urnishing proof for a
given period is shown by the fact that one finds an abundance of it in
every epoch.

Political economy, as the science of the conditions and forms under
which various human societies have produced and exchanged and
according to which they have distributed the products of their
labor,--political economy, in this broad sense, has yet to be planned
for the first time. All that we have so far of political economic
science is almost entirely limited to the beginning and development of
the capitalistic mode of production. It begins with the genesis and
growth of the capitalistic mode of production, and exchange,
recognises the necessity of the disappearance of these by means of the
capitalistic forms, then develops the laws of the capitalistic
methods of production and their corresponding forms of exchange on the
positive side, that is on the side on which they further the objects
of society, as a whole and closes with the socialist criticism of the
capitalistic methods of production, that is, with the exhibition of
its laws on the negative side, with the proof that this method of
production arrives at the point, by its own development, where it is
no longer possible. This criticism proves that the capitalistic
methods of production and exchange constitute more and more an
insufferable fetter upon production itself. The mode of distribution
which is necessarily associated with this form of production has
brought about a class condition which grows daily more unbearable. It
has produced the daily sharpening antagonism between the continually
less numerous but constantly richer capitalists and the more numerous,
but on the whole, continually poorer propertyless wage-workers.
Finally the tremendous productive forces of the capitalistic methods
of production, which are practically unlimited, are only awaiting
their seizure at the hands of an organized co-operative society to
secure for all the members of that society the means of existence and
the fuller development of their faculties in an ever increasing
degree.

In order to fully accomplish this criticism of the bourgeois economy
acquaintance with the capitalistic form of production of exchange and
of distribution was not enough. Preceding forms and others, existing
side by side with the capitalistic mode in a few highly developed
countries, had to be examined and compared at least in their chief
features. Such an investigation and comparision has been