individual members of this class, however, are being constantly
hurled down into the proletariat by the action of competition,
and, as modern industry develops, they even see the moment
approaching when they will completely disappear as an independent
section of modern society, to be replaced, in manufactures,
agriculture and commerce, by overlookers, bailiffs and shopmen.

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,