What is Socialism? (Part 1: The Origins of the Cure)
How Marx and Engels transformed the fight for a better world from a utopian dream into a materialist science
In Affective Socialization Theory (AST), there is a heavy focus on diagnosing the disease, analyzing how the coercive architecture of capitalism physically wires our nervous systems for anxiety, predation, and burnout. But a diagnostic framework is useless if it cannot point to a cure.
Before we can fully operationalize the math of how to dismantle the capitalist macro-environment, we have to define exactly what we are building to replace it. We have to define socialism. Not as a utopian buzzword, but as a concrete, structural alternative. To do that, we must trace its origins, strip away the propaganda, and look at the empirical history of the concept.
“What he’s proposing is socialism!” If you live in the United States, you have heard a TV personality or politician scream this phrase as a warning. Socialism is the ultimate political buzzword; it is twisted by a wide and varied range of people who shape it to fit whatever their personal agenda may be.
But what does socialism actually mean? The concept has evolved over time, varying by place and cultural context. Broadly speaking, socialism is both a political philosophy and an economic system of production. Because human welfare is dictated by economic reality, socialism attempts to make the world a better place by fundamentally transforming the material conditions of society as a whole.
In this specific series, which is adapted from my earlier book, the focus is strictly on the modern political movement that emerged in 19th-century Europe and spread around the world. It is a Eurocentric history because it traces the direct reaction to European industrial capitalism. However, since I wrote this book, I have continued research and have come to a deeper understanding: that while the political ideology of socialism is recent, the biological drive for human cooperation is ancient and universal. Long before Europe industrialized, indigenous societies across the globe successfully organized themselves around the same principles of creating cooperative, communal social systems. In future articles, I will go deeper into the differences in neuro-architecture between indigenous peoples, European colonizers, and other societies, but to understand how to dismantle the modern capitalist state, we first have to understand the specific material trauma that birthed the political movement to destroy it.
The Origins of an Ideology
The term “socialism” emerged in the 1830s to describe a system fundamentally different from capitalism. With the invention of heavy machinery and the factory, the way people in Britain and France made their living, and thereby the way they lived their lives, was violently and suddenly altered.
After only a few generations, life went from rural farming to populations concentrated in dense, polluted urban cities. Black smoke billowed through the air, animal waste soaked the streets, and entire families were forced to live in badly constructed, one-room structures.
In his 1845 book The Condition of the Working Class in England, Friedrich Engels gave a firsthand account of the living conditions he observed. It was a catastrophic, historical spike in Objective Material Strain (MAT). Production had become highly organized: families who previously farmed the land to support themselves were violently evicted when private property became law. They were forced into health-hazard-ridden cesspools that actually lowered human life expectancy.
The desire for liberation from these horrific material conditions inspired a new social concept. It was rooted in an ancient human drive to create a better, collective life. The word for this new idea was “socialism.”
The Utopians and the Scientists
Around the 1820s, Henri de Saint-Simon, known as one of the first socialist theorists, coined the term “social physiology” to describe his view of society as an organism with different parts that we can study and help work together. The key breakthrough was his belief that the scientific method could be applied to society.
He did recognize that the working class should be recognized and happy, but thought that the main threat to this happiness was what he called the “idling class”; basically, he was saying that lazy people are the reason for society's problems. Henri also believed that Europeans were a superior race and advocated for world colonization by Europeans. While Henri was correct in his most famous point, that society, like an organism, can be looked at scientifically and manipulated toward an ideal, his social ideals were obviously a product of the racist and classist environment of the time and culture he came from, and acceptance of it, even the superimposing of it onto this new idea of scientifically analyzing and restructuring society. Henri is also recognized as one of the main founders of “Christian socialist” thought, and this is interesting when we compare his ideas to the ideas of modern-day white Christian nationalists in America. The ideas that lazy people abusing the system are making it harder for everyone else, and that it is the job of “civilized” white people to bring other cultures up to their standards and ideals, are both big topics of discussion among people who today say they are only being practical in proposing a scientific way of analyzing and dealing with society's problems, and also that they are doing this out of some desire to make our society more ideal. Later on in this essay, we will further look into how the proposed policies of what an ideology is advocating for are important, but I think this incompatibility between Henri’s ideas, rooted in Christian nationalism, and what seems to be a core principle of this new concept in its beginning days, namely, the concept of making society more ideal, shows us the raw beginnings of intellectuals in a society conceptualizing a new idea. When Henri and his many followers in his school of thought first thought, basically, we want a more ideal society, this is the concept; now, how can we achieve it? Without any external reference point of what a more ideal society looks like materially, Henri and other intellectuals, who defined this term in the early days, looked within. What were their ideas of a better society? Well, if you were growing up in the early 1800s in France or Britain, and you were like most people and accepted the mainstream ideas and opinions of the time, you might come to the conclusion that rounding up everyone who isn't in a factory and putting them in one to maximize production, and then conquering the rest of the world in the name of God and your “superior” nation, would be the most efficient way to achieve this “more ideal society.”
Others decided to experiment in the real world. In 1824, Robert Owen, a Welsh factory owner, spent his fortune to start a self-contained cooperative commune in Indiana. He believed that if everyone agreed to follow certain ideals, they could create the perfect society. Like many other “utopian socialist” experiments, it failed to maintain sustainability and fell apart. Owen later returned to Great Britain and shifted his focus to practical reforms, advocating for free education and better living conditions for factory workers.
These early attempts to cure capitalism formed two distinct currents: the Utopians and the Reformists. Utopians believed they could exit the system and build a perfect society from scratch, while reformists believed they could stay within the system and advocate for legal policies to make capitalism better.
While their methods differed, both currents suffered from the exact same idealist flaw. They believed they could simply invent a good moral idea and impose it on a material reality that was structurally designed to reject it. The next major leap in socialist thought would destroy this illusion entirely.
Marx, Engels, and the Materialist Reversal
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels fundamentally changed how humanity understands history.
At the time, the popular philosophical concept of “dialectics” (argued by Hegel) argued that the world progressed through the conflict of abstract ideas. Change the ideas, the logic went, and you change reality.
Marx and Engels took this concept and turned it on its head. They argued that it is not ideas that bring about change in the world; it is the material world that brings about change in our ideas. The changes we go through in our society, from the gaining of civil rights to the transition from monarchy to capitalist democracy, are all the result of a change in material conditions.
To be truly scientific, we cannot start with abstract, empirically unobservable notions like “the human spirit.” We have to start by observing our material reality. The brain, which creates our ideas, is material. Therefore, our ideas are shaped by our material environment.
Taking this approach to history, Historical Materialism, Marx and Engels discovered that the massive transitions in human history always resulted from class struggle: the conflict between the ruling class (those who hold power over production) and the exploited classes.
“Its task was no longer to manufacture a system of society as perfect as possible,” Engels wrote regarding the new socialist movement, “but to examine the historico-economic succession of events from which these classes and their antagonism had of necessity sprung.”
Socialism, to Marx and Engels, was no longer about dreaming up a perfect utopian commune. It was a rigorous, scientific attempt to observe the contradicting forces operating in society, and figure out how to alter the structural conditions so those conflicts no longer exist.
To do that, the working class had to overthrow the socioeconomic system that alienated them from their labor, abolish the autocratic rule of the capitalist factory owner, and establish a true proletarian democracy.
A Note on Authorship Also, because Marx and Engels were two great thinkers who collaborated on many key texts of Marxist theory, which is, in modern-day, most often just attributed to Marx without recognition of Engels, I will sometimes say “Marx said…” (excluding Engels) when I talk about Marxist theory; if I am referencing Engels’ specific contribution or a text he is the sole author of, I will just mention Engels. So, if I say Marx, then most often what I mean is Marx and Engels; it is a shorthand for their collaborative partnership.
Coming Up in Part 2: In the next installment of this series, we will dive deeper into the development of Marxist theory, exploring exactly how Marx and Engels constructed the scientific framework to dismantle the capitalist machine, and how that theory fractured into the different socialist movements we see today.
This article is a serialized, adapted excerpt from my book, What is Socialism? A Comprehensive Analysis to Clarify the Concept. If you prefer to read the entire book at once, or want to support this publication, you can [grab the physical paperback on Amazon here].
References
Engels, F. (1880). Socialism: Utopian and Scientific. Marxists Internet Archive. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1880/soc-utop/index.htm
Engels, F. (n.d.). The condition of the working class in England. Marxists Internet Archive. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/condition-working-class-england.pdf (Original work published 1845)