k the
socialization of the means of production cannot be the work of a mass
led by a few and that it must be, and that it will be, the work of the
proletarians themselves when they have become in themselves and through
long practice a political organization.

The development and the extension of the bourgeois system have been
rapid and colossal in these last fifty years. It already invades sacred
and ancient Russia and it is creating, not only in America, Australia
and in India, but even in Japan, new centers of modern production, thus
complicating the conditions of competition and the entanglements of the
world market. The consequences of political changes have been produced,
or will not be long to wait for. Equally rapid and colossal has been the
progress of the proletariat. Its political education takes each day a
new step toward the conquest of political power. The rebellion of the
productive forces against the form of production, the struggle of living
labor against accumulated labor, becomes every day more evident. The
bourgeois system is henceforth upon the defensive and it reveals its
decadence by this singular contradiction; the peaceful world of industry
has become a colossal camp in which militarism develops. The peaceful
period of industry has become by the irony of things the period of the
continuous invention of new engines of war.

Socialism has forced itself into the situation. Those semi-socialists,
even those charlatans who encumber with their presence the press and the
meetings of our party and who often are a nuisance to us, are a tribute
which vanity and ambitions of every sort render in their fashion to the
new power which rises on the horizon. In spite of the foreseen antidote
which scientific socialism is, the truth of which many people have not
come to understand, there is a group of quacks on the social question,
all having some particular specific to eliminate such or such a social
evil: land nationalization, monopoly of grains in the hands of the
State, democratic taxes, statization of mortgages, general strike, etc.
But social democracy eliminates all these fantasies because the
consciousness of their situation leads the proletarians when once they
have become familiar with the political arena to understand socialism in
an integral fashion. They come to understand that they should look for
only one thing, the abolition of wage labor; that there is but one form
of society which renders possi