1. My personal dislikes/disagreements about the reading: Engels prediction for the simultaneous victory of the ‘’’’civilized’’’’ proletariat in England, Amerika, France, and Germany clearly was wrong. These places are the heart of capital & reaction today, and that doesn’t even touch on the loaded language of what he deems as ‘civilized’. Next, while I do agree with his takes on creating a ‘well rounded’, atheist, proletariat with no national allegiances. I have to wonder how exactly would we get this done, his answers weren’t exactly convincing. He seems to argue that the proles will just become experts in everything, disintegrating the roles people fill in society, disintegrating classes, and blurring the lines between urban & rural life. Meanwhile the need for religion and the state will just naturally vanish into thin air. While I do believe in these end goals, I struggle to see how this is all possible using the road map he provides. Maybe I’m just misinterpreting what he is saying, or have a limited creative perspective on the issue. Finally, he opens up a can of worms in section 24/25 in a few ways. He seems to advocate for the use of electoralism to further the cause, working with democratic socialists to a limited degree, and even going so far to advocate support for the bourgeois coming to power over the monarchy. He also seems to take a patsoc angle, ‘turning the constitution against the bourgeoisie and use it in the interests of the proletariat’. This is obviously a nuclear grade take, the constitution was written by and for the bourgeoisie, there will be no ‘turning it on them’.

2. My personal likes/agreements about the reading: There was quite a bit that I enjoyed about the reading, I thought that the way he believes in replacing competition with association was a great line. Also the way he beautifully states, ‘revolutions are not made intentionally and arbitrarily, but that, everywhere and always, they have been the necessary consequence of conditions which were wholly independent of the will and direction of individual parties and entire classes’. The entirety of section 18 is a banger, reading it made my heart flutter and give me chills. Section 18 beautifully states how exactly communists intend to get the project done. I also found it interesting how he states that with the fall of private property, the fall of prostitution will follow, given that prostitution is based off of private property. We’ve had plenty of discussion on sex work on the grad, so I implore people to read further on the subject there. Finally, the way Engels DESTROYS the various flavors of fake socialists with FACTS and LOGIC was just a cherry on top.

3. How this could be applied today: The need for to abolish private property is absolutely necessary today, as it was made clear by Engels that this is a core theme of communism. The very fabric of our society revolves around the protection of, and rights for, property owners. I’m sure we can all think of a few examples where property rights are given priority over everything else, including human lives. Private property needs to go, this is as true then as it is today. ‘Will it be possible for private property to be abolished at one stroke? No, no more than existing forces of production can at one stroke be multiplied to the extent necessary for the creation of a communal society’. I hope the anarchists among us are taking notes, Engels explicitly states that this won’t be done overnight. Next, it is very apparent to me that all of the steps laid out in section 18 are being done, or have already been done, in actually existing socialist countries in one way or another. Thus making section 18 in particular incredibly relevant to today, and personally was my favorite take away from the reading. Lastly there’s the subject of electoralism, as we should know electoralism historically speaking hasn’t been the driver of social progress. Electoralism can be useful, it can be a good addition, if we can make even a small bit of progress through elections then we should be practical in doing so. However for the most part this avenue is a dead end, voting for bourgeois candidate 1 over bourgeois candidate 2 in the bourgeois run election wont bring any meaningful change. At best this avenue will be a temporary band aid solution. There’s a ton of great content by fellow comrades that go into the details of this, please go check them out for a deeper analysis on the subject.

That was a great read. I like how he discusses the difference between the proletariat and the slave, casually mentioning how slavery is still used in the southern USA. As if it were yesterday. Of course slavery just got shifed to prison labour…

Also loved the section on actual steps to dismantle private property via huge taxes, eliminating inheritance, etc. Of course it’s a process not an instant result.

Brilliant reading thanks for posting this.

The part of this section that stood out for me begins with section 17, “Will it be possible for private property to be abolished at one stroke?”, where Engels basically explains that there is no instant communism button:

No, no more than existing forces of production can at one stroke be multiplied to the extent necessary for the creation of a communal society.

In all probability, the proletarian revolution will transform existing society gradually and will be able to abolish private property only when the means of production are available in sufficient quantity.

Very often, people ask, “What will XYZ be like under communism/‘after the revolution’?” asking about various laws, industries, work, housing, and ways of manufacturing and acquiring goods and services. I think in many cases, the answer to these questions is a lot more mundane than some people might initially imagine. We see in section 18 a series of ideas of what a proletarian-led society might democratically implement for itself at the start of proletarian leadership. And, as OP pointed out, we see many of these (or similar) measures underway in AES countries today, providing us real-life examples of the process that we can learn from as it develops.

I think it’s worth noting that Engels points out that these would basically be democratic measures undertaken by the proletarian-led society to continually reduce the prevalence of private property, using various methods to increasingly concentrate “all capital, all agriculture, all transport, all trade” into the hands of the proletarian state, with the basic aim of ensuring the livelihood of the proletariat, and multiplying the society’s productive forces until “production will so expand and man so change that society will be able to slough off whatever of its old economic habits may remain.”

As we can see from the real-life AES examples, this is a long process, with some changes being rapid and dramatic and easily intuitive to the average person, and others taking decades of time and having many possible approaches as well as many possible pitfalls, since longer term and larger scale generational changes like that are often harder for people to perceive and carry out from their individual position without learning more in depth about it. (Actually, on that point, I am glad that Engels specifically mentions education in section 18, as I believe it’s an important part in conveying the function of these longer generational processes to individuals in the society and strengthening their self-understanding of how they participate in building and directing their society.)

I think sections 17-20 could be good to go over with people who seem unclear on how (or why) socialist construction would take place, and on the meaning of terms like socialist-oriented market economy, socialist market economy, etc., as well as going into the reasons why development of the means of production is important (and how and why imperialism purposely hinders and sabotages that development in certain places).

Those are my thoughts, if anyone notices errors in my reasoning or understanding of the text, please point them out.

Thanks for leading this study group, I’m looking forward to its continuation.