Manifesto of the Communist Party

29 

Chapter III: Socialist and Communist Literature 

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 fit of the blues.  

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 

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Chapter III: Socialist and Communist Literature 

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.  

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