III. Socialist and Communist Literature

1. REACTIONARY SOCIALISM


A. Feudal Socialism

Owing to their historical position, it became the vocation of the
aristocracies of France and England to write pamphlets against
modern bourgeois society.  In the French revolution of July 1830,
and in the English reform agitation, these aristocracies again
succumbed to the hateful upstart.  Thenceforth, a serious political
contest was altogether out of the question.  A literary battle
alone remained possible.  But even in the domain of literature
the old cries of the restoration period had become impossible.

In order to arouse sympathy, the aristocracy were obliged to
lose sight, apparently, of their own interests, and to formulate
their indictment against the bourgeoisie in the interest of the
exploited working class alone.  Thus the aristocracy took their
revenge by singing lampoons on their new master, and whispering
in his ears sinister prophecies of coming catastrophe.

In this way arose Feudal Socialism: half lamentation, half
lampoon; half echo of the past, half menace of the future; at
times, by its bitter, witty and incisive criticism, striking the
bourgeoisie to the very heart's core; but always ludicrous in
its effect, through total incapacity to comprehend the march of
modern history.

The aristocracy, in order to rally the people to them, waved the
proletarian alms-bag in front for a banner.  But the people, so
often as it joined them, saw on their hindquarters the old feudal
coats of arms, and deserted with loud and irreverent laughter.

One section of the French Legitimists and "Young England"
exhibited this spectacle.

In pointing out that their mode of exploitation was different to
that of the bourgeoisie, the feudalists forget that they
exploited under circumstances and conditions that were quite
different, and that are now antiquated.  In showing that, under
their rule, the modern proletariat never existed, they forget
that the modern bourgeoisie is the necessary offspring of their
own form of society.

For the rest, so little do they conceal the reactionary
character of their criticism that their chief accusation against
the bourgeoisie amounts to this, that under the bourgeois regime
a class is being developed, which is destined to cut up root and
branch the old order of society.

What they upbraid the bourgeoisie with is not so much that it
creates a proletariat, as that it creates a revolutionary
proletariat.

In political practice, therefore, they join in all coercive
measures against the working class; and in ordinary life,
despite their high falutin phrases, they stoop to pick up the
golden apples dropped from the tree of industry, and to barter
truth, love, and honour for traffic in wool, beetroot-sugar, and
potato spirits.

As the parson has ever gone hand in hand with the landlord,
so has Clerical Socialism with Feudal Socialism.

Nothing is easier than to give Christian asceticism a Socialist
tinge. Has not Christianity declaimed against private property,
against marriage, against the State? Has it not preached in the
place of these, charity and poverty, celibacy and mortification
of the flesh, monastic life and Mother Church? Christian
Socialism is but the holy, water with which the priest consecrates
the heart-burnings of the aristocrat.


B. Petty-Bourgeois Socialism

The feudal aristocracy was not the only class that was ruined by
the bourgeoisie, not the only class whose conditions of existence
pined and perished in the atmosphere of modern bourgeois society.
The mediaeval burgesses and the small peasant proprietors were
the precursors of the modern bourgeoisie.  In those countries
which are but little developed, industrially and commercially,
these two classes still vegetate side by side with the rising
bourgeoisie.

In countries where modern civilisation has become fully
developed, a new class of petty bourgeois has been formed,
fluctuating between proletariat and bourgeoisie and ever renewing
itself as a supplementary part of bourgeois society.  The
individual members of this class, however, are being constantly
hurled down into the proletariat by the action of competition,
and, as modern industry develops, they even see the moment
approaching when they will completely disappear as an independent
section of modern society, to be replaced, in manufactures,
agriculture and commerce, by overlookers, bailiffs and shopmen.

In countries like France, where the peasants constitute far more
than half of the population, it was natural that writers who
sided with the proletariat against the bourgeoisie, should use,
in their criticism of the bourgeois regime, the standard of the
peasant and petty bourgeois, and from the standpoint of these
intermediate classes should take up the cudgels for the working
class.  Thus arose petty-bourgeois Socialism.  Sismondi was the
head of this school, not only in France but also in England.

This school of Socialism dissected with great acuteness the
contradictions in the conditions of modern production.  It laid
bare the hypocritical apologies of economists.  It proved,
incontrovertibly, the disastrous effects of machinery and
division of labour; the concentration of capital and land in a
few hands; overproduction and crises; it pointed out the
inevitable ruin of the petty bourgeois and peasant, the misery
of the proletariat, the anarchy in production, the crying
inequalities in the distribution of wealth, the industrial war of
extermination between nations, the dissolution of old moral
bonds, of the old family relations, of the old nationalities.

In its positive aims, however, this form of Socialism aspires
either to restoring the old means of production and of exchange,
and with them the old property relations, and the old society, or
to cramping the modern means of production and of exchange,
within the framework of the old property relations that have
been, and were bound to be, exploded by those means.  In either
case, it is both reactionary and Utopian.

Its last words are: corporate guilds for manufacture,
patriarchal relations in agriculture.

Ultimately, when stubborn historical facts had dispersed all
intoxicating effects of self-deception, this form of Socialism
ended in a miserable fit of the blues.


C. German, or "True," Socialism

The Socialist and Communist literature of France, a literature
that originated under the pressure of a bourgeoisie in power, and
that was the expression of the struggle against this power, was
introduced into Germany at a time when the bourgeoisie, in that
country, had just begun its contest with feudal absolutism.

German philosophers, would-be philosophers, and beaux esprits,
eagerly seized on this literature, only forgetting, that when
these writings immigrated from France into Germany, French social
conditions had not immigrated along with them.  In contact with
German social conditions, this French literature lost all its
immediate practical significance, and assumed a purely literary
aspect.  Thus, to the German philosophers of the eighteenth
century, the demands of the first French Revolution were nothing
more than the demands of "Practical Reason" in general, and the
utterance of the will of the revolutionary French bourgeoisie
signified in their eyes the law of pure Will, of Will as it was
bound to be, of true human Will generally.

The world of the German literate consisted solely in bringing
the new French ideas into harmony with their ancient philosophical
conscience, or rather, in annexing the French ideas without
deserting their own philosophic point of view.

This annexation took place in the same way in which a foreign
language is appropriated, namely, by translation.

It is well known how the monks wrote silly lives of Catholic
Saints over the manuscripts on which the classical works of
ancient heathendom had been written.  The German literate
reversed this process with the profane French literature.  They
wrote their philosophical nonsense beneath the French original.
For instance, beneath the French criticism of the economic
functions of money, they wrote "Alienation of Humanity," and
beneath the French criticism of the bourgeois State they wrote
"dethronement of the Category of the General," and so forth.

The introduction of these philosophical phrases at the back of
the French historical criticisms they dubbed "Philosophy of
Action," "True Socialism," "German Science of Socialism,"
"Philosophical Foundation of Socialism," and so on.

The French Socialist and Communist literature was thus completely
emasculated. And, since it ceased in the hands of the German to express
the struggle of one class with the other, he felt conscious of having
overcome "French one-sidedness" and of representing, not true
requirements, but the requirements of truth; not the interests of the
proletariat, but the interests of Human Nature, of Man in general, who
belongs to no class, has no reality, who exists only in the misty realm
of philosophical fantasy.

This German Socialism, which took its schoolboy task so seriously
and solemnly, and extolled its poor stock-in-trade in such
mountebank fashion, meanwhile gradually lost its pedantic
innocence.

The fight of the German, and especially, of the Prussian bourgeoisie,
against feudal aristocracy and absolute monarchy, in other words, the
liberal movement, became more earnest.

By this, the long wished-for opportunity was offered to "True"
Socialism of confronting the political movement with the
Socialist demands, of hurling the traditional anathemas
against liberalism, against representative government, against
bourgeois competition, bourgeois freedom of the press, bourgeois
legislation, bourgeois liberty and equality, and of preaching to
the masses that they had nothing to gain, and everything to lose,
by this bourgeois movement.  German Socialism forgot, in the nick
of time, that the French criticism, whose silly echo it was,
presupposed the existence of modern bourgeois society, with its
corresponding economic conditions of existence, and the political
constitution adapted thereto, the very things whose attainment
was the object of the pending struggle in Germany.

To the absolute governments, with their following of parsons,
professors, country squires and officials, it served as a welcome
scarecrow against the threatening bourgeoisie.

It was a sweet finish after the bitter pills of floggings and
bullets with which these same governments, just at that time,
dosed the German working-class risings.

While this "True" Socialism thus served the governments as a
weapon for fighting the German bourgeoisie, it, at the same time,
directly represented a reactionary interest, the interest of the
German Philistines.  In Germany the petty-bourgeois class, a
relic of the sixteenth century, and since then constantly
cropping up again under various forms, is the real social basis
of the existing state of things.

To preserve this class is to preserve the existing state of
things in Germany.  The industrial and political supremacy of the
bourgeoisie threatens it with certain destruction; on the one
hand, from the concentration of capital; on the other, from the
rise of a revolutionary proletariat.  "True" Socialism appeared to
kill these two birds with one stone.  It spread like an epidemic.

The robe of speculative cobwebs, embroidered with flowers
of rhetoric, steeped in the dew of sickly sentiment, this
transcendental robe in which the German Socialists wrapped their
sorry "eternal truths," all skin and bone, served to wonderfully
increase the sale of their goods amongst such a public.  And on
its part, German Socialism recognised, more and more, its own
calling as the bombastic representative of the petty-bourgeois
Philistine.

It proclaimed the German nation to be the model nation, and the
German petty Philistine to be the typical man.  To every
villainous meanness of this model man it gave a hidden, higher,
Socialistic interpretation, the exact contrary of its real
character.  It went to the extreme length of directly opposing
the "brutally destructive" tendency of Communism, and of
proclaiming its supreme and impartial contempt of all class
struggles.  With very few exceptions, all the so-called Socialist
and Communist publications that now (1847) circulate in Germany
belong to the domain of this foul and enervating literature.


2. CONSERVATIVE, OR BOURGEOIS, SOCIALISM

A part of the bourgeoisie is desirous of redressing social
grievances, in order to secure the continued existence of
bourgeois society.

To this section belong economists, philanthropists,
humanitarians, improvers of the condition of the working class,
organisers of charity, members of societies for the prevention of
cruelty to animals, temperance fanatics, hole-and-corner
reformers of every imaginable kind.  This form of Socialism has,
moreover, been worked out into complete systems.

We may cite Proudhon's Philosophie de la Misere as an example of
this form.

The Socialistic bourgeois want all the advantages of modern
social conditions without the struggles and dangers necessarily
resulting therefrom.  They desire the existing state of society
minus its revolutionary and disintegrating elements.  They wish
for a bourgeoisie without a proletariat.  The bourgeoisie
naturally conceives the world in which it is supreme to be the
best; and bourgeois Socialism develops this comfortable
conception into various more or less complete systems.  In
requiring the proletariat to carry out such a system, and thereby
to march straightway into the social New Jerusalem, it but
requires in reality, that the proletariat should remain within
the bounds of existing society, but should cast away all its
hateful ideas concerning the bourgeoisie.

A second and more practical, but less systematic, form of this
Socialism sought to depreciate every revolutionary movement in
the eyes of the working class, by showing that no mere political
reform, but only a change in the material conditions of
existence, in economic relations, could be of any advantage to
them.  By changes in the material conditions of existence, this
form of Socialism, however, by no means understands abolition of
the bourgeois relations of production, an abolition that can be
effected only by a revolution, but administrative reforms, based
on the continued existence of these relations; reforms,
therefore, that in no respect affect the relations between
capital and labour, but, at the best, lessen the cost, and
simplify the administrative work, of bourgeois government.

Bourgeois Socialism attains adequate expression, when, and only
when, it becomes a mere figure of speech.

Free trade: for the benefit of the working class.  Protective
duties: for the benefit of the working class.  Prison Reform: for
the benefit of the working class.  This is the last word and the
only seriously meant word of bourgeois Socialism.

It is summed up in the phrase: the bourgeois is a bourgeois--for
the benefit of the working class.


3.  CRITICAL-UTOPIAN SOCIALISM AND COMMUNISM

We do not here refer to that literature which, in every great
modern revolution, has always given voice to the demands of the
proletariat, such as the writings of Babeuf and others.

The first direct attempts of the proletariat to attain its own
ends, made in times of universal excitement, when feudal society
was being overthrown, these attempts necessarily failed, owing
to the then undeveloped state of the proletariat, as well as to
the absence of the economic conditions for its emancipation,
conditions that had yet to be produced, and could be produced
by the impending bourgeois epoch alone. The revolutionary
literature that accompanied these first movements of the
proletariat had necessarily a reactionary character. It
inculcated universal asceticism and social levelling in its
crudest form.

The Socialist and Communist systems properly so called, those of
Saint-Simon, Fourier, Owen and others, spring into existence in
the early undeveloped period, described above, of the struggle
between proletariat and bourgeoisie (see Section 1. Bourgeois
and Proletarians).

The founders of these systems see, indeed, the class antagonisms, as
well as the action of the decomposing elements, in the prevailing form
of society. But the proletariat, as yet in its infancy, offers to them
the spectacle of a class without any historical initiative or any
independent political movement.

Since the development of class antagonism keeps even pace with
the development of industry, the economic situation, as they find
it, does not as yet offer to them the material conditions for the
emancipation of the proletariat.  They therefore search after a
new social science, after new social laws, that are to create
these conditions.

Historical action is to yield to their personal inventive
action, historically created conditions of emancipation to
fantastic ones, and the gradual, spontaneous class-organisation
of the proletariat to the organisation of society specially
contrived by these inventors.  Future history resolves itself, in
their eyes, into the propaganda and the practical carrying out of
their social plans.

In the formation of their plans they are conscious of caring
chiefly for the interests of the working class, as being the most
suffering class.  Only from the point of view of being the most
suffering class does the proletariat exist for them.

The undeveloped state of the class struggle, as well as their
own surroundings, causes Socialists of this kind to consider
themselves far superior to all class antagonisms.  They want to
improve the condition of every member of society, even that of
the most favoured.  Hence, they habitually appeal to society at
large, without  distinction of class; nay, by preference, to the
ruling class.  For how can people, when once they understand
their system, fail to see in it the best possible plan of the
best possible state of society?

Hence, they reject all political, and especially all
revolutionary, action; they wish to attain their ends by
peaceful means, and endeavour, by small experiments, necessarily
doomed to failure, and by the force of example, to pave the way
for the new social Gospel.

Such fantastic pictures of future society, painted at a time
when the proletariat is still in a very undeveloped state and has
but a fantastic conception of its own position correspond with
the first instinctive yearnings of that class for a general
reconstruction of society.

But these Socialist and Communist publications contain also a
critical element. They attack every principle of existing society.
Hence they are full of the most valuable materials for the
enlightenment of the working class. The practical measures
proposed in them--such as the abolition of the distinction
between town and country, of the family, of the carrying on of
industries for the account of private individuals, and of the wage
system, the proclamation of social harmony, the conversion of the
functions of the State into a mere superintendence of production,
all these proposals, point solely to the disappearance of class
antagonisms which were, at that time, only just cropping up, and
which, in these publications, are recognised in their earliest,
indistinct and undefined forms only. These proposals, therefore,
are of a purely Utopian character.

The significance of Critical-Utopian Socialism and Communism
bears an inverse relation to historical development.  In
proportion as the modern class struggle develops and takes
definite shape, this fantastic standing apart from the contest,
these fantastic attacks on it, lose all practical value and all
theoretical justification.  Therefore, although the originators
of these systems were, in many respects, revolutionary, their
disciples have, in every case, formed mere reactionary sects.
They hold fast by the original views of their masters, in
opposition to the progressive historical development of the
proletariat.  They, therefore, endeavour, and that consistently,
to deaden the class struggle and to reconcile the class antagonisms.
They still dream of experimental realisation of their social
Utopias, of founding isolated "phalansteres," of establishing
"Home Colonies,"  of setting up a "Little Icaria"--duodecimo
editions of the New Jerusalem--and to realise all these castles
in the air, they are compelled to appeal to the feelings and
purses of the bourgeois.  By degrees they sink into the category
of the reactionary conservative Socialists depicted above,
differing from these only by more systematic pedantry, and
by their fanatical and superstitious belief in the miraculous
effects of their social science.

They, therefore, violently oppose all political action on the
part of the working class; such action, according to them, can
only result from blind unbelief in the new Gospel.

The Owenites in England, and the Fourierists in France,
respectively, oppose the Chartists and the Reformistes.