Petty-Bourgeois Socialism

Petty-bourgeois reformist social current formed in the first half of the 19th century. Its chief representative was Sismondi of France.

Under the background of capitalist development, the constant differentiation of petty-bourgeoisie and the bankruptcy of petty craftsmen, Sismondi among others, stood on the standpoint of the petty-bourgeoisie, and criticized capitalism from this yardstick. Engels pointed out that the “while the fundamental views of modern socialism and the demand for the transformation of all the means of production into social property are recognized as justified [by the petty-bourgeoisie], however, the realization of this is declared possible only in the distant future, a future which for all practical purposes is quite out of sight.” Petty-bourgeois socialists analyzed the contradiction between capitalist production and consumption, demonstrated the accumulation and the overproduction of capital and private property, pointed out the inevitability of capitalist socio-economic crisis and the pauperization of the proletariat, but they failed to understand the essence of the fundamental contradiction and the objective laws of operation of the capitalist society, and held that the grievances of society were caused by large-scale machine production. They also did not draw the conclusion that the revolution would inevitably break out, rather they appealed to the bourgeois state to reconcile the contradictions between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. They opposed the socialized large-scale production developing in the capitalist society, advocated that the lands of large capitalist farms should be allocated to farmers for tilling, and that the capitalist large-scale industry should be transformed into small handicraft workshops, in an attempt to restore the guild system of the handicraft industry and the agricultural patriarchal economy in the Middle Ages, and to establish an ideal society for small producers. Engels pointed out: “The petty-bourgeois especially, whose honest labor—even if it is only that of his workmen and apprentices—is daily more and more depreciated in value by the competition of large-scale production and machinery, this small-scale producer especially must long for a society in which the exchange of products according to their labor value is at last a complete and invariable truth. In other words, he must long for a society in which a single law of commodity production prevails exclusively and in full, but in which the conditions are abolished in which it can prevail at all, viz., the other laws of commodity production and, later, of capitalist production.” Therefore, Marx said, “the petty bourgeoisie were by their economical conditions of life excluded from initiating a new revolution and induced to follow in the track of the ruling classes or [to become] the followers of the working class.”