been since 1848 French ex-radicals, or Italian ex-patriots, or German bureaucrats, adorers of the god State and practically slaves of the god Mammon, English parliamentarians broken by the artifices of the art of government, or even politicians under the guise of anarchists. Many people believe that the constellation of Thermidor is destined never to disappear from the heaven of history, or to speak in a more prosaic fashion, that liberalism, that is to say a society where men are equal only in law, marks the extreme limit of human evolution beyond which nothing remains but a return backward. That is the opinion of all those who see in the progressive extension of the bourgeois form over the whole world the reason and the end of all progress. Whether they are optimists or pessimists here are, for them, the columns of Hercules of the human race. Often it happens that this sentiment in its pessimistic form operates unconsciously upon some of those, who with others unclassified, go to swell the ranks of anarchism.

There are others who go further and who theorize upon the objective improbabilities of the assertions of critical communism. That affirmation of the Manifesto that the reduction of all class struggles to a single one carries within itself the necessity of the proletarian revolution, would seem to them intrinsically false. That doctrine would be without foundation because it assumes to draw a theoretical deduction and a practical rule of conduct from the prevision of a fact which, according to these adversaries, would be a simple theoretical point which might be displaced and set ahead indefinitely. The assumed inevitable collision between the productive forces and the form of production would never take place because it is reduced, as they claim, to an infinite number of particular cases of friction, because it multiplies itself into the partial collisions of economic competition, and because it meets with checks and hindrances in the expedients and attacks of the governmental art. In other words, our present society, instead of breaking up and dissolving would in a continuous fashion repair the evils which it produced. Every proletarian movement which is not repressed by violence as was that of June, 1848, and that of May, 1871, would perish of slow exhaustion as happened with Chartism which ended in trade unionism, the war horse of this fashion of arguing, the honor and glory of the economists and of the vulgar sociologists. Every modern proletarian movement would be regarded as meteoric and not organic, it would be a disturbance and not a process, and according to these critics, in spite of ourselves, we should be still utopians.

The historic forecast which is found in the doctrine of the Manifesto and which critical communism has since developed by a broad and detailed analysis of the actual world, has certainly taken on by reason of the circumstances in which it was produced a warlike appearance and a very aggressive form. But it did not imply, any more than it implies now, either a chronological datum or a prophetic picture of the social organization like those in the apocalypses and the ancient prophesies.

The heroic Father Dolcino did not re-appear with the prophetic war cry of Joachino del Fiore. We did not celebrate anew at Münster the resurrection of the Kingdom of Jerusalem. There were no more Taborites nor millenarians. Nor was there another Fourier waiting in his house at a fixed hour year after year for the “candidate of humanity.” Nor again, was there an initiator of a new life, beginning with artificial means to create the first nucleus of an association proposing to make man over, as was the case with Beller, Owen, Cabet, and the enterprise of the Fourierites in Texas, which was the tomb of utopianism, marked by a singular epitaph: the dumbness which succeeded the fiery eloquence of Considerant. Neither is there here a sect which retires modestly and timidly from the world in order to celebrate in a closed circle the perfect idea of communism as in the socialist colonies of America.

Here, on the contrary, in the doctrine of critical communism, it is society as a whole which at a moment of its general process discovers the cause of its destined course and at a critical point asserts itself to proclaim the laws of its movement. The foresight indicated by the Manifesto was not chronological, it was not a prophecy nor a promise, but a morphological prevision.

Beneath the noise of the passions over which our daily conversation extends itself, beyond the visible movements of the persons who formed the material at which the historians stop, beyond the juridical and political apparel of our civil society, far enough from the meanings which religion and art give to life, there remains, grows and develops the elementary structure of society which supports all the rest. The anatomical study of this underlying structure is economics. And as human society has several times changed, partially or entirely, in its most visible exterior form, or in its ideological, religious or artistic manifestations, we must first find the cause and the reason of these changes, the only ones which historians relate, in the transformations more hidden, and at first less visible, of the economic processus of this structure. We must set ourselves to the study of the differences which exist between the various forms of production when we have to deal with historic epochs clearly distinct and properly designated; and when we have to explain the succession of these forms, the replacing of one by the other, we must study the causes of erosion, and of the destruction of the form which disappears; and finally when we wish to understand the historic fact determined and concrete, we must study the frictions and the contrasts which take their rise from the different currents, that is to say, the classes, their subdivisions and their intersections which characterize a given society.

When the Manifesto declared that all history up to the present time has been nothing but the history of class struggles and that these are the cause of all revolutions as also of all reactions, it did two things at the same time, it gave to communism the elements of a new doctrine and to the communists the guiding thread to discover in the confused events of political life the conditions of the underlying economic movement.

In these last fifty years the generic foresight of a new historic era has become for socialists the delicate art of understanding in every case what it is expedient to do, because this new era is in itself in continual formation. Communism has become an art because the proletarians have become, or are on the point of becoming, a political party. The revolutionary spirit is embodied to-day in the proletarian organization. The desired union of communists and proletarians is henceforth an accomplished fact.[10] These last fifty years have been the ever stronger proof of the ever growing revolt of the producing forces against the forms of production. We “utopians” have no other answer to offer than this lesson from events to those who still speak of meteoric disturbances which, as they would have it, will disappear little by little and will all resolve themselves into the calm of this final epoch of civilization. And this lesson suffices.

Eleven years after the publication of the Manifesto, Marx formulated in clear and precise fashion the directing principles of the materialistic interpretation of history in the preface to a book which is