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, these attempts 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.
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