ing the Class Struggle. American Socialists are too apt to be less fair in describing the motives of contemporary reformers.

"The peculiar character of the Social Democracy (in France in 1849) is summed up in this: that democratic-republican institutions are demanded as the means, not to remove the two extremes-Capital and Wage-slavery, but in order to weaken their antagonism and transform them into a harmonious whole. However different the methods may be that are proposed for the accomplishment of this object, however much the object itself may be festooned with more or less revolutionary fancies, the substance remains the same. This substance is the transformation of society upon democratic lines, but a transformation within the boundaries of the small traders' class. No one must run away with the narrow notion that the small traders' class means on principle to enforce a selfish class interest. It bélieves rather that the special conditions for its own emancipation are the general conditions under which alone modern society can be saved and the class struggle avoided. Likewise must we avoid running away with the notion that the Democratic Representatives are all 'shopkeepers', or enthuse for these. They may-by education and individual standing-be as distant from them as heaven is from earth. That which makes them representatives of the small traders' class is that they do not intellectually leap the bounds which that class itself does not leap in practical life; that, consequently, they are theoretically driven to the same problem and solutions, to which material interests and social standing practically drive the latter. Such, in fact, is at all times the relation of the 'political' and 'literary' representatives of a class to the class they represent."

In another passage Marx calls the tendency to rely upon political methods alone the disease of "Parliamentary Idiocy"-a disease "that fetters those whom it infects to an imaginary world, and robs them of all sense, all remembrance, all understanding of the rude outside world." This malady is not yet extinct.

Marx wrote this in 1852 so soon after the coup d'etat of December 2nd 1851, that it was impossible for him to get an absolutely true perspective; there can be no doubt that the Empire of Louis Bonaparte lasted much longer than Marx expected it to. Marx did not and could not realize how very far from maturity as a class the French bourgeoisie then was.

It will be found extremely interesting and illuminating to read in connection with Marx's "Eighteenth Brumaire" Browning's apology for the career of Louis Bonaparte in the little-read poem. "Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau".

May 19, 1907.

ROBERT R. LAMONTE.

The Intellectuals and Working Class Socialism.

2. THE EVOLUTION OF FRENCH SOCIALISM AND THE INTELLECTUALS.

The formation in France of a working class socialism free from alloy enables us to gage better by contrast the value of the socialism of the intellectuals. While the former proceeds from economic reality, from the development of the great industry and its proletarian institutions, the latter comes from the democratic Utopia, ideological systems, and the State superstition. The former sees in the working class the free and voluntary agent in the transformation of the world, the latter regards it as merely the passive instrument utilized by the new aristocracy of thought to impose its plans. Whether they invent theories, construct societies, or occupy themselves prosaically with conquering the public powers and exploiting the State, the intellectuals of socialism, like intellectuals everywhere, have but one aim, to assure the dictatorship of the Idea, and of the Idealists.

This is clearly apparent from the analysis of the two aspects which the socialism of the intellectuals has assumed; utopian socialism and parliamentary socialism. In both cases, although from very different reasons, the literary caste claims to think and act for the proletariat, but in fact it thinks and acts for itself alone; it obeys that illusion common in history which impels social groups to veil with idealistic appearances the egoistic aims which they pursue.

I-UTOPIAN SOCIALISM.

1-Some years ago the most distinguished opponents of the Marxian socialism of the class struggle, the university men, the jurists, and other "scientists of four phrases" were seized with a frenzied infatuation for the Utopians. They talked of nothing so much as of civilizing socialism, which had fallen into its working-class barbarism, by bringing it back to the old "French Sources."

In fact, this return to the Utopians was natural. They were partisans of this principle, that truth is accessible only to literary people, and they had arrived at this other truth, that the direction of the world belongs rightly to "men of science." Why not begin again the Utopian adventure and rescue the laboring masses. from the savagery of instinct by giving them for guides the priests of Intelligence?

The promoters of this movement were not destitute of practical sense; they knew that the worship of superior talents, even though a little out of repair, still has chances of permanence. There will always be people with parchments, who will derive from their diplomas the right of governing the universe; the literary pedants, whose profession is to keep a shop of ideas, will not renounce their trade sooner than necessary, and for a long time yet credulous crowds will purchase the intellectual trash and applaud the charlatans who sell it.

I hasten to say that the first Utopians could not be held responsible for this speculation. The inventors of systems at the beginning of the nineteenth century did not look to the exploitation of human credulity. They were excellent people, who believed in good faith that they were bringing men the recipe for happiness.

The old workingman, Corbon, whose admirable book, "The Secret of the People of Paris," is worth reading for an understanding of the psychology of the masses toward the middle of the last century, reminds us that the proletarian class was in no way deceived in the matter. It had felt what a mystical devotion to the cause of labor animated through their extravagances the followers of Saint-Simon and Fourier. "They may have erred," wrote Corbon, "but they were moved by the profound conviction of the efficacy of their systems, and still more by the ardent desire to improve as promptly as possible the condition of the lower classes. The people, sure of their intentions, could not fail to be grateful even though they showed themselves skeptical with regard to the panaceas, and ridiculed some of the doctrines." We could not say so much of our parliamentary socialists.

It should moreover be added in their defence that at the time when they lived they could not find in their capitalist environment the elements for a just estimate of the social movement. Marx and Engels have judged these pioneers of the first socialist epoch as they deserve. "The founders of these systems," says the Communist Manifesto, "see, indeed, the class antagonisms, as well as the action of the decomposing elements in the prevailing form of society. But the proletariat, as yet in its infancy, offers to them the spectacle of a class without any historical initiative or any independent political movement.

Since the development of class antagonism keeps even pace with the development of industry, the economic situation, as they find it, does not as yet offer to them the material conditions for the emancipation of the proletariat. They therefore search after a new social science, after new social laws, that are to create these conditions.

Historical action is to yield to their personal inventive action, historically created conditions of emancipation to phantastic ones, and the gradual, spontaneous class-organisation of the proletariat to an organisation of society specially contrived by these inventors. Future history resolves itself, in their eyes, into the propaganda and the practical carrying out of their social plans."

The same explanation would not answer for our new utopians. The continuous growth of the working class into a conscious class is the great historic fact of the nineteenth century, as the theorists of "reformism" know very well. But they can not conceive of leaving the proletariat to itself, to its own impulses and reactions, without overwhelming the world with the most terrible catastrophes. A socialism inspired by "working-class coarseness", rude as the factory, brutal as the strike, seems to them a backward step toward barbarism, while it would be "so simple" to listen to reason voicing itself through them, and to employ the positive methods of democracy. What good could possibly come from the blind clash of unchained forces. Would it not be better to follow the enlightened opinions of competent people?

II. In this very way the (early) utopians stated the problem which they proposed to solve, and it is this intellectualist way of going about it, which assumes that ideas lead the world, that our reformists have admired in them most. Reason, guided by science, was to give the "solution of the social question". The formula once found, it need only be applied and society would be transformed in a flash. These inventors of societies were "true children of that amiable, idealistic eighteenth century which has not without reason been described as the century of Wisdom and Light".

It is the common illusion of intellectual speculators to think themselves above phenomena and happenings, in the immaterial world of spirits. The utopians all came from cultured circles: "they were recruited", as Corbon says, "from among the fine flower of the educated youth. The Saint-Simonian group and the Fourierist phalanx counted scarcely any but lettered people among its apostles or adherents; most were indeed intellectuals of the first order."* These seekers after the absolute pictured the social movement to themselves as an outward process, capable of being modified according to a previous plan or of being adapted to a preconceived end. They were the firmest of believers in the disinterested role of Thought, to which they assigned for its mission the quest of Eternal Truth.

But the mind does not work on a void. It borrows from the

Corbon, work cited, page 103.

environment around it the materials which it combines. It is not enough to say with Marx and Engels that the utopians substituted, their own inventions for the historic reality that failed them. We must show that their systems were but a fantastic reconstruction of the society that they had under their eyes. They deformed, magnified, idealized, minified the elements which they found around them, and out of these made an original composite which seemed to have no connection with reality.

Nevertheless it is the contemporary environment which explains these plans of society, and they, in turn, help to understand that time. How are we to interpret Saint-Simonism, if it be separated from the brilliant renascence of Christianity and the accelerated development of the new social order, with its procession of inventors, technicists, captains of industry, ready to inaugurate triumphant capitalism? How can we read Fourier understandingly, without thinking of the eighteenth-century theories on the state of nature, the passions and the sentiments, of the dissolute manners of the Directory, its taste for gallant feasts and easy pleasures? And may not both of these, the Saint-Simonian system and the Fourierist system, be summed up as the social aspect of the romanticism with which this epoch is so highly colored? And again, are they not a form, perhaps the most astonishing form, of that "Napoleonic malady,"* born of the formidable suggestion produced by the revolutionary wars and swollen by the imperial epopee, and which in spite of economic obstacles, inspired those attacked by it with the mystical belief in the creative virtue of Force in the service of the Idea?

We ask in all sincerity what practical borrowings the literary representatives of reformism propose to make from the utopians, and for what use they intend them. What can we derive for our present conduct from a system which is but a distorted aspect of one moment of history? The Saint-Simonians and Fourierists themselves quickly forgot, in contact with economic reality, their dreams of renovation, and they adapted themselves admirably to the new conditions of capitalism. Corbon observes again: "The two doctrines gradually divested themselves of everything repugnant to common sense, and it may thus be seen that both of them, in their primary data, and considered apart from all plans of realization, answered to the highest needs.

But our "cultured" reformists do not stoop to such prosaic interpretations. They do not examine so closely; of Utopianism

"They (the Saint-Simonians) played in sincerity that role of apostles, believing that they were imitating the life of the twelve fishermen of Galilee, hoping, like them, to conquer the world and to rule it. The desire of being leaders of nations possessed them. them, as in many others, the Napoleonic malady thus showed itself."S. Charlety, Histoire du Saint-Simonisme, p. 476.

In