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<DIV>----- Original Message ----- </DIV>
<DIV style="FONT: 10pt arial">
<DIV style="BACKGROUND: #e4e4e4; font-color: black"><B>From:</B> <A
title=gerald.ali@btopenworld.com href="mailto:gerald.ali@btopenworld.com">Gerald
Ali.</A> </DIV>
<DIV><B>To:</B> <B>Sent:</B> Wednesday, July 15, 2009 12:46 PM</DIV>
<DIV><B>Subject:</B> Manifesto of the Communist Party, 1848.----
RELIGION</DIV></DIV>
<DIV><BR></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>
<P><STRONG><FONT color=#000080>As the parson has ever gone hand in hand with the
landlord, <U>so has Clerical Socialism with Feudal Socialism.</U>
</FONT></STRONG><A name=146></A></P>
<P><STRONG><FONT color=#000080>Nothing is easier than to give Christian
asceticism a Socialist tinge. </FONT></STRONG></P>
<P><STRONG><FONT color=#000080>Has not Christianity declaimed against private
property, <U>against marriage,</U> against the State? </FONT></STRONG></P>
<P><STRONG><FONT color=#000080>Has it not preached in the place of these,
charity <U>and poverty</U>, celibacy <U>and mortification of the flesh,</U>
monastic life and <U>Mother Church</U>? </FONT></STRONG></P>
<P><STRONG><FONT color=#000080><U>Christian Socialism is but the holy water with
which the priest consecrates the heart-burnings of the
aristocrat.</U></FONT></STRONG> </P>
<P>------------------------</P>
<P>The charges against Communism made <STRONG>from a religious,</STRONG> a
philosophical and, generally, from an ideological standpoint, <STRONG>are not
deserving of serious examination. </STRONG><A name=119></A></P>
<P>Does it require deep intuition to comprehend that man’s ideas, views, and
conception, in one word, man’s consciousness, changes with every change in the
conditions of his material existence, in his social relations and in his social
life? <A name=120></A></P>
<P>What else does the history of ideas prove, than that intellectual production
changes its character in proportion as material production is changed? The
ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class. <A
name=121></A></P>
<P>When people speak of the ideas that revolutionise society, they do but
express that fact that within the old society the elements of a new one have
been created, and that the dissolution of the old ideas keeps even pace with the
dissolution of the old conditions of existence. <A name=122></A></P>
<P>When the ancient world was in its last throes, the ancient religions were
overcome by Christianity. When Christian ideas succumbed in the 18th century to
rationalist ideas, feudal society fought its death battle with the then
revolutionary bourgeoisie. The ideas of religious liberty and freedom of
conscience merely gave expression to the sway of free competition within the
domain of knowledge. <A name=123></A></P>
<P>“Undoubtedly,” it will be said, “religious, moral, philosophical, and
juridical ideas have been modified in the course of historical development. But
religion, morality, philosophy, political science, and law, constantly survived
this change.” <A name=124></A></P>
<P>“There are, besides, eternal truths, such as Freedom, Justice, etc., that are
common to all states of society. But Communism abolishes eternal truths, it
abolishes all religion, and all morality, instead of constituting them on a new
basis; it therefore acts in contradiction to all past historical experience.” <A
name=125></A></P>
<P>What does this accusation reduce itself to? The history of all past society
has consisted in the development of class antagonisms, antagonisms that assumed
different forms at different epochs. <A name=126></A></P>
<P>But whatever form they may have taken, one fact is common to all past ages,
<EM>viz.</EM>, the exploitation of one part of society by the other. No wonder,
then, that the social consciousness of past ages, despite all the multiplicity
and variety it displays, moves within certain common forms, or general ideas,
which cannot completely vanish except with the total disappearance of class
antagonisms. </P>
<P>--------------------------------------------</P>
<H6><A name=147></A><FONT size=3>B. Petty-Bourgeois Socialism</FONT> </H6>
<P>The feudal aristocracy was not the only class that was ruined by the
bourgeoisie, not the only class whose conditions of existence pined and perished
in the atmosphere of modern bourgeois society. The medieval burgesses and the
small peasant proprietors were the precursors of the modern bourgeoisie. In
those countries which are but little developed, industrially and commercially,
these two classes still vegetate side by side with the rising bourgeoisie. <A
name=148></A></P>
<P>In countries where modern civilisation has become fully developed, a new
class of <A
href="http://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/p/e.htm#petty-bourgeois">petty
bourgeois</A> has been formed, fluctuating between proletariat and bourgeoisie,
and ever renewing itself as a supplementary part of bourgeois society. The
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. <A
name=149></A></P>
<P>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
<EM>régime</EM>, 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. <A name=150></A></P>
<P>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. <A name=151></A></P>
<P>In its positive aims, however, this form of Socialism aspires either to
restoring the old means of production and of exchange, 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. <A name=152></A></P>
<P>Its last words are: corporate guilds for manufacture; patriarchal relations
in agriculture. <A name=153></A></P>
<P>Ultimately, when stubborn historical facts had dispersed all intoxicating
effects of self-deception, this form of Socialism ended in a miserable hangover.
</P>
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