eginnings, appeal may be made, for lack of personal direct
experience--as often happens in Italy--to the authority of a text from
the Manifesto as if it were a precept, but these passages are in reality
of no importance.

Again, we must not, as I believe, seek for this vital part, this
essence, this distinctive character, in what the Manifesto says of the
other forms of socialism of which it speaks under the name of
_literature_. The entire third chapter may doubtless serve for defining
clearly by way of exclusion and antithesis, by brief but vigorous
characterizations, the differences which really exist between the
communism commonly characterized to-day as scientific,--an expression
sometimes used in a mistaken and contradictory way,--that is to say,
between the communism which has the proletariat for its subject and the
proletarian revolution for its theme, and the other forms of socialism;
reactionary, bourgeois, semi-bourgeois, petit-bourgeois, utopian, etc.
All these forms except one[1] have re-appeared and renewed themselves
more than once. They are reappearing under a new form even to-day in the
countries where the modern proletarian movement is of recent birth. For
these countries and under these circumstances the Manifesto has
exercised and still exercises the function of contemporary criticism and
of a literary whip. And in the countries where these forms have already
been theoretically and practically outgrown, as in Germany and Austria,
or survive only as an individual opinion among a few, as in France and
England, without speaking of other nations, the Manifesto from this
point of view has played its part. It thus merely records as a matter
of history something no longer necessary to think of, since we have to
deal with the political action of the proletariat which already is
before us in its gradual and normal course.

That was, to anticipate, the attitude of mind of those who wrote it. By
the force of their thought and with some scanty data of experience they
had anticipated the events which have occurred and they contented
themselves with declaring the elimination and the condemnation of what
they had outgrown. Critical communism--that is its true name, and there
is none more exact for this doctrine--did not take its stand with the
feudalists in regretting the old society for the sake of criticising by
contrast the contemporary society:--it had an eye only to the future.
Neither did it associate itse