Part 3 — Socialist and Communist Literature

Section III opens with feudal socialism: the aristocracies of France and England, ruined by the bourgeoisie, have turned their criticism against modern bourgeois society not because they care about the workers but because they miss their own former exploitation. They waved the proletarian alms-bag in front as a banner; but the people saw on their hindquarters the old feudal coats of arms. Their criticism is half lamentation, half lampoon — sometimes witty and incisive, always reactionary. They oppose the bourgeoisie not because it creates a proletariat, but because it creates a revolutionary one.

Petty-bourgeois socialism — Sismondi is the classic example — is a critique from the standpoint of the artisan and small peasant being ground between capital and proletariat. It has the merit of pointing to the contradictions of modern production; it has the defect of always wanting to restore the old means of production and exchange, and with them the old property relations and the old society. In its positive aims it is either reactionary or utopian. German or "true" socialism made matters worse by translating French socialist demands into the philosophical language of the German petty bourgeoisie, draining them of their revolutionary content and turning them into weapons of existing German governments against a bourgeoisie that had not yet even come to power.

Conservative or bourgeois socialism — Proudhon's Philosophy of Poverty is the example — wants the advantages of bourgeois social conditions without the struggles and dangers necessarily resulting from them. A section of the bourgeoisie wants to redress social grievances in order to secure the continued existence of bourgeois society. Finally, the critical-utopian socialists — Saint-Simon, Fourier, Owen — wrote when the proletariat had not yet developed sufficiently to constitute itself as a class. They attacked every principle of existing society with brilliant insight and produced the most valuable materials for enlightening the working class. But they appealed to reason and benevolence rather than to historical struggle, and their detailed plans for ideal communities have, since the development of the proletariat, become merely fantastic. Their followers have become simple reactionaries.