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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 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 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 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 régime, 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
hangover.
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 (men of
letters), 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 schoolboy 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 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 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, endeavour,
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 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.
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