recognized, of the economy of
competition: although many were then concerned with this. This new
theory was the personal work of Marx and Engels. They carried over the
conception of historical progress through the process of antitheses from
the abstract form, which the Hegelian dialectic had already described
in its most general features, to the concrete explanation of the class
struggle; and in this historic movement where it had been supposed that
we observed the passage from one form of ideas to another form they saw
for the first time the transition from one form of social anatomy to
another, that is from one form of economic production to another form.

This historic conception, which gave a theoretic form to this necessity
of the _new social revolution_ more or less explicit in the instinctive
consciousness of the proletariat and in its passionate and spontaneous
movements, recognizing the intrinsic and imminent necessity of the
revolution, changed the concept of it. That which the sects of
conspirators had regarded as belonging to the domain of the will and
capable of being constructed at pleasure, became a simple process which
might be favored, sustained and assisted. The revolution became the
object of a policy the conditions of which are given by the complex
situation of society; it therefore became a result which the proletariat
must attain through struggles and various means of organization which
the old tactics of revolts had not yet imagined. And this because the
proletariat is not an accessory and auxiliary means, an excrescence, an
evil, which can be eliminated from the society in which we are living
but because it is its substratum, its essential condition, its
inevitable effect and in turn the cause which preserves and maintains
society itself; and thus it cannot emancipate itself without at the
same time emancipating every one, that is to say, revolutionizing
completely the form of production.

Just as the _League of the Just_ had become _The Communist League_ by
stripping itself of the forms of symbolism and conspiracy and adopting
little by little the means of propaganda and of political action from
and after the check attending the insurrection of Barbes and Blanqui
(1839), so likewise the new doctrine, which the _League_ accepted and
made its own, definitely abandoned the ideas which inspired the action
of conspiracies, and conceived as the outcome and objective result of a
process, that which th