s Blanc to
Lassalle. This State socialism, although mingled with revolutionary
doctrines, was then summed up in the empty dream, in the abracadabra, of
the _Right to Work_. This is an insidious formula if it implies a demand
addressed to a government even of revolutionary bourgeois. It is an
economic absurdity if by it is meant to suppress the unemployment which
ensues upon the variations of wages, that is to say upon the conditions
of competition. It may be a tool for politicians, if it serves as an
expedient to calm a shapeless mass of unorganized proletarians. This is
very evident for any one who conceives clearly the course of a
victorious proletarian revolution which cannot proceed to the
socialization of the means of production by taking possession of them,
that is to say, which cannot arrive at the economic form in which there
is neither merchandise nor wage labor and in which the right to work and
the duty of working are one and the same, mingled in the common
necessity of labor for all.

The mirage of the right to work ended in the tragedy of June. The
parliamentary discussion of which it was the object in the sequel was
nothing but a parody. Lamartine, that tearful rhetorician, that great
man for all proper occasions, had pronounced the last, or the next to
the last of his celebrated phrases, "Catastrophes are the experiences of
nations," and that sufficed for the irony of history.

The brevity and simplicity of the Manifesto were wholly foreign to the
insinuating rhetoric of faith or creed. It was of the utmost
inclusiveness by virtue of the many ideas which it for the first time
reduced to a system and it was a series of germs capable of an immense
development. But it was not, and it did not pretend to be a code of
socialism, a catechism of critical communism, or the handbook of the
proletarian revolution. We may leave its "quintessence" to the
illustrious Dr. Schaeffle, to whom also we willingly leave the famous
phrase, "The social question is a question of the stomach."

The "ventre" of Dr. Schaeffle has for long years cut a fine enough
figure in the world to the great advantage of the dilettanti in
socialism and to the delight of the politicians. Critical communism, in
reality, scarcely begun with the Manifesto it needed to develop and it
has developed effectively.

The sum total of the teachings customarily designated by the name of
"Marxism" did not arrive at maturity before the years 1860-1870. I