Page:Socialism, utopian and scientific (1920, Socialist Party of Canada).djvu/10

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Introduction
5

cles in the Leipzig "Vorwärts," the chief organ of the Socialist party, and later on as a book: "Herrn Eugen Dühring’s Umwalzung der Wissenschaft" (Mr. E. Dühring's "Revolution in Science"), a second edition of which appeared in Zurich, 1886.

At the request of my friend, Paul Lafargue, now representative of Lille in the French Chamber of Deputies,I arranged three chapters of this book as a pamphlet, which he translated and published in 1880, under the title: “Socialisme utopique et Socialisme scientifique.” From this French text a Polish and a Spanish edition were prepared. In 1883, our German friends brought out the pamphlet in the original language. Italian, Russian, Danish, Dutch, and Roumanian translations, based upon the German text, have since been published. Thus, with the present English edition, this little book circulates in ten languages. 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. In Germany it has had four editions of about 20,000 copies in all.

The economic terms used in this work, as far as they are new, agree with those used in the English edition of Marx’s "Capital." We call "production of commodities" that economic phase where articles are produced not only for the use of the producers, but also for purposes of exchange; that is, as commodities, not as use-values. This phase extends from the first beginnings of production for exchange down to our present time; it attains its full development under ‘capitalist production only, that is, under conditions where the capitalist, the