e.

It proclaimed the German nation to be the model nation, and the
German petty Philistine to be the typical man. To every
villainous meanness of this model man it gave a hidden, higher,
Socialistic interpretation, the exact contrary of its real
character. It went to the extreme length of directly opposing
the "brutally destructive" tendency of Communism, and of
proclaiming its supreme and impartial contempt of all class
struggles. With very few exceptions, all the so-called Socialist
and Communist publications that now (1847) circulate in Germany
belong to the domain of this foul and enervating literature.

2. CONSERVATIVE, OR BOURGEOIS, SOCIALISM

A part of the bourgeoisie is desirous of redressing social
grievances, in order to secure the continued existence of
bourgeois society.

To this section belong economists, philanthropists,
humanitarians, improvers of the condition of the working class,
organisers of charity, members of societies for the prevention of
cruelty to animals, temperance fanatics, hole-and-corner
reformers of every imaginable kind. This form of Socialism has,
moreover, been worked out into complete systems.

We may cite Proudhon's Philosophie de la Misere as an example of
this form.

The Socialistic bourgeois want all the advantages of modern
social conditions without the struggles and dangers necessarily
resulting therefrom. They desire the existing state of society
minus its revolutionary and disintegrating elements. They wish
for a bourgeoisie without a proletariat. The bourgeoisie
naturally conceives the world in which it is supreme to be the
best; and bourgeois Socialism develops 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 bourgeoisie.

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 only a change in the material conditions of
existence, in economic 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