and with them the old property relations, and the old society, or
to cramping the modern means of production and of exchange,
within the framework of the old property relations that have
been, and were bound to be, exploded by those means. In either
case, it is both reactionary and Utopian.

Its last words are: corporate guilds for manufacture,
patriarchal relations in agriculture.

Ultimately, when stubborn historical facts had dispersed all
intoxicating effects of self-deception, this form of Socialism
ended in a miserable fit of the blues.


C. German, or "True," Socialism

The Socialist and Communist literature of France, a literature
that originated under the pressure of a bourgeoisie in power, and
that was the expression of the struggle against this power, was
introduced into Germany at a time when the bourgeoisie, in that
country, had just begun its contest with feudal absolutism.

German philosophers, would-be philosophers, and beaux esprits,
eagerly seized on this literature, only forgetting, that when
these writings immigrated from France into Germany, French social
conditions had not immigrated along with them. In 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