Editing Socialism (section)

== Variations ==
In the '''Communist Manifesto''', Marx describes more than half a dozen socialist currents popular circa 1848. From every conceivable disaffected corner issued a corresponding socialism, articulated to varying degrees of seriousness.   

=== Reactionary Socialism ===
'''Obsolete aristocrats''' in France and England upbraided their bourgeois successors. Dismayed, not so much by the conditions of the proletariat but by the attendant social instability, their cry went up: "half lamentation, half lampoon; half an echo of the past, half menace of the future... always ludicrous in its effect, through total incapacity to comprehend the march of modern history."<ref name=":0" />  

'''Petty-Bourgeois adjuncts''' (Sismondi at their head) decried capital only insofar as they found themselves tumbling from its seat and thrown beneath the wheels. Competition doomed them, and they sought therefore to constrain it, to cramp productive development to the point of their own preservation, making them both reactionary and Utopian.   

'''German philistines''' imported and presumed to correct French socialism, forgetting meanwhile that they did not import the conditions of France along with her literature. Against every modest gain of bourgeois liberalism they ham-fistedly flung the rhetoric of Socialists in France (a country in which such rhetoric was deployed against an already developed bourgeois state), serving the absolute governments more than anyone. After 1848, this type lost their appetite for such rhetoric and became full-throated reactionaries.   

=== Bourgeois Socialism ===
Typified by '''Proudhon''', Marx includes here "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."<ref name=":0" /> They enjoyed bourgeois society as a whole, but decried its extremes, which they proposed to prune away until they are left with self-propagating fruit sans tree.  

=== Utopian Socialism ===
See main page: [[Utopian socialism]]

The systems of [[Utopian socialism|Owen]], [[Utopian socialism|Fourier]], and [[Utopian socialism|Saint-Simon]] did not lack historical vision. These men understood that the crisis was both irreversible and progressive, and therefore that the only way out was forward. They differed from Marx chiefly in their understanding of class, a difference which Marx ascribes to their prematurity. Utopians saw their theories as ''above'' class antagonism, and sought a new social science with which to improve the condition of all classes. They appealed to society at large, with particular emphasis on the role, not of the proletariat, who they deemed significant only insofar as they suffered more than others, but of the upper class, to the benevolence of whom they entrusted their historical mission. They saw socialism as a naturally and universally appealing idea, the realization of which required nothing but for level-headed men to read their book.