n replace the Manifesto or have the same specific
efficacy. It gives us in its classic simplicity the true expression of
this situation; the modern proletariat exists, takes its stand, grows
and develops in contemporary history as the concrete subject, the
positive force whose necessarily revolutionary action must find in
communism its necessary outcome. And that is why this work while giving
a theoretical base to its prediction and expressing it in brief, rapid
and concise formulae, forms a storehouse, or rather an inexhaustible
mine of embryonic thoughts which the reader may fertilize and multiply
indefinitely; it preserves all the original and originating force of the
thing which is but lately born and which has not yet left the field of
its production. This observation is intended especially for those who
applying a learned ignorance, when they are not humbugs, charlatans, or
amiable dilettanti, give to the doctrine of critical communism
precursors, patrons, allies and masters of every class without any
respect for common sense and the most vulgar chronology. Or again, they
try to bring back our materialistic conception of history into the
theory of universal evolution which to the minds of many is but a new
metaphor of a new metaphysics. Or again they seek in this doctrine a
derivative of Darwinism which is an analogous theory only in a certain
point of view and in a very broad sense; or again they have the
condescension to favor us with the alliance or the patronage of that
positive philosophy which extends from Comte, that degenerate and
reactionary disciple of the genial Saint-Simon, to Spencer, that
quintessence of anarchical capitalism, which is to say that they wish to
give us for allies our most open adversaries.

It is to its origin that this work owes its fertilizing power, its
classic strength, and the fact that it has given in so few pages the
synthesis of so many series and groups of ideas.[3]

It is the work of two Germans, but it is not either in its form or its
basis the expression of personal opinion. It contains no trace of the
imprecations, or the anxieties, or the bitterness familiar to all
political refuges and to all those who have voluntarily abandoned their
country to breathe elsewhere freer air. Neither do we find in it the
direct reproduction of the conditions of their own country, then in a
deplorable political state and which could not be compared to those of
France and England sociall