SOCIALISM: 
 
                         UTOPIAN AND SCIENTIFIC 
 
                           by Frederick Engels 
 
                              Written 1877 
 
Published as a separate pamphlet        This etext accords with the text 
in French at Paris in 1880, in         of the authorized English edition 
German at Zurich in 1882, and at                                of 1892. 
Berlin in 1891, and in English  
at London in 1892. 
 
 
                                   III 
 
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.  The growing perception that existing social 
institutions are unreasonable and unjust, that reason has become 
unreason, and right wrong [7], 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.  From this it also follows that the means of getting rid of the 
incongruities that have been brought to light must also be present, in a 
more or less developed condition, within the changed modes of production 
themselves.  These means are not to be invented by deduction from 
fundamental principles, but are to be discovered in the stubborn facts 
of the existing system of production.  
 
What is, then, the position of modern Socialism in this connection? 
 
The present situation of society -- this is now pretty generally 
conceded -- is the creation of the ruling class of today, of the 
bourgeoisie.  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.  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.  Since steam, machinery, and the making of machines by 
machinery transformed the older manufacture into modern industry, the 
productive forces, evolved under the guidance of the bourgeoisie, 
developed with a rapidity and in a degree unheard of before.  But just 
as the older manufacture, in its time, and handicraft, becoming more 
developed under its influence, 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.  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.  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.  
 
Now, in what does this conflict consist? 
 
Before capitalist production -- i.e., in the Middle Ages -- the system 
of petty industry obtained generally, based upon the private property of 
the laborers in their mens of production; in the country, the 
agriculture of the small peasant, freeman, or serf; in the towns, the 
handicrafts organized in guilds.  The instruments of labor -- land, 
agricultural implements, the workshop, the tool -- were the instruments 
of labor of single individuals, adapted for the use of one worker, and, 
therefore, of necessity, small, dwarfish, circumscribed.  But, for this 
very reason, they belonged as a rule to the producer himself.  To 
concentrate these scattered, limited means of production, to enlarge 
them, to turn them into the powerful levers of production of the present 
day -- this was precisely the historic role of capitalist production and 
of its upholder, the bourgeoisie.  In the fourth section of _Capital_, 
Marx has explained in detail how since the 15th century this has been 
historically worked out through the three phases of simple co-operation, 
manufacture, and modern industry.  But the bourgeoisie, as is shown 
there, could not transform these puny means of production into mighty 
productive forces without transforming them, at the same time, from 
means of production of the individual into _social_ means of production 
only workable by a collectivity of men.  The spinning wheel, the 
handloom, the blacksmith's hammer, were replaced by the 
spinning-machine, the power-loom, the steam-hammer; the individual 
workshop, by the factory implying the co-operation of hundreds and 
thousands of workmen.  In like manner, production itself changed from a 
series of individual into a series of social acts, and the production 
from individual to social products.  The yarn, the cloth, the metal 
articles that now come out of the factory were the joint product of many 
workers, through whose hands they had successively to pass before they 
were ready.  No one person could say of them: "I made that; this is _my_ 
product." 
 
But where, in a given society, the fundamental form of production is 
that spontaneous division of labor which creeps in gradually and not 
upon any preconceived plan, there the products take on the form of 
_commodities_, whose mutual exchange, buying and selling, enable the 
individual producers to satisfy their manifold wants.  And this was the 
case in the Middle Ages.  The peasant, e.g., sold to the artisan 
agricultural products and bought from him the products of handicraft.  
Into this society of individual producers, of commodity producers, the 
new mode of production thrust itself.  In the midst of the old division 
of labor, grown up spontaneously and upon _no definite plan_, which had 
governed the whole of society, now arose division of labor upon _a 
definite plan_, as organized in the factory; side by side with 
_individual_ production appeared _social_ production.  The products of 
both were sold in the same market, and, therefore, at prices at least 
approximately equal.  But organization upon a definite plan was stronger 
than spontaneous division of labor.  The factories working with the 
combined social forces of a collectivity of individuals produced their 
commodities far more cheaply than the individual small producers.  
Individual producers succumbed in one department after another.  
Socialized production revolutionized all the old methods of production.  
But its revolutionary character was, at the same time, so little 
recognized that it was, on the contrary, introduced as a means of 
increasing and developing the production of commodities.  When it arose, 
it found ready-made, and made liberal use of, certain machinery for the 
production and exchange of commodities: merchants' capital, handicraft, 
wage-labor.  Socialized production thus introducing itself as a new form 
of the production of commodities, it was a matter of course that under 
it the old forms of appropriation remained in full swing, and were 
applied to its products as well.  
 
In the medieval stage of evolution of the production of commodities, the 
question as to the owner of the product of labor could not arise.  The 
individual producer, as a rule, had, from raw material belonging to 
himself, and generally his own handiwork, produced it with his own 
tools, by the labor of his own hands or of his family.  There was no 
need for him to appropriate the new product.  It belonged wholly to him, 
as a matter of course.  His property in the product was, therefore, 
based _upon his own labor_.  Even where external help was used, this 
was, as a rule, of little importance, and very generally was compensated 
by something other than wages.  The apprentices and journeymen of the 
guilds worked less for board and wages than for education, in order that 
they might become master craftsmen themselves.  
 
Then came the concentration of the means of production and of the 
producers in large workshops and manufactories, their transformation 
into actual socialized means of production and socialized producers.  
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.  
Hitherto, the owner of the instruments of labor had himself appropriated 
the product, because, as a rule, it was his own product and the 
assistance of others was the exception.  Now, the owner of the 
instruments of labor 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.  The mode of production is subjected to this form of 
appropriation, although it abolishes the conditions upon which the 
latter rests.  [8] 
 
This contradiction, which gives to the new mode of production its 
capitalistic character, _contains the germ of the whole of the social 
antagonisms of today_.  The greater the mastery obtained by the new mode 
of production over all important fields of production and in all 
manufacturing countries, the more it reduced individual production to an 
insignificant residuum, _the more clearly was brought out the 
incompatibility of socialized production with capitalistic 
appropriation_.  
 
The first capitalists found, as we have said, alongside of other forms 
of labor, wage-labor ready-made for them on the market.  But it was 
exceptional, complementary, accessory, transitory wage-labor.  The 
agricultural laborer, though, upon occassion, he hired himself out by 
the day, had a few acres of his own land on which he could at all events 
live at a pinch.  The guilds were so organized that the journeyman to 
today became the master of tomorrow.  But all this changed, as soon as 
the means of production became socialized and concentrated in the hands 
of capitalists.  The means of production, as well as the product, of the 
individual producer became more and more worthless; there was nothing 
left for him but to turn wage-worker under the capitalist.  Wage-labor, 
aforetime the exception and accessory, now became the rule and basis of 
all production; aforetime complementary, it now became the sole 
remaining function of the worker.  The wage-worker for a time became a 
wage-worker for life.  The number of these permanent was further 
enormously increased by the breaking-up of the feudal system that 
occurred at the same time, by the disbanding of the retainers of the 
feudal lords, the eviction of the peasants from their homesteads, etc.  
The separation was made complete between the means of production 
concentrated in the hands of the capitalists, on the one side, and the 
producers, possessing nothing but their labor-power, on the other.  _The 
contradiction between socialized production and capitalistic 
appropriation manifested itself as the antagonism of proletariat and 
bourgeoisie._ 
 
We have seen that the capitalistic mode of production thrust its way 
into a society of commodity-producers, of individual producers, whose 
social bond was the exchange of their products.  But every society based 
upon the production of commodities has this peculiarity: that the 
producers have lost control over their own social inter-relations.  Each 
man produces for himself with such means of production as he may happen 
to have, and for such exchange as he may require to satisfy his 
remaining wants.  No one knows how much of his particular article is 
coming on the market, nor how much of it will be wanted.  No one knows 
whether his individual product will meet an actual demand, whether he 
will be able to make good his costs of production or even to sell his 
commodity at all.  Anarchy reigns in socialized production.  
 
But the production of commodities, like every other form of production, 
has it peculiar, inherent laws inseparable from it; and these laws work, 
despite anarchy, in and through anarchy.  They reveal themselves in the 
only persistent form of social inter-relations -- i.e., in exchange -- 
and here they affect the individual producers as compulsory laws of 
competition.  They are, at first, unknown to these producers themselves, 
and have to be discovered by them gradually and as the result of 
experience.  They work themselves out, therefore, independently of the 
producers, and in antagonism to them, as inexorable natural laws of 
their particular form of production.  The product governs the producers.  
 
In mediaeval society, especially in the earlier centuries, production 
was essentially directed toward satisfying the wants of the individual.  
It satisfied, in the main, only the wants of the producer and his 
family.  Where relations of personal dependence existed, as in the 
country, it also helped to satisfy the wants of the feudal lord.  In all 
this there was, therefore, no exchange; the products, consequently, did 
not assume the character of commodities.  The family of the peasant 
produced almost everything they wanted: clothes and furniture, as well 
as the means of subsistence.  Only when it began to produce more than 
was sufficient to supply its own wants and the payments in kind to the 
feudal lords, only then did it also produce commodities.  This surplus, 
thrown into socialized exchange and offered for sale, became 
commodities.  
 
The artisan in the towns, it is true, had from the first to produce for 
exchange.  But they, also, themselves supplied the greatest part of 
their individual wants.  They had gardens and plots of land.  They 
turned their cattle out into the communal forest, which, also, yielded 
them timber and firing.  The women spun flax, wool, and so forth.  
Production for the purpose of exchange, production of commodities, was 
only in its infancy.  Hence, exchange was restricted, the market narrow, 
the methods of production stable; there was local exclusiveness without, 
local unity within; the mark in the country; in the town, the guild.  
 
But with the extension of the production of commodities, and especially 
with the introduction of the capitalist mode of production, the laws of 
commodity-production, hitherto latent, came into action more openly and 
with greater force.  The old bonds were loosened, the old exclusive 
limits broken through, the producers were more and more turned into 
independent, isolated producers of commodities.  It became apparent that 
the production of society at large was ruled by absence of plan, by 
accident, by anarchy; and this anarchy grew to greater and greater 
height.  But the chief means by aid of which the capitalist mode of 
production intensified this anarchy of socialized production was the 
exact opposite of anarchy.  It was the increasing organization of 
production, upon a social basis, in every individual productive 
establishment.  By this, the old, peaceful, stable condition of things 
was ended.  Wherever this organization of production was introduced into 
a branch of industry, it brooked no other method of production by its 
side.  The field of labor became a battle-ground.  The great 
geographical discoveries, and the colonization following them, 
multiplied markets and quickened the transformation of handicraft into 
manufacture.  The war did not simply break out between the individual 
producers of particular localities.  The local struggles begat, in their 
turn, national conflicts, the commercial wars of the 17th and 18th 
centuries.  
 
Finally, modern industry and the opening of the world-market made the 
struggle universal, and at the same time gave it an unheard-of 
virulence.  Advantages in natural or artificial conditions of production 
now decide the existence or non-existence of individual capitalists, as 
well as of whole industries and countries.  He that falls is 
remorselessly cast aside.  It is the Darwinian struggle of the 
individual for existence transferred from Nature to society with 
intensified violence.  The conditions of existence natural to the animal 
appear as the final term of human development.  The contradiction 
between socialized production and capitalistic appropriation now 
presents itself as _an antagonism between the organization of production 
in the individual workshop and the anarchy of production in society 
generally._ 
 
The capitalistic mode of production moves in these two forms of the 
antagonism immanent to it from its very origin.  It is never able to get 
out of that "vicious circle" which Fourier had already discovered.  What 
Fourier could not, indeed, see in his time is that this circle is 
gradually narrowing; that the movement becomes more and more a spiral, 
and must come to an end, like the movement of planets, by collision with 
the centre.  It is the compelling force of anarchy in the production of 
society at large that more and more completely turns the great majority 
of men into proletarians; and it is the masses of the proletariat again 
who will finally put an end to anarchy in production.  It is the 
compelling force of anarchy in social production that turns the 
limitless perfectibility of machinery under modern industry into a 
compulsory law by which every individual industrial capitalist must 
perfect his machinery more and more, under penalty of ruin.  
 
But the perfecting of machinery is making human labor superfluous.  If 
the introduction and increase of machinery means the displacement of 
millions of manual by a few machine-workers, improvement in machinery 
means the displacement of more and more of the machine-workers 
themselves.  It means, in the last instance, the production of a number 
of available wage workers in excess of the average needs of capital, the 
formation of a complete industrial reserve army, as I called it in 1845 
[9], available at the times when industry is working at high pressure, 
to be cast out upon the street when the inevitable crash comes, a 
constant dead weight upon the limbs of the working-class in its struggle 
for existence with capital, a regulator for keeping of wages down to the 
low level that suits the interests of capital.  
 
  -- Thus it comes about, to quote Marx, that machinery becomes the 
     most powerful weapon in the war of capital against the 
     working-class; that the instruments of labor constantly tear the 
     means of subsistence out of the hands of the laborer; that they 
     very product of the worker is turned into an instrument for his 
     subjugation.   
 
  -- Thus it comes about that the economizing of the instruments of 
     labor becomes at the same time, from the outset, the most reckless 
     waste of labor-power, and robbery based upon the normal conditions 
     under which labor functions; that machinery,  
 
       "the most powerful instrument for shortening labor time, becomes 
       the most unfailing means for placing every moment of the 
       laborer's time and that of his family at the disposal of the 
       capitalist for the purpose of expanding the value of his 
       capital." (_Capital_, English edition, p.406) 
 
  -- Thus it comes comes about that the overwork of some becomes 
     the preliminary condition for the idleness of others, and that 
     modern industry, which hunts after new consumers over the whole 
     world, forces the consumption of the masses at home down to a 
     starvation minimum, and in doing thus destroys its own home market.  
 
       "The law that always equilibrates the relative surplus- 
       population, or industrial reserve army, to the extent and energy 
       of accumulation, this law rivets the laborer to capital more 
       firmly than the wedges of Vulcan did Prometheus to the rock.  It 
       establishes an accumulation of misery, corresponding with the 
       accumulation of capital.  Accumulation of wealth at one pole is, 
       therefore, at the same time accumulation of misery, agony of 
       toil, slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation, at the 
       opposite pole, i.e., on the side of the class that produces _its 
       own product in the form of capital_ (Marx's _Capital_, p.661) 
 
     And to expect any other division of the products from the 
     capitalist mode of production is the same as expecting the 
     electrodes of a battery not to decompose acidulated water, not to 
     liberate oxygen at the positive, hydrogen at the negative pole, so 
     long as they are connected with they battery.  
 
We have seen that the ever-increasing perfectibility of modern machinery 
is, by the anarchy of social production, turned into a compulsory law 
that forces the individual industrial capitalist always to improve his 
machinery, always to increase its productive force.  The bare 
possibility of extending the field of production is transformed for him 
into a similarly compulsory law.  The enormous expansive force of modern 
industry, compared with which that of gases is mere child's play, 
appears to us now as a _necessity_ for expansion, both qualitative and 
quantative, that laughs at all resistance.  Such resistance is offered 
by consumption, by sales, by the markets for the products of modern 
industry.  But the capacity for extension, extensive and intensive, of 
the markets is primarily governed by quite different laws that work much 
less energetically.  The extension of the markets cannot keep pace with 
the extension of production.  The collision becomes inevitable, and as 
this cannot produce any real solution so long as it does not break in 
pieces the capitalist mode of production, the collisions become 
periodic.  Capitalist production has begotten another "vicious circle".  
 
As a matter of fact, since 1825, when the first general crisis broke 
out, the whole industrial and commercial world, production and exchange 
among all civilized peoples and their more or less barbaric hangers-on, 
are thrown out of joint about once every 10 years.  Commerce is at a 
stand-still, the markets are glutted, products accumulate, as 
multitudinous as they are unsaleable, hard cash disappears, credit 
vanishes, factories are closed, the mass of the workers are in want of 
the means of subsistence, because they have produced too much of the 
means of subsistence; bankruptcy follows upon bankruptcy, execution upon 
execution.  The stagnation last for years; productive forces and 
products are wasted and destroyed wholesale, until the accumulated mass 
of commodities finally filter off, more or less depreciated in value, 
until production and exchange gradually begin to move again.  Little by 
little, the pace quickens.  It becomes a trot.  The industrial trot 
breaks into a canter, the canter in turn grows into the headlong gallop 
of a perfect steeplechase of industry, commercial credit, and 
speculation, which finally, after breakneck leaps, ends where it began 
-- in the ditch of a crisis.  And so over and over again.  We have now, 
since the year 1825, gone through this five times, and at the present 
moment (1877), we are going through it for the sixth time.  And the 
character of these crises is so clearly defined that Fourier hit all of 
them off when he described the first "crise plethorique", a crisis from 
plethora.  
 
In these crises, the contradiction between socialized production and 
capitalist appropriation ends in a violent explosion.  The circulation 
of commodities is, for the time being, stopped.  Money, the means of 
circulation, becomes a hindrance to circulation.  All the laws of 
production and circulation of commodities are turned upside down.  The 
economic collision has reached its apogee.  _The mode of production is 
in rebellion against the mode of exchange._ 
 
The fact that the socialized organization of production within the 
factory has developed so far that it has become incompatible with the 
anarchy of production in society, which exists side by side with and 
dominates it, is brought home to the capitalist themselves by the 
violent concentration of capital that occurs during crises, through the 
ruin of many large, and a still greater number of small, capitalists.  
The whole mechanism of the capitalist mode of production breaks down 
under the pressure of the productive forces, its own creations.  It is 
no longer able to turn all this mass of means of production into 
capital.  They lie fallow, and for that very reason the industrial 
reserve army must also lie fallow.  Means of production, means of 
subsistence, available laborers, all the elements of production and of 
general wealth, are present in abundance.  But "abundance becomes the 
source of distress and want" (Fourier), because it is the very thing 
that prevents the transformation of the means of production and 
subsistence into capital.  For in capitalistic society, the means of 
production can only function when they have undergone a preliminary 
transformation into capital, into the means of exploiting human 
labor-power.  The necessity of this transformation into capital of the 
means of production and subsistence stands like a ghost between these 
and the workers.  It alone prevents the coming together of the material 
and personal levers of production; it alone forbids the means of 
production to function, the workers to work and live.  On the one hand, 
therefore, the capitalistic mode of production stands convicted of its 
own incapacity to further direct these productive forces.  On the other, 
these productive forces themselves, with increasing energy, press 
forward to the removal of the existing contradiction, to the abolition 
of their quality as capital, to the _practical recognition of their 
character as social production forces._ 
 
This rebellion of the productive forces, as they grow more and more 
powerful, against their quality as capital, this stronger and stronger 
command that their social character shall be recognized, forces the 
capital class itself to treat them more and more as social productive 
forces, so far as this is possible under capitalist conditions.  The 
period of industrial high pressure, with its unbounded inflation of 
credit, not less than the crash itself, by the collapse of great 
capitalist establishments, tends to bring about that form of the 
socialization of great masses of the means of production which we meet 
with in the different kinds of joint-stock companies.  Many of these 
means of production and of distribution are, from the outset, so 
colossal that, like the railways, they exclude all other forms of 
capitalistic expansion.  At a further stage of evolution, this form also 
becomes insufficient.  The producers on a large scale in a particular 
branch of an industry in a particular country unite in a "Trust", a 
union for the purpose of regulating production.  They determine the 
total amount to be produced, parcel it out among themselves, and thus 
enforce the selling price fixed beforehand.  But trusts of this kind, as 
soon as business becomes bad, are generally liable to break up, and on 
this very account compel a yet greater concentration of association.  
The whole of a particular industry is turned into one gigantic 
joint-stock company; internal competition gives place to the internal 
monopoly of this one company.  This has happened in 1890 with the 
English alkali production, which is now, after the fusion of 48 large 
works, in the hands of one company, conducted upon a single plan, and 
with a capital of 6,000,000 pounds.  
 
In the trusts, freedom of competition changes into its very opposite -- 
into monopoly; and the production without any definite plan of 
capitalistic society capitulates to the production upon a definite plan 
of the invading socialistic society.  Certainly, this is so far still to 
the benefit and advantage of the capitalists.  But, in this case, the 
exploitation is so palpable, that it must break down.  No nation will 
put up with production conducted by trusts, with so barefaced an 
exploitation of the community by a small band of dividend-mongers.  
 
In any case, with trusts or without, the official representative of 
capitalist society -- the state -- will ultimately have to undertake the 
direction of production.[10] This necessity for conversion into State 
property is felt first in the great institutions for intercourse and 
communication -- the post office, the telegraphs, the railways.  
 
If the crises demonstrate the incapacity of the bourgeoisie for managing 
any longer modern productive forces, the transformation of the great 
establishments for production and distribution into joint-stock 
companies, trusts, and State property, show how unnecessary the 
bourgeoisie are for that purpose.  All the social functions of the 
capitalist has no further social function than that of pocketing 
dividends, tearing off coupons, and gambling on the Stock Exchange, 
where the different capitalists despoil one another of their capital.  
At first, the capitalistic mode of production forces out the workers.  
Now, it forces out the capitalists, and reduces them, just as it reduced 
the workers, to the ranks of the surplus-population, although not 
immediately into those of the industrial reserve army.  
 
But, the transformation -- either into joint-stock companies and trusts, 
or into State-ownership -- does not do away with the capitalistic nature 
of the productive forces.  In the joint-stock companies and trusts, this 
is obvious.  And the modern State, again, is only the organization that 
bourgeois society takes on in order to support the external conditions 
of the capitalist mode of production against the encroachments as well 
of the workers as 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.  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.  It is, 
rather, brought to a head.  But, brought to a head, it topples over.  
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.  
 
This 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 social character of the means of 
production and of the products today reacts against the producers, 
periodically disrupts all production and exchange, acts only like a law 
of Nature working blindly, forcibly, destructively.  But,with the taking 
over by society of the productive forces, the social character of the 
means of production and of the products will be utilized by the 
producers with a perfect understanding of its nature, and instead of 
being a source of disturbance and periodical collapse, will become the 
most powerful lever of production itself.  
 
Active social forces work exactly like natural forces: blindly, 
forcibly, destructively, so long as we do not understand, and reckon 
with, them.  But, when once we understand them, when once we grasp their 
action, their direction, their effects, it depends only upon ourselves 
to subject them more and more to our own will, and, by means of them, to 
reach our own ends.  And this holds quite especially of the mighty 
productive forces of today.  As long as we obstinately refuse to 
understand the nature and the character of these social means of action 
-- and this understanding goes against the grain of the capitalist mode 
of production, and its defenders -- so long these forces are at work in 
spite of us, in opposition to us, so long they master us, as we have 
shown above in detail.  
 
But when once their nature is understood, they can, in the hand working 
together, be transformed from master demons into willing servants.  The 
difference is as that between the destructive force of electricity in 
the lightning in the storm, and electricity under command in the 
telegraph and the voltaic arc; the difference between a conflagration, 
and fire working in the service of man.  With this recognition, at last, 
of the real nature of the productive forces of today, the social anarchy 
of production gives place to a social regulation of production upon a 
definite plan, according to the needs of the community and of each 
individual.  Then the capitalist mode of appropriation, in which the 
product enslaves first the producer, and then the appropriator, is 
replaced by the mode of appropriation of the products that is based upon 
the nature of the modern means of production; upon the one hand, direct 
social appropriation, as means to the maintenance and extension of 
production -- on the other, direct individual appropriation, as means of 
subsistence and of enjoyment.  
 
Whilst the capitalist mode of production more and more completely 
transforms the great majority of the population into proletarians, it 
creates the power which, under penalty of its own destruction, is forced 
to accomplish this revolution.  Whilst it forces on more and more of the 
transformation of the vast means of production, already socialized, into 
State property, it shows itself the way to accomplishing this 
revolution.  _The proletariat seizes political power and turns the means 
of production into State property._ 
 
But, in doing this, it abolishes itself as proletariat, abolishes all 
class distinction and class antagonisms, abolishes also the State as 
State.  Society, thus far, based upon class antagonisms, had need of the 
State.  That is, of an organization of the particular class which was, 
pro tempore, the exploiting class, an organization for the purpose of 
preventing any interference from without with the existing conditions of 
production, and, therefore, especially, for the purpose of forcibly 
keeping the exploited classes in the condition of oppression 
corresponding with the given mode of production (slavery, serfdom, 
wage-labor).  The State was the official representative of society as a 
whole; the gathering of it together into a visible embodiment.  But, it 
was this only in so far as it was the State of that class which itself 
represented, for the time being, society as a whole: 
 
  --  in ancient times, the State of slaveowning citizens; 
 
  --  in the Middle Ages, the feudal lords; 
 
  --  in our own times, the bourgeoisie. 
 
When, at last, it becomes the real representative of the whole of 
society, it renders itself unnecessary.  As soon as there is no longer 
any social class to be held in subjection; as soon as class rule, and 
the individual struggle for existence based upon our present anarchy in 
production, with the collisions and excesses arising from these, are 
removed, nothing more remains to be repressed, and a special repressive 
force, a State, is no longer necessary.  The first act by virtue of 
which the State really constitutes itself the representative of the 
whole of society -- the taking possession of the means of production in 
the name of society -- this is, at the same time, its last independent 
act as a State.  State interference in social relations becomes, in one 
domain after another, superfluous, and then dies out of itself; 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._ This gives the measure of the value of the 
phrase :a free State", both as to its justifiable use at times by 
agitators, and as to its ultimate scientific inefficiency; and also of 
the demands of the so-called anarchists for the abolition of the State 
out of hand.  
 
Since the historical appearance of the capitalist mode of production, 
the appropriation by society of all the means of production has often 
been dreamed of, more or less vaguely, by individuals, as well as by 
sects, as the ideal of the future.  But it could become possible, could 
become a historical necessity, only when the actual conditions for its 
realization were there.  Like every other social advance, it becomes 
practicable, not by men understanding that the existence of classes is 
in contradiction to justice, equality, etc., not by the mere willingness 
to abolish these classes, but by virtue of certain new economic 
conditions.  The separation of society into an exploiting and an 
exploited class, a ruling and an oppressed class, was the necessary 
consequences of the deficient and restricted development of production 
in former times.  So long as the total social labor only yields a 
produce which but slightly exceeds that barely necessary for the 
existence of all; so long, therefore, as labor engages all or almost all 
the time of the great majority of the members of society -- so long, of 
necessity, this society is divided into classes.  Side by side with the 
great majority, exclusively bond slaves to labor, arises a class freed 
from directly productive labor, which looks after the general affairs of 
society: the direction of labor, State business, law, science, art, etc.  
It is, therefore, the law of division of labor that lies at the basis of 
the division into classes.  But this does not prevent this division into 
classes from being carried out by means of violence and robbery, 
trickery and fraud.  it does not prevent the ruling class, once having 
the upper hand, from consolidating its power at the expense of the 
working-class, from turning its social leadership into an intensified 
exploitation of the masses.  
 
But if, upon this showing, division into classes has a certain 
historical justification, it has this only for a given period, only 
under given social conditions.  It was based upon the insufficiency of 
production.  It will be swept away by the complete development of modern 
productive forces.  And, in fact, the abolition of classes in society 
presupposes a degree of historical evolution at which the existence, not 
simply of this or that particular ruling class, but of any ruling class 
at all, and, therefore, the existence of class distinction itself, has 
become a obsolete anachronism.  It presupposes, therefore, the 
development of production carried out to a degree at which appropriation 
of the means of production and of the products, and, with this, of 
political domination, of the monopoly of culture, and of intellectual 
leadership by a particular class of society, has become not only 
superfluous but economically, politically, intellectually, a hindrance 
to development.  
 
This point is now reached.  Their political and intellectual bankruptcy 
is scarcely any longer a secret to the bourgeoisie themselves.  Their 
economic bankruptcy recurs regularly every 10 years.  In every crisis, 
society is suffocated beneath the weight of its own productive forces 
and products, which it cannot use, and stands helpless, face-to-face 
with the absurd contradiction that the producers have nothing to 
consume, because consumers are wanting.  The expansive force of the 
means of production burst the bonds that the capitalist mode of 
production had imposed upon them.  Their deliverance from these bonds is 
the one precondition for an unbroken, constantly-accelerated development 
of the productive forces, and therewith for a practically unlimited 
increase of production itself.  Nor is this all.  The socialized 
appropriation of the means of production does away, not only with the 
present artificial restrictions upon production, but also with the 
positive waste and devastation of productive forces and products that 
are at the present time the inevitable concomitants of production, and 
that reach their height in the crises.  Further, it sets free for the 
community at large a mass of means of production and of products, by 
doing away with the senseless extravagance of the ruling classes of 
today, and their political representatives.  The possibility of securing 
for every member of society, by mens of socialized production, an 
existence not only fully sufficient materially, and becoming day-by-day 
more full, but an existence guaranteeing to all the free development and 
exercise of their physical and mental faculties -- this possibility is 
now, for the first time, here, but _it is here_.[11] 
 
With the seizing of the means of production by society, production of 
commodities is done away with, and, simultaneously, the mastery of the 
product over the producer.  Anarchy in social production is replaced by 
systematic, definite organization.  The struggle for individual 
existence disappears.  Then, for the first time, man, in a certain 
sense, is finally marked off from the rest of the animal kingdom, and 
emerges from mere animal conditions of existence into really human ones.  
The whole sphere of the conditions of life which environ man, and which 
have hitherto ruled man, now comes under the dominion and control of 
man, who for the first time becomes the real, conscious lord of nature, 
because he has now become master of his own social organization.  The 
laws of his own social action, hitherto standing face-to-face with man 
as laws of Nature foreign to, and dominating him, will then be used with 
full understanding, and so mastered by him.  Man's own social 
organization, hitherto confronting him as a necessity imposed by Nature 
and history, now becomes the result of his own free action.  The 
extraneous objective forces that have, hitherto, governed history,pass 
under the control of man himself.  Only from that time will man himself, 
more and more consciously, make his own history -- only from that time 
will the social causes set in movement by him have, in the main and in a 
constantly growing measure, the results intended by him.  It is the 
ascent of man from the kingdom of necessity to the kingdom of freedom.  
 
Let us briefly sum up our sketch of historical evolution. 
 
I.  MEDIAEVAL SOCIETY -- Individual production on a small scale.  Means 
    of production adapted for individual use; hence primitive, ungainly, 
    petty, dwarfed in action.  Production for immediate consumption, 
    either of the producer himself or his feudal lord.  Only where an 
    excess of production over this consumption occurs is such excess 
    offered for sale, enters into exchange.  Production of commodities, 
    therefore, only in its infancy.  But already it contains within 
    itself, in embryo, anarchy in the production of society at large.  
 
II. CAPITALIST REVOLUTION -- transformation of industry, at first be 
    means of simple cooperation and manufacture.  Concentration of the 
    means of production, hitherto scattered, into great workshops.  As a 
    consequence, their transformation from individual to social means of 
    production -- a transformation which does not, on the whole, affect 
    the form of exchange.  The old forms of appropriation remain in 
    force.  The capitalist appears.  In his capacity as owner of the 
    means of production, he also appropriates the products and turns 
    them into commodities.  Production has become a _social_ act.  
    Exchange and appropriation continue to be _individual_ acts, the 
    acts of individuals.  The social product is appropriated by the 
    individual capitalist.  Fundamental contradiction, whence arise all 
    the contradictions in which our present-day society moves, and which 
    modern industry brings to light.  
 
    A.  Severance of the producer from the means of production.  
        Condemnation of the worker to wage-labor for life.  Antagonism 
        between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie.  
 
    B.  Growing predominance and increasing effectiveness of the laws 
        governing the production of commodities.  Unbridled competition.  
        Contradiction between socialized organization in the individual 
        factory and social anarchy in the production as a whole.  
 
    C.  On the one hand, perfecting of machinery, made by competition 
        compulsory for each individual manufacturer, and complemented by 
        a constantly growing displacement of laborers.  Industrial 
        reserve-army.  On the other hand, unlimited extension of 
        production, also compulsory under competition, for every 
        manufacturer.  On both sides, unheard-of development of 
        productive forces, excess of supply over demand, over-production 
        and products -- excess there, of laborers, without employment 
        and without means of existence.  But these two levers of 
        production and of social well-being are unable to work together, 
        because the capitalist form of production prevents the 
        productive forces from working and the products from 
        circulating, unless they are first turned into capital -- which 
        their very superabundance prevents.  The contradiction has grown 
        into an absurdity.  The mode of production rises in rebellion 
        against the form of exchange.  
 
    D.  Partial recognition of the social character of the productive 
        forces forced upon the capitalists themselves.  Taking over of 
        the great institutions for production and communication, first 
        by joint-stock companies, later in by trusts, then by the State.  
        The bourgeoisie demonstrated to be a superfluous class.  All its 
        social functions are now performed by salaried employees.  
 
III. PROLETARIAN REVOLUTION -- Solution of the contradictions.  The 
    proletariat seizes the public power, and by means of this transforms 
    the socialized means of production, slipping from the hands of the 
    bourgeoisie, into public property.  By this act, the proletariat 
    frees the means of production from the character of capital they 
    have thus far borne, and gives their socialized character complete 
    freedom to work itself out.  Socialized production upon a 
    predetermined plan becomes henceforth possible.  The development of 
    production makes the existence of different classes of society 
    thenceforth an anachronism.  In proportion as anarchy in social 
    production vanishes, the political authority of the State dies out.  
    Man, at last the master of his own form of social organization, 
    becomes at the same time the lord over Nature, his own master -- 
    free.  
 
To accomplish this act of universal emancipation is the historical 
mission of the modern proletariat.  To thoroughly comprehend the 
historical conditions and this the very nature of this act, to impart to 
the now oppressed proletarian class a full knowledge of the conditions 
and of the meaning of the momentous act it is called upon to accomplish, 
this is the task of the theoretical expression of the proletarian 
movement, scientific Socialism.  
 
 
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