Society of the Future

For the better part of half a century, the book this one is carved from was the most widely read work of socialism on earth.

August Bebel's Woman and Socialism, first published in 1879, went through more than fifty German editions in his lifetime, was smuggled hand to hand under Bismarck's Anti-Socialist Law, and did more to win ordinary workers - and, decisively, working women - to the movement than any theoretical treatise. It was the German party's true catechism, more read than Capital, and its power lay in a simple, daring move: it refused to argue only about what socialism would abolish and insisted on describing what it would build.

This volume is the boldest section of that book: Bebel's portrait of the socialist future itself.

Read it for its nerve. Where most Marxists of his day and after treated the future society as an embarrassment best left vague - Marx himself scorned writing recipes for the cook-shops of the future - Bebel walked straight in and set the table. A future in which the state, having no more classes to hold down, withers into a simple administration of things; in which religion fades not by decree but for want of the misery that fed it; in which education is universal and joyful, art and science belong to everyone, and the individual is free at last to develop.

New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.