Early socialism opposed feudalism to advance rather than negate bourgeois society.

Evidence

Just as the historical character of capitalist development and the working classes associated with that development can be better understood through the medieval civilization in which they were created, a similar task applies to the history of socialism. Socialism as an articulated opposition to social inequality and poverty was first addressed to the adaptation of bourgeois society to feudal structures. Socialist critiques of society were attempts to further the bourgeois revolutions against feudalism. It possessed then a moral character: The critique of property that arose with the liberalism of eighteenth-century France was not… — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 285

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the Black radical tradition’s ancestor — European socialism — as initially a moral, pro-bourgeois force rather than a negation of capitalism.