rruptions especially in
France, and with the exception of Germany, from the dissolution of the
International of glorious memory up to the new International which
lives to-day through other means and which is developing in other ways,
both of them adapted to the political situation in which we live, and
based upon riper experience. But just as the survivors of those who in
December, 1847, discussed and accepted the new doctrine, have
re-appeared on the public scene in the great International, and later
again in the new International, the Manifesto itself has also
re-appeared little by little and has made the tour of the world in all
the languages of the civilized countries, something which it promised to
do but could not do at the time of its first appearance.

There was our real point of departure; there were our real precursors.
They marched before all the others, early in the day, with a step rapid
but sure, over this exact road which we were to traverse and which we
are traversing in reality. It is not proper to give the name of our
precursors to those who followed ways which they later had to abandon,
or to those who, to speak without metaphor, formulated doctrines and
started movements, doubtless explicable by the times and circumstances
of their birth, but which were later outgrown by the doctrine of
critical communism, which is the theory of the proletarian revolution.
This does not mean that these doctrines and these attempts were
accidental, useless and superfluous phenomena. There is nothing
irrational in the historic course of things because nothing comes into
existence without reason, and thus there is nothing superfluous. We
cannot even to-day arrive at a perfect understanding of critical
communism without mentally retracing these doctrines and following the
processes of their appearance and disappearance. In fact these doctrines
have not only passed, they have been intrinsically outgrown both by
reason of the change in the conditions of society and by reason of the
more exact understanding of the laws upon which rest its formation and
its process.

The moment at which they enter into the past, that is to say, that at
which they are intrinsically outgrown, is precisely that of the
appearance of the Manifesto. As the first index of the genesis of modern
socialism, this writing, which gives only the most general and the most
easily accessible features of its teaching, bears within itself traces
of the histo