Introduction

The strength of Marxism lies in its method of analysis, in its philosophical outlook, defined as ‘dialectical materialism’. Marxists analyse the real concrete world, the real developments in society, in economics, in politics, in world relations and ultimately in the class struggle that flows from all of this. Marxism, however, does not limit itself to looking at the surface of phenomena, but looks more deeply at the inner contradictions that drive events.

If one were to limit oneself merely to an empirical observation of the immediate moment, one would lose sight of the more long-term processes that are developing. Instead, by looking at phenomena in their development, in their movement, seeing how they are changing and how they can change in the future, we can develop a perspective of where society is going and an understanding of the explosive events that are inevitable in the coming period. And, more importantly, we can prepare to intervene in them.

The second text included in this volume is a very good introduction to this dialectical method. It is based on Engels’ famous book Anti-Dühring, which, in a polemical manner, deals with the fundamental ideas of Marxism. Three chapters from that book were selected and arranged by Engels himself for publication as a shorter, more accessible text, and first published in French in 1880 as Socialism: Utopian and Scientific.

The reference to both utopian and scientific socialism encapsulates the essence of the text. Prior to Marx and Engels and the elaboration of their scientific method, there had been many socialists, such as Henri de Saint-Simon, Charles Fourier and Robert Owen, for whom, Engels explains:

To all these, socialism is the expression of absolute truth, reason and justice, and has only to be discovered to conquer all the world by virtue of its own power. And as an absolute truth is independent of time, space, and of the historical development of man, it is a mere accident when and where it is discovered. With all this, absolute truth, reason, and justice are different with the founder of each different school.

For these utopian socialists all that was required was to seek the truth, to establish the ‘kingdom of reason’, without having to take into account the real concrete development of society. The utopians had many great ideas and identified the problems of capitalism quite clearly, but none of them fully understood the role of the working class, and all were opposed to the seizure of power by the workers.

Saint-Simon appealed to the capitalists to provide for the proletariat in order to avoid class struggle and revolution; Fourier told everyone to set up socialist colonies and therefore remove themselves from the class struggle; the Owenites were actually opposed to the Chartist movement and tried to compete with it, because they only looked at the economic question, and put forward various schemes to liberate the workers without the seizure of power. As Engels states:

Not one of them appears as a representative of the interests of that proletariat which historical development had, in the meantime, produced.

Marxism moved away from such thinking and placed the idea of socialism on a sound materialist basis, i.e. that it would come about as a result of the class struggle within capitalist society, and not just as some abstract ideal conquering the minds of all of humanity. This mode of thinking flows from an understanding of the real material world, not in a mechanical but in a dialectical manner.

Engels, in praising the great discoveries of science and human thought of the previous four centuries, explained that the method of investigation that had been thus developed:

… has also left us as legacy the habit of observing natural objects and processes in isolation, apart from their connection with the vast whole; of observing them in repose, not in motion; as constraints, not as essentially variables; in their death, not in their life.

So-called ‘common sense’ looks at things in a static, lifeless manner – but this can only go so far in explaining more complex phenomena. To move to a deeper, more insightful mode of investigation, dialectical thinking is required.

Engels explains that his and Marx’s dialectical method derived from the great German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. But he also adds that:

Hegel was an idealist. To him, the thoughts within his brain were not the more or less abstract pictures of actual things and processes, but, conversely, things and their evolution were only the realised pictures of the ‘Idea’, existing somewhere from eternity before the world was.

To transform dialectics into a tool for understanding the world we live in, a return to materialism was required, not to the mechanical materialism of the eighteenth century, but to a higher form, i.e. dialectical materialism, which analyses phenomena in their motion, in their processes of change, which flow from their inner contradictions. As Engels explains:

… the old idealist conception of history […] knew nothing of class struggles based upon economic interests, knew nothing of economic interests; production and all economic relations appeared in it only as incidental, subordinate elements in the ‘history of civilisation’.

The new facts made imperative a new examination of all past history. Then it was seen that all past history, with the exception of its primitive stages, was the history of class struggles; that these warring classes of society are always the products of the modes of production and of exchange – in a word, of the economic conditions of their time; that the economic structure of society always furnishes the real basis, starting from which we can alone work out the ultimate explanation of the whole superstructure of juridical and political institutions as well as of the religious, philosophical, and other ideas of a given historical period. […]

From that time forward, socialism was no longer an accidental discovery of this or that ingenious brain, but the necessary outcome of the struggle between two historically developed classes – the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. Its task was no longer to manufacture a system of society as perfect as possible, but to examine the historico-economic succession of events from which these classes and their antagonism had of necessity sprung, and to discover in the economic conditions thus created the means of ending the conflict.

Herein we have the great contribution of Marx and Engels to the socialist movement. Socialism was no longer an abstract ideal removed from the real material conditions of any given society, but it now became a historical necessity, the final inevitable outcome of the class struggle itself. And these conclusions flowed, on the one hand, from the application of dialectical thinking to the development of society, and on the other from the emergence of capitalist production and with it the proletariat, the class to which the task of transforming society now fell.

A study of this text will give the reader a basic grasp of the method of Marxism and prepare them for tackling other important works of the great Marxists, and thus learn to apply the method to the analysis of today’s turbulent world.

Fred Weston
From ‘The essence of revolutionary communism: new introduction to the “Classics of Marxism”’, Marxist.com
20 June 2025