Modern socialism Author:Robert Charles Kirkwood Ensor Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: MODERN SOCIALISM THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN MODERN AND UTOPIAN SOCIALISM By A. Bebel This is an excerpt from Bebel's Charles Fourier (pp. 287-9). August ... more »Bebel was born in 1840; apprenticed to a wood-turner at fourteen ; entered politics at Leipzig, and in 1864 was President of the Devtscher Arberterbildungaverein (a Radical organization); in 1865 was brought to Socialism by Liebknecht; in 1871 protested with Liebknecht against the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine, whose neutralization he still advocates; has, since Liebknecht's death, been leader of the Social Democratic party in the German Reichstag. All Socialistic experiments which are attempted inside the bourgeois world, and aimed naturally at the reconciliation of mutually exclusive opposites, must come of necessity to grief. While such experiments last some time, as in some small communistically organized communities in the United States, they are able to do so only through almost perfect isolation from the rest of the world, and only under an economic system which constrains their adherents to Spartan simplicity, and necessitates patriarchal conditions. This is not the developed civilization for which mankind strives. That requires a free, unimpeded unfolding of all men's talents and capacities, and a full enjoyment of all the attainments of civilization, which is only to be won if the means of civilization are more and more multiplied up to the highest technical and scientific levels, A small isolated community, limited in its powers and means, canfloV achieve: this, :be it never so artistically organized. It is disturbed "by every-foreign influence which acts on it from outsidejr .-ftnd" rthis Effect- rill be the more present the more - vita"Uafe: the" reianons.Trhich the part conceives to be necessary towards...« less