True Socialism

Also known as “philosophical socialism”, philistine, petty-bourgeois socialist current in the 1840s in Germany. Its chief representatives were Moses Hess, Karl Grün, Herman Semmig and others, who founded Gesellschaftsspiegel (Mirror of Society), Prometheus, Rheinische Jahrbücher zur gesellschaftlichen Reform (Rhenish Yearbooks for Social Reform), Volkstribun (The Tribune of the People), and other publications. At the beginning of 1847, there were various factions in this school, such as the Westphalian school represented by Lüning, the Bohemian school represented by Moor, the Saxon school represented by Semmig and the Berlin school represented by Dronke.

The philosophical basis of “true socialism” was Hegel’s speculative philosophy and Feuerbach’s humanist philosophy. True socialists attempted to marry the ideas of socialist and communist literature with The German Ideology, especially the philosophies of Hegel and Feuerbach. Feuerbach’s concept of human nature or “species” (“Gattung”) is the central idea of “true socialism”. They mingled the English and French communist ideas with classical German philosophy and evaluated these ideas “in terms of true, absolute, i.e., the German philosophical consciousness”; they turned the relations among certain individuals into “human” relations, and held that the most important factor in human essence was love, and regarded charity as the panacea to solve social problems; they held that communism was the embodiment of human essence and that communism should follow humanism. In essence, they vulgarized communism, replaced scientific socialism with bourgeois humanism, obliterated class contradictions, and opposed all political movement. “True socialism” was the product of the then capitalist economy in Germany, which had developed to a certain extent, but not to a high degree, and reflected the state of mind of the petty bourgeoisie, which was on the verge of bankruptcy, trying to preserve the status of small producers, and it reflected the interests of the German petty middle class. It held that capitalist development had led to the bankruptcy of small producers and brought evil to human society, and that land should therefore be distributed to the poor in the form of public property ownership at no cost, so that the proletarians could be turned into small producers. In this way, “true socialism” could prevent the bourgeois democratic revolution and the growth of both the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, thus “killing two birds with one stone” and achieving its aim of maintaining the feudal-despotic system. Marx and Engels pointed out that “true socialism” served the despotic governments of small size German states and their entourage—monks, teachers, Junker landowners and bureaucrats—as much as they needed—as a scarecrow against the rising bourgeoisie that disturbed them. “True socialism” was a sweet finish, after the bitter pills of flogging and bullets, with which these same governments, just at that time, dosed the German working-class uprisings. After the 1848 Revolutions in Europe, “true socialism” vanished without trace. But the trend of thought that sought to replace scientific socialism with bourgeois humanism has never disappeared.