geoisie, the circumference of this burial place must have appeared
very small to the imagination of the writers who scarcely concealed in
the gravity of their style the idealism of their intellectual passion.
The probable circumference in their imagination then embraced only
France and England, and it would scarcely have touched the frontiers of
other countries, for instance, Germany. To-day the circumference appears
to us immense by reason of the rapid and colossal extension of the
bourgeois form of production which by inevitable reaction enlarges,
makes universal and multiplies the movement of the proletariat and
immensely expands the scene upon which is projected the picture of the
coming communism. The burial place extends as far as the eye can reach.
The more productive forces this magician calls forth, the more he
excites and prepares forces that must rebel against himself.

All those who were communists ideological, religious and utopian, or
even prophetic and apocalyptic in the past have always believed that the
reign of justice, equality and happiness was destined to have the world
for its theatre. To-day the world is invaded by civilization and
everywhere is developing that society which lives upon class antagonisms
and class domination, the form of bourgeois production. (Japan may serve
us for an example.) The coexistence of the two nations in one and the
same state, which the divine Plato had already described, is
perpetuated. The earth will not be won over to communism to-morrow. But
as the confines of the bourgeois world enlarge, more numerous are those
who enter into it, abandoning and leaving behind the lower forms of
production,--and thus the attempt of communism gains in firmness and
precision; especially because in the domain and struggle of competition,
the deviations due to conquest and colonization are diminishing. The
proletarian International, while embryonic in the Communist League of
fifty years ago, henceforth becomes Interoceanic and it affirms on the
first of every May that the proletarians of the whole world are really
and actively united. The future grave-diggers of the bourgeoisie and
their descendants to many generations will ever remember the date of the
Communist Manifesto.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] I refer to that form which the Manifesto designates ironically under
the name of "German or 'True' Socialism." This paragraph, which is
unintelligible for those who are not well versed in the Germ