All three works by Vladimir Lenin can be found in Essential Works of Lenin: 'What Is to Be Done?' and Other Writings.Vladimir Lenin, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism.Frederick Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State.Frederick Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific.Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Communist Manifesto.So he begins Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, by stating, 'Modern socialism is, in its essence, the direct product of the recognition, on the one hand, of the class antagonism existing in the society of today between.capitalists and wage workers on the other hand of the anarchy existing in production.'īut while every set of ideas has material roots, the people who develop it inevitably draw on existing ideas in doing so. It is also an attempt to put it into practice.Īs he explained in the introduction to the first English edition (published in 1892), historical materialism 'seeks the ultimate cause and the great moving power of all important historic events in the economic development of society, in the changes in the modes of production and exchange, in the consequent division of society into distinct classes, and in the struggles of these classes against one another.'ĮNGELS APPLIES this perspective to explaining the origins of socialism in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalismīut Engels' pamphlet is not just an exposition of the Marxist view of history.Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State.As he put it in a letter to Marx, the book was 'an encyclopedic survey of our conception of the philosophical, natural-science and historical problems.'Ī few years later, at the request of French socialists, Engels reworked three of the chapters from Anti-Dühring to create a popular account of the origin of socialist ideas and the Marxist theory of history, which he calls 'historical materialism.' It was originally part of a much longer work that Engels, Karl Marx's lifelong friend and collaborator, published in 1878: Herr Eugen Dühring's Revolution in Science (often known as the Anti-Dühring)-a polemical response to the confused ideas of a German academic whose views were having a negative influence on the socialist movement in that country.ĭühring's theories have long since disappeared into the dustbin of history, but they gave Engels the opportunity to write a detailed exposition of Marxist philosophy. FREDERICK ENGELS' pamphlet Socialism: Utopian and Scientific is-alongside The Communist Manifesto-the best short introduction to Marxism.

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