ertheless the Manifesto
precedes it. Its teaching is of prime importance in the light which it
throws on the proletarian movement, which movement indeed had its birth
and development independently of any doctrine. It is also more than this
light. Critical communism dates from the moment when the proletarian
movement is not merely a result of social conditions, but when it has
already strength enough to understand that these conditions can be
changed and to discern what means can modify them and in what direction.
It was not enough to say that socialism was a result of history. It was
also necessary to understand the intrinsic causes of this outcome and to
what all its activity tended. This affirmation, that the proletariat is
a necessary result of modern society, has for its mission to succeed the
bourgeoisie, and to succeed it as the producing force of a new social
order in which class antagonisms shall disappear, makes of the Manifesto
a characteristic epoch in the general course of history. It is a
revolution--but not in the sense of an apocalypse or a promised
millennium. It is the scientific and reflected revelation of the way
which our _civil society_ is traversing (if the shade of Fourier will
pardon me!).

The Manifesto thus gives us the inside history of its origin and
thereby justifies its doctrine and at the same time explains its
singular effect and its wonderful efficacy. Without losing ourselves in
details, here are the series and groups of elements which, reunited and
combined in this rapid and exact synthesis, give us the clue to all the
later development of scientific socialism.

The immediate, direct and appreciable material is given by France and
England which had already had since 1830 a working-class movement which
sometimes resembles and sometimes differentiates itself from the other
revolutionary movements and which extended from instinctive revolt to
the practical aims of the political parties (Chartism and Social
Democracy for example) and gave birth to different temporary and
perishable forms of communism and semi-communism like that to which the
name of socialism was then given.

To recognize in these movements no longer the fugitive phenomenon of
meteoric disturbances but a new social fact, there was need of a theory
which should explain them,--and a theory which should not be a simple
complement of the democratic tradition nor the subjective correction of
the disadvantages, thenceforth