was that of June, 1848, and that of May,
1871, would perish of slow exhaustion as happened with Chartism which
ended in trade unionism, the war horse of this fashion of arguing, the
honor and glory of the economists and of the vulgar sociologists. Every
modern proletarian movement would be regarded as meteoric and not
organic, it would be a disturbance and not a process, and according to
these critics, in spite of ourselves, we should be still utopians.

The historic forecast which is found in the doctrine of the Manifesto
and which critical communism has since developed by a broad and detailed
analysis of the actual world, has certainly taken on by reason of the
circumstances in which it was produced a warlike appearance and a very
aggressive form. But it did not imply, any more than it implies now,
either a chronological datum or a prophetic picture of the social
organization like those in the apocalypses and the ancient prophesies.

The heroic Father Dolcino did not re-appear with the prophetic war cry
of Joachino del Fiore. We did not celebrate anew at Muenster the
resurrection of the Kingdom of Jerusalem. There were no more Taborites
nor millenarians. Nor was there another Fourier waiting in his house at
a fixed hour year after year for the "candidate of humanity." Nor again,
was there an initiator of a new life, beginning with artificial means to
create the first nucleus of an association proposing to make man over,
as was the case with Beller, Owen, Cabet, and the enterprise of the
Fourierites in Texas, which was the tomb of utopianism, marked by a
singular epitaph: the dumbness which succeeded the fiery eloquence of
Considerant. Neither is there here a sect which retires modestly and
timidly from the world in order to celebrate in a closed circle the
perfect idea of communism as in the socialist colonies of America.

Here, on the contrary, in the doctrine of critical communism, it is
society as a whole which at a moment of its general process discovers
the cause of its destined course and at a critical point asserts itself
to proclaim the laws of its movement. The foresight indicated by the
Manifesto was not chronological, it was not a prophecy nor a promise,
but a morphological prevision.

Beneath the noise of the passions over which our daily conversation
extends itself, beyond the visible movements of the persons who formed
the material at which the historians stop, beyond the juridical and
political a