the bourgeois relations of production, an abolition that can be
effected 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.

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, these attempts 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 1. 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