SOCIALISM
UTOPIAN AND SCIENTIFIC
FREDERICK ENGELS
Edited by EDWARD AVELING D.SE
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SOCIALISM
41014
UTOPIAN AND SCIENTIFIC
BY
FREDERICK ENGELS
TRANSLATED BY EDWARD AVELING
D.Sc., Fellow of University College, London
WITH A SPECIAL INTRODUCTION BY THE AUTHOR
SO
ARDVA QVÆ PVLCRA
MUCHONV
LONDON:
SWAN SONNENSCHEIN & CO.
NEW YORK: CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
1892

НХ
2100
.E5613
1892

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VIVOVOM

SOCIALISM
UTOPIAN AND SCIENTIFIC


INTRODUCTION.
THE present little book is, originally, a part of a
larger whole. About 1875, Dr. E. Dühring, privat-
docent at Berlin University, suddenly and rather
clamorously announced his conversion to Socialism,
and presented the German public not only with an
elaborate Socialist theory, but also with a complete
practical plan for the reorganisation of society. As a
matter of course, he fell foul of his predecessors ;
above all, he honoured Marx by pouring out upon him
the full vials of his wrath.
This took place about the time when the two
sections of the Socialist party in Germany-Eisen-
achers and Lassallians—had just effected their fusion,
and thus obtained not only an immense increase of
strength, but, what was more, the faculty of employ-
ing the whole of this strength against the common
enemy. The Socialist party in Germany was fast
becoming a power. But to make it a power, the first
condition was that the newly-conquered unity should
not be imperilled. And Dr. Dühring openly pro-
ceeded to form around himself a sect, the nucleus of
a future separate party. It thus became necessary to
take
up the gauntlet thrown down to us, and to fight
out the struggle whether we liked it or not.
1
V
41014

vi
Introduction.

This, however, though it might not be an ovei
difficult, was evidently a long-winded, business. As i
well known, we Germans are of a terribly ponderou
Gründlichkeit, radical profundity or profound radi-
cality, whatever you may like to call it. Whenever
anyone of us expounds what he considers a new
doctrine, he has first to elaborate it into an all-com-
prising system. He has to prove that both the first
principles of logic and the fundamental laws of the
universe had existed from all eternity for no other
purpose than to ultimately lead to this newly-disy,
covered, crowning theory. And Dr. Dühring, in this
respect, was quite up to the national mark. Nothing
less than a complete “System of Philosophy,” mental,
moral, natural, and historical; a complete “System of
Political Economy and Socialism ;” and, finally, a
“Critical History of Political Economy”—three big
volumes in octavo, heavy extrinsically and intrinsi-
cally, three army - corps of arguments mobilised
against all previous philosophers and economists in
general, and against Marx in particular-in fact, an
attempt at a complete "revolution in science "—these
were what I should have to tackle. I had to treat of
all and every possible subject, from the concepts of
time and space to Bimetallism ; from the eternity of
matter and motion to the perishable nature of moral
ideas ; from Darwin's natural selection to the educa-
tion of youth in a future society. Anyhow, the
systematic comprehensiveness of my opponent gave
me the opportunity of developing, in opposition to
him, and in a more connected form than had pre-

Introduction.
vii
viously been done, the views held by Marx and myself
on this great variety of subjects. And that was the
principal reason which made me undertake this other-
wise ungrateful task.
My reply was first published in a series of articles
in the Leipzig “Vorwärts,” the chief organ of the
Socialist party, and later on as a book: “Herrn
Eugen Dühring's Umwälzung der Wissenschaft” (Mr.
E. Dühring's “Revolution in Science "), a second
edition of which appeared in Zürich, 1886.
At the request of my friend, Paul Lafargue, now
representative of Lille in the French Chamber of
Deputies, I arranged three chapters of this book as a
pamphlet, which he translated and published in 1880,
under the title : “ Socialisme utopique et Socialisme
scientifique.” From this French text a Polish and a
Spanish edition were prepared. In 1883, our German
friends brought out the pamphlet in the original
language. Italian, Russian, Danish, Dutch, and
Roumanian translations, based upon the German
text, have since been published. Thus, with the
present English edition, this little book circulates in
ten languages. I am not aware that any other
Socialist work, not even our “ Communist Manifesto.”
of 1848 or Marx's “ Capital,” has been so often
translated. In Germany it has had four editions of
about 20,000 copies in all.
The Appendix, “the Mark," was written with the
intention of spreading among the German Socialist
party some elementary knowledge of the history and
development of landed property in Germany. This
(6

viii
Introduction.
seemed all the more necessary at a time when the
assimilation by that party of the working people of
the towns was in a fair way of completion, and when
the agricultural labourers and peasants had to be
taken in hand. This appendix has been included in
the translation, as the original forms of tenure of land
common to all Teutonic tribes, and the history of
their decay, are even less known in England than in
Germany. I have left the text as it stands in the
original, without alluding to the hypothesis recently
started by Maxim Kovalevsky, according to which
the partition of the arable and meadow lands among
the members of the Mark was preceded by their
being cultivated for joint-account by a large patri-
archal family community embracing several genera-
tions (as exemplified by the still existing South
Slavonian Zadruga), and that the partition, later on,
took place when the community had increased, so as
to become too unwieldy for joint-account manage-
ment. Kovalevsky is probably quite right, but the
matter is still sub judice.
The economic terms used in this work, as far as
they are new, agree with those used in the English
edition of Marx's “Capital.” We call “production of
commodities” 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.
This phase extends from the first
beginnings of production for exchange down to our
present time; it attains its full development under
- capitalist production only, that is, under conditions


Introduction.
ix
where the capitalist, the owner of the means of pro-
duction, employs, for wages, labourers, people deprived
of all means of production except their own labour-
power, and pockets the excess of the selling price of
he products over his outlay We divide the history
f industrial production since the Middle Ages into
free periods: (1) handicraft, small master craftsmen
with a few journeymen and apprentices, where each
labourer produces the complete article ; (2) manufac-
ture, where greater numbers of workmen, grouped in
one large establishment, produce the complete article
on the principle of division of labour, each workman
performing only one partial operation, so that the
product is complete only after having passed succes-
sively through the hands of all ; (3) modern industry,
where the product is produced by machinery driven
by power, and where the work of the labourer is
limited to superintending and correcting the per-
formances of the mechanical agent.
I am perfectly aware that the contents of this work
will meet with objection from a considerable portion
of the British public. But if we Continentals had
taken the slightest notice of the prejudices of British
respectability," we should be even worse off than we
This book defends what we call “historical
naterialism,” and the word materialism grates upon
he ears of the immense majority of British readers.
* Agnosticism ” might be tolerated, but materialism is
itterly inadmissible.
And yet the original home of all modern materialism,
rom the seventeenth century onwards, is England.
are.
>

X
Introduction.
“Materialism is the natural-born son of Great
Britain. Already the British
British schoolman, Duns
Scotus, asked, 'whether it was impossible for matter
to think?
“In order to effect this miracle, he took refuge iv
God's omnipotence, i.e., he made theology preac
materialism. Moreover, he was a nominalist. Nom
nalism, the first form of materialism, is chiefly founu
among the English schoolmen.
“The real progenitor of English materialism is
Bacon. To him natural philosophy is the only true
philosophy, and physics based upon the experience of
the senses is the chiefest part of natural philosophy.
Anaxagoras and his homoiomeriæ, Democritus and
his atoms, he often quotes as his authorities.
According to him the senses are infallible and the
source of all knowledge. All science is based on
experience, and consists in subjecting the data
furnished by the senses to a rational method of
investigation. Induction, analysis, comparison, ob-
servation, experiment, are the principal forms of such
a rational method. Among the qualities inherent
in matter, motion is the first and foremost, not only
in the form of mechanical and mathematical motion,
but chiefly in the form of an impulse, a vital spirit,
a tension — or a 'qual,' to use a term of Jacob
Böhme's 1-of matter.
-
1 “Qual” is a philosophical play upon words. Qual literally
means torture, a pain which drives to action of some kind ; at
the same time the mystic Böhme puts into the German word
something of the meaning of the Latin qualitas; his “ qual”

Introduction.
xi
“In Bacon, its first creator, materialism still occludes
ithin itself the germs of a many-sided development.
On the one hand, matter, surrounded by a sensuous,
poetic glamour, seems to attract man's whole entity
by winning smiles. On the other, the aphoristically
formulated doctrine pullulates with inconsisten-
cies imported from theology.
“In its further evolution, materialism becomes one-
sided. Hobbes is the man who systematises Baconian
materialism. Knowledge based upon the senses loses
its poetic blossom, it passes into the abstract expe-
rience of the mathematician; geometry is proclaimed
as the queen of sciences. Materialism takes to
misanthropy. If it is to overcome its opponent,
misanthropic, fleshless spiritualism, and that on the
latter's own ground, materialism has to chastise its
own flesh and turn ascetic. Thus, from a sensual, it
basses into an intellectual, entity; but thus, too, it
volves all the consistency, regardless of consequences,
haracteristic of the intellect.
Hobbes, as Bacon's continuator, argues thus : if
all human knowledge is furnished by the senses, then
our concepts and ideas are but the phantoms, divested
of their sensual forms, of the real world. Philosophy
can but give names to these phantoms. One name
may be applied to more than one of them. There
may even be names of names. It would imply a
contradiction if, on the one hand, we maintained that
I
v
f
66
was the activating principle arising from, and promoting in its
turn, the spontaneous development of the thing, relation, or person
subject to it, in contradistinction to a pain inflicted from without.

xii
Introduction.
all ideas had their origin in the world of sensation
and, on the other, that a word was more than a worc.,
that besides the beings known to us by our senses,
beings which are one and all individuals, there existed
also beings of a general, not individual, nature. An
unbodily substance is the same absurdity as an
unbodily body. Body, being, substance, are but
different terms for the same reality. It is impossible
to separate thought from matter that thinks. This
matter is the substratum of all changes going on in
the world. The word infinite is meaningless, unless
it states that our mind is capable of performing an
endless process of addition. Only material things
being perceptible to us, we cannot know anything
about the existence of God. My own existence alone
is certain. Every human passion is a mechanical
movement which has a beginning and an end. The
objects of impulse are what we call good. Man is
subject to the same laws as nature.
Power and
freedom are identical.
“Hobbes had systematised Bacon, without, how
ever, furnishing a proof for Bacon's fundamenta
principle, the origin of all human knowledge from
the world of sensation. It was Locke who, in his
Essay on the Human Understanding, supplied this
proof.
“ Hobbes had shattered the theistic prejudices of
Baconian materialism; Collins, Dodwall, Coward,
Hartley, Priestley similarly shattered the last
theological bars that still hemmed-in Locke's sen-
sationalism. At all events, for practical material-

Introduction.
xiii
11
ts, Theism is but an easy-going way of getting rid
religion."
Thus Karl Marx wrote about the British origin of
..odern materialism. If Englishmen nowadays do
not exactly relish the compliment he paid their
ancestors, more's the pity. It is none the less un-
deniable that Bacon, Hobbes, and Locke are the
fathers of that brilliant school of French materialists
which made the eighteenth century, in spite of all
bat les on land and sea won over Frenchmen by
Germans and Englishmen, a pre-eminently French
century, even before that crowning French Revolu-
tion, the results of which we outsiders, in England as
well as in Germany, are still trying to acclimatise.
There is no denying it. About the middle of this
century, what struck every cultivated foreigner who
set up his residence in England, was, what he was
then bound to consider the religious bigotry and
stupidity of the English respectable middle-class.
We, at that time, were all materialists, or, at least,
very advanced freethinkers, and to us it appeared
inconceivable that almost all educated people in Eng-
lani should believe in all sorts of impossible miracles,
and that even geologists like Buckland and Mantell
should contort the facts of their science so as not to
clash too much with the myths of the book of Genesis;
while, in order to find people who dared to use their
own intellectual faculties with regard to religious
matters, you had to go amongst the uneducated, the
Marx and Engels, “Die Heilige Familie,” Frankfurt a. M.
1845, pp. 201-204.

xiv
Introduction.
great unwashed,” as they were then called, the wor
ing people, especially the Owenite Socialists.
But England has been “civilised” since then. T
exhibition of 1851 sounded the knell of Engli...
insular exclusiveness. England became gradually
internationalised, in diet, in manners, in ideas; so
much so that I begin to wish that some English
manners and customs had made as much headway on
the Continent as other continental habits have made
here. Anyhow, the introduction and spread of salád-
oil (before 1851 known only to the aristocracy) has
been accompanied by a fatal spread of continental
scepticism in matters religious, and it has come to
this, that agnosticism, though not yet considered
" the thing ” quite as much as the Church of England,
is yet very nearly on a par, as far as respectability
goes, with Baptism, and decidedly ranks above the
Salvation Army. And I cannot help believing that
under these circumstances it will be consoling to
many who sincerely regret and condemn this progress
of infidelity, to learn that these "new-fangled notions"
are not of foreign origin, are not "made in Germany
like so many other articles of daily use, but are un-
doubtedly Old English, and that their British origina-
tors two hundred years ago went a good deal further
than their descendants now dare to venture.
What, indeed, is agnosticism, but, to use an ex-
pressive Lancashire term,"shamefaced” materialism?
The agnostic's conception of Nature is materialistic
throughout. The entire natural world is governed
by law, and absolutely excludes the intervention of

Introduction.
XV
action from without. But, he adds, we have no
means either of ascertaining or of disproving the ex-
istence of some Supreme Being beyond the known
universe. Now, this might hold good at the time
when Laplace, to Napoleon's question, why in the
great astronomer's Mécanique céleste the Creator was
not even mentioned, proudly replied : Je n'avais pas
besoin de cette hypothèse. But nowadays, in our
evolutionary conception of the universe, there is
absolutely no room for either a Creator or a Ruler ;
and to talk of a Supreme Being shut out from the
whole existing world, implies a contradiction in terms,
and, as it seems to me, a gratuitous insult to the feel-
ings of religious people.
Again, our agnostic admits that all our knowledge
is based upon the information imparted to us by our
senses. But, he adds, how do we know that our
senses give us correct representations of the objects
we perceive through them? And he proceeds to
inform us that, whenever he speaks of objects or their
qualities, he does in reality not mean these objects
and qualities, of which he cannot know anything for
certain, but merely the impressions which they have
produced on his senses. Now, this line of reasoning
seems undoubtedly hard to beat by mere argumenta-
tion. But before there was argumentation, there was
action. Im Anfang war die That. And human
action had solved the difficulty long before human
ingenuity invented it. The proof of the pudding is in
the eating. From the moment we turn to our own
use these objects, according to the qualities we per-

xvi
Introduction.
ness
a
ceive in them, we put to an infallible test the correct-
or otherwise of our sense- perceptions. If
these perceptions have been wrong, then our estimate
of the use to which an object can be turned must
also be wrong, and our attempt must fail. But if we
succeed in accomplishing our aim, if we find that the
object does agree with our idea of it, and does answer
the purpose we intended it for, then that is positive
proof that our perceptions of it and of its qualities, so
far, agree with reality outside ourselves. And when-
ever we find ourselves face to face with a failure, then
we generally are not long in making out the cause
that made us fail ; we find that the perception upon
which we acted was either incomplete and superficial,
or combined with the results of other perceptions in a
way not warranted by them—what we call defective
reasoning. So long as we take care to train and to
use our senses properly, and to keep our action within
the limits prescribed by perceptions properly made
and properly used, so long we shall find that the
result of our action proves the conformity of our per-
ceptions with the objective nature of the things
perceived. Not in one single instance, so far, have
we been led to the conclusion that our sense-percep-
tions, scientifically controlled, induce in our minds
ideas respecting the outer world that are, by their
very nature, at variance with reality, or that there is
an inherent incompatibility between the outer world
and our sense-perceptions of it.
But then come the Neo-Kantian agnostics and say :
We may correctly perceive the qualities of a thing,

Introduction.
xvii
but we cannot by any sensible or mental process
grasp the thing in itself. This “thing in itself” is
beyond our ken. To this Hegel, long since, has
replied : If you know all the qualities of a thing,
you know the thing itself; nothing remains but the
fact that the said thing exists without us ; and when
your senses have taught you that fact, you have
grasped the last remnant of the thing in itself, Kant's
celebrated unknowable Ding an sich. To which it
may be added, that in Kant's time our knowledge of
natural objects was indeed so fragmentary that he
might well suspect, behind the little we knew about
each of them, a mysterious “thing in itself.” But one
after another these ungraspable things have been
grasped, analysed, and, what is more, reproduced by
the giant progress of science; and what we can pro-
duce, we certainly cannot consider as unknowable.
To the chemistry of the first half of this century
organic substances were such mysterious objects; now,
we learn to build them up one after another from their
chemical elements without the aid of organic processes.
Modern chemists declare that as soon as the chemical
constitution of no matter what body is known, it can
be built up from its elements. We are still far from
knowing the constitution of the highest organic sub-
stances, the albuminous bodies ; but there is no reason
why we should not, if only after centuries, arrive at that
knowledgeand, armed with it, produce artificialalbumen.
But if we arrive at that, we shall at the same time
have produced organic life, for life, from its lowest to
its highest forms, is but the normal mode of existence
of albuminous bodies,
3

xviii
Introduction.
As soon, however, as our agnostic has made these
formal mental reservations, he talks and acts as the
rank materialist he at bottom is. He may say that,
as far as we know, matter and motion, or as it is now
called, energy, can neither be created nor destroyed,
but that we have no proof of their not having been
created at some time or other. But if you try to use
this admission against him in any particular case, he
will quickly put you out of court. If he admits the
possibility of spiritualism in abstracto, he will have
none of it in concreto. As far as we know and can
know, he will tell you there is no Creator and no
Ruler of the universe; as far as we are concerned,
matter and energy can neither be created nor
annihilated; for us, mind is a mode of energy, a
,
function of the brain ; all we know is that the
material world is governed by immutable laws, and so
forth. Thus, as far as he is a scientific man, as far as
he knows anything, he is a materialist; outside his
science, in spheres about which he knows nothing, he
translates his ignorance into Greek and calls it
agnosticism.
At all events, one thing seems clear: even if I was
an agnostic, it is evident that I could not describe
the conception of history sketched out in this little
book, as “historical agnosticism.” Religious people
.
would laugh at me, agnostics would indignantly ask,
was I going to make fun of them ? And thus I hope
even British respectability will not be overshocked if
I use, in English as well as in so many other languages,
the term, “historical materialism,” to designate that
9

Introduction.
xix
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 ex-
change, in the consequent division of society into dis-
tinct classes, and in the struggles of these classes
against one another.
This indulgence will perhaps be accorded to me all
the sooner if I show that historical materialism may
be of advantage even to British respectability. I have
mentioned the fact, that about forty or fifty years ago,
any cultivated foreigner settling in England was
struck by what he was then bound to consider the
religious bigotry and stupidity of the English respect-
able middle-class. I am now going to prove that the
respectable English middle-class of that time was not
quite as stupid as it looked to the intelligent foreigner.
Its religious leanings can be explained.
When Europe emerged from the Middle Ages, the
rising middle-class of the towns constituted its revolu-
tionary element. It had conquered a recognised
position within mediæval feudal organisation, but this
position, also, had become too narrow for its expansive
power. The development of the middle-class, the
bourgeoisie, became incompatible with the mainten-
ance of the feudal system; the feudal system, there-
fore, had to fall.
But the great international centre of feudalism was
the Roman Catholic Church. It united the whole of
feudalised Western Europe, in spite of all internal
wars, into one grand political system, opposed as much

XX
Introduction.
to the schismatic Greeks as to the Mohammedan
countries. It surrounded feudal institutions with the
halo of divine consecration. It had organised its own
hierarchy on the feudal model, and, lastly, it was itself
by far the most powerful feudal lord, holding, as it
did, fully one-third of the soil of the Catholic world.
Before profane feudalism could be successfully attacked
in each country and in detail, this, its sacred central
organisation, had to be destroyed.
Moreover, parallel with the rise of the middle-class
went on the great revival of science; astronomy,
mechanics, physics, anatomy, physiology, were again
cultivated. And the bourgeoisie, for the development
of its industrial production, required a science which
ascertained the physical properties of natural objects
and the modes of action of the forces of Nature. Now
up to then science had but been the humble handmaid
of the Church, had not been allowed to overstep the
limits set by faith, and for that reason had been no
science at all. Science rebelled against the Church;
the bourgeoisie could not do without science, and,
therefore, had to join in the rebellion.
The above, though touching but two of the points
where the rising middle-class was bound to come into
collision with the established religion, will be sufficient
to show, first, that the class most directly interested
in the struggle against the pretensions of the Roman
Church was the bourgeoisie; and second, that every
struggle against feudalism, at that time, had to take
on a religious disguise, had to be directed against the
Church in the first instance. But if the universities


Introduction.
xxi
and the traders of the cities started the cry, it was
sure to find, and did find, a strong echo in the masses
of the country people, the peasants, who everywhere
had to struggle for their very existence with their
feudal lords, spiritual and temporal.
The long fight of the bourgeoisie against feudalism
culminated in three great, decisive battles.
The first was what is called the Protestant Reforma-
tion in Germany. The war-cry raised against the
Church by Luther was responded to by two insurrec-
tions of a political nature: first, that of the lower
nobility under Franz von Sickingen (1523), then the
great Peasants' War, 1525. Both were defeated, chiefly
in consequence of the indecision of the parties most
interested, the burghers of the towns-an indecision
into the causes of which we cannot here enter. From
that moment the struggle degenerated into a fight
between the local princes and the central power, and
ended by blotting out Germany, for two hundred
years, from the politically active nations of Europe,
The Lutheran reformation produced a new creed in-
deed, a religion adapted to absolute monarchy. No
sooner were the peasants of North-east Germany
converted to Lutheranism than they were from free-
men reduced to serfs.
But where Luther failed, Calvin won the day.
Calvin's creed was one fit for the boldest of the
bourgeoisie of his time. His predestination doctrine
was the religious expression of the fact that in the
commercial world of competition success or failure does
not depend upon a man's activity or cleverness, but

xxii
Introduction.
upon circumstances uncontrollable by him. It is not
of him that willeth or of him that runneth, but of the
mercy of unknown superior economic powers; and
this was especially true at a period of economic revolu-
tion, when all old commercial routes and centres were
replaced by new ones, when India and America were
opened to the world, and when even the most sacred
economic articles of faith—the value of gold and silver
-began to totter and to break down. Calvin's church
constitution was thoroughly democratic and republican;
and where the kingdom of God was republicanised,
could the kingdoms of this world remain subject to
monarchs, bishops, and lords ? While German Luther-
anism became a willing tool in the hands of princes,
Calvinisın founded a republic in Holland, and active
republican parties in England, and, above all, Scot-
land.
In Calvinism, the second great bourgeois upheaval
found its doctrine ready cut and dried. This up-
heaval took place in England. The middle-class of
the towns brought it on, and the yeomanry of the
country districts fought it out. Curiously enough, in
all the three great bourgeois risings, the peasantry
furnishes the army that has to do the fighting; and
the peasantry is just the class that, the victory once
gained, is most surely ruined by the economic con-
sequences of that victory. A hundred years after
Cromwell, the yeomanry of England had almost
disappeared. Anyhow, had it not been for that
yeomanry and for the plebeian element in the towns,
the bourgeoisie alone would never have fought the

Introduction.
xxiii
matter out to the bitter end, and would never have
brought Charles I. to the scaffold. In order to
secure even those conquests of the bourgeoisie that
were ripe for gathering at the time, the revolution
had to be carried considerably further-exactly as in
1793 in France and 1848 in Germany. This seems,
in fact, to be one of the laws of evolution of bourgeois
society.
Well, upon this excess of revolutionary activity
there necessarily followed the inevitable reaction
which in its turn went beyond the point where it
might have maintained itself. After a series of
oscillations, the new centre of gravity was at last
attained and became a new starting-point. The grand
period of English history, known to respectability
under the name of “the Great Rebellion,” and the
struggles succeeding it, were brought to a close by
the comparatively puny event entitled by Liberal
historians, “the Glorious Revolution.”
The new starting-point was a compromise between
the rising middle-class and the ex-feudal landowners.
The latter, though called, as now, the aristocracy, had
been long since on the way which led them to be-
come what Louis Philippe in France became at a
much later period, “the first bourgeois of the king-
dom.” Fortunately for England, the old feudal
barons had killed one another during the Wars of
the Roses. Their successors, though mostly scions of
the old families, had been so much out of the direct
line of descent that they constituted quite a new
body, with habits and tendencies 'far more bourgeois
2

xxiv
Introduction.
than feudal. They fully understood the value of
money, and at once began to increase their rents by
turning hundreds of small farmers out and replacing
them by sheep. Henry VIII., while squandering the
Church lands, created fresh bourgeois landlords by
wholesale; the innumerable confiscations of estates, re-
granted to absolute or relative upstarts, and continued
during the whole of the seventeenth century, had the
same result. Consequently, ever since Henry VII., the
English "aristocracy,” far from counteracting the
development of industrial production, had, on the
contrary, sought to indirectly profit thereby ; and
there had always been a section of the great land-
owners willing, from economical or political reasons,
to co-operate with the leading men of the financial
and industrial bourgeoisie. The compromise of 1689
was, therefore, easily accomplished. The political
spoils of “pelf and place” were left to the great land-
owning families, provided the economic interests of the
financial, manufacturing, and commercial middle-
class were sufficiently attended to. And these
economic interests were at that time powerful enough
to determine the general policy of the nation. There
might be squabbles about matters of detail, but, on
the whole, the aristocratic oligarchy knew too well
that its own economic prosperity was irretrievably
bound up with that of the industrial and commercial
middle-class.
From that time, the bourgeoisie was a humble, but
still a recognised component of the ruling classes of
England. With the rest of them, it had a common
G
")

Introduction.
XXV
interest in keeping in subjection the great working
mass of the nation. The merchant or manufacturer
himself stood in the position of master, or, as it was
until lately called, of “natural superior” to his clerks,
his workpeople, his domestic servants. His interest
was to get as much and as good work out of them as
he could ; for this end they had to be trained to
proper submission. He was himself religious ; his
religion had supplied the standard under which he
had fought the king and the lords; he was not long
in discovering the opportunities this same religion
offered him for working upon the minds of his
natural inferiors, and making them submissive to the
behests of the masters it had pleased God to place
over them. In short, the English bourgeoisie now
had to take a part in keeping down the “lower
orders,” the great producing mass of the nation, and
one of the means employed for that purpose was the
influence of religion.
There
was
another fact that contributed to
strengthen the religious leanings of the bourgeoisie.
That was the rise of materialism in England. This
new doctrine not only shocked the pious feelings of
the middle-class; it announced itself as a philosophy
only fit for scholars and cultivated men of the world,
in contrast to religion which was good enough for the
uneducated masses, including the bourgeoisie. With
Hobbes it stepped on the stage as a defender of
royal prerogative and omnipotence; it called upon
absolute monarchy to keep down that puer robustus
sed malitiosus, to wit, the people. Similarly, with the

Xxvi
Introduction.
successors of Hobbes, with Bolingbroke, Shaftesbury,
etc., the new deistic form of materialism remained an
aristocratic, esoteric doctrine, and, therefore, hateful
to the middle-class both for its religious heresy and
for its anti-bourgeois political connexions. Accord-
ingly, in opposition to the materialism and deism of
the aristocracy, those Protestant sects which had fur-
nished the flag and the fighting contingent against
the Stuarts, continued to furnish the main strength of
the progressive middle-class, and form even to-day
the backbone of “the Great Liberal Party.”
In the meantime materialism passed from England
to France, where it met and coalesced with another
materialistic school of philosophers, a branch of
Cartesianism. In France, too, it remained at first an
exclusively aristocratic doctrine. But soon its revo-
lutionary character asserted itself. The French
materialists did not limit their criticism to matters of
religious belief; they extended it to whatever scientific
tradition or political institution they met with ; and
to prove the claim of their doctrine to universal appli-
cation, they took the shortest cut, and boldly applied
it to all subjects of knowledge in the giant work
after which they were named—the Encyclopédie.
Thus, in one or the other of its two forms—avowed
materialism or deism-it became the creed of the
whole cultured youth of France; so much so that,
when the great Revolution broke out, the doctrine
hatched by English Royalists gave a theoretical flag
to French Republicans and Terrorists, and furnished
the text for the Declaration of the Rights of Man.

Introduction.
xxvii
The great French Revolution was the third uprising
of the bourgeoisie, but the first that had entirely cast
off the religious cloak, and was fought out on undis-
guised political lines; it was the first, too, that was
really fought out up to the destruction of one of the
combatants, the aristocracy, and the complete triumph
of the other, the bourgeoisie. In England the con-
tinuity of pre-revolutionary and post-revolutionary
institutions, and the compromise between landlords
and capitalists, found its expression in the continuity
of judicial precedents and in the religious preservation
of the feudal forms of the law. In France the Revolu-
tion constituted a complete breach with the traditions
of the past ; it cleared out the very last vestiges of
feudalism, and created in the Code Civil a masterly
adaptation of the old Roman law—that almost perfect
expression of the juridical relations corresponding to
the economic stage called by Marx the production of
commodities—to modern capitalistic conditions; so
masterly that this French revolutionary code still
serves as a model for reforms of the law of property
in all other countries, not excepting England. Let
us, however, not forget that if English law continues
to express. the economic relations of capitalistic
society in that barbarous feudal language which
corresponds to the thing expressed, just as English
spelling corresponds to English pronunciation—Vous
écrivez Londres et vous prononcez Constantinople, said
a Frenchman--that same English law is the only one
which has preserved through ages, and transmitted to
America and the Colonies the best part of that old

xxviii
Introduction.
Germanic personal freedom, local self-government,
and independence from all interference but that of
the law courts, which on the Continent has been lost
during the period of absolute monarchy, and has
nowhere been as yet fully recovered.
To return to our British bourgeois. The French
Revolution gave him a splendid opportunity, with the
help of the Continental monarchies, to destroy French
maritime commerce, to annex French colonies, and to
crush the last French pretensions to maritime rivalry.
That was one reason why he fought it. Another was
that the ways of this revolution went very much
against his grain. Not only its "execrable " terror-
ism, but the very attempt to carry bourgeois rule to
extremes. What should the British bourgeois do
without his aristocracy, that taught him manners,
such as they were, and invented fashions for him-
that furnished officers for the army, which kept order
at home, and the navy, which conquered colonial
possessions and new markets abroad ?
There was
indeed a progressive minority of the bourgeoisie, that
minority whose interests were not so well attended to
under the compromise ; this section, composed chiefly
of the less wealthy middle-class, did sympathise with
the Revolution, but it was powerless in Parliament.
Thus, if materialism became the creed of the French
Revolution, the God-fearing English bourgeois held
all the faster to his religion. Had not the reign of
terror in Paris proved what was the upshot, if the
religious instincts of the masses were lost ? The
more materialism spread from France to neighbour-

Introduction.
xxix
ing countries, and was reinforced by similar doctrinal
currents, notably by German philosophy, the more, in
fact, materialism and freethought generally became,
on the Continent, the necessary qualifications of a
cultivated man, the more stubbornly the English
middle-class stuck to its manifold religious creeds.
These creeds might differ from one another, but they
were, all of them, distinctly religious, Christian creeds.
While the Revolution ensured the political triumph
of the bourgeoisie in France, in England Watt, Ark-
wright, Cartwright, and others, initiated an industrial
revolution, which completely shifted the centre of
gravity of economic power.
. The wealth of the
bourgeoisie increased considerably faster than that of
the landed aristocracy. Within the bourgeoisie itself,
the financial aristocracy, the bankers, etc., were more
and more pushed into the background by the manu-
facturers. The compromise of 1689, even after the
gradual changes it had undergone in favour of the
bourgeoisie, no longer corresponded to the relative
position of the parties to it. The character of these
parties, too, had changed ; the bourgeoisie of 1830
was very different from that of the preceding century.
The political power still left to the aristocracy, and
used by them to resist the pretensions of the new
industrial bourgeoisie, became incompatible with the
new economic interests. A fresh struggle with the
aristocracy was necessary; it could end only in a
victory of the new economic power. First, the
Reform Act was pushed through, in spite of all re-
sistance, under the impulse of the French Revolution

XXX
Introduction.
of 1830. It gave to the bourgeoisie a recognised and
powerful place in Parliament. Then the Repeal of
the. Corn Laws, which settled, once for all, the
supremacy of the bourgeoisie, and especially of its
most active portion, the manufacturers, over the landed
aristocracy. This was the greatest victory of the
bourgeoisie ; it was, however, also the last it gained
in its own exclusive interest. Whatever triumphs it
obtained later on, it had to share with a new social
power, first its ally, but soon its rival.
The industrial revolution had created a class of
large manufacturing capitalists, but also a class—and
a far more numerous one-of manufacturing work-
people. This class gradually increased in numbers,
in proportion as the industrial revolution seized upon
one branch of manufacture after another, and in the
same proportion it increased in power. This power
it proved as early as 1824, by forcing a reluctant
Parliament to repeal the acts forbidding combinations
of workmen. During the Reform agitation, the
working-men constituted the Radical wing of the
Reform party; the Act of 1832 having excluded
them from the suffrage, they formulated their de-
mands in the People's Charter, and constituted them-
selves, in opposition to the great bourgeois Anti-
Corn Law party, into an independent party, the
Chartists, the first working-men's party of modern
times.
Then came the Continental revolutions of February
and March, 1848, in which the working people played
such a prominent part, and, at least in Paris, put for-

* Introduction.
xxxi
ward demands which were certainly inadmissible from
the point of view of capitalist society. And then
came the general reaction. First the defeat of the
Chartists on the roth April, 1848, then the crushing
of the Paris working-men's insurrection in June of the
same year, then the disasters of 1849 in Italy, Hun-
gary, South Germany, and at last the victory of Louis
Bonaparte over Paris, 2nd December, 1851. For a
time, at least, the bugbear of working-class preten-
sions was put down, but at what cost! If the British
bourgeois had been convinced before of the necessity
of maintaining the common people in a religious
mood, how much more must he feel that necessity
after all these experiences ? Regardless of the sneers
of his Continental compeers, he continued to spend
thousands and tens of thousands, year after year, upon
the evangelisation of the lower orders ; not content
with his own native religious machinery, he appealed
to Brother Jonathan, the greatest organiser in exist-
ence of religion as a trade, and imported from
America revivalism, Moody and Sankey, and the
like; and, finally, he accepted the dangerous aid
of the Salvation Army, which revives the propaganda
of early Christianity, appeals to the poor as the elect,
fights capitalism in a religious way, and thus fosters
an element of early Christian class antagonism, which
one day may become troublesome to the well-to-do
people who now find the ready money for it.
It seems a law of historical development that the
bourgeoisie can in no European country get hold of
political power—at least for any length of time-in
--

xxxii
Introduction.
the same exclusive way in which the feudal aristo-
cracy kept hold of it during the Middle Ages. Even
in France, where feudalism was completely extin-
guished, the bourgeoisie, as a whole, has held full
possession of the Government for very short periods
only. During Louis Philippe's reign, 1830-48, a very
.
small portion of the bourgeoisie ruled the kingdom ;
by far the larger part were excluded from the suffrage
by the high qualification. Under the second Re-
public, 1848-51, the whole bourgeoisie ruled, but for
three years only; their incapacity brought on the
second Empire. It is only now, in the third Republic,
,
that the bourgeoisie as a whole have kept possession
of the helm for more than twenty years; and they
are already showing lively signs of decadence. A A
durable reign of the bourgeoisie has been possible
only in countries like America, where feudalism was
unknown, and society at the very beginning started
from a bourgeois basis. And even in France and
America, the successors of the bourgeoisie, the work-
ing people, are already knocking at the door.
In England, the bourgeoisie never held undivided
sway. Even the victory of 1832 left the landed aris-
tocracy in almost exclusive possession of all the
leading Government offices.
The meekness with
which the wealthy middle-class submitted to this,
remained inconceivable to me until the great Liberal
manufacturer, Mr. W. A. Forster, in a public speech
implored the young men of Bradford to learn French,
as a means to get on in the world, and quoted from
his own experience how sheepish he looked when, as

Introduction.
xxxiii
a Cabinet Minister, he had to move in society where
French was, at least, as necessary as English! The
fact was, the English middle-class of that time were,
as a rule, quite uneducated upstarts, and could not
help leaving to the aristocracy those superior Govern-
ment places where other qualifications were required
than mere insular narrowness and insular conceit,
seasoned by business sharpness. Even now the end-
less newspaper debates about middle-class education
show that the English middle-class does not yet con-
1 And even in business matters, the conceit of national
Chauvinism is but a sorry adviser. Up to quite recently, the
average English manufacturer considered it derogatory from an
Englishman to speak any language but his own, and felt rather
proud than otherwise of the fact that “poor devils” of foreigners
settled in England and took off his hands the trouble of dispos-
ing of his products abroad. He never noticed that these foreign-
ers, mostly Germans, thus got command of a very large part
of British foreign trade, imports and exports, and that the direct
foreign trade of Englishmen became limited, almost entirely, to
the colonies, China, the United States, and South America.
Nor did he notice that these Germans traded with other Ger-
mans abroad, who gradually organised a complete network of
commercial colonies all over the world. But when Germany,
about forty years ago, seriously began manufacturing for export,
this network served her admirably in her transformation, in so
short a time, from a corn-exporting into a first-rate manufactur-
ing country. Then, about ten years ago, the British manufac-
turer got frightened, and asked his ambassadors and consuls
how it was that he could no longer keep his customers together.
The unanimous answer was: (1) You don't learn your customer's
language but expect him to speak your own; (2) You don't even
try to suit your customer's wants, habits, and tastes, but expect
him to conform to your English ones.

xxxiv
Introduction.
sider itself good enough for the best education, and
looks to something more modest. Thus, even after
the Repeal of the Corn Laws, it appeared a matter of
course, that the men who had carried the day, the
Cobdens, Brights, Forsters, etc., should remain ex-
cluded from a share in the official government of the
country, until twenty years afterwards, a new Reform
Act opened to them the door of the Cabinet. The
English bourgeoisie are, up to the present day, so
deeply penetrated by a sense of their social inferiority
that they keep up, at their own expense and that of
the nation, an ornamental caste of drones to repre-
sent the nation worthily at all State functions; and
they consider themselves highly honoured whenever
one of themselves is found worthy of admission into
this select and privileged body, manufactured, after
all, by themselves.
The industrial and commercial middle-class had,
therefore, not yet succeeded in driving the landed
aristocracy completely from political power when
another competitor, the working-class, appeared on
the stage. The reaction after the Chartist movement
and the Continental revolutions, as well as the un-
paralleled extension of English trade from 1848-1866,
(ascribed vulgarly to Free Trade alone, but due far more
to the colossal development of railways, ocean steamers,
and means of intercourse generally), had again driven
the working-class into the dependency of the Liberal
party, of which they formed, as in pre-Chartist times,
the Radical wing. Their claims to the franchise,
however, gradually became irresistible; while the

Introduction,
XXXV
а.
Whig leaders of the Liberals "funked," Disraeli
showed his superiority by making the Tories seize
the favourable moment and introduce household
suffrage in the boroughs, along with a redistribution
of seats. Then followed the ballot; then in 1884 the
extension of household suffrage to the counties and
a fresh redistribution of seats, by which electoral
districts were to some extent equalised. All these
measures considerably increased the electoral power
of the working-class, so much so that in at least 150
to 200 constituencies that class now furnishes the
majority of voters. But parliamentary government is a
capital school for teaching respect for tradition; if the
middle-class look with awe and veneration upon what
Lord John Manners playfully called “our old nobility,”
the mass of the working-people then looked up with
respect and deference to what used to be designated
“their betters," the middle-class. Indeed, the
British workman, some fifteen years ago, was the
model workman, whose respectful regard for the
position of his master, and whose self-restraining
modesty in claiming rights for himself, consoled our
German economists of the Katheder-Socialist school
for the incurable communistic and revolutionary
tendencies of their own working-men at home.
But the English middle-class-good men of business
as they are-saw farther than the German professors.
They had shared their power but reluctantly with the
working-class. They had learnt, during the Chartist
years, what that puer robustus sed malitiosus, the
people, is capable of. And since that time, they had
>
as

xxxvi
Introduction.
been compelled to incorporate the better part of the
People's Charter in the Statutes of the United King-
dom. Now, if ever, the people must be kept in order
by moral means, and the first and foremost of all
moral means of action upon the masses is and
remains-religion. Hence the parsons' majorities
on the School Boards, hence the increasing self-
taxation of the bourgeoisie for the support of all sorts
of revivalism, from ritualism to the Salvation Army.
And now came the triumph of British respectabil-
ity over the freethought and religious laxity of the
Continental bourgeois. The workmen of France
and Germany had become rebellious. They were
thoroughly infected with socialism, and, for very good
reasons, were not at all particular as to the legality of
the means by which to secure their own ascendency.
The puer robustus, here, turned from day to day more
malitiosus. Nothing remained to the French and Ger-
man bourgeoisie as a last resource but to silently drop
their freethought, as a youngster, when sea-sickness
creeps upon him, quietly drops the burning cigar he
brought swaggeringly on board ; one by one, the
scoffers turned pious in outward behaviour, spoke
with respect of the Church, its dogmas and rites, and
even conformed with the latter as far as could not be
helped. French bourgeoisie dined maigre on Fridays,
and German ones sat out long Protestant sermons in
their pews on Sundays. They had come to grief with
materialism. “Die Religion muss dem Volk erhalten
werden,”—religion must be kept alive for the people-
that was the only and the last means to save society
(6

Introduction.
xxxvii
from utter ruin. Unfortunately for thernselves, they
did not find this out until they had done their level
best to break up religion for ever.
And now it was
the turn of the British bourgeois to sneer and to say:
“Why, you fools, I could have told you that two
hundred years ago !”
However, I am afraid neither the religious stolidity
of the British, nor the post festum conversion of the
Continental bourgeois will stem the rising Proletarian
tide. Tradition is a great retarding force, is the vis
inertiæ of history, but, being merely passive, is sure to
be broken down ; and thus religion will be no lasting
safeguard to capitalist society. If our juridical, philo-
sophical, and religious ideas are the more or less remote
offshoots of the economical relations prevailing in a
given society, such ideas cannot, in the long run,
withstand the effects of a complete change in these
relations. And, unless we believe in supernatural
revelation, we must admit that no religious tenets will
ever suffice to prop up a tottering society.
In fact, in England too, the working-people have
begun to move again. They are, no doubt, shackled
by traditions of various kinds. Bourgeois traditions,
such as the widespread belief that there can be but
two parties, Conservatives and Liberals, and that the
working-class must work out its salvation by and
through the great Liberal party. Working-men's
traditions, inherited from their first tentative efforts at
independent action, such as the exclusion, from ever
so many old Trade Unions, of all applicants who
have not gone through a regular apprenticeship; which

xxxviii
Introduction.
means the breeding, by every such union, of its own
blacklegs. But for all that the English working-class
is moving, as even Professor Brentano has sorrowfully
had to report to his brother Katheder-Socialists. It
moves, like all things in England, with a slow and
measured step, with hesitation here, with more or less
unfruitful, tentative attempts there; it moves now and
then with an over-cautious mistrust of the name of
Socialism, while it gradually absorbs the substance ;
and the movement spreads and seizes one layer of the
workers after another. It has now shaken out of their
torpor the unskilled labourers of the East End of
London, and we all know what a splendid impulse
these fresh forces have given it in return. And if the
pace of the movement is not up to the impatience of
some people, let them not forget that it is the working-
class which keeps alive the finest qualities of the
English character, and that, if a step in advance is
once gained in England, it is, as a rule, never lost
afterwards. If the sons of the old Chartists, for reasons
explained above, were not quite up to the mark, the
grandsons bid fair to be worthy of their forefathers.
But the triumph of the European working-class
does not depend upon England alone. It can only
be secured by the co-operation of, at least, England,
France, and Germany. In both the latter countries
the working-class movement is well ahead of England.
In Germany it is even within measurable distance of
success. The progress it has there made during the
last twenty-five years is unparalleled. It advances
with ever-increasing velocity. If the German middle-

Introduction.
xxxix
class have shown themselves lamentably deficient
in political capacity, discipline, courage, energy,
and perseverance, the German working-class have
given ample proof of all these qualities. Four
hundred years ago, Germany was the starting-point
of the first upheaval of the European middle-class;
as things are now, is it outside the limits of pos-
sibility that Germany will be the scene, too, of the
first great victory of the European proletariat ?
F. ENGELS.
April 20th, 1892.


SOCIALISM:
UTOPIAN AND SCIENTIFIC.
I.
2.
MODERN SOCIALISM is, in its essence, the direct
product of the recognition, on the one hand, of
the class antagonisms, existing in the society 1,
of to-day, between proprietors and non-pro-
prietors, between capitalists and wage-workers;
on the other hand, of the anarchy existing
in production. But, in its theoretical form,
modern Socialism originally appears ostensibly
as a more logical extension of the principles
laid down by the great French philosophers
of the eighteenth century. Like every new
theory, modern Socialism had, at first, to
connect itself with the intellectual stock-in-
trade ready to its hand, /however_deeply its
roots lay in material economic facts.
The great men, who in France prepared
А

2
Socialism :
men's minds for the coming revolution, were
themselves extreme revolutionists. They re-
cognised no external authority of any kind
whatever. Religion, natural science, society,
political institutions, everything, was subjected
to the most unsparing criticism : everything
must justify its existence before the judgment-
seat of reason, or give up existence. Reason
became the sole measure of everything. It
was the time when, as Hegel says, the world
stood upon its head ; 1 first, in the sense that
1 This is the passage on the French Revolution :
Thought, the concept of law, all at once made itself felt,
and against this the old scaffolding of wrong could make
no stand. In this conception of law, therefore, a constitu-
tion has now been established, and henceforth everything
must be based upon this. Since the sun had been in the
firmament, and the planets circled round him, the sight had
never been seen of man standing upon his head-i.e., on
the Idea—and building reality after this image. Anaxagoras
first said that the Nous, reason, rules the world; but now,
for the first time, had man come to recognise that the Idea
must rule the mental reality. And this was a magnificent
sunrise. All thinking Beings have participated in celebrat-
ing this holy day. A sublime emotion swayed men at that
time, an enthusiasm of reason pervaded the world, as if
now had come the reconciliation of the Divine Principle
with the world.” [Hegel : “ Philosophy of History," 1840,
:

Utopian and Scientific.
3
the human head, and the principles arrived at
by its thought, claimed to be the basis of all
human action and association ; but by and by,
also, in the wider sense that the reality which
was in contradiction to these principles had,
in fact, to be turned upside down. Every
form of society and government then exist-
ing, every old traditional notion was flung into
the lumber-room as irrational ; the world had
hitherto allowed itself to be led solely by
prejudices; everything in the past deserved
only pity and contempt. Now, for the first
time, appeared the light of day, the kingdom
of reason; henceforth superstition, injustice,
privilege, oppression, were to be superseded by
eternal truth, eternal Right, equality based on
Nature and the inalienable rights of man.
We know to-day that this kingdom of reason
was nothing more than the idealised kingdom
of the bourgeoisie; that this eternal Right
found its realisation in bourgeois justice; that
this equality reduced itself to bourgeois equality
before the law; that bourgeois property was
p. 535.] Is it not high time to set the anti-Socialist law
in action against such teachings, subversive and to the
common danger, by the late Professor Hegel ?

4
Socialism :
proclaimed as one of the essential rights of
man; and that the government of reason, the
Contrat Social of Rousseau, came into being,
and only could come into being, as a demo-
cratic bourgeois republic. The great thinkers
of the eighteenth century could, no more than
their predecessors, go beyond the limits im-
posed upon them by their epoch.
But, side by side with the antagonism of the
feudal nobility and the burghers, who claimed
to represent all the rest of society, was the
general antagonism of exploiters and exploited,
of rich idlers and poor workers. It was this
very circumstance that made it possible for the
representatives of the bourgeoisie to put them-
selves forward as representing, not one special
class, but the whole of suffering humanity.
Still further. From its origin, the bourgeoisie
was saddled with its antithesis : capitalists
cannot exist without wage-workers, and, in
the same proportion as the mediæval burgher
of the guild developed into the modern bour-
geois, the guild journeyman and the day-
labourer, outside the guilds, developed into
the proletarian And although, upon the
whole, the bourgeoisie, in their struggle with

Utopian and Scientific.
5
the nobility, could claim to represent at the
same time the interests of the different
working-classes of that period, yet in every
great bourgeois movement there were inde-
pendent outbursts of that class which was the
forerunner, more or less developed, of the
modern proletariat. For example, at the time
of the German reformation and the peasants'
war, the Anabaptists and Thomas Münzer ;
in the great English revolution, the Levellers ;
in the great French revolution, Babeuf.
There were theoretical enunciations cor-
responding with these revolutionary upris-
ings of a class not yet developed ; in the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Utopian
pictures of ideal social conditions ; in the
eighteenth, actual communistic theories (Mor
elly and Mably). The demand for equality
no longer limited to political rights;
it was extended also to the social conditions
of individuals. It was
not simply class
privileges that were to be abolished, but class
distinctions themselves. A Communism, as-
cetic, denouncing all the pleasures of life,
Spartan, was the first form of the new teaching,
Then came the three great Utopians : Saint
was

6
Socialism :
Simon, to whom the middle-class movement,
side by side with the proletarian, still had a cer-
tain significance; Fourier; and Owen, who in the
country where capitalist production was most de-
veloped, and under the influence of the antagon-
isms begotten of this, worked out his proposals
for the removal of class distinction systemati-
cally and in direct relation to French materialism.
One thing is common to all three. Not
one of them appears as a representative of the
interests of that proletariat, which historical
development had, in the meantime, produced.
Like the French philosophers, they do not
claim to emancipate a particular class to begin
with, but all humanity at once. Like them,
they wish to bring in the kingdom of reason
and eternal justice, but this kingdom, as they
see it, is as far as heaven from earth, from
that of the French philosophers.
For, to our three social reformers, the
bourgeois world, based upon the principles
of these philosophers, is quite as irrational
and unjust, and, therefore, finds its way to the
dust-hole quite as readily as feudalism and
all the earlier stages of society. If pure
ſeason and justice have not, hitherto, ruled

Utopian and Scientific.
7
✓
the world, this has been the case only because
men have not rightly understood them. What
was wanted was the individual man of genius,
who has now arisen and who understands the
truth. That he has now arisen, that the truth
has now been clearly understood, is not an
inevitable event, following of necessity in the
chain of historical development, but a mere
happy accident. He might just as well have
been born 500 years earlier, and might then
have spared humanity 500 years of error, ,
strife, and suffering.
We saw how the French philosophers of the
eighteenth century, the forerunners of the Re-
volution, appealed to reason as the sole judge
of all that is. A rational government, rational
society, were to be founded ; everything that
ran counter to eternal reason was to be re-
morselessly done away with. We saw also that
this eternal reason was in reality nothing but
the idealised understanding of the eighteenth
century citizen, just then evolving into the
bourgeois. The French Revolution had real-
ised this rational society and government.
But the new order of things, rational enough
as compared with earlier conditions, turned


8
Socialism :
out to be by no means absolutely rational.
The State based upon reason completely
collapsed. Rousseau's. Contrat Social had
found its realisation in the Reign of Terror,
from which the bourgeoisie, who had lost con-
fidence in their own political capacity, had
taken refuge first in the corruption of the
Directorate, and, finally, under the wing of the
Napoleonic despotism. The promised eternal
peace was turned into an endless war of con-
quest. The society based upon reason had
fared no better. The antagonism between rich
and poor, instead of dissolving into general
prosperity, had become intensified by the re-
moval of the guild and other privileges, which
had to some extent bridged it over, and by the
removal of the charitable institutions of the
Church. The freedom of property” from
feudal fetters, now veritably accomplished,
turned out to be, for the small capitalists and
small proprietors, the freedom to sell their
small property, crushed under the overmaster-
ing competition of the large capitalists and
landlords, to these great lords, and thus, as
far as the small capitalists and peasant pro-
prietors were concerned, became
“freedom

Utopian and Scientific.
9
from property.” The development of industry
upon a capitalistic basis made poverty and
misery of the working masses conditions of
existence of society. Cash payment became
more and more, in Carlyle's phrase, the sole
nexus between man and man. The number of
crimes increased from year to year. Formerly,
the feudal vices had openly stalked about
in broad daylight ; though not eradicated,
they were now at any rate thrust into the
background. In their stead, the bourgeois
vices, hitherto practised in secret, began to
blossom all the more luxuriantly. Trade became
to a greater and greater extent cheating. The
fraternity” of the revolutionary motto was
realised in the chicanery and rivalries of the
battle of competition. Oppression by force
was replaced by corruption; the sword, as the
first social lever, by gold. The right of the
first night was transferred from the feudal
lords to the bourgeois manufacturers. Prosti-
tution increased to an extent never heard of.
Marriage itself remained, as before, the legally
recognised form, the official cloak of prostitu-
tion, and, moreover, was supplemented by rich
crops of adultery.

66

IO
Socialism:
reason
In a word, compared with the splendid
promises of the philosophers, the social and
political institutions born of the "triumph of
were bitterly disappointing carica-
tures. All that was wanting was the men to
formulate this disappointment, and they came
with the turn of the century. In 1802 Saint
Simon's Geneva letters appeared ; in 1808
appeared Fourier's first work, although the
groundwork of his theory dated from 1799 ;
on January 1, 1800, Robert Owen undertook
the direction of New Lanark.
At this time, however, the capitalist mode
of production, and with it the antagonism be-
tween the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, was
still very incompletely developed. Modern
Industry, which had just arisen in England,
was still unknown in France. But Modern
Industry develops, on the one hand, the
conflicts which make absolutely necessary a']
revolution in the mode of production, and the
doing away with its capitalistic character—-con-
flicts not only between the classes begotten of
it, but also between the very productive forces
and the forms of exchange created by it. And,
on the other hand, it develops, in these very

Utopian and Scientific.
23
The answer was clear. It had been used to
pay the proprietors of the establishment 5 per
cent. on the capital they had laid out, in addi-
tion to over £300,000 clear profit. And that
which held for New Lanark held to a still
greater extent for all the factories in England.
“If this new wealth had not been created by
machinery, imperfectly as it has been applied,
the wars of Europe, in opposition to Napoleon,
and to support the aristocratic principles of
society, could not have been maintained. And
yet this new power was the creation of the
working-classes."1 To them, therefore, the
fruits of this new power belonged. The
newly - created gigantic productive forces,
hitherto used only to enrich individuals and
to enslave the masses, offered to Owen the
foundations for a reconstruction of society ;
they were destined, as the common property
of all, to be worked for the common good of
all.
Owen's Communism was based upon this
a memorial addressed to all the “red Republicans, Com-
munists and Socialists of Europe," and sent to the provisional
government of France, 1848, and also “to Queen Victoria
and her responsible advisers.”
1 Note, l. c, p. 22.


24
Socialisin :
purely business foundation, the outcome, so to
say, of commercial calculation. Throughout,
it maintained this practical character. Thus,
in 1823, Owen proposed the relief of the distress
in Ireland by Communist colonies, and drew up
complete estimates of costs of founding them,
yearly expenditure, and probable revenue.
And in his definite plan for the future, the
technical working out of details is managed
with such practical knowledge-ground plan,
front and side and bird's-eye views all included
—that the Owen method of social reform once
accepted, there is from the practical point of
view little to be said against the actual arrange-
ment of details.
His advance in the direction of Communism
was the turning-point in Owen's life. As
long as he was simply a philanthropist, he was
rewarded with nothing but wealth, applause,
honour, and glory. He was the most popular
man in Europe. Not only men of his own
class, but statesmen and princes listened to
him approvingly.
But when he came
with his Communist theories, that was quite
another thing. Three great obstacles seemed
to him especially to block the path to social

out
hotely
rical

Utopian and Scientific.
25
reform : private property, religion, the present
form of marriage. He knew what confronted
him if he attacked these-outlawry, excommuni-
cation from official society, the loss of his whole
social position. But nothing of this prevented
him from attacking them without fear of con-
sequences, and what he had foreseen happened.
Banished from official society, with a conspiracy
of silence against him in the press, ruined by
his unsuccessful Communist experiments in
America, in which he sacrificed all his fortune,
he turned directly to the working-class and con-
tinued working in their midst for thirty years.
Every social movement, every real advance in
England on behalf of the workers links itself
on to the name of Robert Owen. He forced
through in 1819, after five years' fighting, the
first law limiting the hours of labour of women
and children in factories. He was president
of the first Congress at which all the Trade
Unions of England united in a single great
trade association. He introduced as transition
measures to the complete communistic organi-
sation of society, on the one hand, co-operative
societies for retail trade and production.
These have since that time, at least, given


26
Socialism :
practical proof that the merchant and the manu-
facturer are socially quite unnecessary.
On
the other hand, he introduced labour bazaars
for the exchange of the products of labour
through the medium of labour-notes, whose
unit was a single hour of work; institutions
necessarily doomed to failure, but completely
anticipating Proudhon's bank of exchange of a
much later period, and differing entirely from
this in that it did not claim to be the panacea
for all social ills, but only a first step towards
a much more radical revolution of society.
The Utopians' mode of thought has for a
long time governed the socialist ideas of the
nineteenth century, and still governs some of
them. Until very recently all French and
English Socialists did homage to it. The
earlier German Communism, including that of
Weitling, was of the same school. To all
these Socialism is the expression of · ab-
solute truth, reason, and justice, and has only
to be discovered to conquer all the world by
virtue of its own power, ( And as absolute
truth is independent of time, space, and of the
historical development of man, it is a mere
accident when and where it is discovered.

T
P
A
N

Utopian and Scientific.
27
With all this, absolute truth, reason, and
justice are different with the founder of each
different school. And as each one's special
kind of absolute truth, reason, and justice is
again conditioned by his subjective understand-
ing, his conditions of existence, the measure of
his knowledge and his intellectual training,
there is no other ending possible in this con-
flict of absolute truths than that they shall be
mutually exclusive one of the other. Hence,
from this nothing could come but a kind of
eclectic, average Socialism, which, as a matter
of fact, has up to the present time dominated
the minds of most of the socialist workers in
France and England. Hence, a mish-mash
allowing of the most manifold shades of
opinion ; a mish-mash of such critical state-
ments, economic theories, pictures of future
society by the founders of different sects,
as excite a minimum of opposition ; a mish-
mash which is the more easily brewed the more
the definite sharp edges of the individual con-
stituents are rubbed down in the stream of
debate, like rounded pebbles in a brook.
To make a science of Socialism, it had first
to be placed upon a real basis.

28
Socialism:
II.
In the meantime, along with and after the
French philosophy of the eighteenth century had
arisen the new German philosophy, culminating
in Hegel. ( Its greatest merit was the taking up
again of dialectics as the highest form of
reasoning.) The old Greek philosophers were
all born natural dialecticians, and Aristotle, the
most encyclopædic intellect of them, had al-
ready analysed the most essential forms of
dialectic thought. The newer philosophy, on
the other hand, although in it also dialectics had
brilliant exponents (e.g. Descartes and Spinoza),
had, especially through English influence, be-
come more and more rigidly fixed in the so-
called metaphysical mode of reasoning, by which
also the French of the eighteenth century were
almost wholly dominated, at all events in their
special philosophical work. Outside philosophy
in the restricted sense, the French neverthe-
less produced masterpieces of dialectic. We
need only call to mind Diderot's “Le Neveu
ason

Utopian and Scientific.
29
our
we
see
de Rameau," and Rousseau's “Discours sur
l'origine et les fondements de l'inégalité parmi
les hommes.” We give here, in brief, the essen-
tial character of these two modes of thought.
When we consider and reflect upon nature
at large, or the history of mankind, or
own intellectual activity, at first
the picture of an endless entanglement of
relations and reactions, permutations and
combinations, in which nothing remains
what, where, and as it was, but everything
moves, changes, comes into being and passes
away. We see, therefore, at first the picture as
,
a whole, with its individual parts still more or
less kept in the background; we observe the
movements, transitions, connections, rather than
the things that move, combine, and are con-
nected. This primitive, naïve, but intrinsi-
cally correct conception of the world is that
of ancient Greek philosophy, and was first
clearly formulated by Heraclitus : everything
is and is not, for everything is fluid, is con-
stantly changing, constantly coming into being
and passing away.
But this conception, correctly as it
expresses
the general character of the picture of appear-


30
Socialism :
ances as a whole, does not suffice to explain the
details of which this picture is made up, and so
,
long as we do not understand these, we have
not a clear idea of the whole picture. In order
to understand these details we must detach
them from their natural or historical connection
and examine each one separately, its nature,
special causes, effects, etc. This is, primarily,
the task of natural science and historical re-
search ; branches of science which the Greeks
of classical times, on very good grounds, rel-
egated to a subordinate position, because they
had first of all to collect materials for these
sciences to work upon. A certain amount of
natural and historical material must be collected
before there can be any critical analysis, com-
parison, and arrangement in classes, orders, and
species. The foundations of the exact natural
sciences were, therefore, first worked out by
the Greeks of the Alexandrian period, and later
on, in the Middle Ages, by the Arabs. Real
natural science dates from the second half of
the fifteenth century, and thence onward it has
advanced with constantly increasing rapidity.
The analysis of Nature into its individual parts,
the grouping of the different natural processes

Utopian and Scientific.
31
and objects in definite classes, the study of the
internal anatomy of organised bodies in their
manifold forms—these were the fundamental
conditions of the gigantic strides in our know-
ledge of Nature that have been made during
the last four hundred years. But this method
of work has also left us as legacy the habit of
observing natural objects and processes in
isolation, apart from their connection with the
vast whole; of observing them in repose, not
in motion; as constants, not as esse
as essentially
variables ; in their death, not in their life.
And when this way of looking at things was
transferred by Bacon and Locke from natural emper
science to philosophy, it begot the narrow,
metaphysical mode of thought peculiar to
the last century.
To the metaphysician, things and their
mental reflexes, ideas, are isolated, are to be
considered one after the other and apart from
each other, are objects of investigation fixed,
rigid, given once for all. He thinks in abso-
lutely irreconcilable antitheses.
“His com-
munication is ‘yea, yea; nay, nay;' for what-
soever is more than these cometh of evil.”
For him a thing either exists or does not exist ;

32
Socialism :
a thing cannot at the same time be itself and
something else. Positive and negative ab-
solutely exclude one another; cause and effect
stand in a rigid antithesis one to the other.
At first sight this mode of thinking seems to
us very luminous, because it is that of so-called
sound commonsense. Only sound common-
sense, respectable fellow that he is, in the homely
realm of his own four walls, has very wonderful
adventures directly he ventures out into the
wide world of research. And the metaphysi-
cal mode of thought, justifiable and necessary
as it is in a number of domains whose extent
varies according to the nature of the particular
object of investigation, sooner or later reaches
a limit, beyond which it becomes one-sided, re-
stricted, abstract, lost in insoluble contradictions.
In the contemplation of individual things, it
forgets the connection between them ; in the
contemplation of their existence, it forgets the
beginning and end of that existence; of their
repose, it forgets their motion. It cannot see
the wood for the trees.
For everyday purposes we know and can say,
e.g., whether an animal is alive or not. But,
upon closer inquiry, we find that this is, in


Utopian and Scientific.
33
many cases, a very complex question, as the
jurists know very well. They have cudgelled
.
their brains in vain to discover a rational limit
beyond which the killing of the child in its
mother's womb is murder. It is just as im-
possible to determine absolutely the moment of
death, for physiology proves that death is not
an instantaneous, momentary phenomenon, but
a very protracted process.
In like manner, every organised being is
every moment the same and not the same ;
every moment it assimilates matter supplied
from without, and gets rid of other matter; every
moment some cells of its body die and others
build themselves anew; in a longer or shorter
time the matter of its body is completely
renewed, and is replaced by other molecules of
matter, so that every organised being is always
itself, and yet something other than itself.
Further, we find upon closer investigation
that the two poles of an antithesis, positive
and negative, e.g., are as inseparable as they
are opposed, and that despite all their opposition,
they mutually interpenetrate,* And we find, in
like manner, that cause and effect are concep-
tions which only hold good in their application
с
* unity of Opposites
*

34
Socialism :
to individual cases; but as soon as we consider
the individual cases in their general connection
with the universe as a whole, they run into each
other, and they become confounded when we
contemplate that universal action and reaction in
which causes and effects are eternally changing
places, so that what is effect here and now will
be cause there and then, and vice versa.
None of these processes and modes of
thought enters into the framework of meta-
physical reasoning. Dialectics, on the other
hand, comprehends things and their represen-
tations, ideas, in their essential connection,
concatenation, motion, origin, and ending.
Such processes as those mentioned above are,
therefore, so many corroborations of its own
method of procedure.
Nature is the proof of dialectics, and it must
be said for modern science that it has furnished
this proof with very rich materials increasing
daily, and thus has shown that, in the last
resort, Nature works dialectically and
metaphysically ; that she does not move in the
eternal oneness of a perpetually recurring circle,
but goes through a real historical evolution.
In this connection Darwin must be named

not
;

Utopian and Scientific.
35
before all others. He dealt the metaphysical
conception of Nature the heaviest blow by his
proof that all organic beings, plants, animals,
and man himself, are the products of a process
of evolution going on through millions of years.
But the naturalists who have learned to think
dialectically are few and far between, and this
conflict of the results of discovery with precon-
ceived modes of thinking explains the end-
less confusion now reigning in theoretical
natural science, the despair of teachers as well
as learners, of authors and readers alike.
An exact representation of the universe, of its
evolution, of the development of mankind, and of
the reflection of this evolution in the minds of
men, can therefore only be obtained by the
methods of dialectics with its constant regard to
the innumerable actions and reactions of life and
death, of progressive or retrogressive changes.
And in this spirit the new German philosophy has
worked. Kant began his career by resolving the
stable solar system of Newton and its eternal
duration, after the famous initial impulse had
once been given, into the result of a historic
process, the formation of the sun and all the
planets out of a rotating nebulous mass. From

a

36
Socialism:
this he at the same time drew the conclusion
that, given this origin of the solar system, its
future death followed of necessity. His theory
half a century later was established mathe-
matically by Laplace, and half a century after
that the spectroscope proved the existence in
space of such incandescent masses of gas in
various stages of condensation.
This new German philosophy culminated in
the Hegelian system. In this system-and
herein is its great merit-for the first time the
whole world, natural, historical, intellectual, is
represented as a process, i.e., as in constant
motion, change, transformation, development;
and the attempt is made to trace out the
internal connection that makes a continuous
whole of all this movement and development.
From this point of view the history of man-
kind no longer appeared as a wild whirl of
senseless deeds of violence, all equally con-
demnable at the judgment seat of mature
philosophic reason, and which are best forgotten
as quickly as possible ; but as the process of
evolution of man himself. (It was now the task
of the intellect to follow the gradual march
of this process through all its devious ways,

Utopian and Scientific.
37
and to trace out the inner law running through
all its apparently accidental phenomena. )
That the Hegelian system did not solve the
problem it propounded is here immaterial. Its
epoch-making merit was that it propounded the
problem. This problem is one that no single
individual will ever be able to solve. Although
Hegel was—with Saint Simon—the most en-
-
cyclopædic mind of his time, yet he was limited,
first, by the necessarily limited extent of his
own knowledge, and, second, by the limited
extent and depth of the knowledge and con-
ceptions of his age. To these limits a third
must be added. Hegel was an idealist. To
him the thoughts within his brain were not the
more or less abstract pictures of actual things
and processes, but, conversely, things and
their evolution were only the realised pictures
of the “Idea,” existing somewhere from eternity
before the world was. This way of thinking X
turned everything upside down, and completely
reversed the actual connection of things in the
world. Correctly and ingeniously as many
individual groups of facts were grasped by
Hegel, yet, for the reasons just given, there
is much that is botched, artificial, laboured, in
That's it Freddy. Just take what
woh can use
K

38
Socialism:
a word, wrong in point of detail. The
Hegelian system, in itself, was a colossal mis-
carriage—but it was also the last of its kind.
It was suffering, in fact, from an internal
and incurable contradiction. Upon the one
hand, its essential proposition was the con-
ception that (human history is a process of
evolution, which, by its very nature, \cannot
find its intellectual final term in the discovery
of any so-called absolute truth.) But, on the
other hand, it laid claim to being the very
essence of this absolute truth. A system of
natural and historical knowledge, embracing
everything, and final for all time, is a contra-
diction to the fundamental law of dialectic
reasoning. This law, indeed, by no
excludes, but, on the contrary, includes the
idea that the systematic knowledge of the
external universe can make giant strides from
age to age.
The perception of the fundamental contra-
diction in German idealism led necessarily back
to materialism, but nota bene, not to the simply
metaphysical, exclusively mechanical material-
ism of the eighteenth century. Old materialism
looked upon all previous history as a crude heap


means

Utopian and Scientific. E
39
of irrationality and violence; modern material-
ism sees in it the process of evolution of
humanity, and aims at discovering the laws
thereof. With the French of the eighteenth
century, and even with Hegel, the conception
obtained of Nature as a whole, moving in
narrow circles, and forever immutable, with its
eternal celestial bodies, as Newton, and unalter-
able organic species, as Linnæus, taught.
Modern materialism embraces the more recent
discoveries of natural science, according to
which Nature also has its history in time, the
celestial bodies, like the organic species that,
under favourable conditions, people them, being
born and perishing. And even if Nature, as a
whole, must still be said to move in recurrent
cycles, these cycles assume infinitely larger
dimensions. In both aspects, modern material-
ism is essentially dialectic, and no longer re-
quires the assistance of that sort of philosophy
which, queen-like, pretended to rule the remain-
ing mob of sciences. As soon as each special
science is bound to make clear its position in the
great totality of things and of our knowledge
of things, a special science dealing with this
totality is superfluous or unnecessary. That


40
Socialism :

which still survives of all earlier philosophy is
the science of thought and its laws--formal logic
and dialectics. Everything else is subsumed
in the positive science of Nature and history.
Whilst, however, the revolution in the con-
ception of Nature could only be made in pro-
portion to the corresponding positive materials
furnished by research, already much earlier
certain historical facts had occurred which led
to a decisive change in the conception of his-
tory. In 1831, the first working-class rising
took place in Lyons ; between 1838 and 1842,
the first national working-class movement, that
of the English Chartists, reached its height.
The class struggle between proletariat and
bourgeoisie came to the front in the history
of the most advanced countries in Europe, in
proportion to the development, upon the one
hand, of modern industry, upon the other,
of the newly-acquired political supremacy of
the bourgeoisie. Facts more and more strenu-
ously gave the lie to the teachings of bourgeois
economy as to the identity of the interests of
capital and labour, as to the universal harmony
and universal prosperity that would be the
consequence of unbridled competition. All


Utopian and Scientific.
41
these things could no longer be ignored, any
more than the French and English Social-
ism, which was their theoretical, though very
imperfect, expression. But the old idealist
conception of history, which was not yet dis-
lodged, knew nothing of class struggles based
upon economic interests, knew nothing of eco
nomic interests ; production and all economic
relations appeared in it only as incidental, sub-
ordinate elements in the "history of civilisation.”
The new facts made imperative a new ex-
amination of all past history. Then it was
seen that all past history, with the exception of
its primitive stages, was the history of class
struggles; that these warring classes of society
are always the products of the modes of pro-
duction and of exchange—in a word, of the
economic conditions of their time; that the
economic structure of society always furnishes
the real basis, starting from which we can
alone work out the ultimate explanation of
the whole superstructure of juridical and
political institutions as well as of the religious,
philosophical, and other ideas of a given
historical period. Hegel had freed his-
tory from metaphysics-he had made it dia-

42
Socialism:
N
A
gle is both protauti dialectic?
lectic; but his conception of history was essen-
tially idealistic. But now idealism was driven
from its last refuge, the philosophy of history;
now a materialistic treatment of history was
propounded, and a method found of explaining
man’s “knowing ” by his “ being," instead of, as
heretofore, his “ being” by his “knowing.”
From that time forward Socialism was no
longer an accidental discovery of this or that
ingenious brain, but the necessary outcome of
the struggle between two historically developed
classes—the proletariat and the bourgeoisie.
#ts task was no longer to manufacture a system
y of society as perfect as possible, but to ex-
amine the historico-economic succession of
events from which these classes and their an-
tagonism had of necessity sprung, and to dis-
cover in the economic conditions thus created
the means of ending the conflict. But the
Socialism of earlier days was as incompatible
with this materialistic conception as the con-
ception of Nature of the French materialists
was with dialectics and modern natural science.
The Socialism of earlier days certainly criticised
the existing capitalistic mode of production
and its consequences.
But it could not


Utopian and Scientific.
43
explain them, and, therefore, could not get the
mastery of them. It could only simply reject
them as bad. The more strongly this earlier
Socialism denounced the exploitation of the
working-class, inevitable under Capitalism, the
less able was it clearly to show in what this
exploitation consisted and how it arose. But
for this it was necessary-(1) to present the
capitalistic method of production in its historical
connection and its inevitableness during a
particular historical period, and therefore, also,
to present its inevitable downfall; and (2) to
lay bare its essential character, which was still
This was done by the discovery of
surplus-value. It was shown that the appro-
priation of unpaid labour is the basis of the
capitalist mode of production and of the ex-
ploitation of the worker that occurs under it ;
that even if the capitalist buys the labour-power
of his labourer at its full value as a commodity
on the market, he yet extracts more value from
it than he paid for ; and that in the ultimate
analysis this surplus-value forms those sums of
value from which are heaped up the constantly
increasing masses of capital in the hands of the
possessing classes. The genesis of capitalist
a secret.

44
Socialism:
production and the production of capital were
both explained.
These two great discoveries, the materialistic
conception of history and the revelation of the
secret of capitalistic production through sur-
plus-value,
we
owe to Marx. With these
discoveries Socialism became a science. The
next thing was to work out all its details and
relations.

Utopian and Scientific.
45
r

III.
The materialist conception of history starts
from the proposition that the production of the
means to support human life and, next to pro-
duction, the exchange of things produced, is the
basis of all social structure; that in every society
that has appeared in history, the manner in
which wealth is distributed and society divided
into classes or orders, is dependent upon what is
produced, how it is produced, and how the
products are exchanged. From this point of
view the final causes of all social changes and
political revolutions are to be sought, not in
men's brains, not in man's better insight
into eternal truth and justice, but in changes
in the modes of production and exchange.
They are to be sought, not in the philo-
sophy, but in the economics of each particular
epoch. The growing perception that ex-
isting social institutions unreasonable
and unjust, that reason has become
reason, and right wrong, is only proof that in
the modes of production and exchange
•
are
un-
46
Socialism :
changes have silently taken place, with which
the social order, adapted to earlier economic
conditions, is no longer in keeping. From this
it also follows that the means of getting rid of
the incongruities that have been brought to
light, must also be present, in a more or less
developed condition, within the changed modes
of production themselves. These means are not
to be invented by deduction from fundamental
principles, but are to be discovered in the stub-
born facts of the existing system of production.
What is, then, the position of modern
Socialism in this connexion ?
The present structure of society—this is now
pretty generally conceded—is the creation of the
ruling class of to-day, of the bourgeoisie. The
mode of production peculiar to the bour-
geoisie, known, since Marx, as the capitalist
mode of production, was incompatible with the
feudal system, with the privileges it conferred
upon individuals, entire social ranks and local
corporations, as well as with the hereditary ties
of subordination which constituted the framework
of its social organisation. The bourgeoisie broke
up the feudal system and built upon its ruins the
capitalist order of society, the kingdom of free



Utopian and Scientific.
47
competition, of personal liberty, of the equality,
before the law, of all commodity owners, of all the
rest of the capitalist blessings. Thenceforward
the capitalist mode of production could develop
in freedom. Since steam, machinery, and the
making of machines by machinery transformed
the older manufacture into modern industry, the
productive forces evolved under the guidance of
the bourgeoisie developed with a rapidity and in
a degree unheard of before. But just as the older
manufacture, in its time, and handicraft, becom-
ing more developed under its influence, had come
into collision with the feudal trammels of the
guilds, so now modern industry, in its more com-
plete development, comes into collision with the
bounds within which the capitalistic mode of
production holds it confined. The new pro-
ductive forces have already outgrown the capi-
talistic mode of using them. ( And this conflict
between productive forces and modes of pro-
duction is not a conflict engendered in the mind
of man, like that between original sin and divine
justice. It exists, in fact, objectively, outside us,
independently of the will and actions even of the
men that have brought it on. Modern Social-
ism is nothing but the reflex, in thought, of


Socialism:
this conflict in fact; its ideal reflection in the
minds, first, of the class directly suffering under
it, the working-class.)
.
Now, in what does this conflict consist ?
Before capitalistic production, i.e., in the
Middle Ages, the system of petty industry
obtained generally, based upon the private
property of the labourers in their means of pro-
duction ; in the country, the agriculture of the
small peasant, freeman or serf ; in the towns, the
handicrafts organised in guilds. The instruments
of labour—land, agricultural implements, the
workshop, the tool-were the instruments of
labour of single individuals, adapted for the use
of one worker, and, therefore, of necessity, small,
dwarfish, circumscribed. But, for this very reason
they belonged, as a rule, to the producer himself.
To concentrate these scattered, limited means of
production, to enlarge them, to turn them into the
powerful levers of production of the present day
—this was precisely the historic rôle of capitalist
production and of its upholder, the bourgeoisie.
In the fourth section of “Capital” Marx has
explained in detail, how since the fifteenth
century this has been historically worked out
through the three phases of simple co-operation,



а.

Utopian and Scientific.
49
manufacture, and modern industry. But the
bourgeoisie, as is also shown there, could not
transform these puny means of production into
mighty productive forces, without transforming
them, at the same time, from means of production
of the individual into social means of production
only workable by a collectivity of men. The
spinning-wheel, the handloom, the blacksmith's
hammer, were replaced by the spinning-
machine, the power-loom, the steam-hammer;
the individual workshop, by the factory
implying the co-operation of hundreds and
thousands of workmen.
In like manner,
production itself changed from a series of
a
individual into a series of social acts, and the
products from individual to social products.
The yarn, the cloth, the metal articles that
now came out of the factory were the joint
product of many workers, through whose hands
they had successively to pass before they were
ready No one person could say of them :
· I made that ; this is my product.”
But where, in a given society, the funda-
mental form of production is that spontaneous
division of labour which creeps in gradually and
not upon any preconceived plan, there the pro-
)
D

50
Socialism:
wants.
ducts take on the form of commodities, whose
mutual exchange, buying and selling, enable the
individual producers to satisfy their manifold
And this was the case in the Middle
Ages. The peasant, e.g., sold to the artisan
agricultural products and bought from him the
products of handicraft. Into this society of in-
dividual producers, of commodity-producers, the
new mode of production thrust itself. In the
midst of the old division of labour, grown up
spontaneously and upon no definite plan, which
had governed the whole of society, now arose
division of labour upon a definite plan, as organ-
ised in the factory ; side by side with individual
production appeared social production. The
products of both were sold in the same market,
and, therefore, at prices at least approximately
equal. But organisation upon a definite plan
was stronger than spontaneous division of
labour. The factories working with the com-
bined social forces of a collectivity of individuals
produced their commodities far more cheaply
than the individual small producers. Individual
production succumbed in one department after
another. Socialised production revolutionised
all the old methods of production. But its
;
a

Utopian and Scientific.
51
revolutionary character was, at the same time,
so little recognised, that it was, on the contrary,
introduced as a means of increasing and de-
veloping the production of commodities. When
it arose, it found ready-made, and made liberal
use of, certain machinery for the production and
exchange of commodities; merchants' capital,
handicraft, wage-labour. Socialised production
thus introducing itself as a new form of the pro-
duction of commodities, it was a matter of
course that under it the old forms of appropria-
tion remained in full swing, and were applied
to its products as well.
In the mediæval stage of evolution of the
production of commodities, the question as to
the owner of the product of labour could not
arise. The individual producer, as a rule, had,
from raw material belonging to himself, and
generally his own handiwork, produced it with
his own tools, by the labour of his own hands
or of his family. There was no need for him
to appropriate the new product. It belonged
wholly to him, as a matter of course.
perty in the product was, therefore, based upon
his own labour. Even where external help was
used, this was, as a rule, of little importance, and
His pro-

52
Socialisin :
very generally was compensated by something
other than wages. The apprentices and journey-
men of the guilds worked less for board and
wages than for education, in order that they
might become master craftsmen themselves.
Then came the concentration of the means of
production and of the producers in large work-
shops and manufactories, their transformation
into actual socialised means of production and
socialised producers. But the socialised pro-
ducers and means of production and their pro-
ducts were still treated, after this change, just
as they had been before, i.e., as the means of
production and the products of individuals.
//hitherto, the owner of the instruments of
labour had himself appropriated the product,
because, as a rule, it was his own product and
the assistance of others was the exception.
Now the owner of the instruments of labour
always appropriated to himself the product,
although it was no longer his product but
exclusively the product of the labour of others/
Thus, the products now produced socially were
not appropriated by those who had actually set
in motion the means of production and actually
produced the commodities, but by the capitalists.

Utopian and Scientific.
53
The means of production, and production itself,
had become in essence socialised. But they
were subjected to a form of appropriation which
presupposes the private production of indi-
viduals, under which, therefore, every one owns
his own product and brings it to market. The
mode of production is subjected to this form of
appropriation, although it abolishes the con-
ditions upon which the latter rests./
This contradiction, which gives to the new
mode of production its capitalistic character,
contains the germ of the whole of the social anta-
gonisms of to-day. The greater the mastery ob-
tained by the new mode of production over all
important fields of production and in all manu-
facturing countries, the more it reduced individual
production to an insignificant residuum, the more
1 It is hardly necessary in this connexion to point out,
that, even if the form of appropriation remains the same,
the character of the appropriation is just as much revolu-
tionised as production is by the changes described above.
It is, of course, a very different matter whether I appropriate
to myself my own product or that of another. Note in
passing that wage-labour, which contains the whole
capitalistic mode of production in embryo, is very ancient ;
in a sporadic, scattered form it existed for centuries
alongside of slave-labour. But the embryo could duly de-
velop into the capitalistic mode of production only when
the necessary historical pre-conditions had been furnished. ?? so?

22.50
alcoletion of fend,
mod, e onde concentrate of

54
Socialism :
clearly was brought out the incompatibility of so-
cialised production with capitalistic appropriation.
The first capitalists found, as we have said,
alongside of other forms of labour, wage-labour
ready-made for them on the market.
But it was
exceptional, complementary, accessory, transi-
tory wage-labour. The agricultural labourer,
,
though, upon occasion, he hired himself out by
the day, had a few acres of his own land on
which he could at all events live at a pinch.
The guilds were so organised that the journey-
man of to-day became the master of to-morrow.
But all this changed, as soon as the means of
production became socialised and concentrated
in the hands of capitalists. The means of pro-
duction, as well as the product, of the individual
producer became more and more worthless ;
there was nothing left for him but to turn wage-
worker under the capitalist. Wage-labour,
aforetime the exception and accessory, now be-
came the rule and basis of all production; afore-
time complementary, it now became the sole
remaining function of the worker. The wage-
worker for a time became a wage-worker for
life. The number of these permanent wage-
workers was further enormously increased by

Utopian and Scientific.
55
the breaking-up of the feudal system that oc-
curred at the same time, by the disbanding of
the retainers of the feudal lords, the eviction of
the peasants from their homesteads, etc. The
separation was made complete between the
means of production concentrated in the hands
of the capitalists on the one side, and the
producers, possessing nothing but their labour-
power, on the other. The contradiction between
socialised production and capitalistic appro-
priation manifested itself as the antagonism of
proletariat and bourgeoisie.
We have seen that the capitalistic mode of
production thrust its way into a society of
commodity-producers, of individual producers,
whose social bond was the exchange of their
products. But every society, based upon the
production of commodities, has this peculiarity:
that the producers have lost control over their
own social inter-relations. Each man produces
for himself with such means of production as
he may happen to have, and for such exchange
as he may require to satisfy his remaining wants.
No one knows how much of his particular article
is coming on the market, nor how much of it will
(

be wanted. (No one knows whether his indi-
56
Socialism :

vidual product will meet an actual demand,
whether he will be able to make good his cost
of production or even to sell his commodity at
all. Anarchy reigns in socialised production.
But the production of commodities, like
every other form of production, has its peculiar,
inherent laws inseparable from it; and these
laws work, despite anarchy, in and through
anarchy. They reveal themselves in the only
persistent form of social inter-relations, i.e., in
exchange, and here they affect the individual
producers as compulsory laws of competition.
They are, at first, unknown to these producers
themselves, and have to be discovered by them
gradually and as the result of experience.
They work themselves out, therefore, inde-
pendently of the producers, and in antagonism
to them, as inexorable natural laws of their
particular form of production. The product
governs the producers.- Prolitarist)
In mediæval society, especially in the earlier
centuries, production was essentially directed
towards satisfying the wants of the individual.
It satisfied, in the main, only the wants of the
producer and his family. Where relations of
personal dependence existed, as in the country,
Bilit do that? If so, we that enough?

Utopian and Scientific.
57
it also helped to satisfy the wants of the feudal
lord. In all this there was, therefore, no ex-
change; the products, consequently, did not as-
sume the character of commodities. The family
of the peasant produced almost everything they
wanted : clothes and furniture, as well as means
of subsistence. Only when it began to produce
more than was sufficient to supply its own
wants and the payments in kind to the feudal
lord, only then did it also produce commodities.
This surplus, thrown into socialised exchange
and offered for sale, became commodities.
The artisans of the towns, it is true, had
from the first to produce for exchange. But
they, also, themselves supplied the greatest
part of their own individual wants. They had
gardens and plots of land. They turned their
cattle out into the communal forest, which, also,
yielded them timber and firing. The women
spun flax, wool, and so forth. Production for
the purpose of exchange, production of com-
modities, was only in its infancy. Hence, ex-
change was restricted, the market narrow, the
methods of production stable ; there was local
exclusiveness without, local unity within ; the
mark 1 in the country, in the town, the guild,
1 See Appendix,
1

58
Socialism :
But with the extension of the production of
commodities, and especially with the introduc-
tion of the capitalist mode of production, the
laws of commodity-production, hitherto latent,
came into action more openly and with greater
force. The old bonds were loosened, the old
exclusive limits broken through, the producers
were more and more turned into independent,
isolated producers of commodities. It became
apparent that the production of society at large
was ruled by absence of plan, by accident, by
anarchy ; and this anarchy grew to greater and
greater height. But the chief means by aid of
which the capitalist mode of production intensi-
fied this anarchy of socialised production, was
the exact opposite of anarchy. It was the in-
creasing organisation of production, upon a social
basis, in every individual productive establish-
ment. By this, the old, peaceful, stable condition
of things was ended. Wherever this organisa-
tion of production was introduced into a branch
of industry, it brooked no other method of pro-
duction by its side. The field of labour became
a battle-ground. The great geographical dis-
coveries, and the colonisation following upon
them, multiplied markets and quickened the



Utopian and Scientific.
59
transformation of handicraft into manufacture.
The war did not simply break out between the
individual producers of particular localities.
The local struggles begat in their turn national
conflicts, the commercial wars of the seven-
teenth and the eighteenth centuries.
Finally, modern industry and the opening of
the world-market made the struggle universal,
and at the same time gave it an unheard-of viru-
lence. Advantages in natural or artificial condi-
tions of production now decide the existence or
non-existence of individual capitalists, as well as
of whole industries and countries. He that falls
is remorselessly cast aside. It is the Darwinian
struggle of the individual for existence transferred
from Nature to society with intensified violence.
The conditions of existence natural to the animal
appear as the final term of human development.
The contradiction between socialised produc-
tion and capitalistic appropriation now pre-
sents itself as
an antagonism between the
organisation of production in the individual
workshop and the anarchy of production in
society generally
The capitalistic mode of production moves
in these two forms of the antagonism immanent

60
Socialism:
б
Cractly what is
production ?
anarchyun
in soesel
social


to it from its very origin. It is never able to
get out of that “vicious circle," which Fourier
had already discovered. "What Fourier could
not, indeed, see in his time is, that this circle is
gradually narrowing; that the movement be-
comes more and more a spiral, and must come
to an end, like the movement of the planets,
by collision with the centre,
It is the com-
pelling force of anarchy in the production of
society at large that more and more completely
turns the great majority of men into proletarians ;
and it is the masses of the proletariat again who
will finally put an end to anarchy in production.
It is the compelling force of anarchy in social
production that turns the limitless perfectibility
of machinery under modern industry into a com-
pulsory law by which every individual industrial
capitalist must perfect his machinery more and
more, under penalty of ruin.
,
But the perfecting of machinery is the mak-
ing human labour superfluous. If the intro-
duction and increase of machinery means the
displacement of millions of manual, by a few
machine, workers, improvement in machinery
means the displacement of more and more of
the machine-workers themselves. It means, in
,


a
Hosthisbeendeoproien?
?

Utopian and Scientific.
61
a
the last instance, the production of a number of
available wage-workers in excess of the average
needs of capital, the formation of a complete
industrial reserve army, as I called it in 1845,1
available at the times when industry is working
at high pressure, to be cast out upon the street
when the inevitable crash comes, a constant
dead weight upon the limbs of the working-
class in its struggle for existence with capital, a
regulator for the keeping of wages down to the
low level that suits the interests of capital.
Thus it comes about, to quote Marx, that
machinery becomes the most powerful weapon
in the war of capital against the working-class ;
that the instruments of labour constantly tear
the means of subsistence out of the hands of
the labourer; that the very product of the
worker is turned into an instrument for his
subjugation. Thus it comes about that the
economising of the instruments of labour be-
comes at the same time, from the outset, the
most reckless waste of labour-power, and
robbery based upon the normal conditions
under which labour functions ; that machinery,
1 “ The Condition of the Working-Class in England”
(Sonnenschein & Co.), p. 84.
62
Socialism :
*
“the most powerful instrument for shortening
labour-time, becomes the most unfailing means
for placing every moment of the labourer's time
and that of his family at the disposal of the capi-
talist for the purpose of expanding the value of
his capital" ("Capital," English edition, p. 406).
Thus it comes about that over-work of some be-
comes the preliminary condition for the idleness
of others, and that modern industry, which
hunts after new consume
mers over the whole
world, forces the consumption of the masses at
home down to a starvation minimum, and in
doing thus destroys its own home market.
“ The law that always equilibrates the rela-
tive surplus population, or industrial reserve
army, to the extent and energy of accumulation,
this law rivets the labourer to capital more
firmly than the wedges of Vulcan did Prome-
theus to the rock. It establishes an accumula-
tion of misery, corresponding with accumulation
of capital. Accumulation of wealth at one pole
is, therefore, at the same time, accumulation of
misery, agony of toil, slavery, ignorance,
brutality, mental degradation, at the opposite
pole, i.e., on the side of the class that produces
its own product in the form of capital.” (Marx'



Utopian and Scientific.
63
Capital ” [Sonnenschein & Co.), p. 661.)
And to expect any other division of the
products from the capitalistic mode of pro-
duction is the same as expecting the electrodes
of a battery not to decompose acidulated water,
not to liberate oxygen at the positive, hydrogen
at the negative pole, so long as they are con-
nected with the battery.
We have seen that the ever-increasing
perfectibility of modern machinery is, by the
anarchy of social production, turned into a
compulsory law that forces the individual
industrial capitalist always to improve his
machinery, always to increase its produc-
tive force. The bare possibility of extend-
ing the field of production is transformed
for him into a similar compulsory law. The
enormous expansive force of modern in-
dustry, compared with which that of gases is
mere child's play, appears to us now as
necessity for expansion, both qualitative and
quantitative, that laughs at all resistance. Such
resistance is offered by consumption, by sales,
by the markets for the products of modern
industry. But the capacity for extension, ex-
.
tensive and intensive, of the markets is prim-

64
Socialisın :
arily governed by quite different laws, that
work much less energetically. The extension
of the markets cannot keep pace with the
extension of production. The collision be-
comes inevitable, and as this cannot produce
any real solution so long as it does not break
in pieces the capitalist mode of production,
the collisions become periodic. Capitalist
production has begotten another vicious
circle.”
As a matter of fact, since 1825, when the
first general crisis broke out, the whole in-
dustrial and commercial world, production and
exchange among all civilised peoples and their
more or less barbaric hangers-on, are thrown
out of joint about once every ten years. ( Com-
(
merce is at a standstill, the markets are glutted,
products accumulate, as multitudinous as they
are unsaleable, hard cash disappears, credit
vanishes, factories are closed, the mass of the
workers are in want of the means of subsist-
ence, because they have produced too much of
the means of subsistence; bankruptcy follows
upon bankruptcy, execution upon execution.
The stagnation lasts for years ; productive
forces and products are wasted and destroyed
D
E
vonoz

Utopian and Scientific.
65
a
wholesale, until the accumulated mass of com-
modities finally filter off, more or less depreciated
in value, until production and exchange gradually
begin to move again. Little by little the pace
quickens. It becomes a trot. The industrial
trot breaks into a canter, the canter in turn grows
into the headlong gallop of a perfect steeplechase
of industry, commercial credit, and speculation,
which finally, after breakneck leaps, ends where
it began in the ditch of a crisis.) And so over
and over again. We have now, since the year
1825, gone through this five times, and at the
present moment (1877) we are going through it
for the sixth time. And the character of these
crises is so clearly defined that Fourier hit all
of them off, when he described the first as
“ crise pléthorique," a crisis from plethora.
In these crises, the contradiction between
socialised production and capitalist appropriation
ends in a violent explosion. The circulation of
commodities is, for the time being, stopped.
Money, the means of circulation, becomes a
hindrance to circulation. All the laws of pro-
duction and circulation of commodities are
turned upside down. The economic collision
has reached its apogee. The mode of pro-
.
E

66
Socialism :
t
duction is in rebellion against the mode of
exchange.
The fact that the socialised organisation of
production within the factory has developed so
far that it has become incompatible with the
anarchy of production in society, which exists
side by side with and dominates it, is brought
home to the capitalists themselves by the violent
concentration of capital that occurs during crises,
through the ruin of many large, and a still
greater number of small, capitalists. The whole
mechanism of the capitalist mode of production
breaks down under the pressure of the pro-
ductive forces, its own creations.
It is no
longer able to turn all this mass of means of
production into capital. They lie fallow, and
for that very reason the industrial reserve army
must also lie fallow. Means of production,
means of subsistence, available labourers, all
the elements of production and of general wealth,
are present in abundance. But "abundance
becomes the source bf distress and want
(Fourier), because it is the very thing that pre-
vents the transformation of the means of pro-
duction and subsistence into capital. (For in
capitalistic society the means of production can
)

Utopian and Scientific.
67
only function when they have undergone a
preliminary transformation into capital, into the
means of exploiting human labour-power. The
necessity of this transformation into capital of
the means of production and subsistence stands
like a ghost between these and the workers.
It alone prevents the coming together of the
material and personal levers of production ; it
alone forbids the means of production to
function, the workers to work and live. On
the one hand, therefore, the capitalistic mode
of production stands convicted of its own in-
capacity to further direct these productive forces.
On the other, these productive forces them-
selves, with increasing energy, press forward to
the removal of the existing contradiction, to
the abolition of their quality as capital, to the
practical recognition of their character as social
productive forces.
This rebellion of the productive forces, as they
grow more and more powerful, against their
quality as capital, this stronger and stronger
command that their social character shall be re-
cognised, forces the capitalist class itself to
treat them more and more as social productive
forces, so far as this is possible under capitalist
68
Socialism :
conditions. The period of industrial high pres-
sure, with its unbounded inflation of credit, not
less than the crash itself, by the collapse of great
capitalist establishments, tends to bring about
that form of the socialisation of great masses of
means of production, which we meet with in the
different kinds of joint-stock companies. Many
of these means of production and of distribution
are, from the outset, so colossal, that, like the
railroads, they exclude all other forms of
capitalistic exploitation. At a further stage of
evolution this form also becomes insufficient.
The producers on a large scale in a particular
branch of industry in a particular country unite
in a “Trust,” a union for the purpose of regu-
lating production. They determine the total
amount to be produced, parcel it out among
themselves, and thus enforce the selling price
fixed beforehand. But trusts of this kind, as
soon as business becomes bad, are generally liable
to break up, and, on this very account, compel a
yet greater concentration of association. The
whole of the particular industry is turned into
one gigantic joint-stock company; internal
competition gives place to the internal monopoly
of this one company. This has happened in
(6
a


Utopian and Scientific.
69
1890 with the English alkali production, which
is now, after the fusion of 48 large works, in
,
the hands of one company, conducted upon a
single plan, and with a capital of £6,000,000.
In the trusts, freedom of competition
changes into its very opposite—into mono-
poly; and the production without any de-
finite plan of capitalistic society capitulates
to the production upon a definite plan of the
invading socialistic society. Certainly this is
so far still to the benefit and advantage of the
capitalists. But in this case the exploitation is
so palpable that it must break down. No nation
will put up with production conducted by trusts,
with so barefaced an exploitation of the com-
munity by a small band of dividend-mongers.
In any case, with trusts or without, the official
representative of capitalist society—the State-
will ultimately have to undertake the direction of
production. This necessity for conversion into
1 I say “have to.” For only when the means of produc-
tion and distribution have actually outgrown the form of
management by joint-stock companies, and when, there-
fore, the taking them over by the State has become
economically inevitable, only then — even if it is the
State of to-day that effects this — is there an economic
advance, the attainment of another step preliminary to
the taking over of all productive forces by society itself.

-
-

70
Socialism:
But there are other reasons here too.
(
State-property is felt first in the great institutions
for intercourse and communication—the post-
office, the telegraphs, the railways.
If the crises demonstrate the incapacity
of the bourgeoisie for managing any longer
modern productive forces, the transformation
of the great establishments for production and
distribution into joint-stock companies, trusts,
and State property, show how unnecessary the
But of late, since Bismarck went in for State-ownership
of industrial establishments, a kind of spurious Socialism
has arisen, degenerating, now and again, into something of
flunkeyism, that without more ado declares all State-owner-
ship, even of the Bismarckian sort, to be socialistic. Cer-
tainly, if the taking over by the State of the tobacco industry
is socialistic, then Napoleon and Metternich must be num-
bered among the founders of Socialism. If the Belgian
State, for quite ordinary political and financial reasons, itself
constructed its chief railway lines; if Bismarck, not under
any economic compulsion, took over for the State the chief
Prussian lines, simply to be the better able to have them in
hand in case of war, to bring up the railway employees
as voting cattle for the Government, and especially to create
for himself a new source of income independent of parlia-
mentary votes—this was, in no sense, a socialistic meas-
ure, directly or indirectly, consciously or unconsciously.
Otherwise, the Royal Maritime Company, the Royal porce-
lain manufacture, and even the regimental tailor of the army
would also be socialistic institutions, or even, as was seri-
ously proposed by a sly dog in Frederick William III.'s
reign, the taking over by the State of the brothels.

Utopian and Scientific.
71
bourgeoisie are for that purpose. All the
social functions of the capitalist are now per-
formed by salaried employees. The capitalist
has no further social function than that of
pocketing dividends, tearing off coupons, and
gambling on the Stock Exchange, where the
different capitalists despoil one another of their
capital. At first the capitalistic mode of pro-
duction forces out the workers. Now it forces
out the capitalists, and reduces them, just as it
reduced the workers, to the ranks of the sur-
plus population, although not immediately into
those of the industrial reserve army.
But the transformation, either into joint-
stock companies and trusts, or into State-
ownership, does not do away with the capital-
istic nature of the productive forces. In the
joint-stock companies and trusts this is obvious.
And the modern State, again, is only the
organisation that bourgeois society takes on
in order to support the external conditions of
the capitalist mode of production against the en-
croachments, as well of the workers as of individ-
ual capitalists. The modern State, no matter
what its form, is essentially a capitalist machine,
the state of the capitalists, the ideal personifica-
72
Socialism :
0
tion of the total national capital. The more it
proceeds to the taking over of productive forces,
the more does it actually become the national
capitalist, the more citizens does it exploit. The
workers remain wage-workers-proletarians.
The capitalist relation is not done away with.
It is rather brought to a head. But, brought to
a head, it topples over. State-ownership of the
productive forces is not the solution of the con-
flict, but concealed within it are the technical
conditions that form the elements of that solution.
This solution can only consist in the practical
recognition of the social nature of the modern
forces of production, and therefore in the
harmonising the modes of production, ap-
propriation, and exchange with the socialised
character of the means of production. And
this can only come about by society openly
and directly taking possession of the produc-
tive forces which have outgrown all control
except that of society as a whole. The
social character of the means of production
and of the products to-day reacts against the
producers, periodically disrupts all produc-
tion and exchange, acts only like a law of
Nature working blindly, forcibly, destructively.


Utopian and Scientific.
73
But with the taking over by society of the
productive forces, the social character of the
means of production and of the products will
be utilised by the producers with a perfect
understanding of its nature, and instead of
being a source of disturbance and periodical
collapse, will become the most powerful lever
of production itself
.
Active social forces work exactly like
natural forces : blindly, forcibly, destructively,
so long as we do not understand, and reckon
with, them. But when once we understand
them, when once we grasp their action, their
direction, their effects, it depends only upon
ourselves to subject them more and more to
our own will, and by means of them to reach
our own ends. And this holds quite especially
of the mighty productive forces of to-day.
As long as we obstinately refuse to understand
the nature and the character of these social
means of action—and this understanding goes
against the grain of the capitalist mode of pro-
duction and its defenders—so long these forces
are at work in spite of us, in opposition to
us, so long they master us, as we have shown
above in detail.

74
Socialisin :
When do we know this for sure ?
하
​But when once their nature is understood,
they can, in the hands of the producers work-
ing together, be transformed from master
demons into willing servants. The difference
is as that between the destructive force of
electricity in the lightning of the storm, and
electricity under command in the telegraph and
the voltaic arc; the difference between a
conflagration, and fire working in the service
of man. With this recognition at last of the
real nature of the productive forces of to-day, the
social anarchy of production gives place to a
social regulation of production upon a definite
plan, according to the needs of the community
and of each individual. Then the capitalist
mode of appropriation, in which the pro-
duct enslaves first the producer and then the
appropriator, is replaced by the mode of
appropriation of the products that is based
upon the nature of the modern means of
production ; upon the one hand, direct social
appropriation, as means to the maintenance
and extension of production on the other,
direct individual appropriation, as
means of
subsistence and of enjoyment.
Whilst the capitalist mode of production

Utopian and Scientific.
75
The pro-
more and more completely transforms the
great majority of the population into prole-
tarians, it creates the power which, under
penalty of its own destruction, is forced to
accomplish this revolution. Whilst it forces
on, more and more, the transformation of the
vast means of production, already socialised,
into State property, it shows itself the way
to accomplishing this revolution.
letariat seizes political power and turns the
means of production into State property.
But, in doing this, it abolishes itself as
proletariat, abolishes all class distinctions and
class antagonisms, abolishes also the State
as State. Society thus far, based upon class
antagonisms, had need of the State. That is,
of an organisation of the particular class which
was pro tempore the exploiting class, an organisa-
tion for the purpose of preventing any interfer-
ence from without with the existing conditions
of production, and therefore, especially, for the
purpose of forcibly keeping the exploited classes
in the condition of oppression corresponding
with the given mode of production (slavery,
serfdom, wage-labour). The State was the
official representative of society as a whole ;

76
Socialism :
our
the gathering of it together into a visible
embodiment. But it was this only in so far
as it was the State of that class which itself
represented, for the time being, society as a
whole; in ancient times, the State of slave-
owning citizens; in the middle ages, the feudal
lords ; in own time, the bourgeoisie.
When at last it becomes the real representative
of the whole of society, it renders itself un-
necessary As soon as there is no longer
any social class to be held in subjection ; as
soon as class rule, and the individual struggle
for existence based upon our present anarchy
in production, with the collisions and excesses
arising from these, are removed, nothing more
remains to be repressed, and a special repres-
sive force, a State, is no longer necessary.
The first act by virtue of which the State
really constitutes itself the representative of
the whole of society-the taking possession of
the means of production in the name of
society—this is, at the same time, its last
independent act as a State. State interference
in social relations becomes, in one domain
after another, superfluous, and then dies out
of itself; the government of persons is replaced



The
//

Hurry upadie, Russia
Utopian and Scientific.
77
2
or less
by the administration of things, and by the
conduct of processes of production. The State
is not “abolished.” It dies out. This gives the
measure of the value of the phrase "a free
State,” both as to its justifiable use at times
by agitators, and as to its ultimate scientific
insufficiency; and also of the demands of the
so-called anarchists for the abolition of the
State out of hand.
Since the historical appearance of the
capitalist mode of production, the appropria-
tion by society of all the means of production
has often been dreamed of, more
vaguely, by individuals, as well as by sects,
as the ideal of the future. But it could be-
come possible, could become historical
necessity, only when the actual conditions for
its realisation were there. Like every other
social advance, it becomes practicable, not by
men understanding that the existence of classes
is in contradiction to justice, equality, etc.,
not by the mere willingness to abolish these
classes, but by virtue of certain new economic
conditions. The separation of society into an
exploiting and an exploited class, a ruling and an
oppressed class, was the necessary consequence
a
78
Socialism:

of the deficient and restricted development of
production in former times. So long as the total
social labour only yields a produce which but
slightly exceeds that barely necessary for the
existence of all; so long, therefore, as labour
engages all or almost all the time of the great
majority of the members of society--so long,
of necessity, this society is divided into classes.
Side by side with the great majority, exclu-
sively bond slaves to labour, arises a class freed
from directly productive labour, which looks
after the general affairs of society; the direc-
tion of labour, State business, law, science, art,
It is, therefore, the law of division of
labour that lies at the basis of the division into
classes. But this does not prevent this division
into classes from being carried out by means
of violence and robbery, trickery and fraud.
It does not prevent the ruling class, once
having the upper hand, from consolidating its
power at the expense of the working-class,
from turning their social leadership into an
intensified exploitation of the masses.
(But if, upon this showing, division into
classes has a certain historical justification, it
has this only for a given period, only under

etc.

Utopian and Scientific.
79
given social conditions.
It was based upon
the insufficiency of production. It will be
swept away by the complete development
of modern productive forces. And, in fact,
, ,
the abolition of classes in society presupposes
a degree of historical evolution, at which the
existence, not simply of this or that particular
ruling class, but of any ruling class at all, and,
therefore, the existence of class distinction itself
has become an obsolete anachronism. It pre-
supposes, therefore, the development of pro-
duction carried out to a degree at which
appropriation of the means of production and
of the products, and, with this, of political
domination, of the monopoly of culture, and of
intellectual leadership by a particular class of
society, has become not only superfluous, but
economically, politically, intellectually a hin-
drance to development.
This point is now reached. Their political
and intellectual bankruptcy is scarcely any longer
a secret to the bourgeoisie themselves. Their
economic bankruptcy recurs regularly every
ten years. In every crisis, society is suffocated
beneath the weight of its own productive forces
and products, which it cannot use, and stands
80
Socialism :
+
consume,
helpless, face to face with the absurd contra-
diction that the producers have nothing to
because consumers are wanting.
The expansive force of the means of produc-
tion bursts the bonds that the capitalist mode
of production had imposed upon them. Their
deliverance from these bonds is the one pre-
condition for an unbroken, constantly-acceler-
ated development of the productive forces, and
therewith for a practically unlimited increase of
production itself. Nor is this all. The social-
ised appropriation of the means of production
does away, not only with the present artificial
restrictions upon production, but also with the
positive waste and devastation of productive
forces and products that are at the present
time the inevitable concomitants of production,
and that reach their height in the crises.
Further, it sets free for the community at large
a mass of means of production and of products,
by doing away with the senseless extravagance
of the ruling classes of to-day, and their politi-
cal representatives. The possibility of securing
for every member of society, by means of
socialised production, an existence not only
fully sufficient materially, and becoming day


Utopian and Scientific
81
.
by day more full, but an existence guarantee-
ing to all the free development and exercise
of their physical and mental faculties—this
possibility is now for the first time here, but
it is here.1
With the seizing of the means of production
by society, production of commodities is done
away with, and, simultaneously, the mastery
of the product over the producer. Anarchy in
social production is replaced by systematic,
definite organisation. The struggle for indi-
vidual existence disappears. Then for the first
time, man, in a certain sense, is finally marked
off from the rest of the animal kingdom, and
emerges from mere animal conditions of exist-
1 A few figures inay serve to give an approximate idea of
the enormous expansive force of the modern means of pro-
duction, even under capitalist pressure. According to Mr.
Giffen, the total wealth of Great Britain and Ireland
amounted, in round numbers, in
1814 to £2,200,000,000.
1865 to £6,100,000,000.
1875 to £8,500,000,000.
As an instance of the squandering of means of production
and of products during a crisis, the total loss in the German
iron industry alone, in the crisis 1873-78, was given at the
second German Industrial Congress (Berlin, February 21,
1878) as £22,750,000,
F

82
Socialisin :
own
ence into really human ones. The whole sphere
of the conditions of life which environ man, and
which have hitherto ruled man, now comes
under the dominion and control of man, who
for the first time becomes the real, conscious
lord of Nature, because he has now become
master of his own social organisation. The
laws of his own social action, hitherto stand-
ing face to face with man as laws of Nature
foreign to, and dominating, him, will then be
used with full understanding, and so mastered
by him.
Man's social organisation,
hitherto confronting him as a necessity im-
posed by Nature and history, now becomes
the result of his own free action.) The ex-
traneous objective forces that have hitherto
governed history, pass under the control of
man himself.
Only from that time will man
himself, more and more consciously, make his
own history-only from that time will the social
causes set in movement by him have, in the
main and in a constantly growing measure, the
results intended by him. It is the ascent of
man from the kingdom of necessity to the king-
dom of freedom.




Utopian and Scientific.
83
Let us briefly sum up our sketch of historical
evolution.
I. Mediaval Society.—Individual production
on a small scale. Means of production adapted
for individual use ; hence primitive, ungainly,
petty, dwarfed in action. Production for imme-
diate consumption, either of the producer him-
self or of his feudal lord. Only where an
excess of production over this consumption
occurs is such excess offered for sale, enters into
exchange. Production of commodities, there-
fore, only in its infancy. But already it con-
tains within itself, in embryo, anarchy in the
production of society at large.
II. Capitalist Revolution. Transformation
of industry, at first by means of simple co-
operation and manufacture. Concentration of
the means of production, hitherto scattered, into
great workshops. As a consequence, their
transformation from individual to social means
of production--a transformation which does
not, on the whole, affect the form of exchange.
The old forms of appropriation remain in force.
The capitalist appears. In his capacity as owner

84
Socialism:
of the means of production, he also appro-
priates the products -and turns them into com-
modities. Production has become a social act.
Exchange and appropriation continue to be
individual acts, the acts of individuals. The
social product is appropriated by the individual
capitalist. Fundamental contradiction, whence
arise all the contradictions in which our present
day society moves, and which modern industry
brings to light.

A. Severance of the producer from the means
of production. Condemnation of the worker
to wage-labour for life. Antagonism between
the proletariat and the bourgeoisie.

B. Growing predominance and increasing
effectiveness of the laws governing the produc-
tion of commodities. Unbridled competition.
Contradiction between socialised organisation in
the individual factory and social anarchy in
production as a whole.
C. On the one hand, perfecting of machinery,
made by competition compulsory for each in-
dividual manufacturer, and complemented by a

Utopian and Scientific.
85
constantly growing displacement of labourers.
Industrial reserve-army. On the other hand,
unlimited extension of production, also compul-
sory under competition, for every manufacturer.
On both sides, unheard of development of pro-
ductive forces, excess of supply over demand,
over-production, glutting of the markets, crises
every ten years, the vicious circle : excess here,
of means of production and products-excess
there, of labourers, without employment and
without means of existence. But these two
levers of production and of social well-being
are unable to work together, because the capi-
talist form of production prevents the productive
forces from working and the products from
circulating, unless they are first turned into
capital—which their very superabundance pre-
vents. The contradiction has grown into an
absurdity. The mode of production rises in
rebellion against the form of exchange. The
bourgeoisie are convicted of incapacity further
to manage their own social productive forces.

D. Partial recognition of the social character
of the productive forces forced upon the capi-
talists themselves. Taking over of the great

86
Socialism :
institutions for production and communication,
first by joint-stock companies, later on by trusts,
then by the State. The bourgeoisie demon-
strated to be a superfluous class. All its social
functions are now performed by salaried em-
ployees.
III. Proletarian Revolution.-Solution of the
contradictions. The proletariat seizes the public
power, and by means of this transforms the
socialised means of production, slipping from
the hands of the bourgeoisie, into public pro-
perty. By this act, the proletariat frees the
means of production from the character of
capital they have thus far borne, and gives their
socialised character complete freedom to work
itself out.
Socialised production upon a pre-
determined plan becomes henceforth possible.
The development of production makes the exist-
ence of different classes of society thenceforth
an anachronism. In proportion as anarchy in
social production vanishes, the political autho-
rity of the State dies out. Man, at last the
master of his own form of social organisation,
becomes at the same time the lord over Nature,
his own master-free.
To accomplish this act of universal emanci-

Utopian and Scientific.
87
pation is the historịcal mission of the modern
proletariat. To thoroughly comprehend the
historical conditions and thus the very nature
of this act, to impart to the now oppressed
proletarian class a full knowledge of the condi-
tions and of the meaning of the momentous
act it is called upon to accomplish, this is the
task of the theoretical expression of the prole-
tarian movement, scientific Socialism.


APPENDI X.
THE MARK.
See p. 57

In a country like Germany, in which quite half the
population live by agriculture, it is necessary that the
socialist working-men, and through them the peasants,
should learn how the present system of landed pro-
perty, large as well as small, has arisen. It is neces-
sary to contrast the misery of the agricultural labourers
of the present time and the mortgage-servitude of the
small peasants, with the old common property of all
free men in what was then in truth their “fatherland,"
the free common possession of all by inheritance.
I shall give, therefore, a short historical sketch of
the primitive agrarian conditions of the German
tribes. A few traces of these have survived until our
own time, but all through the Middle Ages they
served as the basis and as the type of all public in-
stitutions, and permeated the whole of public life, not
only in Germany, but also in the north of France,
England, and Scandinavia. And yet they have been
89
90
Appendix.
so completely forgotten, that recently G. L. Maurer
has had to re-discover their real significance.
Two fundamental facts, that arose spontaneously,
govern the primitive history of all, or of almost all,
nations; the grouping of the people according to
kindred, and common property in the soil. And this
was the case with the Germans. As they had brought
with them from Asia the method of grouping by tribes
and gentes, as they even in the time of the Romans
so drew up their battle array, that those related to
each other always stood shoulder to shoulder, this
grouping also governed the partitioning of their new
territory east of the Rhine and north of the Danube.
Each tribe settled down upon the new possession, not
according to whim or accident, but, as Cæsar ex-
pressly states, according to the gens-relationship
between the members of the tribe. A particular area
was apportioned to each of the nearly related larger
groups, and on this again the individual gentes, each
including a certain number of families, settled down
by villages. A number of allied villages formed a
hundred (old high German, huntari; old Norse,
heradh). A number of hundreds formed a gau or shire.
The sum total of the shires was the people itself.
The land which was not taken possession of by the
village remained at the disposal of the hundred.
What was not assigned to the latter remained for the


Appendix.
91
shire. Whatever after that was still to be disposed of
-generally a very large tract of land—was the im-
mediate possession of the whole people. Thus in
Sweden we find all these different stages of common
holding side by side. Each village had its village
common land (bys almänningar), and beyond this
was the hundred common land (härads), the shire
common land (lands), and finally the people's common
land. This last, claimed by the king as representative
of the whole nation, was known therefore as Konungs
almänningar. But all of these, even the royal lands,
were named, without distinction, almänningar, com-
mon land.
This old Swedish arrangement of the common
land, in its minute subdivision, evidently belongs to
a later stage of development. If it ever did exist
in Germany, it soon vanished. The rapid increase in
the population led to the establishment of a number
of daughter-villages on the Mark, i.e., on the large
tract of land attributed to each individual mother
village. These daughter-villages formed a single
mark-association with the mother village, on the basis
of equal or of restricted rights. Thus we find every-
where in Germany, so far as research goes back, a
larger or smaller number of villages united in one
mark-association. But these associations were, at
least, at first, still subject to the great federations of
92
Appendix.
the marks of the hundred, or of the shire. And,
finally, the people, as a whole, originally formed one
single great mark-association, not only for the admin-
istration of the land that remained the immediate
possession of the people, but also as a supreme court
over the subordinate local marks.
Until the time when the Frankish kingdom sub-
dued Germany east of the Rhine, the centre of gravity
of the mark-association seems to have been in the gau
or shire—the shire seems to have formed the unit
mark-association. For, upon this assumption alone
is it explicable that, upon the official division of the
kingdom, so many old and large marks reappear as
shires. Soon after this time began the decay of the
old large marks. Yet even in the code known as the
Kaiserrecht, the “Emperor's Law” of the thirteenth or
fourteenth century, it is a general rule that a mark
includes from six to twelve villages.
In Cæsar's time a great part at least of the Ger-
mans, the Suevi, to wit, who had not yet got any
fixed settlement, cultivated their fields in common
From analogy with other peoples we may take it that
this was carried on in such a way that the individual
gentes, each including a number of nearly related
families, cultivated in common the land apportioned
to them, which was changed from year to year, and
divided the products among the families. But after

6

Appendix.
93
era, had
the Suevi, about the beginning of our era,
settled down in their new domains, this soon ceased.
At all events, Tacitus (150 years after Cæsar) only
mentions the tilling of the soil by individual families.
But the land to be tilled only belonged to these for a
year. Every year it was divided up anew and re-
distributed.
How this was done, is still to be seen at the
present time on the Moselle and in the Hochwald,
on the so-called "Gehöferschaften.” There the whole
of the land under cultivation, arable and meadows,
not annually it is true, but every three, six, nine, or
twelve years, is thrown together and parcelled out
into a number of “Gewanne,” or areas, according to
situation and the quality of the soil. Each Gewann
is again divided into as many equal parts, long,
narrow strips, as there are claimants in the associa-
tion. These are shared by lot among the members,
so that every member receives an equal portion in
each Gewann. At the present time the shares have
become unequal by divisions among heirs, sales, etc. ;
but the old full share still furnishes the unit that deter-
mines the half, or quarter, or one-eighth shares. The
uncultivated land, forest and pasture land, is still a
common possession for common use.
The same primitive arrangement obtained until the
beginning of this century in the so-called assignments
by lot (Loosgüter) of the Rhein palatinate in Bavaria,
94
Appendix.
whose arable land has since been turned into the
private property of individuals. The Gehöferschaften
also find it more and more to their interest to let the
periodical re-division become obsolete and to turn the
changing ownership into settled private property.
Thus most of them, if not all, have died out in the last
forty years and given place to villages with peasant
proprietors using the forests and pasture land in

common.

The first piece of ground that passed into the
private property of individuals was that on which the
house stood. The inviolability of the dwelling, that
basis of all personal freedom, was transferred from
the caravan of the nomadic train to the log house of
the stationary peasant, and gradually was transformed
into a complete right of property in the homestead.
This had already come about in the time of Tacitus.
The free German's homestead must, even in that time,
have been excluded from the mark, and thereby in-
accessible to its officials, a safe place of refuge for
fugitives, as we find it described in the regulations
of the marks of later times, and to some extent,
even in the “ leges Barbarorum,” the codifications of
German tribal customary law, written down from the
fifth to the eighth century. For the sacredness of
the dwelling was not the effect but the cause of its
transformation into private property.

Appendix.
95
Four or five hundred years after Tacitus, according
to the same law-books, the cultivated land also was
the hereditary, although not the absolute freehold
property of individual peasants, who had the right
to dispose of it by sale or any other means of transfer.
The causes of this transformation, as far as we can
trace them, are twofold.
First, from the beginning there were in Germany
itself, besides the close villages already described, with
their complete ownership in common of the land,
other villages where, besides homesteads, the fields
also were excluded from the mark, the property of
the community, and were parcelled out among the in-
dividual peasants as their hereditary property. But
this was only the case where the nature of the place,
so to say, compelled it: in narrow valleys, and on
narrow, flat ridges between marshes, as in Westphalia;
later on, in the Odenwald, and in almost all the
Alpine valleys. In these places the village consisted,
as it does now, of scattered individual dwellings, each
surrounded by the fields belonging to it. A periodical
re-division of the arable land was in these cases hardly
possible, and so what remained within the mark was
only the circumjacent untilled land. When, later, the
right to dispose of the homestead by transfer to a
third person became an important consideration, those
who were free owners of their fields found them-

96
Appendix,
selves in an advantageous position. The wish to
attain these advantages may have led in many of the
villages with common ownership of the land to the
letting the customary method of partition die out and
to the transformation of theindividual shares of the mem-
bers into hereditary and transferable freehold property.
But, second, conquest led the Germans on to Roman
territory, where, for centuries, the soil had been private
property (the unlimited property of Roman law), and
where the small number of conquerors could not
possibly altogether do away with a form of holding
so deeply rooted. The connexion of hereditary private
property in fields and meadows with Roman law, at all
events on territory that had been Roman, is supported
by the fact that such remains of common property in
arable land as have come down to our time are found
on the left bank of the Rhine-i.e., on conquered terri-
tory, but territory thoroughly Germanised. When the
Franks settled here in the fifth century, common
ownership in the fields must still have existed among
them, otherwise we should not find there Gehöfer-
schaften and Loosgüter. But here also private owner-
ship soon got the mastery, for this form of holding
only do we find mentioned, in so far as arable land is
concerned, in the Riparian law of the sixth century,
And in the interior of Germany, as I have said, the
cultivated land also soon became private property.



Appendix.
97
But if the German conquerors adopted private
ownership in fields and meadows—i.e., gave up at the
first division of the land, or soon after, any re-par-
tition (for it was nothing more than this), they intro-
duced, on the other hand, everywhere their German
mark system, with common holding of woods and
pastures, together with the over-lordship of the
mark in respect to the partitioned land. This hap-
pened not only with the Franks in the north of France
and the Anglo-Saxons in England, but also with the
Burgundians in Eastern France, the Visigoths in
the south of France and Spain, and the Ostro-
goths and Langobardians in Italy. In these last-
named countries, however, as far as is known, traces
of the mark government have lasted until the present
time almost exclusively in the higher mountain
regions.
The form that the mark government has assumed
after the periodical partition of the cultivated land had
fallen into disuse, is that which now meets us, not only
in the old popular laws of the fifth, sixth, seventh, and
eighth centuries, but also in the English and Scandin-
avian law-books of the Middle Ages, in the many
German mark regulations (the so-called Weisthümer)
from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century, and in
the customary laws (coûtumes) of Northern France.
Whilst the association of the mark gave up the
G

98
Appendix.
right of, from time to time, partitioning fields and
meadows anew among its individual members, it did
not give up a single one of its other rights over these
lands. And these rights were very important. The
association had only transferred their fields to in-
dividuals with a view to their being used as arable
and meadow land, and with that view alone. Beyond
that the individual owner had no right. Treasures
found in the earth, if they lay deeper than the
ploughshare goes, did not, therefore, originally
belong to him, but to the community. It was the
, .
same thing with digging for ores, and the like. All
these rights were, later on, stolen by the princes and
landlords for their own use.
But, further, the use of arable and meadow lands
was under the supervision and direction of the com-
munity and that in the following form. Wherever
three-field farming obtained—and that was almost
everywhere—the whole cultivated area of the village
was divided into three equal parts, each of which
was alternately sown one year with winter seed, the
second with summer seed, and the third lay fallow.
Thus the village had each year its winter field, its
summer field, its fallow field. In the partition of the
land care was taken that each member's share was
made up of equal portions from each of the three
fields, so that everyone could, without difficulty,

Appendix.
99
accommodate himself to the regulations of the com-
munity, in accordance with which he would have to
sow autumn seed only in his winter field, and so on.
The field whose turn it was to lie fallow returned,
for the time being, into the common possession, and
served the community in general for pasture. And as
soon as the two other fields were reaped, they likewise
became again common property until seed-time, and
were used as common pasturage. The same thing
occurred with the meadows after the aftermath. The
owners had to remove the fences upon all fields given
over to pasturage. This compulsory pasturage, of
course, made it necessary that the time of sowing and
of reaping should not be left to the individual, but be
fixed for all by the community or by custom.
All other land, i.e., all that was not house and farm-
yard, or so much of the mark as had been distributed
among individuals, remained, as in early times,
common property for common use; forests, pasture
lands, heaths, moors, rivers, ponds, lakes, roads and
,
bridges, hunting and fishing grounds. Just as the
share of each member in so much of the mark as was
distributed was of equal size, so was his share also in
the use of the “common mark.” The nature of
this use was determined by the members of the
community as a whole. So, too, was the mode of
partition, if the soil that had been cultivated no

100
Appendix.
longer sufficed, and a portion of the common mark
was taken under cultivation. The chief use of the
common mark was in pasturage for the cattle and
feeding of pigs on acorns. Besides that, the forest
yielded timber and firewood, litter for the animals,
berries and mushrooms, whilst the moor, where it ex-
isted, yielded turf. The regulations as to pasture,
the use of wood, etc., make up the most part of
the many mark records written down at various
epochs between the thirteenth and the eighteenth
centuries, at the time when the old unwritten law
of custom began to be contested. The common
woodlands that are still met with here and there,
are the remnants of these ancient unpartitioned
marks. Another relic, at all
all events in West
and South Germany, is the idea, deeply rooted
in the popular consciousness, that the forest should be
common property, wherein every one may gather
flowers, berries, mushrooms, beechnuts and the like,
and generally so long as he does no mischief, act and
do as he will. But this also Bismarck remedies,
and with his famous berry-legislation brings down
the Western Provinces to the level of the old Prussian
squirearchy.
Just as the members of the community originally
had equal shares in the soil and equal rights of us-
age, so they had also an equal share in the legislation,

Appendix.
IOI
administration, and jurisdiction within the mark. At
fixed times and, if necessary, more frequently, they
met in the open air to discuss the affairs of the mark
and to sit in judgment upon breaches of regulations
and disputes concerning the mark. It was, only in
miniature, the primitive assembly of the German
people, which was, originally, nothing other than a
great assembly of the mark. Laws were made, but
only in rare cases of necessity. Officials were chosen,
their conduct in office examined, but chiefly judicial
functions were exercised. The president had only
to formulate the questions. The judgment was given
by the aggregate of the members present.
The unwritten law of the mark was, in primitive
times, pretty much the only public law of those
German tribes, which had no kings; the old tribal
nobility, which disappeared during the conquest of
the Roman empire, or soon after, easily fitted itself
into this primitive constitution, as easily as all other
spontaneous growths of the time, just as the Celtic
clan-nobility, even as late as the seventeenth century,
found its place in the Irish holding of the soil in com-
mon. And this unwritten law has struck such deep
roots into the whole life of the Germans, that we find
traces of it at every step and turn in the historical
development of our people. In primitive times, the
whole public authority in time of peace was exclu-


IO2
Appendix.
sively judicial, and rested in the popular assembly of
the hundred, the shire, or of the whole tribe. But
this popular tribunal was only the popular tribunal of
the mark adapted to cases that did not purely
concern the mark, but came within the scope of
the public authority. Even when the Frankish kings
began to transform the self-governing shires into pro-
vinces governed by royal delegates, and thus separated
the royal shire-courts from the common mark tribun-
als, in both the judicial function remained vested in
the people. It was only when the old democratic
freedom had been long undermined, when attendance
at the public assemblies and tribunals had become a
severe burden upon the impoverished freemen, that
Charlemagne, in his shire-courts, could introduce
judgment by Schöffen, lay assessors, appointed
by the king's judge, in the place of judgment by
the whole popular assembly. But this did not
seriously touch the tribunals of the mark. These, on
the contrary, still remained the model even for the
feudal tribunals in the Middle Ages. In these, too,
the feudal lord only formulated the issues, whilst
1 Not to be confused with the Schöffen courts after the manner
of Bismarck and Leonhardt, in which lawyers and lay assessors
combined find verdict and judgment. In the old judicial courts
there were no lawyers at all, the presiding judge had no vote at
all, and the Schöffen or lay assessors gave the verdict inde-
pendently.

Appendix.
103
the vassals themselves found the verdict. The institu-
tions governing a village during the Middle Ages are
but those of an independent village mark, and passed
into those of a town as soon as the village was trans-
formed into a town, i.e., was fortified with walls and
trenches. All later constitutions of cities have grown
out of these original town mark regulations. And,
finally, from the assembly of the mark were copied
the arrangements of the numberless free associations
of mediæval times not based upon common holding
of the land, and especially those of the free guilds.
The rights conferred upon the guild for the exclusive
carrying on of a particular trade were dealt with just
as if they were rights in a common mark. With the
same jealousy, often with precisely the same means
in the guilds as in the mark, care was taken that
the share of each member in the common benefits
and advantages should be equal, or as nearly equal
as possible.
All this shows the mark organisation to have
possessed an almost wonderful capacity for adapta-
tion to the most different departments of public life
and to the most various ends. The same qualities
it manifested during the progressive development of
agriculture and in the struggle of the peasants with the
advance of large landed property. It had arisen with
the settlement of the Germans in Germania Magna,

104
Appendix.
that is, at a time when the breeding of cattle was the
chief means of livelihood, and when the rudimentary,
half-forgotten agriculture which they had brought
with them from Asia was only just put into practice
again. It held its own all through the Middle Ages in
fierce, incessant conflicts with the land-holding nobility.
But it was still such a necessity that wherever the
nobles had appropriated the peasants' land, the
villages inhabited by these peasants, now turned into
serfs, or at best into coloni or dependent tenants, were
still organised on the lines of the old mark, in spite of
the constantly increasing encroachments of the lords
of the manor. Farther on we will give an example of
this. It adapted itself to the most different forms
of holding the cultivated land, so long as only an
uncultivated common was still left, and in like man-
ner to the most different rights of property in the
common mark, as soon as this ceased to be the free
property of the community. It died out when almost
the whole of the peasants' lands, both private and
common, were stolen by the nobles and the clergy,
with the willing help of the princes. But economi-
cally obsolete and incapable of continuing as the pre-
valent social organisation of agriculture it became
only, when the great advances in farming of the
last hundred years made agriculture a science and led
to altogether new systems of carrying it on.

Appendix.
105
As re-
The undermining of the mark organisation began
soon after the conquest of the Roman empire.
presentatives of the nation, the Frankish kings took
possession of the immense territories belonging to the
people as a whole, especially the forests, in order to
squander them away as presents to their courtiers,
to their generals, to bishops and abbots. Thus
they laid the foundation of the great landed estates,
later on, of the nobles and the Church. Long
before the time of Charlemagne, the Church had a
full third of all the land in France, and it is certain
that, during the Middle Ages, this proportion
held generally for the whole of Catholic Western
Europe.
The constant wars, internal and external, whose
regular consequences were confiscations of land, ruined
a great number of peasants, so that even during the
Merovingian dynasty, there were very many free men
owning no land. The incessant wars of Charlemagne
broke down the mainstay of the free peasantry. Origin-
ally every freeholder owed service, and not only had
to equip himself, but also to maintain himself under
arms for six months. No wonder that even in Charle-
magne's time scarcely one man in five could be
actually got to serve. Under the chaotic rule of his
successors, the freedom of the peasants went still more
rapidly to the dogs. On the one hand, the ravages of

106
Appendix.
the Northmen's invasions, the eternal wars between
kings, and feuds between nobles, compelled one free
peasant after another to seek the protection of some
lord. Upon the other hand, the covetousness of these
same lords and of the Church hastened this process;
by fraud, by promises, threats, violence, they forced
more and more peasants and peasants' land under
their yoke. In both cases, the peasants' land was added
to the lord's manor, and was, at best, only given back
for the use of the peasant in return for tribute and ser-
vice. Thus the peasant, from a free owner of the land,
was turned into a tribute-paying, service-rendering ap-
panage of it, into a serf. This was the case in the
western Frankish kingdom, especially west of the
Rhine. East of the Rhine, on the other hand, a large
number of free peasants still held their own, for the
most part scattered, occasionally united in villages
entirely composed of freemen. Even here, however,
in the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth centuries, the over-
whelming power of the nobles and the Church was
constantly forcing more and more peasants into serf-
dom.
When a large landowner-clerical or lay-got hold
of a peasant's holding, he acquired with it, at the same
time, the rights in the mark that appertained to the
holding. The new landlords were thus members of
the mark and, within the mark, they were, originally,


Appendix.
107
only regarded as on an equality with the other mem-
bers of it, whether free or serfs, even if these happened
to be their own bondsmen. But soon, in spite of the
dogged resistance of the peasants, the lords acquired
in many places special privileges in the mark, and were
often able to make the whole of it subject to their own
rule as lords of the manor. Nevertheless the old or-
ganisation of the mark continued, though now it was
presided over and encroached upon by the lord of the
manor.
How absolutely necessary at that time the constitu-
tion of the mark was for agriculture, even on large
estates, is shown in the most striking way by the col-
onisation of Brandenburg and Silesia by Frisian and
Saxon settlers, and by settlers from the Netherlands
and the Frankish banks of the Rhine. From the
twelfth century, the people were settled in villages on
the lands of the lords according to German law, i.e.,
according to the old mark law, so far as it still held on
the manors owned by lords. Every man had house
and homestead; a share in the village fields, determined
after the old method by lot, and of the same size for
and the right of using the woods and pastures,
generally in the woods of the lord of the manor, less
frequently in a special mark. These rights were
hereditary. The fee simple of the land continued in
the lord, to whom the colonists owed certain hereditary
all ;

108
Appendix.
tributes and services. But these dues were so moder-
ate, that the condition of the peasants was better here
than anywhere else in Germany. Hence, they kept
quiet when the peasants' war broke out. For this
apostasy from their own cause they were sorely chas-
tised.
About the middle of the thirteenth century there
was everywhere a decisive change in favour of the
peasants. The crusades had prepared the way for it.
.
Many of the lords, when they set out to the East,
explicitly set their peasant serfs free.
Others were
killed or never returned. Hundreds of noble families
vanished, whose peasant serfs frequently gained their
freedom. Moreover, as the needs of the landlords in-
creased, the command over the payments in kind and
services of the peasants became much more important
than that over their persons. The serfdom of the
earlier Middle Ages, which still had in it much of
ancient slavery, gave to the lords rights which lost
more and more their value ; it gradually vanished, the
position of the serfs narrowed itself down to that of
simple hereditary tenants. As the method of cultivating
the land reinained exactly as of old, an increase in the
revenues of the lord of the manor was only to be ob-
tained by the breaking up of new ground, the estab-
lishing new villages. But this was only possible by a
friendly agreement with the colonists, whether they be-


Appendix.
109
longed to the estate or were strangers. Hence, in
the documents of this time, we meet with a clear deter-
a
mination and a moderate scale of the peasants' dues,
and good treatment of the peasants, especially by the
spiritual landlords. And, lastly, the favourable posi-
tion of the new colonists reacted again on the condition
of their neighbours, the bondmen, so that in all the
North of Germany these also, whilst they continued
their services to the lords of the manor, received their
personal freedom. The Slav and Lithuanian peasants
alone were not freed. But this was not to last.
In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the towns
rose rapidly, and became rapidly rich. Their artistic
handicraft, their luxurious life, throve and flourished,
especially in South Germany and on the Rhine. The
profusion of the town patricians aroused the envy of the
coarsely-fed, coarsely-clothed, roughly-furnished, coun-
try lords. But whence to obtain all these fine things?
Lying in wait for travelling merchants became more
and more dangerous and unprofitable. But to buy
them, money was requisite. And that the peasants
alone could furnish. Hence, renewed oppression of
the peasants, higher tributes, and more corvée; hence
renewed and always increasing eagerness to force the
free peasants to become bondmen, the bondmen to
become serfs, and to turn the common mark-land into
land belonging to the lord. In this the princes and


ΙΙΟ
Appendix.
nobles were helped by the Roman jurists, who, with
their application of Roman jurisprudence to German
conditions, for the most part not understood by them,
knew how to produce endless confusion, but yet that
sort of confusion by which the lord always won and
the peasant always lost. The spiritual lords helped
themselves in a more simple way. They forged
documents, by which the rights of the peasants
were curtailed and their duties increased. Against
these robberies by the landlords, the peasants, from
the end of the fifteenth century, frequently rose in
isolated insurrections, until, in 1525, the great
Peasants' War overflowed Suabia, Bavaria, Franconia,
extending into Alsace, the Palatinate, the Rheingau,
and Thuringen. The peasants succumbed after hard
fighting. From that time dates the renewed predom-
inance of serfdom amongst the German peasants
generally. In those places where the fight had raged,
all remaining rights of the peasants were now shame-
lessly trodden under foot, their common land turned
into the property of the lord, they themselves into
serfs. The North German peasants, being placed in
more favourable conditions, had remained quiet ; their
only reward was that they fell under the same sub-
jection, only more slowly. Serfdom is introduced
among the German peasantry from the middle of
the sixteenth century in Eastern Prussia, Pomerania,



Appendix.
III
Brandenburg, Silesia, and from the end of that century
in Schleswig-Holstein, and henceforth becomes more
and more their general condition.
This new act of violence had, however, an economic
cause. From the wars consequent upon the Pro-
testant Reformation, only the German princes had
gained greater power. It was now all up with the
nobles' favourite trade of highway robbery. If the
nobles were not to go to ruin, greater revenues had
to be got out of their landed property. But the only
way to effect this was to work at least a part of their
own estates on their own account, upon the model
of the large estates of the princes, and especially of the
monasteries. That which had hitherto been the
exception now became a necessity.
But this new
agricultural plan was stopped by the fact that almost
everywhere the soil had been given to tribute-paying
peasants. As soon as the tributary peasants, whether
free men or coloni, had been turned into serfs, the
noble lords had a free hand. Part of the peasants
were, as it is now called in Ireland, evicted, i.e., either
hunted away or degraded to the level of cottars,
with mere huts and a bit of garden land, whilst
the ground belonging to their homestead was made
part and parcel of the demesne of the lord, and was
cultivated by the new cottars and such peasants as
were still left, in corvée labour. Not only were many

II2
Appendix.
peasants thus actually driven away, but the corvée
service of those still left was enhanced considerably,
and at an ever increasing rate. The capitalistic period
announced itself in the country districts as the period
of agricultural industry on a large scale, based upon
the corvée labour of serfs.
This transformation took place at first rather slowly.
But then came the Thirty Years' War. For a whole
generation Germany was overrun in all directions by
the most licentious soldiery known to history. Every-
where was burning, plundering, rape, and murder.
The peasant suffered most where, apart from the
great armies, the smaller independent bands, or
rather the freebooters, operated uncontrolled, and
upon their own account. The devastation and de-
population were beyond all bounds.
When peace
came, Germany lay on the ground helpless,
down-trodden, cut to pieces, bleeding; but, once
again, the most pitiable, miserable of all was the
peasant.
The land-owning noble was now the only lord in
the country districts. The princes, who just at that
time were reducing to nothing his political rights in
the assemblies of Estates by way of compensa-
tion, left him a free hand against the peasants.
The last power of resistance on the part of the
peasants had been broken by the war. Thus the

Appendix.
II3
noble was able to arrange all agrarian conditions in
the manner most conducive to the restoration of his
ruined finances. Not only were the deserted home-
steads of the peasants, without further ado, united with
the lord's demesne; the eviction of the peasants was
carried on wholesale and systematically. The greater
the lord of the manor's demesne, the greater, of
course, the corvée required from the peasants. The
system of “unlimited corvée " was introduced anew;
the noble lord was able to command the peasant,
his family, his cattle, to labour for him, as often
and as long as he pleased. Serfdom was now
general; a free peasant was now as rare as a white
And in order that the noble lord might be
in a position to nip in the bud the very smallest
resistance on the part of the peasants, he received
from the princes of the land the right of patrimonial
jurisdiction, i.e., he was nominated sole judge in all
cases of offence and dispute among the peasants, even
if the peasant's dispute was with him, the lord himself,
so that the lord was judge in his own case! From
that time, the stick and the whip ruled the agri-
cultural districts. The German peasant, like the
whole of Germany, had reached his lowest point of
degradation. The peasant, like the whole of Ger-
many, had become so powerless that all self-help failed
him, and deliverance could only come from without.
crow.
H

114
Appendix.
And it came.
With the French Revolution came
for Germany also and for the German peasant the
dawn of a better day. No sooner had the armies of
the Revolution conquered the left bank of the Rhine,
than all the old rubbish vanished, as at the stroke of
an enchanter's wand—corvée service, rent dues of every
kind to the lord, together with the noble lord himself.
The peasant of the left bank of the Rhine was now
lord of his own holding; moreover, in the Code Civil,
drawn up at the time of the Revolution and only
baffled and botched by Napoleon, he received a
code of laws 'adapted to his new conditions, that he
could not only understand, but also carry comfort-
ably in his pocket.
But the peasant on the right bank of the Rhine
had still to wait a long time. It is true that in
Prussia, after the well-deserved defeat at Jena, some
of the most shameful privileges of the nobles were
abolished, and the so-called redemption of such peasants'
burdens as were still left was made legally possible.
But to a great extent and for a long time this was
only on paper. In the other German States, still less
was done. A second French Revolution, that of 1830,
was needed to bring about the "redemption” in
Baden and certain other small States bordering upon
France. And at the moment when the third French
Revolution, in 1848, at last carried Germany along
)

Appendix.
115
with it, the redemption was far from being completed
in Prussia, and in Bavaria had not even begun. After
that, it went along more rapidly and unimpeded; the
corvée labour of the peasants, who had this time
become rebellious on their own account, had lost all
value.
And in what did this redemption consist ? In this,
that the noble lord, on receipt of a certain sum of
money or of a piece of land from the peasant, should
henceforth recognise the peasant's land, as much or as
little as was left to him, as the peasant's property, free
of all burdens; though all the land that had at any
time belonged to the noble lord was nothing but land
stolen from the peasants. Nor was this all. In these
arrangements, the Government officials charged with
carrying them out almost always took the side, natur-
ally, of the lords, with whom they lived and caroused,
so that the peasants, even against the letter of the law,
were again defrauded right and left.
And thus, thanks to three French revolutions, and
to the German one, that has grown out of them, we
have once again a free peasantry. But how very in-
ferior is the position of our free peasant of to-day
compared with the free member of the mark of the
olden time! His homestead is generally much smaller,
and the unpartitioned mark is reduced to a few very
small and poor bits of communal forest. But, without
,



116
Appendix.
the use of the mark, there can be no cattle for the
small peasant; without cattle, no manure; without
manure, no agriculture. The tax-collector and the
officer of the law threatening in the rear of him, whom
the peasant of to-day knows only too well, were people
unknown to the old members of the mark.
And so
was the mortgagee, into whose clutches nowadays
one peasant's holding after another falls. And the
best of it is that these modern free peasants, whose
property is so restricted, and whose wings are so clipped,
were created in Germany, where everything happens
too late, at a time when scientific agriculture and the
newly-invented agricultural machinery make cultivation
on a small scale a method of production more and more
antiquated, less and less capable of yielding a liveli-
hood. As spinning and weaving by machinery re-
placed the spinning-wheel and the hand-loom, so these
new methods of agricultural production must inevit-
ably replace the cultivation of land in small plots by
landed property on a iarge scale, provided that the
time necessary for this be granted.
For already the whole of European agriculture, as
carried on at the present time, is threatened by an
overpowering rival, viz., the production of corn on a
gigantic scale by America. Against this soil, fertile,
manured by nature for a long range of years, and to
be had for a bagatelle, neither our small peasants, up


Appendix.
117
to their eyes in debt, nor our large landowners, equally
deep in debt, can fight. The whole of the European
agricultural system is being beaten by American com-
petition. 'Agriculture, as far as Europe is concerned,
will only be possible if carried on upon socialised lines,
and for the advantage of society as a whole.
This is the outlook for our peasants. And the
restoration of a free peasant class, starved and stunted
as it is, has this value,—that it has put the peasant in
a position, with the aid of his natural comrade, the
worker, to help himself, as soon as he once under-
stands how.
a

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1. Work and Wages.
Prof. J. E. THOROLD ROGERS.
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people."-- Athenæum.
2. Civilisation : its Cause and Cure.
EDWARD CARPENTER.
“No passing piece of polemics, but a permanent possession."-Scottish Review.
3. Quintessence of Socialism.
Dr. SCHÄFFLE.
“Precisely the manual needed. Brief, lucid, fair and wise."— British Weekly.
4. Darwinism and Politics.
D. G. RITCHIE, M.A. (Oxon.).
New Edition, with two additional Essays on HUMAN EVOLUTION.
“One of the most suggestive books we have met with.”- Literary World.
5. Religion of Socialism.
E. BELFORT Bax.
6. Ethics of Socialism.
E. BELFORT BAX.
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7. The Drink Question.
Dr. KATE MITCHELL.
“Plenty of interesting matter for reflection.'-Graphic.
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Prof. M. MACMILLAN.
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EDWARD CARPENTER.
"The literary power is unmistakable, their freshness of style, their humour, and
their enthusiasm."-Pall Mall Gazette.
10. Socialism in England.
SIDNEY WEBB, LL.B.
“The best general view of the subject from the modern Socialist side." —Athenæum.
11. Prince Bismarck and State Socialism.
W. H. DAWSON.
"A succinct, well-digested review of German social and economic legislation since
1870."-Saturday Review.
12. Godwin's Political Justice (On Property).
Edited by H. S. SALT.
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13. The Story of the French Revolution.
E. BELFORT BAX.
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14. The Co-Operative Commonwealth.
LAURENCE GRONLUND.
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BERNARD BOSANQUET, M.A. (Oxon.).
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16. Charity Organisation. C. S. Loch, Secretary to Charity Organisation
Society.
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“Deserves a wide circulation.”---Scotsman.
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18. Self-Help a Hundred Years Ago.
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19. The New York State Reformatory at Elmira. ALEXANDER WINTER.
With Preface by HAVELOCK ELLIS.
"A valuable contribution to the literature of penology."-Black and White.


SOCIAL SCIENCE SERIES-(Continued).
20. Common Sense about Women.
T. W. HIGGINSON.
“An admirable collection of papers, advocating in the most liberal spirit the
emancipation of women.”-Woman's Herald.
21. The Unearned Increment.
W. H. Dawson.
“A concise but comprehensive volume.”—Echo.
22. Our Destiny.
LAURENCE GRONLUND.
"A very vigorous little book, dealing with the influence of Socialism on morals
and religion.”—Daily Chronicle.
23. The Working-Class Movement in America.
Dr. EDWARD and E. MARX AVELING.
“Will give a good idea of the condition of the working classes in America, and of
the various organisations which they have formed." --Scots Leader.
24. Luxury
Prof. EMILE DE LAVELEYE.
"An eloquent plea on moral and economical grounds for simplicity of life.”-
Academy.
25. The Land and the Labourers.
Rev. C. W. STUBBS, M.A.
“This admirable book should be circulated in every village in the country.”-
Manchester Guardian.
26. The Evolution of Property.
PAUL LAFARGUE.
“Will prove interesting and profitable to all students of economic history."-
Scotsman,
27. Crime and its Causes.
W. DOUGLAS MORRISON.
“Can hardly fail to suggest to all readers several new and pregnant reflections on
the subject.”- Anti-Jacobin.
28. Principles of State Interference.
D. G. RITCHIE, M.A.
“An interesting contribution to the controversy on the functions of the State.”-
Glasgow Herald
29. German Socialism and F. Lassalle.
W. H. Dawson.
“As a biographical history of German Socialistic movements during this century
it may be accepted as complete.”British Weekly.
30. The Purse and the Conscience.
H. M. THOMPSON, B.A. (Cantab.).
“Shows common sense and fairness in his arguments.”-Scotsman.
31. Origin of Property in Land. FUSTEL DE COULANGES. Edited, with an
Introductory Chapter on the English Manor, by Prof. W. J. ASHLEY, M.A.
“His views are clearly stated, and are worth reading."-Saturday Review.
32. The English Republic. W. J. LINTON. Edited by KINETON PARKES.
“Characterised by that vigorous intellectuality which has marked his long life of
literary and artistic activity.”—Glasgow Herald.
33. The Co-Operative Movement.
BEATRICE POTTER.
“Without doubt the ablest and most philosophical analysis of the Co-Operative
Movement which has yet been produced."-Speaker.
34. Neighbourhood Guilds.
Dr. STANTON COIT.
"A most suggestive little book to anyone interested in the social question.”—
Pall Mall Gazette.
35. Modern Humanists.
J. M. ROBERTSON.
“Mr. Robertson's style is excellent-nay, even brilliant--and his purely literary
criticisms bear the mark of much acumen."— Times.
36. Outlooks from the New Standpoint.
E. BELFORT BAX.
“Mr. Bax is a very acute and accomplished student of history and economics."
- Daily Chronicle.
Edited by
37. Distributing Co-Operative Societies. Dr. LUIGI PIZZAMIGLIO.
F. J. SNELL.
"Dr. Pizzamiglio has gathered together and grouped a wide array of facts and
statistics, and they speak for themselves."-Speaker.
38. Collectivism and Socialism. By A. NACQUET. Edited by W. HEAFORD.
“ An admirable criticism by a well-known French politician of the New Socialism
of Marx and Lassalle."--Daily Chronicle.
6

SOCIAL SCIENC, NERIES--(Continued).
39. The London Programme.
SIDNEY WEBB, LL.B.
"Brimful of excellent ideas.”- Anti-Jacobin.
40. The Modern State.
PAUL LEROY BEAULIEU.
“A most interesting book; well worth a place in the library of every social
inquirer."--N.B. Economist.
41. The Condition of Labour.
HENRY GEORGE.
"Written with striking ability and sure to attract attention.”- Newcastle Chronicle.
42. The Revolutionary Spirit preceding the French Revolution.
FELIX ROCQUAIN. With a Preface by Professor HUXLEY.
“The student of the French Revolution will find in it an excellent introduction to
the study of that catastrophe.”- Scotsman.
43. The Student's Marx.
EDWARD AVELING, D.Sc.
“One of the most practically useful of any in the Series.”—Glasgow Heralt.
44. A Short History of Parliament.
B. C. SKOTTOWE, M.A. (Oxon.).
“Deals very carefully and completely with this side of constitutional history."-
Spectator.
45. Poverty : Its Genesis and Exodus.
J. G. GODARD.
“He states the problems with great force and clearness.”—N. British Economist.
46. The Trade Policy of Imperial Federation.
MAURICE H. HERVEY.
“An interesting contribution to the discussion.”- Publishers' Circular.
47. The Dawn of Radicalism.
J. BOWLES DALY, LL.D.
“Forms an admirable picture of an epoch more pregnant, perhaps, with political
instruction than any other in the world's history." —Daily Telegraph.
48. The Destitute Alien in Great Britain. ARNOLD WHITE; MONTAGUE CRACKAN-
THORPE, Q.C.; W. A. M'ARTHUR, M.P.; W. H. WILKINS, &c.
49. Illegitimacy and the Influence of Seasons on Conduct.
ALBERT LEFFINGWELL, M.D.
50. Commercial Panics of the Nineteenth Century.
H. M. HYNDMAN.
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LLOYD JONES.
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Dr. A. SCHÄFFLE.
3. The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844. FREDERICK ENGELS.
4. The Elements of Social Economy.
YVES GUYOT.
IN PREPARATION-
Progress and Prospects of Political Economy. Prof. J. K. INGRAM.
Socialism : Scientific and Utopian.
FRED, ENGELS.
The State and Pensions in Old Age. J. A. SPENDER and ARTHUR
ACLAND, M.P.
University Extension.
Dr. M. E. SADLER.
The Elements of Socialism.
Prof. R. T. ELY.
Communism and Anarchism.
R. W. BURNIE.
Catholic Socialism.
Dr. NITTI.
The Effects of Machinery on Wages.
Prof. J. S. NICHOLSON.
The Fallacy of Saving.
JOHN M. ROBERTSON.
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