The Socialistic bourgeois want all the advantages of modern
social conditions without the struggles and dangers necessarily
resulting therefrom. They desire the existing state of society
minus its revolutionary and disintegrating elements. They wish
for a bourgeoisie without a proletariat. The bourgeoisie
naturally conceives the world in which it is supreme to be the
best; and bourgeois Socialism develops this comfortable
conception into various more or less complete systems. In
requiring the proletariat to carry out such a system, and thereby
to march straightway into the social New Jerusalem, it but
requires in reality, that the proletariat should remain within
the bounds of existing society, but should cast away all its
hateful ideas concerning the bourgeoisie.

A second and more practical, but less systematic, form of this
Socialism sought to depreciate every revolutionary movement in
the eyes of the working class, by showing that no mere political
reform, but only a change in the material conditions of
existence, in economic relations, could be of any advantage to
them. By changes in the material conditions of existence, this
form of Socialism, however, by no means understands abolition of
the bourgeois relations of production, an abolition that can be
effected only by a revolution, but administrative reforms, based
on the continued existence of these relations; reforms,
therefore, that in no respect affect the relations between
capital and labour, but, at the best, lessen the cost, and
simplify the administrative work, of bourgeois government.

Bourgeois Socialism attains adequate expression, when, and only
when, it becomes a mere figure of speech.