ifferent countries, in different times, in different places, what I may
call almost a hierarchy of souls, of intellects, of minds. That is to
say, that culture, which, for the idealists, constitutes the sum of
progress, has been and is by the necessities of the case very unequally
distributed. The greater portion of mankind, by the quality of their
occupations, are composed of individuals who are disintegrated, broken
into fragments and rendered incapable of a complete and normal
development. To the economics of classes and to the hierarchy of social
positions corresponds the psychology of classes. The relativity of
progress is then for us the inevitable consequence of class
distinctions. These distinctions constitute the obstacles which explain
the possibility of relative retrogression, up to the point of degeneracy
and of the dissolution of an entire society. The machines, which mark
the triumph of science, become, by reason of the antithetic conditions
of the social plexus, instruments which impoverish millions and millions
of artisans and free peasants. The progress of technique, which fills
the towns with merchandise, makes more miserable and abject the
condition of the peasants, and in the cities themselves it further
humbles the condition of the humble. All the progress of science has
served thus far to differentiate a class of scientists and to keep ever
further from culture the masses who, attached to their ceaseless daily
toil, are thus feeding the whole of society.

Progress has been and is, up to the present time, partial and one-sided.
The minorities which share in it call this human progress; and the proud
evolutionists call this human nature which is developing. All this
partial progress, which has thus far developed upon the oppression of
man by man, has its foundation in the conditions of opposition, by which
economic distinctions have engendered all the social distinctions; from
the relative liberty of the few is born the servitude of the greater
number, and law has been the protector of injustice. Progress, thus seen
and clearly appreciated, appears to us as the moral and intellectual
epitome of all human miseries and of all material inequalities.

To discover this inevitable relativity it was necessary that communism,
born at first as an instinctive movement in the soul of the oppressed,
should become a science and a political party. It was then necessary
that our doctrine should give the measure of