the orators of Chartism; there is the declaration of a new
'93 with no room left for a new Thermidor.

And Thermidor has re-appeared several times since in various forms, more
or less explicit or disguised, and their authors have been since 1848
French ex-radicals, or Italian ex-patriots, or German bureaucrats,
adorers of the god State and practically slaves of the god Mammon,
English parliamentarians broken by the artifices of the art of
government, or even politicians under the guise of anarchists. Many
people believe that the constellation of Thermidor is destined never to
disappear from the heaven of history, or to speak in a more prosaic
fashion, that liberalism, that is to say a society where men are equal
only in law, marks the extreme limit of human evolution beyond which
nothing remains but a return backward. That is the opinion of all those
who see in the progressive extension of the bourgeois form over the
whole world the reason and the end of all progress. Whether they are
optimists or pessimists here are, for them, the columns of Hercules of
the human race. Often it happens that this sentiment in its pessimistic
form operates unconsciously upon some of those, who with others
unclassified, go to swell the ranks of anarchism.

There are others who go further and who theorize upon the objective
improbabilities of the assertions of critical communism. That
affirmation of the Manifesto that the reduction of all class struggles
to a single one carries within itself the necessity of the proletarian
revolution, would seem to them intrinsically false. That doctrine would
be without foundation because it assumes to draw a theoretical deduction
and a practical rule of conduct from the prevision of a fact which,
according to these adversaries, would be a simple theoretical point
which might be displaced and set ahead indefinitely. The assumed
inevitable collision between the productive forces and the form of
production would never take place because it is reduced, as they claim,
to an infinite number of particular cases of friction, because it
multiplies itself into the partial collisions of economic competition,
and because it meets with checks and hindrances in the expedients and
attacks of the governmental art. In other words, our present society,
instead of breaking up and dissolving would in a continuous fashion
repair the evils which it produced. Every proletarian movement which is
not repressed by violence as