Union of Soviet Socialist Republics

We do not here refer to that literature which, in every great modern revolution, has always given
voice to the demands of the proletariat, such as the writings of Babeuf and others.
The first direct attempts of the proletariat to attain its own ends, made in times of universal
excitement, when feudal society was being overthrown, necessarily failed, owing to the then
undeveloped state of the proletariat, as well as to the absence of the economic conditions for its
emancipation, conditions that had yet to be produced, and could be produced by the impending
bourgeois epoch alone. The revolutionary literature that accompanied these first movements of
the proletariat had necessarily a reactionary character. It inculcated universal asceticism and
social levelling in its crudest form.
The Socialist and Communist systems, properly so called, those of Saint-Simon, Fourier, Owen,
and others, spring into existence in the early undeveloped period, described above, of the struggle
between proletariat and bourgeoisie (see Section I. Bourgeois and Proletarians).
The founders of these systems 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.