Marx and Engels on "Communitarian" Anti-Capitalism
Insightful, for 1848:
The Communist Manifesto: In order to arouse sympathy, the aristocracy... formulate[d] its indictment against the bourgeoisie in the interest of the exploited working class alone.... In this way arose feudal socialism: half lamentation, half lampoon; half an echo of the [communitarian] past, half menace of the future; at times, by its bitter, witty and incisive criticism, striking the bourgeoisie to the very heart's core, but always ludicrous in its effect.... [T]he feudalists forget that they exploited under circumstances and conditions that were quite different and that are now antiquated.... [I]n ordinary life, despite their high falutin' phrases, they stoop to pick up the golden apples dropped from the tree of industry, and to barter truth, love, and honor, for traffic in wool, beetroot-sugar, and potato spirits.
As the parson has ever gone hand in hand with the landlord, so has clerical socialism with feudal socialism. Nothing is easier than to give Christian asceticism a socialist tinge....
The feudal aristocracy was not the only class that was ruined by the bourgeoisie.... The medieval burgesses... the small peasant proprietors... a new class of petty bourgeois.... 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 labor; 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 it positive aims, however, this form of socialism aspires either to restoring the old [communitarian] means of production and of exchange, and with them the old property relations, and the old society... it is both reactionary and Utopian.... [C]orporate guilds for manufacture; patriarchal relations in agriculture...
