the forerunner of “Capital.”[11]

“The first work which I undertook for the purpose of solving the doubts which perplexed me was a critical re-examination of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law. The introduction to this work appeared in the German-French Year Books, published in Paris in 1844.

My investigation ended in the conviction that legal relations and forms of government cannot be explained either by themselves or by the so-called general development of the human mind, but on the contrary, have their roots in the conditions of man’s physical existence, whose totality Hegel, following the English and French writers of the eighteenth century, summed up under the name of civil society; and that the anatomy of civil society must be sought in political economy.

The study of the latter which I began at Paris was continued at Brussels whither I had betaken myself in consequence of an order of Guizot expelling me from France.

The general result which I arrived at and which, once obtained, served as a guide for my subsequent studies, can be briefly formulated as follows:

In making their livelihood together men enter into certain necessary involuntary relations with each other, industrial relations which correspond to whatever stage society has reached in the development of its material productive forces.

The totality of these industrial relations constitutes the economic structure of society, the real basis upon which the legal and political superstructure is built, and to which definite forms of social consciousness correspond.

The method of producing the material livelihood determines the social, political and intellectual life process in general.

It is not men’s consciousness which determines their life; on the contrary, it is their social life which determines their consciousness.

At a certain stage of their development the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the old conditions of production or, to use a legal expression, with the old property relations under which these forces have hitherto been exerted. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into fetters of production. Then begins an epoch of social revolution. With the change of the economic basis the whole vast superstructure undergoes sooner or later a revolution.

In considering such revolutions one must constantly distinguish between the industrial revolution, to be carefully posited scientifically, which takes place in the economic conditions of production, and the legal, political, religious, artistic or philosophical, in short ideological, forms wherein men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out. As little as we judge an individual by what he himself thinks he is, just as little can we judge such a revolutionary epoch by its own consciousness. We must rather explain this consciousness out of the antagonisms of men’s industrial life, out of the conflict existing between the forces of social production and the relations of social production.

A form of society never breaks down until all the productive forces are developed for which it affords room. New and higher relations of production are never established, until the material conditions of life to support them have been prepared in the lap of the old society itself. Therefore mankind always sets for itself only such tasks as it is able to perform; for upon close examination it will always be found that the task itself only arises where the material conditions for its solution are already at hand or are at least in process of growth.

We may in broad outlines characterize the Asiatic, the antique, the feudal and the modern capitalist methods of production as progressive epochs in the economic evolution of society.

The industrial relations arising out of the capitalistic method of production constitute the last of the antagonistic forms of social production; antagonistic not in the sense of an individual antagonism, but of an antagonism growing out of the social conditions of individuals.

But the productive forces which are developed in the lap of capitalistic society create at the same time the material conditions needed for the abolition of this antagonism. The capitalist form of society therefore, brings to a close this prelude to the history of human society.”

Marx had some years before left the political arena and he did not return to it until later with the International. The reaction had triumphed in Italy, Austria, Hungary and Germany over the patriotic, liberal or democratic revolution. The bourgeoisie on its side had overcome the proletarians of France and England. The indispensable conditions for the development of a democratic and proletarian movement suddenly disappeared. The battalion small in numbers indeed of the Manifesto communists who had taken part in the revolution and who had participated in all the acts of resistance and popular rebellion against reaction saw its activity crushed by the memorable process of Cologne. The survivors of the movement tried to make a new start at London, but soon Marx, Engels and others separated themselves from the revolutionaries and retired from the movement. The crisis was passed. A long period of repose followed. This was shown by the slow disappearance of the Chartist movement, that is to say, the proletarian movement of the country which was the spinal column of the capitalist system. History had for the moment discredited the illusions of the revolutionaries.

Before giving himself almost entirely to the long incubation of the already discovered elements of the critique of political economy, Marx illustrated in several works the history of the revolutionary period from 1848 to 1850 and especially the class struggles in France, showing thus that if the revolution in the forms which it had taken on at that moment had not succeeded, the revolutionary theory of history was not contradicted for all that.[12] The suggestions given in the Manifesto found here their complete development.

Later the 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte[13] was the first attempt to apply the new conception of history to a series of facts contained within precise limits of time. It is extremely difficult to rise from the apparent movement to the real movement of history and to discover their intimate connection. There are indeed great difficulties in rising from the phenomena of passion, oratory, Parliaments, elections and the like to the inner social gearing to discover in the latter the different interests of the large and small bourgeois, of the peasants, the artisans, the laborers, the priests, the soldiers, the bankers, the usurers and the mob. All these interests act consciously or unconsciously, jostling each other, eliminating each other, combining and fusing, in the discordant life of civilized man.

The crisis was passed and this was precisely true in the countries which constituted the historic field from which critical communism proceeded. All that the critical communists could do was to understand the reaction in its