During their lifetimes, Marx and Engels developed their perception of socialism and communism without pointing out or explaining the differences, perhaps because they did not believe in a fixed and ideal definition of socialism. It was a mode of production that would originate out of a specific historical situation which to a large extent would define its content.
Engels, in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, identifies the founders of socialism as Henri de Saint-Simon (1760–1825), Owen, and Charles Fourier (1772–1837), and he refers to the “actual communistic theories” of Étienne-Gabriel Morelly and Gabriel Bonnot de Mably. Proudhon and Louis Blanc both produced plans for a communist organization of society in the first part of the nineteenth century. Marx was familiar with this tradition and assimilated, criticized, and modified many of his predecessors’ ideas. From Saint-Simon stems the idea of a planned economy; from Proudhon Marx heard that “property is theft”; from Louis Blanc the precept “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.”
Lenin states that Marx’s ideas are a synthesis of French socialism, German idealist philosophy, and British political economy. However, there is something more to add.
Marx’s work was part of the scientific breakthroughs of the mid-nineteenth-century and the subsequent organization of knowledge into modern academic disciplines. Besides the significant developments in the social sciences, there were major discoveries in natural science, the earth’s geological history, biological cells, the origins of species, and energy transformation. Marx’s ideas were highly influenced by natural science. One example is Marx’s theory of the metabolic rift. It was built on the German chemist Justus von Liebig’s observations of how nutrients were systematically removed from the soil in the form of agricultural products and shipped hundreds and even thousands of miles to the new urban centers. The result was pollution in the cities and less fertile soil. Based on Liebig’s research, Marx’s critique of political economy included an ecological critique dialectically connected to his overall analysis of capitalist production. The capitalist mode of production disrupted human relations to nature and thereby “provoke[d] an irreparable rift in the interdependent process of social metabolism, a metabolism prescribed by the natural laws of life itself.” Marx also developed the notion of sustainability, arguing that humans do not own the earth but need to sustain it for future generations as “good heads of the household.” Socialism was defined in Volume III of Capital as the rational regulation by the associated producers of the metabolism of nature and society to conserve energy and promote human development.
The new scientists, such as Charles Darwin and Liebig, shared the same materialist perception of how and why things happen. Marx was an empirical scientist par excellence. He used statistics, reports, parliamentary proceedings, figures, and trade and shipping logs as empirical support for his theories. What makes Marx special among contemporaneous scientists was that he connected different parts of science into a systemic theory: history, sociology, economics, and different parts of natural science.
What distinguished Marx and Engels from their predecessors is that communism was no utopian dream but a realistic endeavor based on a scientific theory of history: historical materialism. Just as the rising bourgeoisie had overthrown feudalism to create capitalism, the working class would overthrow capitalism and construct communism. Marx did not specify how a socialist society should be run. However, he reckoned that progress in technology would upend classes, abolish capitalism, and make an equitable and prosperous future possible and likely. One of the first times that Marx and Engels wrote about communism is in The German Ideology, written in 1845-46:
This ‘alienation’ (to use a term which will be comprehensible to the philosophers) can, of course, only be abolished given two practical premises. For it to become an “intolerable” power, i.e. a power against which men make a revolution, it must necessarily have rendered the great mass of humanity “propertyless,” and produced, at the same time, the contradiction of an existing world of wealth and culture, both of which conditions presuppose a great increase in productive power, a high degree of its development. And, on the other hand, this development of productive forces (which itself implies the actual empirical existence of men in their world-historical, instead of local, being) is an absolutely necessary practical premise because without it want is merely made general, and with destitution the struggle for necessities and all the old filthy business would necessarily be reproduced; and furthermore, because only with this universal development of productive forces is a universal intercourse between men established, which produces in all nations simultaneously the phenomenon of the “propertyless” mass (universal competition), makes each nation dependent on the revolutions of the others, and finally has put world-historical, empirically universal individuals in place of local ones.
Without this, (1) communism could only exist as a local event; (2) the forces of intercourse themselves could not have developed as universal, hence intolerable powers: they would have remained home-bred conditions surrounded by superstition; and (3) each extension of intercourse would abolish local communism. Empirically, communism is only possible as the act of the dominant peoples “all at once” and simultaneously, which presupposes the universal development of productive forces and the world intercourse bound up with communism. Moreover, the mass of propertyless workers – the utterly precarious position of labour – power on a mass scale cut off from capital or from even a limited satisfaction and, therefore, no longer merely temporarily deprived of work itself as a secure source of life – presupposes the world market through competition. The proletariat can thus only exist world-historically, just as communism, its activity, can only have a “world-historical” existence. World-historical existence of individuals means existence of individuals which is directly linked up with world history. Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence.
What Marx and Engels are doing here is giving a credible forecast of the possible development of communism. As it does not exist, one cannot analyze it. The premise for the development of communism is that the vast majority of the masses are proletarians: propertyless wage laborers. A certain level in the development of the productive forces is also necessary. Socialism with less developed productive forces would only mean the generalization of poverty. Another strategic insight is that it is hard to imagine that communism can exist as a local project: it would produce hostility with the surrounding capitalist world. And finally, that communism is not “an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself,” it is a “movement which abolishes the present state of things” on the conditions of the existing world. All these thoughts were presented in the Communist Manifesto in 1848. Communism and socialism are no longer utopian ideas of a better society, but a prognosis built on an analysis of history, sociology, and a critique of political economy.
-Torkil Lauesen, The Long Transition Towards Socialism And The End of Capitalism Pgs. 5-6
