eory until the
Italian socialists have time to despoil the illustrious Mr. Loria of the
peacock feathers which he has stolen."[19]

I would willingly close here, but more remains to be said.

On all sides and from all camps protests arise and objections are urged
against historical materialism. And some times these voices are swelled
here and there by newly converted socialists, socialists who are
philosophical, socialists who are sentimental and sometimes hysterical.
Then reappears, as a warning, the "question of the belly." Others devote
themselves to exercise of logical gymnastics with abstract categories of
egoism and altruism; for others again the inevitable struggle for
existence always turns up at the right moment.

Morality! But it is high time that we understand the lesson of this
morality of the bourgeois epoch in the fable of the bees by Mandeville,
who was contemporary with the first projection of classic economics.

And has not the politics of this morality been explained in classic
phrases that can never be forgotten by the first great political writer
of the capitalist epoch Machiavelli, who did not invent Machiavellism,
but who was its secretary and faithful and diligent editor. And as for
the logical tourney between egoism and altruism, has it not been in full
view from the time of the Reverend Malthus up to that empty, prolix and
tiresome reasoner, the indispensable Spencer? Struggle for existence!
But could you wish to observe, study and understand a struggle more
important for us than the one which has its birth and is taking on
gigantic proportions in the proletarian agitation? Perhaps you would
reduce the explanation of this struggle which is developing and working
in the supernatural domain of society, which man himself has created in
the course of history, through his labor, through improved processes and
through social institutions, and which man himself can change through
other forms of labor, processes and institutions,--you would perhaps
reduce it to the simple explanation of the more general struggle in
which plant and animals, and men themselves in so far as they are
animals, are contending in the bosom of nature.

But let us return to our subject.

Critical communism has never refused, and it does not refuse, to welcome
the multiple and valuable suggestions, ideological, ethical, psychologic
and pedagogic which may come from the knowledge and from the study of
all forms of comm