partial and confused because it was sudden and of short duration) of the action of the proletariat in gaining control of political power. This experience, too, was neither desired nor sought for, but imposed by circumstances. It was heroically carried through and it has become a salutary lesson for us to-day. It might easily happen that where the socialist movement is still in its beginnings, appeal may be made, for lack of personal direct experience—as often happens in Italy—to the authority of a text from the Manifesto as if it were a precept, but these passages are in reality of no importance.

Again, we must not, as I believe, seek for this vital part, this essence, this distinctive character, in what the Manifesto says of the other forms of socialism of which it speaks under the name of literature. The entire third chapter may doubtless serve for defining clearly by way of exclusion and antithesis, by brief but vigorous characterizations, the differences which really exist between the communism commonly characterized to-day as scientific,—an expression sometimes used in a mistaken and contradictory way,—that is to say, between the communism which has the proletariat for its subject and the proletarian revolution for its theme, and the other forms of socialism; reactionary, bourgeois, semi-bourgeois, petit-bourgeois, utopian, etc. All these forms except one[1] have re-appeared and renewed themselves more than once. They are reappearing under a new form even to-day in the countries where the modern proletarian movement is of recent birth. For these countries and under these circumstances the Manifesto has exercised and still exercises the function of contemporary criticism and of a literary whip. And in the countries where these forms have already been theoretically and practically outgrown, as in Germany and Austria, or survive only as an individual opinion among a few, as in France and England, without speaking of other nations, the Manifesto from this point of view has played its part. It thus merely records as a matter of history something no longer necessary to think of, since we have to deal with the political action of the proletariat which already is before us in its gradual and normal course.

That was, to anticipate, the attitude of mind of those who wrote it. By the force of their thought and with some scanty data of experience they had anticipated the events which have occurred and they contented themselves with declaring the elimination and the condemnation of what they had outgrown. Critical communism—that is its true name, and there is none more exact for this doctrine—did not take its stand with the feudalists in regretting the old society for the sake of criticising by contrast the contemporary society:—it had an eye only to the future. Neither did it associate itself with the petty bourgeois in the desire of saving what cannot be saved:—as, for example, small proprietorship, or the tranquil life of the small proprietor whom the bewildering action of the modern state, the necessary and natural organ of present society, destroys and overturns, because by its constant revolutions it carries in itself the necessity for other revolutions new and more fundamental.

Neither did it translate into metaphysical whimsicalities, into a sickly sentimentalism, or into a religious contemplation, the real contrasts of the material interests of every day life: on the contrary, it exposed those contrasts in all their prosaic reality. It did not construct the society of the future upon a plan harmoniously conceived in each of its parts. It has no word of eulogy and exaltation, of invocation and of regret, for the two goddesses of philosophic mythology, justice and equality, those two goddesses who cut so sad a figure in the practical affairs of everyday life, when we observe that the history of so many centuries maliciously amuses itself by nearly always contradicting their infallible suggestions. Once more these communists, while declaring on the strength of facts which carry conviction that the mission of the proletarians is to be the grave diggers of the bourgeoisie, still recognize the latter as the author of a social form which represents extensively and intensively an important stage of progress, and which alone can furnish the field for the new struggles which already give promise of a happy issue for the proletariat. Never was funeral oration so magnificent. There is in these praises addressed to the bourgeoisie a certain tragical humor,—they have been compared to dithyrambics.

The negative and antithetical definitions of other forms of socialism then current, which have often re-appeared since, even up to the present time, although they are fundamentally beyond criticism both in their form and their aim, nevertheless, do not pretend to be and are not the real history of socialism; they furnish neither its outlines nor its plan for him who would write it. History in reality does not rest upon the distinction between the true and the false, the just and the unjust and still less upon the more abstract antithesis between the possible and the real as if the things were on one side and on another side were their shadows and their reflections in ideas. History is all of a piece, and it rests upon the process of formation and transformation of society; and that evidently in a fashion altogether objective and independent of our approval or disapproval. It is a dynamic of a special class to speak like the positivists who are so dainty with expressions of this sort but are often dominated by the new phrases which they have put out. The different socialist forms of thought and action which have appeared and disappeared in the course of the centuries, so different in their causes, their aspects, and their effects, are all to be studied and explained by the specific and complex conditions of the social life in which they were produced. Upon a close examination it is seen that they do not form one single whole of continuous process because the series is frequently interrupted by changes in the social fabric and by the disappearance and breaking off of the tradition. It is only since the French Revolution that socialism presents a certain unity of process, which appears more evident since 1830 with the definite political supremacy of the capitalist class in France and England and which finally becomes obvious, we might say even palpable, since the rise of the International. Upon this road the Manifesto stands like a colossal guide post bearing a double inscription: on one side the first sketch of the new doctrine which has now made the circle of the world; on the other, the definition of its relations to the forms which it excludes, without giving, however, any historic account of them.

The vital part, the essence, the distinctive character of this work are all contained in the new conception of history which permeates it and which in it is partially explained and developed. By the aid of this conception communism, ceasing to be a hope, an aspiration, a remembrance, a conjecture, an expedient, found for the first time its adequate expression in the realization of its very necessity, that is to say, in the realization that it is the outcome and the solution of the struggles of existing classes. These struggles have varied according to times and places and out of them history has developed; but, they are all reduced in our days to the single struggle between the capitalist bourgeoisie and the workingmen inevitably forced into the ranks of the proletariat. The Manifesto gives the