I must now, if I do not wish to run the risk of subjecting my presentation to great misunderstandings, explain my own conception of the word bourgeoisie, or upper bourgeoisie, as a term for a political party.  The word bourgeoisie may be translated into German by Buergertum (body of citizens).  In my opinion this is not what it means.  We are all Buerger (citizens)—­the working man, the Kleinbuerger (lower middle class), Grossbuerger (upper middle class), etc.  But in the course of history the word bourgeoisie has acquired the significance of a definite political tendency, which I will now explain.[47]

The whole class of commoners outside the nobility was divided, when the French Revolution began, and is still divided in general, into two subordinate classes—­first, those who get their living chiefly or entirely from their labor, and are supported in this by very little capital, or none at all, which might give them the possibility of actively engaging in production for the support of themselves and their families; to this class, accordingly, belong the laborers, the lower middle class, the artisans, and, in general, the peasants; second, those who control a large amount of property and capital, and on that basis engage in production or receive an income from it.  These can be called the capitalists; but no capitalist is a bourgeois merely because of his wealth.

No commoner has any objection to a nobleman’s rejoicing privately over his ancestry and his landed estates.  But if the nobleman tries to make these ancestors or these landed estates the condition of special influence and privilege in the government, of control over public policy, then the anger of the commoner rises against the nobleman and he calls him a feudalist.

Conditions are the same with reference to the actual difference of property within the class of commoners.  If the capitalist rejoices in private over the great convenience and advantage which a large estate implies for the holder, nothing is more simple, more moral, and more lawful.

To whatever extent the laborer and the poorer citizen—­in a word, all classes outside the capitalists—­are entitled to demand from the State that its whole thought and effort be directed toward improving the lamentable and poverty-stricken material condition of the working classes and toward assuring to them, through whose hands all the wealth is produced of which our civilization boasts, to whose hands all products owe their being, without whom society as a whole could not exist another day, a more abundant and less uncertain revenue, and thus the possibility of intellectual culture, and, in time, an existence really worthy of a human being—­however much, I say, the working classes are entitled to demand this from the State and to establish this as its true object, the workingmen must and will never forget that all property once lawfully acquired is completely inviolable and legitimate.