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The first direct attempts of the proletariat to attain its own

ends, made in times of universal excitement, when feudal society

was being overthrown, these attempts 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 1. Bourgeois and

Proletarians).