ese forces have hitherto been exerted. From forms of development of
the productive forces these relations turn into fetters of production.
Then begins an epoch of social revolution. With the change of the
economic basis the whole vast superstructure undergoes sooner or later a
revolution.

In considering such revolutions one must constantly distinguish between
the industrial revolution, to be carefully posited scientifically, which
takes place in the economic conditions of production, and the legal,
political, religious, artistic or philosophical, in short ideological,
forms wherein men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out. As
little as we judge an individual by what he himself thinks he is, just
as little can we judge such a revolutionary epoch by its own
consciousness. We must rather explain this consciousness out of the
antagonisms of men's industrial life, out of the conflict existing
between the forces of social production and the relations of social
production.

A form of society never breaks down until all the productive forces are
developed for which it affords room. New and higher relations of
production are never established, until the material conditions of life
to support them have been prepared in the lap of the old society itself.
Therefore mankind always sets for itself only such tasks as it is able
to perform; for upon close examination it will always be found that the
task itself only arises where the material conditions for its solution
are already at hand or are at least in process of growth.

We may in broad outlines characterize the Asiatic, the antique, the
feudal and the modern capitalist methods of production as progressive
epochs in the economic evolution of society.

The industrial relations arising out of the capitalistic method of
production constitute the last of the antagonistic forms of social
production; antagonistic not in the sense of an individual antagonism,
but of an antagonism growing out of the social conditions of
individuals.

But the productive forces which are developed in the lap of capitalistic
society create at the same time the material conditions needed for the
abolition of this antagonism. The capitalist form of society therefore,
brings to a close this prelude to the history of human society."

Marx had some years before left the political arena and he did not
return to it until later with the International. The reaction had
triumphed in Italy, Aus