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.