Book III: The Postulates of German Socialism, Chapter I: “True” Socialism

Contempt for French Socialists—Apology for German Socialism—Communism, Collectivism, and Socialism synonymous—Programmes of Saint Mandé and of the Havre Congress.

Socialists who range themselves under Karl Marx say: Plato, Campanella, More, Morelly, Owen, Saint Simon, Fourier, Cabet, Considérant, and Louis Blanc forsooth! Why tell us of all these Socialists, Utopians, dreamers, and more or less enlightened makers of literature, all so far removed from all reality? Neither Owen, nor Pierre Leroux were worthy to invent the word “socialism.” As for Proudhon, who said “Every man is a socialist who concerns himself with social reform,” he proved that despite his pretension, he belonged to those socialists of the clubs, the salons, and the vestries who indulged in elegiac, declamatory, and sentimental socialism in and about 1848.

Proudhon was nothing but a “petit bourgeois” as Karl Marx said. There is but one true socialism, the socialism of Germany, whose formula was propounded by Karl Marx and Engels in the “Communistic Manifesto” of 1848.

They chose “communism” because the word “socialism” had been too much discredited at the time, but they subsequently resumed it, for the logical conclusion of all socialism is communism. The word “collectivism,” says Paul Lafargue, was only invented in order to spare the susceptibilities of some of the more timorous. It is synonymous with the word “communism.” Every socialistic programme, be it the programme of St. Mandé, published in 1896 by M. Millerand, which lays down that “collectivism is the secretion of the capitalist régime,” or that of the Havre Congress, drawn up by Karl Marx, and carried on the motion of Jules Guesde, concludes with “the political and economic expropriation of the capitalist class and the return to collective ownership of all the means of production.”

But is this conclusion really so very different from that of their predecessors whom they treat with such scorn? What claim have Karl Marx, Engels, and their followers to prefix the word “scientific” to the word “socialism?”