Working-Class Consciousness and Politics

Abstract

We have seen that from about the time of Marx’s death, and increasingly after Engels’s, capital’s ‘logic’ began to run quite counter to the prediction they had passed on to their followers, the ‘maximalist’ ideas of increasing class polarization, growing alienation of the majority working class, and its inexorable movement to class consciousness and revolution. In this respect, it is important to note the importance in reaffirming orthodoxy of Engels’s pamphlet Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, adapted from three chapters of his Anti-Dühring and first published in French in 1880, German and Italian in 1883 and English in 1892, by which time it was also being read in six other languages, including Danish and Russian.