ke chance, and afterwards, considered
theoretically, becomes for the mind more inextricable than the track of
meteors.

Speaking of the irony which sits as a sovereign above history is not a
simple phrase; because, in truth, if there is no god of Epicurus
laughing above over human affairs, here below human affairs are of
themselves playing a divine comedy.

Will this irony of human destinies ever cease? Will that form of
association ever be possible which gives room for the possible complete
development of all aptitudes, in such a way that the ulterior
_processus_ of history may become a real and true evolution? And, to
speak like the amateurs of high-sounding phrases, will there ever be a
humanization of all men? When once in the communism of production the
antitheses which are now the cause and the effect of economic
differentiations are eliminated, will not all human energies acquire a
very high degree of efficacy and intensity in co-operative effects, and
at the same time will they not develop with a greater liberty of
self-expression among all individuals?

It is in the affirmative answers to these questions that consists what
_critical communism_ says, that is to say foresees, of the future. But
it does not say it and it does not foretell it as if it were discussing
an abstract possibility, or like him who wishes, by his will, to give
life to a state of things which he desires and which he dreams. But it
says and predicts because what it announces must inevitably happen by
the immanent necessity of history, seen and studied henceforth in the
foundation of its economic substructure.

"It is only in an order of things where there will no longer be classes
and class antagonisms that social revolutions will cease to be political
revolutions.[31]

"To the old bourgeois society with its classes and class antagonisms
will succeed an association in which the free development of each is the
condition of the free development of all.[32]

"The relations of bourgeois production are the last antagonistic form of
the social _processus_ of production--a form antagonistic not in the
sense of individual antagonism, but of the antagonism which proceeds
from the conditions of the social life of individuals; but the
productive forces which are developing in the lap of bourgeois society
are creating at the same time the material conditions to terminate that
antagonism. With this social organization ends the prehistory of the
h