.
.+-
Description
Socialism: Utopian and Scientific remains one of the best introductions to scientific socialism, with sections taken and edited from Anti-Duhring and put into the popular style. In it, Engels outlines the progression of socialism as a science, from the utopians’ idealist yearnings for a society without exploitation to modern-day scientific socialism which observes the contradiction between the social character of production and private appropriation of surplus-value coming full circle, making socialism and communism inevitable in our epoch. Thus bridges the gap from dreams to objective law-governed analyses. Engels also mentions the question of dialectics, proving that only the kernel he and Marx took from Hegel’s dialectics while casting away its idealist shell. Waging war against the metaphysicians, who were the dominant trend in both natural and social science at the time, Engels proves that nature, especially on the basis of Darwin’s findings, has always been dialectical. Lastly, he proves, through science, how the transition to and construction of socialism and communism will effect itself.