_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.