Engels Slide Show PDF

“Hope locates itself in the premises that we don’t know what will happen and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act. When you recognise uncertainty, you recognise that you may be able to influence the outcomes – you alone or you in concert with a few dozen or several million others....

“Hope locates itself in the premises that we don’t know what will happen and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act. When you recognise uncertainty, you recognise that you may be able to influence the outcomes – you alone or you in concert with a few dozen or several million others. Hope is an embrace of the unknown and the unknowable, an alternative to the certainty of both optimists and pessimists.” THE STATE “The modern State, again, is only the organization that bourgeois society takes in order to support … the capitalist mode of production against the encroachments [both] of the workers [and] of individual capitalists. 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.” 1: HISTORICAL MATERIALISM (Chapter 3) The materialist conception of history starts from the proposition that the production of the means to support human life and, next to production, the exchange of things produced, is the basis of all social structure; that in every society that has appeared in history, the manner in which wealth is distributed and society divided into classes or orders is dependent upon what is produced, how it is produced, and how the products are exchanged. From this point of view, the final causes of all social changes and political revolutions are to be sought, not in men's brains, not in men's better insights into eternal truth and justice, but in changes in the modes of production and exchange. They are to be sought, not in the philosophy, but in the economics of each particular epoch. Core example: How do we understand and narrate The French Revolution? Do we tell it like this? The great men, who in France prepared men’s minds for the coming revolution, were themselves extreme revolutionists. They recognized no external authority of any kind whatever. Religion, natural science, society, political institutions – everything was subjected to the most unsparing criticism: everything must justify its existence before the judgment-seat of reason or give up existence. Reason became the sole measure of everything. … Every form of society and government then existing, every old traditional notion, was flung into the lumber-room as irrational; the world had hitherto allowed itself to be led solely by prejudices; everything in the past deserved only pity and contempt. Now, for the first time, appeared the light of day, the kingdom of reason; henceforth superstition, injustice, privilege, oppression, were to be superseded by eternal truth, eternal Right, equality based on Nature and the inalienable rights of man. We know today that this kingdom of reason was nothing more than the idealized kingdom of the bourgeoisie… that this equality reduced itself to bourgeois equality before the law; that bourgeois property was proclaimed as one of the essential rights of man; and that the government of reason… only could come into being, as a democratic bourgeois republic. The great thinkers of the 18th century could, no more than their predecessors, go beyond the limits imposed upon them by their epoch. … or like this? The mode of production peculiar to the bourgeoisie, known, since Marx, as the capitalist mode of production, was incompatible with the feudal system, with the privileges it conferred upon individuals, entire social ranks and local corporations, as well as with the hereditary ties of subordination which constituted the framework of its social organization. [So] the bourgeoisie broke up the feudal system and built upon its ruins the capitalist order of society, the kingdom of free competition, of personal liberty, of the equality, before the law, of all commodity owners, of all the rest of the capitalist blessings. Thenceforward, the capitalist mode of production could develop in freedom. Just as the older manufacture…had come into collision with the feudal trammels of the guilds, so now modern industry, in its complete development, comes into collision with the bounds within which the capitalist mode of production holds it confined. The new productive forces have already outgrown the capitalistic mode of using them. But the socialized producers and means of production and their products were still treated, after this change, just as they had been before — i.e., as the means of production and the products of individuals. … Now, the owner of the instruments of labor [the Capitalist] always appropriated to himself the product, although it was no longer his product but exclusively the product of the labor of others. Thus, the products now produced socially were not appropriated by those who had actually set in motion the means of production and actually produced the commodities, but by the capitalists. The means of production, and production itself, had become in essence socialized. But they were subjected to a form of appropriation which presupposes the private production of individuals, under which, therefore, every one owns his own product and brings it to market. This contradiction, which gives to the new mode of production its capitalistic character, contains the germ of the whole of the social antagonisms of The new productive forces have already outgrown the capitalistic mode of using them. And this conflict between productive forces and modes of production is not a conflict engendered in the mind of man, like that between original sin and divine justice. It exists, in fact, objectively, outside us, independently of the will and actions even of the men that have brought it on. The growing perception that existing social institutions are unreasonable and unjust, that reason has become unreason, and right wrong, is only proof that in the modes of production and exchange changes have silently taken place with which the social order, adapted to earlier economic conditions, is no longer in keeping. Modern Socialism is nothing but the reflex, in thought, of this conflict in fact; its ideal reflection in the minds, first, of the class directly suffering under it, the working class. 2. Dialectical Materialism(Chapter 2) [But] when we consider and reflect upon Nature at large, or the history of For [the metaphysician], a thing mankind, or our own intellectual activity either exists or does not exist; a … we see the picture of an endless thing cannot at the same time be entanglement of relations and reactions, itself and something else. Positive permutations and combinations, in which and negative absolutely exclude one nothing remains what, where and as it another; cause and effect stand in a was, but everything moves, changes, rigid antithesis, one to the other. comes into being and passes away. But this method of work has also left We find upon closer investigation that us as legacy the habit of observing the two poles of an antithesis, positive natural objects and processes in and negative, e.g., are as inseparable as isolation, apart from their they are opposed, and that despite all connection with the vast whole; of their opposition, they mutually observing them in repose, not in interpenetrate. And we find, in like motion … in their death, not in their manner, that cause and effect are life. In the contemplation of conceptions which only hold good in individual things, it forgets the their application to individual cases; but connection between them; in the as soon as we consider the individual contemplation of their existence, it cases in their general connection with forgets the beginning and end of the universe as a whole … causes and that existence …It cannot see the effects are eternally changing places, so Dialectics … comprehends things and their representations, ideas, in their essential connection, concatenation, motion, origin and ending. Legacy of GWF Hegel (1770-1831) In [Hegel’s] system — and herein is its great merit — for the first time the whole world, natural, historical, intellectual, is represented as a process — i.e., as in constant motion, change, transformation, development; and the attempt is made to trace out the internal connection that makes a continuous whole of all this movement and development. From this point of view, the history of mankind no longer appeared as a wild whirl of senseless deeds of violence, all equally condemnable at the judgment seat of mature philosophic reason … but as the process of evolution of man himself. It was now the task of the intellect to follow the gradual march of this process through all its devious ways, and to trace out the inner law running through all its apparently accidental phenomena. Nature is the proof of dialectics, and it must be said for modern science that it has … shown that, in the last resort, Nature works dialectically and not metaphysically; that she does not move in the eternal oneness of a perpetually recurring circle, but goes through a real historical evolution. In this connection, Darwin must be named before all others. He dealt the metaphysical conception of Nature the heaviest blow by his proof that all organic beings, plants, animals, and man himself, are the products of a process of evolution going on through millions of years. Old materialism looked upon all previous history as a crude heap of irrationality and violence; modern materialism sees in it the process of evolution of humanity, and aims at discovering the laws thereof. Socialism was no longer an accidental discovery of this or that ingenious brain, but the necessary outcome of the struggle between two historically developed classes — the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. Its task was no longer to manufacture a system of society as perfect as possible, but to examine the historico-economic succession of events from which these classes and their antagonism had of necessity sprung, and to discover in the economic conditions thus created the means of ending the conflict. a) to present the capitalistic mode of production in its historical connection and its inevitableness during a particular historical period, and therefore, also, to present its inevitable downfall; and b) to lay bare its essential character, which was still a secret. This was done by the discovery of surplus-value. “Utopian Socialists: Charles Fourier (1772-1837), Henri de Saint Simon (1760-1825), Robert Owen (1771-18 To the crude conditions of capitalistic production and the crude class conditions correspond crude theories. The solution of the social problems, which as yet lay hidden in undeveloped economic conditions, the Utopians attempted to evolve out of the human brain. Society presented nothing but wrongs; to remove these was the task of reason. It was necessary, then, to discover a new and more perfect system of social order and to impose this upon society from without by propaganda, and, wherever it was possible, by the example of model experiments. These new social systems were foredoomed as Utopian; the more completely they were worked out in detail, the more they could not avoid drifting off into pure phantasies. 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. And as an absolute truth is independent of time, space, and of the historical development of man, it is a mere accident when and where it is discovered. With all this, absolute truth, reason, and justice are different with the founder of each different school. 4. The “Solution”: Proletarian Revolutionary Socialism “[The] solution can only consist in the practical recognition of the social nature of the modern forces of production, and therefore in the harmonizing with the socialized character of the means of production. And this can only come about by society openly and directly taking possession of the productive forces which have outgrown all control, except that of society as a whole.”  The Revolution as the Metaphorical and Actual Mastery of Nature The solution can only consist in the practical recognition of the social nature The possibility of securing for every member of society, by of the modern forces of production, and means of socialized production, an existence not only fully therefore in the harmonizing with the sufficient materially, and becoming day-by-day more full, socialized character of the means of but an existence guaranteeing to all the free development production. And this can only come and exercise of their physical and mental faculties — this about by society openly and directly possibility is now, for the first time, here, but it is here. taking possession of the productive With the seizing of the means of production by society, forces which have outgrown all control, production of commodities is done away with, and, simultaneously, the mastery of the product over the except that of society as a whole. producer. Anarchy in social production is replaced by The social character of the means of systematic, definite organization. The struggle for production and of the products today individual existence disappears. reacts against the producers, periodically disrupts all production and Then, for the first time, man, in a certain sense, is exchange, [and] acts only like a law of finally marked off from the rest of the animal Nature, working blindly, forcibly, kingdom, and emerges from mere animal destructively … But once their nature is conditions of existence into really human ones. The understood, they can, in the hand whole sphere of the conditions of life which environ working together, be transformed from man, and which have hitherto ruled man, now master demons into willing servants. comes under the dominion and control of man, who The difference is as that between the for the first time becomes the real, conscious lord destructive force of electricity in the of nature, because he has now become master of lightning in the storm, and the his own social organization. The laws of his own social action, hitherto standing face-to-face with man as laws of Nature III. Proletarian Revolution. Solution foreign to, and dominating him, will then be used of the contradictions. The with full understanding, and so mastered by him. proletariat seizes the public Man's own social organization, hitherto power, and by means of this confronting him as a necessity imposed by transforms the socialized means Nature and history, now becomes the result of his of production, slipping from the own free action. The extraneous objective forces hands of the bourgeoisie, into that have, hitherto, governed history, pass under public property. By this act, the the control of man himself. Only from that time proletariat frees the means of will man himself, more and more consciously, production from the character of make his own history — only from that time will capital they have thus far borne, the social causes set in movement by him have, in and gives their socialized the main and in a constantly growing measure, character complete freedom to the results intended by him. It is the ascent of work itself out. Socialized man from the kingdom of necessity to the production upon a predetermined kingdom To accomplishof this freedom. act of universal emancipation is the historical plan becomes henceforth possible. mission of the modern proletariat. To thoroughly comprehend the The development of production historical conditions and the very nature of this act, to impart to the makes the existence of different now oppressed proletarian class a full knowledge of the conditions classes of society thenceforth an and of the meaning of the momentous act it is called upon to anachronism. In proportion as accomplish, this is the task of the theoretical expression of the anarchy in social production proletarian movement, scientific Socialism. vanishes, the political authority of the State dies out. Man, at las the