I.

In three years we can celebrate our jubilee. The memorable date of the

publication of the Communist Manifesto (February, 1848) marks our first

unquestioned entrance into history. To that date are referred all our

judgments and all our congratulations on the progress made by the

proletariat in these last fifty years. That date marks the beginning of

the new era. This is arising, or, rather, is separating itself from the

present era, and is developing by a process peculiar to itself and thus

in a way that is necessary and inevitable, whatever may be the

vicissitudes and the successive phases which cannot yet be foreseen.

All those in our ranks who have a desire or an occasion to possess a

better understanding of their own work should bring to mind the causes

and the moving forces which determined the genesis of the Manifesto, the

circumstances under which it appeared on the eve of the Revolution which

burst forth from Paris to Vienna, from Palermo to Berlin. Only in this

way will it be possible for us to find in the present social form the

explanation of the tendency toward socialism, thus showing by its

present necessity the inevitability of its triumph.

Is not that in fact the vital part of the Manifesto, its essence and its

distinctive character?

We surely should be taking a false road if we regarded as the essential

part the measures advised and proposed at the end of the second chapter

for the contingency of a revolutionary success on the part of the

proletariat,--or again the indications of political relationship to the

other revolutionary parties of that epoch which are found in the fourth

chapter. These indications and these measures, although they deserved to

be taken into consideration at the moment and under the circumstances

where they were formulated and suggested, and although they may be very

important for forming a precise estimate of the political action of the

German communists in the revolutionary period from 1848 to 1850,

henceforth no longer form for us a mass of practical judgments for or

against which we should take sides in each contingency. The political

parties which since the International have established themselves in

different countries, in the name of the proletariat, and taking it

clearly for their base, have felt, and feel, in proportion as they are

born and develop, the imperious necessity of adopting and conforming

their programme and their action to circumstances always different and

multiform. But not one of these parties feels the dictatorship of the

proletariat so near that it experiences the need or desire or even the

temptation to examine anew and pass judgment upon the measures proposed

in the Manifesto. There are really no historic experiences but those

that history makes itself. It is as impossible to foresee them as to

plan them beforehand or make them to order. That is what happened at the

moment of the Commune, which was and which still remains up to this day

the only experience (although 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 genesis of this struggle; it

details its evolutionary rhythm, and predicts its final result.

In that conception of history is embodied the whole doctrine of

scientific communism. From that moment the theoretical adversaries of

socialism have no longer had to discuss the abstract possibility of the

democratic socialization of the means of production;[2] as if it were

possible in this question to rest their judgment upon inductions based

upon the general and common aptitudes of what they characterize as human

nature. Thenceforth, the question was to recognize, or not to recognize,

in the course of human events the necessity which stands over and above

our sympathy and our subjective assent. Is or is not society in the

countries most advanced in civilization organized in such a way that it

will pass into communism by the laws inherent in its own future, once

conceding its present economic structure and the friction which it

necessarily produces within itself, and which will end by breaking and

dissolving it? That is the subject of all discussion since the

appearance of this theory and thence follows also the rule of conduct

which imposes itself upon the action of the socialist parties whether

they be composed of proletarians alone or whether they have in their

ranks men who have come out from the other classes and who join as

volunteers the army of the proletariat.

That is why we voluntarily accept the epithet of scientific, provided we

do not thus confuse ourselves with the positivists, sometimes

embarrassing guests, who assume to themselves a monopoly of science; we

do not seek to maintain an abstract and generic thesis like lawyers or

sophists, and we do not plume ourselves on demonstrating the

reasonableness of our aims. Our intentions are nothing less than the

theoretical expression and the practical explanation of the data offered

us by the interpretation of the process which is being accomplished

among us and about us and which has its whole existence in the objective

relations of social life of which we are the subject and the object, the

cause and the effect. Our aims are rational, not because they are

founded on arguments drawn from the reasoning of reason, but because

they are derived from the objective study of things, that is to say,

from the explanation of their process, which is not, and which cannot

be, a result of our will but which on the contrary triumphs over our

will and subdues it.

Not one of the previous or subsequent works of the authors of the

Manifesto themselves, although they have a much more considerable

scientific leaning, can replace the Manifesto or have the same specific

efficacy. It gives us in its classic simplicity the true expression of

this situation; the modern proletariat exists, takes its stand, grows

and develops in contemporary history as the concrete subject, the

positive force whose necessarily revolutionary action must find in

communism its necessary outcome. And that is why this work while giving

a theoretical base to its prediction and expressing it in brief, rapid

and concise formulae, forms a storehouse, or rather an inexhaustible

mine of embryonic thoughts which the reader may fertilize and multiply

indefinitely; it preserves all the original and originating force of the

thing which is but lately born and which has not yet left the field of

its production. This observation is intended especially for those who

applying a learned ignorance, when they are not humbugs, charlatans, or

amiable dilettanti, give to the doctrine of critical communism

precursors, patrons, allies and masters of every class without any

respect for common sense and the most vulgar chronology. Or again, they

try to bring back our materialistic conception of history into the

theory of universal evolution which to the minds of many is but a new

metaphor of a new metaphysics. Or again they seek in this doctrine a

derivative of Darwinism which is an analogous theory only in a certain

point of view and in a very broad sense; or again they have the

condescension to favor us with the alliance or the patronage of that

positive philosophy which extends from Comte, that degenerate and

reactionary disciple of the genial Saint-Simon, to Spencer, that

quintessence of anarchical capitalism, which is to say that they wish to

give us for allies our most open adversaries.

It is to its origin that this work owes its fertilizing power, its

classic strength, and the fact that it has given in so few pages the

synthesis of so many series and groups of ideas.[3]

It is the work of two Germans, but it is not either in its form or its

basis the expression of personal opinion. It contains no trace of the

imprecations, or the anxieties, or the bitterness familiar to all

political refuges and to all those who have voluntarily abandoned their

country to breathe elsewhere freer air. Neither do we find in it the

direct reproduction of the conditions of their own country, then in a

deplorable political state and which could not be compared to those of

France and England socially and economically, except as regards certain

portions of their territory. They brought to their work, on the

contrary, the philosophic thought which alone had placed and maintained

their country upon the level of contemporary history:--this philosophic

thought which in their hands was undergoing that important

transformation which permitted materialism, already renewed by Feuerbach

combined with dialectics, to embrace and understand the movement of

history in its most secret and until then unexplored causes,--unexplored

because hidden and difficult to observe. Both were communists and

revolutionists, but they were so neither by instinct, by impulse nor by

passion. They had elaborated an entirely new criticism of economic

science and they had understood the connection and the historic meaning

of the proletarian movement on both sides of the Channel, in France and

in England, before they were called to give in the Manifesto the

programme and the doctrine of the Communist League. This had its center

in London and numerous branches on the continent; it had behind it a

life and development of its own.

Engels had already published a critical essay in which passing over all

subjective and one-sided corrections he brought out for the first time

in an objective fashion the criticism of political economy and of the

antitheses inherent in the data and the concepts of that economy itself,

and he had become celebrated by the publication of a book on the

condition of the English working class which was the first attempt to

represent the movements of the working class as the result of the

workings of the forces and means of production.[4] Marx, in the few

years preceding, had become known as a radical publicist in Germany,

Paris and Brussels. He had conceived the first rudiments of the

materialistic conception of history. He had made a theoretically

victorious criticism of the hypotheses of Proudhon and the deductions

from his doctrine, and had given the first precise explanation of the

origin of surplus value as a consequence of the purchase and the use of

labor power, that is to say the first germ of the conceptions which were

later demonstrated and explained in their connection and their details

in Capital. Both men were in touch with the revolutionists of the

different countries of Europe, notably France, Belgium and England;

their Manifesto was not the expression of their personal theory, but the

doctrine of a party whose spirit, aim and activity already formed the

International Workingmen's Association.

These are the beginnings of modern socialism. We find there the line

which separates it from all the rest.

_The Communist League_ grew out of the _League of the Just_; the latter

in its turn had been formed with a clear consciousness of its

proletarian aims through a gradual specialization of the generic group

of the refugees, the exiles. As a type, bearing within itself in an

embryonic design the form of all the later socialist and proletarian

movements, it had traversed the different phases of conspiracy and of

equalitarian socialism. It was metaphysical with Gruen and utopian with

Weitling. Having its principal seat at London it was interested in the

Chartist movement and had had some influence over it. This movement

showed by its disordered character, because it was neither the fruit of

a premeditated experience, nor the embodiment of a conspiracy or of a

sect, how painful and difficult was the formation of a proletarian

political party. The socialist tendency was not manifested in Chartism

until the movement was near its end and was nearly finished (though

Jones and Horner can never be forgotten). The _League_ everywhere

carried an odor of revolution, both because the thing was in the air and

because its instinct and method of procedure tended that way: and as

long as the revolution was bursting forth effectively, it provided

itself, thanks to the new doctrine of the Manifesto, with an instrument

of orientation which was at the same time a weapon for combat. In fact,

already international, both by the quality and differences of origin of

its members, and still more by the result of the instinct and devotion

of all, it took its place in the general movement of political life as

the clear and definite precursor of all that can to-day be called modern

socialism, if by modern we mean not the simple fact of extrinsic

chronology but an index of the internal or organic process of society.

A long interruption from 1852 to 1864 which was the period of political

reaction and at the same time that of the disappearance, the dispersion

and the absorption of the old socialist schools, separates the

International of the _Arbeiterbildungsverein_ of London, from the

International properly so called, which, from 1864 to 1873, strove to

put unity into the struggle of the proletariat of Europe and America.

The action of the proletariat had other interruptions especially in

France, and with the exception of Germany, from the dissolution of the

International of glorious memory up to the new International which

lives to-day through other means and which is developing in other ways,

both of them adapted to the political situation in which we live, and

based upon riper experience. But just as the survivors of those who in

December, 1847, discussed and accepted the new doctrine, have

re-appeared on the public scene in the great International, and later

again in the new International, the Manifesto itself has also

re-appeared little by little and has made the tour of the world in all

the languages of the civilized countries, something which it promised to

do but could not do at the time of its first appearance.

There was our real point of departure; there were our real precursors.

They marched before all the others, early in the day, with a step rapid

but sure, over this exact road which we were to traverse and which we

are traversing in reality. It is not proper to give the name of our

precursors to those who followed ways which they later had to abandon,

or to those who, to speak without metaphor, formulated doctrines and

started movements, doubtless explicable by the times and circumstances

of their birth, but which were later outgrown by the doctrine of

critical communism, which is the theory of the proletarian revolution.

This does not mean that these doctrines and these attempts were

accidental, useless and superfluous phenomena. There is nothing

irrational in the historic course of things because nothing comes into

existence without reason, and thus there is nothing superfluous. We

cannot even to-day arrive at a perfect understanding of critical

communism without mentally retracing these doctrines and following the

processes of their appearance and disappearance. In fact these doctrines

have not only passed, they have been intrinsically outgrown both by

reason of the change in the conditions of society and by reason of the

more exact understanding of the laws upon which rest its formation and

its process.

The moment at which they enter into the past, that is to say, that at

which they are intrinsically outgrown, is precisely that of the

appearance of the Manifesto. As the first index of the genesis of modern

socialism, this writing, which gives only the most general and the most

easily accessible features of its teaching, bears within itself traces

of the historic field within which it is born, which was that of France,

England and Germany. Its field for propaganda and diffusion has since

become wider and wider, and it is henceforth as vast as the civilized

world. In all countries in which the tendency to communism has developed

through antagonisms under aspects different but every day more evident

between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, the process of its first

formation is wholly or partly repeated over and over. The proletarian

parties which are formed little by little have traversed anew the stages

of formation which their precursors traversed at first; but this process

has become from country to country and from year to year always more

rapid by reason of the greater evidence, the pressing necessity and

energy of the antagonisms, and because it is easier to assimilate a

doctrine and a tendency than to create both for the first time. Our

co-workers of 50 years ago were also from this point of view

international, since by their example they started the proletariat of

the different nations upon the general march which labor must

accomplish.

But the perfect theoretical knowledge of socialism to-day, as before,

and as it always will be, lies in the understanding of its historic

necessity, that is to say, in the consciousness of the manner of its

genesis; and this is precisely reflected, as in a limited field of

observation and in a hasty example, in the formation of the Manifesto.

It was intended for a weapon of war and thus it bears upon its own

exterior the traces of its origin. It contains more substantial

declarations than demonstrations. The demonstration rests entirely in

the imperative force of its necessity. But we may retrace the process of

this formation and to retrace it is to understand truly the doctrine of

the Manifesto. There is an analysis which while separating in theory the

factors of an organism destroys them in so far as they are elements

contributing to the unity of the whole. But there is another analysis,

and this alone permits us to understand history, which only

distinguishes and separates the elements to find again in them the

objective necessity of their co-operation toward the total result.

It is now a current opinion that modern socialism is a normal and thus

an inevitable product of history. Its political action, which may in

future involve delays and set-backs but never henceforth a total

absorption, began with the _International_. Nevertheless the Manifesto

precedes it. Its teaching is of prime importance in the light which it

throws on the proletarian movement, which movement indeed had its birth

and development independently of any doctrine. It is also more than this

light. Critical communism dates from the moment when the proletarian

movement is not merely a result of social conditions, but when it has

already strength enough to understand that these conditions can be

changed and to discern what means can modify them and in what direction.

It was not enough to say that socialism was a result of history. It was

also necessary to understand the intrinsic causes of this outcome and to

what all its activity tended. This affirmation, that the proletariat is

a necessary result of modern society, has for its mission to succeed the

bourgeoisie, and to succeed it as the producing force of a new social

order in which class antagonisms shall disappear, makes of the Manifesto

a characteristic epoch in the general course of history. It is a

revolution--but not in the sense of an apocalypse or a promised

millennium. It is the scientific and reflected revelation of the way

which our _civil society_ is traversing (if the shade of Fourier will

pardon me!).

The Manifesto thus gives us the inside history of its origin and

thereby justifies its doctrine and at the same time explains its

singular effect and its wonderful efficacy. Without losing ourselves in

details, here are the series and groups of elements which, reunited and

combined in this rapid and exact synthesis, give us the clue to all the

later development of scientific socialism.

The immediate, direct and appreciable material is given by France and

England which had already had since 1830 a working-class movement which

sometimes resembles and sometimes differentiates itself from the other

revolutionary movements and which extended from instinctive revolt to

the practical aims of the political parties (Chartism and Social

Democracy for example) and gave birth to different temporary and

perishable forms of communism and semi-communism like that to which the

name of socialism was then given.

To recognize in these movements no longer the fugitive phenomenon of

meteoric disturbances but a new social fact, there was need of a theory

which should explain them,--and a theory which should not be a simple

complement of the democratic tradition nor the subjective correction of

the disadvantages, thenceforth recognized, of the economy of

competition: although many were then concerned with this. This new

theory was the personal work of Marx and Engels. They carried over the

conception of historical progress through the process of antitheses from

the abstract form, which the Hegelian dialectic had already described

in its most general features, to the concrete explanation of the class

struggle; and in this historic movement where it had been supposed that

we observed the passage from one form of ideas to another form they saw

for the first time the transition from one form of social anatomy to

another, that is from one form of economic production to another form.

This historic conception, which gave a theoretic form to this necessity

of the _new social revolution_ more or less explicit in the instinctive

consciousness of the proletariat and in its passionate and spontaneous

movements, recognizing the intrinsic and imminent necessity of the

revolution, changed the concept of it. That which the sects of

conspirators had regarded as belonging to the domain of the will and

capable of being constructed at pleasure, became a simple process which

might be favored, sustained and assisted. The revolution became the

object of a policy the conditions of which are given by the complex

situation of society; it therefore became a result which the proletariat

must attain through struggles and various means of organization which

the old tactics of revolts had not yet imagined. And this because the

proletariat is not an accessory and auxiliary means, an excrescence, an

evil, which can be eliminated from the society in which we are living

but because it is its substratum, its essential condition, its

inevitable effect and in turn the cause which preserves and maintains

society itself; and thus it cannot emancipate itself without at the

same time emancipating every one, that is to say, revolutionizing

completely the form of production.

Just as the _League of the Just_ had become _The Communist League_ by

stripping itself of the forms of symbolism and conspiracy and adopting

little by little the means of propaganda and of political action from

and after the check attending the insurrection of Barbes and Blanqui

(1839), so likewise the new doctrine, which the _League_ accepted and

made its own, definitely abandoned the ideas which inspired the action

of conspiracies, and conceived as the outcome and objective result of a

process, that which the conspirators believed to be the result of a

pre-determined plan or the emanation from their heroism.

At that point begins a new ascending line in the order of facts and

another connection of concepts and of doctrines.

The communism of conspiracy, the Blanquism of that time, carries us up

through Buonarotti and also through Bazard and the "Carbonari" to the

conspiracy of Baboeuf, a true hero of ancient tragedy who hurled himself

against fate because there was no connection between his aim and the

economic condition of the moment, and he was as yet incapable of

bringing upon the political scene a proletariat having a broad class

consciousness. From Baboeuf and certain less known elements of the

Jacobin period, past Boissel and Fauchet we ascend to the intuitive

Morelly and to the original and versatile Mably and if you please to

the chaotic _Testament_ of the _cure_ Meslier, an instinctive and

violent rebellion of "good sense" against the savage oppression endured

by the unhappy peasant.

These precursors of the socialism of violence, protest and conspiracy

were all equalitarians; as were also most of the conspirators. Thus by a

singular but inevitable error they took for a weapon of combat,

interpreting it and generalizing it, that same doctrine of equality

which developing as a _natural right_ parallel to the formation of the

economic theory, had become an instrument in the hands of the

bourgeoisie which was winning step by step its present position to

transform the society of privilege into that of liberalism, free

exchange and the civil code.[5]

Following this immediate deduction which at bottom was a simple

illusion, that all men being equal in nature should also be equal in

their enjoyments, it was thought that the appeal to reason carried with

it all the elements of propaganda and persuasion, and that the rapid,

immediate and violent taking possession of the exterior instruments of

political power was the only means to set to right those who resisted.

But whence come and how persist all these inequalities which appear so

irrational in the light of a concept of justice so simple and so

elementary? The Manifesto was the clear negation of the principle of

equality understood so naively and so clumsily. While proclaiming as

inevitable the abolition of classes in the future form of collective

production, it explains to us the necessity, the birth and the

development of these very classes as a fact which is not an exception,

or a derogation of an abstract principle, but the very process of

history.

Even as the modern proletariat involves the bourgeoisie, so the latter

cannot exist without the former. And both are the 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 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'Etat 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 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 Muenster 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 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 hidden economic causes because, for the moment, to

understand the reaction was to continue the work of the revolution. The

same thing happened under other conditions and other forms 20 years

later when Marx, in the name of the International made in the "Civil War

in France" an apology for the Commune which was at the same time its

objective criticism.

The heroic resignation with which Marx after 1850 abandoned political

life was shown again when he retired from the International after the

congress at the Hague in 1872. These two facts have their value for

biography because they give glimpses of his personal character. With

him, in fact, ideas, temperament, policy and thought were one and the

same. But, on the other hand, these facts have a much greater bearing

for us. Critical communism does not manufacture revolutions, it does not

prepare insurrections, it does not furnish arms for revolts. It mingles

itself with the proletarian movement, but it sees and supports that

movement in the full intelligence of the connection which it has, which

it can have, and which it must have, with all the relations of social

life as a whole. In a word it is not a seminary in which superior

officers of the proletarian revolution are trained, but it is neither

more nor less than the consciousness of this revolution and especially

the consciousness of its difficulties.

The proletarian movement has grown in a colossal fashion during these

last thirty years. In the midst of numberless difficulties, through

gains and losses, it has little by little taken on a political form. Its

methods have been elaborated and gradually applied. All this is not the

work of the magic action of the doctrine scattered by the persuasive

virtue of written and spoken propaganda. From their first beginnings the

communists had this feeling that they were the extreme left of every

proletarian movement, but in proportion as the latter developed and

specialized it became their necessity and duty to assist, (through the

elaboration of programmes, and through their participation in the

political action of the parties) in the various contingencies of the

economic development and of the political situation growing out of it.

In the fifty years which separate us from the publication of the

Manifesto the specialization and the complexity of the proletarian

movement have become such that there is henceforth no mind capable of

embracing it in its completeness, of understanding it in its details and

grasping its real causes and exact relations. The single International,

from 1864 to 1873, necessarily disappeared after it had fulfilled its

task. The preliminary equalization of the general tendencies and of the

ideas common and indispensable to all the proletariat, and no one can

assume or will assume to re-constitute anything like it.

Two causes, notably, contributed in a high degree to this

specialization, this complexity of the proletarian movement. In many

countries the bourgeoisie felt the need of putting an end in the

interest of its own defense to some of the abuses which had arisen in

consequence of the introduction of the industrial system. Thence arose

labor legislation, or as it has been pompously called social

legislation. This same bourgeoisie in its own interest or, under the

pressure of circumstances has been obliged, in many countries to

increase the generic conditions of liberty, and notably to extend the

right of suffrage. These two circumstances have drawn the proletariat

into the circle of daily political life. They have considerably

increased its chance for action and the agility and suppleness thus

acquired permit it to struggle with the bourgeoisie in elective

assembles. And as the _processus_ of things determines the _processus_

of ideas, this practical multiform development of the proletariat is

accompanied by a gradual development of the doctrines of critical

communism, as well in the manner of understanding history or

contemporary life as in the minute description of the most infinitesimal

parts of economics: in a word, it has become a science.

Have we not there, some ask, a deviation from the simple and imperative

doctrine of the Manifesto? Others again say, have we not lost in

intensity and precision what we have gained in extension and complexity?

These questions, in my opinion, arise from an inexact conception of the

present proletarian movement and an optical illusion as to the degree of

energy and revolutionary valor of the former movements.

Whatever be the concessions that the bourgeoisie can make in the present

economic order even if it be a very great reduction in the hours of

labor, it always remains true that the necessity for exploitation upon

which the whole present social order rests imposes limits beyond which

capital as a private instrument of production has no more reason for

existence. If a concession to-day can allay one form of discontent in

the proletariat, the concession itself can do nothing less than to give

rise to the need of new and ever increasing concessions. The need of

labor legislation arose in England before the Chartist movement and it

developed afterwards along with it. It had its first successes in the

period which immediately followed the fall of Chartism. The principles

and the reasons of this movement in their causes and their effects were

studied in a critical manner by Marx in Capital and they afterwards

passed, through the International, into the programmes of the different

socialist parties. Finally this whole process, concentrating itself into

the demand for eight hours, became with the 1st of May an international

marshalling of the proletariat, and a means for estimating its progress.

On the other hand, the political struggle in which the proletariat takes

part democratizes its habits; still more a real democracy takes birth

which, with time, will no longer be able to adapt itself to the present

political form. Being the organ of a society based on exploitation it is

constituted as a bureaucratic hierarchy, as a judicial bureaucracy and a

mutual aid society of the capitalists for the defense of their special

privileges, the perpetual income from the public debt, the rent of land

and the interest on capital in all its forms. Consequently the two

facts, which according to the discontented and the hypercritical seem to

make us deviate infinitely from the lines laid down by communism,

become, on the contrary, new means and new conditions which confirm

these lines. The apparent deviations from the revolution are, at bottom,

the very thing which is hastening it.

Moreover, we must not exaggerate the significance of the revolutionary

faith of the communists of fifty years ago. Given the political

situation of Europe, if they had a faith, it was that they were

precursors, and this they have been; they hoped that the political

conditions of Italy, Austria, Hungary, Germany and Poland might

approximate to modern forms, and this has happened later, in part, and

through other means; if they had a hope, it was that the proletarian

movement of France and England might continue to develop. The reaction

which intervened upset many things and stopped more than one development

which had already begun. It upset also the old revolutionary tactic, and

in these last years a new tactic has arisen. Therein lies all the

change.[14]

The Manifesto was designed for nothing else than the first guiding

thread to a science and a practice which nothing but experience and time

could develop. It gives only the scheme and the rhythm of the general

march of the proletarian movement.

It is perfectly evident that the communists were influenced by the

experience of the two movements which they had before their eyes, that

of France, and especially the Chartist movement which the manifestation

of April 10th was soon to strike with paralysis. But this scheme does

not fix in any invariable fashion a tactic of war, which indeed had

already been made frequently. The revolutionists had often indeed

explained in the form of catechism what ought to be a simple consequence

of the development of events.

This scheme became more vast and complex with the development and

extension of the bourgeois system. The rhythm of the movement has become

more varied and slower because the laboring mass has entered on the

scene as a distinct, political party, which fact changes the manner and

the measure of their action and consequently their movement.

Just as in view of the improvement of modern weapons the tactic of

street riots has become inopportune, and just as the complexity of the

modern state shows the insufficiency of a sudden capture of a municipal

government to impose upon a whole people the will and the ideas of a

minority, no matter how courageous and progressive, even so, on its

side, the mass of the proletarians no longer holds to the word of

command of a few leaders, nor does it regulate its movements by the

instructions of captains who might upon the ruins of one government

raise up another. The laboring mass where it has developed politically

has made and is making its own democratic education. It is choosing its

representatives and submitting their action to its criticism. It

examines and makes its own the ideas and the propositions which these

representatives submit to it. It already knows, or it begins to

understand according to the situation in the various countries, that the

conquest of the political power cannot and should not be made by others

in its name, and especially that it cannot be the consequence of a

single blow. In a word it knows, or it is beginning to understand that

the dictatorship of the proletariat which shall have for its task the

socialization of the means of production cannot be the work of a mass

led by a few and that it must be, and that it will be, the work of the

proletarians themselves when they have become in themselves and through

long practice a political organization.

The development and the extension of the bourgeois system have been

rapid and colossal in these last fifty years. It already invades sacred

and ancient Russia and it is creating, not only in America, Australia

and in India, but even in Japan, new centers of modern production, thus

complicating the conditions of competition and the entanglements of the

world market. The consequences of political changes have been produced,

or will not be long to wait for. Equally rapid and colossal has been the

progress of the proletariat. Its political education takes each day a

new step toward the conquest of political power. The rebellion of the

productive forces against the form of production, the struggle of living

labor against accumulated labor, becomes every day more evident. The

bourgeois system is henceforth upon the defensive and it reveals its

decadence by this singular contradiction; the peaceful world of industry

has become a colossal camp in which militarism develops. The peaceful

period of industry has become by the irony of things the period of the

continuous invention of new engines of war.

Socialism has forced itself into the situation. Those semi-socialists,

even those charlatans who encumber with their presence the press and the

meetings of our party and who often are a nuisance to us, are a tribute

which vanity and ambitions of every sort render in their fashion to the

new power which rises on the horizon. In spite of the foreseen antidote

which scientific socialism is, the truth of which many people have not

come to understand, there is a group of quacks on the social question,

all having some particular specific to eliminate such or such a social

evil: land nationalization, monopoly of grains in the hands of the

State, democratic taxes, statization of mortgages, general strike, etc.

But social democracy eliminates all these fantasies because the

consciousness of their situation leads the proletarians when once they

have become familiar with the political arena to understand socialism in

an integral fashion. They come to understand that they should look for

only one thing, the abolition of wage labor; that there is but one form

of society which renders possible and even necessary the elimination of

classes,--the association which does not produce commodities, and that

this form of society is no longer the State, but its opposite, that is

to say, the technical and pedagogical administration of human society,

the self-government of labor. Behind the Jacobins are the gigantic

heroes of 1793 and their caricatures of 1848.

_Social democracy!_ But is not that, say some, an evident attenuation of

the communist doctrine as it is formulated in the Manifesto in terms so

ringing and so decisive?

This is not the moment to recall that the phrase _social democracy_ has

had in France many significations from 1837 to 1848, all of which were

based upon a vague sentimentalism. Neither is it necessary to explain

how the Germans have been able in this nomenclature to sum up all the

rich and vast development of their socialism from the episode of

Lassalle now passed over and transformed up to our own days. It is

certain that _social democracy_ can signify, has signified and signifies

many things which have not been, are not, and never will be, either

critical communism or the conscious march toward the proletarian

revolution. It is also certain that contemporary socialism even in the

countries where its development is most advanced, carries with it a

great deal of dross which it throws off little by little along the road.

It is certain also, in fine, that this broad designation of social

democracy serves as an escutcheon and a buckler to many intruders. But

here we need to fix our attention only upon certain points of capital

importance.

We must insist upon the second term of the expression in order to avoid

any equivocation. Democratic was the constitution of the _Communist

League_; democratic was its fashion of welcoming and discussing each new

teaching; democratic was its intervention in the revolution of 1848 and

its participation in the rebellious resistance against the invasion of

reaction; democratic finally was the very way in which the League was

dissolved. In this first type of our present parties, in this first cell

so to speak, of our complex organism, elastic and highly developed,

there was not only the consciousness of the mission to be accomplished

as precursor, but there was already the form and the method of

association which alone are suitable for the first initiators of the

proletarian revolution. It was no longer a sect; that form was already,

in fact, outgrown. The immediate and fantastic domination of the

individual was eliminated, what predominated was a discipline which had

its source in the experience of necessity and in the precise doctrine

which must proceed from the reflex consciousness of this necessity. It

was the same with the International, which appeared authoritarian only

to those who could not make their own authority prevail in it. It must

be the same, and it is so, in the working class parties and where this

character is not or cannot yet be marked, the proletarian agitation

still elementary and confused simply engenders illusions and is only a

pretext for intrigues, and when it is not so, then we have a passover

where men of understanding touch elbows with the madman and the spy; as

for example the society of The International Brothers which attached

itself like a parasite to the International and discredited it; or again

the co-operative which degenerates into a business and sells itself to

capitalists; the labor party which remains outside politics and which

studies the variations of the market to introduce its tactic of strikes

into the sinuosities of competition; or again a group of malcontents,

for the most part social outcasts and little bourgeois, who give

themselves up to speculations on socialism considered as one of the

phases of political fashion. Social democracy has met all these

impedimenta upon its way and it has been obliged to relieve itself of

them as it will have to do again from one time to another. The art of

persuasion does not always suffice. Oftener it was necessary and it is

necessary to resign ourselves and wait until the hard school of

disillusion serves to instruct, which it does better than reasonings can

do.

All these intrinsic difficulties of the proletarian movement, which the

wily bourgeoisie oftener than not stirs up of itself and which it makes

the most of, form a considerable part of the internal history of

socialism during these last years.

Socialism has not found impediments merely in the general conditions of

economic competition and in the resistance of the political power, but

also in the very conditions of the proletarian mass and in the mechanism

sometimes obscure although inevitable of its slow, varied, complex

movements, often antagonistic and contradictory. That prevents many

people from seeing the increasing reduction of all class struggles to

the single struggle between the capitalists and the proletarianized

workers.

Even as the Manifesto did not write, as the utopians did, the ethics and

the psychology of the future society, just so it did not give the

mechanism of that formation and of the development in which we find

ourselves. It is surely enough that these few pioneers have opened the

road. We must walk upon it to arrive at understanding and experience.

Moreover man is distinctively the experimental animal; that is why he

has a history, or rather that is why he makes his own history.

Upon this road of contemporary socialism which constitutes its

development because it is its experience, we have met the mass of the

peasants.

Socialism which at first kept itself practically and theoretically to

the study and experience of the antagonisms between capitalists and

proletarians in the circle of industrial production properly so called,

has turned its activity toward that mass in which _peasant stupidity_

blossoms. To capture the peasants is the question of the hour, although

the quintessential Schaeffle long ago mobilized the anti-collectivist

brains of the peasants for the defense of the existing order. The

elimination and the capture of domestic industry by capital, the passage

more and more rapid of agrarian industry into the capitalist form, the

disappearance of small proprietorship, or its lessening through

mortgages, the disappearance of the communal domaines, usury, taxes and

militarism, all this is beginning to work miracles even in those brains

assumed to be props of the existing order.

The Germans have been the pioneers in this field. They were brought to

it by the very fact of their immense expansion; from the cities they

have gone to the smallest centers and they thus arrive inevitably at the

frontiers of the country. Their attempts will be long and difficult;

this fact explains, excuses, and will excuse, the errors which have been

and will be committed.[15] As long as the peasant shall not be gained

over we shall always have behind us this _peasant stupidity_ which

unconsciously repeats, and that because it is stupid, the errors of the

18th Brumaire and the 2d of December. The development of modern society

in Russia will probably proceed on parallel lines with this conquest of

the country districts. When that country shall have entered into the

liberal era with all its imperfections and all its disadvantages, with

all the purely modern forms of exploitation and of proletarization, but

also with the compensations and the advantages of the political

development of the proletariat, social democracy will no longer have to

fear the threat of unforeseen perils from without, and it will at the

same time have triumphed over the internal perils by the capture of the

peasants.

The example of Italy is instructive. This country after having opened

the capitalist era dropped out for several centuries from the current

history. It is a typical case of decadence which can be studied in a

precise fashion from original documents in all its phases. It partly

returned into history at the time of the Napoleonic domination. It

reconquered its unity and became a modern state after the period of the

reaction and conspiracies, and under circumstances known to all, and

Italy has ended by having all the vices of parliamentarism, of

militarism and of finance without having at the same time the forms of

modern production and the resulting capacity for competition on equal

terms. It cannot compete with countries where industry is more advanced

by reason of the absolute lack of coal and scarcity of iron, the lack of

technical ability,--and it is waiting, or hoping now, that the

application of electricity may permit it to regain the time lost. It is

this which gave the impulse to different attempts from Biella to Schio.

A modern state in a society almost exclusively agricultural and in a

country where agriculture is in great part backward, it is that which

gives birth to this general sentiment of universal discontent.

Thence come the incoherence and the inconsistency of the parties, the

rapid oscillations from demagogy to dictatorship, the mob, the

multitude, the infinite army of the parasites of politics, the makers of

fantastic projects. This singular social spectacle of a development

prevented, retarded, embarrassed and thus uncertain, is brought out in

bold relief by a penetrating spirit which, if it is not always the fruit

and the expression of a modern, broad and real culture nevertheless

bears within itself as the relic of an excellent civilization the mark

of great cerebral refinement. Italy has not been for reasons easy to

guess a suitable field for the indigenous formation of socialist ideas

and tendencies. The Italian Philippe Buonaroti, at first the friend of

the younger Robespierre, become the companion of Babeuf and later

attempted to re-establish Babeufism in France, after 1830. Socialism

made its first appearance in Italy at the time of the International, in

the confused and incoherent form of Bakuninism; it was not, moreover, a

labor movement, but it was the work of the small bourgeois and

instinctive revolutionists.[16] In these last years socialism has fixed

itself in a form which _almost_ reproduces the general type of _social

democracy_.[17] Now in Italy the first sign of life which the

proletariat gave is in the shape of the rising of the Sicilian peasants

followed by other revolts of the same kind on the continent to which

others will perhaps succeed in the future. Is it not very significant?

After this incursion into the history of contemporary socialism we

gladly return to our precursors of fifty years ago, who put on record in

the Manifesto how they took possession of an advance post on the road of

progress. And that is true not merely of the theorizers, that is to say,

Marx and Engels. Both of these men would have exercised, under other

circumstances and at all times either by tongue or pen, a considerable

influence over politics and science such was the force and originality

of their minds and the extent of their knowledge even if they had never

met on their way the _Communist League_. But I am referring to all the

"unknown" according to the exclusive and vain jargon of bourgeois

literature:--of the shoemaker, Bauer, the tailors, Lessner and Eccarius,

the miniature painter, Pfaender, the watchmaker, Moll,[18] of Lochner,

etc., and many others who were the first conscious initiators of our

movement. The motto, "Workingmen of all countries, unite," remains as

their monument. The passage of socialism from utopia to science marks

the result of their work. The survival of their instinct and of their

first impulse in the work of to-day is the ineffaceable title which

these precursors have acquired to the gratitude of all socialists.

As an Italian, I return so much the more willingly to these beginnings

of modern socialism because for me, at least, this recent warning of

Engels' is not without importance. "Thus the discovery that everywhere

and always political conditions and events find their explanation in

economic conditions would not have been made by Marx in 1845, but rather

by Loria in 1886. He has at least succeeded in impressing this belief

upon his compatriots, and since his book has appeared in French even

upon some Frenchmen and he may now go on inflated with pride and vanity

as if he had discovered an epoch-making historic theory until the

Italian socialists have time to despoil the illustrious Mr. Loria of the

peacock feathers which he has stolen."[19]