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 band 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 has 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 site 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.
........
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