Engalos
Friedrich Engels, Socialism, Utopian and Scientific (selections)
The following text contains selections taken from a pamphlet published in 1880 by Friedrich Engels, longtime collaborator with Karl Marx, following Marx's death. In it, Engels sought to provide an overview of Marx's theories accessible to workers in Germany. This text was translated into English in 1892 with Engels' approval. I have added paragraph numbers to this
The full text can be found through the Marx/Engels Internet Archive (marxists.org) 1993, 1999 at http://www.marx.org/archive/marx/works/1880/soc-utop/index.htm.
Paper text can be found in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1978; 683-717.
1. What does Engels mean by the term "social production"? How is it different from "individual production"? What changes as a result of the shift from "individual production" to "social production"?
2. What, according to Engels, is the "anarchy of production" produced by capitalism? Why does capitalism produce this?
3. How, according to Engels, do economic crises lead to monopolies or "trusts"?
4. According to Engels, how does the relationship between a worker and the products that worker makes, change as a result of the transition from feudalism to capitalism? (Alienation is NOT in the short engels piece put back in?)
5. According to Engels, why does machinery become "the most powerful weapon in the war of capital against the working-class"?
6. What does Engels mean by the phrase "The mode of production is in rebellion against the mode of exchange."?
III
[Historical Materialism]
[1]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...
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