l communism is neither moralizer, nor preacher, nor herald,
nor utopian--it already holds the thing itself in its hands and into the
thing itself it has put its ethics and its idealism.

This orientation which seems harsh to the sentimentalists because it is
too true, too realistic and too real, permits us to retrace the history
of the proletariat and of the other oppressed classes which preceded it.
We see their different phases; we take account of the failures of
Chartism, of the Conspiracy of Equals and we explore still further back
to attempts at relief, to acts of resistance, and to wars,--to the
famous peasants' war in Germany, to the Jacquerie and to Father Dolcino.
In all these facts and in all these events we discover forms and
phenomena relating to the future of the bourgeoisie in proportion as it
tears to pieces, overthrows, triumphs over and issues from the feudal
system. We can do the same with the class struggles of the ancient world
but with less clearness. This history of the proletariat and of the
other oppressed classes, of the vicissitudes of their struggles and
their revolts, is already a sufficient guide to assist us in
understanding why the ideologies of the communism of other epochs were
premature.

If the bourgeoisie has not yet arrived everywhere at the final stage of
its evolution, it surely has arrived in certain countries at its
accomplishment. In fact, in the most advanced countries it is subjecting
the various older forms of production, either directly or indirectly, to
the action and to the law of capital. And thus it simplifies, or it
tends to simplify, the different class struggles of former times, which
then obscured each other by their multiplicity, into this single
struggle between capital which is converting into merchandise all the
products of human labor indispensable to life and the mass of
proletarians which sells its labor power,--now also become simple
merchandise. The secret of history is simplified. It is all prosaic. And
just as the present class struggle is the simplification of all other,
so likewise, the communism of the Manifesto simplifies into rigid and
general theoretical formulas the ideologic, ethic, psychologic and
pedagogic suggestion of the other forms of communism not by denying but
by exalting them. All is prosaic and communism itself partakes of this
character, it is now a science.

Thus there are in the Manifesto neither rhetoric nor protestations. It
does