The Communist Manifesto and Other Revolutionary Writings by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780486113968
Publisher: Dover Publications
Published: 2012-07-18T04:00:00+00:00

2. CONSERVATIVE OR BOURGEOIS SOCIALISM

One section of the bourgeoisie desires to redress social grievances in order to secure the continuance of bourgeois society.

To this section belong: economists, philanthropists, humanitarians, reformers of working class conditions, charity organisers, temperance fanatics, and all the motley variety of reformers of every description. And this bourgeois socialism has been elaborated into complete systems.

We may cite as an example Proudhon’s Philosophie de la Misère.

The bourgeois socialists want to have the conditions of life of modern society without the necessarily resulting struggles and dangers. They want the existing state of society with the elimination of its revolutionary and disintegrating elements. They want the bourgeoisie without the proletariat. The bourgeoisie naturally regards the world in which it rules as the best world. Bourgeois socialism elaborates this comforting conception into systems more or less complete. When it summons the proletariat to realise its system and to enter the New Jerusalem, it only requires in reality that the proletariat should remain in existing social conditions, but should cast away its hateful ideas about those conditions.

A second, more practical, but less systematic form of this socialism, sought to disgust the working class with every revolutionary movement by showing that not this or that political reform, but only a change in the material conditions of existence, in economic relations, could be of any benefit. By a change in the material conditions of life this form of socialism by no means refers to a change in bourgeois relations of production, for which a revolution is necessary, but to administrative reforms carried out on the basis of these relations of production, thus leaving unaltered the relations of capital and wage-labour, and, at best, merely lessening the cost of government for the bourgeoisie and simplifying its administrative work.

Bourgeois socialism only attains adequate expression when it becomes a mere figure of rhetoric.

Free trade—in the interest of the working class! Protection—in the interest of the working class! Prison reform—in the interest of the working class! That is the last and only serious word of bourgeois socialism.

The socialism of the bourgeoisie is summed up in the phrase: the bourgeois is a bourgeois—in the interest of the working class.

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