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Marx/Engels: Manifesto of the
Communist Party
III. Socialist
and Communist Literature
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.(1)
In order to arouse sympathy, the
aristocracy was obliged to lose sight, apparently, of its 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 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 régime 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.(2)
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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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.(3)
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 cite Proudhon’s Philosophis 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 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 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,
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 an organisation 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 favoured. 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 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”, or setting up a “Little Icaria”(4)
— 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 [or] 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 Réformistes.
(1)
Not the English Restoration (1660-1689), but the French
Restoration (1814-1830). [Engels, 1888
German edition]
(2)
This applies chiefly to Germany, where the landed aristocracy
and squirearchy have large portions of their estates
cultivated for their own account by stewards, and are,
moreover, extensive beetroot-sugar manufacturers and
distillers of potato spirits. The wealthier British
aristocracy are, as yet, rather above that; but they, too,
know how to make up for declining rents by lending their names
to floaters or more or less shady joint-stock companies.
[Engels, 1888 German edition]
(3)
The revolutionary storm of 1848 swept away this whole shabby
tendency and cured its protagonists of the desire to dabble in
socialism. The chief representative and classical type of this
tendency is Mr Karl Gruen. [Engels, 1888
German edition]
(4)
Phalanstéres were Socialist colonies on the plan of
Charles Fourier; Icaria was the name given by Cabet
to his Utopia and, later on, to his American Communist colony.
[Engels, 1888 English Edition]
“Home Colonies” were what Owen
called his Communist model societies. Phalanstéres
was the name of the public palaces planned by Fourier.
Icaria was the name given to the Utopian land of fancy,
whose Communist institutions Cabet portrayed.
[Engels, 1890 German Edition] |
