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III. PROLETARIANS AND COMMUNISTS
In what relation do the Communists stand to the proletarians as a
whole?
The Communists do not form a separate party opposed to other
working-class parties.
They have no interests separate and apart from those of the
proletariat as a whole.
They do not set up any sectarian principles of their own, by which to
shape and mould the proletarian movement.
The Communists are distinguished from the other working-class parties
is only: (1) In the national struggles of the proletarians of the
different countries, they point out and bring to the front the common
interests of entire proletariat, independently of nationality. (2) In
the various stages of development which the struggle of the working
class against the bourgeoisie has to pass through, they always and
everywhere represent the interests of the movement as a whole.
The Communists, therefore, are on the one hand, practically, the most
advanced and resolute section of the working-class parties of every
country, that section which pushes forward all others; on the other
hand, theoretically, they have over the great mass of the proletariat
the advantage of clearly understanding the line of march, the
conditions, and the ultimate general results of the proletarian
movement.
The immediate aim of the Communist is the same as that of all the other
proletarian parties: formation of the proletariat into a class,
overthrow of the bourgeois supremacy, conquest of political power by
the proletariat.
The theoretical conclusions of the Communists are in no way based on
ideas or principles that have been invented, or discovered, by this or
that would-be universal reformer. They merely express, in general
terms, actual relations springing from an existing class struggle, from
a historical movement going on under our very eyes. The abolition of
existing property relations is not at all a distinctive feature of
Communism.
All property relations in the past have continually been subject to
historical change consequent upon the change in historical conditions.
The French Revolution, for example, abolished feudal property in favour
of bourgeois property.
The distinguishing feature of Communism is not the abolition of
property generally, but the abolition of bourgeois property. But
modern bourgeois private property is the final and most complete
expression of the system of producing and appropriating products, that
is based on class antagonisms, on the exploitation of the many by the
few.
In this sense, the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the
single sentence: Abolition of private property.
We Communists have been reproached with the desire of abolishing the
right of personally acquiring property as the fruit of a man's own
labour, which property is alleged to be the groundwork of all personal
freedom, activity and independence.
Hard-won, self-acquired, self-earned property! Do you mean the
property of the petty artisan and of the small peasant, a form of
property that preceded the bourgeois form? There is no need to
abolish that; the development of industry has to a great extent
already destroyed it, and is still destroying it daily.
Or do you mean modern bourgeois private property?
But does wage-labour create any property for the labourer? Not a bit.
It creates capital, i.e., that kind of property which exploits
wage-labour, and which cannot increase except upon condition of
begetting a new supply of wage-labour for fresh exploitation.
Property, in its present form, is based on the antagonism of capital
and wage-labour. Let us examine both sides of this antagonism.
To be a capitalist, is to have not only a purely personal, but a social
status in production. Capital is a collective product, and only by the
united action of many members, nay, in the last resort, only by the
united action of all members of society, can it be set in motion.
Capital is, therefore, not a personal, it is a social power.
When, therefore, capital is converted into common property, into the
property of all members of society, personal property is not thereby
transformed into social property. It is only the social character of
the property that is changed. It loses its class-character.
Let us now take wage-labour.
The average price of wage-labour is the minimum wage, i.e., that
quantum of the means of subsistence, which is absolutely requisite in
bare existence as a labourer. What, therefore, the wage-labourer
appropriates by means of his labour, merely suffices to prolong and
reproduce a bare existence. We by no means intend to abolish this
personal appropriation of the products of labour, an appropriation that
is made for the maintenance and reproduction of human life, and that
leaves no surplus wherewith to command the labour of others. All that
we want to do away with, is the miserable character of this
appropriation, under which the labourer lives merely to increase
capital, and is allowed to live only in so far as the interest of the
ruling class requires it.
In bourgeois society, living labour is but a means to increase
accumulated labour. In Communist society, accumulated labour is but a
means to widen, to enrich, to promote the existence of the labourer.
In bourgeois society, therefore, the past dominates the present; in
Communist society, the present dominates the past. In bourgeois
society capital is independent and has individuality, while the living
person is dependent and has no individuality.
And the abolition of this state of things is called by the bourgeois,
abolition of individuality and freedom! And rightly so. The abolition
of bourgeois individuality, bourgeois independence, and bourgeois
freedom is undoubtedly aimed at.
By freedom is meant, under the present bourgeois conditions of
production, free trade, free selling and buying. But if selling and
buying disappears, free selling and buying disappears also. This talk
about free selling and buying, and all the other "brave words" of our
bourgeoisie about freedom in general, have a meaning, if any, only in
contrast with restricted selling and buying, with the fettered traders
of the Middle Ages, but have no meaning when opposed to the Communistic
abolition of buying and selling, of the bourgeois conditions of
production, and of the bourgeoisie itself.
You are horrified at our intending to do away with private property.
But in your existing society, private property is already done away
with for nine-tenths of the population; its existence for the few is
solely due to its non-existence in the hands of those nine-tenths. You
reproach us, therefore, with intending to do away with a form of
property, the necessary condition for whose existence is the
non-existence of any property for the immense majority of society.
In one word, you reproach us with intending to do away with your
property. Precisely so; that is just what we intend.
From the moment when labour can no longer be converted into capital,
money, or rent, into a social power capable of being monopolised, i.e.,
from the moment when individual property can no longer be transformed
into bourgeois property, into capital, from that moment, you say
individuality vanishes.
You must, therefore, confess that by "individual" you mean no other
person than the bourgeois, than the middle-class owner of property.
This person must, indeed, be swept out of the way, and made impossible.
Communism deprives no man of the power to appropriate the products of
society; all that it does is to deprive him of the power to subjugate
the labour of others by means of such appropriation.
It has been objected that upon the abolition of private property all
work will cease, and universal laziness will overtake us.
According to this, bourgeois society ought long ago to have gone to the
dogs through sheer idleness; for those of its members who work, acquire
nothing, and those who acquire anything, do not work. The whole of this
objection is but another expression of the tautology: that there can no
longer be any wage-labour when there is no longer any capital.
All objections urged against the Communistic mode of producing and
appropriating material products, have, in the same way, been urged
against the Communistic modes of producing and appropriating
intellectual products. Just as, to the bourgeois, the disappearance of
class property is the disappearance of production itself, so the
disappearance of class culture is to him identical with the
disappearance of all culture.
That culture, the loss of which he laments, is, for the enormous
majority, a mere training to act as a machine.
But don't wrangle with us so long as you apply, to our intended
abolition of bourgeois property, the standard of your bourgeois notions
of freedom, culture, law, etc. Your very ideas are but the outgrowth
of the conditions of your bourgeois production and bourgeois property,
just as your jurisprudence is but the will of your class made into a
law for all, a will, whose essential character and direction are
determined by the economical conditions of existence of your class.
The selfish misconception that induces you to transform into eternal
laws of nature and of reason, the social forms springing from your
present mode of production and form of property-historical relations
that rise and disappear in the progress of production -- this
misconception you share with every ruling class that has preceded you.
What you see clearly in the case of ancient property, what you admit in
the case of feudal property, you are of course forbidden to admit in
the case of your own bourgeois form of property.
Abolition of the family! Even the most radical flare up at this
infamous proposal of the Communists.
On what foundation is the present family, the bourgeois family, based?
On capital, on private gain. In its completely developed form this
family exists only among the bourgeoisie. But this state of things
finds its complement in the practical absence of the family among the
proletarians, and in public prostitution.
The bourgeois family will vanish as a matter of course when its
complement vanishes, and both will vanish with the vanishing of
capital.
Do you charge us with wanting to stop the exploitation of children by
their parents? To this crime we plead guilty.
But, you will say, we destroy the most hallowed of relations, when we
replace home education by social.
And your education! Is not that also social, and determined by the
social conditions under which you educate, by the intervention, direct
or indirect, of society, by means of schools, etc.? The Communists
have not invented the intervention of society in education; they do but
seek to alter the character of that intervention, and to rescue
education from the influence of the ruling class.
The bourgeois clap-trap about the family and education, about the
hallowed co-relation of parent and child, becomes all the more
disgusting, the more, by the action of Modern Industry, all family ties
among the proletarians are torn asunder, and their children transformed
into simple articles of commerce and instruments of labour.
But you Communists would introduce community of women, screams the
whole bourgeoisie in chorus.
The bourgeois sees in his wife a mere instrument of production. He
hears that the instruments of production are to be exploited in common,
and, naturally, can come to no other conclusion than that the lot of
being common to all will likewise fall to the women.
He has not even a suspicion that the real point is to do away with the
status of women as mere instruments of production.
For the rest, nothing is more ridiculous than the virtuous indignation
of our bourgeois at the community of women which, they pretend, is to
be openly and officially established by the Communists. The Communists
have no need to introduce community of women; it has existed almost
from time immemorial.
Our bourgeois, not content with having the wives and daughters of their
proletarians at their disposal, not to speak of common prostitutes,
take the greatest pleasure in seducing each other's wives.
Bourgeois marriage is in reality a system of wives in common and thus,
at the most, what the Communists might possibly be reproached with, is
that they desire to introduce, in substitution for a hypocritically
concealed, an openly legalised community of women. For the rest, it is
self-evident that the abolition of the present system of production
must bring with it the abolition of the community of women springing
from that system, i.e., of prostitution both public and private.
The Communists are further reproached with desiring to abolish
countries and nationality.
The working men have no country. We cannot take from them what they
have not got. Since the proletariat must first of all acquire
political supremacy, must rise to be the leading class of the nation,
must constitute itself the nation, it is, so far, itself national,
though not in the bourgeois sense of the word.
National differences and antagonisms between peoples are daily more and
more vanishing, owing to the development of the bourgeoisie, to freedom
of commerce, to the world-market, to uniformity in the mode of
production and in the conditions of life corresponding thereto.
The supremacy of the proletariat will cause them to vanish still
faster. United action, of the leading civilised countries at least, is
one of the first conditions for the emancipation of the proletariat.
In proportion as the exploitation of one individual by another is put
an end to, the exploitation of one nation by another will also be put
an end to. In proportion as the antagonism between classes within the
nation vanishes, the hostility of one nation to another will come to an
end.
The charges against Communism made from a religious, a philosophical,
and, generally, from an ideological standpoint, are not deserving of
serious examination.
Does it require deep intuition to comprehend that man's ideas, views
and conceptions, in one word, man's consciousness, changes with every
change in the conditions of his material existence, in his social
relations and in his social life?
What else does the history of ideas prove, than that intellectual
production changes its character in proportion as material production
is changed? The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of
its ruling class.
When people speak of ideas that revolutionise society, they do but
express the fact, that within the old society, the elements of a new
one have been created, and that the dissolution of the old ideas keeps
even pace with the dissolution of the old conditions of existence.
When the ancient world was in its last throes, the ancient religions
were overcome by Christianity. When Christian ideas succumbed in the
18th century to rationalist ideas, feudal society fought its death
battle with the then revolutionary bourgeoisie. The ideas of religious
liberty and freedom of conscience merely gave expression to the sway of
free competition within the domain of knowledge.
"Undoubtedly," it will be said, "religious, moral, philosophical and
juridical ideas have been modified in the course of historical
development. But religion, morality philosophy, political science, and
law, constantly survived this change."
"There are, besides, eternal truths, such as Freedom, Justice, etc.
that are common to all states of society. But Communism abolishes
eternal truths, it abolishes all religion, and all morality, instead of
constituting them on a new basis; it therefore acts in contradiction to
all past historical experience."
What does this accusation reduce itself to? The history of all past
society has consisted in the development of class antagonisms,
antagonisms that assumed different forms at different epochs.
But whatever form they may have taken, one fact is common to all past
ages, viz., the exploitation of one part of society by the other. No
wonder, then, that the social consciousness of past ages, despite all
the multiplicity and variety it displays, moves within certain common
forms, or general ideas, which cannot completely vanish except with the
total disappearance of class antagonisms.
The Communist revolution is the most radical rupture with traditional
property relations; no wonder that its development involves the most
radical rupture with traditional ideas.
But let us have done with the bourgeois objections to Communism.
We have seen above, that the first step in the revolution by the
working class, is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling as
to win the battle of democracy.
The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degrees,
all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of
production in the hands of the State, i.e., of the proletariat
organised as the ruling class; and to increase the total of productive
forces as rapidly as possible.
Of course, in the beginning, this cannot be effected except by means of
despotic inroads on the rights of property, and on the conditions of
bourgeois production; by means of measures, therefore, which appear
economically insufficient and untenable, but which, in the course of
the movement, outstrip themselves, necessitate further inroads upon the
old social order, and are unavoidable as a means of entirely
revolutionising the mode of production.
These measures will of course be different in different countries.
Nevertheless in the most advanced countries, the following will be
pretty generally applicable.
-
Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of
land to public purposes.
-
A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.
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Abolition of all right of inheritance.
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Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels.
-
Centralisation of credit in the hands of the State, by means of
a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly.
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Centralisation of the means of communication and transport in
the hands of the State.
-
Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the
State; the bringing into cultivation of waste-lands, and the
improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan.
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Equal liability of all to labour. Establishment of industrial
armies, especially for agriculture.
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Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual
abolition of the distinction between town and country, by a more
equable distribution of the population over the country.
-
Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of
children's factory labour in its present form. Combination of education
with industrial production, &c., &c.
When, in the course of development, class distinctions have
disappeared, and all production has been concentrated in the hands of a
vast association of the whole nation, the public power will lose its
political character. Political power, properly so called, is merely
the organised power of one class for oppressing another. If the
proletariat during its contest with the bourgeoisie is compelled, by
the force of circumstances, to organise itself as a class, if, by means
of a revolution, it makes itself the ruling class, and, as such, sweeps
away by force the old conditions of production, then it will, along
with these conditions, have swept away the conditions for the existence
of class antagonisms and of classes generally, and will thereby have
abolished its own supremacy as a class.
In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class
antagonisms, we shall have an association, in which the free
development of each is the condition for the free development of all.
3 III SOCIALIST AND COMMUNIST LITERATURE
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REACTIONARY SOCIALISM
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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 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.
-
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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