Scientific socialism

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Marx and Engels

The term Scientific Socialism is in place

  1. especially at the beginning of the 19th century in Europe for the search for a scientific term for the social science that was developed in connection with communist ideas (analogous to sociology ).
  2. today mainly for the approach of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels to the analysis of bourgeois society and the conditions of a socialist development.
  3. for scientific socialism - like other terms ( e.g. Marxism ) - used in German social democracy at the end of the 19th century for self-expression and
  4. for - especially by Lenin and Stalin - dogmas of Soviet ideology developed from this and other terms (see Stalin's work On Dialectical and Historical Materialism ).

Origin of the term

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon used in his book “ Qu'est-ce que la propriété? Ou recherches sur le principe du droit du gouvernement ”first used the term“ socialisme scientifique ”.

Karl Marx used the term scientific socialism to stand out against the approaches of the early socialists. Later, in the debate against Dühring , Friedrich Engels assigned the term Marx (creator of the WS) in a way that encouraged the use of a “Marxist teaching building”. For Engels, the derivation of the exploitation of the working class under capitalism and the materialist conception of history were the two great discoveries of Marx that would have made socialism a science. However, even Marx himself described this debate by Engels as an introduction to scientific socialism.

In the following, reference is made primarily to the approach of Marx and Engels in the early work Die deutsche Ideologie , which emerged in 1845 as a formulation of a common position as the basis for further cooperation between the two, but was only published in 1933.

Definition

In the sense of a non-dogmatic term, Scientific Socialism - based on Marx and Engels:

  1. a current in the socialist movement since the 19th century, which refers to the scientific analysis of society and the economy in order to assess the possibilities for a socialist revolution. Both were regarded as insufficient, merely a desire to follow an idea (for example utopian socialism ; anarchism) to enforce a classless society.
  2. It contains one of the early formulations of an image of man that places the free, non-alienated, comprehensively educated individual at the center of social theory. Compared to the use of workers as a mere supplement, as tools of the machine under their rhythm according to the plan of the capitalist in early industry, socialist production leads to the appropriation of the productive forces by the workers: “The appropriation of a totality of production instruments is therefore the development of a Totality of abilities in the individuals themselves. “Capitalist work is characterized by the expropriation of the abilities of the worker (as in the handicraft) and the transfer of productive knowledge to the disposal of the capitalist (planning office, patents ...).
  3. It was a matter of opposing the act of creation of the world by God, which until then had been defended by the Christian churches as dogma, as the only valid idea ( idealism ), with a materialistic philosophy corresponding to the new natural laws ( Laplace ...). Materialism is the philosophy of explaining the creation of the world out of itself. Positive, objective historiography was set against ideas and utopia (this was also linked to formulations of Auguste Comte's Cours de philosophie positive , which Marx / Engels, however, was considered a reactionary). In simplified terms, one could speak of a positivistic appropriation of the material in its dialectical presentation in Marx's research work.
  4. Theoretical science is linked to the methods of the natural sciences, which increasingly succeeded in describing nature with general "laws". The aim was to also grasp the analysis in social science as a ( nomological ) “great theory”, to analyze society as a “totality” (wholeness). “Where speculation ends, in real life, then real, positive science begins, the presentation of practical activity, the practical development process of people.” Such approaches were consistently found in early sociology. The great theory , the attempt to grasp the world in one litter, also in the humanities (roughly according to Darwin's approach), was later further developed through the approaches of historical materialism and dialectical materialism in the direction of a natural law (equated with truth) to a dogma.

Scientific socialism, as Marx and Engels saw it, is generally a theory of evolution, even if it itself emphasized revolutionary development with references to the class struggle and the stages of historical development. That also had to do with the current, revolutionary situation in the middle of the 19th century. The motive of the development is still not the revolution, but the work ( basis ), which can lead to revolutionary adjustments in politics and culture ( superstructure ) - or not: "Socialism or barbarism" seemed to Marx the alternative.

Role of work

How did primitive society come about ( primitive communism )? About the evolutionary development of toolmaking animals , the tool-making animal .

How did the slave owner society come about ? By developing the work and the division of labor, whereby a multi-product could be created! And it wasn't the slaves who overcame them.

How did feudalism come about ? Through a further division of labor, which, according to Marx, is identical with property relations, which are unequal (see below). Not only the main classes (nobility and peasants in the peasant war) were in contradiction, but the newly emerging bourgeoisie overcame this system (not least through the generation of capital from money by means of wage labor).

How did capitalism come about ? Through a qualitative further change in ownership (having - not having). Only here is the opposite pole of the capitalists, the proletariat, as a class directly the antipode (main antagonistic classes). The abolition of one class requires that of the other, the self-liberation of the proletariat at the same time overcomes capitalism and the property relations to the new form of society of socialism and leads to the abolition of the division of labor between intellectual and physical labor.

The German ideology

With the volumes Das Kapital , Karl Marx became the author of the central analysis of the laws of motion of the capitalist system in the 19th century (primarily in England). He was stimulated - which is often forgotten - by a sketchy economic analysis of Friedrich Engels' outlines to a critique of national economy (1844; called by Marx "brilliant sketch").

Due to a joint text from 1845, which was aimed at the self-understanding between Marx and Engels, the German Ideology , both are today considered to be the founders of Scientific Socialism.

The work Die deutsche Ideologie was only published in the 1930s (for example , it remained unknown to Lenin and Luxemburg ). It contains a brief outline of the history of both of them about social development. The Critique of Political Economy , so the subtitle of the volumes of Capital , then analyzes more specifically the laws of motion of the capital that has arisen from money and wage labor.

Scientific socialism stands against currents such as utopian socialism. In addition to the dialectical method of Hegel , which Marx turned 'upside down', the methodological issue was not to demand what could not be “real” implemented, what had not matured in the lap of the old man. “For us, communism is not a state that is to be established, an ideal according to which reality [will] have to orient itself. We call communism the real movement that cancels the current situation, ”it says in the German ideology . “It is not enough that the thought pushes to realize, reality has to push itself to the thought.” And work, social work, is essentially understood as the driving force of social development.

In the antagonistic (irreconcilable) juxtaposition of capital and labor, represented by the character masks capitalist and worker , who represent the mutually dependent main classes (not the only ones) in capitalist society, capital transcends itself. The development of the productive forces (machines up to towards know-how, i.e. also the intellectual part in it) but at the same time go beyond the conditions of the capitalist economy; through rationalization ( tendency of the rate of profit to fall ) it abolishes labor, and thus also undermines its own basis, the exploitation of workers and nature. In capital , among other things, the function of money, the production and appropriation of surplus value , the impoverishment of the working classes are analyzed.

Being determines consciousness

The humanistic aspect is already outlined in the German Ideology . "It is" - it says there - "starting out from the real active people and from their real life process also the development of ideological reflexes and echoes is shown." It is not the ideas of the people that determine the story, but the material conditions that they find, determined the ideas, the spirit, the consciousness, so: "The social being determines the social consciousness."

With this statement it should first be remembered that it was made in the 19th century, at a time when, for example, Charles Darwin was reluctant to formulate his theory of evolution in disagreement with the church, which only recognized the divine creation of the world and no development of any kind People (even from apes) accepted (literature: Ernst Mayr, ... and Darwin is right, Munich 1994). Second, for Marx and Engels, it stood in the context of their dialectical method (not dialectical materialism). That is, they assumed a mutual dependence and determination of being and consciousness. Consciousness (the idea) belongs to being, which is therefore also dependent on consciousness and does not run mechanically (which again would be tantamount to a divine idea), as predominantly represented by social democrats and communists at the beginning of the 20th century (socialism would come from self).

Division of labor and private ownership of the means of production

The decisive factor of the dialectic in this conception for the being of men is work . Man develops according to his environment, fulfills himself through a creative examination of his being and through this work changes the world and thus his environment and thus himself - from the groups of collectors and hunters to the slave-owning society and the peasant (feudal) to capitalist society. And the work itself changes in this process.

The division of labor arises . The first basic division of labor - it says in the German ideology - is that of man and woman, the first social division of labor that of town and country. With the division of labor, property arises; Division of labor and private property - what is meant is not personal property, but the means of production with which others can be exploited - are “identical expressions - the same is said in one in relation to activity as in the other in relation to the product of Activity is stated. "

Division of labor and ownership lead to alienation . The concrete work is alienated because it ceases to be part of the nature of the worker (as it still tends to be with the handicraft ). In the family, although the woman creates the basis for the man’s production, the man nevertheless appropriates the ownership of both of their production. This only becomes clear when surpluses are produced that are sold as goods. At the same time, the man alienates himself from his product, the goods.

“The division of labor only really becomes division from the moment when the spiritual and material division of labor” occurs, with it being “at the same time also the distribution, namely the unequal, quantitative and qualitative distribution of labor and its products given, that is, property that ... has its first form in the family. "

Dominion arises from property, later primarily from ownership of the means of production. And indeed in its most perfect form with (in fact) extensive socialization of production and at the same time private appropriation by a few capitalists. Extensive socialization means that the workers are the real "masters" of production thanks to their knowledge of the work processes. According to Marx and Engels, the main social classes, wage workers and capitalists (along with other secondary classes), who are irreconcilably opposed to one another, have formed through the division of labor. The history of human beings is therefore a history of class struggles , in which the worker turns against the exploitation of his labor by appropriating the surplus value he has created (compared to the low wages he merely earned).

Requirements for a new society

Only in capitalism are the productive forces so developed that the struggles for existence stop. Only here does the contradiction between wage labor and capital become so clear that the working class can recognize it and translate it into political action (as a "class for itself" - compared to the "class itself" before). Only now (mid-19th century) is the working class numerically strong enough to push through the social revolution. Only here are the productive forces developed sufficiently for socialist society.

According to the authors of scientific socialism, this new society will develop as a germ in the womb of the old one. The previous revolutions of bourgeois societies would only have changed the balance of power among the classes, but the socialist revolution would change the type of activity of people and thereby remove alienation (that from work and oneself) through the new combination of manual and mental work. . Then begin the true story of man. (To be read in the foreword to the "Critique of Political Economy" by Karl Marx)

The goal of socialism is the emancipation of man, the development of the individual personality through self-realization within the process of a productive relationship between man and nature. Marx and Engels - in contrast to a crude communism of egalitarianism - was about a new era in which the following should apply: "Everyone according to his abilities, everyone according to his needs."

The prerequisite for them was a certain wealth of society and an already advanced socialization, especially of the means of production “in the bosom of the old”, as was already emerging in England with the already developed industry (but not in Russia in 1917). The revolution, which they imagined as a relatively bloody event in the early writings, should then also represent the real development in political power, initially through the rule of the working class in the state, which should replace the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. The state would wither in the further process of socialization, said Engels later, political rule would come to an end. In the foreword to the second volume of Capital , he speaks of the fact that Karl Marx could have imagined a revolutionary upheaval through parliament in England.

Others

In contrast to the explanations given above, for Marx the central weight of the question of human development was not merely technical-economic progress, but above all its universality. From this point of view, Marx criticized his utopian predecessors such as Fourier and Proudhon , who had also designed socialist models of society but did not know how to put their models of socialism into practice. It was only with Marx that it became clear that people (at least in Europe and the USA) were pushing back the existing state, religious, etc. borders with the bourgeois revolutions to such an extent that the socialism that had been dreamed of for centuries is now finally blossoming in the bosom of the liberal world could. The bearers of the new society would be called the proletarians, who would proceed much more radically in their demands for freedom and universality than their liberal champions. The socialist revolution (at least in the civilized world) had to finally abolish compulsory labor. For this purpose, an international workers' organization based on the model of the First International was and is above all necessary.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Paris 1840, p. 233 f.
  2. ^ Jacques Grandjonc, Hans Pelger: The discussion of utopian and scientific socialism around 1840 . In: Politics and Society in Old Austria. Festschrift for Rudolf Neck for his 60th birthday . Verlag für Geschichte und Politik, Vienna 1981, ISBN 3-486-51021-5 , p. 327.
  3. ↑ "" Scientific socialism "- used only in opposition to utopian socialism, which wants to attach new fantasies to the people instead of limiting its science to the knowledge of the social movement made by the people" Marx: [Konspekt von Bakunin's book "Statehood and Anarchy"]; MEW Vol. 18, pp. 635f.
  4. ↑ see: Scientific socialism and workers' movement , writings from the Karl-Marx-Haus Trier, issue 24, Trier 1980 and in general: the new edition of the Marx-Engels complete edition , MEGA, including the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences
  5. ↑ Engels: The development of socialism from utopia to science . In: Marx-Engels-Werke Vol. 20, p. 209.
  6. ↑ "The latest series of articles, which he ironically titled " Mr. Eugen Dühring's upheaval in science "... he sent to" Vorwärts ". This series was combined into one volume and had great success with the German socialists. In this brochure we bring the most appropriate excerpts from the theoretical part of this book, which in a sense form an introduction to scientific socialism. "Marx: Introduction to Engels The Development of Socialism from Utopia to Science , MEW Vol. 20, p. 185 .
  7. ↑ Marx-Engels-Werke Vol. 3