Hegel was the first to state correctly the relation between freedom and necessity. To him, freedom is the insight into necessity. [read more]

In 1867 there appeared in Hamburg Capital, a Critical Analysis of Capitalist Production, Volume I, Marx’s chief work, which expounds the foundations of his economic socialist conceptions and the main features of his criticism of existing society, the capitalist mode of… [read more]

What, indeed, is agnosticism but, to use an expressive Lancashire term, “shamefaced” materialism? The agnostic’s conception of Nature is materialistic throughout. The entire natural world is governed by law, and absolutely excludes the intervention of action from… [read more]

The cornerstone of the capitalist mode of production is the fact that our present social order enables the capitalists to buy the labour power of the worker at its value, but to extract from it much more than its value, by making the worker work longer than is necessary in order… [read more]

Communism is the doctrine of the conditions of the liberation of the proletariat. [read more]

This has now been the motto of the English working-class movement for the last fifty years. It did good service in the time of the rising Trades Unions after the repeal of the infamous Combination Laws in 1824 ; it did still better service in the time of the glorious Chartist… [read more]

This is Engels’s afterword to the 1894 reprint of his book On Social Relations in Russia (1875). In it, he addresses a polemic in which Marx is very implicated, regarding the applicability of his theories to the Russian situation. I discovered it through Anatoly… [read more]

Forty years ago England stood face to face with a crisis, solvable to all appearance by force only. The immense and rapid development of manufactures had outstripped the extension of foreign markets and the increase of demand. Every ten years the march of industry was violently… [read more]

Political economy came into being as a natural result of the expansion of trade, and with its appearance elementary, unscientific huckstering was replaced by a developed system of licensed fraud, an entire science of enrichment. [read more]

The question has often been asked, in what degree are the different classes of society useful or even necessary? And the answer was naturally a different one for every different epoch of history considered. There was undoubtedly a time when a territorial aristocracy was an… [read more]

Now that I have returned from a visit to Germany I have at last got to your article, which I have just read with much interest. Here are my observations upon it, written in German, as this enables me to be more concise. [read more]

A number of Socialists have recently launched a veritable crusade against what they call the principle of authority. It suffices to label this or that act authoritarian for them to condemn it. This summary procedure is abused to such an extent that it has become… [read more]