its adherents did not feed upon the utopian manufacture of the future but their minds were full of the experience and the necessity of the present. They united with the proletarians whom instinct, not as yet fortified by experience, impelled to overthrow, at Paris and in England, the rule of the bourgeois class with a rapidity of movement not guided by well-considered tactics. These communists disseminated their revolutionary ideas in Germany: they were the defenders of the June martyrs, and they had in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung a political organ, extracts from which, reproduced occasionally after so many years, still carry authority.[7] After the disappearance of the historic situations which in 1848 had pushed the proletarians to the front of the political stage, the doctrines of the Manifesto no longer found either a foundation or a field for diffusion. Many years were required before it circulated again and that because many years were required before the proletariat could re-appear by other roads and under other methods as a political force upon the scene, making of this doctrine its intellectual organ and directing its course by it.

But from the day when the doctrine appeared it made its anticipated criticism of that socialismus vulgaris which was flourishing in Europe and especially in France from the coup d’État to the International; the latter moreover in its short period of life had not time to vanquish and eliminate it. This vulgar socialism found its intellectual food (when nothing even more incoherent and chaotic was at hand) in the doctrine and especially in the paradoxes of Proudhon who had already been vanquished theoretically by Marx[8] but who was not vanquished practically until the time of the Commune when his disciples, and it was a salutary lesson in affairs, were forced to act in opposition to their own doctrines and those of their master.

From the time of its appearance this new communist doctrine carried an implied criticism of all forms of State socialism from Louis Blanc to Lassalle. This State socialism, although mingled with revolutionary doctrines, was then summed up in the empty dream, in the abracadabra, of the Right to Work. This is an insidious formula if it implies a demand addressed to a government even of revolutionary bourgeois. It is an economic absurdity if by it is meant to suppress the unemployment which ensues upon the variations of wages, that is to say upon the conditions of competition. It may be a tool for politicians, if it serves as an expedient to calm a shapeless mass of unorganized proletarians. This is very evident for any one who conceives clearly the course of a victorious proletarian revolution which cannot proceed to the socialization of the means of production by taking possession of them, that is to say, which cannot arrive at the economic form in which there is neither merchandise nor wage labor and in which the right to work and the duty of working are one and the same, mingled in the common necessity of labor for all.

The mirage of the right to work ended in the tragedy of June. The parliamentary discussion of which it was the object in the sequel was nothing but a parody. Lamartine, that tearful rhetorician, that great man for all proper occasions, had pronounced the last, or the next to the last of his celebrated phrases, “Catastrophes are the experiences of nations,” and that sufficed for the irony of history.

The brevity and simplicity of the Manifesto were wholly foreign to the insinuating rhetoric of faith or creed. It was of the utmost inclusiveness by virtue of the many ideas which it for the first time reduced to a system and it was a series of germs capable of an immense development. But it was not, and it did not pretend to be a code of socialism, a catechism of critical communism, or the handbook of the proletarian revolution. We may leave its “quintessence” to the illustrious Dr. Schaeffle, to whom also we willingly leave the famous phrase, “The social question is a question of the stomach.”

The “ventre” of Dr. Schaeffle has for long years cut a fine enough figure in the world to the great advantage of the dilettanti in socialism and to the delight of the politicians. Critical communism, in reality, scarcely begun with the Manifesto it needed to develop and it has developed effectively.

The sum total of the teachings customarily designated by the name of “Marxism” did not arrive at maturity before the years 1860-1870. It is certainly a long step from the little work Wage Labor and Capital[9] in which is seen for the first time in precise terms how from the purchase and the use of the labor-commodity is obtained a product superior to the cost of production, this being the clue to the question of surplus value—it is a long step from this to the complex and multiple developments of “Capital.” This book goes exhaustively into the genesis of the bourgeois epoch in all its inner economic structure, and intellectually it transcends that epoch because it explains its course, its particular laws and the antitheses which it organically produces and which organically dissolve it.

It is a long step also from the proletarian movement which succumbed in 1848 to the present proletarian movement which through great difficulties after having re-appeared on the political scene has developed with continuity and deliberation. Until a few years ago this regularity of the forward march of the proletariat was observed and admired only in Germany. The social democracy there had normally increased as upon its own field (from the Workingmen’s Conference of Nuremburg, 1868, to our day). But since then the same phenomenon has asserted itself in other countries, under various forms.

In this broad development of Marxism and in this increase of the proletarian movement in the limited forms of political action, has there not been, as some assert, an alteration from the militant character of the original form of critical communism? Has there not been a passing from revolution to the self-styled evolution? Has there not been an acquiescence of the revolutionary spirit in the exigencies of the reform movement?

These reflections and these objections have arisen and arise continually both among the most enthusiastic and most passionate of the socialists and among the adversaries of socialism whose interest it is to give an appearance of uniformity to the special defeats, checks and delays, so as to affirm that communism has no future.

Whoever compares the present proletarian movement and its varied and complicated course with the impression left by the Manifesto when one reads it without being provided with knowledge from other sources, may easily believe that there was something juvenile and premature in the confident boldness of those communists of fifty years ago. There is in them the sound as of a battle cry and an echo of the vibrant eloquence of some of the orators of Chartism; there is the declaration of a new ’93 with no room left for a new Thermidor.

And Thermidor has re-appeared several times since in various forms, more or less explicit or disguised, and their authors have