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 civilization 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 _regime_, 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 labor; 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 frame work 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 manu