12-04-04 11:02 PM
the old feudal coats of arms,
and deserted with loud and irreverent laughter.
One section of the French Legitimists and "Young England" exhibited this
spectacle:
In pointing out that their mode of exploitation was different to that of
the bourgeoisie, the feudalists forget that they exploited under
circumstances and conditions that were quite different and that are now
antiquated. In showing that, under their rule, the modern proletariat
never existed, they forget that the modern bourgeoisie is the necessary
offspring of their own form of society.
For the rest, so little do they conceal the reactionary character of
their criticism that their chief accusation against the bourgeois
amounts to this: that under the bourgeois regime a class is being
developed which is destined to cut up, root and branch, the old order of
society.
What they upbraid the bourgeoisie with is not so much that it creates a
proletariat as that it creates a _revolutionary_ proletariat.
In political practice, therefore, they join in all corrective measures
against the working class; and in 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. [2]
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.
Has not Christianity declaimed against private property, against
marriage, against the state? Has it not preached in the place of these,
charity and poverty, celibacy and mortification of the flesh, monastic
life and Mother Ch
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