tofore, all survivals of
old notions, were thrown into the lumber room as unreasonable. Up to
that time the world had only allowed itself to be led by prejudice.
All that had been done deserved merely pity and contempt. Now for the
first time day broke: from now on, superstition, injustice, tyranny
and privilege should be replaced by eternal truth, eternal justice,
equality founded on natural rights and the inalienable rights of man.

We now know that the rule of reason was nothing more than the rule of
the bourgeoisie idealised, that eternal right found its realisation in
bourgeois justice, that equality was materialised in bourgeois
equality before the law, that when the rights of man were proclaimed
bourgeois rights of property were proclaimed at one and the same time,
and that the state of reason, Rousseau's Social Contract, could only
come into existence as the bourgeois democratic republic. To such a
slight extent could the great thinkers of the eighteenth century, just
as their predecessors, prevail over the limits which their own epoch
had placed upon them.

But besides the antagonism between feudal baron and bourgeois there
existed the general antagonism between the robbers and the robbed,
between the rich idlers and the toiling poor. It was just this
antagonism which made it possible for the leaders of the bourgeoisie
to pose as the representatives not merely of a special class but of
the whole of suffering humanity. Furthermore the bourgeoisie was
saddled with an antithesis right from the start. Capitalists cannot
exist without laborers, and, in proportion, as the members of the
gilds in the Middle Ages developed into the modern bourgeois, the
journeymen of the gilds and the day laborers, on their part, developed
into the proletariat. And though the bourgeois, as a general rule,
might claim to represent also the interests of the different working
classes of the period, still, independent movements of the latter
classes broke out in connection with each great movement on the part
of the bourgeoisie; such working classes being the more or less
developed predecessors of the modern proletariat. Thus there came into
being at the time of the German Reformation and the Peasant War the
party of Thomas Munzer, in the great English Revolution the Levellers,
and in the great French Revolution, Baboeuf.

Besides these revolutionary demonstrations of a class still
undeveloped, occurred certain theoretical manifestation