for a review of the introduction, please click here. also note that this text is taken directly from a larger work, anti-duhring. the pamphlet places three separate stages of socialism within a historical perspective, with a chapter for each stage. sequentially, these stages are utopian socialism (socialism's irrigorous past), scientific socialism (the then present, rigorous state of socialism) and communism (the eventually implemented future of socialism). engels' goal appears to be to separate what he considers to be "respectable" forms of socialism from "primitive" or "naive" forms of socialism, as well as to (ironically) act as somewhat of a socialist clairvoyant.
the utopian stage of socialism is explored through three major icons: st. stephen, charles fourier and robert owens. engels derives this stage out of the disappointment of the french revolution, the so-called "triumph of reason" that climaxed in despotism and perpetual war. according to engels, the french revolution was the product of french "materialism" and the great "materialist" philosophers of the eighteenth century who placed everything in subservience to reason. engels seems to differentiate these "materialist" philosophers from the aforementioned "socialist" philosophers by their attention to class; the french rationalists "do not claim to emancipate a particular class to begin with, but all humanity at once.", whereas st. simon speaks of the class conflict between the "workers" and the "idlers". the purpose of this section seems to be to briefly inform the reader about the roots of socialism without getting into it too much, mostly because engels doesn't want you to get into it too much. in fact, engels wants you to reject these utopian thinkers because "the more completely they (early/utopian systems of socialism) were worked out in detail, the more they could not avoid drifting into pure fantasies.". while engels does clearly hold robert owen in high regard, going so far as to say that "every social movement, every real advance england on behalf of the workers links itself to the name of robert owen.", his real interest is in what he calls "scientific socialism", which is something that he derives from marx.
the second section provides the reader with a cursory outline of the renaissance of dialectics and an explanation of how this renaissance allowed for the construction of a "materialist" history. this "materialist" history is what we would today call "marxist history", the view that history is characterized by class struggle. engels attributes this "materialist history" to marx and conflicts it with what he calls the "idealistic" (and incorrect) view that history is an unending evolutionary process, one where perfection is pushed further and further away as we reach our previous conceptions of it, which he attributes to hegel. in engels' view, this deep discovery necessitates a complete rewriting of all history (a scary proposition!) and is, along with the discovery of surplus value, one of the two breakthroughs that allowed marxism to call itself a "science", despite the loud objections of scientists, no doubt. surplus value is simply the idea that, no matter how much the capitalist pays for labour, the capitalist will always extract a greater value than he pays for labour. i'm going to assume that this is an observation and not a proposed sociological law and then note that a capitalist would both call that greater value "profit" and argue that it's the whole point.
the third section is the heart of the essay and requires a few reads to understand fully. what engels is doing, ultimately, is explaining why we need communism. in the process, he...well, to be blunt, he meanders through a variety of loosely connected historical, economic and philosophical concepts. there's quite a bit written here, but it's not written very coherently; this is more than a translation issue, it's an organization problem. no contemporary editor would let this to pressing. yet, it did make it out (twice!) so this is what we have to deal with...
engels starts off by describing the evolution in production from the medieval guildsman to the socialization of production, with the aim of deriving the natural conflict between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. many years ago, producers were in complete control of their product from the point of gathering raw materials to the point of sale. the producer of a canoe, for example, would begin by carving the canoe and end by selling it. consequently, the producer would both set the price of the product and retain all profit from it's sale. with industrialization, however, came the socialization of production. factories were able to produce products faster and cheaper than individual guildspeople, hopelessly outcompeting them to the point that individual tradespeople became unable to exist upon their skills. faced with the loss of their only source of income, the tradespeople were forced into selling their labour to the very factories that put them out of business. such was the beginning of a new class of individuals, the proletariat - those who have no good to exchange for existence other than their labour. with this change, however, did not come a change in the way that goods are exchanged. the owners of the factories - the capitalists - became the sellers of products which they did not create on their own. so, while the goods were made by several people, they were only sold by one; engels sees this as a contradiction and labels it to the root of the class conflict between the workers and the owners of the factories, manifested as an argument over wages paid out by the capitalists to the workers. of course, both sides will seek to maximize their own share of profits at the expense of the other. at this point, engels' argument is not just reasonable but obvious; nobody disputes the existence of this class conflict or it's irresolvability without the final triumph of one side over the other.
the next thing that engels discusses is what he calls the "anarchy of production". what he's really describing is competition. in the old days, workers only produced what they were asked to produced. that aforementioned canoe would not have been randomly built and sold in a marketplace; an agreement would have been reached with the buyer before the canoe was built. with industrialization, however, goods were just produced with the hope that they would be sold eventually. as multiple factories/companies ended up doing this, often producing the same surplus goods, a type of competition that was hitherto unknown began to develop. engels has a distinct distaste for this; he describes competition using words such as "anarchy" and "animalistic", blames it for the existence of commercial wars and even goes so far as to claim that the struggle between individual companies is darwinian in nature. he once again sees this conflict between organized and chaotic production as a symptom of the contradiction between capitalistic appropriation and socialized production.
engels then turns to the topic of machinery replacing human labour, inevitably resulting in labour surpluses, which he calls the "industrial reserve army". these labour surpluses then reduce wages through market forces, which destroys the market altogether because the increasingly unemployed workers have no buying power beyond subsistence. the capitalists must consequently search for foreign markets to sell the goods produced by the workers. the process is consequently one of wealth trickling upwards to a select few, leaving a mass of starving slaves to work the machines that are unable to afford to purchase the very good that they make. furthermore, engels sees this as inevitable within any capitalist society. production consequently must seek greater and greater foreign markets to justify it's own existence, which is of course impossible. as mechanization increases, production increases faster than markets are able to grow, leading to surpluses of goods and subsequent market crashes; this is the marxist explanation for recessions, and while we may argue today that it's a little over-simplified, it's basically correct. this is also considered to be inherent within market capitalism and an inescapable implication of the anarchy of production, as demonstrated by the historical fact of boom and bust cycles.
engels finishes the essay by outlining what he sees as the necessary and correct ordering of steps involved in a communist revolution. first, the capitalists must recognize the social nature of production. once they have fully understood this aspect of the nature of production, they will understand that the most efficient way to exploit workers and markets is to form trusts, or monopolies. however, as engels puts it, "no nation will put up with production conducted by trusts, with so barefaced an exploitation of the community by a small band of dividend-mongers", so the trusts will inevitably eventually be placed directly under the direct control of the state, reducing the capitalists to mere bureaucrats. engels does not see this as a final solution because he views the state as a crude means for the capitalists to control the workers in the first place; within a marxist framework, the final solution is the end of the state altogether. it is truly the class relation that is abolished by reducing the capitalists to proletarians, as they now *also* must rely *only* upon their labour to survive. the class struggle consequently absolves itself along with class itself, anarchy in production is replaced with order and the state ceases to exist along with it's justification for existence, exploitation based on class. the emancipation is total - not just of the proletariat, but of all of society from the violence of the class relation.
i'm going to restrict my brief critical analysis to the very last part of the essay and reduce it to the fact that engels has completely ignored the third class, the aristocracy, which is of course still present in society and in government in some way or another, either through direct power or through indirect, financial power. the term "dictatorship of the proletariat" is not used here, but the concept is also essentially aristocratic. so long as the aristocracy still exists, the reduction of the bourgeoisie to the proletariat will obviously merely result in the reconstruction of a feudal relation, and i don't mean to offer an alternate proof of hayek's thesis. to be fair, it must have been assumed that the aristocracy was initially eliminated in the bourgeois revolution, but this does not accurately reflect any historical bourgeois revolution. an active mechanism to reduce the aristocracy to wage slavery must also be incorporated, lest socialism become a road to serfdom.
full text:
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/Engels_Socialism_Utopian_and_Scientific.pdf
http://dghjdfsghkrdghdgja.appspot.com/categories/books/congress/HX/276.E55/index.html