who still speak of
meteoric disturbances which, as they would have it, will disappear
little by little and will all resolve themselves into the calm of this
final epoch of civilization. And this lesson suffices.

Eleven years after the publication of the Manifesto, Marx formulated in
clear and precise fashion the directing principles of the materialistic
interpretation of history in the preface to a book which is the
forerunner of "Capital."[11]

"The first work which I undertook for the purpose of solving the doubts
which perplexed me was a critical re-examination of Hegel's Philosophy
of Law. The introduction to this work appeared in the German-French Year
Books, published in Paris in 1844.

My investigation ended in the conviction that legal relations and forms
of government cannot be explained either by themselves or by the
so-called general development of the human mind, but on the contrary,
have their roots in the conditions of man's physical existence, whose
totality Hegel, following the English and French writers of the
eighteenth century, summed up under the name of civil society; and that
the anatomy of civil society must be sought in political economy.

The study of the latter which I began at Paris was continued at Brussels
whither I had betaken myself in consequence of an order of Guizot
expelling me from France.

The general result which I arrived at and which, once obtained, served
as a guide for my subsequent studies, can be briefly formulated as
follows:

In making their livelihood together men enter into certain necessary
involuntary relations with each other, industrial relations which
correspond to whatever stage society has reached in the development of
its material productive forces.

The totality of these industrial relations constitutes the economic
structure of society, the real basis upon which the legal and political
superstructure is built, and to which definite forms of social
consciousness correspond.

The method of producing the material livelihood determines the social,
political and intellectual life process in general.

It is not men's consciousness which determines their life; on the
contrary, it is their social life which determines their consciousness.

At a certain stage of their development the material productive forces
of society come into conflict with the old conditions of production or,
to use a legal expression, with the old property relations under which
th