long quote
The bourgeoisie professes a morality that is most closely connected with its essence. Its first demand in this regard is that one should carry on a solid business, an honest trade, and lead a moral life. To it, the swindler, the whore, the thief, robber and murderer, the gambler, the penniless person without a job, the reckless one, are all immoral. The honest bourgeois citizen describes the feeling against these āimmoralā people as his ādeepest indignation.ā All of them lack a stable residence, the solidity of business, a solid, respectable life, a steady income, etc., in short, because their existence does not rest on a secure basis, they are among the dangerous individuals or lone drifters, the dangerous proletariat; they are āindividual troublemakersā who offer no āguaranteesā and have ānothing to lose,ā and so nothing to risk. The formation of family ties, for example, binds the human being, the one tied down holds to a pledge, can be understood; not so with the prostitute. The gambler stakes everything on the game, ruins himself and othersāno guarantee. One can include all who appear suspicious, hostile, and dangerous to the bourgeois citizen in the name āvagabondsā; every vagabond way of living displeases him. Because there are also intellectual vagabonds to whom the ancestral home of their fathers seems too cramped and oppressive for them to be willing to content themselves with the limited space anymore; instead of staying within the bounds of a moderate way of thinking, and taking as inviolable truth what grants consolation and reassurance to thousands, they leap over all boundaries of tradition and run wild with their impudent criticism and untamed skepticism, these extravagant vagabonds. They form the class of the vagrant, restless, changeable, i.e., the proletariat, and when they give voice to their unsettled essence, they are called āunruly guys.ā The so-called proletariat, or pauperism, has that wide of a sense. How mistaken one would be if one credited the bourgeoisie with desiring to do away with poverty (pauperism) to the best of its abilities. On the contrary, the good bourgeois citizen helps himself with the incomparably comforting conviction that āthe goods of fortune are unequally distributed now and will always remain soāaccording to Godās wise decision.ā The poverty that surrounds him in every alley doesnāt disturb the true bourgeois any further than that at most he compensates for it by throwing alms, or provides work and food for an āhonest and usefulā lad. But he feels his quiet enjoyment clouded so much the more by discontented poverty, seeking for innovation, by those poor people who no longer behave quietly and endure, but begin to run wild and get restless. Lock up the vagabond, throw the troublemaker into the darkest dungeon! He wants to āarouse discontent and stir people up against existing regulationsā in the stateāstone him, stone him!
