r essence of modern history,
if it gives the key to comprehend the true reason of the new class
struggle of which the communist conception has become the expression,
is of such a nature that no sentimental protest, no argument based on
justice can resolve it and disentangle it.

It is for these reasons which I have explained here as simply as
possible that equalitarian communism remained vanquished. Its practical
powerlessness blended with its theoretical inability to account for the
causes of the wrongs or of the inequalities which it desired, bravely or
stupidly, to destroy or eliminate at a blow.

To understand history became thenceforth the principal task of the
theorists of communism. How could a cherished ideal be still opposed to
the hard reality of history? Communism is not the natural and necessary
state of human life in all times and in all places and the whole course
of historic formations cannot be considered as a series of deviations
and wanderings. One does not reach communism nor return to it by Spartan
abnegation or Christian resignation. It can be, still more it must be
and it will be the consequence of the dissolution of our capitalist
society. But the dissolution cannot be inoculated into it artificially
nor imported from without. It will dissolve by its own weight as
Machiavelli would say. It will disappear as a form of production which
engenders of itself and in itself the constant and increasing rebellion
of its productive forces against the conditions (juridical and
political) of production and it continues to live only by augmenting
(through competition which engenders crises, and by a bewildering
extension of its sphere of action) the intrinsic conditions of its
inevitable death. The death of a social form like that which comes from
natural death in any other branch of science becomes a _physiological
case_.

The Manifesto did not make, and it was not its part to make the picture
of a future society. It told how our present society will dissolve by
the progressive dynamics of its forces. To make this understood it was
necessary above all to explain the development of the bourgeoisie and
this was done in rapid sketches, a model philosophy of history, which
can be retouched, completed and developed, but which cannot be
corrected.[6]

Saint-Simon and Fourier, although neither their ideas nor the general
trend of their development were accepted, found their justification.
Idealists both, they