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 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.
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