this comfortable conception into various more or less complete systems.
In requiring the proletariat to carry out such a system, and thereby to
march straightway into the social New Jerusalem, it but requires in
reality, that the proletariat should remain within the bounds of
existing society, but should cast away all its hateful ideas concerning
the bourgeosie.

A second and more practical, but less systematic form of this Socialism
sought to depreciate every revolutionary movement in the eyes of the
working class, by showing that no mere political reform but a change in
the material conditions of existence in economical relations could be
of any advantage to them. By changes in the material conditions of
existence this form of Socialism, however, by no means understands
abolition of the bourgeois relations of production,--an abolition that
can be effected only by a revolution--but administrative reforms, based
on the continued existence of these relations; reforms, therefore, that
in no respect affect the relations between capital and labor, but, at
the best, lessen the cost and simplify the administrative work of
bourgeois government.

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 Baboeuf 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 cr