Page:Manifesto of the Communist Party.djvu/60

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56
COMMUNIST MANIFESTO.

torical development of the proletariat. They, therefore, endeavor and that consistently, to deaden the class struggle and to reconcile the class antagonisms. They still dream of experimental realization of their social Utopias, of founding isolated "phalanstères," of establishing "Home Colonies," of setting up a "Little Icaria"[1]—duodecimo editions of the New Jerusalem, and to realize all these castles in the air, they are compelled to appeal to the feelings and purses of the bourgeois. By degrees they sink into the category of the reactionary conservative Socialists depicted above, differing from these only by more systematic pedantry, and by their fanatical and superstitious belief in the miraculous effects of their social science.

They, therefore, violently oppose all political action on the part of the working class; such action, according to them, can only result from blind unbelief in the new Gospel.

The Owenites in England, and the Fourierists in France, respectively, oppose the Chartists and the "Reformistes."


IV.

POSITION OF THE COMMUNISTS IN RELATION TO THE VARIOUS EXISTING OPPOSITION PARTIES.

Section II. has made clear the relations of the Communists to the existing working class parties,

  1. Phalanstères were socialist colonies on the plan of Charles Fourier. Icaria was the name given by Cabot to his Utopia and later on, to his American Communist colony.