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.
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