capital as a private instrument of production has no more reason for
existence. If a concession to-day can allay one form of discontent in
the proletariat, the concession itself can do nothing less than to give
rise to the need of new and ever increasing concessions. The need of
labor legislation arose in England before the Chartist movement and it
developed afterwards along with it. It had its first successes in the
period which immediately followed the fall of Chartism. The principles
and the reasons of this movement in their causes and their effects were
studied in a critical manner by Marx in Capital and they afterwards
passed, through the International, into the programmes of the different
socialist parties. Finally this whole process, concentrating itself into
the demand for eight hours, became with the 1st of May an international
marshalling of the proletariat, and a means for estimating its progress.
On the other hand, the political struggle in which the proletariat takes
part democratizes its habits; still more a real democracy takes birth
which, with time, will no longer be able to adapt itself to the present
political form. Being the organ of a society based on exploitation it is
constituted as a bureaucratic hierarchy, as a judicial bureaucracy and a
mutual aid society of the capitalists for the defense of their special
privileges, the perpetual income from the public debt, the rent of land
and the interest on capital in all its forms. Consequently the two
facts, which according to the discontented and the hypercritical seem to
make us deviate infinitely from the lines laid down by communism,
become, on the contrary, new means and new conditions which confirm
these lines. The apparent deviations from the revolution are, at bottom,
the very thing which is hastening it.

Moreover, we must not exaggerate the significance of the revolutionary
faith of the communists of fifty years ago. Given the political
situation of Europe, if they had a faith, it was that they were
precursors, and this they have been; they hoped that the political
conditions of Italy, Austria, Hungary, Germany and Poland might
approximate to modern forms, and this has happened later, in part, and
through other means; if they had a hope, it was that the proletarian
movement of France and England might continue to develop. The reaction
which intervened upset many things and stopped more than one development
which had already begun. It upset also