ence and Roman law, remaining all the while
an ancient democratic city, with slavery, might at the same time acquire
and develop all the conditions of modern technique? Why not believe that
the trade guild of the Middle Ages, remaining all the while on its
inflexible mould, should take its way to the conquest of the world
market without the conditions of unlimited competition, which actually
began by its destruction and negation? Why not imagine a fief which,
remaining a fief all the while, should become a factory producing
commodities exclusively? Why could not Michel de Lando have written the
Communist Manifesto? Why could we not also believe that the discoveries
of modern science could have proceeded from the brains of men of no
matter what other time and place, that is to say, before determined
conditions had given rise to determined needs, and before repeated and
accumulated experiences should have provided for the satisfaction of
these needs?

Our doctrine assumes the broad, conscious and continuous development of
modern technique, and with it that society which produces commodities in
the antagonisms of competition, that society which as a first condition
and an indispensable means for its own perpetuation presupposes
capitalist accumulation in the form of private property; that society
which continually produces and reproduces proletarians, and which if it
is to perpetuate itself, must incessantly revolutionize its tools, and
with them the State and its legal gearings. This society, which, by the
very laws of its movement, has laid bare its own anatomy, produces by
its reaction the materialistic conception. Even as it has produced in
socialism its positive negation, so it has engendered in the new
historic doctrine its ideal negation. If history is the product, not
arbitrary, but necessary and normal, of men in so far as they are
developing, and if they are developing in so far as they are making
social experiments, and if they are experimenting in so far as they are
making improvements in their labor, which accumulate and preserve
products and results, the phase of development in which we live cannot
be the last and final phase, and the contrasts which are intimately
bound to it and inherent in it are the productive forces of new
conditions. And this is how the period of the great economic and
political revolutions of these last two centuries has ripened in the
mind these two concepts: the immanence and constan