European Unions

Yoshie Furuhashi furuhashi.1 at osu.edu
Fri Apr 6 20:23:37 PDT 2001


DP wrote:


>Political thought is not that difficult to grasp, nor should it be.

I agree, but nothing in Engels's words to which you object is beyond the comprehension of the general reader:

***** We have seen that the capitalistic mode of production thrust its way into a society of commodity-producers, of individual producers, whose social bond was the exchange of their products. But every society based upon the production of commodities has this peculiarity: that the producers have lost control over their own social inter-relations. Each man produces for himself with such means of production as he may happen to have, and for such exchange as he may require to satisfy his remaining wants. No one knows how much of his particular article is coming on the market, nor how much of it will be wanted. No one knows whether his individual product will meet an actual demand, whether he will be able to make good his costs of production or even to sell his commodity at all. Anarchy reigns in socialized production.

But the production of commodities, like every other form of production, has it peculiar, inherent laws inseparable from it; and these laws work, despite anarchy, in and through anarchy. They reveal themselves in the only persistent form of social inter-relations -- i.e., in exchange -- and here they affect the individual producers as compulsory laws of competition. They are, at first, unknown to these producers themselves, and have to be discovered by them gradually and as the result of experience. They work themselves out, therefore, independently of the producers, and in antagonism to them, as inexorable natural laws of their particular form of production. The product governs the producers. <http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1880/soc-utop/ch03.htm> *****

Engels wrote "Socialism: Utopian and Scientific" as a pamphlet for the working class (who on the average were _much less_ formally educated in Engels' days than in the present). It would be very difficult to write more simply, clearly, & eloquently than Engels did on the same subject, and I doubt that you can.

Yoshie



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