian revolution: once "the proletariat seizes political power" and turns the "socialized means of production, slipping from the hands of the bourgeoisie, into public property," commodity production and "the mastery of the product over the producer" end, and "socialized production upon a predetermined plan becomes henceforth possible." Engels treats the joint-stock companies, trusts, and state ownership that capitalism itself increasingly relies on as evidence that production is already outgrowing individual capitalist control, though he is careful to insist state ownership alone — "even of the Bismarckian sort" — is not yet socialism. Owen's cooperative societies and labor-exchange bazaars in Chapter 2 are Engels' one real-world precedent for workers organizing production and exchange directly, though he calls Owen's labor-note bazaars "institutions necessarily doomed to failure."
- Related: The State "Dies Out", Robert Owen, Capitalist Mode of Production, Joint-Stock Companies and Trusts
- Crises (Commercial and Industrial Crises)
- The periodic breakdowns Engels treats as the clearest proof of capitalism's "anarchy of production," recurring "about once every ten years" since the first general crisis of 1825: "commerce is at a stand-still, the markets are glutted, products accumulate... hard cash disappears, credit vanishes, factories are closed, the mass of the workers are in want of the means of subsistence, because they have produced too much of the means of subsistence." He borrows Fourier's phrase for it — "crise plethorique," a crisis from plethora — and treats each crisis as forcing further concentration of capital into joint-stock companies and trusts, itself a step, though not a solution, toward socialized production.
- Related: Anarchy of Production, Fourier, Joint-Stock Companies and Trusts, Industrial Reserve Army
D
- Dialectics
- The mode of thought Engels contrasts with "metaphysical" thinking, which treats things "as objects of investigation fixed, rigid, given once for all" and reasons in "absolutely irreconcilable antitheses" — a thing either is or is not. Dialectics instead "comprehends things and their representations, ideas, in their essential connection, concatenation, motion, origin, and ending," so that, for instance, "every organized being is every moment the same and not the same," constantly exchanging matter with its surroundings while remaining itself. Engels finds dialectics first in Heraclitus, developed most fully (though upside-down, as pure "Idea") by Hegel, and confirmed by Darwin's proof that species themselves evolve rather than staying fixed — later Soviet orthodoxy would codify Engels' scattered examples here into a rigid "laws of dialectics" catechism that this chapter itself never states as such.
- Related: Hegel and Hegelian Dialectics, Historical Materialism, Scientific Socialism, Fourier
F
- Fourier
- The Utopian Engels praises as "one of the greatest satirists of all time," whose criticism of bourgeois civilization uses "the dialectic method in the same masterly way as his contemporary Hegel." Fourier divides history into savagery, barbarism, the patriarchate, and "civilization" (his term for bourgeois society), and shows how civilization "moves in a vicious circle," constantly producing the opposite of what it promises — so that "under civilization poverty is born of superabundance itself." Engels also singles out his claim that "the degree of woman's emancipation is the natural measure of the general emancipation," and later reuses Fourier's own phrase "vicious circle" to describe the crisis-cycles of capitalist overproduction in Chapter 4.
- Related: Utopian Socialism, Saint-Simon, Dialectics, Crises (Commercial and Industrial Crises)
- French Materialism and Eighteenth-Century Philosophy
- The intellectual soil Engels says modern socialism first had to "connect itself with," even though its real roots "lay in material economic facts." Chapter 2 opens with the Enlightenment philosophers who prepared the French Revolution, "extreme revolutionists" who subjected "religion, natural science, society, political institutions, everything... to the most unsparing criticism" in the name of Reason — a movement Engels traces, via the Marx essay he quotes in Chapter 1, back to English materialists like Bacon, Hobbes, and Locke, who "are the fathers of that brilliant school of French materialists" behind the Encyclopédie. His verdict on the outcome is deflationary: "this kingdom of reason was nothing more than the idealized kingdom of the bourgeoisie," its "eternal Right" realized as ordinary bourgeois law.
- Related: Utopian Socialism, Agnosticism as "Shamefaced" Materialism, Historical Materialism
H
- Hegel and Hegelian Dialectics
- Engels credits Hegel with the "epoch-making merit" of representing "the whole world, natural, historical, intellectual" as "a process," in constant "motion, change, transformation, development," and with tracing "the internal connection" running through it. But he calls the resulting system "a colossal miscarriage" because Hegel was an idealist, treating actual things as merely "the realized pictures of the 'Idea,' existing somewhere from eternity" — and because a supposedly final, all-embracing system of absolute truth flatly contradicts dialectics' own premise that history has no final term. Engels' own project, "materialist dialectics," claims to correct this by keeping the dialectical view of history as process while dropping the idealist claim that ideas, rather than economic conditions, drive it.
- Related: Dialectics, Historical Materialism, Scientific Socialism
- Historical Materialism
- Engels' own name — chosen because "materialism grates upon the ears" of British readers and "agnosticism" would misdescribe his actual position — for "that view of the course of history which seeks the ultimate cause and the great moving power of all important historic events in the economic development of society, in the changes in the modes of production and exchange, in the consequent division of society into distinct classes, and in the struggles of these classes against one another." Chapter 4 works the theory out at length: "the production of the means to support human life... is the basis of all social structure," so that legal, political, and religious ideas rest on an economic foundation rather than the reverse. Later Marxist-Leninist textbooks paired this with "dialectical materialism" as a fixed philosophical system to be memorized — a use considerably more rigid than Engels' own presentation of it as a method for investigating specific, changing economic conditions.
- Related: Scientific Socialism, Class Struggle, Capitalist Mode of Production, Dialectics
I
- Industrial Reserve Army
- Engels' own coinage, first used "as I called it in 1845" in The Condition of the Working-Class in England, for the pool of unemployed workers that improving machinery constantly throws off. He describes it as "available at the times when industry is working at high pressure, to be cast out upon the street when the inevitable crash comes," functioning as "a regulator for the keeping of wages down to the low level that suits the interests of capital." Quoting Marx's Capital, he presents it as proof that "accumulation of wealth at one pole is... at the same time, accumulation of misery... at the opposite pole" — the mechanism, alongside crises, by which the anarchy of production bears most directly on workers' lives.
- Related: Anarchy of Production, Crises (Commercial and Industrial Crises), Capitalist Mode of Production, Surplus Value
J
- Joint-Stock Companies and Trusts
- The forms of concentrated ownership Engels reads as capitalism's own unconscious steps toward socialized production. Booms and crises alike drive "that form of the socialization of great masses of means of production, which we meet with in the different kinds of joint-stock companies," and at a further stage producers in an industry "unite in a 'Trust'... to regulate production," fixing output and prices — Engels cites the 1890 fusion of 48 English alkali works into a single company as a concrete case. He is careful to note that trusts and even state ownership do not by themselves abolish "the capitalistic nature of the productive forces": the modern state, whoever runs it, remains "essentially a capitalist machine" until the working class itself takes possession of production.
- Related: Cooperative Production and the Socialization of the Means of Production, Crises (Commercial and Industrial Crises), The State "Dies Out", Capitalist Mode of Production
R
- Robert Owen
- A wealthy Manchester-trained manufacturer who ran the New Lanark cotton mill from 1800–1829 as a model community with a ten-and-a-half-hour day, no premature child labor, and full wages during a four-month cotton crisis — proof, to Engels, that humane conditions and profit were compatible. Owen's turn toward Communism was "the turning-point in his life": once he attacked "private property, religion, the present form of marriage," Engels writes, respectable society answered with "outlawry, excommunication... and the loss of his whole social position," and Owen spent his fortune on failed American colonies before returning to organize British trade unions and cooperative societies. Engels treats his socialism as "purely business," grounded in the plain arithmetic question of where the wealth New Lanark's workers produced over and above their wages had actually gone.
- Related: Utopian Socialism, Saint-Simon, Fourier, Cooperative Production and the Socialization of the Means of Production
S
- Saint-Simon
- The first of the three Utopians Engels treats seriously, a "son of the great French Revolution" who recast its central conflict not as nobles versus bourgeoisie but as "idlers" versus "workers" — a category broad enough to include "the working bourgeois, manufacturers, merchants, bankers" alongside wage-workers. Engels credits him with declaring as early as 1816 that "politics is the science of production," which Engels reads as containing in embryo "the idea of the future conversion of political rule over men into an administration of things" — the phrase later associated with the withering-away of the state. His attention above all to "the class that is the most numerous and the most poor" is, for Engels, what makes him more than a mouthpiece for bourgeois reform.
- Related: Utopian Socialism, Fourier, Robert Owen, The State "Dies Out"
- Scientific Socialism
- Engels' name, used in the pamphlet's title and its closing line, for the approach he and Marx developed once socialism stopped being "an accidental discovery of this or that ingenious brain" and became "the necessary outcome of the struggle between two historically developed classes." He credits it to "these two great discoveries, the materialistic conception of history and the revelation of the secret of capitalistic production through surplus-value," writing that "with these discoveries Socialism became a science." Later Soviet-era usage hardened "scientific socialism" into an official state doctrine and closed system of dogma — the opposite of Engels' own claim that dialectics "by its very nature, cannot find its intellectual final term in the discovery of any so-called absolute truth."
- Related: Utopian Socialism, The Two Great Discoveries, Historical Materialism, Surplus Value
- Surplus Value
- The second of the "two great discoveries" Engels attributes to Marx, introduced in Chapter 3 as the demonstration "that the appropriation of unpaid labor is the basis of the capitalist mode of production," and that "even if the capitalist buys the labor-power of his laborer at its full value as a commodity on the market, he yet extracts more value from it than he paid for." This compressed sketch is deliberately much shorter than the full treatment in Marx's Capital; Engels' point here is only to show that capitalist profit has a specific, discoverable mechanism rather than being either a mystery or a simple swindle. Chapter 4 relies on this discovery without re-deriving it, treating unpaid surplus labor as the source of the "accumulation of capital in the hands of the possessing classes."
- Related: Scientific Socialism, The Two Great Discoveries, Historical Materialism, Capitalist Mode of Production
T
- The State "Dies Out"
- Engels' precise, and famously mangled, formulation for what happens to political authority after the proletariat takes control of the means of production: "the government of persons is replaced by the administration of things, and by the conduct of processes of production. The State is not 'abolished.' It dies out." His argument is that the state exists specifically as a "special repressive force" for keeping an exploited class down; once class antagonism itself disappears there is "nothing more... to be repressed," so the state's function lapses rather than being smashed by decree, which is why Engels explicitly criticizes both the phrase "a free State" and "the demands of the so-called anarchists for the abolition of the State out of hand." Twentieth-century Marxist-Leninist states that indefinitely retained and strengthened a "dictatorship of the proletariat" apparatus departed sharply from this specific prediction of a state that lapses because its repressive function has become unnecessary.
- Related: Capitalist Mode of Production, Class Struggle, Historical Materialism, Saint-Simon
- The Two Great Discoveries
- Engels' explicit phrase for the pair of findings that, in his account, converted socialism from a moral appeal into an analysis: "the materialistic conception of history and the revelation of the secret of capitalistic production through surplus-value. These two great discoveries... we owe to Marx." He states flatly that "with these discoveries Socialism became a science," and that the remaining task was merely "to work out all its details and relations" — the claim that gives the whole pamphlet its title's second half.
- Related: Historical Materialism, Surplus Value, Scientific Socialism, Dialectics
U
- Utopian Socialism
- As Engels frames it in Chapter 2, the theories of Saint-Simon, Fourier, and Owen sought "the kingdom of reason and eternal justice" independent of any particular class or historical moment — a perfect social order that needed only "the individual man of genius" to discover it, and could in principle "have been born 500 years earlier." Because it treats socialism as a truth to be invented rather than a process rooted in existing economic conditions, Engels calls its systems "foredoomed as Utopian," destined to shade into "pure phantasies" the more completely they were worked out. He insists this was no failure of intellect — "we delight in the stupendously grand thoughts" in them — but a limit imposed by the immaturity of the class struggle they arose too early to theorize.
- Related: Scientific Socialism, Saint-Simon, Fourier, Robert Owen