itical and economic ideals of
Socialism involves the atrophy of Religion, the metamorphosis of the
Family, and the suicide of the State.

The Nihilism of Socialism springs from the Materialist Conception of
History, and this is precisely the portion of the socialist doctrine
that is usually ignored or half-understood by the enthusiastic young
intellectuals who are in growing numbers joining the Socialist movement
on both sides of the Atlantic. While the Communist Manifesto, written
by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in 1847, is throughout founded on this
conception, the first clearly formulated statement of the conception
itself is to be found in the Preface to the "Contribution to the
Critique of Political Economy," published by Karl Marx in 1859, the same
year in which Darwin and Wallace made public their independent and
almost simultaneous discoveries of the theory of Natural Selection. This
first statement runs thus:

"In the social production which men carry on they enter into
definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their
will; these relations of production correspond to a definite stage
of development of their material powers of production. The sum
total of these relations of production constitutes the economic
structure of society--the real foundation, on which rise legal and
political superstructures and to which correspond definite forms of
social consciousness. The mode of production in material life
determines the general character of the social, political, and
spiritual processes of life. It is not the consciousness of men
that determines their existence, but, on the contrary, their social
existence determines their consciousness. At a certain stage of
their development, the material forces of production in society
come in conflict with the existing relations of production,
or--what is but a legal expression for the same thing--with the
property relations within which they had been at work before. From
forms of development of the forces of production these relations
turn into their fetters. Then comes the period of social
revolution. With the change of the economic foundation the entire
immense superstructure is more or less rapidly transformed."[9]

This statement contains a whole Revolution in embryo. Viewed from the
standpoint of the established order, it is the very Quintessence o