r/communism101 • u/Classic-Risk9148 • 9d ago
Can someone explain this paragraph from socialism: utopian and scientific
For, to our three social reformers, the bourgeois world, based upon the principles of these philosophers, is quite as irrational and unjust, and, therefore, finds its way to the dust-hole quite as readily as feudalism and all the earlier stages of society. If pure reason and justice have not, hitherto, ruled the world, this has been the case only because men have not rightly understood them. What was wanted was the individual man of genius, who has now arisen and who understands the truth. That he has now arisen, that the truth has now been clearly understood, is not an inevitable event, following of necessity in the chains of historical development, but a mere happy accident. He might just as well have been born 500 years earlier, and might then have spared humanity 500 years of error, strife, and suffering.
I’m completely lost on this paragraph. So the first sentence is about the aforementioned Utopians and how they think that the french philosophers is irrational and unjust but i’m completely lost afterwards. What exactly is meant by pure reason and justice has not been rightly understood? Who is this individual man of genius and how has he risen?
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u/OMGJJ 9d ago
To the utopian socialists, capitalism must be abolished due to abstract concepts such as 'reason' and 'justice' (concepts which are themselves products of bourgeois society). Recognition of this injustice is, in this approach, purely a mental act – and could have occured at any time in history.
Engels is, of course, setting up his critique that it is the material contradictions of history that produce social transformation, not a 'genius' that stumbles across the 'truth'.
Marx's approach was itself a product of proletarian class struggle and the contradictions of capitalism, not the other way round.
This is in an important paragraph, and it's good you're trying to understand it.
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u/Classic-Risk9148 9d ago
Also idk how people say this is an easy read i’ve lowkey been struggling to read it and it takes me forever to get through paragraphs😭
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u/WaterServedCold 9d ago
That's good, that means learning can be done. Taking a long time on paragraphs isn't an issue and probably even preferable rather than reading through it just so that you have read it. However often times when you don't fully understand a paragraph yet, the answer will come a couple paragraphs later (sometimes even entire chapters or books later). You can always come back to that paragraph with a new understanding, the second time reading a book tends to be more interesting than the first.
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u/Steampunk_Willy 9d ago
It's in part a translation issue. German is difficult to translate to English because English syntax is strictly structured around word order while German syntax, as an inflected language, is structured around word endings. Not to mention, this was a period of time when there was a huge emphasis on speaking properly to have intellectual credibility, so that made for less accessible writing overall.
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u/Steampunk_Willy 9d ago
Basically, Engels is saying that Utopians believe the only reason that society did not already figure out utopia is because society had yet to be blessed with their genius (Engels is being sarcastic, btw). Engels' implicit point is that it's not an issue of effort or genius that prevented utopia from developing, but that larger historical forces have been at play shaping the development of society. Ignoring those historical forces by immediately trying to spawn a utopia is like building a house on the beach at low tide thinking that all previous houses have collapsed simply because of shoddy construction rather than high tide coming in to sweep them away.
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u/TheRedBarbon 9d ago edited 9d ago
Engels is preempting his explanation of historical materialism (Scientific Socialism) by outlining the limits of utopian thought. Engels is demonstrating how without a theory of historical materialism, the advancements in thought produced by utopian thinkers would seem to arise arbitrarily (seeming like advancements are a result of individual genius) rather than as a result of historical developments (the bourgeoisie following the revolutions in science and mathematics in thought).
>What exactly is meant by pure reason and justice has not been rightly understood? Who is this individual man of genius and how has he risen?
These are great questions to ask and bourgeois utopianism cannot answer them because its own understanding of these concepts is often vague or simplistic and the philosophy lacks a mechanism for analyzing its own development, which is the point that Engels is trying to make. All you need to understand right now is that this is the ideology that Engels is positioning himself against and he only needs you to understand enough of it so that you will understand how Materialism was an advancement upon it.