1882 Preface to the First German Edition of Socialism: Utopian and Scientific

Engels’ introduction to the German edition of his book Socialism: Utopian and Scientific. Written in September 1882 in the book Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, published in 1882 in Hottingen-Zurich.

In 1880, Engels asked Lafargue to translate three chapters of his 1878 work criticizing the Dühringist work, Herr Eugen Dühring’s Revolution in Science, into French, and added detailed explanations. The work was then published in Revue Socialiste, and later published as a single volume in Paris under the title Socialisme utopique et Socialisme scientifique, which was an unexpected success. In order to meet the urgent needs of the propaganda of the Social Democratic Party of Germany, Engels handed the German version of the single edition to the editorial department of the Zurich Der Sozialdemokrat to publish, and wrote this preface for the single edition.

In the Preface, Engels answers the questions of how could what was in the first place a purely scientific work be suitable for that, and what changes in form and content were required. He pointed out that, in terms of form, there was no need to spare with foreign words, and for workers who read newspapers regularly, it was sufficient to “delete all unnecessary foreign words”; and in terms of content, this work truthfully generalized “the general conditions of [workers’] life”, and is thus much easier to understand by the workers than by the “educated” bourgeoisie, and the content did not need to be modified. In addition, Engels also explained the reasons why natural science and classical German philosophy were mentioned in the literature that outlined the history of socialist development. In his view, scientific socialism is after all an essentially German product and could arise only in that nation whose classical philosophy had kept alive the tradition of conscious dialectics: in Germany; and for as indispensable, as German dialectics were for the genesis of scientific socialism, as equally indispensable for it were the developed economic and political conditions of England and France.

Preface to the First German Edition 1882 of Socialism: Utopian and Scientific is an important work in the development history of Marxism, it has expounded on the relationship of scientific socialism with classical German philosophy and English political economy, as well as the close relationship of scientific socialism both with materialist dialectics and modern natural sciences, it has provided enlightenment for comprehensive understanding of Marxism and promoted the popularization of Marxism. In this “Preface” Engels specifically, underlined the need to find a proper way of writing pamphlets based on a purely scientific work which could be used as a propaganda material to be distributed among the class conscious workers.