In countries like France, where the peasants constitute far more
than half of the population, it was natural that writers who
sided with the proletariat against the bourgeoisie, should use,
in their criticism of the bourgeois regime, the standard of the
peasant and petty bourgeois, and from the standpoint of these
intermediate classes should take up the cudgels for the working
class. Thus arose petty-bourgeois Socialism. Sismondi was the
head of this school, not only in France but also in England.

This school of Socialism dissected with great acuteness the
contradictions in the conditions of modern production. It laid
bare the hypocritical apologies of economists. It proved,
incontrovertibly, the disastrous effects of machinery and
division of labour; the concentration of capital and land in a
few hands; overproduction and crises; it pointed out the
inevitable ruin of the petty bourgeois and peasant, the misery
of the proletariat, the anarchy in production, the crying
inequalities in the distribution of wealth, the industrial war of
extermination between nations, the dissolution of old moral
bonds, of the old family relations, of the old nationalities.

In its positive aims, however, this form of Socialism aspires
either to restoring the old means of production and of exchange,
and with them the old property relations, and the old society, or
to cramping the modern means of production and of exchange,
within the framework of the old property relations that have
been, and were bound to be, exploded by those means. In either
case, it is both reactionary and Utopian.

Its last words are: corporate guilds for manufacture,
patriarchal relations in agriculture.

Ultimately, when stubborn historical facts had dispersed all
intoxicating effects of self-deception, this form of Socialism
ended in a miserable fit of the blues.

C. German, or "True," Socialism

The Socialist and Communist literature of France, a literature
that originated under the pressure of a bourgeoisie in power, and
that was the expression of the struggle against this power, was
introduced into Germany at a time when the bourgeoisie, in that
country, had just begun its contest with feudal absolutism.

German philosophers, would-be philosophers, and beaux esprits,
eagerly seized on this literature, only forgetting, that when
these writings immigrated from France into Germany, French social
conditions had not immigrated along with them. In c