result of a process of formation which rests altogether upon the new mode of production of the objects necessary to life, that is to say, which rests altogether upon the manner of economic production. The bourgeois society grew out of the corporative and feudal society and it grew out of it through struggle and revolution in order to take possession of the instruments and means of production which all culminate in the formation, the development and the multiplication of capital. To describe the origin and the progress of the bourgeoisie in its different phases, to explain its successes in the colossal development of technique and in the conquest of the world market, and to point out the political transformations which followed it, which are the expression, the defense and the result of these conquests is, at the same time, to write the history of the proletariat. The latter in its present condition is inherent in the epoch of bourgeois society and it has had, it has, and will have as many phases as that society itself up to the time of its extinction. The antithesis of rich and poor, of happy and unhappy, of oppressors and oppressed is not something accidental which can easily be put on one side as was believed by the enthusiasts of justice. Still further it is a fact of necessary correlation, once granted the directing principle of the present form of production which makes the wageworker a necessity. This necessity is double. Capital can only take possession of production by converting laborers into proletarians and it cannot continue to live, to be fruitful, to accumulate, to multiply itself and to transform itself except on the condition of paying wages to those whom it has made proletarians. The latter, on their side, can only live and reproduce their kind on the condition of selling themselves as labor power, the use of which is left to the discretion, that is to say, to the good pleasure of the possessors of capital. The harmony between capital and labor is wholly contained in this fact that labor is the living force by which the proletarians continually put in motion and reproduce by adding to it the labor accumulated in the capital. This connection resulting from a development which is the whole inner essence of modern history, if it gives the key to comprehend the true reason of the new class struggle of which the communist conception has become the expression, is of such a nature that no sentimental protest, no argument based on justice can resolve it and disentangle it.

It is for these reasons which I have explained here as simply as possible that equalitarian communism remained vanquished. Its practical powerlessness blended with its theoretical inability to account for the causes of the wrongs or of the inequalities which it desired, bravely or stupidly, to destroy or eliminate at a blow.

To understand history became thenceforth the principal task of the theorists of communism. How could a cherished ideal be still opposed to the hard reality of history? Communism is not the natural and necessary state of human life in all times and in all places and the whole course of historic formations cannot be considered as a series of deviations and wanderings. One does not reach communism nor return to it by Spartan abnegation or Christian resignation. It can be, still more it must be and it will be the consequence of the dissolution of our capitalist society. But the dissolution cannot be inoculated into it artificially nor imported from without. It will dissolve by its own weight as Machiavelli would say. It will disappear as a form of production which engenders of itself and in itself the constant and increasing rebellion of its productive forces against the conditions (juridical and political) of production and it continues to live only by augmenting (through competition which engenders crises, and by a bewildering extension of its sphere of action) the intrinsic conditions of its inevitable death. The death of a social form like that which comes from natural death in any other branch of science becomes a physiological case.

The Manifesto did not make, and it was not its part to make the picture of a future society. It told how our present society will dissolve by the progressive dynamics of its forces. To make this understood it was necessary above all to explain the development of the bourgeoisie and this was done in rapid sketches, a model philosophy of history, which can be retouched, completed and developed, but which cannot be corrected.[6]

Saint-Simon and Fourier, although neither their ideas nor the general trend of their development were accepted, found their justification. Idealists both, they had by their heroic vision transcended the “liberal” epoch which in their horizon had its culminating point at the epoch of the French revolution. The former in his interpretation of history substituted social physics for economic law and politics, and in spite of many idealistic and positivistic uncertainties, he almost discovered the genesis of the third estate. The other, ignorant of details which were still unknown or neglected, in the exuberance of his undisciplined spirit imagined a great chain of historic epochs vaguely distinguished by certain indications of the directing principle of the forms of production and distribution. He thereupon proposed to himself to construct a society in which the existing antitheses should disappear. From all these antitheses he discovered by a flash of genius and he, more than any other, developed “the vicious circle of production”; he there unconsciously reached the position of Sismondi, who at the same epoch, but with other intentions and along different roads, studying crises and denouncing the disadvantages of the large scale industry and of unbridled competition, announced the collapse of the newly established economic science. From the summit of his serene meditation on the future world of the harmonians he looked down with a serene contempt upon the misery of civilization and unmoved wrote the satire of history. Ignorant both, because idealists, of the bitter struggle which the proletariat is called upon to maintain before putting an end to the epoch of exploitation and of antitheses, they arrived through a subjective necessity at their conclusions, in the one case scheme-making, in the other utopianism. But as by divination they foresaw some of the direct principles of a society without antitheses. The former reached a clear conception of the technical government of society in which should disappear the domination of man over man, and the other divined, foresaw and prophesied along with the extravagances of his luxuriant imagination a great number of the important traits of the psychology and pedagogy of that future society in which according to the expression of the Manifesto, “the free development of each is the condition of the free development of all.”

Saint-Simonism had already disappeared when the Manifesto appeared. Fourierism, on the contrary, was flourishing in France and in consequence of its nature not as a party but as a school.

When the school attempted to realize its utopia by means of the law, the Parisian proletarians had already been beaten in those days of June by that bourgeoisie which through this victory was preparing a master for itself: it was a military adventurer whose power lasted twenty years.

It is not in the name of a school, but as the promise, the threat, and the desire of a party that the new doctrine of critical communism presented itself. Its authors and