emancipation of the proletariat. They therefore search after a
new social science, after new social laws, that are to create
these conditions.

Historical action is to yield to their personal inventive
action, historically created conditions of emancipation to
fantastic ones, and the gradual, spontaneous class-organisation
of the proletariat to the organisation of society specially
contrived by these inventors. Future history resolves itself, in
their eyes, into the propaganda and the practical carrying out of
their social plans.

In the formation of their plans they are conscious of caring
chiefly for the interests of the working class, as being the most
suffering class. Only from the point of view of being the most
suffering class does the proletariat exist for them.

The undeveloped state of the class struggle, as well as their
own surroundings, causes Socialists of this kind to consider
themselves far superior to all class antagonisms. They want to
improve the condition of every member of society, even that of
the most favoured. Hence, they habitually appeal to society at
large, without distinction of class; nay, by preference, to the
ruling class. For how can people, when once they understand
their system, fail to see in it the best possible plan of the
best possible state of society?

Hence, they reject all political, and especially all
revolutionary, action; they wish to attain their ends by
peaceful means, and endeavour, by small experiments, necessarily
doomed to failure, and by the force of example, to pave the way
for the new social Gospel.

Such fantastic pictures of future society, painted at a time
when the proletariat is still in a very undeveloped state and has
but a fantastic conception of its own position correspond with
the first instinctive yearnings of that class for a general
reconstruction of society.

But these Socialist and Communist publications contain also a
critical element. They attack every principle of existing society.
Hence they are full of the most valuable materials for the
enlightenment of the working class. The practical measures
proposed in them--such as the abolition of the distinction
between town and country, of the family, of the carrying on of
industries for the account of private individuals, and of the wage
system, the proclamation of social harmony, the conversion of the
functions of the State into a mere superintendence of production,
all these proposals,