Socialism: Utopian and Scientific

and, to my knowledge, no one complained about it. Since that time, our workers have read newspapers far more and far more regularly, and have thereby become familiar with foreign words to the same degree. I have limited myself to removing all unnecessary foreign words. For the unavoidable ones, I have dispensed with the addition of so-called explanatory translations. The unavoidable foreign words, mostly generally accepted scientific-technical expressions, would simply not be unavoidable if they were translatable. Translation therefore falsifies the meaning; instead of explaining, it confuses. Oral information helps much more in this regard.

The content, on the other hand, I believe I can claim, will cause the German workers little difficulty. Generally, only the third section is difficult, but far less so for the workers, whose general living conditions it summarizes, than for the "educated" bourgeois. Regarding the numerous explanatory additions I have made here, I have in truth thought less of the workers than of "educated" readers; people, for example, like the Member of Parliament von Eynern, the Privy Councilor Heinrich von Sybel, and other Treitschkes, possessed by the irresistible urge to display their horrific ignorance and the understandable, colossal misunderstanding of socialism resulting from it, again and again, in black and white. If Don Quixote lowers his lance against windmills, that is his duty and his role; but we cannot possibly permit such a thing to Sancho Panza.

Such readers will also be surprised to encounter the Kant-Laplace cosmogony, modern natural science and Darwin, classical German philosophy and Hegel in a sketched development of the history of socialism. But scientific socialism is, after all, an essentially German product and could only arise in the nation whose classical philosophy had kept the tradition of conscious dialectics alive: in Germany.*) "In Germany" is a spelling error. It should read: "among the Germans." For as indispensable as German dialectics were on the one hand for the genesis of scientific socialism, the developed economic and political conditions of England and France were equally indispensable for it. The economic and political stage of development in Germany, which was even further behind in the early 1840s than it is today, could at most produce socialist caricatures (cf. Communist Manifesto III, 1, c: "German or True Socialism"). Only when the economic and political conditions produced in England and France were subjected to German-dialectical criticism could a real result be obtained. In this respect, therefore, scientific socialism is not an exclusively German product, but just as much an international one. The materialist view of history