Marx, Engels and Other Socialisms
t Marx and Engels treat the movement for socialism and communism as a modern phenomenon. Commentators are sometimes tempted to treat socialism and communism in a historically expansive fashion – dating back, for instance, to the institution of the jubilee in pre-exilic Israel, or to the social arrangements of primitive Christianity. However, Marx and Engels maintain that socialist and communist systems “proper” [eigentlich] emerged only with the first stirrings of the struggle between bourgeoisie and proletariat, a struggle which they describe earlier in the Manifesto (CM 257). Pre-modern expressions of socialism and communism might, of course, be of interest, but they necessarily foundered on the “undeveloped condition” of the proletariat and the lack of “material conditions for its emancipation” – two conditions which are only met with the development of the bourgeois epoch (CM 257). Until the theoretical and practical connection is made between the movement for communism and the interests of the proletariat, Marx and Engels insist that communism will remain nothing more than an aspiration. In the Manifesto, Marx and Engels present a typology which identifies three main types of non-Marxian socialism, which they call “reactionary socialism,” “conservative” or “bourgeois socialism” and “critical utopian socialism.” The first of these is subdivided into three sub-categories which they call “feudal socialism,” “petty-bourgeois socialism” and “German” or “true socialism.” In short, Marx and Engels discuss five individual non-Marxian socialisms, which they see as exemplifying three basic types of such socialism. As well as the obvious chronological limit (existing before 1848), all of these other socialisms are deemed to be of some contemporary relevance. On the grounds of lack of contemporary relevance, for example, they omit sustained discussion of the primitive communism of Gracchus Babeuf (1760–1797). So-called Babouvism had embodied a “general asceticism” and “crude egalitarianism,” and is associated, by Marx and Engels, with the earliest efforts of the proletariat to articulate its interests during the upheaval accompanying the overthrow of feudalism (CM 257). In short, section III offers a snapshot of certain non-Marxian socialisms deemed sufficiently relevant to their German audience at this particular time. It seems likely that Marx and Engels were not unalterably wedded to this particular way of dividing up other socialisms. The account in section III certainly differs in detail from the alternative typologies found in Engels’s “Principles of Communism” [Grundsätze des Kommunismus] (1847) (CW 6: 341–357) and in Marx’s “Draft Plan for Section III” (1847) (CW 6: 576). We should probably think of this part of the Manifesto as one of a series of attempts in the late 1840s to categorize other socialisms. Note that this particular typology is organized primarily, not, as often suggested, on the class basis of their support, but rather on where these contemporary non-Marxian socialisms locate the good society. Socialist accounts of the good society are typically based on a commitment to certain values (such as equality and community) and a conviction that certain institutions (for instance, producers’ cooperatives) would best embody those values. However, socialists disagree amongst themselves not only about which values and institutions are the right ones, but also about the historical association of their good society. Simply put, backward-looking socialisms (such as the three varieties of reactionary socialism) identify the good society with some part of the past; sideways-looking socialisms (such as conservative socialism) identify the good society with some, suitably reformed, aspects of the present; and forwardlooking socialisms (such as critical utopian socialism) identify the good society with the future. In what follows, I address each of these three types of socialism in turn, explaining whom they refer to, and outlining the assessment of them contained in the Manifesto.
Reactionary socialism [reaktionaire Socialismus] is backward-looking; it associates the good society with some part of the past. Those identified with it are reactionary in the literal sense that they want, at least in part, to return to a pre-bourgeois society, “to turn back the tide of history” (CM 244). In the “Principles of Communism,” Engels describes this otherwise diverse group as adherents of the “feudal and patriarchal society” which had been, and continued to be, destroyed by the large-scale industry which characterized bourgeois society. These reactionary socialists are said to recognize some of the “ills of present-day society,” but from the existence of those ills they erroneously drew the conclusion that “feudal and Patriarchal society should be restored because it was free from these ills” (CW 6: 355). Marx and Engels not only think that such a restoration is impossible; they also share little of this pre-modern nostalgia. Indeed, a constant thread in the Manifesto is their celebration of the revolutionary role of bourgeois society and, in particular, its destruction of the parochial, static and patriarchal world of feudalism. Marx and Engels subdivide reactionary socialism into three different contemporary strands which they discuss separately: “feudal socialism,” “pettybourgeois socialism” and “German” or “true socialism.” The first form of reactionary socialism, feudal socialism [feudale Socialismus], refers to the critique of modern bourgeois society offered by certain elements of the French and English aristocracy. It is linked with the July Revolution (1830) in France, and the Reform movement in England; more precisely, a section of “the French legitimists” and “the Young England movement” are identified as representatives of feudal socialism (CM 252). This particular socialism can also have a whiff of “Christian asceticism,” perhaps unsurprisingly, given not only the flexibility of Christian declamations against private property and the state, but also the Marxian judgment that the feudal parson was always “hand in glove” with the feudal lord (CM 253). The French “legitimists” here are those who sought the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy (overthrown in the July Revolution). The feudal socialists among them – those who championed some reform of the conditions of workers and the poor – perhaps included the vicômte Frédéric Alfred Pierre de Falloux (1811–1886), who stressed the social duties of the nobility and argued against the right to work. (The Christian variants of feudal socialism might be thought to include French “social Catholics” such as Paul Alban Villeneuve-Bargemont (1784–1850) and cômte Charles Forbes de Montalembert (1810–1870).) In turn, “Young England” was the name of a conservative political and literary group which included Lord John Manners (1818–1906) and the young Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881). Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881), the author of Past and Present (1843), is also often associated with it. Carlyle’s writings, especially before 1848, embodied the relevant combination of an admiring account of the hierarchies of the feudal past, together with some fierce criticism of the bourgeois present – including trenchant observations concerning crises of overproduction in which “in the midst of plethoric plenty, the people perish,” and the poverty of social relations in which “cash payment” increasingly forms “the one nexus of man to man” (Carlyle 1960, 6, 163). Marx and Engels offer a complex assessment of feudal socialism. They recognize that the social criticism of this movement is not without effectiveness; the feudal socialists are said to provide a “bitter, witty, biting” verdict on the bourgeoisie which strikes the latter at their “very core” (CM 252). Indeed, some of Carlyle’s criticisms of bourgeois society are directly echoed in the Manifesto itself; for example, in the Marxian characterization of contemporary bourgeois society as fostering no social bond which is not based on “unfeeling ‘hard cash’” [gefühllose “baare Zahlung”] (CM 235). However, these feudal socialists are also criticized for their limited grasp of the “course of modern history,” for hoping to restore a world which in their romanticized form (overflowing with feudal “love and honour”) had never existed, and which in its unromanticized form had actually given birth to the new world against which they now raged (CM 253). Furthermore, the political appeal of the movement is judged to be incoherent; feudal socialists have to appeal to the exploited against the bourgeoisie, but the modern working class would have no place in the aristocratic idyll which these socialists sought. Marx and Engels suggest that modern workers recognize this political incoherence and the concealed aristocratic standpoint which generates it. The astute social criticism might draw “the people”close to feudal socialism, but, once they can see the old feudal coat of arms on the “hind quarters” of feudal socialism, they soon desert “with loud and irreverent laughter” (CM 252). Marx’s imagery is drawn from Heinrich Heine (1797– 1856), who in Deutschland. Ein Wintermärchen (1844) [Germany. A Winter’s Tale] had written mockingly of “Knights errant and lords superior, Who bore true faith upon their breast, Coats of arms upon their posterior” (Heine 1982, 487). Marx was a huge admirer and good friend of the great German poet, and this text was one that Marx had first published for Heine in Vorwärts! [Forward!]. Feudal socialism is seen less as a serious political movement to restore the old world, than as a literary response to the threat to aristocratic “conditions of life” presented by modern bourgeois society (CM 253). Lastly, Marx and Engels note that, in practice, and for all their complaints about the bourgeoisie’s treatment of the exploited, the members of this movement always end up supporting “repressive legislation” against the working class (CM 253). In short, the social criticism of feudal socialism had some undoubted merit, but its historical understanding is limited, its political appeal lacks coherence, and its practical ambitions are ultimately reactionary. The result is a socialist-tinged lament for the past which never entirely manages to avoid a slightly “comic” air (CM 252). The second form of reactionary socialism, namely petty-bourgeois socialism [kleinbürgerliche Socialismus], embodies the response of sections of the petty bourgeoisie (like sections of the aristocracy in the case of feudal socialism) to the threat to its “conditions of life” presented by modern bourgeois society (CM 253). The petty bourgeoisie typically earn their living by their own labor, together with some ownership of means of production (such as tools or premises). (It is presumably this association with premises which led Helen Macfarlane to replace kleinbürgerliche Socialismus with the imaginative, if not entirely successful, neologism “shopocrat socialism” in her 1850 English translation of the Manifesto.) Marx and Engels identify two different types of petty bourgeoisie, reflecting different levels of industrial and commercial development. In less-developed countries, such as France, the petty bourgeoisie consist primarily of peasants. In countries where “modern civilisation has developed” more fully, such as England, a new petty bourgeoisie had emerged, a class of small independent producers (including self-employed artisans) whose existence remains precarious and whose members are increasingly forced into the proletariat as a result of competition (CM 253). The best-known exponent of petty-bourgeois socialism is said to be Sismondi. (No other examples are named in the Manifesto, but Eugène Buret (1811–1892) is often thought to be an additional candidate.) Sismondi is now usually thought of as a political economist – the author of Nouveaux principes d’économie politique [New Principles of Political Economy] (1819, 1827) – but he was also a distinguished historian of medieval Italian city states. Sismondi’s critique of modern industrial society – which drew on his visits to Britain – emphasized its inevitable crises of overproduction, the associated misery and suffering of the workforce and its increasingly global impact on rival producers. Sismondi’s historical enthusiasm for civic virtue over the steam engine suggested, to his own mind at least, the need to create a modern analogue of the guild system which had once enabled peasants and artisans to lead lives of selfreliance and virtuous citizenship. Marx and Engels are enthusiastic about the critical dimension of pettybourgeois socialism, and especially its negative diagnosis of the ills of contemporary society. Petty-bourgeois socialism is said to have “dissected with great perspicacity the conflicts inherent in modern relations of production,” and in doing so to have exposed the “hypocritical apologetics” of contemporary economists (CM 253). More precisely, petty-bourgeois socialism had demonstrated “incontrovertibly” the ways in which modern relations of production – through their use of machinery, concentration of capital and overproduction – have generated destructive social consequences. Alongside the dissolution of traditional morality, family relations and national identities, Marx and Engels mention the ruin of the small trader and peasant, the poverty of the proletariat and the “flagrant disparities in the distribution of wealth” that have resulted (CM 254). Marx and Engels are less sympathetic to the constructive dimension of pettybourgeois socialism, that is, its positive proposals for social change. These socialists are said to seek either to restore wholly the property relations and society that belong to an earlier epoch, or somehow to contain modern means of production within the confines of previous property relations. In practice, Marx and Engels remark that “guild socialism for artisans and patriarchal relations in agriculture are the last word here” (CM 254). These constructive proposals are judged “reactionary” [reaktionär] and “utopian” [utopistisch] in equal measure; they are “reactionary” in the literal sense that they attempt to reverse the historical process (to restore aspects of pre-bourgeois society), and they are “utopian” in the popular sense that this goal is impossible to realize (CM 254). The third form of reactionary socialism, namely German or true socialism [deutsche oder ... wahre Socialismus], is a result of what might be called combined and uneven historical development across Europe. More particularly, it reflects the distinctive German circumstances which Marx had earlier diagnosed as combining philosophical precocity with economic and political backwardness (Leopold 2007, 22–26). Its origins are said to lie with a group of Teutonic literati who took French socialist literature – including the work of Charles Fourier (1772–1837), Henri de Saint-Simon (1760–1825) and their various followers – and adapted it to the very different social conditions that obtained in the German confederation. In the Manifesto, these various “philosophers, semi-philosophers, and wordsmiths” are not named, but we can confidently identify them from the group of texts usually known as Die deutsche Ideologie [The German Ideology] (1846– 1847) (CM 254). The best-known true socialists are perhaps Karl Grün and Hermann Kriege (1820–1850), but the group also included Hermann Semmig (1820–1897), Ernst Dronke (1822–1891) and others. In The German Ideology, Marx and Engels emphasized that the true socialists’ knowledge of their French sources looked to be weak and derivative, having been gained secondhand from the superficial accounts found in the works of Lorenz von Stein (1815–1890), Theodor Oelckers (1816–1869) and others. Indeed, Marx and Engels entertain themselves – at some length – by identifying striking examples of true socialist plagiarism from this limited range of barely adequate and second-hand accounts of socialism in France. In the Manifesto, the true socialists are said to combine much seemingly “idle speculation concerning the true society or the realization of the human essence” together with a critique of a bourgeois society which does not yet exist in Germany (CM 254). (Interestingly, and for reasons which are unclear, this last sentence is omitted from the 1888 English translation by Samuel Moore and revised by Engels.) This combination captures the changes to both the theoretical form, and the political meaning, of these French ideas, which resulted from their relocation to German soil. This relocation of French ideas to German circumstances transformed their theoretical form, as abstract philosophical speculation was substituted for practical and concrete social criticism. Marx and Engels elaborate this substitution using a satirical and slightly strained contrast between, on the one hand, the historical progress embodied in the practice of medieval Christian monks who wrote their lives of saints over the pagan manuscripts that they had discovered, and, on the other, the historical regression embodied in the process whereby these German literati wrote “their philosophical nonsense under the original French” (CM 255). (This palimpsest image may also have been drawn from Heine, although it is not unknown elsewhere (Prawer 1976, 139, n. 3).) The process of translating this “secular French literature” back into their own traditional philosophical idiom is seen as a distinctive and reactionary one (CM 255). Thus, under the French critique of monetary relations, the true socialists “wrote ‘externalisation of the human essence’,” and under the French critique of the bourgeois state “they wrote ‘transformation of the reign of abstract generality’” (CM 255). Given that Marx’s own early writings were not entirely unmarked by this distinctive Teutonic idiom, it is tempting to see some implicit self-criticism here. (In his “Draft Plan for Section III,” Marx uses the label “German philosophical socialism” for this movement (CW 6: 576).) In this context, we might note that the intellectual forebears of true socialism include several figures with whom Marx and Engels had recently been intellectually and personally close; most obviously the writer and activist Moses Hess (1812–1875) and the left-Hegelian philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–1872). The relocation of French ideas to German circumstances also transformed their political meaning. Simply put, they were “punctiliously emasculated” by this move (CM 255). It is this political transformation which helps explain both the classification of true socialism as a form of reactionary socialism, and the fierceness of Marxian efforts to minimize its influence in the nascent German workers’ movement. That original socialist literature presupposed the existence of the economic and political conditions characteristic of “modern bourgeois society,” and its political meaning was transformed by this relocation to a country in which the bourgeoisie were only just beginning to struggle against “feudal absolutism” (CM 254). Simply put, what was in France an attack on the bourgeois present functioned in Germany as a defense of the pre-bourgeois present. Marx and Engels insist that to struggle “against the representative state, against bourgeois competition, bourgeois freedom of the press, bourgeois justice, bourgeois freedom and equality” before any of those things exist, is to lend support to the efforts of pre-modern German absolutism to maintain its power (CM 255). In this way, true socialism is seen as encouraging resistance to the very economic and political developments which would – on the Marxian account – make communism possible. Whatever their intentions, the true socialists provide practical succor to “the absolutist regimes in Germany,” offering them a “welcome scarecrow” to help frighten off “the rising bourgeoisie” which threatened them (CM 255).
Conservative or bourgeois socialism [konservative oder Bourgeois-Socialismus] is sideways-looking. Unlike reactionary socialism, it does not resist or regret the arrival of bourgeois society, but rather attempts to ensure its preservation (to conserve it) by seeking to moderate the “struggles and dangers” that, according to the Marxian account, are a necessary companion to “the living conditions of modern society” (CM 256). Of course, this particular socialism does not always understand itself in these terms, but essentially it would be happy with existing bourgeois society if only certain regrettable “social grievances” could be redressed (CM 256; emphasis in original). This conservative socialism can take a more systematic or a less systematic form. In the more systematic category, we find the French radical Proudhon. In the less systematic category, we find “economists, philanthropists, humanitarians, do-gooders for the working classes, charity organisers, animal welfare enthusiasts, temperance union workers, two-a-penny reformers of multifarious kinds” (CM 256). Proudhon is now usually thought of as an anarchist, but the idea of anarchism as a systematic competitor to Marxian views had not yet emerged. Marx had very recently attacked the views of Proudhon, whom he knew personally, in his Misère de la philosophie [The Poverty of Philosophy] (1847). (Marx’s title satirically reverses the subtitle of the object of his criticism – namely, Proudhon’s Système des Contradictions Économiques ou Philosophie de la Misère [System of Economic Contradictions, or the Philosophy of Poverty] (1846).) Very roughly, Marx had criticized three threads in Proudhon’s work: Proudhon’s economic views, especially his ambition to establish a system of free and equal exchange which would somehow avoid the unearned income and inequality of contemporary economic arrangements; his hostility to certain political struggles, not least his rejection of both militant trade union activity and the revolutionary strivings of the proletariat; and his misguided enthusiasm for, and misunderstandings of, German philosophy, in particular his unfortunate predilection for a Hegelian dialectic involving the hypostatization of concepts. The Manifesto picks up on the first of those threads and portrays Proudhon as a conservative socialist who seeks to reform rather than overthrow existing society. In its less systematic and more practical form, conservative socialism also sees bourgeois society, suitably reformed, as in the interests of the working class. It typically seeks to persuade the proletariat that the political changes sought by revolutionary movements will make little difference to them, and that they should seek material changes to their circumstances instead (CM 256). However, the material changes that conservative socialists propose fail to threaten the “bourgeois relations of production,” and consist of “administrative reforms” which do little more than reduce the costs to the bourgeoisie of their “political rule” (CM 256). The basic “relationship of capital and wagelabour” is left unchanged by the reforming ambitions of these various advocates of charity and philanthropy (CM 256). The central Marxian complaint about conservative socialism concerns its inability to grasp that certain failings are the necessary accompaniment to modern bourgeois society. In the “Principles of Communism,” Engels describes these socialists as “adherents of present society” who fear that the “evils inseparable from it” threaten its survival (CW 6: 355). As a result, they “endeavor to preserve present society but to remove the evils bound up with it” (CW 6: 355). Some of them propose “measures of mere charity,” whilst others offer “grandiose systems of reform,” which purport to reorganize present society but end up retaining its “foundations” (CW 6: 355). In either form, the endeavor is futile given the inseparability, on which the Marxian argument insists, of bourgeois society and its attendant miseries.
Finally, we reach forward-looking (but still non-Marxian) socialisms. In this category we find what the Manifesto calls critical-utopian [kritischutopistische] socialism and communism. These critical utopians are portrayed as the authors of the first “proper” [eigentlich] socialist and communist systems, which emerged in the period when the struggle between proletariat and bourgeoisie was only just developing (CM 257). This group includes the famous original triumvirate of utopian socialists: Fourier, Robert Owen (1771–1858) and Saint-Simon. These three form an age cohort, and the mature form of their work appeared at around the same time; namely, on the cusp of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. (No utopian communists are identi- fied in the Manifesto itself, but in the preface to the 1888 English edition, Engels named Étienne Cabet (1788–1856) and Wilhelm Weitling (1808–1871) as examples.) Accounts of the Marxian attitude towards other socialisms often make two erroneous claims: they suggest that Marx and Engels divide socialism into two exhaustive categories, scientific and utopian, as if all socialists had to be one or the other; and they suggest that Marx and Engels are unremittingly hostile to the utopian alternative. The erroneous character of the first of these claims should already be obvious (given the diversity of other socialisms discussed above), but the second claim is also unfounded. Marx and Engels have positive things to say about utopian socialism and communism, as indeed they do about feudal and petty-bourgeois socialisms (see above). I have argued elsewhere (Leopold 2005) that, in order to make sense of the considered Marxian view of utopian socialism, it is necessary to notice two distinctions at work in the writings of Marx and Engels. The first is a chronological distinction between the original generation of utopians (including Fourier, Owen and Saint-Simon) and the subsequent generations (including assorted followers of that original triumvirate). The second is a textual distinction between the critical dimension of utopian writings, which attacks contemporary bourgeois society, and the constructive dimension of those works, which portrays the ideal society of the future. These two distinctions are important, not least in making sense of the balance of Marxian approval and disapproval of utopian socialism. Simply put, Marx and Engels are more enthusiastic about the first generation of utopians than they are about the subsequent generations, and they are more enthusiastic about the critical than they are about the constructive dimension of utopian writings. This structure can already be discerned in the Manifesto’s discussion of utopian socialism. The chronological distinction, and its associated levels of approval and disapproval, is apparent in the claim that there is an “inverse relationship” between historical development and the significance of utopian socialism (CM 258). We are told that the first generation were “revolutionary in many senses,” whereas their disciples – the subsequent generations – have “in every case formed reactionary sects” (CM 258). Note that these subsequent generations are thought to hold broadly the same theoretical and practical views as the first generation (including the mistaken views about the transition to socialism discussed below). However, because they were working in circumstances in which both the proletariat and the material conditions for its emancipation were as yet underdeveloped, this first generation had some historical excuse for those (mistaken) views; that is, they could not in all fairness be blamed for holding them. That historical excuse is not available to their later followers, who operate in very different circumstances, and utopian socialism subsequently “loses all practical worth, all theoretical justification” (CM 258). Indeed, these later generations of utopians can easily degenerate into reactionary or conservative forms of socialism, distinguished only by their “systematic pedantry” and faith in the miraculous effects of their own “social science” socialen Wissenschaft] (CM 257). In this context, Marx and Engels note the opposition of some contemporary utopians to the independent political activity of workers, observing that the “Owenites in England oppose the Chartists” (that is, the movement for democratic political reform organized around the People’s Charter of 1838), and that “the Fourierists in France oppose the réformistes” (that is, the political tendency organised around the radical-liberal daily La Réform (1843–1850)) (CM 259). The textual distinction, and its associated levels of approval and disapproval, is apparent in the Marxian enthusiasm for the attacks on “the fundamental principles of existing society” to be found in utopian writings, and the contrasting hostility to the “fantastic images of future society” which those works also contain (CM 258). The “critical elements” in utopian writings, although they are not discussed further in the Manifesto, are judged to be “very valuable for the enlightenment of the workers” (CM 258). In contrast, their “positive proposals concerning future society” are said to “have a purely utopian import” in that they transcend existing society but only in the imagination; that is, they are utopian in the popular sense that they have no impact on reality (CM 258). In the Manifesto, Marx and Engels do not criticize the content of utopian ambitions, which, they note, include: overcoming the divide between “town and country”; transforming the existing “family” and “wage labour”; converting the state into “a mere agency for administering production”; and proclaiming “social harmony” (CM 258). Indeed, it will be apparent that Marx and Engels share not only the utopians’ chronological location of socialism in the future, but also many of these social and political objectives, broadly construed. However, Marx and Engels do criticize the utopian socialists for failing to understand the character of historical change, and failing to grasp how these socialist objectives might come about. In particular, the utopians are said to fail to see that historical development is providing the conditions for socialism, and instead seek to substitute for such solutions – that is, those being delivered by the historical process – their own “personally invented forms of action” (CM 257). On the Marxian account, this is no trivial misunderstanding, and it has serious consequences for the utopians’ misguided attitude towards the proletariat and class struggle. The utopian socialists acknowledge the existence of class conflict, but they “discern on the side of the proletariat no historical autonomy, no political movement of its own” (CM 257). That is, the utopians see in the proletariat only “the class that suffers most,” and fail to recognize its potential as a collective agent which can change the world (CM 257). In turn, the utopians imagine themselves to stand above “the conflicting classes,” and would ideally prefer to appeal to the “whole of society without distinction” (CM 257–258). However, since their communal experiments (see below) require considerable financial support, they usually find themselves having to appeal to “the philanthropy of the bourgeois heart and purse” (CM 258). The utopian misunderstanding of historical change is also reflected in a misguided attitude towards political action. They are said to reject all political action, especially revolutionary action, in favor of the “power of example,” imagining that “small scale experiments” provide a peaceful and effective method of social change (CM 258). The utopians are associated here with what might more accurately be called “communitarian socialism,” which identifies intentional communities – that is, small, voluntary settlements of individuals living and working together for some common (religious, moral or political) purpose – as both the means of transition to, and the final institutional form of, socialist society (Leopold 2012). (The links here are more complicated than the Manifesto account suggests, since not all utopians are communitarians, and not all communitarians are socialists.) Marx and Engels insist that these “pocket editions of the new Jerusalem”–“individual phalansteries” (Fourier), “home colonies” (Owen) or “a little Icaria” (Cabet) – are all doomed to failure (CM 258). (Marx and Engels are not alone in their linguistic conflation of Fourier’s proposed community, properly called a “phalanx,” with its central building, the “phalanstery.”) In section III Marx and Engels do not elaborate on this tendency for these communitarian experiments to “naturally fail,” but elsewhere they suggest that these little islands of socialism are liable, in some way, to be undermined and corrupted by their surrounding non-socialist environment (CM 258). There are few remaining signs in the Manifesto of the young Engels’s earlier, and short-lived, enthusiasm for communitarian socialism (Leopold 2012)
Reactionary socialism [reaktionaire Socialismus] is backward-looking; it associates the good society with some part of the past. Those identified with it are reactionary in the literal sense that they want, at least in part, to return to a pre-bourgeois society, “to turn back the tide of history” (CM 244). In the “Principles of Communism,” Engels describes this otherwise diverse group as adherents of the “feudal and patriarchal society” which had been, and continued to be, destroyed by the large-scale industry which characterized bourgeois society. These reactionary socialists are said to recognize some of the “ills of present-day society,” but from the existence of those ills they erroneously drew the conclusion that “feudal and Patriarchal society should be restored because it was free from these ills” (CW 6: 355). Marx and Engels not only think that such a restoration is impossible; they also share little of this pre-modern nostalgia. Indeed, a constant thread in the Manifesto is their celebration of the revolutionary role of bourgeois society and, in particular, its destruction of the parochial, static and patriarchal world of feudalism. Marx and Engels subdivide reactionary socialism into three different contemporary strands which they discuss separately: “feudal socialism,” “pettybourgeois socialism” and “German” or “true socialism.” The first form of reactionary socialism, feudal socialism [feudale Socialismus], refers to the critique of modern bourgeois society offered by certain elements of the French and English aristocracy. It is linked with the July Revolution (1830) in France, and the Reform movement in England; more precisely, a section of “the French legitimists” and “the Young England movement” are identified as representatives of feudal socialism (CM 252). This particular socialism can also have a whiff of “Christian asceticism,” perhaps unsurprisingly, given not only the flexibility of Christian declamations against private property and the state, but also the Marxian judgment that the feudal parson was always “hand in glove” with the feudal lord (CM 253). The French “legitimists” here are those who sought the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy (overthrown in the July Revolution). The feudal socialists among them – those who championed some reform of the conditions of workers and the poor – perhaps included the vicômte Frédéric Alfred Pierre de Falloux (1811–1886), who stressed the social duties of the nobility and argued against the right to work. (The Christian variants of feudal socialism might be thought to include French “social Catholics” such as Paul Alban Villeneuve-Bargemont (1784–1850) and cômte Charles Forbes de Montalembert (1810–1870).) In turn, “Young England” was the name of a conservative political and literary group which included Lord John Manners (1818–1906) and the young Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881). Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881), the author of Past and Present (1843), is also often associated with it. Carlyle’s writings, especially before 1848, embodied the relevant combination of an admiring account of the hierarchies of the feudal past, together with some fierce criticism of the bourgeois present – including trenchant observations concerning crises of overproduction in which “in the midst of plethoric plenty, the people perish,” and the poverty of social relations in which “cash payment” increasingly forms “the one nexus of man to man” (Carlyle 1960, 6, 163). Marx and Engels offer a complex assessment of feudal socialism. They recognize that the social criticism of this movement is not without effectiveness; the feudal socialists are said to provide a “bitter, witty, biting” verdict on the bourgeoisie which strikes the latter at their “very core” (CM 252). Indeed, some of Carlyle’s criticisms of bourgeois society are directly echoed in the Manifesto itself; for example, in the Marxian characterization of contemporary bourgeois society as fostering no social bond which is not based on “unfeeling ‘hard cash’” [gefühllose “baare Zahlung”] (CM 235). However, these feudal socialists are also criticized for their limited grasp of the “course of modern history,” for hoping to restore a world which in their romanticized form (overflowing with feudal “love and honour”) had never existed, and which in its unromanticized form had actually given birth to the new world against which they now raged (CM 253). Furthermore, the political appeal of the movement is judged to be incoherent; feudal socialists have to appeal to the exploited against the bourgeoisie, but the modern working class would have no place in the aristocratic idyll which these socialists sought. Marx and Engels suggest that modern workers recognize this political incoherence and the concealed aristocratic standpoint which generates it. The astute social criticism might draw “the people”close to feudal socialism, but, once they can see the old feudal coat of arms on the “hind quarters” of feudal socialism, they soon desert “with loud and irreverent laughter” (CM 252). Marx’s imagery is drawn from Heinrich Heine (1797– 1856), who in Deutschland. Ein Wintermärchen (1844) [Germany. A Winter’s Tale] had written mockingly of “Knights errant and lords superior, Who bore true faith upon their breast, Coats of arms upon their posterior” (Heine 1982, 487). Marx was a huge admirer and good friend of the great German poet, and this text was one that Marx had first published for Heine in Vorwärts! [Forward!]. Feudal socialism is seen less as a serious political movement to restore the old world, than as a literary response to the threat to aristocratic “conditions of life” presented by modern bourgeois society (CM 253). Lastly, Marx and Engels note that, in practice, and for all their complaints about the bourgeoisie’s treatment of the exploited, the members of this movement always end up supporting “repressive legislation” against the working class (CM 253). In short, the social criticism of feudal socialism had some undoubted merit, but its historical understanding is limited, its political appeal lacks coherence, and its practical ambitions are ultimately reactionary. The result is a socialist-tinged lament for the past which never entirely manages to avoid a slightly “comic” air (CM 252). The second form of reactionary socialism, namely petty-bourgeois socialism [kleinbürgerliche Socialismus], embodies the response of sections of the petty bourgeoisie (like sections of the aristocracy in the case of feudal socialism) to the threat to its “conditions of life” presented by modern bourgeois society (CM 253). The petty bourgeoisie typically earn their living by their own labor, together with some ownership of means of production (such as tools or premises). (It is presumably this association with premises which led Helen Macfarlane to replace kleinbürgerliche Socialismus with the imaginative, if not entirely successful, neologism “shopocrat socialism” in her 1850 English translation of the Manifesto.) Marx and Engels identify two different types of petty bourgeoisie, reflecting different levels of industrial and commercial development. In less-developed countries, such as France, the petty bourgeoisie consist primarily of peasants. In countries where “modern civilisation has developed” more fully, such as England, a new petty bourgeoisie had emerged, a class of small independent producers (including self-employed artisans) whose existence remains precarious and whose members are increasingly forced into the proletariat as a result of competition (CM 253). The best-known exponent of petty-bourgeois socialism is said to be Sismondi. (No other examples are named in the Manifesto, but Eugène Buret (1811–1892) is often thought to be an additional candidate.) Sismondi is now usually thought of as a political economist – the author of Nouveaux principes d’économie politique [New Principles of Political Economy] (1819, 1827) – but he was also a distinguished historian of medieval Italian city states. Sismondi’s critique of modern industrial society – which drew on his visits to Britain – emphasized its inevitable crises of overproduction, the associated misery and suffering of the workforce and its increasingly global impact on rival producers. Sismondi’s historical enthusiasm for civic virtue over the steam engine suggested, to his own mind at least, the need to create a modern analogue of the guild system which had once enabled peasants and artisans to lead lives of selfreliance and virtuous citizenship. Marx and Engels are enthusiastic about the critical dimension of pettybourgeois socialism, and especially its negative diagnosis of the ills of contemporary society. Petty-bourgeois socialism is said to have “dissected with great perspicacity the conflicts inherent in modern relations of production,” and in doing so to have exposed the “hypocritical apologetics” of contemporary economists (CM 253). More precisely, petty-bourgeois socialism had demonstrated “incontrovertibly” the ways in which modern relations of production – through their use of machinery, concentration of capital and overproduction – have generated destructive social consequences. Alongside the dissolution of traditional morality, family relations and national identities, Marx and Engels mention the ruin of the small trader and peasant, the poverty of the proletariat and the “flagrant disparities in the distribution of wealth” that have resulted (CM 254). Marx and Engels are less sympathetic to the constructive dimension of pettybourgeois socialism, that is, its positive proposals for social change. These socialists are said to seek either to restore wholly the property relations and society that belong to an earlier epoch, or somehow to contain modern means of production within the confines of previous property relations. In practice, Marx and Engels remark that “guild socialism for artisans and patriarchal relations in agriculture are the last word here” (CM 254). These constructive proposals are judged “reactionary” [reaktionär] and “utopian” [utopistisch] in equal measure; they are “reactionary” in the literal sense that they attempt to reverse the historical process (to restore aspects of pre-bourgeois society), and they are “utopian” in the popular sense that this goal is impossible to realize (CM 254). The third form of reactionary socialism, namely German or true socialism [deutsche oder ... wahre Socialismus], is a result of what might be called combined and uneven historical development across Europe. More particularly, it reflects the distinctive German circumstances which Marx had earlier diagnosed as combining philosophical precocity with economic and political backwardness (Leopold 2007, 22–26). Its origins are said to lie with a group of Teutonic literati who took French socialist literature – including the work of Charles Fourier (1772–1837), Henri de Saint-Simon (1760–1825) and their various followers – and adapted it to the very different social conditions that obtained in the German confederation. In the Manifesto, these various “philosophers, semi-philosophers, and wordsmiths” are not named, but we can confidently identify them from the group of texts usually known as Die deutsche Ideologie [The German Ideology] (1846– 1847) (CM 254). The best-known true socialists are perhaps Karl Grün and Hermann Kriege (1820–1850), but the group also included Hermann Semmig (1820–1897), Ernst Dronke (1822–1891) and others. In The German Ideology, Marx and Engels emphasized that the true socialists’ knowledge of their French sources looked to be weak and derivative, having been gained secondhand from the superficial accounts found in the works of Lorenz von Stein (1815–1890), Theodor Oelckers (1816–1869) and others. Indeed, Marx and Engels entertain themselves – at some length – by identifying striking examples of true socialist plagiarism from this limited range of barely adequate and second-hand accounts of socialism in France. In the Manifesto, the true socialists are said to combine much seemingly “idle speculation concerning the true society or the realization of the human essence” together with a critique of a bourgeois society which does not yet exist in Germany (CM 254). (Interestingly, and for reasons which are unclear, this last sentence is omitted from the 1888 English translation by Samuel Moore and revised by Engels.) This combination captures the changes to both the theoretical form, and the political meaning, of these French ideas, which resulted from their relocation to German soil. This relocation of French ideas to German circumstances transformed their theoretical form, as abstract philosophical speculation was substituted for practical and concrete social criticism. Marx and Engels elaborate this substitution using a satirical and slightly strained contrast between, on the one hand, the historical progress embodied in the practice of medieval Christian monks who wrote their lives of saints over the pagan manuscripts that they had discovered, and, on the other, the historical regression embodied in the process whereby these German literati wrote “their philosophical nonsense under the original French” (CM 255). (This palimpsest image may also have been drawn from Heine, although it is not unknown elsewhere (Prawer 1976, 139, n. 3).) The process of translating this “secular French literature” back into their own traditional philosophical idiom is seen as a distinctive and reactionary one (CM 255). Thus, under the French critique of monetary relations, the true socialists “wrote ‘externalisation of the human essence’,” and under the French critique of the bourgeois state “they wrote ‘transformation of the reign of abstract generality’” (CM 255). Given that Marx’s own early writings were not entirely unmarked by this distinctive Teutonic idiom, it is tempting to see some implicit self-criticism here. (In his “Draft Plan for Section III,” Marx uses the label “German philosophical socialism” for this movement (CW 6: 576).) In this context, we might note that the intellectual forebears of true socialism include several figures with whom Marx and Engels had recently been intellectually and personally close; most obviously the writer and activist Moses Hess (1812–1875) and the left-Hegelian philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–1872). The relocation of French ideas to German circumstances also transformed their political meaning. Simply put, they were “punctiliously emasculated” by this move (CM 255). It is this political transformation which helps explain both the classification of true socialism as a form of reactionary socialism, and the fierceness of Marxian efforts to minimize its influence in the nascent German workers’ movement. That original socialist literature presupposed the existence of the economic and political conditions characteristic of “modern bourgeois society,” and its political meaning was transformed by this relocation to a country in which the bourgeoisie were only just beginning to struggle against “feudal absolutism” (CM 254). Simply put, what was in France an attack on the bourgeois present functioned in Germany as a defense of the pre-bourgeois present. Marx and Engels insist that to struggle “against the representative state, against bourgeois competition, bourgeois freedom of the press, bourgeois justice, bourgeois freedom and equality” before any of those things exist, is to lend support to the efforts of pre-modern German absolutism to maintain its power (CM 255). In this way, true socialism is seen as encouraging resistance to the very economic and political developments which would – on the Marxian account – make communism possible. Whatever their intentions, the true socialists provide practical succor to “the absolutist regimes in Germany,” offering them a “welcome scarecrow” to help frighten off “the rising bourgeoisie” which threatened them (CM 255).
Conservative or bourgeois socialism [konservative oder Bourgeois-Socialismus] is sideways-looking. Unlike reactionary socialism, it does not resist or regret the arrival of bourgeois society, but rather attempts to ensure its preservation (to conserve it) by seeking to moderate the “struggles and dangers” that, according to the Marxian account, are a necessary companion to “the living conditions of modern society” (CM 256). Of course, this particular socialism does not always understand itself in these terms, but essentially it would be happy with existing bourgeois society if only certain regrettable “social grievances” could be redressed (CM 256; emphasis in original). This conservative socialism can take a more systematic or a less systematic form. In the more systematic category, we find the French radical Proudhon. In the less systematic category, we find “economists, philanthropists, humanitarians, do-gooders for the working classes, charity organisers, animal welfare enthusiasts, temperance union workers, two-a-penny reformers of multifarious kinds” (CM 256). Proudhon is now usually thought of as an anarchist, but the idea of anarchism as a systematic competitor to Marxian views had not yet emerged. Marx had very recently attacked the views of Proudhon, whom he knew personally, in his Misère de la philosophie [The Poverty of Philosophy] (1847). (Marx’s title satirically reverses the subtitle of the object of his criticism – namely, Proudhon’s Système des Contradictions Économiques ou Philosophie de la Misère [System of Economic Contradictions, or the Philosophy of Poverty] (1846).) Very roughly, Marx had criticized three threads in Proudhon’s work: Proudhon’s economic views, especially his ambition to establish a system of free and equal exchange which would somehow avoid the unearned income and inequality of contemporary economic arrangements; his hostility to certain political struggles, not least his rejection of both militant trade union activity and the revolutionary strivings of the proletariat; and his misguided enthusiasm for, and misunderstandings of, German philosophy, in particular his unfortunate predilection for a Hegelian dialectic involving the hypostatization of concepts. The Manifesto picks up on the first of those threads and portrays Proudhon as a conservative socialist who seeks to reform rather than overthrow existing society. In its less systematic and more practical form, conservative socialism also sees bourgeois society, suitably reformed, as in the interests of the working class. It typically seeks to persuade the proletariat that the political changes sought by revolutionary movements will make little difference to them, and that they should seek material changes to their circumstances instead (CM 256). However, the material changes that conservative socialists propose fail to threaten the “bourgeois relations of production,” and consist of “administrative reforms” which do little more than reduce the costs to the bourgeoisie of their “political rule” (CM 256). The basic “relationship of capital and wagelabour” is left unchanged by the reforming ambitions of these various advocates of charity and philanthropy (CM 256). The central Marxian complaint about conservative socialism concerns its inability to grasp that certain failings are the necessary accompaniment to modern bourgeois society. In the “Principles of Communism,” Engels describes these socialists as “adherents of present society” who fear that the “evils inseparable from it” threaten its survival (CW 6: 355). As a result, they “endeavor to preserve present society but to remove the evils bound up with it” (CW 6: 355). Some of them propose “measures of mere charity,” whilst others offer “grandiose systems of reform,” which purport to reorganize present society but end up retaining its “foundations” (CW 6: 355). In either form, the endeavor is futile given the inseparability, on which the Marxian argument insists, of bourgeois society and its attendant miseries.
Finally, we reach forward-looking (but still non-Marxian) socialisms. In this category we find what the Manifesto calls critical-utopian [kritischutopistische] socialism and communism. These critical utopians are portrayed as the authors of the first “proper” [eigentlich] socialist and communist systems, which emerged in the period when the struggle between proletariat and bourgeoisie was only just developing (CM 257). This group includes the famous original triumvirate of utopian socialists: Fourier, Robert Owen (1771–1858) and Saint-Simon. These three form an age cohort, and the mature form of their work appeared at around the same time; namely, on the cusp of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. (No utopian communists are identi- fied in the Manifesto itself, but in the preface to the 1888 English edition, Engels named Étienne Cabet (1788–1856) and Wilhelm Weitling (1808–1871) as examples.) Accounts of the Marxian attitude towards other socialisms often make two erroneous claims: they suggest that Marx and Engels divide socialism into two exhaustive categories, scientific and utopian, as if all socialists had to be one or the other; and they suggest that Marx and Engels are unremittingly hostile to the utopian alternative. The erroneous character of the first of these claims should already be obvious (given the diversity of other socialisms discussed above), but the second claim is also unfounded. Marx and Engels have positive things to say about utopian socialism and communism, as indeed they do about feudal and petty-bourgeois socialisms (see above). I have argued elsewhere (Leopold 2005) that, in order to make sense of the considered Marxian view of utopian socialism, it is necessary to notice two distinctions at work in the writings of Marx and Engels. The first is a chronological distinction between the original generation of utopians (including Fourier, Owen and Saint-Simon) and the subsequent generations (including assorted followers of that original triumvirate). The second is a textual distinction between the critical dimension of utopian writings, which attacks contemporary bourgeois society, and the constructive dimension of those works, which portrays the ideal society of the future. These two distinctions are important, not least in making sense of the balance of Marxian approval and disapproval of utopian socialism. Simply put, Marx and Engels are more enthusiastic about the first generation of utopians than they are about the subsequent generations, and they are more enthusiastic about the critical than they are about the constructive dimension of utopian writings. This structure can already be discerned in the Manifesto’s discussion of utopian socialism. The chronological distinction, and its associated levels of approval and disapproval, is apparent in the claim that there is an “inverse relationship” between historical development and the significance of utopian socialism (CM 258). We are told that the first generation were “revolutionary in many senses,” whereas their disciples – the subsequent generations – have “in every case formed reactionary sects” (CM 258). Note that these subsequent generations are thought to hold broadly the same theoretical and practical views as the first generation (including the mistaken views about the transition to socialism discussed below). However, because they were working in circumstances in which both the proletariat and the material conditions for its emancipation were as yet underdeveloped, this first generation had some historical excuse for those (mistaken) views; that is, they could not in all fairness be blamed for holding them. That historical excuse is not available to their later followers, who operate in very different circumstances, and utopian socialism subsequently “loses all practical worth, all theoretical justification” (CM 258). Indeed, these later generations of utopians can easily degenerate into reactionary or conservative forms of socialism, distinguished only by their “systematic pedantry” and faith in the miraculous effects of their own “social science” socialen Wissenschaft] (CM 257). In this context, Marx and Engels note the opposition of some contemporary utopians to the independent political activity of workers, observing that the “Owenites in England oppose the Chartists” (that is, the movement for democratic political reform organized around the People’s Charter of 1838), and that “the Fourierists in France oppose the réformistes” (that is, the political tendency organised around the radical-liberal daily La Réform (1843–1850)) (CM 259). The textual distinction, and its associated levels of approval and disapproval, is apparent in the Marxian enthusiasm for the attacks on “the fundamental principles of existing society” to be found in utopian writings, and the contrasting hostility to the “fantastic images of future society” which those works also contain (CM 258). The “critical elements” in utopian writings, although they are not discussed further in the Manifesto, are judged to be “very valuable for the enlightenment of the workers” (CM 258). In contrast, their “positive proposals concerning future society” are said to “have a purely utopian import” in that they transcend existing society but only in the imagination; that is, they are utopian in the popular sense that they have no impact on reality (CM 258). In the Manifesto, Marx and Engels do not criticize the content of utopian ambitions, which, they note, include: overcoming the divide between “town and country”; transforming the existing “family” and “wage labour”; converting the state into “a mere agency for administering production”; and proclaiming “social harmony” (CM 258). Indeed, it will be apparent that Marx and Engels share not only the utopians’ chronological location of socialism in the future, but also many of these social and political objectives, broadly construed. However, Marx and Engels do criticize the utopian socialists for failing to understand the character of historical change, and failing to grasp how these socialist objectives might come about. In particular, the utopians are said to fail to see that historical development is providing the conditions for socialism, and instead seek to substitute for such solutions – that is, those being delivered by the historical process – their own “personally invented forms of action” (CM 257). On the Marxian account, this is no trivial misunderstanding, and it has serious consequences for the utopians’ misguided attitude towards the proletariat and class struggle. The utopian socialists acknowledge the existence of class conflict, but they “discern on the side of the proletariat no historical autonomy, no political movement of its own” (CM 257). That is, the utopians see in the proletariat only “the class that suffers most,” and fail to recognize its potential as a collective agent which can change the world (CM 257). In turn, the utopians imagine themselves to stand above “the conflicting classes,” and would ideally prefer to appeal to the “whole of society without distinction” (CM 257–258). However, since their communal experiments (see below) require considerable financial support, they usually find themselves having to appeal to “the philanthropy of the bourgeois heart and purse” (CM 258). The utopian misunderstanding of historical change is also reflected in a misguided attitude towards political action. They are said to reject all political action, especially revolutionary action, in favor of the “power of example,” imagining that “small scale experiments” provide a peaceful and effective method of social change (CM 258). The utopians are associated here with what might more accurately be called “communitarian socialism,” which identifies intentional communities – that is, small, voluntary settlements of individuals living and working together for some common (religious, moral or political) purpose – as both the means of transition to, and the final institutional form of, socialist society (Leopold 2012). (The links here are more complicated than the Manifesto account suggests, since not all utopians are communitarians, and not all communitarians are socialists.) Marx and Engels insist that these “pocket editions of the new Jerusalem”–“individual phalansteries” (Fourier), “home colonies” (Owen) or “a little Icaria” (Cabet) – are all doomed to failure (CM 258). (Marx and Engels are not alone in their linguistic conflation of Fourier’s proposed community, properly called a “phalanx,” with its central building, the “phalanstery.”) In section III Marx and Engels do not elaborate on this tendency for these communitarian experiments to “naturally fail,” but elsewhere they suggest that these little islands of socialism are liable, in some way, to be undermined and corrupted by their surrounding non-socialist environment (CM 258). There are few remaining signs in the Manifesto of the young Engels’s earlier, and short-lived, enthusiasm for communitarian socialism (Leopold 2012)
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