ever the struggle of the laborers
has taken definite form, the bourgeois codes have been convicted of
falsehood. Written judgment has shown itself powerless to save the
wage-workers from the oscillations of the market, to guarantee women and
children against the oppressive hours of the factories, or to find an
expedient to solve the problem of forced idleness. The partial
limitation of the hours of labor has, itself alone, been the subject and
the occasion of a gigantic struggle. The small and the large
bourgeoisie, agrarians and manufacturers, advocates of the poor and
defenders of accumulated wealth, monarchists and democrats, socialists
and reactionaries, have bitterly contended over extracting profit from
the action of the public authorities and over exploiting the
contingencies of politics and parliamentary intrigue, to find the
guaranty and the defense of certain definite interests in the
interpretation of existing law, or in the creation of a new law. This
new legislation has more than once been revised, and the strangest
oscillations may be observed in it; extending from the humanitarianism
which defends the poor and even animals, to the promulgation of martial
law. Justice has been stripped of its mask and has become merely a
profane thing.

The consciousness of experience has come to us and has given us a
formula as precise as it is modest; every rule of law has been and is
the customary, authoritative, or judicial defense of a definite
interest; the reduction of law to economics is then almost immediately
accomplished.

If the materialistic conception finally came to furnish to these
tendencies an explicit and systematic view, it is because its
orientation has been determined by the visual angle of the proletariat.
This last is the necessary product and the indispensable condition of a
society in which all the persons are, from an abstract point of view,
equal before the law, but where the material conditions of development
and the liberties of each are unequal. The proletarians are the forces
through which the accumulated means of production reproduce themselves
and reconstitute themselves into new wealth; but they themselves live
only by enrolling themselves under the authority of capital; and from
one day to the next they find themselves out of work, impoverished and
exiles. They are the army of social labor, but their chiefs are their
masters. They are the negation of justice in the empire of law, that