In other words, Engels argues, the cooperatives were to be developed, not as islands of socialism within a sea of of capitalism, but as workers' bastions and bulwarks, used to provide practical examples to workers of the way they could organise society, encouraging the workers to extend them throughout the economy, as Marx had noted in Capital III, Chapter 27.
“The co-operative factories of the labourers themselves represent within the old form the first sprouts of the new, although they naturally reproduce, and must reproduce, everywhere in their actual organisation all the shortcomings of the prevailing system. But the antithesis between capital and labour is overcome within them, if at first only by way of making the associated labourers into their own capitalist, i.e., by enabling them to use the means of production for the employment of their own labour. They show how a new mode of production naturally grows out of an old one, when the development of the material forces of production and of the corresponding forms of social production have reached a particular stage. Without the factory system arising out of the capitalist mode of production there could have been no co-operative factories. Nor could these have developed without the credit system arising out of the same mode of production. The credit system is not only the principal basis for the gradual transformation of capitalist private enterprises into capitalist stock companies, but equally offers the means for the gradual extension of co-operative enterprises on a more or less national scale. The capitalist stock companies, as much as the co-operative factories, should be considered as transitional forms from the capitalist mode of production to the associated one, with the only distinction that the antagonism is resolved negatively in the one and positively in the other.”
So, also, when Duhring wrote 80 years after the time of the utopians, setting out his own schema, differing only in it being based upon his revelation of absolute truths, he became “the latest utopian”.
In fact, as Marx had set out in Capital III, Chapter 27, and, as he and Engels set out later in this book, the worker cooperatives, by the end of the 19th century, were not the only, or even main, form of socialised capital, the transitional form of property between capitalism and socialism. The joint stock companies, today's giant multinational corporations are, also, the collective property of “the associated producers”.
Engels criticism of Duhring was that he sought to draw up this schema of the future society out of his head, rather than evolving it “out of the historically developed material at his disposal, as its necessary result”. (p 342)
By the end of the 19th century, and start of the 20th century, those material conditions, reflected in the development o those huge corporations, with their long-term plans, their need for the planning and regulation of the whole economy, by the state, and the need to ever increase the size of the market – imperialism – and so to move beyond the fetters of the nation state, were clear. Yet, so much of the focus of “socialist” organisations, in the last century, has been to oppose those same large corporations, to cling to the reactionary notions of the nation state, and to fail to recognise the nature of of that socialised capital, as the collective property of the workers. Instead of demanding that workers be given their rightful democratic control over their own property, they have instead demanded that the capitalist state be granted that control, via policies of nationalisation.
“... large-scale industry has developed the contradictions lying dormant in the capitalist mode of production into such crying antagonisms that the approaching collapse of this mode of production is, so to speak, palpable; that the new productive forces themselves can only be maintained and further developed by the introduction of a new mode of production corresponding to their present stage of development; that the struggle between the two classes engendered by the hitherto prevailing mode of production and constantly reproduced in ever sharper antagonism has gripped all civilised countries and is daily becoming more violent; and that this historical chain of connections, the conditions of the social transformation which it makes necessary, and the basic features of this transformation likewise determined by it, have already been apprehended.” (p 342)
Note that Engels does not say, here, that these sharpening contradictions are economic contradictions leading to some economic collapse, but are sharpening contradictions between the two classes – proletariat and bourgeoisie. The point is detailed further, later in the book. Those sharpening contradictions are heightened even more, when the bourgeoisie, as ruling class, becomes almost exclusively a rentier class, living off its interest/dividends and rent, as deductions from profit, and does so whilst denying the workers the right to control their own collective property, which produces those profits.
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