only necessary to bring this reversal of conditions to outward
recognition to give it legal sanction. This is always the case in
all revolutions. You can never make a revolution. You can only give
external legal recognition and logical embodiment in practice to a
revolution which has already become an actuality in the essential
relations of society. Trying to make a revolution is the folly of
immature men who have no conception of the laws of history.

Precisely for this reason it is just as immature and childish to
suppress a revolution already fully formed in the womb of society and
to oppose its legal recognition, or to reproach those who assist at
its birth with being revolutionary. If the revolution is at hand in
the actual conditions of society, nothing can prevent its appearing
and passing into legislation.

How these things were related, and how far they had already gone in
this direction in the period of which I speak, you will best see from
another matter which I will mention.

I have already spoken about the division of labor, the development of
which consists of separating all production into a series of entirely
simple mechanical operations requiring no thought on the part of the
operator. As this separation progresses farther and farther, the
discovery is finally made that these single operations, because they
are quite simple and call for no thought, can be accomplished just as
well, and even better, by unthinking agents; and so in 1775, fourteen
years before the French Revolution, Arkwright invented the first
machine, his famous spinning-jenny.

We can see that the machine in itself was not the cause of the
revolution. Too little time intervened between this invention, which
furthermore was not immediately introduced into France, and the
revolution; but it embodied in itself the actually incipient and fully
ripe revolution. This machine, however innocent it seemed, was in fact
the revolution personified. The reasons for this are simple. You, of
course, have heard of the guild system, by which production in the
Middle Ages was directed. The guild system of the Middle Ages was
inseparably connected with other institutions. The guilds lasted
through the whole medieval period up to the French Revolution; but as
early as 1672 the matter of their abolition was considered in the
German parliament, though without result. Even in 1614, in the French
_Etats Generaux_, the abolition of the guilds was demanded