the new
historic conception is not an easy thing. We must not be over-hasty in
tabulating it. At the very beginning we must understand the economics
relative to each epoch,[26] in order to explain specifically the classes
which develop in it, avoiding hypothetical and uncertain data and taking
care not to carry over our own conditions into each epoch. For that,
skilled fingers are needed. Thus, for example, what the Manifesto says
of the first origin of the bourgeoisie proceeding from the serfs of the
Middle Ages incorporated little by little into the cities is not a
general truth. This mode of origin is peculiar to Germany and to the
other countries which reproduce its process. It is not the case either
in Italy, nor in Southern France, nor in Spain, which were the fields
upon which began the first history of the bourgeoisie, that is to say,
of modern civilization. In this first phase are found all the premises
of the whole capitalist society as Marx informed us in a note to the
first volume of Capital.[27] This first phase which reaches its perfect
form in the Italian municipalities forms the pre-historic background for
that capitalist accumulation which Marx has explained with so many
characteristic details in the evolution of England. But I will stop
there.

The proletarians can have in view nothing but the future. That with
which all scientific socialists are primarily concerned is the present
in which are spontaneously developed and in which are ripening the
conditions of the future. The knowledge of the past is practically of
use and of interest only in so far as it throws light upon and explains
the present. For the moment it is enough to say that the partisans of
critical communism fifty years ago conceived the elements of the new and
definite philosophy of history. Soon this fashion of seeing will impose
itself because it will be impossible to think the contrary; and this
discovery will have the fate of Columbus' egg. And perhaps before an
army of scientists has made an application of this conception to the
continuous narration of the whole history, the success of the
proletariat will have become such that the bourgeois epoch will appear
to all as something that must be left behind because it will nearly be
so in reality. _To understand is to leave behind_ (Hegel).

When, fifty years ago, the Manifesto made of the proletarians, of the
unfortunates who excited pity, the predestined grave-diggers of the
bour