Part 1 (1/2)
Landmarks of Scientific Socialism.
by Friedrich Engels.
CHAPTER I
TRANSLATOR'S INTRODUCTION
When Dr. Eugene Duehring, privat docent at Berlin University, in 1875, proclaimed the fact that he had become converted to Socialism, he was not content to take the socialist movement as he found it, but set out forthwith to promulgate a theory of his own. His was a most elaborate and self-conscious mission. He stood forth as the propagandist not only of certain specific and peculiar views of socialism but as the originator of a new philosophy, and the propounder of strange and wonderful theories with regard to the universe in general. The taunt as to his all-comprehensiveness of intellect, with which Engels pursues him somewhat too closely and much too bitterly, could not have affected Herr Duehring very greatly. He had his own convictions with respect to that comprehensive intellect of his and few will be found to deny that he had the courage of his convictions.
Thirty years have gone since Duehring published the fact of his conversion to socialism. The word ”conversion” contains in itself the distinction between the socialism of thirty years ago and that of to-day. What was then a peculiar creed has now become a very widespread notion. Men are not now individually converted to socialism but whole groups and cla.s.ses are driven into the socialist ranks by the pressure of circ.u.mstances. The movement springs up continually in new and unexpected places. Here it may languish apparently, there it gives every indication of strong, new and vigorous life.
The proletariat of the various countries race as it were towards the socialist goal and, as they change in their respective positions, the economic and political fields on which they operate furnish all the surprises and fascinations of a race course. In 1892 Engels wrote that the German Empire would in all probability be the scene of the first great victory of the European proletariat. But thirteen years have sufficed to bog the German movement in the swamps of Parliamentarianism.
Great Britain, whose Chartist movement was expected to provide the British proletariat with a tradition, has furnished few examples of skill in the management of proletarian politics, but existing society in Great Britain has none the less been thoroughly undermined. The year before that in which Herr Duehring made his statement of conversion, the British Liberals had suffered a defeat which, in spite of an apparent recuperation in 1880, proved the downfall of modern Liberalism in Great Britain, and showed that the Liberal Party could no longer claim to be the party of the working cla.s.s. Not only that, but the British philosophic outlook has become completely changed. The nonconformist conscience grows less and less the final court of appeal in matters political. A temporary but fierce attack of militant imperialism coupled with the very general acceptance of an empiric collectivism has sufficed to destroy old ideas and to make the road to victory easier for a determined and relentless working cla.s.s movement.
But if thirty years have worked wonders in Europe, and disintegration can be plainly detected in the social fabric, the course of social and political development in the United States has been still more remarkable. In 1875 the country was still a farming community living on the edge of a vast wilderness through which the railroad was just beginning to open a path. Thirty years have been sufficient to convert it into the greatest of manufacturing and commercial states. The occupation of the public lands, the establishment of industry on an hitherto undreamed of scale, the marvellous, almost overnight creation of enormous cities, all these have resulted in the production of a proletariat, cosmopolitan in its character, and with no traditions of other than cash relations with the cla.s.s which employs it. The purity of the economic fact is un.o.bscured. Hence a socialistic agitation has arisen in the United States, the enthusiasm of which vies with that in any of the European countries and the practical results of which bid fair to be even more striking. This movement has arisen almost spontaneously as the result of economic conditions. It is a natural growth not the result of the preaching of abstract doctrines or the picturing of an ideal state. The modern American proletariat is, as a matter of fact, given neither to philosophic speculation nor to the imagination which is necessary to idealism. Such socialism as it has adopted it has taken up because it has felt impelled thereto by economic pressure.
Hence, apart from all socialistic propaganda, a distinct disintegration-process has been proceeding in modern society. Each epoch carries within itself the seeds of its own dissolution. Things have just this much value, they are transitory, says Engels in his paraphrase of Hegel, and this is in fact the central idea of his dialectic philosophy.
He criticises the work of Duehring from this standpoint. He labors not so much to show that Duehring is mistaken in certain conclusions as to prove that the whole method of his argument is wrong. His diatribes, though the subject matter of his argument requires him to attack the Berlin tutor, are directed chiefly against all absolute theories.
”Eternal truth,” in the realm of science, equally with that of philosophy, he scouts as absurd. To interpret the history of the time in terms of the spirit of the time, to discover the actual beneath the crust of the conventional, to a.n.a.lyse the content of the formulae which the majority are always ready to take on trust, and to face the fact with a mind clear of preconceived notions is what Engels set out to do. It cannot be said that he altogether succeeded. No man can succeed in such a task. The prejudices and animosities created by incessant controversy warped his judgment in some respects, and tended on more than one occasion to destroy his love of fair play. The spirit which is occasionally shown in his controversial writing is to be deplored but it may be said in extenuation that all controversies of that time were disfigured in the same way. He pays the penalty for the fault.
Much of the work is valueless to-day because of Engels' eagerness to score a point off his adversary rather than to state his own case. But where the philosopher lays the controversialist on one side for a brief period, and takes the trouble to elucidate his own ideas we discover what has been lost by these defects of temperament. He possesses in a marked degree the gift of clear a.n.a.lysis and of keen and subtle statement.
The socialist movement everywhere arrives some time or other at what may be called the Duehring stage of controversy. There are two very distinct impulses towards socialism. The individuals who are influenced by these impulses must sooner or later come into collision, and as a result of the impact the movement is for a time divided into hostile parties and a war of pamphleteering and oratory supervenes.
This period has just ended in France. For the last few years the French movement has been divided upon the question of the philosophical foundation of the movement, and the parties to the controversy may be divided into those who sought to justify the movement upon ethical grounds and those who have regarded it as a modern political phenomenon dependent alone upon economic conditions.
The former of these parties based its claims to the suffrages of the French people upon the justice of the socialistic demands. It proclaimed socialism to be the logical result of the Revolution, the necessary conclusion from the teachings of the revolutionary philosophers. Justice was the word in which they summed up the claims of socialism, that and Equality, for which latter term as Engels points out in the present work, the French have a fondness which amounts almost to a mania. Hence one party of the French socialist movement chose as a platform those very ”eternal truths” which Engels ridicules and which it is the sole purpose of the present work to attack.
To kill ”eternal truths” is however by no means an easy matter. Years of habit have made them part of the mental structure of the citizens of the modern democratic or semi-democratic states. Not only in France but to an even greater degree in the English speaking countries these ”eternal truths” persist, they form the stock in trade of the clergyman and the ordinary politician. Bernard Shaw directs the shafts of his ridicule against these ”eternal truths” and smites with a sarcasm which is more fatal than all the solemn German philosophy which Engels has at his command. But Shaw is not appreciated by the British socialist. The latter cannot imagine that the writer is really poking fun at things so exceedingly serious and so essential to any well const.i.tuted man, to a well-const.i.tuted Briton in particular. The British socialist is as much in love with ”eternal truths” as is the stiffest and most unregenerate of his bourgeois opponents. He therefore toploftily declares that Mr. Shaw is an unbalanced person, a licensed jester. Precisely the same results would attend the efforts of an American iconoclast who would venture to ridicule the ”eternal truths” which have been handed down to us in doc.u.ments of unimpeachable respectability, like the Declaration of Independence, and by Fourth of July orators, portly of person and of phrase.
The ”eternal truth” phase of socialist controversy seems to be as eternal as the truth, and must necessarily be so as long as the movement is recruited by men who bring into it the ideas which they have derived from the ordinary training of the American citizen.
The other side of the controversy to which reference has been made derived its philosophy from the experience of the proletariat. This modern proletariat, trained to, the machine, is a distinct product of the occupation by which it lives. The organisation of industry in the grasp of which the workman is held during all his working hours and manufacture by the machine-process, the motions of which he is compelled to follow have produced in him a mental condition which does not readily respond to any sentimental stimulus. The incessant process from cause to effect endows him with a sort of logical sense in accordance with which he works out the problems of life independent of the preconceptions and prejudices which have so great a hold upon the reason of his fellow citizens who are not of the industrial proletariat. Without knowing why he arrives by dint of the experience of his daily toil at the same conclusions as Engels attained as the result of philosophic training and much erudition. The Church is well aware of this fact to her sorrow for the industrial proletarian seldom darkens her portals. He has no hatred of religion, as the atheistic radical bourgeois had, but with a good-natured ”non possumus” says by his actions what Engels says by his philosophy.
Revolution is an every day occurrence with the industrial proletarian.
He sees processes transformed in the twinkling of an eye. He wakes up one morning to find that the trade which he has learned laboriously has overnight become a drug on the market. He is used to seeing the machine whose energy has enchained him flung on the sc.r.a.p heap and contemptuously disowned, in favor of a more competent successor whose motions he must learn to follow or be himself flung on the sc.r.a.p heap also. This constant revolution in the industrial process enters into his blood. He becomes a revolutionist by force of habit. There is no need to preach the dialectic to him. It is continually preached. The transitoriness of phenomena is impressed upon him by the changes in industrial combinations, by the constant subst.i.tution of new modes of production for those to which he has been accustomed, subst.i.tutions which may make ”an aristocrat of labor” of him to-day, and send him tramping to-morrow.
The industrial proletarian therefore knows practically what Engels has taught philosophically. So that when in the course of his political peregrinations he strays into the socialist movement and there finds those who profess a socialism based upon abstract conceptions and ”eternal truths” his contempt is as outspoken as that of a Friedrich Engels who chances upon a certain Eugen Duehring spouting paraphrases of Rousseau by the socialistic wayside. Engels simply antic.i.p.ated by the way of books the point of view reached by the industrial proletarian of to-day by the way of experience, and by the American machine-made proletarian in particular. This is a matter of no mean importance. In the following pages we can detect if we can look beyond and beneath the mere criticism of Duehring, an att.i.tude of mind, not of one controversialist to another merely but of an entire cla.s.s, the cla.s.s upon which modern society is driven more and more to rely, to the cla.s.s which relies upon it.
For their popular support cla.s.ses and governments rely upon formulae.
When the cry of ”Down with the Tsar” takes the place of the humbly spoken ”Little Father” what becomes of the Tsardom? When the terms ”Liberty” and ”Equality” become the jest of the workshop, upon what basis can a modern democratic state depend? This criticism of ”eternal truths” is destructive criticism, and destructive of much more than the ”truths.” It is more destructive than sedition itself. Sedition may be suppressed cheaply in these days of quick-firing guns and open streets. But society crumbles away almost insensibly beneath the mordant acid of contemptuous a.n.a.lysis. So to-day goaded on the one side by the gibes of the machine-made proletariat, and on the other, by the raillery of the philosophic jester, society staggers along like a wounded giant and is only too glad to creep into its cave and to forget its sorrows in drink.
As for 1875, ”Many things have happened since then” as Beaconsfield used to say, but of all that has happened nothing could have given more cynical pleasure to the ”Old Jew” than the lack of faith in its own s.h.i.+bboleths which has seized the c.o.c.ksure pompous society in which he disported himself. The rhetoric of a Gladstone based upon the ”eternal truths” which const.i.tuted always the foundations of his political appeals would fail to affect the ma.s.ses to-day with any other feeling than that of ridicule. We have already arrived at the ”Twilight of the Idols” at least so far as ”eternal truths” are concerned. They still find however an insecure roosting place in the pulpits of the protestant sects.
If blows have been showered upon the political ”eternal truths” in the name of which the present epoch came into existence social and ethical ideals have by no means escaped attack. Revolt has been the watchword of artist and theologian alike. The pre-Rafaelite school, a not altogether unworthy child of the Chartist movement, raised the cry of artistic revolt against absolutism and the revolt spread in ever widening circles until it has exhausted itself in the sickly egotism of the ”art nouveau.” Even Engels, with all his independence and glorification of change as a philosophy, can find an opportunity to fling a sneer at Wagner and the ”music of the future.” The remnants of early Victorianism cling persistently to Engels. He cannot release himself altogether from the bonds of the bourgeois doctrine which he is so anxious to despise. He is in many respects the revolutionist of '48, a bourgeois politician possessed at intervals by a proletarian ghost, such as he says himself ever haunts the bourgeois. The younger generation without any claims to revolutionism has gone further than he in the denunciation of authority and without the same self consciousness. The scorn of Bernard Shaw for the moguls of the academies and for social ideals is greater than the scorn of Engels for ”eternal truths.” Says Mr. Shaw, ”The great musician accepted by his unskilled listener is vilified by his fellow musician. It was the musical culture of Europe that p.r.o.nounced Wagner the inferior of Mendelssohn and Meyerbeer. The great artist finds his foes among the painters and not among the men in the street. It is the Royal Academy that places Mr. Marcus Stone above Mr. Burne Jones. It is not rational that it should be so but it is so for all that. The realist at last loses patience with ideals altogether and finds in them only something to blind us, something to numb us, something to murder self in us.
Something whereby instead of resisting death we disarm it by committing suicide.” Here is a note of modernity which Engels was hardly modern enough to appreciate and yet it was written before he died.
Nietzsche, Tolstoy and a host of minor writers have all had their fling at ”eternal truths” and modern ideals. The battle has long since rolled away from the ground on which Engels fought. His arguments on the dialectic are commonplaces to-day which it would be a work of supererogation to explain to anyone except the persistent victim of Little Bethel. The world has come to accept them with the equanimity with which it always accepts long disputed truths.
The sacred right of nationality for which men contended in Engels'