This little book was not planned as a book. In 1877 and 1878 Engels spent the best part of a year answering Eugen Dühring, a Berlin lecturer who had announced his conversion to socialism and presented the German public with a whole new system, complete with a plan for reorganising society. Dühring was gathering a following inside a party that had only just been stitched together at Gotha, and, as Engels put it, "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." The reply ran to a fat volume of philosophy, economics and natural science — Anti-Dühring. Then, as Engels tells the story in the introduction printed here, "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." That accident of publishing produced the most widely read work of Marxism there has ever been. By the English edition of 1892 Engels could report, with the satisfaction of a man who had spent forty years writing things few people read, that "this little book circulates in ten languages," and that he knew of no other socialist work, "not even our Communist Manifesto of 1848 or Marx's Capital," so often translated.
The edition in your hands is Moscow's: Progress Publishers' Selected Works in three volumes, Volume Three, first printed in 1970 and reprinted in 1973, following a Russian edition prepared by the Institute of Marxism-Leninism attached to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. A publishers' note records that "The texts of all works included herein have been rechecked with the original sources kept in the Institute." The main text is given "according to the text of the authorised English edition of 1892"; the volume names no translator for it. In front of it stands Engels's Special Introduction to that English edition, which he wrote in English, in London, and dated 20 April 1892 — the last substantial thing he published on the history of ideas, and much the best part of the book.
Begin with what it does supremely well. The pamphlet's real achievement is not that it defends socialism but that it historicises it. Engels turns the same method on his own side that Marx had turned on political economy: he asks where socialist ideas came from and what conditions produced them. His predecessors — Saint-Simon, Fourier, Owen — are not treated as cranks to be dismissed but as men whose reach exceeded the grasp of their times. Their fault was a way of thinking, not a want of intelligence: "To all these socialism is the expression of absolute truth, reason and justice, and has only to be discovered to conquer all the world by virtue of its own power." A truth of that kind is timeless, so its discovery is an accident of who happened to think of it — which is why each founder produced a different absolute. The generosity here is exemplary. Engels wants the reader to see that the utopians could not have done otherwise, because the class antagonism they wanted to abolish had barely taken shape around them; and he wants the reader to keep everything in them that is worth keeping. It remains a model of how to read one's predecessors, and it is a good deal more generous than most of what has since been written about Engels.
The analytical core is equally durable. Production became social — carried on by thousands of hands in a single works, planned inside that works "upon a definite plan" down to the minute — while appropriation stayed private. From this "incompatibility of socialised production with capitalistic appropriation" Engels derives everything else, and he states the contradiction in the form that still bites: an "antagonism between the organisation of production in the individual workshop and the anarchy of production in society generally." Order within the firm, chaos between firms. Crises follow, not as accidents but as the system's way of correcting itself by destruction; and the concentration that crises drive on — into joint-stock companies, trusts, and finally state ownership — demonstrates that the owners have become superfluous, since "all the social functions of the capitalist are now performed by salaried employees." Anyone who has looked at a modern corporation, planned internally with a precision that would astonish a Gosplan official and colliding with its rivals in an unplanned world market, will find the description exact.
The weaknesses are as real, and it is worth naming them plainly. The first is a consequence of how the book was made: three chapters lifted out of a polemic have to carry a whole worldview, and the compression shows. The summary Engels appends at the end — I. Mediaeval Society, II. Capitalist Revolution, III. Proletarian Revolution — is a brilliant piece of exposition that also reads like a staircase, and generations read it as one, as though history climbed by numbered steps to a landing marked socialism. The second is the word in the title. By "scientific" Engels means something precise and defensible: that after the materialist conception of history and the discovery of surplus value, "socialism became a science" rather than a moral wish. But a doctrine that calls itself a science acquires, once a party takes charge of it, the authority of a science — including the right to correct those who disagree, and to treat disagreement as error rather than as politics. That is not Engels's fault, but it is his word, and it travelled.
The third is the tone of the 1892 introduction on England, where Engels is at his most hopeful. The working class, he writes, "moves, like all things in England, with a slow and measured step, with hesitation here, with more or less unfruitful, tentative attempts there... while it gradually absorbs the substance." The judgement is shrewd about the England of 1892; the trouble is what the movement made of Engels's late optimism after his death, converting the expectation of steady advance into a law of nature which guaranteed that time was on socialism's side. That confidence held until August 1914, when the parties which had inherited it voted the war credits. And the fourth weakness is a phrase: "Socialised production upon a predetermined plan becomes henceforth possible." Possible, yes. But the sentence leaves open the two questions the following century made central — who does the planning, and to whom do the planners answer.
Which brings us to the question this edition cannot ask about itself. Socialism: Utopian and Scientific contains the sharpest warning against state ownership anywhere in the founders' writings, and it was reprinted for decades by a state that owned nearly everything.
Engels could hardly have been clearer. Against the "spurious socialism" that had arisen since Bismarck went in for state ownership of industry, he writes that "if the taking over by the state of the tobacco industry is socialistic, then Napoleon and Metternich must be numbered among the founders of socialism"; otherwise the royal porcelain works, the regimental tailors' shops and — "as was seriously proposed by a sly dog in Frederick William III's reign" — the state's taking over of the brothels would be socialistic institutions too. He then states the principle: "The modern state, no matter what its form, is essentially a capitalist machine, the state of the capitalists, the ideal personification 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." And, in case the point could be missed: "State ownership of the productive forces is not the solution of the conflict, but concealed within it are the technical conditions that form the elements of that solution." The solution lies elsewhere, in society's actually taking possession — after which, in the book's most famous formulation, "the government of persons is replaced by the administration of things, and by the conduct of processes of production. The state is not 'abolished.' It dies out."
Set those sentences beside the country that printed them in 1970 and again in 1973. Nearly all productive forces had been taken over by the state; the workers who operated them drew wages from it; and the state, half a century after the revolution, had not begun to die out but had grown into the largest apparatus of administration and compulsion in the world. Engels's own test — does the taking over by the state end the wage relation, or does it merely give it a single employer? — was never put. The Institute's note on the work, printed at the back of this volume, summarises it accurately as showing that the contradiction of capitalism "can be done away with only through a proletarian revolution," which is true and beside the point. The reader is not invited to ask the next question.
The official answer, when one was given, was that the class character of the state had changed, so that Engels's warning applied only to capitalist states. It is not a foolish answer — a state resting on expropriated capitalists is not the state of the capitalists — but it substitutes a claim about origins for a test about the present, and Engels's whole method runs the other way. His criterion is not who holds the title deeds; it is whether the producers have taken control of the process. The reply from within the tradition came in 1936, in Trotsky's The Revolution Betrayed, and it is simply Engels's question asked in earnest. "The means of production belong to the state," Trotsky wrote. "But the state, so to speak, 'belongs' to the bureaucracy." As for the withering: "at the end of its second decade of existence, it has not only not died away, but not begun to 'die away.' Worse than that, it has grown into a hitherto unheard of apparatus of compulsion."
Why it turned out so is a question about circumstances before it is a question about doctrine. A revolution in a poor and largely peasant country, left isolated when the German rising failed, its working class scattered and killed in a civil war and its industry wrecked, had no material basis on which persons could stop being governed. Out of that scarcity an administering caste raised itself above the society it managed and made its position permanent — and then had to make the founders agree. The evidence that it never did agree is that the passages above went on being printed. A regime that had genuinely superseded Engels would have had no need to keep him in print; a regime whose legitimacy rested on him had no choice, and so it published, year after year, in millions of copies, the standard by which it fell short. The canonised text is the measure of the betrayal, not its cause.
So what is this Marxism worth now? The state-ownership passage alone earns the book its place, because it cuts in both directions at once. It disposes of the Cold War's central confusion — that socialism and the state are the same thing — and the case against the Soviet Union can be built almost entirely out of Engels's own paragraphs. It equally disposes of the comfortable assumption, common again wherever a public utility is taken back into public hands, that nationalisation is by itself a step towards socialism. Engels's answer is that it may be a technical precondition and is nothing more; what matters is whether those who do the work control what they do. The analysis of order within the enterprise and anarchy outside it has, if anything, gained force in a world of planetary supply chains run to the hour by firms that cannot between them plan the climate they are altering. And the treatment of the utopians is a standing lesson in how to inherit: judge people by the conditions they worked in, and take what is usable.
Engels ends with the ascent "from the kingdom of necessity to the kingdom of freedom." It was a promise, not a description, and it is still owed. Read this book, then, not as a catechism and not as a relic, but as the yardstick it always was — one that the state which reprinted it for forty years failed, and that has not been taken down.