rgeoisie is the necessary offspring of their
own form of society.

For the rest, so little do they conceal the reactionary
character of their criticism that their chief accusation against
the bourgeoisie amounts to this, that under the bourgeois regime
a class is being developed, which is destined to cut up root and
branch the old order of society.

What they upbraid the bourgeoisie with is not so much that it
creates a proletariat, as that it creates a revolutionary
proletariat.

In political practice, therefore, they join in all coercive
measures against the working class; and in ordinary life,
despite their high falutin phrases, they stoop to pick up the
golden apples dropped from the tree of industry, and to barter
truth, love, and honour for traffic in wool, beetroot-sugar, and
potato spirits.

As the parson has ever gone hand in hand with the landlord,
so has Clerical Socialism with Feudal Socialism.

Nothing is easier than to give Christian asceticism a Socialist
tinge. Has not Christianity declaimed against private property,
against marriage, against the State? Has it not preached in the
place of these, charity and poverty, celibacy and mortification
of the flesh, monastic life and Mother Church? Christian
Socialism is but the holy, water with which the priest consecrates
the heart-burnings of the aristocrat.

B. Petty-Bourgeois Socialism

The feudal aristocracy was not the only class that was ruined by
the bourgeoisie, not the only class whose conditions of existence
pined and perished in the atmosphere of modern bourgeois society.
The mediaeval burgesses and the small peasant proprietors 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 civilisation 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.