Communist Manifesto FULL

III. Socialist and Communist Literature

1. Reactionary SocialismA. Feudal Socialism 

Owing to their historical position, it became the vocation of the aristocracies of France andEngland to write pamphlets against modern bourgeois society. In the French Revolution of July1830, and in the English reform agitation, these aristocracies again succumbed to the hatefulupstart. Thenceforth, a serious political struggle was altogether out of the question. A literarybattle alone remained possible. But even in the domain of literature the old cries of the restorationperiod had become impossible.*In order to arouse sympathy, the aristocracy was obliged to lose sight, apparently, of its owninterests, and to formulate their indictment against the bourgeoisie in the interest of the exploitedworking class alone. Thus, the aristocracy took their revenge by singing lampoons on their newmasters 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, halfmenace of the future; at times, by its bitter, witty and incisive criticism, striking the bourgeoisieto the very heart's core; but always ludicrous in its effect, through total incapacity to comprehendthe march of modern history.The aristocracy, in order to rally the people to them, waved the proletarian alms-bag in front for abanner. But the people, so often as it joined them, saw on their hindquarters the old feudal coatsof 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, thefeudalists forget that they exploited under circumstances and conditions that were quite differentand that are now antiquated. In showing that, under their rule, the modern proletariat neverexisted, they forget that the modern bourgeoisie is the necessary offspring of their own form ofsociety.For the rest, so little do they conceal the reactionary character of their criticism that their chiefaccusation against the bourgeois amounts to this, that under the bourgeois régime a class is beingdeveloped 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 createsa revolutionary proletariat.In political practice, therefore, they join in all coercive measures against the working class; and inordinary life, despite their high-falutin phrases, they stoop to pick up the golden apples droppedfrom 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 withFeudal Socialism.Nothing is easier than to give Christian asceticism a Socialist tinge. Has not Christianitydeclaimed against private property, against marriage, against the State? Has it not preached in theplace of these, charity and poverty, celibacy and mortification of the flesh, monastic life andMother Church? Christian Socialism is but the holy water with which the priest consecrates theheart-burnings of the aristocrat.

 B. Petty-Bourgeois Socialism

The feudal aristocracy was not the only class that was ruined by the bourgeoisie, not the onlyclass whose conditions of existence pined and perished in the atmosphere of modern bourgeoissociety. The medieval burgesses and the small peasant proprietors were the precursors of themodern bourgeoisie. In those countries which are but little developed, industrially andcommercially, 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 pettybourgeois has been formed, fluctuating between proletariat and bourgeoisie, and ever renewingitself 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 completelydisappear 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 wasnatural that writers who sided with the proletariat against the bourgeoisie should use, in theircriticism of the bourgeois régime, the standard of the peasant and petty bourgeois, and from thestandpoint of these intermediate classes, should take up the cudgels for the working class. Thusarose petty-bourgeois Socialism. Sismondi was the head of this school, not only in France butalso in England.This school of Socialism dissected with great acuteness the contradictions in the conditions ofmodern production. It laid bare the hypocritical apologies of economists. It proved,incontrovertibly, the disastrous effects of machinery and division of labour; the concentration ofcapital and land in a few hands; overproduction and crises; it pointed out the inevitable ruin of thepetty bourgeois and peasant, the misery of the proletariat, the anarchy in production, the cryinginequalities in the distribution of wealth, the industrial war of extermination between nations, thedissolution 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 ofproduction and of exchange, and with them the old property relations, and the old society, or tocramping the modern means of production and of exchange within the framework of the oldproperty 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.