III
Socialist and Communist
Literature1. 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 struggle
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 was obliged
to lose sight, apparently, of its own interests, and to formulate its 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 masters
and whispering in his ears sinister prophesies of coming catastrophe. In this
way arose feudal socialism: half lamentation, half lampoon; half an 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 bourgeois 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 corrective
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 honor, 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 medieval 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 civilization has become fully developed,
a new class of petty bourgeois has been formed, fluctuating between proletariat
and bourgeoisie, and ever renewing itself a supplementary part of bourgeois society.
The individual members of this class, however, as 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 labor; 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 it 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 expressions 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 laws of
pure will, of will as it was bound to be, of true human will generally. The
work of the German literati 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 literati 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 school-boy task so seriously
and solemnly, and extolled its poor stock-in-trade in such a mountebank fashion,
meanwhile gradually lost its pedantic innocence. The fight of the Germans,
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 socialistic 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
those 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 flogging and bullets, with
which these same governments, just at that time, dosed the German working-class
risings. While this "True" Socialism thus served the government as a weapon
for fighting the German bourgeoisie, it, at the same time, directly represented
a reactionary interest, the interest of German philistines. In Germany, the petty-bourgeois
class, a relic of the sixteenth century, and since then constantly cropping up
again under the 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
recognized, 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, organizers 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 Philosophy of
Poverty 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 straightaway 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 economical 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 affected 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 labor, 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, 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 I.
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 organization of the proletariat to an
organization of society especially 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 favored. Hence, they habitually appeal
to society at large, without the 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, 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 function of the state into a more 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 recognized 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 justifications. 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, endeavor, and that
consistently, to deaden the class struggle and to reconcile the class antagonisms.
They still dream of experimental realization of their social Utopias, of founding
isolated phalansteres, of establishing "Home Colonies", or setting up
a "Little Icaria" - pocket editions of the New Jerusalem - and to realize 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. |
