Hello readers and happy August! For this Thursday's reading, we're taking a break from the contemporary and going back to some Marxist classics with chapter 3 of Friedrich Engels' timeless Socialism: Utopian and Scientific. The third chapter is entitled Historical Materialism and can be found online here: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1880/soc-utop/ch03.htm
First appearing in French in 1880, the title was adopted for the first English edition — the tenth language in which the book appeared. Intended as a popularisation of Marxist ideas for a working-class readership, the book was one of the fundamental publications of the international socialist movement during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, selling tens of thousands of copies and books.
Marx's lengthy volume Capital was, then as now, extremely difficult for the average reader to penetrate, leading Engels to suggest to Marx in a letter of September 16, 1868 that a short popularised version of Capital for a working-class audience was urgently needed. Marx concurred with Engels' assessment, suggesting "it would be a very good thing if you yourself wrote a small popular explanatory pamphlet." At the time of the English translation's release in 1892, Engels noted "I am not aware that any other Socialist work, not even our Communist Manifesto of 1848 or Marx's Capital, has been so often translated."
With the text, Engels provides the best short explanation of the materialist conception of history and class struggle available in English. We'll use the third chapter as a base for discussion of themes such as the varieties and implications of materialism, economic determinism versus personal voluntarism and "free will", the nature of class struggles at different moments in civilisational history, and much more.
Take care and happy reading!
