ABSTRACT
Engels claimed in 1892 that his Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (three chapters excerpted from his longer and more difficult Anti-Dühring) was circulating in ten languages. “I am not aware,” he wrote (rather Germanically), “that any other socialist work, not even our Communist Manifesto or Marx’s Capital, has been so often translated. In Germany, it has had four editions of about 20,000 copies in all”.1 This is a sobering, even alarming, claim. It suggests that significant numbers of interested readers were receptive, not necessarily to Marx in any direct sense, but to a Marxism whose scope was self-consciously extended – but also narrowed – by Engels. As Engels himself condescendingly put it in the privacy of a letter, “Most people are too idle to read thick books like Capital, so a little pamphlet does the job much more quickly.”2 In what follows, I argue that this extension – and narrowing – needs urgently to be interrogated. The notion that Socialism: Utopian and Scientific does the job of Capital is an instance of breathtaking hubris. I argue further that Engels’s arguments in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific are in significant respects at variance and plainly incompatible with what Marx had said, and that the wide dissemination of Engels’s arguments as surrogates for Marx’s own has had effects – not just on the reception of Marx’s doctrines but on the development of Marxism as a political movement – that were little short of disastrous.
