Page:Karl Kautsky - Frederick Engels - 1899.djvu/8

 trades unions or of political activity. The labor movement again—Chartism—acted wholly within the bounds of the existing wage system. The complete freedom of contract, the right of suffrage, the normal labor day, or perchance the small agricultural holdings, were for the majority of the Chartists not weapons with which to overthrow the existing social order, but only a means to make the condition of the masses more endurable.

In opposition to this Engels declared: "Socialism in its present form can never accomplish anything for the laboring class; it would never lower itself enough to stand for an instant on the basis of Chartism. The union of this Owenism with Chartism, the reproduction in an English form of the French communism, must be the next step, and has already in part begun. When this is accomplished the laboring class movement will have become for the first time a power in England." This union of socialism with the labor movement created modern scientific socialism. In the "Condition of the Laboring Class" their needs were for the first time definitely expressed; with this book scientific socialism had its beginning. It was largely based, even if but half consciously, on the same foundation from which two years later the "Communist Manifesto" sprung. This was the common production of Marx and Engels, in which for the first time Marx clearly expressed the materialistic conception of history. The historical role of class antagonisms and the class struggle is here plainly set forth. Engels himself said in the appendix to the English edition of his "Condition": "In this book great emphasis is laid upon the statement that communism is not merely a party principle for the laboring class but is a theory which means the emancipation of all society, including the capitalist class from the narrowness of its present life. In theory this is perfectly correct, but it is useless or worse than that in practice. So long as the possessing class not only feel no need of emancipation but energetically oppose the attempts of the laboring class to free themselves, so long must the social transformation be planned and carried through by the laboring class alone."

"The Condition of the Laboring Class in England" is, however, the first scientific work on socialism, not only because of its standpoint in relation to Utopianism and the labor movement, but also through its method of presenting the condition of the laboring class of England. This presentation is not, as in so many philanthropic books, merely a