t is
certainly a long step from the little work Wage Labor and Capital[9] in
which is seen for the first time in precise terms how from the purchase
and the use of the labor-commodity is obtained a product superior to the
cost of production, this being the clue to the question of surplus
value--it is a long step from this to the complex and multiple
developments of "Capital." This book goes exhaustively into the genesis
of the bourgeois epoch in all its inner economic structure, and
intellectually it transcends that epoch because it explains its course,
its particular laws and the antitheses which it organically produces and
which organically dissolve it.

It is a long step also from the proletarian movement which succumbed in
1848 to the present proletarian movement which through great
difficulties after having re-appeared on the political scene has
developed with continuity and deliberation. Until a few years ago this
regularity of the forward march of the proletariat was observed and
admired only in Germany. The social democracy there had normally
increased as upon its own field (from the Workingmen's Conference of
Nuremburg, 1868, to our day). But since then the same phenomenon has
asserted itself in other countries, under various forms.

In this broad development of Marxism and in this increase of the
proletarian movement in the limited forms of political action, has there
not been, as some assert, an alteration from the militant character of
the original form of critical communism? Has there not been a passing
from revolution to the self-styled evolution? Has there not been an
acquiescence of the revolutionary spirit in the exigencies of the reform
movement?

These reflections and these objections have arisen and arise continually
both among the most enthusiastic and most passionate of the socialists
and among the adversaries of socialism whose interest it is to give an
appearance of uniformity to the special defeats, checks and delays, so
as to affirm that communism has no future.

Whoever compares the present proletarian movement and its varied and
complicated course with the impression left by the Manifesto when one
reads it without being provided with knowledge from other sources, may
easily believe that there was something juvenile and premature in the
confident boldness of those communists of fifty years ago. There is in
them the sound as of a battle cry and an echo of the vibrant eloquence
of some of