Socialism, Utopian and ScientificEngels, Friedrich
Philosophy
Socialism, Utopian and Scientific
Engels, Friedrich
Socialism
[A] "Qual" is a philosophical play upon words. Qual literally means
torture, a pain which drives to action of some kind; at the same time
the mystic Böhme puts into the German word something of the meaning of
the Latin _qualitas_; his "qual" was the activating principle arising
from, and promoting in its turn, the spontaneous development of the
thing, relation, or person subject to it, in contradistinction to a
pain inflicted from without.
[B] Marx and Engels, "Die Heilige Familie," Frankfurt a. M. 1845, pp.
201-204.
[C] And even in business matters, the conceit of national Chauvinism
is but a sorry adviser. Up to quite recently, the average English
manufacturer considered it derogatory from an Englishman to speak any
language but his own, and felt rather proud than otherwise of the fact
that "poor devils" of foreigners settled in England and took off his
hands the trouble of disposing of his products abroad. He never
noticed that these foreigners, mostly Germans, thus got command of a
very large part of British foreign trade, imports and exports, and
that the direct foreign trade of Englishmen became limited, almost
entirely, to the colonies, China, the United States, and South
America. Nor did he notice that these Germans traded with other
Germans abroad, who gradually organized a complete network of
commercial colonies all over the world. But when Germany, about forty
years ago, seriously began manufacturing for export, this network
served her admirably in her transformation, in so short a time, from a
corn-exporting into a first-rate manufacturing country. Then, about
ten years ago, the British manufacturer got frightened, and asked his
ambassadors and consuls how it was that he could no longer keep his
customers together. The unanimous answer was: (1) You don't learn your
customer's language but expect him to speak your own; (2) You don't
even try to suit your customer's wants, habits, and tastes, but expect
him to conform to your English ones.
SOCIALISM
UTOPIAN AND SCIENTIFIC
I
Modern Socialism is, in its essence, the direct product of the
recognition, on the one hand, of the class antagonisms, existing in
the society of to-day, between proprietors and non-proprietors,
between capitalists and wage-workers; on the other hand, of the
anarchy existing in production. But, in its theoretical form, modern
Socialism originally appears ostensibly as a more logical extension of
the principles laid down by the great French philosophers of the
eighteenth century. Like every new theory, modern Socialism had, at
first, to connect itself with the intellectual stock-in-trade ready to
its hand, however deeply its roots lay in material economic facts.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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