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Friedrich Engels

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Socialism: Utopian and Scientific Kindle Edition

by Friedrich Engels (Author), Edward Aveling (Translator) Format: Kindle Edition

4.6 781 ratings

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This book was converted from its physical edition to the digital format by a community of volunteers. You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B007P77NZG
Publication date ‏ : ‎ March 27, 2012
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 222 KB
Simultaneous device usage ‏ : ‎ Unlimited
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
Print length ‏ : ‎ 69 pages

Best Sellers Rank: #14,976 Free in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #3,193 in Nonfiction (Kindle Store)

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4.6 781 ratings

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Friedrich Engels

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Friedrich Engels (English /ˈɛŋɡəlz/ or /ˈɛŋəlz/; German: [ˈfʁiːdʁɪç ˈɛŋəls]; 28 November 1820 – 5 August 1895) was a German philosopher, social scientist, journalist and businessman. He founded Marxist theory together with Karl Marx. In 1845 he published The Condition of the Working Class in England, based on personal observations and research in Manchester.

In 1848 he co-authored The Communist Manifesto with Karl Marx, though he also authored and co-authored (primarily with Marx) many other works, and later he supported Marx financially to do research and write Das Kapital. After Marx's death, Engels edited the second and third volumes. Additionally, Engels organised Marx's notes on the "Theories of Surplus Value," which he later published as the "fourth volume" of Capital. He has also made contributions to family economics.

Bio from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

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4.6 out of 5

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Amazon Customer

Concise, a perfect explanation of the goals of socialism

Reviewed in the United States on March 30, 2024

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Engels clearly describes the aims and goals of scientific socialism. He's also much easier to read than Marx, making this a perfect book for the new Marxist.

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Kindle Customer

Sosialism Utopian and Scientific, well over a century ago, is still a great read.

Reviewed in the United States on September 11, 2020

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This pamphlet, published around 1886, is actually three chapters of a larger work entitled "Mr. Duhring's 'Revolution in Science.'" It immediately became a best seller and was the first popular exposition of Marx's economic doctrine and the materialist conception of history. I believe it is still unsurpassed as a basic text in the teachings of Marxism.
--Frank Chapman

14 people found this helpful

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Jonathan E. Kiser

5 Stars! Engels articulately explains Scientific Socialism

Reviewed in the United States on July 6, 2023

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I have read this book many times. Every time I reread it I discover new something that smacks me hard and shows me that I need to develop a better sense of analytical thought.

The seller sent me two books and they were in mint condition imo although they were advertised as used. I appreciate the rain delivery and care that the seller put into the delivery.

One person found this helpful

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Eric F.

Great book

Reviewed in the United States on April 7, 2022

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Everything arrived on time and as advertised

One person found this helpful

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Asko Korpela

The path to scientific socialism

Reviewed in the United States on December 6, 2021

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The path to scientific socialism
Only after reading the whole book did I check in my files what was the Engels Socialism book I had read in Spanish a couple of years ago. And helas! It was this same book. Although not considering myself socialist I had liked the book and had given a full five-star assessment of it. So also this time. This is an excellent summary of the development of social life understood as divided into classes and developing from utopian to scientific socialism with stages of this process taking shape through major social upheavals and reforms.

3 people found this helpful

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James Kalomiris, The Peripatetic Reader

Still One of the Best Introductions to Socialism

Reviewed in the United States on April 13, 2021

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Written in clear, direct language, this thin volume is actually culled from Engels’ much longer work, Anti-Duhring. That treatment suffered from long digression, polemics, and occasional snarky comments on the work of Eugen Duhring. Here, however, all the polemics and snide comments are lifted, and the substance remains. Engels makes important statements about the historical events leading to socialism, dialectics, transformation and historical materialism. Restating what Marx had written in the Critique of the Gotha Program, Engels concisely describes the four stages of human development: Capitalism, Dictatorship of the Proletariat — erroneously named, because Engels specifies that this stage really signifies the workers (Proletariat) taking control of the means of production — the withering of the State, and finally true freedom. Engels was a better writer than Marx, and the distinctions made by Engels make this required reading.

24 people found this helpful

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N. Love

Important theoretical work for those interested in socialism, 2nd only to Capital.

Reviewed in the United States on March 16, 2023

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Realistically, if you read this, and really, really grasp its content, then you know most everything you need to know to understand Marxism.

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LenZen

Not Very Scientific

Reviewed in the United States on October 16, 2022

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This books provides a very short introduction to "scientific socialism" aka dialectical materialism aka Marxism. The writing is clear, at least to the extent that that is possible given how nebulous some of the ideas underlying Marxism are. Many Marxists feel that this book is the best introduction to Marxist thought. Although there has been some debate as to whether or not Engels writings can be taken to 100% accurately reflect Marx's thought the truth is that Engels was Marx's life long patron and was, essentially, familiar with all of his writings and many believe that when you read Engels are you are, effectively, reading Marx. Engels’ writing style is less caustic than Marx's which will, presumably, be looked at favorably by some Marxists and unfavorably by others.

Part I of the book starts off by Engels giving his overview of Enlightenment thinking leading into the French Revolution and the disappointments that followed. Along the way we learn who Engels’ heroes during this period were: for instance Fourier for his ability to critique society. As will come as a surprise to nobody, Engels feels that the French Revolution's failures were ultimately due to it being a bourgeois revolution. Engels then briefly discusses early, "pre scientific" or utopian socialist thought and shows a particular admiration for Robert Owen. Although a great admirer of Owen, Engels feels that Utopian Socialism ultimately was limited in its implementation by not having a scientific foundation and, thus, was subject to the idiosyncrasies of particular individuals who tried to implement it. Scientific socialism, he claims, gets rid of this problem.

Part II of the book deals with "dialectics" which Engels believes was the way to get socialism onto a scientific footing. The most interesting thing to learn here is how, despite striving for a scientific footing, the dialectic is a very nebulous thing without a clear definition. It has something to do with "contradictions". In the case of the dialectic, however, the definition of "contradiction" is different than what it is in science. In logic and, hence, science a contradiction is something which simply cannot be true, and, hence, simply cannot exist because it is violation of the laws of logic. In the dialectic, however, contradictions do exist, and the dialectic is an historical force which works to resolve them and move evolution forward. For example, capitalism's enormous productivity increases providing the ability to provide abundantly for all, but fails to do so. Naturally Engels mentions Darwin's discovery of evolution as demonstrating the truth of the dialectic.

One of the most important things to learn from Engels' discussion of the dialectic is that it is something that advocates believe exists above science. In this way, Marxists philosophers and other academics in the humanities, even to the present day, see themselves as being above physical scientists.

Another part of the too-loose-to-be-scientific non-definition of the dialectic is that it has something to do with how truth is not really a crisp set of "true" and "false" binaries or even definite concepts or objects. Engels gives the example of the fact that what constitutes the atoms in your body is constantly changing and, eventually, completely replaced over time. Are you then the same person? This fuzziness is an idea that has greatly influence Marxists and post-modernist philosophy right up to the present day. If we look at modern day science, however, it is pretty clear that at the most fundamental level, physics, all the reasoning is done with logic which is quite binary. In contrast to the dialectic, there are crisp opposites and non-fuzzy sets: for example fermions and bosons. It did not take new laws of logic invented after Engels to get science on a crisp foundation. Indeed it has always been like that. Thus, here Engels shows that despite feeling the dialectic puts Marxists above physical scientists they actually do not seem to have a scientific mindset at all. Indeed, it is rather anti-scientific. Again a trend which continues with their philosophers to the present day.

What the dialectic does entail, however, is the belief that through scientific study in which scientific socialists use the dialectic to resolve "contradictions" the economy and society can be run in a manner superior to the "anarchy" of capitalism.

In the final part, Engels discusses his view of capitalism. The main claim here is that capitalism is fatally flawed because it is trying to apply a notion of ownership of the results of labor production that was valid in the middle ages but no longer is. A contradiction has emerged and the dialectic will work it out. In the middle ages the final product of labor was due almost entirely to you and as such you owned it. Occasionally laborers would be hired by others but only occasionally so wage labor was not a problem. Most people owned most of their own land and, hence, kept most of the output of their labor. Engels believes that capitalism changed all that. Now labor was spread out among many people, it became a social instead of an individual phenomena, and none of the workers end up owing the final output of their labor. This allowed capitalists to take away as much of that labor value as possible to increase their wealth to ridiculous extremes, which Engels claims even they recognized, while the proletariat received barely enough to get by as their numbers and conditions worsened over time.

Engels cites machinery and the productivity booms it enabled as primarily responsible for the misery of capitalism. Since machinery was continuously evolving and able to displace workers and since competition was fierce to sell goods at the lowest price misery increased over time and, to the benefit of capitalists, an increasing army of reserve labor was created. Engels also criticizes capitalism for expanding infinitely including into other countries across the globe as part of its insatiable appetite for new markets to sell into.

True to the dialectic, Engels points out how capitalism contains the seeds of its own destruction. First, it creates a cycle of booms and busts that become increasingly intolerable. To alleviate this, temporary, capitalists create monopolies and trusts (think Standard Oil). That, however, is too blatantly exploitive so the next step it to control the modern state which Engels insists exists to protect the bourgeoisie from the proletariat and, occasionally, other capitalists so bad that even most capitalists feel have gone too far. That too becomes intolerable, however, and Engels sees the proletariat then rising up to seize political power and the means of production.

Exceeding even his vagueness in discussing what the dialectic is, Engels is particularly vague in describing how things would work once the proletariat seized political power and the means of production. All social ills would be resolved through scientific application of dialectical reasoning. Productive forces which capitalism held back would be unleashed such that everyone's needs were met and they could now live at a level above animals. In a truly bizarre sentence and, unintentionally, demonstrating an actual contradiction, Engels contends that by working out how to administer everything in a scientific way class and the need for the state would then vanish. Truly the modern state only continues to exist to help the bourgeois exploit the proletariat!

Deciding how to rate a book like this is interesting. Certainly it is does indeed give an excellent overview of Marxism. It is short. It is cheap: 99 cents for the kindle edition. Most can probably read it in a day or two. (I am a very slow and like to take notes so it took me four sittings.) Triangulating with Thomas Sowell's "Marxism: Philosophy and Economics" I could not find any inconsistencies, this suggesting that both Engels and Sowell knew Marx's work well. Thus the book is an invaluable introduction to Marxism and seems a must read for that reason.

On the other hand, Engels approach is completely unscientific and, indeed, even anti-scientific. Engels seems to ignore the fact that at the time he wrote the book, in 1892, the predictions of Marxism just were not coming true. There were not getting to be more proletariat. Their conditions were improving. Yes, there were still booms and busts in the capitalist economic cycles, which continues even now 130 years later, but they were not bringing western societies closer to a communist revolution. Engels was aware of all these things, having corresponded with Marx about them, but fails to mention the problems he realized in this overview. That is certainly not a very scientific approach! Real scientists make a point of highlighting the limitations of their theories. To Engles it is all roses.

As a final note, having read Sowell, I was expecting there to be more discussion of how naive Marx thought Utopian socialists were. How he ridiculed the idea that everyone would be paid the same flat rate multiplied by how many hours they clocked in. How Utopians foresaw the free market going away where, by contrast, Marx thought there would always be a need for one to some degree. Finally, although alienation was a central theme of Marx's work, Engels only spends a couple of sentences discussing it. Due to all the flaws I can only rate the book 3 out of 5 stars. Despite this everyone who wants to understand classical Marxism, which should be everyone these days, should read it.

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Barry Avis

A good starting point for those wishing to understand socialism

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on October 9, 2023

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I have set myself a goal to read a selection of historical socialist publications to really understand its beginnings and philosophy. This booklet is viewed as a good starting point for those wishing to understand socialism. It discusses the development of socialist theory and of capitalism from the early feudalism where the landed gentry used “peasants” to produce commodities they could sell on through the industrialisation whereby wage-labour is used to produce goods that the capitalists could sell on. Engels also notes that simply bringing production under state ownership just replaces capitalist exploitation of workers by state exploitation and that only a socialised ownership can remove the class structure.
The book makes it clear how religion is used as a method of controlling the masses and ensuring that the “great unwashed” do not think for themselves too much and how this was used to quell revolution following the revolution in France.
It would have been interesting to see what Engels made of todays’ Britain where manufacturing has been outsourced and the increase in service industries and the gig economy where capitalists are able to exploit workers even easier than they could in a manufacturing-based economy.
An interesting book that I will no doubt go back to several times.

One person found this helpful

Sara Jamil

Don't buy the book from Amazon

Reviewed in Germany on August 4, 2020

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Can hardly read it. Printed in size 6

Kristian blewitt

Great book

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 3, 2024

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Great book highly recommended

AL

Easy to read and very interesting

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on March 4, 2022

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The print is a good size, clear and easy to read. The front cover picture of St.Basil's Cathedral in the Red Square, Moscow, is not useful for various reasons. A picture of Engels would be better. The book's subject matter is essential reading for anyone of any age who wishes to understand history, economics, culture, society and politics.

2 people found this helpful

JB

Interesting to see the roots of the diseased plant

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on April 24, 2022

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So much hope for a utopian socialist society... however, experience has shown the naivety of such hope. Humans are bound by natural laws that will constantly run counter to the altruistic ideals espoused by utopian thinkers. Self is first, family second, society third, nation fourth, humanity fifth. Superstitious heavenly Overlords come in the mix somewhere, depending on culture and individual taste. To think that humans, freed from class and labour divisions, would turn into reasonable, altruistic guardians of society in general, has been shown to be little but wishful fancy.

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