136 THE POVERTY OF PHILOSOPHY
perfected. It denies the necessity of antagonism; it would make all men bourgeois; it would realise the theory in so far as it is distinguished from practice and encloses no antagonism. It goes without saying that, in theory, it is easy to make abstraction of the contradictions that are met with each instant in reality. This theory would become then idealised reality. The philanthropists thus wish to conserve the categories which express bour- geois relations, without having the antagonism which is inseparable from these relations. They fancy they are seriously combatting the bourgeois system, and they are more bourgeois than the others.
As the economists are the scientific representatives of the bourgeois class, so the Socialists and Communists are the theorists of the proletarian class. So long as the proletariat is not sufficiently developed to constitute itself as a class, so long as, in consequence, the struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie has not ac- quired a political character, and while the productive forces are not sufficiently developed in the bosom of the bourgeoisie itself to allow a perception of the material conditions necessary to the emancipation of the proletariat and the. formation of a new society, so long these theorists are only utopians who, to obviate the distress of the oppressed classes, improvise systems and run after a regenerative science. But as history develops and with it the struggle of the proletariat becomes more clearly defined, they have no longer any need to seek for such a science in their own minds, they have only to give an account of what passes before their eyes and to make of that their medium. So long as they seek science and only make systems, so long as they are at the beginning of the struggle, they see in poverty only poverty, with-
