h returns to the buyer more than it costs him; and is not this
commodity precisely the labor power of the wage worker? The economic
system is not a tissue of reasonings but it is a sum and a complexus of
facts which engenders a complex tissue of relations. It is a foolish
thing to assume that this system of facts which the ruling class has
established with great pains through the centuries by violence, by
sagacity, by talent and by science will confess itself vanquished, will
destroy itself to give way to the demands of the poor and to the
reasonings of their advocates. How demand the suppression of poverty
without demanding the overthrow of all the rest? To demand of this
society that it shall change its law which constitutes its defense is to
demand an absurd thing. To demand of this State that it shall cease to
be the buckler and the defense of this society and of this law is
plunging into absurdities.[24] The one-sided socialism which without
being clearly utopian starts from the hypothesis that society admits of
certain errata without revolution, that is to say without a fundamental
change in the general elementary structure of society itself, is a mere
piece of ingenuity. This contradiction with the rigid laws of the
process of things is shown in all its evidence in Proudhon, who,
reproducing without knowing it, or copying directly, some of the
one-sided English socialists, wished to arrest and change history, armed
with a definition and a syllogism.

The partisans of critical communism recognized that history has the
right to follow its course. The bourgeois phase can be outgrown and it
will be. But as long as it exists it has its laws. The relativity of
these consists in the fact that they grow and develop in certain
determined conditions, but their relativity is not simply the opposite
of necessity, a mere appearance, a soap-bubble. These laws may disappear
and they will disappear by the very fact of the change of society, but
they do not yield to the arbitrary suggestion which demands a change,
proclaims a reform, or formulates a programme. Communism makes common
cause with the proletariat because in this resides the revolutionary
force which, bursts, breaks, shakes and dissolves the present social
form and creates in it, little by little, new conditions; or to be more
exact, the very fact of its movement shows to us that these new
conditions are already born.

The theory of the class struggle was found. It w