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p Karl Marx (1818-83) and Frederick Engels (1820-95) embarked upon their scientific and revolutionary activities in Germany in the 1840s. This was a period of rapid development of capitalism, which had firmly established itself in some European countries and North America, and of the growth of a new class, the industrial proletariat, and the beginning of its revolutionary struggle.

p The bourgeoisie had deposed feudalism, and its optimism about its own future knew no bounds. It firmly believed that private ownership would be perpetual.

p Yet in 1848, like a bolt from the blue, when it seemed that the world was destined to be ruled by the bourgeoisie for ever, came the words of the Communist Manifesto. In this Manifesto, on behalf of history, Marx and Engels passed sentence on capitalism. They showed that capitalist society with its private ownership and exploitation would give way to a society without exploitation or slavery, to a communist society, just as inevitably as it had itself replaced feudalism and that mankind was moving towards a great communist revolution. “Let the ruling classes shudder in face of the communist revolution,” Marx and Engels declared. The Manifesto ended the epoch of utopian socialism and ushered in the epoch of scientific socialism.

p Utopian socialism, as we have seen, was founded on humanism. This inspired the Utopians to devise a society that would conform to the nature and dignity of man. But they were unable to conceive a lucid picture of the nature, of the very substance of man. They saw man abstractly, as an aggregate of thoughts and passions and, besides, they had an extremely vague idea of the source of these human passions and thoughts. The great 19th century Utopians had inherited from the Enlighteners the profound theory that man was a product of the social environment, of his surroundings, but they had no notion of this environment or its laws and driving forces. Hence, they had no idea of human development. In spite of that, they firmly believed that the capitalist system, the system of 29 oppression and private property, which was mutilating man, had to be destroyed. They imagined the evolution of environment as the evolution of human passions and ideas. This gave rise to a vicious circle: thinking man was the product of his environment, and the environment was the product of man’s ideas.

p This vicious circle had to be broken, for as Marx and Engels wrote: “If man is shaped by his surroundings, his surroundings must be made human.”  [29•*  These surroundings could be made “human” only by laying bare the real laws governing the development of the social environment and skilfully using them for the benefit of man. But to reveal the substance of social laws meant showing the substance of man, who was the product of social relations. In other words, the abstract ideas of Utopian humanism and the ideas of creating a society worthy of man had to be transferred to the soil of reality.

p The basic difference between scientific and Utopian socialism is that the former rests not on speculative ideas and good intentions but on the soil of reality, on a scientific understanding of the laws of social development and of the substance of man himself.

Counterposing a scientific, dialectical-materialist understanding of social development to the idealism of the Utopians, and showing the historical inevitability of the revolutionary replacement of capitalism by socialism, Marx and Engels turned socialism from a Utopia into a science.