Ch.04: III. SOCIALIST AND COMMUNIST LITERATURE

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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 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 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 relique 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 Misère 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 “Réformistes.”

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