Manifesto of the Communist Party

31 

Chapter III: Socialist and Communist Literature 

To preserve this class is to preserve the existing state of things in Germany. The industrial and 

political supremacy of the bourgeoisie threatens it with certain destruction – on the one hand, 

from the concentration of capital; on the other, from the rise of a revolutionary proletariat. “True” 

Socialism appeared to kill these two birds with one stone. It spread like an epidemic.  

The robe of speculative cobwebs, embroidered with flowers of rhetoric, steeped in the dew of 

sickly sentiment, this transcendental robe in which the German Socialists wrapped their sorry 

“eternal truths”, all skin and bone, served to wonderfully increase the sale of their goods amongst 

such a public. 

And on its part German Socialism recognised, more and more, its own calling as the bombastic 

representative of the petty-bourgeois Philistine.  

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 Misère 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 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 affected 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 labour, but, at the best, lessen the cost, and simplify the administrative work, 

of bourgeois government.  

                                                      

*

 The revolutionary storm of 1848 swept away this whole shabby tendency and cured its protagonists of the desire to 

dabble in socialism. The chief representative and classical type of this tendency is Mr Karl Gruen. [Note by Engels to 

the German edition of 1890.] 

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32 

Chapter III: Socialist and Communist Literature 

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 Babeuf 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, 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 crudest form.  

The Socialist and Communist systems, properly so called, those of Saint-Simon, Fourier, Owen, 

and others, spring into existence in the early undeveloped period, described above, of the struggle 

between proletariat and bourgeoisie (see Section I. Bourgeois and Proletarians).  

The founders of these systems see, indeed, the class antagonisms, as well as the action of the 

decomposing elements in the prevailing form of society. But the proletariat, as yet in its infancy, 

offers to them the spectacle of a class without any historical initiative or any independent political 

movement.  

Since the development of class antagonism keeps even pace with the development of industry, the 

economic situation, as they find it, does not as yet offer to them the material conditions for the 

emancipation of the proletariat. They therefore search after a new social science, after new social 

laws, that are to create these conditions.  

Historical action is to yield to their personal inventive action; historically created conditions of 

emancipation to fantastic ones; and the gradual, spontaneous class organisation of the proletariat 

to an organisation of society especially contrived by these inventors. Future history resolves 

itself, in their eyes, into the propaganda and the practical carrying out of their social plans.  

In the formation of their plans, they are conscious of caring chiefly for the interests of the 

working class, as being the most suffering class. Only from the point of view of being the most 

suffering class does the proletariat exist for them.  

The undeveloped state of the class struggle, as well as their own surroundings, causes Socialists 

of this kind to consider themselves far superior to all class antagonisms. They want to improve 

the condition of every member of society, even that of the most favoured. Hence, they habitually 

appeal to society at large, without the distinction of class; nay, by preference, to the ruling class. 

For how can people, when once they understand their system, fail to see in it the best possible 

plan of the best possible state of society?  

Hence, they reject all political, and especially all revolutionary action; they wish to attain their 

ends by peaceful means, necessarily doomed to failure, and by the force of example, to pave the 

way for the new social Gospel.  

Such fantastic pictures of future society, painted at a time when the proletariat is still in a very 

undeveloped state and has but a fantastic conception of its own position, correspond with the first 

instinctive yearnings of that class for a general reconstruction of society.  

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