maxims and general and abstract
principles. In the circle of these products, and of these derived and
complex developments of the second degree, spring up also the sciences
and arts, philosophy and learning, and history as a literary fashion of
production. This circle is what the rationalists and the ideologists,
ignorant of its real foundations, have called, and call, in an exclusive
fashion, civilization. And, in fact, it has happened, and it happens,
that some men, and especially professional scientists, lay or clerical,
have found, and find, the means of intellectual livelihood in the closed
circle of the reflex and secondary products of civilization, and that
they have been able and are able consequently to submit all the rest to
the subjective view which they have elaborated under these conditions;
that is, the origin and explanation of all the ideologies. Our doctrine
has definitely outgrown the visual angle of ideology. The premeditated
designs, the political views, sciences, systems of law, etc., instead of
being the means and the instrument of the explanation of history, are
precisely what require to be explained, because they are derived from
determined conditions and situations. But that does not mean that they
are pure appearances, soap bubbles. If they are things which have been
developed and derived, that does not imply that they are not real
things; and that is so true that they have been, for centuries, to the
unscientific consciousness, and to the scientific consciousness still on
the way towards its formation, the only ones which really existed.

But that is not all.

Our doctrine, like others, may lead to reverie and offer an occasion and
a theme for a new inverted ideology. It was born on the battlefield of
communism. It assumes the appearance of the modern proletariat on the
political stage, and it assumes that alignment upon the origins of our
present society which has permitted us to reconstruct in a critical
manner the whole genesis of the bourgeoisie. It is a doctrine
revolutionary from two points of view; because it has found the reasons
and the methods of development of the proletarian revolution which is in
the making, and because it proposes to find the causes and the
conditions of development of all other social revolutions which have
taken place in the past, in the class antagonisms which arrived at a
certain critical point, by reason of the contradiction between the forms
of producti