contact with German social conditions, this French
literature lost all its immediate practical significance
and assumed a purely literary aspect. Thus, to the
German philosophers of the Eighteenth Century, the
demands of the first French Revolution were nothing
more than the demands of “Practical Reason” in
general, and the utterance of the will of the revolu-
tionary French bourgeoisie signified, in their eyes, the
laws of pure Will, of Will as it was bound to be, of true
human Will generally.
The work of the German literati consisted solely
in bringing the new French ideas into harmony with
their ancient philosophical conscience, or rather, in
annexing the French ideas without deserting their own
philosophic point of view.
This annexation took place in the same way in
which a foreign language is appropriated, namely, by
translation.
It is well known how the monks wrote silly lives of
Catholic Saints over the manuscripts on which the
classical works of ancient heathendom had been
written. The German literati reversed this process with
the profane French literature. They wrote their
philosophical nonsense beneath the French original.
For instance, beneath the French criticism of the
economic functions of money, they wrote “Alienation
of Humanity”, and beneath the French criticism of the
bourgeois state they wrote “Dethronement of the
Category of the General”, and so forth.
The introduction of these philosophical phrases
at the back of the French historical criticisms, they
dubbed “Philosophy of Action”, “True Socialism”,
“German Science of Socialism”, “Philosophical
Foundation of Socialism”, and so on.
The French Socialist and Communist literature
was thus completely emasculated. And, since it ceased
in the hands of the German to express the struggle of
one class with the other, he felt conscious of having
overcome “French one-sidedness” and of
representing, not true requirements, but the
requirements of Truth; not the interests of the
proletariat, but the interests of Human Nature, of Man
in general, who belongs to no class, has no reality,
who exists only in the misty realm of philosophical
fantasy.
This German sociali sm, which took its schoolboy
task so seriously and solemnly, and extolled its poor
stock-in-trade in such a mountebank fashion,
meanwhile gradually lost its pedantic innocence.
The fight of the Germans, and especially of the
Prussian bourgeoisie, against feudal aristocracy and
absolute monarchy, in other words, the liberal
movement, became more earnest.
By this, the long-wished for opportunity was offered
to “True” Socialism of confronting the political
May- 2017
movement with the Socialist demands, of hurling the
traditional anathemas against liberalism, against
representative government, against bourgeois
competition, bourgeois freedom of the press, bourgeois
legislation, bourgeois liberty and equality, and of
preaching to the masses that they had nothing to gain,
and everything to lose, by this bourgeois movement.
German Socialism forgot, in the nick of time, that the
French criticism, whose silly echo it was, presupposed
the existence of modern bourgeois society, with its
corresponding economic conditions of existence, and
the political constitution adapted thereto, the very
things those attainment was the object of the pending
struggle in Germany.
To the absolute governments, with their following
of parsons, professors, country squires, and officials,
it served as a welcome scarecrow against the
threatening bourgeoisie.
It was a sweet finish, after the bitter pills of flogging
and bullets, with which these same governments, just
at that time, dosed the German working-class risings.
While this “True” Socialism thus served the
government as a weapon for fighting the German
bourgeoisie, it, at the same time, directly represented
a reactionary interest, the interest of German
Philistines. In Germany, the petty-bourgeois class, a
relic of the sixteenth century, and since then constantly
cropping up again under the various forms, is the real
social basis of the existing state of things.
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
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. (3)
9