Among the best explainations of Marxism made by Marx and Engels, Engels wrote this pamphlet from portions of Anti-Duhring, with the intention of providing workers with a straight-forward exposition to Marxist thought.

In the three sections of the pamphlet, Engels' explains the three components of Marxist thought: French Socialism, German Philosophy, and English Economics. In the first part of the pamphlet Engels explains that Socialism of the past had been utopian — holding the belief that as soon as everyone in a society
understood Socialism and believed in it, a Socialist society would appear. Engels wrote, "... the Utopians attempted to evolve out of the human brain. Society presented nothing but wrongs; to remove these were the task of reason. It was necessary, then, to discover a new and more perfect system of social order and to impose this upon society from without by propaganda, and, wherever it was possible, by the example of model experiments."

Engels then explains the slow historical development of the dialectical philosophy over thousands of years; knowledge that culminated into what allowed Marx to see and explain the materialist conception of history, which Engels goes onto explain in the third part of this pamphlet.