Proudhon was a socialist thinker active in France. He is known as a man who had ties to the Russian revolutionaries Bakunin and Gertzen, among others.

Marx Engels was also initially impressed by his ideas, but as usual, they fell out and criticized each other.

And Marx published a Proudhon critique called "The Poverty of Philosophy".

Although Marx Engels has the image of having been willing to resort to armed revolution, he did not approve of the way workers suddenly started an armed revolution in the 1845-48 phase.

Is it here that reference books on Marxian thought rely on the commentary that "Marx was against armed revolution"? It is true that he may have opposed armed revolution by the workers until bourgeois society matured, but whether they were opposed to armed revolution all their lives is another matter. We must read their biographies with caution on this matter as well in the future!

In this article, I will discuss the German Ideology, which was co-authored by Marx Engels.

This is also where the often heard terms "superstructure" and "substructure" come from.

And in this work Marx Engels concluded that revolution was necessary to change history!

It also brings up a very important point when considering the thought of Marx Engels

The utopia of the communist world envisioned by Marx and Engels in 1845 was described here

One word of bourgeois is made into a curse word, which they repeat to the point of disgust, but they themselves are soaked in bourgeois from head to toe.

Perhaps nothing more accurately describes the lifestyle of Marx Engels than these words of Bakunin.

We will continue to see them throughout their lives, and in fact, they will never abandon their bourgeois lifestyle after this.

I think that these contradictions are also important when considering Marx-Engels.

Robert Owen was called a fantastical socialist by Engels, but he is clearly different from the other two (Saint-Simon and Fourier).

As a result, his socialism failed, but his principles and actual activities were not fanciful.

In his autobiography, which I'll return to in a later article, he describes how he tried to change society, and I was very surprised to see a manager in 19th century Europe who actually thought about and worked with workers to this extent.

His New Lanark factory is now a World Heritage Site.

The young Engels was forced to confront his own contradictions.

He has become himself the bourgeois that he himself was attacking so vehemently.

He would continue to harbor such contradictions for many years to come, even as he expressed his feelings to Marx.

But later on, they would also reopen and act in an imposingly bourgeois manner. The same is true of Marx. Marx, too, had a contradictory life, yearning for a bourgeois life and suffering from lack of money when he actually spent money in this way.

Engels left for England in 1842 after a year of military service in Berlin.

I even told you in my last article that during that journey, I received direct guidance from German communist Moses Hess, who became an ardent communist.

The reason why Engels visited Manchester was because his father was a partner in the firm of Ermen & Engels. His father had sent Engels to Manchester to train his son as a merchant, who had become obsessed with philosophy and was a radical. (Of course, he also needed him to run the company.)

When we think of communism, we tend to think of Marx, but this idea itself is not Marx's original creation.

Neither Marx nor Engels created great ideas out of nothing. They are both intense students. They studied the great thinkers of the past and the ideas of their contemporaries to formulate their own ideas. It is very interesting to trace the background of their thought.

その代表例が今回ご紹介するドイツの思想家モーゼス・ヘスです。この記事は特におすすめの内容となっています。

Imaginary socialist is a famous term preached by Engels in From Imagination to Science, published in 1880.

Engels described three famous pre-Marxian exponents of socialist thought, Saint-Simon, Charles Fourier, and Robert Owen, as "fantastical socialists."

He then declares that Marx's theory is "scientific" as opposed to their "fanciful" theories.

In this article, we will first talk about the person, Saint-Simon.