uman race.[33]

"With the taking possession of the means of production on the part of
society, is excluded the production of commodities, and with it the
dominance of the product over the producer. The anarchy which dominates
in social production will be succeeded by conscious organization. The
struggle for individual existence will cease. Only in this way man will
detach himself, in a certain sense, from the animal world in a definite
fashion, and will pass from a condition of animal existence to
conditions of human existence. The entire sum of the conditions of life
which has thus far dominated men will pass under the rule and the
examination of men themselves, who will thus for the first time become
the real masters of nature, because they will be the masters of their
own association. The laws of their own social activity, which had been
outside of them like foreign laws imposed upon them, will be applied and
mastered by the men themselves, with full knowledge of their cause.
Their very association, which appeared to men as if imposed by nature
and history, will become their own and their free work. The foreign and
objective forces, which till then dominated history, will pass under the
care of men. Only from that moment will men make their own history with
full understanding; only from that moment will the social causes which
they put in motion, be able to arrive, in great part and in a proportion
ever increasing, at the desired effects. It is the leap of the human
race from the reign of necessity into that of liberty. To accomplish
this action emancipating the world, such is the historic mission of the
modern proletariat."

If Marx and Engels had been phrasemakers, if their spirit had not been
made prudent, even scrupulous, by the daily and minute use and
application of scientific methods, if the permanent contact with so many
conspirators and visionaries had not given them a horror of every
Utopia, opposing it indeed up to the point of pedantry, these formulas
might pass for good-natured paradoxes, which criticism need not examine.
But these formulas are, as it were, the close, the effective conclusion
of the doctrine of historic materialism. They are the direct result of
the criticism of economies and of historical dialectics.

In these formulas, which may be developed, as I have had occasion to
show elsewhere, is, summed up every forecast of the future, which is not
and is not intended for a romance or a Utopi