Socialism: Utopian and Scientific

task. In contrast to the idea—prevailing both among the French of the 18th century and still with Hegel—of nature as a whole moving in narrow cycles, remaining always the same with eternal celestial bodies, as taught by Newton, and unchanging species of organic beings, as taught by Linnaeus, it summarizes the recent progress of natural science, according to which nature also has its history in time. Celestial bodies, as well as the species of organisms by which they are inhabited under favorable circumstances, come into being and pass away, and the cycles, insofar as they remain permissible at all, assume infinitely more magnificent dimensions. In both cases, it is essentially dialectical and no longer needs a philosophy standing above the other sciences. As soon as every individual science is faced with the demand to become clear about its position in the overall context of things and the knowledge of things, any special science of the overall context becomes superfluous. What remains independently of the entire previous philosophy is the doctrine of thought and its laws—formal logic and dialectics. Everything else is absorbed into the positive science of nature and history.

However, while the upheaval in the view of nature could only take place to the extent that research provided the corresponding positive material of knowledge, historical facts had already asserted themselves much earlier that brought about a decisive turning point in the conception of history. In 1831, the first workers' uprising had taken place in Lyon; between 1838 and 1842, the first national workers' movement, that of the English Chartists, reached its peak. The class struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie entered the foreground of the history of the most advanced countries of Europe, in the same measure as large-scale industry developed there on one hand, and the newly won political rule of the bourgeoisie on the other. The teachings of bourgeois economics regarding the identity of interests between capital and labor, and regarding general harmony and general public welfare as a consequence of free competition, were increasingly belied by the facts. All these things could no longer be dismissed, just as little as French and English socialism, which was their theoretical, albeit highly imperfect, expression. But the old idealistic conception of history, which had not yet been displaced, knew nothing of class struggles based on material interests, or of material interests at all; production, like all economic relations, appeared in it only incidentally, as subordinate elements of "cultural history."