Study Guide for

Engels’s

The Principles of Communism

Preparatory Reading:

Communist League
Rules of the Communist League (First Draft)
Communist Confession of Faith (Second Draft)
Letter from Engels to Marx on the form of the document.

Introduction

1: What is Communism?

Terms: Communism.
Engels’ Answer

2: What is the proletariat?

Terms: Proletariat, Capital.
Engels’ Answer

3: Proletarians, then, have not always existed?

Terms: Tribal Society.
Engels’ Answer

4: How did the proletariat originate?

Terms: Feudal Society, Bourgeois Society.
Engels’ Answer

5: Under what conditions does this sale of the labor take place?

Terms: Necessary Labour, Working Day.
Engels’ Answer

6: What working classes were there before the industrial revolution?

Terms: Wage Labour, Private Labour.
Engels’ Answer

7: In what way do proletarians differ from slaves?

Terms: Slave Society. Commodity, Labour Power.
Engels’ Answer

8: In what way do proletarians differ from serfs?

Terms: Poverty, Surplus Value.
Engels’ Answer

9: In what way do proletarians differ from handicraftsmen?

Terms: Division of Labour, Question 12 in Communist Confession of Faith
Engels’ Answer

10: In what way do proletarians differ from manufacturing workers?

Terms: Mechanisation and Automation,
Engels’ Answer

11: What were the immediate consequences of the industrial revolution?

Terms: Commodification, Modernity.
Engels’ Answer

12: What were the further consequences of the industrial revolution?

Terms: Credit, Business Cycle, Organic Composition of Capital.
Engels’ Answer

13: What follows from these periodic commercial crises?

Terms: Crisis of Capitalism, Concentration of Capital.
Engels’ Answer

14: What will this new social order have to be like?

Terms: Equality, Democracy,
Engels’ Answer

15: Was not the abolition of private property possible at an earlier time?

Terms: Private Property, Productive Forces, Utopia.
Engels’ Answer

16: Will the peaceful abolition of private property be possible?

Terms: State, Peaceful Road to Socialism.
Engels’ Answer

17: Will it be possible for private property to be abolished at one stroke?

Terms: Planned Economy, Public Property, Privatisation and Nationalisation, Proletarian Democracy.
Engels’ Answer

18: What will be the course of this revolution?

Terms: Dictatorship of the Proletariat. Socialism.
Engels’ Answer

19: Will it be possible for this revolution to take place in one country alone?

Terms: Socialism in One Country, Globalisation, Peaceful Coexistence, Permanent Revolution.
Engels’ Answer

20: What will be the consequences of the disappearance of private property?

Terms: Freedom.
Engels’ Answer

21: What will be the influence of communist society on the family?

Terms: Women's Liberation.
Engels’ Answer

22: What will be the attitude of communism to existing nationalities?

Terms: Women's Liberation.
Engels’ Answer

23: What will be its attitude to existing religions?

Terms: Religion, Atheism.
Engels’ Answer

24: How do communists differ from Reactionary / Bourgeois / Democratic socialists?

Terms: Reformism, Social Democracy, Stalinism.
Engels’ Answer

25: What is the attitude of the communists to the other political parties?

Terms: Political Party, Social Movements, Trade Union.
Engels’ Answer